not going to the Costume Institute ball. I’m just getting in a bit of the arts. Since when did the museum have a dress code?”
But this was useless. I was speaking to a woman who still wore a navy blazer, ballroom gloves and Ferragamo bowed shoes every time she traveled on a commercial flight. She honored a past time when manners showed your status better than the limited edition LV bag bought after your name was crossed from a waiting list. Mom, skilled in bar car-chatter, versed in the kind of social skills where the hostess mingled with her guests while holding a tray of stuffed artichokes.
“And, Emily, we must discuss the wedding. The wedding!”
With that said, I lifted myself from my chair, gave Mao an apologetic scratch behind his ear where he returned the affection with a lick to my face (the animal was truly infatuated), a peck to my mother’s cheek as she gets kissed, never kisses, and walked out of the house with no regard to her curious rumbles that trailed me.
Feeling insecure about my sneakers, I decided to forego the Met for a little window indulging. I walked along Madison, passing the display booth boutiques with storefronts peddling clothes propped on invisible silhouettes in the same positions featured in the shopping pages of the fashion magazines. I zigzagged through other walkers in congested midtown. Looked up as the buildings stretched to the sky while we clambered at their base.
I passed the imperious lions that guard the New York Public Library, walked under the shadowed gleams of the Chrysler. Chose the left breach imposed by the Flatiron and stopped to buy an apple at the farmer’s market in Union Square. With the sustenance gained from chomping on a picked-from-Amish-hands piece of fruit, feeling quite wholesome and cleansed with proletarian ethics, I finished off the last leg of my city walk to Henry’s apartment, which I’ve casually pitched as my primary residence for the past few months—living in the proverbial sin before giving my housing situation the loaded “living together” label.
Walking down East Twelfth, and if you ever assumed that a pigeon pecking in the middle of a street would be able to fly to safety from a mad city cab driver, you haven’t lived in New York, where cabbies literally pencil in road kills on that chit you assumed recorded passenger fares. I had to quickly look away when I saw that this particular fatality had trampled more than a few feathers.
Slowing my pace, Tide-scented air puffed from the basement grates of an apartment complex, slapping my ankles with that unbalanced wave of humidity you feel after stepping outside an overly air-conditioned office building. As I approached my favorite townhouse, I became exhilarated, faintly making out the owner exiting the red-painted door like a diver swimming to surface. She closed the door too quickly for me to look inside. Her dog, more appropriate for the Moors with a few ducks stuffed in its mouth, poked his muzzle in sensitive areas until she snapped a few commands in Italian. He retreated, sat and looked at her obediently until she shouted the name of a pasta sauce to switch him back on. The dog clearly understood Italian. I didn’t know Italian. In some ways, this dog was more intelligent than me.
Reaching the apartment, I had somehow forgotten about the paper trail of torn magazine pages I had left in the kitchen. Henry’s nose focused on the page that had been given the highest honor, fridge door placement. It was a picture of the most perfect butt, an extreme close-up shot barely clad in boy-cut Eres turquoise bottoms and a few specks of sand.
“Let me guess,” mused Henry. “This is your way of telling me that you’re a lesbian.”
I walked over to the refrigerator door to give the picture a closer inspection. It was truly the most spectacular piece of butt I had ever seen. A woman’s body, when perfect, blew away a male physique of rock star Rolling Stone cover proportions.
“Possibly,” I said easily. “In a repressed kind of way. But the original idea was to achieve that butt, causing guilt of extreme portions every time I opened that door for an unnecessary scoop of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie. Lowfat.”
Henry opened the freezer door so it gave a lip-smacking suction, pulling out the very container of ice cream I had been trying to avoid—it was frozen yogurt, to be specific, but I had my suspicions of the labeling as semantic marketing.
“I love your butt,” he said, slapping my butt. “Now get two teaspoons and let’s polish this thing off.”
Which seemed a great idea in theory, but I was surprised that Henry had not been aware that the container was considerably light, absent in its contents aside from a teaspoonful left (a ploy one uses so you could soothe yourself by saying you were not a fully grown, oinking pig because you didn’t actually finish the entire pint), having been devoured after a night of looking at magazines, feeling inadequate with myself and resorting to the comfort of Ben & Jerry’s.
Henry peeled off the lid, his lips breaking into a supercilious smirk as he must have made a mental visual of my actions last night.
“Hmm.” I poked my head in the container. “The maid did it.”
“Maid my ass, or, truthfully, it’s your ass that’s in question here.”
I gave Henry a wounded princess look.
“And speaking of this ass,” he said, scrutinizing the picture on the fridge. “I think I know her.”
“Know her? Right. Of course. People are now recognized by their butt cheeks.”
“No. Really!” he laughed. “That’s Carmenia’s butt. You remember Carmenia, she’s that Brazilian, or is it Argentinean? That model that dated Gil Stephens.”
Gil Stephens was one of the FOX producers whom Henry and I, now strictly Henry, worked with.
“You see that raisin-shaped mole?” Henry pointed to a mole, indeed the size and shape of a raisin, just under the fold of her right cheek. My fiancé was touching a woman’s butt—the most perfect butt on the planet. The boy was basically committing adultery before my eyes.
“Henry!” I scolded, swatting his index finger away from Carmenia’s butt. “This is wrong on so many levels. First, I don’t like you ass-picking Carmenia so brazenly before me, and then why? How could you identify this glorified freckle? You must have been doing some hard-core poolside scanning to pick up that blemish.”
“Oh, Emily.”
I’ve clocked in a lot of “Oh, Emilys” today.
“Carmenia’s mole is to butt like Cindy’s mole is to upper lip,” Henry said as if reading from a legal document. “She had it surgically attached so she could ‘make her mark’ in the butt modeling business, so to speak.”
I then swiped Carmenia’s butt off the fridge and threw it into the garbage.
“She’s trash,” I said, feeling like the last unwanted squished cupcake at the end of a bake sale.
Henry opened up his arms. I had the vague impression that my body was meant to be folded into the vee he created. But I am completely uninterested in being all sweet and cuddly based on my current agitated state. His stare acted as beams, magnetizing me into his outstretched arms.
“Listen, Emily. We need to discuss our living arrangements.”
“But. But. But.”
“But what? Emily, you really must get your mind out of the trash—though Carmenia’s butt does have that effect.”
