Authors: Ali Wentworth
I
was curled up on my sofa with my mug (which has a picture of Lionel Richie on it and says
HELLO? IS IT TEA YOU’RE LOOKING FOR?
) filled with PG Tips and loads of cream watching
Good Morning America
when I suddenly spewed liquid all over my pajamas. On national television, Lena Dunham, award-winning actress, writer, director, voice of a generation, and a woman I admire, called my husband “a sexual icon.” A SEXUAL ICON! Well, I figured, it was just a matter of time before he left me. He would have his pick of every twenty-something Brooklyn-based, braless, offbeat girl. Yes, with all the tattoos and piercings, the odds were pretty high that he would contract
hepatitis C. But they are all so coquettish and verbally raw, I don’t think he’d mind.
Well, that’s it, I decided, I was getting Botox.
Have I mentioned that I’m terrified of needles? Whenever a nurse takes my blood, I latch on to her waist like a needy toddler and have at least three other medical administrators sing a Taylor Swift song or describe their first kiss. And I always scream like they are extracting organs without numbing cream. Yes, I am a doctor’s worst nightmare. I can’t even watch my children get shots. They can’t fathom why their mother is running down the hall, bawling, before the alcohol has even been rubbed. I don’t get flu shots; I get flu nasal snorts. Apparently, after age fifty you have to get the shot. Reason enough to lie about my age for the next twenty years.
Beyond my needle phobia, there is the fact that Botox is a lethal toxin. I was contemplating injecting a life-threatening illness into my body to paralyze facial muscles. Oh, what the hell, I wanted to be pretty.
I wasn’t sure how to find a Botox doctor. Walk up to strange women on the street and ask, “Hey, who did your face?” I started looking through magazines at people whose faces I coveted and that looked real enough. I figured I could call their agents or publicists? Oh, right, celebrities don’t have any “work done.” They just drink a lot of water or are happy in their current relationship.
I
have a friend, Ruthie, whom I’ve known for twenty years. A witty and warm woman who makes me wish I were born a Jew. She is currently teaching me Yiddish. I should be fluent by Hanukkah. Well, luckily, she’s married to a Park Avenue doctor! Not only a doctor, but a plastic surgeon—the good kind. Like I would know from a good plastic surgeon! I called her and asked if her husband, Ezra, dabbled in Botox. “Are you kidding me? Why do you think he looks twenty? He injects the leftovers on himself!”
I explained my aversion to needles, but that I needed to do something before my husband ran off with Lena Dunham.
“Are you nuts? Your husband is a mensch, he will never leave you, even if you lost your whole face.”
“I know,” I said, “but now he’s a sexual icon.”
“Ah, yeah, that’s a tough one. I tell you what, I’ve never had Botox either, and my looks are going to the dogs; I’ll go with you!”
I figured since she was married to the guy, we wouldn’t have a six-month wait.
I had no idea what Botox cost. Did you pay by the prick? By the ounce or bag like drugs? It could have been ten dollars or five hundred. But I figured I would get the friends and family rate. After all, I went to their son’s bar mitzvah and I don’t mean just the party—temple too.
The office was in the East Sixties on Park Avenue. This area is the mecca of medical hotshots. I think because it’s the Upper East Side, people assume that if the doctor can afford the rent, he must be exemplary. I mean, would you get a butt lift in Coney Island? I just didn’t want to end up with a droopy eye or missing an ear.
The waiting room could have been my grandmother’s Chicago living room circa 1968. There was a worn chenille sofa and two oak chairs with ornately carved arms, a coffee table with a toile tray covered in two-year-old magazines, and a fern (which I suspect was fake). I was devouring a pamphlet on Juvéderm when Ruthie stomped into the room. “Oy! Are we sure we want to do this? I couldn’t sleep all night!”
Oh, there was no turning back now. I have jumped out of a plane and walked nude on a public beach, so injecting botulism into my forehead for the sake of keeping my husband was definitely within the realm of possibility. I would take a needle for him.
My favorite thing about Ruthie and her husband, Dr. Ezra, is that when they’re together they morph into a pair of Borscht Belt comedians. In the 1950s they would have done warm-up for Shecky Greene. When Ezra led us into the inner sanctum of tummy tucks and breast enhancements, Ruthie began to balk.
“Oy gevalt!”
I watched Ezra fill the syringe with the evil potion.
“You hear my wife kvetching?” he chuckled. I stared at the clear serum. My armpits started to emit a scent associated with high-stress situations like public speaking and parent-teacher conferences.
Ruthie started pacing. “This is
fercockt,
look at that needle! I’m about to
plotz
!”
Ezra, slightly annoyed, rolled his eyes at me. “You hear all this
tummel
? I’m about to punch her in her
kishka
!”
My palms started to sweat; who would go first? Did I get it over with? Or did I watch Ruthie suffer so I could get a better grasp of the situation and see how much blood was involved? I could always escape out the back (or entrance, for incognito famous people) if it was a nip/tuck horror show.
Ezra made the choice for me. “Ali, you go and show this
pisher
what’s what!” He slapped on the rubber gloves and I lay back in his teal blue pleather medical chair. I closed my eyes and willed myself to take it like a man, or woman, take it like a Kardashian. Ezra hit a pedal and the chair slowly and loudly reclined.
“Bissela, bissela,
” Ruthie shouted.
I opened my eyes. “What’s
bissela
?” I had to make sure it didn’t mean wrong place, wrong place!
Ezra stopped, turned, and gave Ruthie a look as a droplet fell off the tip of the needle onto the floor. He turned back to me; my jaw was clenched. “It means a little.”
I took a deep breath and went to my quiet place. I could feel the needle pinch and then penetrate the skin. Once by my left brow, then my right. My eyes were tearing. And I hadn’t exhaled. Then a sharp pinch between the furrow in my brows. Just as his fingers ran along the sides of my eyes—well, crow’s-feet—I barked, “I’m good!” I had visions of my face distorting like a Modigliani painting.
My outburst sent Ruthie into a panic. “What? What? You okay . . . Ezra, something’s wrong? What have you done, you
alter cocker
?” Ezra was unfazed. When Ruthie’s grocery delivery is thirty minutes late, she calls 911. He handed me a bag of ice and pressed it on my forehead. The freeze hurt more than the injections.
“Oy!” Ruthie inspected my face. “She looks like she got stung by a hive of bees!”
I kept checking in the mirror to see if I had transformed into Jessica Biel. It was still just me, but with red bumps.
Ezra was wrestling Ruthie into the chair while I continued to numb my
punim
(that’s Yiddish for face) with the ice pack. I had to side with Ezra a little; Ruthie was acting like she was being tied to a head crusher.
“Listen to me, listen to me . . .
bissela, bissela
!” Ezra pointed to his wife. “You see this? I’m giving her free Botox, something my clients pay hundreds of dollars for, and look at her? Like I’m pulling out all her teeth!”
“Come on, I don’t have the
koyakh,
give me the damn juice!” Thank God I went first. Watching Ruthie was like being in the front row of a beheading.
W
e sat in the waiting room with ice packs on our foreheads, clinging to the fern and moaning like two old German shepherds with hip dysplasia. Ezra chuckled as he opened a box of gelatinous implants.
I lifted my throbbing head. “Ezra, how much do I owe you? Does Cigna Health cover this?”
He slammed a double D on the desk. “Don’t be ridiculous! You’re
mishpacha
! You pay me nothing.”
I’m not comfortable with owing people. I believe a service should be reciprocated with money or sex, preferably money. “Ezra, please, let me pay you something! Or clean your office?”
Ruthie continued moaning. “I can’t feel my brain!”
“Ali, I tell you what, you bake me some of those chocolate chip cookies and we’ll call it even.” Yes, they’re THAT good!
“No! No cookies! Ezra, we don’t need any more sweets in the house. I can’t fit into any of my pants!”
He smiled. “Why? I do lipo!”
I negotiated a box of cookies and a dozen brownies that I would hand-deliver to his office the next day.
Ruthie and I walked up Park Avenue, periodically
checking out each other’s facades. For ten blocks all I heard was, “Is it bruised? It’s bruised, isn’t it? Oy, that quack.”
We finally parted at Seventy-eighth Street. Ruthie had to speak with her super; there were accusations floating around her building that her shih tzu had bitten one of the doormen.
As I continued walking I thought about the pain of beauty and all the women who try to mask their age, only to be outdone by their necks, which always give it away. And the price of upkeep: I would have to do a lot of baking. I wondered what a dozen whoopee pies would get me? Would I even get Botox again?
And then it dawned on me: I was so fixated on myself, I had forgotten to stop at the drugstore and pick up dandruff shampoo for the sexual icon.
I
don’t know why I burst into tears, but I did. I was weeping driving down Sunset Boulevard past strip clubs, the Viper Room, and the Roxy, looking for a juice bar or smoothie hut or someplace to sip something sweet to rid my mouth of last night’s melatonin metallic taste. Every time I stopped at a light, I would catch the guy in the Lamborghini with the license plate—
MOGUL
—eyeing my hysteria. I pretended I was on speakerphone, laughing. The window was down, so I kept repeating, “You kill me, Louis CK!” I’d been in Los Angeles less than twenty-four hours on a pitching spree. Which means I fly out on my own dime with some half-baked television idea in the hopes that I sell the script, they
make it into a show, that show goes into syndication, and I eventually feel like an empowered female. And that feeling propels me to finally start exercising. It’s amusing the places I go to feel accomplishment. And it’s not the same fulfillment as watching your child ride a bike for the first time or ladling corn chowder at a soup kitchen. It’s not selfless. It’s more of a “See? I’m not such a loser, I too can be in the
Hollywood Reporter
as a player [pronounced ‘playa’].” Oh, I’m not proud of the feeling, but I have to acknowledge it because it is the feeling that got me in the rental car cruising down Sunset Boulevard in the first place! But why the sobbing?
The last time I was truly single was when I lived in the Hollywood Hills. I was young (well, any age is young to me now), a bachelorette, and every day was full of the possibility of fortuitousness and action. A movie deal, starring in a TV show, and making out with Channing Tatum were all just a whiff away. There was always a meeting or an audition that could instantly blast me into the stratosphere of celebrity. Or there was some creative pal to meet with and discuss a provocative idea based on a
New Yorker
cartoon over sake at a Rock’N Sushi happy hour. But that was then. Today, I am very married, a mother, and the odds of the barometer of my life moving in any significant way are slight at best.
I was on my way to the valley via Laurel Canyon, a mecca of cliff-side, stucco hippie crash pads, the tree
houses of wayward actors, and a little general store that blares Rasta music. I always experience a jolt coming over the peak of the canyons, where a deeply tanned homeless man is skateboarding and there’s a pungent smell of marijuana and jasmine over to the valley, which is essentially an endless line of mini-malls and frozen yogurt shacks. How much Pinkberry, Bigg Chill, Humphreys, Menchie’s, and Yogurtland can these people devour? They must have extremely healthy colony-forming units of microorganisms based on the enormous amounts of lactobacillus they consume. And gas.
The San Fernando Valley is always ten degrees hotter, which makes me ten degrees sadder. I was en route to pitch to two networks. And a vast majority of corporate television lives in the dry climate of the San Fernando desert. Yes, television executives and rattlesnakes.
In between being paraded into spare conference rooms, where I tried to convince executives with glazed-over eyes that my genius idea for a multicamera sitcom would be bigger than
Cheers
and more lucrative than
Modern Family,
I would sit on a velveteen sofa from Overstock.com in the waiting area and ponder why I didn’t live in London and own a sublimely lit gallery in Hoxton Square that featured the works of Lucian Freud. I made clear to my audience, slugging down their coffee lattes, that my success would validate their need for
bigger Spanish-style mansions closer to the beach and shinier Mercedes.
There was something disheartening about slogging up the hill in my rented SUV now, some twenty years later, with the same old bag of tricks, jokes, and need for approval. I was even older than the executives I was pitching. And those kinds of feelings are a punch in the stomach worse than sex in a strange position.
But my melancholy ran deeper than a simple case of capitalist malaise. My closest girlfriends still reside in L.A. They’re not in the minuscule tenements of their twenties committed only to their rescue pit bull mixes; now they throw soccer balls on their lush lawns in Santa Monica in front of their chalky white, four-bedroom haciendas covered in fuchsia bougainvillea. They are constant reminders of my past life in L.A., although they too have aged. They haven’t frozen in time (well, maybe their foreheads) and are a reminder that I too am getting older and worried about retirement funds and whether to put teenagers on Ritalin. A visit to L.A. these days is as depressingly nostalgic as riding It’s a Small World at Disneyland—instead of feeling overwhelmed by the magnificence, I find myself focusing on the air-conditioning vents on the ceilings amidst painted clouds.
As I cruised by a dilapidated shack in the hills, I recalled once making out with the guy who lived there
before it was condemned. He was a South American retro furniture dealer with his own shop in Hollywood. I had flashbacks to driving over in the middle of the night and trying to navigate a parking spot as cars roared by, almost taking me and the driver’s door with them. Our love never went beyond kissing and back rubbing. Even when I spent the night, it was cuddling and spooning in his boxers and Edie Sedgwick T-shirt. I mean, I knew deep down he was as gay as George Michael in a bathhouse listening to Cher, but I liked the idea of living atomic style with a South American who relished a nice Eames sofa and had an appreciation for melamine dishware.
As I cruised farther up the canyon, more film clips clicked through my mind. The afternoons I lay in bed with Michelle smoking Camel Lights and drinking ginger ale. Even now in our middle age we have been known to meet at my hotel, get under the covers, and consume a whole plate of chocolate chip cookies (the smoker’s substitute) and ginger ale. Most of my Los Angeles days involved Michelle and ginger ale, Scrabble, cigarettes, and boys. Sometimes it was advice about a boy we were currently dating, sometimes about a boy we were trying to disengage from, and sometimes about boys from our adolescence. We were just young enough that the boys we had as teenagers could still surface for a do-over at any time. Now, they are all vague memories that resurface in dismal lives on Facebook.
But I liked the unpredictability of life then. Who would be the next love conquest? How could I juggle not two, but three men? My skin regimen consisted of soap and maybe astringent because I loved the Mediterranean blue color of the Kiehl’s bottle. Now, my skin ritual takes an hour and requires the space of another bedroom for all the products. There are jars of antiaging, collagen-making, contouring, line-reducing, wrinkle-erasing creams scattered about my sink. And they will make me as nubile looking as rubbing a Hostess cupcake on my face will. But I have always been a victim of the promise.
I think that is why women my age seek affairs. They don’t really love those men—the sexy father at baseball practice, the kid’s guitar teacher, the thirty-year-old editor’s assistant who makes fantastic cappuccinos. No, they want it all back. The sleepless nights overlooking the twinkling lights of Los Angeles with the possibility of a 3
A.M.
burrito, a drive over to a blossoming romance, a skinny dip, or just knowing that the night holds no limits. I wonder what would happen if I got up one night now, checked on my sleeping children and snoring dogs, put on some jeans and black stiletto suede boots and whispered to my husband, “I’m going downtown to see what the city brings me”? I’m pretty sure it would not go over well; chances are, I would find myself stuck in a four-hour session with a psychopharmacologist the next day. I would definitely get a call from my mother.
T
hat night in Los Angeles, I had some girlfriends, ghosts of the carefree past, over to dinner at the friend’s house where I was staying—a perfectly manicured marble sculpture of a house ready for the pages of
Architectural Digest,
with nary a futon smelling of mold and stale beer in sight. I’d thought through the menu carefully. In-N-Out Burger was not an option, as all the girls were now watching their cholesterol, eating non-dairy (except for calcium supplements), and menopausally conscious of their caloric consumption. I made roast chicken, squash puree, and a standard for my lady set—kale salad. One thing that never changes is a girlfriend’s yen for a cocktail; this is truly the single constant that never varies, from eighteen to eighty. I served my best tequila with ice and lots of lime. I had my usual club soda and cranberry juice. And very predictably, the ladies didn’t eat much but sucked on their cocktails like they were connected to life support. And then the night got weird.
My friend Lucy began to discuss the inevitable wear and tear of her vagina. She has had four children and no amount of Pilates and Kegels in the world can sprinkle it with fairy dust and bring it back to its former pink rosebud state. “I think I have to do some work down there.”
Katherine’s eyes opened. “Like landscaping work?”
Lucy rolled her eyes. “No, plastic surgery. I don’t
think I have stuff hanging down, but I want to get everything organized.”
“But you’re married. Who cares?” I whispered.
That might have been the end of it, if Peggy, the only lesbian in the group, hadn’t had one too many tequilas and decided to egg Lucy on. “Well, let’s see, we’ll tell you!”
I had a moment of panic, hoping it wouldn’t turn into some orgy—in which case I would have to coolly excuse myself to hide upstairs in my paisley pajamas with a mug of warm milk. And the Old Testament.
Lucy unbuttoned her purposely tattered and expensive jeans and lowered her La Perla underpants. It was the most finely trimmed and delicately pruned vagina I had ever seen. I knew Lucy would age well; she monitored every inch of her body like a guard at San Quentin. The rest of us sadly looked down at our vaginas, which we all knew looked like the back of
Grey Gardens
. In my youth I would have been best in show.
I
decided on the plane ride home, in between episodes of
Downton Abbey,
that I was going to make an effort to infuse my life with more ebullience and adventure. But what exactly is my idea of excitement these days? A midnight bowl of fiber cereal while watching last Wednesday’s
Law and Order SVU,
which is on too late
to see it in real time? To quote Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is?” You see, I’m not ready for true adulthood! I don’t want a colonoscopy! I don’t wish to sleep with other people, but I would like a few men and perhaps a woman to at least try!
And whatever happens, I will not throw myself a big, blowout fiftieth birthday party. It would be like attending my own funeral, and then picking up the tab. I have been caught up in the flurry of fiftieth birthday parties and although I may dance like a soul sister until I’m covered in sweat and jump up and down like a sorority girl being handed carbs, it all makes me heartsick for sweet sixteen. These celebrations of the fact that we’re still alive feel more like a segment of
This Is Your Life.
(Yes, I’m old enough to know that reference.) We all observe vintage childhood photos of the birthday girl carefully pasted on lavender boards and hanging about the room so we all can see just how deteriorated she has become.
How do I want to mark the fact that I will be turning half a century old? I want to fly to an island, alone, with a bag of books, no beauty creams, and a stash of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I want to dive in the ocean without worrying about how much cellulite I’ve acquired, like rings on a tree, or how, even from a distance, I would never be mistaken for a twenty-year-old. And when I dive into the sea where there are no sounds, I can just be. And I will marvel at the churning sand and
the conch shells that are still perfect and pink even after decades of tumult. You see, underwater and above coral there are no TV executives, memories of Michelle and me buying a carton of Marlboro Lights at the 7-Eleven, old lovers, decaying bodies, Facebook, slide shows, or retrospective sadness. It’s the only place where my vagina and I are ageless.