Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown (12 page)

“I think I’ve got the guy,” Rachel announced, calling me from the supermarket. “I was standing here trying to decide if I should get Coke, Pepsi, Diet Sprite, Diet Dr Pepper, or Mr. Pibb and this guy turned to me, looking as perplexed as I was, and said, ”There’s so much to consider. I wish I could find a woman with a strong decision-making sense.”

“I met him,” Heidi said as I sat down with her and her daughter Sienna for lunch one day. “The only problem is that he likes tall brunettes,” she said, staring at my blond hair, then tying Sienna’s shoes and grabbing a toy for her to play with. “I figure he’ll love your personality so much, he won’t notice the blond or the height.”

“OK,” Serena said as we compared nail polish colors for an upcoming cousin’s bar mitzvah, “the search is over. I found him.”

His name was Billy Lange and he was, as Serena described, “a screenwriter on the verge of superstardom.”

“Yeah, Billy Lange,” he said as he picked up the phone, noticeably leaving out the “it‘s” in “It’s Billy Lange,” or “Hi, Adena. I’m Serena’s friend Billy Lange.” No, it was “Let’s meet for a drink, say, Friday, Four Seasons Hotel. Seven o’clock. I’ve got brown hair. See you there.”

Serena said that Billy Lange had really bad phone manners, but was actually a really good guy. “He must have been nervous,” she said.

Serena arrived at my house on Tuesday at five o‘clock. We had three days and two hours to get ready.

Serena flipped through my closet. The promise in potential guys was certainly there, but there was a much more delicate matter to attend to: My depression had affected my wardrobe.

“Where’s the sexy stuff?” she asked, flipping through each hanging object as her eyes went wide. “Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I saw you wear anything sexy.”

As common as the notion for a twentysomething woman might be when searching for new clothes, the notion of “sexy” did not make it into the final analysis for me when buying something new. While quick tallies of fashionable, classy, fun, or cool did factor in, sexy wasn’t even an afterthought. I had been in a relationship for so long, and then had been mourning the loss of the relationship for so long, I had lost the ability to think of sexy anymore in terms of clothing. For me, the mid-nineties were all about long, baggy, depressing dresses and skirts. I had resigned myself to the flowered dress, the frilly skirt, and the pencil-straight ankle-length skirt. Frankly, I looked like a “Before” picture.

“What about that black dress?” I asked, pointing to a sleeveless black jersey ankle-length dress with a scoop neck.

“Jeez, Dean,” Serena said. pulling out the black jersey dress. “No offense. It’s sexy if you’re going to a funeral, but not for a date.”

“Now I have to get a new wardrobe?” I cried like the eggshell I’d become.

“No, no. no,” she said, taking a closer look at the dress. “We just need to sex up what you already have. This is a good thing.” She handed me a tissue. “You’re young; you need to have some fun. A change will do you good.”

Off to the tailor we went. With my six-inch heels in hand, Serena and the tailor shortened the dress a little bit, then a little bit more, and then a little more than that, until I was left with a tiny black minidress. Cost for my new look: $8.

I felt incredibly uncomfortable heading on my first date out of the single file gate. I was sure that the tailor had made my dress too short. Did my minidress with the addition of my six-inch heels make me look like a hooker?

“I swear,” Serena said, “you do not look like a hooker. You don’t have enough makeup on to look like a hooker,” she said as she dabbed a little rouge on my cheeks.

I didn’t feel sexy at all. I felt awkward and agitated. I didn’t want to date. I didn’t want to see the world. Even though I was incredibly unhappy, I had gotten used to being unhappy. That was better than anything new.

“You’re gorgeous,” Serena said, trying to psych me up. “You’ve got great legs and a great figure. It’s about time that you showed it off.”

I entered the Four Seasons Hotel at exactly 7:17 p.m. I wanted to be a little late, and the two sevens I saw on my car’s digital clock seemed like a lucky time to start my single life.

I stood in the entryway of the bar, trying to size up any man with brown hair who looked like he was a screenwriter on the verge of superstardom. There weren’t any, so I got a glass of Merlot (the mid-nineties drink of choice) and took a seat at the bar. Sitting on such a high seat caused me to think that maybe my cellulite would be showing, so I took a seat on one of the couches—also a bad idea. Had Billy Lange sat down next to me on the sofa, I would have had to speak to him facing sideways. Keeping a short skirt from showing cellulite while sitting sideways felt like a disaster in the making, so I got up and switched to a regular chair.

“Hey, Goldilocks. Is that chair just right?” said a brown-haired guy who looked like he was a screenwriter on the verge of superstardom sitting four feet away. I went red in the face.

“I hope you’re Adena,” he said, taking a seat on the sofa next to me. “Even if you’re not, those are some great gams.”

The limbs that held up my body were great? Those toned, lean things?

“Oh, goodness, thank you,” I exhaled, crossing one great gam over the other and taking a sip of Merlot. “Genetics,” I joked.

Four hours, three Merlots for me, and three vodkas on the rocks for him later, we were both drunk and if my cellulite was showing, I had no tact left to know or care.

The following morning, he left my apartment at about seven. Serena had to pick me up to take me back to the Four Seasons to get my car, but I told her we were going shopping first. If it was sexy, I was going to buy it. I came home that day with three pairs of skintight jeans, two miniskirts, four halter tops, a slinky slip dress, another pair of six-inch heels, and a hot pair of dangly earrings. The long skirts were put in the back of the closet for posterity.

“Are you going to see him again?” Serena asked me when I left her.

“There’s a whole world of guys out there that I’ve never met,” I said smugly. “Why would I want to just stop with the first one?”

n my mother’s first weekend as a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania in 1955, fourteen boys called to ask her out. Not five or six or seven or eight, hut fourteen! Can you imagine?

“It was different in those days,” Arlene would say with a shrug. “You went on a date without the notion that it might lead to marriage. You went to a dance hall together or you had a burger.” Regardless of how she tried to downplay it, the volume was mesmerizing any way you looked at it.

“Get to the part when all the boys called,” I’d say.

“Well”—she’d smile devilishly as her eyes sparkled—“the phone would ring and your grandmother would shout out, ‘Here’s another one!’ ”

I always loved the image of my mother jumping down the stairs in their Wynnefield home and grabbing the phone in the kitchen, acting so casual, as if each boy was the first to call.

“Friday night?” she’d repeat as my grandmother, Esther, stood listening in incredulity. “I’ll have to check my calendar and get back to you.”

I imagined my mother getting tired of taking the calls and Esther taking them for her, like her manager who would start to get picky with the boys, asking them something like, “You want to take Arlene out on a date Friday night? What did you say your major was? English literature? No, I don’t think so. We already have a pre-law set up for that night. Change your major and get back to us.”

“Did you sleep with any of them?” I’d ask.

“Of course not,” she’d answer as if I’d offended her. “It was the fifties!”

“Did you wear something sexy that day?”

“For Christ’s sake, Adena, it was the fifties,” she’d say, getting pissed off. “The sexiest I ever got was keeping the top button open on my cashmere sweaters.”

As the story went, it took her half the semester to go on a date with all of them, but she didn’t end up marrying any of them and she never mentioned that she even seriously dated any of them.

This story has had a profound affect on my life. Never have fourteen boys at a time, much less five, asked me out in a single day. I know this is an impossible notion for anyone, but when you know the ability is in your blood, you might like to think you could come close.

After my one-night stand with Billy Lange, I realized that there was a whole world of dating out there that I had never even attempted to conquer in short black dresses and six-inch heels. The five women you meet in Los Angeles had that time while I was still with my college sweetheart five years out of college. This was my time, my first weekend at Penn, and whether Billy Lange had written my number on a bathroom wall followed by the words “for a good time call ...” or it started to get around that there was a new single girl on the scene, I’ll never know. What I do know is that they started calling, which in turn, for the first time in my life, gave me the confidence to be as picky as I wanted to be. Men could come and go for the slightest reason. Who cared? Another one was bound to pop up at any moment.

First there was Rob who called me “Little Heather Locklear” because of my blond hair, six-inch heels, and newly acquired short skirts, which he thought were reminiscent of Melrose Place. The Locklear comparison earned him a month of dating until I met Stu, who asked all five feet of me if I had ever modeled. That got him sex the very first night and a month and a half of dating until I dumped him for Andy, who sought me out at a party introducing himself and saying I was “a vision in red leather pants and a gray tank in a sea of black.” That relationship only lasted two weeks, as I ran out of colorful clothes.

If I knew I was going to sleep with Bobby on the third-date take-out Chinese and DVD at his place, my outfit was always my slouchy Levi’s with my best Calvin Klein ribbed white tank (the one that was the same as all the others, but for some reason looked better).

“Your arms look amazing in this,” Bobby said as he slipped it off of me.

If it were a conservative guy, like Richard, I’d wear a black low-cut blouse, black cigarette pants, and pearls.

“The thing I like about you,” Richard said, “you’re conventional, but with a sexy edge.”

If we were going to a business function, like the one I went to with Leo, I wore my Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress for the I-just-came-from-work look, even though I’d secretly left work early to shower and put on my sexy wrap dress.

“There is no one sexier than you,” Leo whispered before introducing me to his boss.

If a cute guy happened to come into my office and asked if I wanted to grab a drink after work, I kept a drawer at my desk full of accessories, which came in handy when I met Oliver.

“You’re like an article in one of those fashion magazines,” he said, complimenting the scarf I’d fashionably tied around my neck as he quoted, “How to turn your daytime outfit into night in two simple steps.”

If it were a daytime activity date, like the time I went Rollerblading with Keith, I wore my black leggings, a white tank top, and my old gray long-sleeve Rolling Stones Steel Wheels Tour T-shirt that I stole from my brother David, which I wrapped around my waist.

“You’re a sexy tomboy,” Keith said as we skated off the cement path and fell into the grass. I had to give up that relationship the day he asked if I wanted to go swimming. He was cute, but not cute enough for me to get my hair wet.

Saturday night dates were all-embracing: my gold halter top with my Theory shiny black tight-fitting tuxedo pants. At a dinner party with Zach, Zach’s friend Leslie kept gushing over the top.

“I am dating the sexiest, best-dressed girl in town,” Zach boasted.

Black-tie events, like the one I went to with Al, called for my silk charmeuse slim-fitting white skirt and a black halter top with a V-shaped back.

“You look like someone Frank Sinatra would sing about,” Al said as he dipped me on the dance floor.

Sometimes relationships ended simply because I had nothing else to wear, like when my relationship with Nick ended because I had worn the same outfit on date two as I did on date seven.

“I love the way you dress,” Nick said when he picked me up for date two—dinner and a movie.

By the time date seven rolled around, I was out of the outfits that fit the criteria of the look he loved, so I put on date two’s outfit and hoped for the best. He said nothing when I answered the door. He kissed me hello and complained about the traffic. I felt dirty. I had failed. Before he could get to it, I broke it off the next day using the old “things at work have been crazy/its not you, it’s me/I’m really screwed up right now/I’m not in the right place” excuse.

Sometimes it wasn’t easy keeping up the sexy/ultraconfident sexscapade.

There was the time I got my six-inch heel stuck in a street grate. As I pulled the wedged heel from the grate, the force of the action made me knock into Gil, who in turn hit his head on a street pole and passed out on the sidewalk, his head bleeding profusely.

“Is there any way I can reimburse you for this?” I asked Gil as he lay in the ambulance on the way to the hospital after coming to consciousness with the paramedics finishing the stitches.

While Myles thought it was hysterical, trying to be playful and accidentally unhooking my halter top and leaving me topless for about three seconds, long enough for everyone within eye reach of our dinner table to catch a glimpse of my braless breasts, it was the last I saw of him.

That story went along the same lines as my date with Lawrence. I went to grab my water glass and inadvertently knocked a full glass of red wine onto my lap. Since I was wearing a pair of extra-tight white pants and had decided to go sans underwear, it is my belief that I will never experience a more self-inflicted source of mortification than when I had to walk out of the restaurant with a tablecloth wrapped around my waist. Worse, Lawrence had light-cream-colored seats in his car and insisted that I sit on some plastic bags he found in his trunk. I never ordered red wine ever again and always decline it if it’s ever offered. Some wine-snob dates have haughtily disapproved when I’ve ordered a Pinot Grigio with steak. If they only knew.