Love, Loss, and What We Ate Page 15

  When I had both an early-morning and a late-afternoon call, Nina would let me hang around the office instead of having to trek home only to trek back later. On those days I’d bring lunch in a little Igloo cooler and eat in the conference room. In an office full of lingerie ads and tape measures, I must have made for a strange sight hunched over a Tupperware filled with one of my college staples: Top Ramen stir-fried with curried flank steak. I’ve always felt like a truck driver trapped in the wrong body. Today, I eat straight from pans with my fingers. I overturn blenders, the dregs of sauces sliding slowly into my mouth. Home alone, I get in bed, perch a pizza box on my lap, and go at it, wiping my mouth on my sleeve.

  On the day a flamboyant Italian casting agent named Luigi came to the office, I had just polished off one of my favorite lunches at the time: approximately half a loaf of bread layered with tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella and doused with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I’d just sucked down my last bite, fingers still greasy, when Luigi and Nina walked into the conference room. They sat down with a stack of portfolios. Luigi, I overheard as they flipped through them, was a scout for an agency in Milan. I quietly packed my stuff and had gotten up to slink out when he looked at me and asked, “What about her?”

  I was no longer the girl who’d shown up ashy for a casting. I had confidence. I knew how to hold my body, and how to walk. My dark features would work in Italy, he thought. They certainly didn’t serve me well in the U.S. Commercial work was about selling products. And the logic was, you’d only buy the shampoo if you identified with the model lathering her hair in the shower. His agency would front the money to ship me to Milan and put me up in an apartment his agency kept for models. I’d pay them back from the work I did. Nina, to my surprise, said no. She said she wanted to save me for Paris. I had no idea if she really had this in mind for me or if it was some negotiating technique. Either way, I decided to go. I yearned to be somewhere where I felt beautiful and sophisticated, as I had in Madrid. And at the very least, the opportunity meant I could finally move out of my mom’s house in La Puente, the same old Carveresque working-class neighborhood I had lived in throughout high school and that I had tried so hard to escape. The things I had seen and sampled, not only from my time in Madrid but also from rubbing shoulders with the many international students at Clark University, had left me thirsty for a more cosmopolitan environment. And although Worcester, Massachusetts, had been no London, Paris, or even New York, I had still been at an academic institution devoted to learning, close enough to NYC that I could drive or get there by train on the weekends.

  Once I was discovered by Luigi in Nina Blanchard’s office, I didn’t look back. One thing I knew: I was not going to move back in with my mom, ever. I would do whatever I needed to, to make my own way to a life for myself. While in Spain, I saw for the first time a world much larger than my mother’s or Peter’s immigrant existence. My mother loved the theater and museums, but after moving to La Puente we rarely went to any. I can remember only once going to a musical that had traveled from Broadway to Los Angeles, called, ironically, Sophisticated Ladies, composed by Duke Ellington. From the time I arrived at JFK at age four until we left for California in the early eighties, my mom and I had gone to many Broadway shows, including I Remember Mama, The Wiz, Chicago, Evita, and Ain’t Misbehavin’. My mom would wait in line in the cold for discount tickets, somehow managing to find the pennies from her nurse’s salary to pay for all those lovely excursions.

  I wanted museums, plays, and, most of all, a place where there were lots of people from different backgrounds who would inspire me and from whom I could learn. I hoped I could make a living in Milan, but, more important, I hoped somehow that even if the modeling didn’t work out (which I had serious doubts it would, what with my scar and all) I would find a path that was right for me. I had gone to L.A. with little more than a BA in theater arts and a modeling portfolio, and after just a summer of pounding the pavement, it was pretty clear that opportunities for a girl like me were more elusive than they had been in Spain. I was eager to get back to Europe, where the notions of beauty and sex appeal were not as narrow.

  I arrived in Milan on October 6, 1992, just as its status as the center of the fashion world had nearly completed its descent. I’d be staying in the south of the city, far from the attractive center and well into the gray, sleepy industrial section. Luigi’s agency put me up in a building called La Darsena—Italian for “the dock”—appropriate, since it was the first port of call for new models in the city. It was like a low-rent version of the Barbizon Hotel, a repository for the thin and wayward. I had two roommates: a chirpy Brit who seemed more interested in men than in castings and a seasoned American model with a been-there-done-that attitude. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that if she were actually as experienced as she acted, she probably wouldn’t have been sharing a one-bedroom apartment with two other girls. They slept on two twin beds. As the new girl, I was stuck with the sleeper sofa in the living room. Good thing I stayed in Milan for only three weeks. Yet its unglamorous beginning didn’t extinguish the thrill of my new life. No longer was I a moonlighting student. I was living with other models, because I myself was a real model.

  Three days after I got there, Luigi and Chicco, his club promoter friend, told us to get ready, because we were all going out for dinner. I remember asking whether we would be going somewhere expensive. If so, I’d politely bow out. My English roommate laughed. “I’ve never seen a bill,” she said. Several cars pulled up in front of La Darsena, and a gaggle of girls filed out of the building, teetering on heels, and piled in. My roommates were there, along with a twenty-year-old from Australia, a nineteen-year-old from Germany, and a sixteen-year-old from Omaha, who I remember thinking should’ve been at home with her mom. At hardly twenty-two, I was the oldest of the bunch.

  Dinner was at a pizzeria. This I was excited about. I had never met a pizza-related food I didn’t like. English muffin pizzas, stromboli, cheese-filled calzones, those gloriously greasy New York slices I had for lunch, seventy-five cents and worth every penny. We sat down and instead of Sprite, my typical pizza partner, we drank Chianti, deep red and tannic, with more weight than the Ernest & Julio Gallo that my mom bought by the jug. Before we ordered, waiters arrived with bread, crusty and warm; little bowls of almost syrupy olive oil that tasted of grass; and shards of Parmesan, like uncut diamonds. Before that night, I had thought Parmesan was a salty powder that came in a green shaker with a yellow top. These shards were altogether different, studded with crunchy crystals and sweet with a funky dairy tang that overtook the back of my mouth like chaatpati.

  I attempted to order pizza with pepperoni, siren of many a lapsed vegetarian. Yet when my pizza arrived—a whole pizza, nearly as big as my dinner plate, just for me!—I found it covered with marinated peppers. This was my first lesson in Italian. Here, peperoni meant bell peppers. The lack of spicy meat wasn’t the only difference between the irregular circle in front of me and the massive triangles I’d scarfed down in the States. While I expected pizza sauce, pasty and dark, I was met with a glorious, warm, pulpy liquid the color of a summer tomato, which lightly coated the pie. Rather than a golden ocean of cheese on top of that, there were just milky-white tidal pools dotting its surface. And just as I was about to pick the whole thing up, I looked around to see my tablemates going at their pies with forks and knives. One bite and I knew: this was the Chanel of pizza. I had only ever known the Gap.

  Around midnight, after demolishing the pizza and draining too many wine bottles, we crammed into the cars again and pulled up in front of Chicco’s club, Madame Claude, named for the doyenne of the eponymous Paris brothel. Chicco led us as we strode in, a parade of thin, tall girls from all corners of the earth. We passed the waiting hordes, proud of our access and unaware that we were being sacrificed to the modelizers inside.

  We were led to velvet couches and, as if out of nowhere, our intoxicants arrived. We danced with one another, careful to avoid eye con
tact as the vultures began to circle. But as the night wore on and the drinks kept coming—I’d had plenty of Chianti; I definitely did not need whiskey and Cokes—I turned into a vulture myself.

  I spotted Luigi at a table chatting with two men and went over to say hi. I’m still not sure what came over me, but I turned to one of Luigi’s friends, pulled his folded-up tie from his pocket, and wrapped it around my neck like a scarf. My impishness was innocent. At twenty-two years old, I had no designs on this man, unremarkable but for his resemblance to Michael Douglas (circa Fatal Attraction), mixed in with a bit of Al Pacino—but in Dog Day Afternoon, not The Godfather: Part II—and with about the same build. We danced all night and I reveled in the excitement of being in a new country, with a new, unknown life about to unfold. This was the first man in Milan who courted me, just three days after I arrived from the U.S., and he did it with charm and what I decided was the utmost panache. We met on a Thursday night and he asked if he could give me a tour of the city and show me around that Saturday. He showed up at the agreed time and when I got in the car he had everything planned for the whole day. I had assumed we would just drive around and have lunch and that would be it. We walked in the center of town and he took me to see the Duomo. Then we went to the artists’ district of Brera to the Pinacoteca, to see works by Caravaggio, Raphael, and Rubens, but also to his favorite gelato place on Via Solferino. He took me to see designer boutiques I had only read about in Vogue, and then to a fast casual sandwich shop called Panino Giusto. He savored highbrow treats and lowbrow treats with equal gusto and filled our day with a mix of both.

  My Italian beau, Daniele, and I would spend much of the next six years together. In Daniele, I saw so much of what I sought to be myself: he was worldly, sophisticated, and knowledgeable about art and culture. From the first, he had a huge effect both on my quality of life in Europe and on how I saw myself. I had arrived in October with one large suitcase of clothes and two thousand dollars, and that was it. By December, with the weather growing cold and my funds dwindling, he could see that I needed a bit of sprucing up. Daniele very sweetly bought me a cashmere coat with a fur collar trim, one that I sorely needed. I had left my puffy jacket and my wool coat back in the States. In fact, in those first days after college I still didn’t even know the difference between a jacket and a coat. Daniele had lived in New York and spoke English well, so he corrected me. A coat, he said, went at least to the knees, whereas a jacket was only sport-coat length, hitting at the thigh, or even higher, around the hips, like a baseball or leather bomber jacket. That was where Daniele’s tutoring started, but there was way more he would school me in over the years. I spent most of my twenties in Italy, much of that time with Daniele. I had never experienced a life like Daniele’s. His family had very deep roots in the textile-making community of Como, in northern Italy. He had had a very privileged upbringing and while he was a bit of an overgrown, spoiled rich kid, he did also work very hard. He partied the same way.

  In the world of fashion, much of the 1990s was a period of excess and debauchery for many of its inhabitants. And when you spend your time being judged for your body and nothing else, you sometimes need to leave it. Or abuse it. I began to dip my toe into a world I could not have afforded or even fathomed just a short time earlier. My healthy fear of hurting my mother or my relatives in India kept me from ever developing a serious drug habit, but I was not immune to testing the limits. I felt uninhibited, free to experiment and do things I normally wouldn’t do. I wanted to please Daniele as well. But only I am responsible for my actions, not anyone else, and there are certain nights I’d rather forget.

  I was eager to be an adult. I was not very experienced sexually, and when I wasn’t sober, I felt free to do things I wouldn’t normally do. It was the first time I had acted out my curiosities and fantasies. Some I regret, but not all, like knowing what it’s like to touch and be touched by a woman. Not since I kissed two boys in one afternoon during a seventh-grade field trip to an amusement park had I been that promiscuous.

  But these bacchanalian evenings happened only once a month or so. Daniele’s appeal lay more in how much he made me laugh. He had a fantastic sense of humor and a playful childlike streak. He was very creative and a good singer who played the harmonica like a pro and loved to dance. He dressed sharply but in the understated Milanese uniform of jeans, blazer, crisp monogrammed shirt, and a simple Rolex. To be honest, a lot of this was lost on me at first. I didn’t even understand how much Rolexes cost. In fact, I wouldn’t have even been able to tell a Rolex from a Casio until he once pronounced that every well-dressed young woman should have a good watch, like a Rolex. He very sweetly gave me one on our first Valentine’s Day together. All I remember thinking was that this small piece of stainless steel and glass had cost more than my mother made after taxes in a whole month as a nurse. I was terrified I was going to break it. And at first I wore it only when I was around him.

  Admittedly, it did not take long for me to get more and more comfortable with this new flashy life, in which I traveled back and forth from Milan to Paris for the weekend (I moved to Paris two winters in a row to build my book) and down to Sardinia in the summer, where Daniele’s folks had a house in Porto Cervo. But it wasn’t just how to dress or the lifestyle or that Daniele taught me which fork to use (which he did!). It was also the many excursions he took me on to Florence, to Venice, to Rome. Daniele definitely was a hedonist, but he also had a serious, bookish side. He was a voracious reader and understood so much about European art and history. It was a joy to hop around Europe and experience all these things firsthand. I was totally wide-eyed and savored every minute of all the schooling I was getting. I worked only a few days a week, and often took a trip or two a month, getting an education that four years at Clark never gave me.

  I was coming from a pretty humble existence, and while college did expose me to the way others lived, I had been a financial aid student who was right back in her mom’s house after graduation. For me, modeling was really a chance at sophistication, at becoming cultured and getting to see the world in a way I would never get to otherwise. Daniele’s choosing to be with me also seemed a badge of sorts. He had lots of choices and he had even invested in a modeling agency (not mine, though—I had the good sense to keep my autonomy there). But he wanted to be with me. Being rejected early on at all those modeling castings was tough. Daniele was the perfect salve. In a way, Daniele gave me the courage to feel like I even belonged at those castings, scar and all. In less than six months, I had gone from living with my parents after college and wondering how I was going to pay off all my student loans to going to La Scala, shopping at Kenzo, and eating at Bice. My head was spinning.

  My years in Europe shaped me as a woman. I don’t really think any of us are women right when we turn eighteen, or even twenty-one for that matter. You have to live a little. I certainly tried to do that. It was amazing just to walk the streets in those cities. There is so much history in the buildings alone. In Paris, I studied how French women dressed, so casual yet put together and nonchalantly sexy, so individual and idiosyncratic somehow, even if they all shopped at the same stores. I studied the way Italian women walked, so feminine and playful, to some indecipherable beat that gave them both poise and sex appeal at once. I was fascinated by the culture all around me.

  And I explored those two cities through my fork as well. In Milan, the brioche and other pastry in the mornings, always with cappuccino, suddenly made me a sweet-eater. The pastas and meat dishes you could get at trattorias for a modest sum were simple in their preparation but deliciously complex in the mouth. I learned the regional differences between north and south and savored all the glorious seafood of Liguria. I never ate any fish until I got to Italy. Fish was the last frontier for my newfound carnivorousness to conquer. The first couple of years in Milan and Paris were surreal. I was in my early twenties, far from home in a new and exciting atmosphere with the freedom to really look at who I was and who I wanted to be. I h
ad grown up in a pretty conservative environment in my mother’s home. My stepdad wouldn’t even let a boy talk to me on our front lawn in broad daylight. I was not a rebellious teenager in high school and was too worried about how much college was costing us to even risk jeopardizing my place thereafter. In Europe I was alone, without my parents or family, so I made my own decisions, and for the first time in my whole life money was not a constant issue. I wasn’t making that much in that first year or two as a model, but compared with what my parents and I had to live on, I barely needed to work a couple of days to meet my month’s expenses. It was an unbelievable turn of events in the history of my short life.

  chapter 7

  I joined a new agency that sent me to Paris to build my book after just one month of being in Milan. The apartment I lived in, on Rue du Chemin Vert in the Bastille neighborhood, was no better than the one I’d left behind in Milan. I shared two rooms with four other girls, all models, all wretched, in debt to our agency for rent and the pittance they advanced us for living expenses, and on a seemingly impossible hustle for work to pay it off. I went on endless castings and “go-sees” (where you’d go to see an editor or photographer in the hope that they’d take a shine to you), clutching my modeling book as I waited in line with two hundred other girls, only to have the kingmaker in question flip through my book without so much as looking me in the eye. I’d race from one go-see and casting to the next. At my low level, sometimes you’d get a job because you were the first hireable girl to arrive.

  But at least I was in Paris. At least after I left castings dejected I could walk through the Place Vendôme or Jardin des Tuileries, admiring the city even if I didn’t feel a part of it. The endless castings forced me to experience Paris by Metro and by foot, to wend my way through immigrant neighborhoods, past slivers of restaurants selling goat curry, down alleys packed with Chinese shops selling tea, ginger, and fresh cilantro, even in February. I’d scurry by butcher shops, averting my eyes and wishing I could unsee the skinned rabbits and lambs hanging in the windows, eyes still in their sockets, or the pigs’ heads, each wearing a strange smirk. I had only just started eating meat a few years prior, and, as far as I was concerned then, it should only come nestled in Styrofoam trays and wrapped in plastic.