“I worked hard to earn my roses!”
She sighed. “I know, but you started with so many more of them than the rest of us ever get. All you had to do was gild the lily. The rose. Whatever. Cathryn, be happy with all the roses you’ve already been given. Maybe there are some more out there, waiting for you to find them in places you never looked, before. Your career—the one you want—is over. Get out of L.A. Go somewhere far away from this business. Forget about the life you had. Get a hobby. Marry a nice guy and have some kids. You’re rich, you have no money worries, you can start a charitable foundation or something. You’re a good person. A smart person. You can do something new with your life.” She stood. “Or you can play a burn victim from now on.”
When I said nothing, afraid I’d cry, she squeezed my shoulder on the un-burned side, and left.
I went back to bed.
Scheduling a hair-and-makeup consultation with Luce, Randi, and Judi was one of those useful, turning-point moments I would look back on later, much later, as a character-building experience. But at the time it simply added another straw to the towering heap of Last Straws I was already carrying. The sword of Damocles isn’t really a sword, it’s a thousand deceptively harmless needles hanging over a person’s head and dropping, like water torture, one shivering razor point—or one feathery straw—at a time.
“Hi, folks,” I sang out as the trio walked into my bedroom suite. I stood there with a desperate façade of nonchalance, dressed in a slender black t-shirt and slacks, sans face mask, my incoming hair a short, dark, inverted bowl that gave me a vague resemblance to Moe of The Three Stooges. “Welcome to the lair of the Phantom! Come and work your magic on me!” My tone was perfectly cheerful. I’d spent hours practicing.
The three of them stared at me in horror. Judi murmured, “I’m so sorry for you. I had no idea it was this bad.” Luce cried and nodded. “We thought the rumors were all lies.” Randy literally backed toward the suite doors, one hand on his heart. “I need a little air,” he said. When a black guy looks ashen, you know it’s bad.
So much for my cosmetic support group. Their outright pity was a shock I hadn’t expected. I waved them off. “Thanks for coming, but let’s re-schedule, okay? I’m having a lot more surgery on my face, you know. I won’t look like this the next time you see me. We’ll look back on today and . . . laugh at how y’all reacted. Okay?”
They escaped as quickly as good manners and hyperventilation would allow. I wandered to a desk in one corner and deleted the three of them from my address book. No, there wouldn’t be any styling sessions in the future.
That night I crept outdoors. Los Angeles glittered under a beautiful, lonely moon. I sat by my pool and put my bare feet in the water, watching the moonlight reflect on the water, and crying from frustration. I couldn’t bring myself to look at my reflection in the water.
I rummaged among my prescriptions and found a bottle of pills I’d stopped using weeks earlier, as the pain became manageable without them. I poured the capsules into the palm of my burned hand, counted them, then put them back in the bottle one at a time, listening to the soft tap of each highly controlled opium derivative. Click. Click. Click.
Wash them down with a bottle of bourbon and they’d take away the pain permanently. A thought to keep in mind.
Shattered Recluse—
Cathryn Deen Hides From Public
In Heart-Breaking Shame.
Curtains, Cover-Ups And Cold Meals—
Rumors Of Star’s Quirks Increase.
Most Beautiful Woman Now Most Tragic Eccentric.
Most of the time the tabloids screech half-truths, wild exaggerations or outright lies. Unfortunately, in my case, they got it right. Judi, Luce and Randi couldn’t resist talking about me to friends who talked to reporters.
Only the weekly care packages from Delta and Thomas stopped me from swallowing the bottle of pills. One particularly depressing day I pulled out a couple of photos, stared at them, and did a double-take.
“In this picture, Cathy, you’re napping in the pasture,” Thomas had written on the bottom of a photo. A small, gold-and-white calf snoozed in the sun. In the second photo the calf was being chased by a baby goat. Thomas wrote, “Here you’re frolicking in the hay with Ellen. She’s named after Ellen DeGeneres. You and little Ellen are just good friends.”
A Greek shipping heir had once named a yacht after me. A famous chef had named a dessert in my honor. But no one had ever named a cow after me, before. The little gold-and-white calf had big, dark eyes and a nose that looked so small and delicate I could cup it in my palm.
She was beautiful. I put the pictures on my nightstand, in front of the pills.
Thank you, Thomas, for enough light to keep me going a little longer.
Thomas
I didn’t start out to name a calf after Cathy. It just happened that way.
There’s nothing more fun on a hot summer day than the smell of cow manure and blood. Throw in a few fat, buzzing flies and an audience of suspicious women, and you’ve got the makings of a bad reality TV show. Survivor: Crossroads.
I sat on the barn floor at Rainbow Goddess Farms—the queendom of our local, lesbian berry farmers, Alberta Groover and Macy Spruill, who were also known by their musical nom de ovaries, The Log Splitter Girls—with my big, bare, male feet planted firmly on either side of a cow’s vagina. Around me, watching intently, were two-dozen women and children. They worked and lived at the place, which was a combination commercial farm, commune, co-op and unofficial shelter for battered women.
Thus, I was surrounded by a spectrum of women ranging from those who didn’t need men, to those who didn’t want men, to those who didn’t trust men, and finally, to those who thought all men should be castrated and forced to watch Thelma and Louise. Some of my spectators were armed with hoes and shovels. If anything went wrong with the bovine birth about to occur, I just hoped they wouldn’t kill me in front of their kids.
Yours truly, Cow Midwife. I’d just dropped by to borrow some more camera gear for my newest round of photos to send Cathy. Alberta and Macy instantly recruited me to act as their human forceps. A victory for brute masculine strength.
“Now, Thomas. Take this baby by the feet and pull gently,” ordered Alberta. Both she and Macy crouched beside me on the heels of their manure-stained work boots, peering at the pair of tiny, bloody, mucous-covered hooves peeking from a raw, heaving vortex of cow twat.
I leaned in close between my bent knees, carefully wrapped my hands around the calf’s tiny feet, and pulled. The mother, a gold-and-white Guernsey milk cow, grunted wearily, so tired she couldn’t deliver without help. It was her first pregnancy, and labor had gone on for too long, even though the calf was turned correctly and simply should have slipped out.
Pull, that’s it, pull, that’s it!” Alberta chanted. Females push babies out, males pull them. I did my sex proud.
A gooey, bloody, placenta-draped calf squirted into my lap. I grabbed it in a hug. It uttered a soft bleat and began wrestling. Instantly my hands and arms were covered in gore, my jeans were stained, and my beard filled with blood, mucous, and placenta. The audience applauded, cheered or went “Eeeew.”
“Good pulling. We’ll take it from here,” Macy said. She and Alberta scrubbed the baby with old towels. As its soft, golden hide began to dry it revealed a milkshake splash of white on the calf’s back and front legs and a broad dollop of white on its face. A truly beautiful bovine.
I got to my feet and watched, swaying a little. My head buzzed. I had been in the delivery room when Ethan was born, had stood by Sherryl’s head, coaching, watching in awe as our tiny, perfect son eased into the world. He seemed to smile from the moment he was born. Surely he’d had cranky days and crying bouts during his three years of life, but I couldn’t remember anything but his smile, now.
“Why did we need a man to help?” one of the women whispered behind me. “I thought no men were allowed here. With all that hair and beard, this guy
looks like a psycho Wookie.”
“Ssssh,” someone whispered back. “That’s Thomas Mitternich. You know. The one with the wife and son. Who died in . . . you know. Nine-eleven.”
“Oh, my God. You mean that’s the alcoholic who intervened when LaRane’s ex-boyfriend and his biker friends tried to run her off the road?”
“Yep. That’s him. Mr. Nice Guy. Get this: he’s straight, and he’s celibate.”
“No way.”
“Way.”
Their conversation came to me through a hazy fog.
“It’s a girl,” Macy proclaimed, peering between the calf’s hind legs. In deference to me and the handful of male children on hand, the other women stifled their high-fives and applause.
Alberta looked up at me, smiling. “Tom, in honor of your midwifery, you get to name her.”
A dark rim began to crowd my vision. “All right,” I mumbled. “Cathy. I name her ‘Cathy.’”
“Ohhh-kay.” Alberta scowled. She and Macy looked at each other askance, then shrugged. Macy turned to the audience. “We hereby christen our new heifer, our sister of the nurturing breast, ‘Cathy.’”
Applause.
I had named a milk cow after Cathy.
I walked gingerly out of the barn, holding my arms away from my sides. I tried to concentrate on the farm’s sunlit spring fields, the Log Splitters’ big log house, the barns where Cathy’s four-footed sisters produced organic milk via the warm hands of milking women. I tried to notice the free-range hens who laid politically correct eggs, the shelter-rescued dogs, cats, rabbits and pot-bellied pigs, and the nude statue of a goddess in the herb garden, carved by chainsaw from a ten-foot-tall oak log. But all I could think about was the viscous coating of birth fluids beginning to dry on my skin, to tighten, squeezing my breath out of me. Don’t go there. Breathe. Don’t look down.
But the horror, the compulsion, was too great. I looked down at myself, my hands spread in blood-stained supplication. Suddenly I was back in lower Manhattan, covered in drying blood and the dust of the dead, searching for Sherryl and Ethan.
Wrapped in death, again.
Time for a drink.
Chapter 8
Cathy The Seclusion Worsens
Beauty opened all the doors; it got me things I didn’t even know I wanted, and things I certainly didn’t deserve. So sayeth Janice Dickinson, one of the first supermodels, who appeared on Vogue covers an incredible thirty-seven times during a career that peaked thirty years ago. Now, at fifty-something, Janice was a reality TV star with a vocabulary that might make a Marine blush. So sayeth Janice: I’d rather be an honest bitch than some ass-kissing, sugarcoating, namby-pamby, wiping-ass motherfucker.
Me, too, I thought. If I could just muster the energy to get angry about something.
All three of Janice’s memoirs were scattered around me on my bed, along with a laptop computer, self-help books, books on phobias and panic attacks, feminist manifestos including The Feminine Mystique and The Beauty Myth, a Bible, a book on Zen Buddhism, and Gone With The Wind.
Scarlett was the ultimate beauty queen. Put her at a microphone, ask her about her interests, and she’d smile that deadly smile and say in a soft, lilting voice, “I plan to devote my life to achieving world peace.” But you just knew she was thinking, Screw world peace. I want money, Tara, and Rhett with a stiff one. I want Ashley to kiss my feet and do my hair. And as for Melanie? Bite me, you holier-than-thou bee-atch.
Across from the foot of my bed, on a giant, flat-screen TV, a flabby but well-hung man and a hard-faced woman with stretch marks on her thighs were engaged in lathered, fast-pumping, doggie-style sex. On another large TV, Mary and Half-Pint were getting a stern but adorable lecture on life from Little Joe, I mean Pa, via Little House on the Prairie. Porno and Little House had only two things in common: No one caught on fire, and neither remotely resembled real life.
Perfect. I wanted nothing to do with real life. I’d been Googling the biographies of the great recluses, my soulmates. It came as no surprise when I discovered that money is the great emancipator for the mentally unhinged hermits of the world, the smooth wall between a homeless man hiding from his demons in a storm drain and Howard Hughes hiding from his in a Las Vegas hotel he owns.
I lay in the center of my bed, propped up on pillows, dressed only in my fake-flesh-colored pressure suit and glorified ski mask, drugged into a meditative state, with a remote phone set plugged into my good ear through a small hole I’d cut in the side of the mask. I held one of Janice’s books to my chest, idly watched the porno movie, and ate one of Delta’s biscuits.
Framed photos of Granny Nettie’s farm decorated the entire room now. I’d taped Thomas’s latest ones to my bed posts. I went back to reading Janice’s book. I was fascinated by the feverish determination of her survival, the gleeful anger with which she observed the world. I wanted to understand how people did that: Get angry. I couldn’t manage to get angry at my circumstances, just more and more depressed. I was searching for landmarks on a lonely road with no map. Hello, fellow travelers.
Let it be known that in my pre-grilled life I had been the Goody Two-Shoes of modern womanhood: I didn’t smoke, do drugs, drink heavily, or hook up with casual acquaintances for unprotected sex and Howard Stern interviews. I read books with lots of pages and small print, occasionally went to museums, and could listen to opera without falling asleep. I never posed nude and I never flashed my breasts or ass on film. Not that I have an entrenched moral resistance to all forms of public nudity, it was just that my aging Atlanta aunts would have voided my membership in the Junior League, and it would have broken Daddy’s conservative heart.
All in all, I had been a wholesome person.
Now I was a flash-fried porno watcher, reader of lurid tell-all’s and suicide-victim-waiting-to-happen. I had way too much pride to admit my bizarre fears to anyone, even my doctors, who, of course, knew I was hiding a Pandora’s Box of twitchy ideas but could do nothing about it without my permission. Oh, no. I wasn’t going to let some shrink chronicle my personal trip down the rabbit hole. What if Homeland Security decided to round up all the quirky people some day, post-apocalypse? They’d Google the term “nutzoid,” and there I’d be in the database of not-so-private medical records. Off to the internment camp with me, you betcha.
I knew I should be grateful to be alive, grateful to have the best medical care money could buy, grateful to be so rich I never had to work another day in my life, grateful for biscuits, grateful for Thomas and his photos. But I wasn’t grateful, at least not on a sincere, joyous level. I wanted my old life back. I felt guilty for not feeling grateful to be alive and rich, and I felt guilty for having been a pampered princess who somehow brought the wrath of bad karma down upon herself.
Suddenly, an answer dawned on me.
I need to bribe God.
Some people promise to do good works if God will save their lives or the lives of loved ones. My prayer request was simpler: Please, God, show me how to be happy with the way I look now. What could I give up that epitomized my vanity, my wealth, my very sense of self?
“I’ve got it,” I said, sitting up in bed one afternoon. “Haute couture.”
I ran to the dressing room off my bath suite. Past the sauna, past the massage nook, past the personal beauty salon complete with waxing station. I threw open a pair of twelve-foot-tall double doors, flicked a switch, and gazed at row upon row of designer fashions.
If God would just let me feel beautiful again, even if it was just a delusion, I’d donate everything to charity. My Valentino’s, my Chanel’s, my Donna Karan’s, and even my beloved Vera Wang’s. I began grabbing innocent, unsuspecting gowns off the racks.
Hours later, I carried what I thought was the last of the sacrificial couture into the empty living room. I spread each gown on the floor. The huge room looked like a designer version of a murder scene. Instead of chalk outlines, Yves Saint Laurent and Versace showed where the bodies had fallen.
S
uddenly God spoke to me, or I spoke to myself and He just listened in.
Cathryn, I notice you kept the dresses with high necklines and long sleeves.
Well, Sir, those are the ones that will hide some of the scars on my neck and right arm.
You’re planning to put on a beautiful gown and go out in public? This is news to me. If you truly felt confident about your new look, you wouldn’t worry so much about hiding your scars.
What are you insinuating, Sir?
That your effort to come to terms with your scars is a little half-hearted. What you really want is a miracle. I’m not going to give you that miracle. You want to be beautiful again. Not just feel beautiful. Be beautiful. No can do.
“Then you’re not getting the rest of my dresses,” I said bitterly, and went to bed.
Bonita cried the next morning when she saw the designer fashions thrown everywhere. “Everything? You want to donate everything to my sister’s mission school?” Bonita jokingly called her nun sibling “Sister Sister.” I’d given large donations to Sister Sister’s convent in the past, but never something like this.
“Everything. You contact an auction company, sell all of this, and send Sister Sister the money. Wait a minute. Almost all the money. I want a part of it to go to my cousin in North Carolina.”
“There must be one or maybe even two-million dollars’ worth of designer gowns here.”
“At least. Now that I’m grotesque and infamous I expect these gowns will sell for twice what I’d paid for them.”
“Bless you, but—”
“Just tell your sister to have her fellow nuns say a prayer for me.”
“A simple prayer? This may qualify you for sainthood.”