Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown (21 page)

“I’m starting to lose brain cells from all that Lycra,” I said, laughing.

“Maybe we should have a benefit for you,” he joked.

“I am going to throw on my nastiest, oldest sweats and that crazy sweater you had woven from your dead dog’s fur,” I said, getting up.

“Don’t be mean to Banjo’s memory; I love that sweater.” He pouted, grabbing the sweater and petting the arm. “It’s like Banjo is still here.”

“If you love it, I love it,” I said, grabbing an old pair of sweatpants.

“Hey, put on the sweats that Lina got for you,” he said in that matter-of-fact tone I’d come to know so well.

y aunt Judy Savitt had come to Los Angeles on vacation, and we made plans to have dinner one night. As Judy got into my car and I started to drive, I smelled a wonderful scent that to me screamed hugs, laughter, frustration, appreciation, degradation, admiration, anger, respect, disapproval, and, of course, love.

“Are you wearing Carolina Herrera perfume?” I asked her.

“Yes, how did you know?”

“It suddenly smelled like my mom was here.”

It’s hard for me to date a guy who wears Cartier cologne. It smells like my father is there, watching every move the guy makes.

I can be in a department store and a perfume saleswoman will ask me if I want to try Giorgio Armani’s Acqua Di Gio.

“Why bother?” I tell her. “All I have to do is go to my friend Rachel’s house and smell her. Same goes for my friend Susan and Burberry Brit.”

Luckily Heidi has a big mouth or I’d never know she’d entered a room; she’s allergic to perfume.

Someone at the next table in a restaurant will be squeezing some lemon into her Diet Coke and I will suddenly think of Serena. She always wears this fragrance she first bought in Paris called Eau d‘Hadrien by Annick Goutal. Very lemony and fresh. I get the same feeling when I take a sniff of makeup powder and automatically think of my childhood best friend Amy Chaikin’s Anaïs Anaïs fetish in high school. Amy called me recently and told me that she’s really into wearing Marc Jacobs perfume. Since we live three thousand miles away from each other, whenever I miss her, I take a sniff of it in a department store. It makes me feel a little closer to my dear old friend. My other childhood best friend Julie Pelagatti and I have lost touch. We had a disagreement a couple of years ago. I honestly can’t remember what it was about. As teenagers, just before we’d head into a party, Julie would spritz on some Giorgio by Giorgio Beverly Hills that she kept in her glove compartment. Just last week, a woman passed me on the street wearing that unmistakably abundant bouquet of jasmine, rose, and amber. It made me very sad.

It’s not so much the smell of Fragile perfume by Jean Paul Gaultier that makes me think of my cousin Michele. It’s the cool snow globe with the gold flakes that fly around the pretty lady inside wearing the strapless black dress. Every time I’m in Michele’s bedroom, I shake the bottle. Same goes for when I’m in a department store. It’s so fun and glamorous, just like my cousin who wears it.

The smell of Calvin Klein’s Obsession, however, makes me think about my taxes. It’s the scent my accountant wears. Hemp hair gel’s citrus scent reminds me that I have to get my teeth cleaned. It’s the aroma I smell on Dr. Oche, my dentist, when he’s looking into my mouth. I Profumi di Firenze smells like I have to get my roots done. It’s my hairdresser’s signature scent.

My signature fragrance is Donna Karan’s Cashmere Mist body lotion. I like the body lotion scent better than the scent that comes from the atomizer. It just smells cleaner, less alcohol-y, I don’t know. I’ve asked saleswomen why, and they tell me it’s something in the mix of the lotion and perfume or something like that. I’ve also tried the Cashmere Mist shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, and decorative scented candle but, in the end, I’ve found that using the body lotion is just enough. Too much, and I start to feel like I could sprout a garden out of my ears. I’ve been wearing Cashmere Mist for years—not for everyday, but for nights that I go to dinner with friends or to a party or for romantic occasions.

I always put my Cashmere Mist on the same way: I apply it to all the pressure points like the magazines have told me to do—on my wrists, my neck, behind my ears, around my shoulders, and under my boobs. I don’t remember what magazine told me to apply it under my boobs, but it doesn’t seem to hurt.

Sometimes, if I want to feel extra special, I put it on my legs so I smell extra fantastic, but that’s not too often, as I don’t like the wet feeling of the lotion on my legs sticking slightly to my pants if I’m wearing them.

I’ve always gotten compliments on my Cashmere Mist. The guys love it. “You always smell so good,” some of them have told me in the past.

The best part about all of it is that no one else who is close to me wears Cashmere Mist. It’s all mine. It’s my scent, just like the friends and family I’ve mentioned have their scents.

Coco Chanel once said of perfume, “It is the unseen, unforgettable, ultimate accessory of fashion ... that heralds your arrival and prolongs your departure.” Don’t you love that? I could not agree more with Ms. Chanel. It is the sweetened addition to the people we care most about in our lives and the ones who come in briefly and leave that indelible mark.

A person is telling you that they want to spend every day for the rest of their life with you until they die. No matter what your problem is, no matter your little idiosyncrasies, annoying habits, criminal record, or otherwise, that’s all fine, they know all about that stuff and they still want to spend the rest of their lives with you until they die. To add to it, they want to get up in front of your friends and family and in front of a religious figure or a judge or anyone legally acceptable to make this promise binding. The search is over. You are the mythical figure they mentioned in conversation “The person I marry ...” or “I hope to find my soul mate one day....” It’s you. You are the one they want to be with until they are no more.

Not only is it a really heavy thing to grasp, but wow, how flattering.

This was what was going through my mind when Pete took out the six-carat emerald-cut diamond engagement ring from Tiffany’s and asked for my hand in marriage.

It was a nothing Thursday in 2003.
Friends
was a rerun that night, so earlier that morning I mentioned to Pete that maybe we’d go out to dinner, which he was fine with. No mention of where we’d go had been discussed. Nothing, not even Pete, seemed out of the ordinary. It was a sunny Thursday March day in Southern California, highs were in the low seventies, and I wore a pair of True Religion jeans and a black Co-Op knit cardigan with a white button-down shirt underneath untucked, skimming the tops of my thighs, leaving a nice unpolished, comfortable look for my nothing-out-of-the-ordinary day on the eighth floor at the Promo House offices. Pete wore his usual unordinary attire: a James Perse T-shirt—this one was long sleeve in black—Levi‘s, and his black Prada driving shoes. I saw him once during the day when he came down to give me a quick kiss hello before he went to lunch, something he normally did. He didn’t seem happier to see me, just normal-happy to see his gal.

I got home first that night. Pete told me he was having a quick drink with a screenwriter. I was watching
Entertainment Tonight.
Mary Hart was reporting on the fact that since the war in Iraq had recently begun, stars were planning on dressing down in a more subdued tone for the Oscars that Sunday night. I was taking off my jeans and black sweater for the time being until we were going to dinner, leaving on the white button-down, and throwing on my black Juicy velvet sweats. I watched Bob Goen reporting that Tobey Maguire had signed on to appear in the sequel of
Spider-Man
despite a back injury. My stomach was starting to growl in the middle of the report, so I went down to the kitchen to grab some tortilla chips to tide me over until we went to dinner. As I was eating out of the pantry closet, Pete came home.

He had a really nice smile on his face. He seemed like he was in a really good mood—more than usual, but not enough to take note of as he hugged and kissed me hello and grabbed some chips for himself. I was telling him about the crappy meeting I’d had with a network that didn’t like the way we were promoting their shows. I still had my head in the pantry, using a shelf as my table as I opened a jar of salsa and began to dip. I was really hungry, and some chips that hadn’t made it to my mouth instead fell on the floor.

“You know, you’re adorable,” he said and smiled as I was in the middle of telling him about my day. This stopped me in my eating/work-gripe frenzy as I turned to give him a smile full of chips. He kissed me on the cheek.

He had actually mentioned to me a week before that he didn’t like the fact that I had a habit of eating a meal out of the refrigerator or from the pantry. That night he thought it was adorable Men. They can be so finicky sometimes.

I continued to eat my salsa and chips out of the pantry closet and continued to go on about my day.

“The jerks don’t want to pay us what they owe us,” I told Pete. “That’s what’s behind this,” I said with a mouthful. Just then, I dripped some of the salsa onto my white button-down shirt and let out a pissed-off bellow.

“Son of a bitch!” I shouted as I turned around to grab a paper towel to swipe the salsa off my shirt. These were the last words I would articulate before turning around again and seeing Pete down on one knee with the six-carat emerald-cut diamond engagement ring from Tiffany’s.

“I was going to wait until this weekend”—he smiled brightly—“and I was going to do all this stuff—take you out to a nice place, get some roses, have some guy playing the violin.... Seeing you standing there though, I just thought that this was the most appropriate way to ask you. Dean ... Adena, will you marry me?”

I was numb in my tracks, and yet my senses were on highest alert. I could feel the wet salsa sticking the white button-down shirt to my chest. Some tortilla crumbs were underneath my bare feet. I had a slight wedgie from my boy-cut sheers, and
Entertainment Tonight
was announcing the birthdays of Holly Hunter, Spike Lee, and Carl Reiner.

He wanted to marry
me.
He wanted to spend the rest of his life with
me.
Why me? Who was I to be asked such a question, and with salsa on my white shirt no less? What did I have that the others didn’t? Me? Are you sure?

“Are you sure?” I blurted out with this smiling, perplexed look on my face as he remained in place, bent on one knee holding the ring to my face. I took a step forward and another chip speared its way into my foot.

“I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” he whispered in that positive, matter-of-fact tone I’d come to love.

Who was I to turn such a thing down?

Was I making too much out of it? Sure, he was asking me to marry him, and this was a huge deal, but billions of other people, even the people closest to me, had been asked this same question and they seemed to take it off the cuff. They went on with their lives, had children, and no one ever mentioned, “I couldn’t believe he wanted to marry me.”

Still, the thought of the words “I want to spend the rest of my life with you” had me shaking and crying and unable to speak. What a statement. What a beautiful, unselfish, loving, trusting statement.

So I nodded my head and accepted his proposal.

The ring looked incredibly obnoxious on the tiny fourth finger of my left hand. I would have to start getting manicures on a regular basis. “Why did the ring have to be so big?” I thought to myself. “I’ll have to drag my arm across the floor. I’ll look like the hunchback of Notre Dame with amazing jewelry. I could blind someone with this thing. I’m just going to tell him it’s too big.” This was what was going through my mind as we kissed madly. “You’re out of your mind!” I could hear generations of women in my family screaming. “We’ve never heard of such a thing. You’re upset that the diamond is too big? This should be a problem for you? How did you get into this family?”

“Do you like the ring?” he whispered, admiring it on my finger.

“It’s the most beautiful ring I’ve ever seen,” I cried.

“The thing looks like ten carats on you.” He laughed, taking my hand. “If I’d known it was going to look so big, I could have gotten you one carat and saved the money.”

hen you are newly engaged and gearing up to plan a wedding, start prenatal vitamins, have children, and start a new phase in your life, a full-time job—if you can swing it—is out of the question. It just takes up too much time. This was the reasoning that Pete and I had when I quit my job with Promo House.

“There’s just too much that has to be done,” Pete reasoned, “and your work is going to suffer for it.”

“I just feel like I’ll he wasting your time,” I told my boss. “Even as I’m telling you this, my mind is going back and forth between lemon- or cream-colored napkins for the wedding reception.”

The twenty-four-year-olds were ready to sit shivah for me.

“Will you just leave a pair of your shoes here?” Jesse cried. “Just so a part of you is with us.”

My co-thirtysomethings thought I was out of my mind.

“Getting ready for a wedding is no reason to give up your life,” Julian scolded. “You are going to hate shopping all day. What are you going to do when the wedding is over?”

“I’ll have babies and go to PTA meetings. This part of my life is over,” I scolded back. “I’ve worked my butt off, literally, for the last fifteen years. It’s time to do something else.”

“That’s the thing,” Paula said. “You won’t be doing anything else. Trust me; first you’ll plan your days, but slowly you’re going to find yourself watching HBO in the middle of the afternoon. Four o‘clock after Oprah is a killer; I know this from maternity leave,” she said, clutching her heart. “It’s the longest part of life you’ll ever experience when you have nothing to do. You’ll get to that four o’clock hour one day when it’s another four hours from dinner and there’s nothing else to do. Take my advice; pray for something good on HBO. That’s the best you can hope for.”