A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body Read online

  “JUST TELL ME!”

  It is during this moment of tension that I somehow create a bubble. A large gas bubble that causes a cramp that is worse than my constipation has ever been. It starts right then and won’t go away until the day after the Emmys.

  When my limo pulls up on the day of the ceremony I discover I’m riding with the youngest staff writer, who brought his mother as his Emmy date, and the writer who recently caused a stink by doing a stunt with a local radio show that involved having sex in a pew at a Catholic church. Both of these writers had not been invited to return for the show’s next season. I’ve been officially assigned to limo number “you’re fired.”

  Within five minutes, between the blazing sun and the nerves, I’m sweating. A lot. (Which is not to be confused with my enema glow.) First I notice the large amount of sweat (I nudge the fired writer guy next to me and ask, “Hey! Is that all me? Is any of this you?”), then I notice the smell. A deep, solid smell.

  It’s not the fired writer next to me. It’s the dress. It smells like it’s been cut off a dead body. And not the newly dead. A body that was found in the attic eighty years after its demise. The corpse was rotting but the dress was flawless save for its stench. And now I’m encased in it.

  Five minutes from the red carpet I realize that this dress has never been dry-cleaned. Or washed. Or spritzed with Febreze. Not since the day I bought it at Goodwill. I did have it steamed when I got to LA. When Jay and I picked it up we thought we kept smelling something in the car, but as always we blamed it on his three dogs. One of them had clearly either taken a shit or rolled around on a skunk. Or both.

  How magical. I’m here at the Emmys, smelling like a corpse, cramped with an intestinal air bubble, and missing Mathew. He would tell me that I didn’t smell that bad and I didn’t have blue eye shadow in my eyebrows. He would say things like, “Even smelling like a dead body, you look gorgeous.” And at this point I wouldn’t give a shit if he sounded so much like FDR that he was in a wheelchair. Though that would make getting out of the limo tough.

  When we arrive I get out of the limo and try to join a group of nonfired people whose limo has just pulled up. But as soon as my foot hits the red carpet this gigantic monster of a security guard yells, “Keep moving! Keep moving! Do not stop! Move!”

  I do what I’m told—I don’t want no trouble. I start pushing people along the red carpet, urging them, “Come on guys! Hurry up! We have to hurry! Move it!”

  When I come to the end of the carpet, I look back and see that everyone is way the hell back at the beginning, walking slowly and enjoying the moment. Nobody has listened to the security guard. Except for me. I’ve run like I was being chased by a Scientologist with a piping hot pot of coffee in her hands.

  Being inside the theater is like reading an issue of People magazine and discovering yourself in a photo, standing right behind Tom Hanks. The goody bag they hand me on the way out of the restroom contains lip gloss and a perfume sample. Perfect! I throw half the sample on the dress. But the perfume is no match—the dress wins. I can still smell it. So I dab perfume under my nose. Eventually I’m dabbing it under the noses of whomever I’m speaking with. I keep asking everyone if they can smell me. (The most common answer is, “No, but thanks for asking.”)

  “If we win, do we walk up on stage using the middle aisle, or should we just take the fastest route?” I ask Carrie. She is seated next to me and has already told me eight times to shut up about my coffee enema and stinky dress.

  “If we win, we stay in our seats and look supportive of the folks who get to go on stage. Which doesn’t include you.”

  “We don’t get to go on stage?” I say. I’m shocked. That changes everything. “I’m going to the bathroom to get more lip gloss then.” As soon as I get to the bathroom I hear over the speakers that we lost.

  During the next commercial break most of The Daily Show staff comes pouring out of the theater. “Do you guys kind of blame me?” I ask the writers, while dabbing perfume under their noses.

  They shoot me irritated looks and walk outside to smoke.

  At the HBO party after the ceremony everyone sits around looking disinterested and very soon decides to go back to the hotel.

  “You guys are going back already?” I ask. “Don’t we all have tickets to another party after this?” But they don’t want to go. In fact nobody does except for me and Mary and a few other production assistants. We have the “party shuttle” all to ourselves. At the end of the night I’m in somebody’s hotel room, accompanied by a group of die-hard partiers who either are my co-workers or some people I met in the elevator, smoking pot out of an apple and forcing people to smell my dress.

  The phone in my hotel room rings, interrupting the warm haze of my post-Emmys morning. It’s Mathew.

  “Hey! So how was it?”

  Before I can answer him I have to finish chewing the half-dissolved Cheeto that is still in my mouth from when I raided the mini bar last night. My pillow is covered in bright orange finger smears. Apparently I couldn’t be bothered to wash my hands, or my face, or take off my dress. Or finish chewing the last bite. This is what happens when you can’t end the night with sweet, drunken Emmys sex with your husband.

  I hadn’t wanted Mathew here ruining all my fun. (The fun of coffee enemas gone bad and riding in the fired limo.) But it turns out partying with twenty-two-year-olds and smoking pot out of an apple hasn’t made me fun and single. It just made me possibly soon-to-be-single.

  I tell him he should have come with me. That we should have made it happen.

  “I’m sorry you’re not here, Mathew. I’m sorry your fear that ‘everything is wrong in the world’ doesn’t mesh with my version of ‘everything is wrong in the world.’” I’m not sure I’ve said what I mean. I’m still a little drunk. So like a drunk I tell him how sad I am. How sad I’ve been.

  “I bet you looked gorgeous,” he says. “And everything is not wrong in the world—you got to see a bunch of famous people, right? Who’d you see?”

  For the next twenty minutes, as I finish off the bag of Cheetos, I list every single celebrity that I made smell my dress, and by the time I get to Martin Sheen my dress is off, the Emmys are over, and I am pouring coffee into my mouth. All is right in the universe.

  EAGLES ARE SUCH A GOOD SIGN

  The moment I arrive at Dini’s house for Thanksgiving dinner everyone looks over my shoulder for my husband, Mathew. They’re standing up on tiptoes to search behind me, as if he were crouching behind my back.

  Normally when people are looking for Mathew I make jokes about his height. I ask for a booster chair for him. Or I raise my hands, cupped tightly together like I’m holding a little bug. “He’s in here!” I say, like the Jolly Green Giant. I had a million of them.

  But now all I can say to this tribe of married, engaged, pregnant, and “working on a quilt to celebrate their grandparents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary” people is, “Mathew’s not coming.”

  “Mathew promised me he’d call me every Thursday at 3:00 during the separation and he has yet to do it,” I said to my best friend Gay Jay as we trudged up a steep incline.

  Jay and I had recently taken to popping a fat burner ($85 in your local gay-friendly vitamin store) and going on long hikes with his dog Sparkle. (When Jay rescued Sparkle his name was “Sparky,” but he changed it. The other dog owners in the park always sit up a little taller when Jay yells “SPARKLE! SPARKLE!” like a demanding chorus line leader.)

  “Why would he say that if he’s not going to do it?” I asked.

  Ahead of me, Jay yelled back, “He can’t do it, Lauren! Don’t you see? He’s never going to ‘get down to it’ with you. He’s never gonna tell you what happened those three days when he disappeared.”

  My fat burner was failing to burn off the anxiety that had accompanied me ever since Mathew had left. Of all the people on earth, Mathew knew me better than anyone and he had chosen not to be with me. No matter how often I tried to show him wh
at he’d be missing and screamed and cried on the phone, he’d hang up on me and then claim his cell phone had suddenly burst into flames. When I begged him to start couples therapy again, but he told me his only free time would be Sundays from 9:00-9:30 p.m.

  He’d moved back home with his family and told me he needed some time to figure out how he could move forward. But I didn’t understand what had happened. As much as I’d wanted out and suggested that maybe we weren’t meant for each other, as much as I’d never trusted him and never believed he really loved me, the possible end of our marriage came as a complete shock.

  “What the fuck happened to ‘I will love you for the rest of my life?!?’” I shouted at Jay, who suddenly stopped hiking and grabbed his chest.

  “Sorry, I’m listening,” he said. “I just thought I was having a heart attack, and I couldn’t do that to you. Losing your best friend and your husband all at once—wow. Plus they’d find the fat burners in your purse and blame this on you too.”

  Jay and his boyfriend, Bryan, consider Dini a part of their extended family. They’re the ones who convinced me to join them for Thanksgiving instead of staying home and staring into the fireplace, as I’d done every day for the three months since Mathew and I had separated. They dragged me away from my alternating rituals of watching E!’s True Hollywood Story and reading as many biographies about tortured women as I can find. (I prefer those that end with a line like “... then she finished her scotch, fell down the steps, and died.”)

  Jay spent all morning making his case that spending Thanksgiving with a sweet, stable family would make me feel better about my lack of such a thing. Kind of a “so your legs have been amputated, let’s go to the track and watch people run” philosophy. (Then we’ll go the shoe store and watch people put shoes on their feet.)

  At Dini’s Thanksgiving extravaganza, the mingling before dinner is easy. I just sit on the couch and watch the back of everyone’s heads as they enjoy the video of Dini’s wedding from 1983. (“Look at my veil! Oh wait, this is the part where Leslie read from Winnie the Pooh. Turn it up!”)

  Every once in a while the women spontaneously hug and giggle and look around with tears in their eyes in search of their husbands, who are all gathered on the patio smoking cigars.

  “Oh gosh, can you see, Lauren?” they ask, realizing they are blocking my view of the screen.

  I stare at them and make a little grunting noise. “Ugh.”

  We reach Dini’s husband’s vows (“I will love you for the rest of my life. Through the mountains and the valleys. Cuz you can’t get to the mountains without going through the valleys. I want to watch you get old ... ”) when I am saved by the call from the kitchen.

  “Dinner’s ready!”

  Jay had a lot of opinions about the demise of my marriage. As he and Bryan and I drove to the movies one night, he shared his views from the front seat while I moped in the back.

  Jay’s feeling was that I shouldn’t act so victimized by Mathew’s leaving. I played a part, he argued. His point, with which he was very pleased, was that Mathew loved me so much that he did the one thing he thought that I wanted: He got rid of himself.

  “Mathew was probably having the biggest breakdown of his life and all you can think about is yourself,” Jay said.

  “I’m the one who wanted to move to California so that he could be near his family,” I yelled to the front seats. “I’m the one who told him that I wanted to put our marriage before my career.”

  Jay spun around to face me, thrilled that at least I was no longer comatose, excited that I was back to play with.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but you were like Joan Rivers with that poor man. Remember that joke you told everyone at our housewarming party? ‘Who do you have to fuck in this town to get an orgasm? Apparently not Mathew!’ Then poor Mathew comes in the house with a picture of you that he wants to show everybody because he is so proud of his beautiful wife!”

  “You’re being mean,” Bryan said.

  “How is that mean?” Jay asked.

  He continued to scream at me, full volume. But I knew that Jay wasn’t being mean, he was just frustrated. He’d been prepared for maybe three or four weeks of sadness and endless repetition of the same story (“And I was the one who wanted to start over again. Make a real commitment to the marriage ... but then suddenly he was just gone ... like a bad movie ... called My Life ...”), but now that we were entering the second month, the novelty was wearing off. He wanted Fun Lauren back. So he kept shaking me like I was a toy whose batteries had died.

  We’d been stuck at a red light for what seemed like half an hour when Jay turned to Bryan and me.

  “Remember when you were fat in high school? I miss Fat Lauren,” he said. “She was more fun. She was jolly. And so easy! You could give her a cookie and she was happy for hours. Is Fat Lauren going to be coming back again?”

  I was about to assure him that Fat Lauren would be coming back with a vengeance when I noticed two homeless men pummeling each other back and forth in the deserted Target parking lot—a sight that would have disturbed me greatly in the past.

  “Mathew and I never fought. I’d fight but he wouldn’t fight back.” The homeless man without a shirt had fallen onto his back and was kicking at the air. At nobody. Until his opponent graciously staggered up and stuck his face out to let it be kicked.

  The light turned green.

  “Oh my god!” Jay screamed from the front. “Call the police! Call 911!”

  Mathew just wanted us to be husband and wife and love each other—quietly and without drama. But I couldn’t handle that. He was just so “okay” and I was ... what’s the technical term? “Not okay.”

  “We have a Thanksgiving tradition where we pass a flame around the table,” Dini explains to the table full of family, friends, and me. “You light your neighbor’s candle, and say what you are grateful for.”

  She reminds me of a sweet kindergarten teacher, explaining to her beloved children how to “hold the frog when it’s your turn.” She’s talking very slowly and with wide eyes and hand gestures as if for the deaf.

  “Oh god” actually slips out of my mouth.

  In response Dini puts her arm around me and gives me a little hug. She is all soft corners, no edge at all. Her face glows with so much love and sweetness—or maybe it’s some sort of salt scrub—it’s painful for me to look at her.

  Since she’s the hostess, Dini offers to go first. Reaching into her pocket, she pulls out a folded out piece of paper. “Oh my gosh, I’m not kidding, you guys. I had to write them all down!” she says.

  “Oh god,” I say again, but nobody hears me over the chorus of “That’s so Dini!” and laughs and exclamations that have consumed the table.

  Dini’s family takes in all the animals of the forest. There are Rastafarian boyfriends, crystal meth-addicted cousins, stepmothers and original mothers, commercial actors, beloved gay uncles like Jay and Bryan, and the soon-to-be-divorced who has found herself living with her gay best friend in Los Angeles, even though she did not plan to live with him ... no, the plan was to live with her husband happily ever after.

  The last time I visited Mathew at the bar where he worked in New York, I made sure to have a few drinks before I got there so I could relax enough to drink some more. I also arrived earlier than he was expecting so I could look through the window and catch him getting a blow job behind the bar. Instead I caught him doing something worse.

  When I peeked in through the front window of the bar I saw him standing around with a group of his co-workers and regulars, having what looked to be a really good time. He was laughing, and everybody he was talking to was laughing too. He looked relaxed and happy until I walked in the door. When he saw me, his face fell. But he still went through all his “perfect husband” gestures.

  “Hey, my beautiful wife,” he announced. (Looking caught.) He came out from behind the bar to give me a hug. “I’m so glad you came in,” he whispered in my ear.

 
; “Oh yeah? You don’t look like you’re so glad I’m here,” I spit back.

  “Lauren, I’m always glad you come in. Don’t say that, okay? What can I get you to drink?” He moved back behind the bar with a tired smile on his face.

  “I’ll have a vodka and tonic, but I don’t want you to pay for it,” I said. “Man, I don’t know what the hell was going on when I walked in, but sorry I broke up the little party. Maybe I should just go.” I started to say more but Mathew interrupted.

  “You know what? Maybe you should.” He took the drink he’d just made for me and threw it out in the sink. “I’ll see you at home,” he said. Then he turned away and went back to his friends at the end of the bar.

  In the five years that I’d been with him, that moment was the harshest that Mathew had ever been to me. And that was it. He wasn’t going to play anymore. He was done. I sat at the end of the bar, in total shock. Mathew had been trying to love me for a long time and now he was done.

  “I’m grateful to have Lauren here!” Dini begins.

  She’s kicking off her list of thanks with the saddest situation she knows of, and it’s me. I thought there would at least be a “grateful the prostate cancer is in remission” for some uncle somewhere before she got to me.

  Dini puts her arm around my shoulders and gives me half a mama hug. “At Thanksgiving, we just love to open our home to strays and—” She stops herself, but not before the entire table feels mortified on her behalf. When Dini realizes what she’s done, she leans in and whispers, “Oh Lauren, you are not a stray. I say that little speech every year. Hear me when I tell you, you are not a stray.”

  Just then it hits me that for as long as I’ve known Jay (about twenty years), he’s been known to take in strays of all shapes and sizes—mostly dogs, cats, birds, and fish. He takes them in and they run away or get eaten by coyotes living in the canyon behind his house. The last stray he took in, Chancy, was a seventeen-year-old nearly dead dog that did nothing beyond lie under a tree. Jay would gesture toward him with a sad face and say, “He’s dying. But I couldn’t let him die alone.” I remember thinking that he just loved to be able to tell everyone that he took in a dying dog—it offset his debauchery in the gym locker room.