Ali in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tales (13 page)

It was late afternoon, and I was holding my six-month-old daughter, singing that song about monkeys jumping on beds (which always struck me as slightly disturbing, because after they fall off the bed, they smack their heads. And by the way, why are lullabies so violent? When the bough breaks, the baby will fall? I don’t know why she swallowed a fly; I guess she’ll die?). The phone rang, and it was my agent. Apparently the aforementioned TV crime show was looking for a love interest for their lead, the inner-city cop played by Dax. There would be nudity. Ahem, n-u-d-i-t-y! They wanted me naked? I didn’t have the kind of career that needed nudity clauses, R ratings, or nipple tape. The only time I did anything with even a whiff of a romantic lead to it was kissing Jerry Seinfeld (I was Schmoopie) in the infamous Soup Nazi episode. And even then, nobody wanted a second take.

I don’t believe in astrology, but if I did, the universe had just pulled out an enormous rubber chicken. I laughingly explained to my agent that this job was inconceivable (so to speak) because he was an ex-lover, and that the last time I saw him he was boarding a Virgin Atlantic flight while I clung to his boots and screamed, “You don’t know it, but you love me! You’re in love with me, asshole!”

Two diaper changes later, my mother called. “You want to hear something funny?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she answered.

“I just got a call from my agent. Do you know the show called
The Beat
on HBO?”

“The violent show?” she asked.

“Yes, the violent show.”

“I can’t understand it.”

“Well, nobody can, but they are interested in me for a leading lady part.”

She responded without hesitation, “So do it!”

“It’s not that simple. They are interested in me playing the love interest to Dax. Dax is the lead.”

“Well, you should do it!” she repeated.

I took a deep breath. “Dax, who I used to be in love with! Dax, the playboy of the Western world? The one you said to have as an hors d’oeuvre and not the main course?”

“Well, there are not a lot of acting opportunities in D.C.”

“Mom, let me tell you what the reality of this situation would be. It’s five a.m.; I hand off your granddaughter to a nice South American woman I barely know who could steal or eat the baby, then get in a town car and drive two hours to the set. After hours of body makeup—because I’ll be NAKED—I get on set and roll around with Dax for four hours in front of three cameras and God knows how many cameramen, kissing, caressing, and hopefully just dry humping. Then they call lunch, and because I am so confused and distressed, I go to Dax’s trailer to talk to him. We end up making love all through break. I drive home hysterically crying in my town car because I can’t shake the image of being thrown up against his trailer wall and knowing if I go back to the set, back to his arms, I might never leave again. Then what? I walk in the door, tell Lupe she can go home, and make a roast chicken?”

There was another extended pause. “Well,” my mother finally said, “it
is
HBO.”

Chapter Seventeen

Like a Good Melon, You Know

I
met my future husband in the restaurant of Barneys New York on a sublime spring afternoon. He requested dinner, I countered with coffee, we settled on lunch. It was my first blind date, and I didn’t possess much faith in the outcome. I showered, but didn’t shave my legs. I may have plucked my eyebrows, but I didn’t bother with any makeup, not even Chapstick. I figured the date would yield an intriguing dinner-party story, nothing more. I had grown up in a family of political journalists, I had no interest in political journalism, and he was a political journalist—a very nice political journalist, I was sure, but a political journalist nonetheless. I assumed I’d become Mrs. Hugh Grant and live a Hollywood life split between our glass Gehry house in Malibu, our limestone flat in Notting Hill, and our tree house high in the banana plants of Barbados. Well, ultimately I knew that wasn’t really my destiny; I knew tree houses had appalling septic systems, I was not a black transgender hooker, and I can only take so much brooding. The point is, I assumed I’d at least marry someone who was a member of AFTRA or SAG. Barneys New York seemed an ideal choice for lunch, because if the date ended up being social root canal, at least I could race upstairs and buy my Kiehl’s grapefruit shower gel, and the day wouldn’t be a total wash.

When George and I saw each other, we each did the perfunctory nod as if to say, “Ah yes, it’s me, here we go, please work out.” We shook hands and were escorted to a middle table—or, as I like to refer to it, theater in the round. We both ordered crab salad, which I didn’t take as a sign; we both just like crab salad. I can’t explain what it is that creates chemistry between two people. How many times have we asked ourselves, Why is he with HER? or, Why is she with HIM? I’m talking beyond the blatant he’s-very-rich and she-has-very-large-breasts currency. When I met George, it was like coming home. There was a comfort and understanding. And, like you know when you tap and sniff a good melon, I knew. By the end of lunch we could have taken the subway downtown to the courthouse and exchanged I do’s; it wouldn’t have seemed impulsive.

I didn’t play hard to get, but harder not to get. I was staying with my best friend Holly, who was a disciple of
The Rules
and urged me to act insolent, aloof, and unavailable. I didn’t understand how one moved the relationship forward by being inaccessible. And I was too old for games. He would eventually see my cellulite anyway, so why bother with the Spanx? But Holly had a theory that involved pulling in big fish and teasing the worm and all kinds of confusing metaphors. She had set me up with a man the week before (which was technically my first blind date, but I don’t count it because I have done my best to repress it). She pitched him as a worldly Brazilian artist, so naturally I pictured a shirtless Benjamin Bratt splattered in oil paint. I sat at a table in the corner of Balthazar consuming a whole basket of bread and straining for a glimpse of every newcomer that walked in. And then a sixty-year-old gnome with a face smeared in orange self-tan, sporting a tweed foxhunting jacket, pulled up the adjoining chair—a pompous and insipid man who drove me to pick at my thumb so mindlessly, I had to excuse myself, run to the bathroom, and get a mound of Kleenex to staunch the bleeding. When the check came, I felt salvation was near. If he had gone for the brandy and cigar, I would have swallowed my own tongue. He offered me a ride in his white Hummer limousine, a vision of subtlety and elegance complete with light-up bar and candy dishes brimming with Altoids and condoms. When he threw himself on me and I coughed rape, he held the back of his hand up to my cheek and yelled, “Baste.” I jumped out of the car. Sometimes public transportation is the safest way to travel, and I would have welcomed a brutal mugging over ten more blocks with that sociopath.

A
nd that is why I consider George my official first blind date. The following day, he called for a second date. As I held the phone, Holly gestured around me like an overly caffeinated air traffic controller, whispering things like, “Say no, you’re busy,” and, “Tell him you’ll see if you can get out of your date with Prince Albert of Monaco.” Instead, I opted for full disclosure: “Yes, I’m free tonight and tomorrow night, absolutely no plans.” Holly smacked her forehead and fell back on the couch.

George and I held hands and stared into each other’s eyes, barely escaping oncoming cars and smacking into parking meters. We went to cafés and movies, forgetting to order or follow the plot. And after three days, just when we were heating up to the point of combustion, I was whisked off to a spa with my older sister and mother.

We had planned it months earlier, a bonding weekend for the girls and a chance to jump-start yet another healthy life plan. I had signed up for yoga, spinning, and a hot stone massage prior to the trip. I was going to shed pounds, steam out toxins, and find my third eye. I had not expected to fall in love—particularly not before a weekend at Canyon Ranch.

When I told my sister and mother about the date, they screamed. My sister was ecstatic; my mother fascinated but somewhat dubious—not about George, but about me. I spent the weekend on the phone chatting and chain-smoking, something health spas vigorously discourage. It’s funny how in the beginning of the relationship you can spend two hours conversing about a cinnamon bun you had for breakfast, and then after a decade of marriage your conversations are summed up in quick transactions like, “Did you fix the toilet?” My mother and sister would enter the room in leotards and sweatpants and leave freshly showered in cashmere scarves, with moisturized faces, off to sample dairyless cheese soufflés and wheatgrass brownies. I don’t remember eating, although my mother would bring back vegan bran muffins from the commissary and I know I was given a water bottle with my name on it at check-in. But by the end of our spa getaway, I was the one glowing.

G
eorge and I continued a cross-country courtship, he in New York and me in Los Angeles. And two months later we flew to Mykonos on our first vacation. It would have been easier to have just gone to the Motel 6 in Paramus; we scarcely absorbed our surroundings as we clawed at each other like two kittens in a box. We stayed in a whitewashed stone hotel on the rocky cliffs overlooking the Aegean Sea. And as much as I enjoy looking out at the outlet mall parking lot, the teal ocean was a sexier backdrop. To detail the four days would only belittle the experience and read like a saccharine airport romance. Here’s all you need to know: the view was breathtaking; I was with the right person, in the right place, and I was super thin. It’s probably the only time in my life where I wore a bikini without a wrap and didn’t get some form of dysentery from foreign cuisine.

The only non-Harlequin moment, aside from competitively sunbathing with George (a Mediterranean whose ancestors carried bricks up hills in the scorching sun), which resulted in me covered in painful blisters, involved an afternoon battle with hideous menstrual cramps. I swallowed a handful of Advil and passed out beneath the embroidered mesh net covering our bed in an ibuprofen coma. I was awakened several hours later by soft murmuring. “What?” I kept repeating. George was whispering in my ear. What was clear was, “I want you to be my wife.” Instantaneously, the cramps subsided.

As cliché as it sounds, you do want to shout the news of your engagement from the rooftops, or cliff tops, or the Acropolis. If it were today, I would have texted, Facebooked, and Tweeted until dark. As it was 2001, we called George’s parents, who were full of congratulations, then siblings, friends . . . and my mom. I detected a hint of caution in her response. Later I called Sissy. “What did Mom say to you about the engagement?”

She laughed. “Mom said when she sees you walking down the aisle, she’ll believe it.”

Okay, it was not the first time I had called with engagement news; at this point I had a box full of rejected rings. But this time around my mother would have to eat her cynicism with her Fiber Harmony over low-fat plain yogurt, because this union was going down.

Chapter Eighteen

Tied in Knots

I
had a big, fat, WASP Greek wedding, heavy on the Greek. What I didn’t realize was, when you marry one Greek, you marry them all—approximately sixteen million. We were married by George’s father, a priest, in a traditional ceremony in the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Trinity on East Seventy-fourth Street. I walked in circles holding a candle amid a cloud of incense, promising loyalty and purifying my soul. I think. It was all Greek to me.

After we got engaged, I didn’t have an industrial-size bulletin board overflowing with bridal dress sketches and wedding cake photos. I didn’t become obsessed with picking bridesmaids or experimenting with a variety of hairdos with and without baby’s breath. I had my two sisters stand with me, and I dressed them in dark brown polyester. And no accessories. They’re very cute, so I had to take precautions; I was the bride, after all, I didn’t need anything to steal focus. The only thing I weighed in on was the heart-shaped box made out of shells for the parting gifts. I just wanted to marry George, and I was willing to endure all the shenanigans and circus acts that went with it.

My “Cindy Crawford barefoot on the beach in the Bahamas” wedding fantasy was instantly nixed, as was any form of elopement or destination wedding. George’s father had presided over the most beautiful cathedral on the East Coast, so why make him stand shoeless on a reef in Eleuthera? It would have been like Vera Wang’s daughter buying her wedding dress from Costco. With the venue set, I assumed we had all smoothly sailed over the biggest hurdle. (This is where the Greek chorus clutch their masks and gasp.)

George’s mother is as formidable and strong-willed as mine. And I say that with admiration and respect. Both our mothers were dead set on the photographer they wanted, the people they had to invite, and how many troops it would take to invade Poland. The upside is, they’re so much alike! The downside is, they’re so much alike!

Weeks after the engagement was announced, my mother and I started scouting out potential venues for the reception. Naturally, as the bride, the reception was my prerogative, or so I thought. . . . We spent rainy New York afternoons touring limestone mansions with rooms for rent like the Metropolitan Club and the University Club. I would study my mother as she walked the spaces, daydreaming about the fete: twelve tables of ten, white roses and fresh lavender, cream linens, white asparagus in lemon dribble. “Mom!” I would say as I elbowed her in her burgundy coat, breaking her trance. “There’s only one bathroom, and it’s two floors down—George has yia-yias, you know, Greek grandmothers, it’s not going to work.” And we would venture off to the next overpriced room that promised the most magical night of my life, with free mini quiches thrown in. In between appointments I was Googling “party lofts” and meatpacking boom-boom rooms. A little “yee-ha” for the yia-yias.

I have very little advice for people planning a wedding except for the following: do not go to tastings on an empty stomach. Also, don’t use bronze body makeup with a white dress. I brought my mother to the acclaimed Sylvia Weinstock, the celebrated cake maker, for a sampling. Forkful of chocolate cake with buttercream frosting in my hand, I tapped the Limoges dish. “This is it. Delicious!” I instructed Ms. Weinstock to ice the cake light blue and decorate it with edible shells and sea life, and I would break up with George and marry the damn confection. My mother nibbled vanilla cake with lemon filling, chocolate and caramel, apricot, chocolate cake and chocolate mousse filling, hazelnut and key lime, and when I finally convinced her I had chosen the cake, she asked for a full slice of the chocolate cake with caramel filling. It was not really a tasting so much as a cake bender. My mother salivated about the chocolate cake for the next few days the way newly converted vegetarians fantasize about meat loaf. You would think after three weddings of her own, these rituals would be monotonous, but she was as enthusiastic as a drunk girl during Fleet Week.

If it were up to my mother, the menu at my wedding would have been that cake plus a shot glass of tomato aspic. But that wouldn’t fly with the Greeks. I had been to a Greek wedding a few months earlier that boasted culinary stations of the cross: a pasta, a moussaka, Chinese noodles, a meats station, cheese and salad, and so on. This before the train of desserts. People don’t realize that Greeks rival Jews when it comes to the buffet-till-you-barf. I knew at my wedding we couldn’t pass around Triscuits and cheese and assume people would drink their main course at the bar. WASPs don’t feed guests; they intoxicate them and then wait for someone to call the Red Cross for doughnuts. I decided on filet mignon and potatoes. The wedding was in November, and a hearty meal seemed appropriate. Until I started second-guessing myself. “What about people with allergies?” I asked my mother.

“They can have cake!”

“And the vegans?”

She gave me that look. “Well, I assumed they weren’t invited.”

T
he search for the perfect wedding dress is a ritual that requires mandatory attendance on the part of the bride’s mother, mother-in-law, sisters, cousins, and any female she’s met in her lifetime. The women are supposed to cry and hug when the perfect poufy dress is presented, and in the meantime eat Junior Mints and swig Diet Coke as they trade war stories about how men suck and they all cheat. I was on my way back from a Duane Reade run for Q-tips and hand sanitizer when I happened into Vera Wang’s wedding dress store on Madison Avenue. I browsed one rack, saw a dress I liked, and bought it. I tried it on when I got home and figured I could take it to them for any tweaks. As an actress, nothing is as laborious or time-intensive as a costume fitting. The idea of trying on a million wedding dresses for one that wouldn’t even make it into a major motion picture? What’s the point? And that goes for makeup as well. Anything involving concealer and powder base is work to me. But I wasn’t twenty-one when I got married, so the dewy, fresh, nubile look had to be contrived by a professional or a team of professionals. It took two full hours to make me look as if I were makeup-free. (A family friend sweetly asked a few days before my wedding, “Do you have time to get your eyes done?”)

I
was feeling on top of my wedding game but still didn’t have a place for the reception. George called from work one afternoon. “We’re having it in the church rectory.”

I took a moment to let it sink in. “Um, but, I thought we could take a boat up . . .” The conversation ended there. It was his family’s church. It was rude to have the ceremony in the church and then shuttle-bus everyone to another location. In November. Plus, I didn’t want to lose any guests to the Italian joint down the street.

My mother met me outside the cathedral the next day. We both took a deep breath and entered the narthex. It’s an awe-inspiring structure with a Mediterranean blue ceiling and a dome graced with gorgeous mosaics. We walked down the nave of the church to the altar, marveling at the beauty and the symbolism. My mother studied the sacrament table and the bishop’s throne. “A lotta gold,” she whispered.

“You can’t change that, Mom.” That said, she has never underestimated the power of a few well-placed ivy topiaries.

In this particular cathedral there was a man—more of a sprite, actually—who lived behind a hidden panel in the wall and would occasionally pop out and begin sweeping the floor with what appeared to be a makeshift Ethiopian fly swatter. When you made eye contact, he would evaporate into a mural of the Last Supper. On our first visit the little church man led my mother and me down the stone steps to the rectory. The room was pitch-black. There were no windows or light (I don’t think Little Church Man had ever seen the sun) until he hit a switch and hundred-watt halogen lights, the kind your dermatologist uses to examine your moles, flooded the room. Now, I love my mother- and father-in-law, but this room, with stained linoleum floors and small stage, was designed for Sunday School assemblies and after-church coffee. Little Church Man showed us a couple of foldout tables and an extension cord. All I needed for my nuptial extravaganza. Maybe I could conduct a few AA meetings between toasts. Before I could ask Little Church Man if we could cover up the school water fountain on the wall, he had vanished again. I looked to my mother, as I have at the onset of every major drama in my life. She took a moment. “It’s going to take a lot of gauze, but I think we can do it.”

Here’s where the marrying one Greek means marrying them all. We wanted a hundred guests. My mother-in-law wanted a thousand. And that’s a lot of spanakopita. But you can’t have the Petropouli without inviting the Papadaki, who are related to the Kalfases whose son married Sophia Zorzos. And then there’s the Pappases and the Callases, not to mention the Angelis, who live next to the Stephanideses . . . We decided my mother-in-law would throw her own engagement party. (You know the Greek chorus is gasping here too.)

The party took place a couple of weeks before the actual wedding. It was held in the church. In the same room as the reception. And, I believe, the entire population of Crete was there. I heard there was food, but I never even saw a discarded toothpick. George and I were standing like two Modigliani sculptures by the front door as a long procession of Hellenic folk pinched our cheeks and reassured George that he’d found a “nice one.” And then the archbishop appeared, in cascading black robes. The archbishop is the Grand Poobah of Greek Orthodoxy, one step below their pope. We both kissed his ring, and we all gathered on one side of the room. All I know is he spoke for twenty minutes in Greek, and then he delivered a benediction. My mother-in-law got the wedding she wanted, and—if she’s reading this right now—we
were
married that night, weren’t we, Nikki?

O
nly a gay party planner with a knack for votives could transform that room into a wedding space fit for the royal family. And the design genius Robert Isabell was the man who did it. Not since I first saw
The Nutcracker
performed in a friend’s basement, complete with snow machine and a real pony, had I witnessed such a transformation. I never had a bite of the food—although my mother told me the risotto balls were a hit—and managed only a couple sips of champagne. (As I had inherited my mother’s inability to hold liquor, I felt my wedding reception was not the place to yank off my dress.) And we danced. The compromise had been a disco band to kick off the evening with songs like “We Are Family,” and a Greek band to follow. The disco band lasted about half an hour before the Greek band muscled them off the stage. My favorite moment was watching my relatives try to Greek dance. It was like watching a group of old people auditioning for
Lord of the Dance
. Then mercifully they were swept up by George’s family to snake around the room, screaming “Opa” at inappropriate moments. I reminded my stepfather not to hurl the china against the wall. Not that kind of Greek party.

George and I were dancing in a circle with our five-year-old flower girl. I still had cake crumbs on the corner of my mouth, and I was waving to an old friend I had promised the next dance. Suddenly my mother appeared and gently tapped my shoulder. “You have to leave now,” she whispered.

“Why?” I swirled the little girl around, sending her orchid crown to the floor.

“It’s almost midnight, and it’s time for you to go.”

I adjusted the crown. “Did the bar close?”

She gave me a stern look. “People want to go home, but nobody can leave until the bride and groom do.”

I assumed I’d get kicked out of boarding school or book clubs I’d never attend, but kicked out of my own wedding? Thank God George left with me!