Imperfections (23 page)

“Easy,” she said. “Stop eating.”

I knew I had come to the right person. Donna had stopped eating once. She watched a documentary about obesity in children and thought she needed a cause. She wanted to be a role model, so she boycotted obesity as if it were some seal hunt. She got down to sixty-five pounds. She stopped menstruating and her skin became translucent, so she stopped buying tampons and started putting on more foundation. She had chronic indigestion and got a persistent urinary tract infection, so she chewed antacids like candy and popped three antibiotics a day. Her doctor told her she had to eat or she would die. She laughed. Her fee had gone up by $20,000 a shoot. And then she collapsed.

“I have to eat,” I said. “I can't stop.”

“It sounds like you have a problem, Richard. How long have you been a chronic overeater?” Donna asked and then said, “Go see Dr. Bella. She'll make you better.”

“I don't know,” I said.

“It worked for my friend, Mila.”

Mila's story was a legend told to scare new models as they snuggled down under 600-thread count Lauren bedsheets at night. Mila wasn't fat but she had her stomach stapled anyway, had it turned into the size of a thumb. She lost thirty pounds and her career took off. Top-ten model. She complained she was always starving. She had to eat every thirty minutes. She developed gallstones, osteoporosis and anaemia within a year.

She died during revisional surgery. Plastic surgeons never called it corrective surgery because it implied a mistake had been made.

The Cause: She starved slowly and painfully. She ate every half-hour but her body couldn't absorb anything.

The Moral: I wasn't really sure. I thought long and hard about what was worse, to be beautiful and dead or to be dead with friends and family knowing it was due to vanity. I still didn't know. The moral didn't matter. Mila was dead.

“It didn't really work for Mila though,” I said.
 

“Well,” Donna countered, “it did for a while.”

“I don't want a doctor,” I said. The feeling that calling Donna was the right thing to do was waning.

“Really? Because you're sick, Richard. Being fat makes you sad, you being sad made you reach out to me. A doctor can fix your body and then you'll be happy again. A beautiful body causes a happy mind.”

I hadn't realized I was fat and sad until I called Donna.

Maybe I should go back to my psychologist.

Maybe I needed to get my 2:9 happy ratio realigned.
 

Maybe I should just hang up.

Donna was onto something though. I recalled my psychologist blathering on about physiognomy, something about how there is a close relationship between the body and the soul, how the two can't be separated, how one was a manifestation of the other. I just couldn't remember which manifested which.

“A good plastic surgeon is better than a good psychologist any day,” Donna continued, seemingly reading my mind. “The reason shrinks never work is because they go at the problem from the wrong end. The problem is not inside your brains or wherever, it's on the outside. Once you fix the extremities, the intremities follow. Trust me, it works. You're talking to living proof.”

I heard Father's voice in the background.

“In a minute, Jack,” Donna said through muffling fingers. “I'm helping Richard. He's fat. Okay, I'll hurry.” There was a staticky sound and Donna's voice became louder. “So, no liposuction then?” Donna asked.

Lipo, Donna's fountain of youth. Twenty-five years ago, doctors were just excising wedges of fat and stitching the body back together. The flesh left behind became a minefield of infection, gangrene and puckered scars. It wasn't until the seventies that a clever doctor figured out how to remove fat deposits without massive scarring and prolonged bleeding. The machine in that surgeon's hands had since evolved into the modern liposuction vacuum from its humble beginnings in abortionists' hands as the gynaecological cannula. From suction abortions to liposuction, progress is directional.

“No doctors,” I said. “No surgery.”

“Fine.” I could almost hear her pout.
 

“You have just one option really. I wouldn't wish it on anyone but I want to help you get better and you leave us no choice.”

“What is it?”

“Dulcolax diet.” Without a pause, Donna described it to me and all I thought was how Heaven better be worth it. Looking back at my life though, I had never really wanted anything until that moment. I was dizzy with the idea of having a goal. I would do anything.

I hung up, put on my shoes and coat and headed for the nearest pharmacy.

The Dulcolax diet is basically an extended version of what patients do for three days before their lower gastrointestinal series, better known as a barium enema.
 

I was lucky on two counts. I had six days, not three, and I didn't have colorectal cancer.

The diet is clear fluids only, no solid food, not even a hearty soup. Additionally, take two Dulcolax every four hours and stay close to the bathroom. The day before the flight to Paris, I completed the final stage, inserting a bullet-shaped Dulcolax suppository.
 

Voila, seventeen pounds in six days. I felt so light I could have flown to Paris under my own power; that, and I was also half-delirious due to starvation and dehydration. I couldn't drink though, not that day, not any more than was necessary to keep my kidneys from shutting down. My urine may have been like a desert rat's syrupy dribbles but there were $80,000 pants waiting for me in Heaven.

On the flight, I watched a nature documentary. A narrator with a haughty British accent talked about avifauna. “In the bird world, the onset of sexual maturity is marked by the development of gaudy plumage and huge bulbous body ornamentation which is disadvantageous for survival, as it draws the attention of predators, but is evolutionarily necessary as it attracts the attention of a mate.” Several images of birds humping flashed on the tiny, in-seat screen. I must have zoned out because when I looked again, the narrator was talking about plants reproducing. “This variety of orchid produces scents and grows dangly, bright baubles, which mimic the form of a female wasp.” Flash to a wasp humping a flower. “This confuses the male into mating with the flower which leads to pollination.”

The flight touched down at Charles de Gaulle in the early evening, the day before the Heavenly Show. I spied Donna and Father ahead of me in the Customs line and wondered why I hadn't seen them on the flight. Donna was wearing sunglasses and a scarf. Father was wearing sunglasses and a scarf. Donna carried a Fendi Baguette. Father carried four suitcases.
 

“Oh, first class sucked hard.”
 

My gut clenched, either from the familiar pang of Donna's voice or remnants of the laxative suppository. She was talking to another model whose photo hung near Stella Supernova's on the Agency wall. I had seen her at a few shows but couldn't remember her name. Sienna or Savannah or something.

“The champagne was barely chilled and they didn't start service until we were in the air… Oh my God, are those new?”

“What, these?” Sierra glowed. “Yes. Do my nipples look off-centre though?”

Donna took a step back for better perspective.

Sahara thrust her chest out, “I feel like one is looking at the wall and the other at the ceiling.”

“No, they're great,” Donna said. “Okay, check this out.” Donna hung her coat over Father and lifted her shirt to expose her midriff. “Jack got me an outie.”

“I love it,” Samhain squealed. “I gotta get me one. Innies are so 1986.”

“My surgeon just started doing umbilicoplasty. She's amazing, an artist. I swear, every time I go to her my paycheque grows.” Donna pulled her coat off Father, slung it over her shoulders and planted her hands on her hips.

The Customs officer said something to her.

Father prompted Donna to step up to the desk. She scolded him and then shrugged to Salmonella. “I can never understand what these Customs fuckers are saying, you know?”

Charles de Gaulle aerodrome is what Paul Andreu thought the future would look like from the year 1966. At that time, the future was a world of smooth, Plexiglas tubes covering moving sidewalks, all intertwined over a central courtyard cylinder. At that time, people still thought the future would only get better. There were so few angles in the building, I too couldn't help but feel fooled by the hope for a smooth, clean, soft future with no edges to bump into. It was a future of jetpacks and flying cars, a fantasy of robot slaves and laser ray guns that I dreamed about as a kid.

It was a lonely building though. The rest of the world still hadn't caught up.

I stood in the bustle of the spaceport and looked up the four-storey cylinder above me. I stood in the middle of a vision of a better world that hadn't quite made it. The longer I looked, the more I saw how the vision was breaking down. The Plexiglas tube enclosing the moving sidewalk spanning the second and third floors was hazy with scratches. There was a fuzzy white square on the railing to the central courtyard where someone had removed a sticker but left behind some adhesive. A dark smear of bubble gum blemished the otherwise-gleaming floor. There were subtle signs of decay everywhere I looked. It was as though the building tried to outrun the present but got caught in a dark alley.

I didn't see Donna or Father or Saliva on the other side of Customs. They must have found their driver and headed into the city. I couldn't find my driver, so I hailed a cab.

The ride to the hotel was a solitary affair. The driver smoked the whole way and mumbled at the traffic in French. At the hotel, the gentleman at the front desk would not speak English. He just shrugged at me until I put my passport on the counter, then he checked me in without a word. My room was a small, street-side affair with a Romeo and Juliet balcony overlooking the Opera House. I didn't turn on the lights. I stood looking out at the golden angel statues and listening to the foreign sounds drifting up from the street. There was the constant whoosh of traffic punctuated by the occasional sonar blast of a horn that echoed off the surrounding buildings. The voices coming from the sidewalk were smoky and exotic. It seemed everyone had someone to talk to, to stroll hand in hand with through the streets of Paris. They all seemed to have something they could say to bring smiles to their companions' faces.

In the dark, I picked up the phone and demanded room service deliver a bottle of San Pellegrino Chinotto, three lemons, a Cohiba Robusto and Taku Wild smoked salmon, raw buttermilk cream cheese and salted capers on a bagel. At that time in my life, obscure room service orders became a proxy of my loneliness.

Half an hour later there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find a tray on the floor with a small bottle of Perrier, two lime wedges, a packet of Marlboros and some stinking cheese and a baguette. I brought the tray in and sat on the bed with it beside me. I drank straight from the bottle, threw the limes across the room into the bathroom sink, lit a cigarette and cried while contemplating the cheese.

I gagged on the smoke. My mind sparked with the cigarette's crackle to the last time I smoked, fifteen years old and the taste of marshmallows on Paige Green's lips when we kissed by the campfire. I remembered the solitary light over the empty, black highway. The only thing between the stars and me was a buzzing power line. Standing with Leonard in the vast darkness, I never felt smaller until that night in Paris. I was small again but this time in a darkened hotel room in the middle of the City of Lights, surrounded by millions of people, on the eve of my greatest show ever, crying over blue cheese—or perhaps it was the baguette that made me weep.
 

The cigarette butt hissed when I pushed it into the stinking chunk of cheese.
 

My cellphone rang.

“Richard.” It was Leonard. “I'm so glad I caught you. Where are you?”

“Paris. Alone.”

“Is everything all right? You sound…”

“It's good to hear your voice, Leonard.”

“What's wrong?”

“All of a sudden, I feel everything.” I snorked back a gloob of snot that had somehow made its way onto my lip.

“What do you mean? Are you drunk?”

“No.” I couldn't keep back a sob. “I can't… I can't eat the blue cheese.”

“That's okay, buddy, few people can.”

“No, listen. I can't eat the baguette either.” There was silence on the other end, which I took as a prompt to continue. Maybe I haven't explained it all that well, I thought. “I probably shouldn't even be drinking this water. I'll bloat an inch and the $80,000 pants won't fit. I asked for San Pellegrino but they brought Perrier.” I needed to get it across. I needed Leonard's help, not Donna's, I always had. “I have been shitting myself for a week. I needed to, no, I wanted to, so I made it happen.”

“Richard, slow down. You aren't making sense. Start at the beginning.”

“It started after the orgy, the one in Tokyo, I think. A few years ago, anyway, I had just seen my butt hole and my life didn't make sense. I didn't know my own butt hole and I got thinking that I didn't know anything. My God, Leonard. I realize I have never felt anything. I never felt love for anyone. I never felt the friendship from you. I always knew we were friends but now I can feel it. I never felt anything for my family but detachment. I never felt pleasure in my success. I've never wanted anything. It all happened and over the past few years, I've figured out that I can change things. I've always lived on the outside, outside my skin. Then, all of a sudden, tonight, I feel everything. The whole past twenty-two years is here tonight. All that stuff that has built up on the outside, now I can feel it. The past twenty-two years, all at once, and it's wonderful and terrifying and sad.”