(You are a goddess)
Your phone, Maxine. Is that Marnie texting you again?” My mother nudges me. “Tell her I got her those tribal print jeans she wanted from J. Crew.”
We are heading back into the city, and I have just dozed off, only to be zapped back into consciousness by a screeching, cling-clanging, vibrating phone.
“Could be Dad,” I mumble, foraging through my bag for my phone.
“Ay, Dad doesn’t remember how to text anymore these days.”
Yes, it’s definitely my phone beeping, and my heart leaping. But it doesn’t appear to be my little Marnie looking for Maxi-Mum.
Oh, Emilio. How can one sentence manage to be a damning indictment of the state of American public school education and a loins-swirling assertion of virility at the same time?
Would of, could of, should of … The grammar Nazi that is mother dearest would have a field day with this, except that this is classified reading material. A jolt of java it’s not, but it is enough to perk me up at the end of this long Memorial Day spent trudging along the outlet stores at Woodbury Common with all the enthusiasm of a comatose patient, while everyone else seemed to be stocking up for the coming of Designer Apocalypse, like shiny-eyed Japanese characters in an anime film. Indeed most of them were shiny-eyed Japanese shoppers mixed with mainland Chinese, corralled behind the ropes outside Coach and Prada and Tory Burch, their excitement palpable even as their innate sense of order reined them in.
My eyes craved darkness and quiet, but instead I got crowds and unrelenting sunshine. I’d slinked back into the apartment close to four in the morning with Emilio’s scent mingled with mine. Mother, thankfully, was lost in slumber; sleep had won over anxiety. By six-thirty a.m., however, I was smothered in the acrid stench of Benson & Hedges, which meant, in her language of smoke signals, “Get up and make me breakfast.”
At eight a.m., Orlando sauntered in, diminutive and fresh-faced, with a Starbucks latte and a quick wink-wink nudge-nudge at me.
“The two of you were out partying till late last night, no?” my mom said in a voice that was half-playful, half-reproachful and not a little envious.
“Oh my God, Mrs. R!” Orlando said chirpily—how could he be so chirpy this early in the morning?—“We had so much fun!”
“Orlando, you know you can call me Auntie Helena,” she reminded him.
“Oh no, I love calling you Mrs. R!” he exclaimed, referring, obviously, to her surname, Rodriguez. “Because R is for Ravishing.”
Orlando certainly knew how to put her in a good mood.
“So,” she said cheerfully, “you went clubbing last night? Aren’t you guys a bit too old to still be going out to clubs? Or maybe it’s a gay thing?”
“Mrs. R!” Orlando covered his ears in mock horror. “Don’t. Call. Me. An. Ageing. Queen! You’re turning me into a cliché!”
She laughed before she could continue her tirade, almost coughing out the coffee she had just drunk. “Ay, Orlando, you’re such a drama queen! Don’t worry, you look like you’re twenty-five years old. Maxine, on the other hand, is a different story. She has grown children, and here she is, still partying. But it’s fine, I know she’s with you.”
“Mom,” I sighed, trying not to sound irritated. We’d had this conversation countless times before. “Please. I almost never go out when I’m with my kids, so this is fun for me.”
“Don’t you have a live-in maid? So what’s the problem? The maid can watch them.”
“Yes, I do. But that’s not the point. When I’m with my kids, I’m with my kids. So when I’m abroad, I admit it, I party.”
“A bit too much, if you ask me,” she muttered.
Of course I couldn’t quite disclose that last night’s party got even better after I left Orlando and the others. Orlando and I exchanged another round of winks and nudges, our secret walk-of-shame Morse code. The night got even better for him, too. In a low voice, out of eavesdropping range from my mother, he recounted how, after Hotel Americano, he’d hooked up with his Swiss lover, Markus, and in fact, knowing what a stickler for punctuality my mother was, battled to get him out of his bed and his apartment this morning.
“Well, you know, when I was younger and in my prime, I came to New York once,” my mom was saying in a try-to-top-this-if-you-can tone, “and I danced all night at Studio 54.”
“Way to go, Mamacita!”
“Oh my God!” Orlando screamed. “Did you see Jackie and Bianca?”
“Or Cher?” I chimed in.
My mom shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Que tontos sois! The two of you can be so silly sometimes.”
“That’s why we still like to party together, Mrs. R,” said Orlando.
“And I like to shop.” She took one last drag of her cigarette and stubbed it out. “Let’s go. Is the driver there already? Who is it? That guy again?”
No, it wasn’t that guy. It wasn’t Emilio waiting downstairs. After last night, I’d have been surprised if he would of being walking straight today.
Network fluke or apologetic re-send? For some reason, Emilio’s text comes through a second time, its beep seemingly more insistent. If I as much as weaved from side to side today as I wandered through Woodbury Common, my mom would simply have assumed that I was hung-over or lacked sleep, and not, had Emilio’s claims been put to the test, barely coherent and barely ambulant thanks to endless, energetic bouts of lovemaking.
Apology accepted, but I can’t quite resist the urge to tease Emilio about the boastful declaration of his yet-to-be-tested-in-full prowess. I text him back.
Like a boy scout, he’d been prepared, checking us into the hotel with a packet of condoms in his pocket, and a scarcely contained hard-on in his pants. He’d scribbled some name on the register and impatiently led me by the hand to the dismal little room with its yellowing sheets, saying, his speech slightly slurred, vamos a chingar mami.
I’d sworn to myself, as Emilio kicked off his pants and stood before me with his gloriously erect penis free from textile constraints, that next time I would never ever come back to this depressing hotel even with the promise of a carnal all-nighter. I’d thought to myself, as he lifted my shirt and unhooked my bra and sucked ravenously at my breasts, first the right, and then the left, while his hands busied themselves pulling down my shorts and then my panties, already soaked with my wetness, that next time I would rather do it in his car, or better yet, I would pay for a hotel that was more chic and discreet, one with soft lighting and fluffy down pillows and smooth, 400 thread-count sheets made of Egyptian cotton. I’d avowed silently, as he slipped three fingers inside of me while his thumb stroked my clitoris, that next time I would just go all Mrs. Robinson on him and tell him exactly where we were going to go and what we were going to do and—and—
I’d forgotten everything I’d just said to myself as he threw me into the air, completely without warning, his hands supporting my shoulders, and ready to catch me, and I felt like an Olympic gymnast, landing perfectly on his stiff penis that he had somehow managed to sheath in a condom, and he raised my hips ever so slightly and brought them down ever so gently so that he slid in and out of me, pumping him rhythmically, my legs wrapped around his back, until finally, with him still inside me, we keeled toward the bed, propelled by gravity or muscle fatigue, I wasn’t sure, I just melted into him.
And then he fell asleep.
Ones, twice, three times a lady …
Ah, the wonders of technology. As a teenager whispering inanities into the phone that swirled into a cotton candy froth of conversation with a stammering suitor, I would have been beyond embarrassed had my mother caught the briefest whiff of what I was saying. Talk about six degrees of mortification. Admittedly, I do have some nerve today, conducting this rather explicit text exchange with my mother beside me, a mere neck-craning distance away. I wonder what would be more mortifying for her: reading about my racy escapade the night before, complete with orgasm count, or realizing that I’m fucking the driver from the airport?
“The driver?” I can just imagine her shrieking. “You’re having sex with the driver? I didn’t raise you to sleep with the help!” This is the kind of mindset you deal with when you are raised in a feudal democracy.
Strictly speaking, this wasn't sexting though, was it? It’s more like post-coital pillow talk in the digital age, complete with clumsy grammar and atrocious spelling. I sound like my own teenage daughters trying to sass their way out of trouble. Not that it matters, anyway. Despite my listlessness from lack of sleep, I nevertheless feel awake and alive and powerful inside, fancying myself as this multi-orgasmic sex goddess who renders the male of the species rabid with desire, challenging them to demonstrate their virility until, sated and convinced beyond all doubt of their prowess, I beg them to stop. Or not.
My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard …
Ha!
“What’s so funny?” Mom asks, nudging me again.
And my ex-husband said I was frigid.
If you asked me what I was wearing when my ex-husband proposed to me twenty-odd years ago, I honestly wouldn’t have a clue.
But ask me what I was wearing the very moment my divorce came through, I will tell you: next to nothing, save for the flimsiest of underwear and two squishy balls of silicone gel.
Yes, at the precise second my phone beeped with the electronic serenade that announced the arrival of a text message, the unflappable and distinguished cosmetic surgeon Dr. Smooth and I were carefully considering the difference between full and floozy, splendid and slutty. That difference boiled down to a few crucial cubic centimeters.
At some point in her life, every woman has contemplated having different breasts. Bigger, smaller, higher, rounder, fuller, perkier, more to the center than the side. Any woman who says otherwise is, quite frankly, lying.
For most of my adult life, I never had much reason to complain about my breasts. Though occasionally they would cause the buttons of my top to strain against the fabric, they had always been a nice, full 34B—neither too big nor too small, but just right for my petite frame.
And so I thought they would remain. But three pregnancies later, it seemed that motherhood had other plans for Madame Mammary. My breasts ballooned to 36D, pumped up to exploding point with milk and hormones, only to deflate post-breastfeeding like discarded airbags, with just enough helium to keep them afloat. Yet they were bereft of bounce and limp of life. A ghost of their former glory, in other words.
Worse, there were stretch marks along the sides of my breasts, streaky reminders that once upon a time, my B-cups did runneth over.
Fortunately, they still passed the pencil test, the one where you stuck a pencil underneath each breast. If the pencil stayed snug and secure in the crevice between fold and skin, it meant that your breasts had heeded the pull of gravity and were headed for the inevitable trajectory down south. If, however, the pencil fell to the floor, it meant that you could still buy some time before your breasts docked permanently at Sag Harbor.
So, soon-to-be-divorced—happily, I might add—I decided it was high time my vessels were made seaworthy once again. And, since we’re speaking in maritime metaphors, let’s just say that there was a new captain—or was he more of a rogue pirate?—manning the ship.
Thus began the search for Doctor Right. Emboldened by a sudden addiction to E! Channel’s Doctor 90210, I approached my quest with the self-conscious confidence of someone starring in a reality TV series.
Unlike the aspiring actresses on reality TV, however, I most adamantly did not want new breasts of porn star proportions. All I wanted was a return to my former fullness.
Countless consultations with girlfriends, trainers at the gym, and even the radiographer at the mammography clinic yielded a shortlist of four doctors, all narrowed down to the Johannesburg area. I saw them all, and discussed with them at length the safety of today’s implants, the risks involved in the procedure, and postoperative recovery. The only other issues left to tackle, really, were size and cut.
He came highly recommended and for some reason I thought a gay surgeon might be a good idea. He wouldn’t have fetishized ideals of what a woman’s breasts should look like, I hoped, and would therefore not encourage me to give Dolly Parton a run for her money.
He didn’t, though he told me, eyebrows arched and chin raised in a manner approaching the camp severity of Nathan Lane in a Broadway musical, that I was no longer a B, but in fact, an A.
His recommendation was drastic: a lift on the left breast, and an augmentation on both. He promised a restoration to a full 34B, but with scars all over. On the left, he planned a semicircular incision around the areola, a cut going down and finally another half-moon slice in the fold of the breast to accommodate the implant under the muscle. The slightly smaller right breast simply needed a bigger implant and a half-moon slice underneath.
His delight in the scalpel seemed a bit too grisly for my taste, more Dexter Does Doctor than Gay’s Anatomy. He blithely dismissed my concerns about the extensive scarring and assured me that they would fade in ten years’ time. But I was already a few months shy of forty-six; I had no desire to live with the equivalent of tribal markings on my breasts for the next ten years.
I slashed Doctor Gay Blade off my list.
“No, we don’t want you looking like a porn star,” he told me as he tried to persuade me that 300cc implants were the way to go.
The Size King enjoyed a reputation as an excellent reconstructive surgeon, the person to go to for complicated cases. As mine was, I believed, a simple matter of breast augmentation, there shouldn’t be any problem, should there?
Except that according to him, the lack of fullness at my pecs would allow him to cut along the fold of my breasts in order to position the implants in front of the muscle, literally making mountains out of molehills. By doing so, he explained, the slightly droopy left breast would get an instant lift.
In short, he wanted to supersize me. And I would end up with the va-va-voobs of a Playboy centerfold. In the body of a midget.
Yes, size did matter, but proportion more so.
I cut the Size King off my list.
The alarm bells should have clanged loudly in my brain when the Stripper Mom with the Double D’s told me who had given her the gift of surgically enhanced life. But Professor Higgins had also been spoken of with reverence by the radiographer as she squished what was left of my depleted rack between two plates during a routine mammography.
“He is a very well-known surgeon,” she whispered, “who has written a book about everything you need to know if you’re considering cosmetic surgery. He also happens to be a professor.”
Was that another way of saying he was “cutting edge”?
Like the others before him, Professor Higgins—the black-rimmed spectacles added to his air of scholarly authority—had a penchant for sub-mammarial incisions, which he preferred over the peri-areolar variety. Clearly, as the doctors’ prescribed implant sizes grew, so did my medical vocabulary.
I asked him about the other surgical methods I’d seen on Dr. 90210, such as the one that went through the navel. His reply was straight from the halls of the academe: “You mean the trans-abdominal mammoplasty? I don’t see the point in taking the most complex route when the direct approach is far more effective. It’s like having a trans-vaginal tonsillectomy.”
He was just as blunt when it came to size. “I would say 280 at the least,” he advised. “You could even take 300.”
Here we go again. Poor Professor Higgins. You are the weakest link, goodbye!
Just when I’d despaired of finding a doctor who would understand that porn-star protrusions did not go with a pint-sized body, I met Dr. Smooth.
In retrospect, I was fortunate to snag an appointment with him at short notice; he was often in London for weeks at a time to attend to his Harley Street patients. But someone had cancelled, and I was in.
And in retrospect, he should have been the first doctor on my list. After all, he had “done” a few of my friends, like Corinna—I should have listened to her from the start, of course—and they were unreservedly enthusiastic about the results. One of them (most definitely not Corinna) even went back for bigger implants—twice.
Nevertheless, he could have been the Picasso of plastic surgeons, but if there was no meeting of minds, so to speak, there would be no meeting of scalpel and flesh.
Oh, but Dr. Smooth knew all the moves. Friendly and efficient staff, check. Complete and accessible website, check. Tastefully appointed rooms, with climate control set to warm and cozy in the examination room, check. Soft cotton robes with lace trim, check. A doctor who studied you from all angles, including the back and side, check.
It was obvious that he adored women and wanted them to look and feel their best. As I stood in front of the mirror in his examination room, stripped down to my underwear, he immediately remarked that I was tiny in frame and there was no need to go “glamour model” big when a lovely, full B cup would do very nicely for me.
“Try them on,” he urged, helping me position on my breasts two gooey blobs of clear gel encased in a high-grade elastomer coating, all made of silicone. These were not your Playboy Bunny circa 1975 silicone implants. The 2.0 version for the new millennium were virtually indestructible. It would be safe to assume that at the end of time, when ashes turned to ashes and dust to dust, mounds of silicone were all that would remain in the graveyards of the world.
“You look like a tart of note,” he said when I’d put my clingy knit dress back on with the 300cc implants underneath.
“Thank you,” I replied, pleased. What on earth were those other doctors thinking? The Pamela Anderson look was just not me.
He handed me another set. “Now try these on for size.”
They were perfect. Not too big and not too small, they gave my breasts the right boost of oomph. Womanly without being wanton. All that from a mere 140 and 160 ccs of silicone—around half of what the other doctors had recommended.
And best of all, there was no need for extensive mutilation. Dr. Smooth would cut around the nipple: along the top for the left breast, in order to give it a slight lift, and along the bottom of the nipple for the right breast, which would be fitted with the larger implant.
I’d leave the hospital with heavily bandaged breasts, yes, but in the months to come, both the doctor and Corinna reassured me, they would settle into splendid and natural-looking fullness. Most importantly, they would look and feel real. Capitan Felipe, the rogue pirate, would have preferred the souped-up, super-enhanced options presented by the other surgeons. Of course. I expected no less from him. But they were my breasts, albeit his funds, and the decision was, ultimately, mine.
I knew, with unwavering certainty, that Dr. Smooth was so the doctor for me.
Believe me, if I had been as fastidious about finding Mr. Right Man to Marry and Be Stuck with for the Rest of My Life as I was about finding Dr. Right Slice, well … I’d probably still have needed a slight pectoral boost after three pregnancies.
Instead I ended up with Dex. The Despicable Ex (as christened by my sister Karine), father of my children and the object of my indifference.
Dex and I were utterly, spectacularly mismatched. For instance, he was PC to my Mac. Pavlov to my Maslow. Jekyll to his own Hyde. But, true to my solid upper middle-class Catholic upbringing, I fooled myself into believing that not only did love conquer all eventually, even the most glaring differences, love also had the power to transform jerks into gentlemen. If only someone had told me, “Honey, no saint in heaven is that powerful.”
Our marriage was doomed from the start, even before we’d landed in Hong Kong to set up a house. I was a girl from the tropics; he was British and boring. Chilly where I was charming, arrogant where I was accommodating, insecure where I was independent. And, according to Dex, highly sexed where I was lacking in libido.
He would broadcast it as well. “We’re not that compatible when it comes to sex,” he’d say at dinner parties before we got married. “Maxine has a low sex drive, and I’m the opposite. But we’ll make it work.”
Like he was doing me a huge favor by marrying me nevertheless, because he had bagged the trophy that everyone desired but only he knew the truth about. “You’re very pretty,” he would say in lieu of foreplay, “but you’re not really sexy.”
I’m not sure in what universe those words would count as a guaranteed form of arousal. But Dex, ever the banker, would even quantify our moments of physical intimacy. “I hug you more than you hug me,” he would say. Or, “I always kiss you first. Why don’t you ever kiss me first?”
How could I tell my husband that he was an appalling kisser? Did I say, oh, sorry darling, but wet, sloppy kisses don’t do it for me? He would have gone apoplectic with how-dare-you rage, and then he would have proceeded to enumerate his top ten list of my apparent sexual shortcomings. And according to him, there were many, beginning with me “not being sexy enough.”
Funny he would say that. Wasn’t it the humorist Miles Kington who declared that the British didn’t have sex, they had hot water bottles? Besides, what British men of Dex’s generation knew about sex, they gleaned from watching Benny Hill.
And here I was thinking marriage was a partnership, not a competition. It was as if there were a scoreboard etched on the wall above our bed, with Dex tallying emotional debits and credits and always coming out tops, according to his calculations. Because my “pretty little brain,” he’d said, “could not process the complex workings of the world of banking and finance.”
So why did I marry him?
After a string of Latino flings, Dex’s very Britishness seemed reassuringly sincere. A promise uttered in that plummy accent to love, honor, and cherish seemed honorable. And unlike the daredevil media types, polo-playing playboys, and commando-going bohemian architects I’d dated previously, the fact that he was a banker made him seem solid and safe, if a bit stodgy. Good husband material, or so I thought.
Plus, as my mother had said, it was better to marry someone who loved you more than you loved him, which was the case with her own marriage. My mother was everything to my father. She could have told me, however, that there was a caveat to that rule; it mattered little that he loved me more if he was controlling, insecure, and, well, seriously fucked in the head.
Of course I thought I was in love with him when I married him. Of course I thought that he, out of all the possibilities that had presented themselves at that point in my life when I felt I was ready to settle down and start a family, was the best and the most stable, in terms of finances, career, and gene pool. Of course I thought that in due time he would melt and mellow and then revel in the limitless sunshine of my love.
Of course I was wrong.
As for my supposed lack of libido, Dex had it all wrong. This was definitely a case of “it’s not me, it’s you,” you being Dex, although the penny didn’t quite drop till much later. In the meantime, I’d gone to see a few doctors, trying to explain, haltingly, that I couldn’t seem to lubricate sufficiently during sex with my husband. “Oh, not to worry, Mrs. Slater,” I was told by well-meaning doctors with gray hair and robust Scottish surnames like McDougall and Farquharson and Sinclair. “Yours is a fairly common situation,” they reassured me. “It could even be a side effect of being on the Pill.”
But Doctor, I wanted to say, the other day at the Gucci launch, I met a man, he was Italian, urbane, witty, and rakishly sexy in an American Gigolo way, Armani-clad, and charm-laden. And definitely not gay. We exchanged no more than a few words and went our separate ways, yet I could feel the moisture soaking into my panties. What was wrong with me, Doctor? I wanted to ask. Please tell me so I can fix it.
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with you, Mrs. Slater,” the doctors told me repeatedly. “Lack of lubrication is nothing unusual. Happens all the time. A dab of some K-Y jelly should get things moving smoothly along the path to wedded bliss.”
You're on the highway to hell …
But the road was pocked with holes and bumps, the biggest roadblock of all being Dex himself. Because, really, you couldn’t belittle your wife all day long and expect her to blow you at night. But that’s exactly what Dex expected. And there’s nothing more unpalatable than blowing someone you’re so not into. So forgive me if my vagina wouldn’t quite gush forth like Victoria Falls during peak season every time Dex would touch me.
Clearly, what our marriage needed was a miracle. Call it the eternal sunshine of the stubborn mind, but divorce was not an option—initially. I clung to the fantasy that children would soften Dex and kick-start our marriage from its usual flatlining state. Considering the infrequency of our attempts at copulation, especially after I’d gone off the Pill, and Dex’s reluctance to have children, it was indeed no small miracle that our daughters Ariane, Gia, and Marnie were born.
Dex was baffled when I finally told him I wanted a divorce after fifteen years of marriage. Baffled, then angry, then nasty. “Happily ever after” was just not going to happen for us—I’d known that almost from Day One—but deciding exactly when to leave was far from simple. The children were still little—eight, six, and four, respectively. Didn’t they deserve to grow up in a home where both mother and father were present? I worried about the impact raising them with a father they saw only on weekends would have on their notions of family, and eventually, their relationships with men. I wrestled with the reality of having to uproot them from a home they perceived to be stable, however shaky its foundation and noxious its energy. I feared that our sudden poverty, downsizing from a suburban four-bedroom home in a gated community, complete with swimming pool and two-car garage, to a two-bedroom apartment, would be too startling a change for them. But deep down I knew, I absolutely knew, that this was the best thing I could ever do for them, and that with humor, grace, and a whole lot of patience and understanding, we would somehow find a way to become whole and happy. It wasn’t easy. In fact it was pretty damn trying, exhausting, and draining. But we did, and we never looked back, neither in anger nor regret.
Dex chose to believe that I wanted a divorce, that I willingly destroyed our family “so that she could find herself.” Whatever, dude. I never needed to find myself; I was never lost. I’d always known who I was. I’d never derived my sense of identity from him. And the fact was that for fifteen years, I did not like the person that I’d become being married to him. Detached, armored, and self-contained, smiles carefully parceled out—that wasn’t me. It wasn’t so much about finding myself as it was reclaiming myself.
Once, in Manila, on a quick visit home with my kids—which really was a break from Dex and his hostile energy back in Hong Kong, I was sipping red wine with my father at dusk, he in his favorite armchair, sitting in near darkness, watching the play of light in the sky.
“Muu-muu,” he said softly, looking straight into the approaching night, “where have you gone?”
“Huh?”
He reached out to put his hand over mine.
“Only you will know when it’s time to go.”
Perhaps it was the harsh, unrelenting glare of the African sun that finally stripped away the pretense that was our marriage, exposing it as arid and soulless. I suppose I could have gone on living as I had been, focusing on my children, cultivating my own separate friendships, pursuing my own interests, not rising to the bait when Dex belittled me, my family or my ethnicity in front of the children, and lying back and thinking of George Clooney whenever he climbed on top of me. But in the end, I wasn’t doing my daughters any favors by staying. Because it was possible to go on living with someone I didn’t love, but there was no way I could have remained married to someone I neither liked nor respected. And I couldn’t raise a family together with a man who didn’t share the same values.
Besides, all throughout my marriage I’d felt a profound sense of solitude. Being alone did not frighten me.
When I took the children and moved out of the house I’d shared with Dex, he’d said to me, in his signature tone of condescension and go-fuck-yourself bitterness, “Go, you frigid little bitch. With all your baggage, your stretch marks, and your sagging breasts, who’s going to want you anyway, you cold fish?”
As it turned out, quite a few. And how. And some of them made me come more than “ones.”
From the hellish fires of my marriage, I have been rewarded in the sexual afterlife. Fellatio as performed by me is apparently heavenly. Emilio says I give head like a goddess. Did you hear that, Dex?
Emilio’s not done texting me yet.
Frigid? Yeah, right.
And my breasts? They’re fucking magnificent.
Thank you, Dr. Smooth.