Stuck in Downward Dog, page 3
“I am more than happy to stock the kitchen and let her help herself to whatever she likes—fruit, bagels, salad, biscotti—but to blatantly ask me to pick up specific items like white cranberry and peach juice and Perrier when there’s San Pellegrino and orange juice right there in the fridge just seems ridiculous.”
“Why don’t you tell her she has to bring her own beverages?” I asked.
“Because—you can never be sure about manual labor. For all I know, she could smile and agree, then spit in my soy milk.” Olivia brushed a non-existent strand of hair off her forehead. “I just need to find someone with both manners and attention to detail. Is that too much to ask?”
Is it too much to clean your own condo? I thought as Mitz stood up, too.
“I’ll come with you,” Mitz said. “I’ve got to pick up the Save the Date cards for the wedding at Paper Ideas.”
“Already?” I asked. She’d been engaged only three days, and the wedding was still a year away.
“Olivia said I should send them out immediately,” Mitz said, looking to Olivia for confirmation.
“Definitely. It’s only proper etiquette not to give your guests last-minute notice for a summer wedding. Plus,” Olivia added, “the sooner you send the Save the Dates, the sooner you’ll be able to redo your kitchen with all the new accessories you registered for.”
“Good point,” Mitz said, then turned to me. “And while I plan my wedding, you can plan your dating strategy. You could use my wedding as a target. If you start now, you might time things just right to have a new guy propose to you at my wedding.”
“Or not,” Olivia said. “Mara doesn’t need a guy to be complete. I certainly hope you don’t think that I’m who I am because of Johnnie.” She turned to me. “Just think of all the things you could accomplish now that you’re a free, empowered woman.”
I looked back and forth at them as Olivia patted my hand. “I’ll call you tomorrow and make sure that you’re on track,” she said to me. “Remember, I know what’s best for you.”
Mitz gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. “We’re here for you, and we’ll help you get through this. Just remember, even if you do meet a rich guy on the way home and fall madly in love”—she waved her finger at me—“no getting married before July 21 even if he tries to fly you to Vegas. I don’t want anybody trying to steal my bouquet, so to speak!” Mitz laughed and Olivia joined in. I had to wonder if they were laughing at Mitz’s joke-with-truth or at the ridiculousness of the possibility that I would meet a man and fall madly in love when I had just been unsuccessful at securing the guy I’d dated for nearly a year—which was definitely a sufficient amount of time when a girl is twenty-eight and a guy is thirty.
I stood in front of the tea shop, watching Olivia and Mitz as they turned to walk south back to the corner of Yonge and College to grab a cab together, yoga bags slung over their shoulders. Mitz was like a tiny, perfect housewife doll in a floral Ann Taylor Loft skirt and cream twin set with even creamier pearls, a gift from her grandmother when she turned twenty-one. Her fake but reasonable-length acrylic nails and her perfect, naturally wavy hair, enhanced with rollers every morning to make each curl more precise, made her classic and classy.
Olivia, by comparison, was just short of five-foot-nine in sneakers, which she wore only to yoga or while out running, making her five-foot-eleven the rest of the time in one of her signature pairs of Christian Louboutin heels.
Olivia was adamant about not altering her appearance for a man, but that was a cinch for her since there was nothing that needed altering. Everything about her appeared to be effortlessly chic, from her chemical-free long blonde hair that hung without a single kink even hours after being tied back in an elastic, to the two-hundred-dollar tank tops she could wear without a bra, to the Prada sunglasses she sported while driving her silver Saab 9-3. She didn’t really exercise, but she was also prepared to skip breakfast if it meant she could fit into the last pair of Seven jeans at a sample sale. She had a year-round tan, thanks to lunch hours spent shopping on shabby-to-chic Queen West and winters split between Under the Tuscan Sun Bed tanning salon and last-minute trips to Johnnie’s mother’s current residence, a beachfront property on Venice Beach where she was living with her fourth husband.
Although Olivia refused to marry Johnnie and claimed to be an independent, unmotherly type, I had to think she liked having a guy who didn’t make as much money as she did, and who needed her to take care of him, both emotionally and financially—which she did seemingly without effort. Both boutiques and banks sent her holiday cards, which she’d hang over the mantel of the latest condo she’d purchased—she was on her third since graduation and was currently seeking out a fourth. Each one had netted a heftier profit than the last, thanks to the cosmetic upgrades she’d done herself.
How did my two best friends—the girls I’d once done everything with at the same time, from getting our ears pierced to getting our periods—get so far ahead of me and so sure of themselves? Okay, so they had their differences. Mitz was a traditionalist. Although she had a very good career, being a chef and caterer only better prepared her to cook meals for her family-to-be in her future role as a full-time housewife and mother. And while Olivia might not make pesto from scratch, she knew which of the city’s caterers did. In the end, their dinner parties were both successes, each in their own way. And while Mitz might wait for a man to open a door and Olivia would open it herself, they both knew which door needed to be opened—the one that led them right to the next opportunity, whether it was a new client, a new promotion or a new, better, more beautifully decorated home.
I looked down at my split ends, my chipped nail polish and the thin layer of brown cat fur that didn’t blend into my blue sweater vest. Where my friends were decisive, strong and perfect, I was indecisive, weak and so full of flaws that I didn’t even know which to start fixing first.
I thought about this as I made my way west on College, through the hospital district to the base of the university campus, where students filled patios and emptied their beer steins. I walked along the edge of Chinatown to Little Italy, the most romantic neighborhood in the city, where couples strolled after intimate dinners, stopping on the sidewalk for gelato or a spontaneous kiss. A community made for coupledom. A place I no longer belonged.
I opened the door to my basement apartment, and Pumpernickel jumped down from the window ledge in the kitchen, galloped over to my feet and reached up to put his paws on my thighs. I dropped my brown-and-orange argyle yoga bag and reached down to pick him up. I carried him into the bedroom, grabbed a notebook and pen from under the futon and then returned to the roaster box, where I sat, putting Pumpernickel at my feet, which he sniffed and then flopped on top of.
If my friends were perfect and I was stuck in a rut, what I had to do was become more like them. I wasn’t about to plagiarize them, but a little harmless imitation-as-flattery couldn’t hurt. I needed to start with our similarities and build from there, but as I thought about all of their accomplishments, I realized the only thing I had in common with my two best friends was the yoga class we had, until today, attended together. Getting better at yoga was a start—at least that way, when we joined a new club in the fall, anyone in the class watching us chant “Om” in unison might think that if we were at the same level in yoga, maybe we were at the same level in other areas. Maybe no one would ever know in how many ways I lagged behind my two best friends. But I wanted more than that. I wanted to be just as good as they were at everything else in life.
And then I had an idea. Since I had nowhere to go but up, all I needed to do was create a list of the ideals that Olivia and Mitz embodied, the rules they lived by that made Olivia and Mitz—OM—so perfect, and then methodically implement the list, item by item. I would give myself a deadline and, I thought, suddenly feeling it all come together, a party at which I would have all my friends over to witness how much I had accomplished.
Which is how, four days after my twenty-eighth birthday, I put pen to paper, and came up with the OM list.
The OM List
By Mara Brennan
Get a perfect body.
Get a promotion or a real job.
Become a fabulous chef with my own unique dossier of recipes.
Keep an immaculately clean living space.
Unleash my inner decor diva on my apartment.
Improve my time-management and multi-tasking skills to appear busier to others and create an air of importance.
Become an etiquette expert so as not to embarrass myself in social situations.
Be well read and knowledgeable in order to engage in enlightening conversations.
Stop dressing in Gap and create my own signature style.
Throw a dinner party to display my accomplishments and the successful implementation of my OM list.
chapter two
KARMA YOGI: A PERSON WHO IS SELFLESSLY DEVOTED TO WORK.
The present state of work is a result of cause and effect, past actions or inactions.
Face Value Cosmetic Surgery Clinic (where I was not usefully employed but employed nonetheless as a receptionist) was located on Bloor Street East in the final row of businesses before the rather desolate Bloor Street Viaduct with its suicide barriers, erected to prevent depressives from jumping onto the Don Valley Parkway below. At first glance, Face Value’s address might suggest that the place was located in the midst of both the creaseless foreheads and the couture that comprised Bloor Street West (Toronto’s version of the Champs-Élysées). But it wasn’t.
Most of the other lucrative cosmetic surgeons in the city were tucked in behind Holt Renfrew (in the heart of Bloor Street West shopping) in renovated Victorian brick houses or inside Hazelton Lanes, a boutique-filled shopping complex. Face Value was located on the wrong side of Yonge Street, which acted as the meridian, dividing the city into a west side and an east side. As far as Bloor Street was concerned, west was haute and east was hoax, but my boss and the owner of the clinic, Dr. Marjorie Wickham, liked it because the rent was cheap. Like her. And so, since opening more than five years ago, the clinic had occupied a unit on the second story of Goodluck Strip, or so I referred to it because good luck was what you needed to find anything decent for lunch (once you’d exhausted the five choices—Subway sandwiches, Starbucks, Swiss Chalet, Nijo Sushi and the Panzerotto Pizza joint) but also for the Goodwill used clothing store that acted as a hub for the homeless, unemployed and bored.
It was a lengthy walk from my apartment to work, but one I undertook every morning and every evening anyway, because it was free and because taking public transit meant walking south from my apartment to the streetcar on College, taking the streetcar over to Yonge Street, transferring to the subway to go north to Bloor, then changing subway lines to go east one stop to Sherbourne, all in all a feat that ended up taking just as long as walking the whole way. Walking also saved me $3.00 each way, and I got to wander through the Annex, and past Chanel, Cartier and Holt Renfrew on Bloor. Some nights I even stopped for kimchi-fried rice at Ka-Chi in Koreatown. Through the uninteresting blocks, I usually attempted to devour the beauty pages of Allure, Flare or Vogue, while trying not to bump into telephone poles, newspaper boxes or parking meters. I figured it was good exercise, too, though it remained a mystery to me why I was still a size 10 after years of the twice-a-day trek.
Annie Markowitz called at 9:35 a.m., just as I was opening the door to the clinic. This involved using four different keys to unbolt four locks to the second-story office, which was located just above a street-level tchotchke store that featured holiday ornaments in the front window display year-round. I lunged for the phone, fell into my chair and kicked off my shoes. Annie wanted to book another follow-up appointment to her third rhinoplasty, which she had had last month. Since the first surgery, she hadn’t been able to breathe while lying down. This was a problem for obvious reasons, although Marjorie—who was also the cosmetic surgeon and only other employee of Face Value—said Annie was most upset because it meant she had to be on top whenever she was “making whoopee” (Marjorie’s words, not mine). With a husband plus a boyfriend on the side, Annie wasn’t pleased. Since neither Marjorie nor Annie wanted to have to redo the nose job, Annie came in once a week and Marjorie took a CT scan each time to see if things were getting any better.
“What’s the latest appointment available tomorrow?” she asked.
I told her, penciled her in and started my morning routine, which I had down to a fine-tuned procedure (think mini-liposuction: ultra-thin cannulas leaving no marks and causing no downtime). I was technically paid to arrive and start this series of menial tasks at 9 a.m., but I could get everything done—coffee started, stereo turned on to pump elevator-music renditions of popular ’80s theme songs from L.A. Law to Family Ties through the surround-sound speakers Marjorie’s brother had set up last summer, mail sorted into six very specific and color-coded folders, and Marjorie’s slightly burnt (just the way she liked it) coffee poured into her stained 97.3 EZ Rock mug—in less than half an hour and before she arrived at 10:03 a.m. So I usually aimed to be in the office by 9:30 a.m. And since I was making $15 an hour, starting half an hour late slightly increased my wage-per-hour ratio and made me somewhat less embittered that I was approaching my third anniversary working for a woman I despised.
I didn’t have time for distractions before Marjorie arrived, so when the phone rang again, I debated not answering it, but did anyway because I could see by the caller ID it was Bradford. Distractions from friends were the jujubes of my working day, so although Marjorie puckered up at personal calls, I told him to hold while I started the coffee. Then I came back to talk to him, since I still had fifteen minutes to spare.
I met Bradford Lynch on a cruise ship the year after I graduated from university. Both of us were traveling with our grandmothers, who were widowed and happened to be friends from the Fonthill YMCA morning aquacize class. I agreed to accompany Grandma Gerta for several reasons, one of which was that I really liked her and not because I felt I had to, but more importantly because she chose me over my sister and had offered to pay. Given that I hadn’t found a career that would do the same, I took her up on it.
After three days on the Caribbean Sea, while Grandma was at origami class on the lido deck, I headed to the fitness room for the first time. I was on the treadmill, wondering how long I had to walk to call it a workout, while watching a Love Boat rerun on the overhead TV, when tall and gangly Bradford, who had hands as big as his feet and was festooned in a blue Maple Leafs hockey jersey and burgundy-and-gold plaid flannel pants—managing to be overdressed (for the July heat) and underdressed (for a Princess Cruise Line) at the same time—asked me if I had any lip balm. Although I wasn’t attracted to him (for reasons obvious to any girl who doesn’t wear Sorels with a sundress), I was thankful for an excuse—any excuse—to get off the treadmill. We went back to my room, where we divulged our mutual love for The Body Shop’s Born Lippy lip balm. Later, we drank Bellinis and then bonded over napkin-folding classes for the same reason: the hot napkin-folding instructor, Dylan. Which is when I realized that Bradford was gay, despite his horrible fashion sense and love of hockey.
At first, Bradford tried to discourage me from being his friend. He warned me it wouldn’t be good for my ratings, since he claimed that too often the single woman on the brink of fabulousness meets her downfall by getting wrapped up in a gay male friend. And he did not want us to be thrown in with the Bridget Jones and Tom, Will and Grace or Julianne and George in My Best Friend’s Wedding couples of the world.
“The gay guy will be handsome, kind, wise, witty, fashion-savvy and the perfect boyfriend—if only he weren’t gay. And the girl will lose all sense of self—and opportunity for dates—by relying too much on her gay friend, then complaining that she’s going to die alone and near killing the gay friend with her incessant moaning until she snaps out of it. Count me out. I don’t want to be responsible for your downfall, nor put up with the agony, which could last a good six months or more,” Bradford had said to me.
Once I reminded Bradford that (as if his non-existent sense of style and my questionable fabulousness weren’t clues) we weren’t fictional characters in books, on the syndication circuit or the TBS movie of the weekend, he agreed that we could give friendship an audition once we disembarked and got back to our lives in Toronto, where we both lived. He, in the heart of the gayborhood at Church and Wellesley, and me, in the Annex, where I was then sharing a second-floor apartment with Olivia and Mitz.
Five years, two fights and a million martinis and late-night bonding sessions later (often over Molly Ringwald movies, for which Bradford had a soft spot), Bradford was my confidant. Olivia and Mitz were still my best friends, but Bradford was the one with whom I could really be honest. He was the first person I had called on Monday night. After it happened.
“You can have my apartment,” he now said on the phone. “I’ve called my landlord. It’s a go. If I were straight, I’d tell you to bake me cookies in nothing but an apron as a thank-you, but alas, I’m not turned on by such frivolities. And I’ve been hypersensitive about hygiene lately. So please, fully clothed culinaration only.”
“Cookies or not, I can’t take your apartment,” I told him. “I’m planning to clean my living space, and if I’m going to embark on a cleansing ritual, I want to do it to banish my own ill remains, not yours.” Besides, moving was not an item on my OM list, and I wasn’t convinced that Bradford wouldn’t break up with his current boyfriend, Tobias Strolz, a hot Austrian decorator and pseudo-celebrity (with whom he lived in a house in High Park), and move back into his apartment on Isabella Street—otherwise, why was he still holding on to it? I told him so.
“I’m about to be the uncle of my own sperm baby. I hardly think that’s the sign of a flighty relationship-goer.” It was true. Tobias’s sister was also gay, and she and her partner were about to have a baby—one that was conceived thanks to Bradford’s sperm donation.
“Why don’t you tell her she has to bring her own beverages?” I asked.
“Because—you can never be sure about manual labor. For all I know, she could smile and agree, then spit in my soy milk.” Olivia brushed a non-existent strand of hair off her forehead. “I just need to find someone with both manners and attention to detail. Is that too much to ask?”
Is it too much to clean your own condo? I thought as Mitz stood up, too.
“I’ll come with you,” Mitz said. “I’ve got to pick up the Save the Date cards for the wedding at Paper Ideas.”
“Already?” I asked. She’d been engaged only three days, and the wedding was still a year away.
“Olivia said I should send them out immediately,” Mitz said, looking to Olivia for confirmation.
“Definitely. It’s only proper etiquette not to give your guests last-minute notice for a summer wedding. Plus,” Olivia added, “the sooner you send the Save the Dates, the sooner you’ll be able to redo your kitchen with all the new accessories you registered for.”
“Good point,” Mitz said, then turned to me. “And while I plan my wedding, you can plan your dating strategy. You could use my wedding as a target. If you start now, you might time things just right to have a new guy propose to you at my wedding.”
“Or not,” Olivia said. “Mara doesn’t need a guy to be complete. I certainly hope you don’t think that I’m who I am because of Johnnie.” She turned to me. “Just think of all the things you could accomplish now that you’re a free, empowered woman.”
I looked back and forth at them as Olivia patted my hand. “I’ll call you tomorrow and make sure that you’re on track,” she said to me. “Remember, I know what’s best for you.”
Mitz gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. “We’re here for you, and we’ll help you get through this. Just remember, even if you do meet a rich guy on the way home and fall madly in love”—she waved her finger at me—“no getting married before July 21 even if he tries to fly you to Vegas. I don’t want anybody trying to steal my bouquet, so to speak!” Mitz laughed and Olivia joined in. I had to wonder if they were laughing at Mitz’s joke-with-truth or at the ridiculousness of the possibility that I would meet a man and fall madly in love when I had just been unsuccessful at securing the guy I’d dated for nearly a year—which was definitely a sufficient amount of time when a girl is twenty-eight and a guy is thirty.
I stood in front of the tea shop, watching Olivia and Mitz as they turned to walk south back to the corner of Yonge and College to grab a cab together, yoga bags slung over their shoulders. Mitz was like a tiny, perfect housewife doll in a floral Ann Taylor Loft skirt and cream twin set with even creamier pearls, a gift from her grandmother when she turned twenty-one. Her fake but reasonable-length acrylic nails and her perfect, naturally wavy hair, enhanced with rollers every morning to make each curl more precise, made her classic and classy.
Olivia, by comparison, was just short of five-foot-nine in sneakers, which she wore only to yoga or while out running, making her five-foot-eleven the rest of the time in one of her signature pairs of Christian Louboutin heels.
Olivia was adamant about not altering her appearance for a man, but that was a cinch for her since there was nothing that needed altering. Everything about her appeared to be effortlessly chic, from her chemical-free long blonde hair that hung without a single kink even hours after being tied back in an elastic, to the two-hundred-dollar tank tops she could wear without a bra, to the Prada sunglasses she sported while driving her silver Saab 9-3. She didn’t really exercise, but she was also prepared to skip breakfast if it meant she could fit into the last pair of Seven jeans at a sample sale. She had a year-round tan, thanks to lunch hours spent shopping on shabby-to-chic Queen West and winters split between Under the Tuscan Sun Bed tanning salon and last-minute trips to Johnnie’s mother’s current residence, a beachfront property on Venice Beach where she was living with her fourth husband.
Although Olivia refused to marry Johnnie and claimed to be an independent, unmotherly type, I had to think she liked having a guy who didn’t make as much money as she did, and who needed her to take care of him, both emotionally and financially—which she did seemingly without effort. Both boutiques and banks sent her holiday cards, which she’d hang over the mantel of the latest condo she’d purchased—she was on her third since graduation and was currently seeking out a fourth. Each one had netted a heftier profit than the last, thanks to the cosmetic upgrades she’d done herself.
How did my two best friends—the girls I’d once done everything with at the same time, from getting our ears pierced to getting our periods—get so far ahead of me and so sure of themselves? Okay, so they had their differences. Mitz was a traditionalist. Although she had a very good career, being a chef and caterer only better prepared her to cook meals for her family-to-be in her future role as a full-time housewife and mother. And while Olivia might not make pesto from scratch, she knew which of the city’s caterers did. In the end, their dinner parties were both successes, each in their own way. And while Mitz might wait for a man to open a door and Olivia would open it herself, they both knew which door needed to be opened—the one that led them right to the next opportunity, whether it was a new client, a new promotion or a new, better, more beautifully decorated home.
I looked down at my split ends, my chipped nail polish and the thin layer of brown cat fur that didn’t blend into my blue sweater vest. Where my friends were decisive, strong and perfect, I was indecisive, weak and so full of flaws that I didn’t even know which to start fixing first.
I thought about this as I made my way west on College, through the hospital district to the base of the university campus, where students filled patios and emptied their beer steins. I walked along the edge of Chinatown to Little Italy, the most romantic neighborhood in the city, where couples strolled after intimate dinners, stopping on the sidewalk for gelato or a spontaneous kiss. A community made for coupledom. A place I no longer belonged.
I opened the door to my basement apartment, and Pumpernickel jumped down from the window ledge in the kitchen, galloped over to my feet and reached up to put his paws on my thighs. I dropped my brown-and-orange argyle yoga bag and reached down to pick him up. I carried him into the bedroom, grabbed a notebook and pen from under the futon and then returned to the roaster box, where I sat, putting Pumpernickel at my feet, which he sniffed and then flopped on top of.
If my friends were perfect and I was stuck in a rut, what I had to do was become more like them. I wasn’t about to plagiarize them, but a little harmless imitation-as-flattery couldn’t hurt. I needed to start with our similarities and build from there, but as I thought about all of their accomplishments, I realized the only thing I had in common with my two best friends was the yoga class we had, until today, attended together. Getting better at yoga was a start—at least that way, when we joined a new club in the fall, anyone in the class watching us chant “Om” in unison might think that if we were at the same level in yoga, maybe we were at the same level in other areas. Maybe no one would ever know in how many ways I lagged behind my two best friends. But I wanted more than that. I wanted to be just as good as they were at everything else in life.
And then I had an idea. Since I had nowhere to go but up, all I needed to do was create a list of the ideals that Olivia and Mitz embodied, the rules they lived by that made Olivia and Mitz—OM—so perfect, and then methodically implement the list, item by item. I would give myself a deadline and, I thought, suddenly feeling it all come together, a party at which I would have all my friends over to witness how much I had accomplished.
Which is how, four days after my twenty-eighth birthday, I put pen to paper, and came up with the OM list.
The OM List
By Mara Brennan
Get a perfect body.
Get a promotion or a real job.
Become a fabulous chef with my own unique dossier of recipes.
Keep an immaculately clean living space.
Unleash my inner decor diva on my apartment.
Improve my time-management and multi-tasking skills to appear busier to others and create an air of importance.
Become an etiquette expert so as not to embarrass myself in social situations.
Be well read and knowledgeable in order to engage in enlightening conversations.
Stop dressing in Gap and create my own signature style.
Throw a dinner party to display my accomplishments and the successful implementation of my OM list.
chapter two
KARMA YOGI: A PERSON WHO IS SELFLESSLY DEVOTED TO WORK.
The present state of work is a result of cause and effect, past actions or inactions.
Face Value Cosmetic Surgery Clinic (where I was not usefully employed but employed nonetheless as a receptionist) was located on Bloor Street East in the final row of businesses before the rather desolate Bloor Street Viaduct with its suicide barriers, erected to prevent depressives from jumping onto the Don Valley Parkway below. At first glance, Face Value’s address might suggest that the place was located in the midst of both the creaseless foreheads and the couture that comprised Bloor Street West (Toronto’s version of the Champs-Élysées). But it wasn’t.
Most of the other lucrative cosmetic surgeons in the city were tucked in behind Holt Renfrew (in the heart of Bloor Street West shopping) in renovated Victorian brick houses or inside Hazelton Lanes, a boutique-filled shopping complex. Face Value was located on the wrong side of Yonge Street, which acted as the meridian, dividing the city into a west side and an east side. As far as Bloor Street was concerned, west was haute and east was hoax, but my boss and the owner of the clinic, Dr. Marjorie Wickham, liked it because the rent was cheap. Like her. And so, since opening more than five years ago, the clinic had occupied a unit on the second story of Goodluck Strip, or so I referred to it because good luck was what you needed to find anything decent for lunch (once you’d exhausted the five choices—Subway sandwiches, Starbucks, Swiss Chalet, Nijo Sushi and the Panzerotto Pizza joint) but also for the Goodwill used clothing store that acted as a hub for the homeless, unemployed and bored.
It was a lengthy walk from my apartment to work, but one I undertook every morning and every evening anyway, because it was free and because taking public transit meant walking south from my apartment to the streetcar on College, taking the streetcar over to Yonge Street, transferring to the subway to go north to Bloor, then changing subway lines to go east one stop to Sherbourne, all in all a feat that ended up taking just as long as walking the whole way. Walking also saved me $3.00 each way, and I got to wander through the Annex, and past Chanel, Cartier and Holt Renfrew on Bloor. Some nights I even stopped for kimchi-fried rice at Ka-Chi in Koreatown. Through the uninteresting blocks, I usually attempted to devour the beauty pages of Allure, Flare or Vogue, while trying not to bump into telephone poles, newspaper boxes or parking meters. I figured it was good exercise, too, though it remained a mystery to me why I was still a size 10 after years of the twice-a-day trek.
Annie Markowitz called at 9:35 a.m., just as I was opening the door to the clinic. This involved using four different keys to unbolt four locks to the second-story office, which was located just above a street-level tchotchke store that featured holiday ornaments in the front window display year-round. I lunged for the phone, fell into my chair and kicked off my shoes. Annie wanted to book another follow-up appointment to her third rhinoplasty, which she had had last month. Since the first surgery, she hadn’t been able to breathe while lying down. This was a problem for obvious reasons, although Marjorie—who was also the cosmetic surgeon and only other employee of Face Value—said Annie was most upset because it meant she had to be on top whenever she was “making whoopee” (Marjorie’s words, not mine). With a husband plus a boyfriend on the side, Annie wasn’t pleased. Since neither Marjorie nor Annie wanted to have to redo the nose job, Annie came in once a week and Marjorie took a CT scan each time to see if things were getting any better.
“What’s the latest appointment available tomorrow?” she asked.
I told her, penciled her in and started my morning routine, which I had down to a fine-tuned procedure (think mini-liposuction: ultra-thin cannulas leaving no marks and causing no downtime). I was technically paid to arrive and start this series of menial tasks at 9 a.m., but I could get everything done—coffee started, stereo turned on to pump elevator-music renditions of popular ’80s theme songs from L.A. Law to Family Ties through the surround-sound speakers Marjorie’s brother had set up last summer, mail sorted into six very specific and color-coded folders, and Marjorie’s slightly burnt (just the way she liked it) coffee poured into her stained 97.3 EZ Rock mug—in less than half an hour and before she arrived at 10:03 a.m. So I usually aimed to be in the office by 9:30 a.m. And since I was making $15 an hour, starting half an hour late slightly increased my wage-per-hour ratio and made me somewhat less embittered that I was approaching my third anniversary working for a woman I despised.
I didn’t have time for distractions before Marjorie arrived, so when the phone rang again, I debated not answering it, but did anyway because I could see by the caller ID it was Bradford. Distractions from friends were the jujubes of my working day, so although Marjorie puckered up at personal calls, I told him to hold while I started the coffee. Then I came back to talk to him, since I still had fifteen minutes to spare.
I met Bradford Lynch on a cruise ship the year after I graduated from university. Both of us were traveling with our grandmothers, who were widowed and happened to be friends from the Fonthill YMCA morning aquacize class. I agreed to accompany Grandma Gerta for several reasons, one of which was that I really liked her and not because I felt I had to, but more importantly because she chose me over my sister and had offered to pay. Given that I hadn’t found a career that would do the same, I took her up on it.
After three days on the Caribbean Sea, while Grandma was at origami class on the lido deck, I headed to the fitness room for the first time. I was on the treadmill, wondering how long I had to walk to call it a workout, while watching a Love Boat rerun on the overhead TV, when tall and gangly Bradford, who had hands as big as his feet and was festooned in a blue Maple Leafs hockey jersey and burgundy-and-gold plaid flannel pants—managing to be overdressed (for the July heat) and underdressed (for a Princess Cruise Line) at the same time—asked me if I had any lip balm. Although I wasn’t attracted to him (for reasons obvious to any girl who doesn’t wear Sorels with a sundress), I was thankful for an excuse—any excuse—to get off the treadmill. We went back to my room, where we divulged our mutual love for The Body Shop’s Born Lippy lip balm. Later, we drank Bellinis and then bonded over napkin-folding classes for the same reason: the hot napkin-folding instructor, Dylan. Which is when I realized that Bradford was gay, despite his horrible fashion sense and love of hockey.
At first, Bradford tried to discourage me from being his friend. He warned me it wouldn’t be good for my ratings, since he claimed that too often the single woman on the brink of fabulousness meets her downfall by getting wrapped up in a gay male friend. And he did not want us to be thrown in with the Bridget Jones and Tom, Will and Grace or Julianne and George in My Best Friend’s Wedding couples of the world.
“The gay guy will be handsome, kind, wise, witty, fashion-savvy and the perfect boyfriend—if only he weren’t gay. And the girl will lose all sense of self—and opportunity for dates—by relying too much on her gay friend, then complaining that she’s going to die alone and near killing the gay friend with her incessant moaning until she snaps out of it. Count me out. I don’t want to be responsible for your downfall, nor put up with the agony, which could last a good six months or more,” Bradford had said to me.
Once I reminded Bradford that (as if his non-existent sense of style and my questionable fabulousness weren’t clues) we weren’t fictional characters in books, on the syndication circuit or the TBS movie of the weekend, he agreed that we could give friendship an audition once we disembarked and got back to our lives in Toronto, where we both lived. He, in the heart of the gayborhood at Church and Wellesley, and me, in the Annex, where I was then sharing a second-floor apartment with Olivia and Mitz.
Five years, two fights and a million martinis and late-night bonding sessions later (often over Molly Ringwald movies, for which Bradford had a soft spot), Bradford was my confidant. Olivia and Mitz were still my best friends, but Bradford was the one with whom I could really be honest. He was the first person I had called on Monday night. After it happened.
“You can have my apartment,” he now said on the phone. “I’ve called my landlord. It’s a go. If I were straight, I’d tell you to bake me cookies in nothing but an apron as a thank-you, but alas, I’m not turned on by such frivolities. And I’ve been hypersensitive about hygiene lately. So please, fully clothed culinaration only.”
“Cookies or not, I can’t take your apartment,” I told him. “I’m planning to clean my living space, and if I’m going to embark on a cleansing ritual, I want to do it to banish my own ill remains, not yours.” Besides, moving was not an item on my OM list, and I wasn’t convinced that Bradford wouldn’t break up with his current boyfriend, Tobias Strolz, a hot Austrian decorator and pseudo-celebrity (with whom he lived in a house in High Park), and move back into his apartment on Isabella Street—otherwise, why was he still holding on to it? I told him so.
“I’m about to be the uncle of my own sperm baby. I hardly think that’s the sign of a flighty relationship-goer.” It was true. Tobias’s sister was also gay, and she and her partner were about to have a baby—one that was conceived thanks to Bradford’s sperm donation.
