The Weight-Loss Performance Artist
David Kranes
Ginger’s 27 and has almost perfected invisibility. She weighs 340 pounds, is 5 feet 5 inches and is in the Crossroads Mall, coming from the Food Court , when two men, Clay and Waldo, ask to talk. She wonders how they’ve seen her. Of course, she’s spotted them with their fancy video cameras more than 100 feet away.
“Hey!” each says, extending a card. Clay! Waldo! And then: “Have you ever been chosen for something really important?”
At first, Ginger is hesitant. Because—isn’t she, at least, transparent? It would seem not, because others have begun to stop nearby. She can feel their eyes; she can feel the presences of them float and mill. And, as well, she can feel an emanation, a force that approaches heat, from the cameras. She doesn’t like the moment. She feels herself, in part, a side-show Fat Lady—a celebrity-freak. She can pick out a kind of insect-buzz of low words and laughter. It’s the sort of discomfort that had launched her invisibility imaging nearly three years ago.
What’s particularly strange is: Waldo and Clay seem genuinely happy to see her. Chances are, it’s their equipment, but somehow Ginger begins to feel almost-special with them.
The two men introduce their gear—its capability, its sophistication. The words they use make her feel like she’s watching “NOVA.” Pixel is their favorite. One says, then the other repeats: Pixel Projection and Pixel Predictability. Their voices shuttle like gamecocks or perhaps two lounge-show comedians. The shorter partner, Waldo, keeps connecting the word chosen to her. The taller and more red-faced partner, Clay, keeps promising that, “in just a minute—we’re going to show you some amazing pictures we just took.”
The word, pictures, frightens Ginger. Her mind swipes at it, like a mosquito, but, like a mosquito, it comes back. She tries ridicule: Pictures, she thinks. Of what?Of thin air?! But with the two men, Waldo and Clay, clattering on, neither her swipes nor ridicule work.
“And—!” each time Waldo inserts.
“And—! Right! And—! We’re going to offer you a lot of money.”
“A lot! Because—!”
What their technology enables, they explain, hooking up the word image in three different ways, is: ... Image-assessment! Image-enhancement! and Image-predictability!—all according to supplemental information fed into the camera.
“For example, age,” Waldo says.
“Or height,” Clay almost instantly appends.
“For instance—!”
“Whoa! You are going to love this!”
“—We can take a 12-year-old boy—say one with a growth spurt and who’s shown basketball talent—and the camera will tell us—”
“Forecast!”
“—with a 97 percent certainty—”
“—what he’ll look like... at, for instance—”
“—pick a number!—let’s say 23.”
“Make it younger.”
“20.”
“So that a basketball coach at, say—”
“Duke.”
“—Duke! Perfect! Coach K! ... will know whether the kid is potentially someone to keep an eye on.”
Today’s pixels are tomorrow’s reality, they explain. Then they produce her own pictures.
And Ginger begins to first sweat, then shake.
The first image reminds Ginger why she never looks in a mirror. It’s huge, swollen, freakish, humiliating. She feels the encircling crowd the way she sometimes feels heat-exhaustion.
“Think of this as Before,” Clay announces.
“The point is: We have to start somewhere,” Waldo says.
And though the next image, in its way, is again hard for Ginger to confront, it’s better—less misshapen, less obese.
“This is you 20 pounds lighter,” Waldo says.
In each successive shot, Ginger recognizes herself, feels herself to become more tangible, because—like the difference from first to second—each image sheds at least 20 pounds. In the sixth photo-image, Ginger sees herself at fewer than 200 pounds, and, in the eighth, at only 152. At 112, in the 10th image, there is no question: Ginger is both clear and palpable, well-shaped and beautiful.
Someone in the crowd around her prompts a wave of applause, a cascade of claps that travels from the polite to the appreciative.
“Previews of your life-to-come,” Waldo says.
Clay shifts to five-pound-loss-increment shots. At 105—dressed in the clothes she’s dressed in now, sized by the technology, of course, smaller—Ginger looks, she thinks, like a movie star. “Oh my Heavens!” she says. And then tries to say the next thing in the heated rush of words inside her but can’t.
Clay and Waldo pitch their offer. What they propose is that she become a spokesperson for their new and powerful diet product. They keep coupling the words You and Perfect and keep using her first name.
If she’ll agree, they say, to sign all the necessary papers, she’ll be given $4,000 for every pound she loses using their product. They tell her their company’s name is PoundSolve.
“Pounds Dissolve!” Waldo helps her.
“Sounds like Pine Sol,” Ginger says.
Waldo says, “Cute.”
Clay says, “Clever.” Then he inserts, “Only a few conditions.”
Waldo goes on. “Ginger,” he begins. He tells her payment will commence at the 100-pound-loss mark.
“That’s the bad news,” Clay smiles.
“Hardly bad news though, because—”
“—doing the math—”
Waldo leans in, whispers. “Your first check’s going to be cut for about a half-million dollars,” he says.
Even invisible, even as a ghost-only, Ginger needs a chair, a wall, at least, to lean against.
“Can you wait a month or two?”
Ginger notices the crowd; it seems gathered, in ways, because of her. She’s failed; she’s been seen! She thinks: How large their eyes are! How many mouths are open! There are perhaps 70 now.
They’re sure, Waldo and Clay say, that she can understand why their company’s reluctant to pay, say, $80,000 for the loss of a mere 20 pounds. No! What their company is after is an agreement highly beneficial to both the poster/spokes-person and itself. None of this will interfere, Clay says, with her regular day job—that is, if she has one.
Does she?Nevermind; it’s not important. Will she be willing?
Ginger scrambles. Her mind races. She asks what she hopes isn’t a stupid question: “Should I get a lawyer?”
At first, Waldo and Clay are silent. Then—
“Hey—a lawyer would be fine,” Waldo says, “if you think you need one. Sure. Why not?! Go for it!”
“Go for it!” Clay repeats.
And then Waldo offers getting a lawyer for her at their company’s expense. And though she works as a legal assistant in a large law firm—compounded by a grab-bag of embarrassment, elation and disbelief—she accepts.
“We don’t want you to rush into this,” Clay confides.
“Listen: I tell you what,” Waldo suggests. “Why don’t we draw up some paperwork then you can look at what-we’ve-drawn-up and decide.”
“How’s that?” Clay asks. “In fact—! Trying to anticipate things—!”
The two produce a document. It runs two and a half pages—big print.
“This doesn’t look particularly complicated,” Ginger says, perusing. “It’s pretty much what you said.”
“Ginger—Hey: It’s your call,” Waldo says.
Ginger signs, loses 22 pounds the first week, feels at least her hair’s returned (possibly her smile too) and gets a nonnegotiable check for $88,000. The sight of the check, holding it in her hand, takes her breath away. “Put it in a safe place,” Clay advises.
PoundSolve’s offices—where Ginger goes to pick up her checks and be photographed—are in a strip mall south and west of the city’s downtown. Waldo calls them suites—three interconnected and heavily carpeted rooms. “Welcome to company headquarters,” Clay says, the first time Ginger visits. There’s not a lot of furniture, but it’s nice. And there are pictures of movie stars on the walls—mostly Elizabeth Taylor and Kathy Bates and Oprah Winfrey, together with framed articles about them from the tabloids. “It’s our People-of-Fame wall,” Waldo remarks. “We just love people who are very visible.”
The PoundSolve plan involves the following steps. Mix the morning PoundSolve powder with enough water to give it oatmeal consistency; heat it up; add raisins; eat it with 1 percent milk. Mix the lunchtime PoundSolve powder with enough water so that it can be formed into a large patty; fry the patty with no oil in a non-stick pan; eat it in a half slice of pita bread with chopped onions and mustard. Mix the dinner PoundSolve powder with only enough unsweetened apple-juice to shape it around the synthetic turkey bone; cook the turkey bone in the microwave for three minutes (or until chewy); eat it with the PoundSolve mashed-potatoes-and-gravy mix and one packet of the dried cranberries. In addition, drink 12 full eight-ounce glasses of water every day. Four times a day, with water, take one package of the PoundSolve supplemental vitamins.
“I was never hungry,” Ginger tells the two men at the end of the first week.
“And that’s the magic!” Waldo says.
“But how could that be?” Ginger asks. “Eating only—”
“That’s the secret,” Clay says.
The second week, Ginger loses only seven pounds and feels discouraged. But when she arrives at PoundSolve’s corporate headquarters and both Clay and Waldo keep delightedly saying, “Look at you,” she feels much better. In the photography stint, they keep repeating Amazing! And of course the non-negotiable check for $28,000 lifts her spirits and makes her feel visible as well.
“I’m never hungry,” Ginger says with amazement.
“Bless you, my child,” Waldo says. And he places his right hand on the top of her head, and they all laugh.
At her legal assistant job in the sprawling downtown law firm, Ginger has almost electric surges of new energy. “More work—more work,” she keeps pleading and notices various eyebrows rising. When they give her the work and she does it, they compliment her on its quality and accuracy. “Are you losing weight?” a couple of the junior partners ask. Good-Lord, Good-Lord: They noticed. She feels fabulous!
In the third week, she loses 12 pounds; in the fourth, 14. Now Ginger has four non-negotiable checks from PoundSolve totaling $220,000—enough to, outright, buy a house. And, even better, she’s more than half-way to having the checks be negotiable; she’s lost 55 pounds. She buys some cherry-red lingerie at Lane Bryant and fantasizes making a sex video.
When she picks up her fourth check and poses, Clay and Waldo announce, “Ginger: We’re ready!”—by which they mean that, in the next week, ads will appear nationally carrying her first four weeks of pictures and her story. These ads will appear in selected newspapers and magazines. Ginger likes the word selected. Still, the idea of a tangible, filled-in image of herself seen by ... What? Who? Thousands? Millions? ... terrifies her.
And then, smack in the middle of the next week and true to PoundSolve’s resolve, the ads appear. Color! Full-page! Ginger opens a Women’s World, and oh my god there she is! Is! Is! Not not-is, not is not! And—Lord Lord Lord!—however they’ve done it, the fourth-week picture makes her look even thinner than she is. When she goes to work the next morning, Thursday, Ginger waits for somebody at the firm to say something. Then, when nobody does and, instead, asks her to take on yet-another-task, she flips, shaking, through all the side-table, waiting-room magazines, but none carry her image. Not Time, not Newsweek, not Fortune, not Barron’s, not The Wall Street Journal, not even GQ or Esquire. So Ginger makes a note to herself to ask Clay and Waldo next time: Just what is the selective national magazine list?
But—on the street—people do recognize Ginger; people recognize her moving through the aisles of Smith’s Food King. It’s her! ... It’s her! she hears. Strangers ask how she feels. They ask whether she feels hungry all the time and what she plans to do with her new body and with all her money. Especially thin women, though, speed their carts up past her. They seem angry. Ginger senses their anger. And then, two or three days after the ads have first appeared, one of the very, very thin women stops—her face purply-red—and confronts her. “No one’s paying me any money!” she spits. “And I’ve looked like a knockout forever!”
By the middle of the sixth week, Ginger is office news—first, with the stenos and go-fers, but very quickly, with the junior partners and partners. She overhears the word celebrity! again and again—usually with admiration; once, though, with laughter. Then a junior partner named Keith Chapetto, calls her into his office. “So!” he says—and grins.
Ginger briefly feels at-the-least translucent again, framed in Keith Chapetto’s door, though she can’t construct what feels to be an appropriate response to So!
“So the news is out,” he grins.
Ginger reaches for substance, for language.
“So—what’ve you lost so far?” Keith asks.
She says: 87 pounds.
He does the quick math on a yellow pad, blows air out in a half-whistle. “Whoa! More than my salary,” he says.
“But not for a lifetime,” Ginger counters.
“ But not for a lifetime : That’s true; good point. Nevertheless—!” He asks what her plans are for the money.
“Find a cure for cancer,” Ginger says.
When he asks—then presses about—whether she’s represented, Ginger excuses herself.
“So what’s most different for you these days?!” Keith Chapetto calls out after her.
What’s most different? What’s most different? Actually it’s a good question. Pinned to the wall, she would name three things. She would say: energy, will-power and tangibility. Number one, though, clearly is energy. Energy bursts inside her, daily, like firework-grand-finales. Instead of hunger pangs, she’s has energy bursts—bigger and bigger and even then again more fabulous ideas about what her life might become, move on to. All the books she can write! The television series she can star in! The unsolved mysteries of science she can contribute to! The art-gallery openings where people come and drink wine and eat tiny sandwiches and walk the space studying 40 different variations on a theme that’s Ginger.
She crosses the century mark of weight-loss. Her non-negotiable checks totaling $440,000—are given signatures by a man named Brian ... Ginger can’t make out the signature last name; the word it looks like is Marsupial. She’s learned a thing or two as a legal assistant and she puts all but $40,000 in various interest-bearing instruments. She likes using the word instruments in conversation.
Everywhere she goes, she’s recognized. She even starts to recognize herself and begins to feel herself on a bullet train—moving, at high speeds, from almost-invisible to watercolor, then on to an amplified-hologram, then painting-by-Rubens, Rodin sculpture, guest on “Oprah.” “How’s it going?” people on the street say to her; “How’re you feeling?” She’s a celebrity.
A question slips in and becomes inflamed to raw curiosity. “I’m just curious,” she says to Clay and Waldo at their next shoot: “—What’s in this?” And she shakes a quart-sized PoundSolve container.
“Mostly nucleic proteins,” Clay offers.
“With methyl-salicylate freeze-dried enzymes,” Waldo adds.
“Everything is either organically grown or organically extracted,” Clay finishes.
Another question the strangers ask her: “Are you doing this under a doctor’s supervision?” It’s a question that gathers increasing sense in its repeated asking, so she passes it on to her two benefactors.
Clay shrugs. He glances at Waldo. Waldo shrugs. What’s to be said?
“We have a company HMO,” Waldo offers. “We could set something up. Check-up. Whatever. Be proactive. Run some lab stuff. Blood sugar. Thyroid. We could check your serotonin levels, put you on a treadmill and run a battery of stress stuff.”
“Company expense.”
Ginger says, the truth is: She can’t remember feeling better.
“Hey—! If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Waldo jokes.
It’s as though she’s gone through a looking glass, Ginger thinks. In certain ways. She’s never been here—never, in this particular world. Always, in her memory, she’s been overweight. Obese. Fat. There’s a picture of her on her second birthday labeled 87 lbs. In fact, she’s never allowed herself to use the words obese or fat to herself before, even in the deepest, saddest recesses of her mind.
So it’s all discovery. She buys mirrors. She looks in them. She catches images of herself in glass storefronts, thrown back from the waxed fenders of cars. Good Lord, oh Lord!I’m beautiful! She’s lost 147 pounds. She weighs 165. She’s been paid $588,000. None of the supermarkets or CVS drugstores can keep PoundSolve on the shelf. “You’re a miracle!” both Clay and Waldo tell her almost daily.
Miracle , maybe, is the word, she thinks. It so stuns her that she’s a person who’s become apparent in the world—substantial, real, sometimes a hushed center of attraction. Again: She has never ever been here! In this world where a man named Tom Cruise is the March Hare! Where people who are named Paris Hilton and Kevin Bacon are the Walrus and the Carpenter!
As far back as Ginger can remember, she has lived only where bloatedness and unsatisfiable hunger lurk and shadow. In high school, the vocabulary words haunting her were balloon ... distend ... engorge. The walls of any space always seemed too near. And if there had been any sexual awakenings, they’d scurried for hollows and cracks and had submerged so as to not be recognized, lived hidden away like insects trapped under her skin, groundhogs burrowed deep inside her belly. So now, in a size 16 dress, everything is as powerful as a centerfold and as new!
Each day brims with initiation. Her picture is everywhere; all the wire-services carry her story. Ginger’s not simply copy; she’s news—thin, thinner, thinnest—and, each day, more and more beautiful and almost adolescently ripe. All the early-morning TV and radio talk shows want her! Clay and Waldo give her lists of appropriate and inappropriate topics when she’s interviewed, acceptable and unacceptable answers. She memorizes them. She’s bright. It’s easy.
But it’s the ordinary people who make her the most heady, the women particularly. You must be so incredibly strong! What is it now? Over 190 pounds? How are you ever going to spend all that money? Still, once in a while, one is mean. “Have you any idea how hard you’re making it for the rest of us?”
When she hits the low 130s, three of the firm’s lawyers start currying her favor. The first, named Jacob, always takes her to restaurants he calls bistros, where he orders grilled snapper, drinks merlot and talks about only two things: the stock market and professional football.
The second, Carl, always chooses Asian. He loves sushi; he adores Singapore noodles, pad thai, pho. Carl both scares and excites Ginger. He quizzes her about sexual fantasies, and she confesses that—truth told—she’s never thought she’d have sex. “But now, anything’s possible—right?” Carl asks, holding a round of sui mei on a fork, raising his eyebrows.
The third lawyer’s name is Charles, and Charles is a fish maniac—a man obsessed with raw bars, places where he can peel shrimp and suck oysters. If he can get an ahi or mahi steak lightly seared, he’s in heaven. Charles calls Ginger Minnow and is the first man to ever bed her, and she is made dizzy and breathless, tearful and confused. She’s lost more than 170 pounds, and sexual sporting makes her light-headed and unsteady. She thinks: Shouldn’t I be as much a part of this as he is? Shouldn’t he be saying things like, “I love you”? Instead, he just makes a lot of the same hunger-sounds he makes when they’re together at the raw bar.
Alone in her new four-bedroom, gated-development house, after an evening with Charles, Ginger stops at her full-length mirror and finds herself younger than she’s ever thought of herself to be. She thinks: I’ve just been born! understanding the thought to be silly—giddy, girlish.
She rents several porn videos. She finds they arouse her and imagines herself starring in such a video where the woman—at the beginning of an hour of marathon sex—weighs more than 300 pounds and at the end weighs only 110. She could write that film. She could star in it. She would call the film Ginger Does Ginger! At 138, with nearly $700,000 banked, Ginger feels she can do anything. Say, I don’t want to see you to Charles. Say to the wannabe eager personal-manager-woman from New York , Please don’t call any more. Or—to the others, calling to cash in: Thank you but no; I’m going to do it myself.
She slips the last porno into its sleeve, takes a second shower, touches herself, feels pleasure, washes her hair with almost brutal vigor, slips into a new terrycloth robe, descends the stairs to her kitchen, opens her fridge, stares in, smiles, closes it, climbs the carpeted stairs and goes to bed.
Sometimes, in her dreams, Ginger remains fat. Often the fat, sad Ginger asks, Why won’t you be my friend?—her crying so crushing the new Ginger’s breath that she wakes—twisting, gasping. One such morning—not fully understanding why—she inserts the current week’s all-network ad videotape. In it, she weighs 122. She’s wearing a dark shade of lip-gloss and eye-liner. Her hair’s been styled and curls in at her neck. Her wardrobe is Donna Karan—black with, here and there, red accessorizing. On the audio, she says, “I’ve lost 180 pounds—and feel great!” And then she runs her manicured nails up her bare arm and says, “Can you imagine what it feels like to—for the first time—realize you have skin? And that your skin’s alive?”
At their next meeting, Ginger asks Waldo and Clay, point blank, “When’s it over?”
Clay and Waldo stare. It’s as though she were the empty space on a rug from which a very expensive entertainment system has just been stolen.
“When do I stop?” she asks.
For an unnatural time, the room’s only dialogue comes from the duct system and the wiring. A fluorescent buzzes overhead. A conditioning flange rattles. A grate whirs. A halogen bulb sounds anxious.
“I’m having trouble imagining myself thinner,” Ginger says. “Yesterday—” Ginger tries to explain. “Yesterday—I had this feeling that—I don’t know—that I’d been walking along a long road, walking to meet myself. And ... had arrived. Does that make any—?”
“Jesus! Great line,” Clay says.
“Write it down,” Waldo says.
There are messages on Ginger’s phone from Jacob, Carl and Charles. Is she freefor dinner? Other messages offer her product tie-ins, personal management and media coverage. When they started, Ginger diligently returned all the calls, people and new people and newer people—all seeming as delicious and possible as a kind of family. Now, she returns none. In only 14 months, Ginger’s world filled up—with everybody!—then emptied.
The last message is from Waldo. Is she free tonight? Maybe dinner. Everything would be unofficial, he says. Just dinner, just them, no obligations, no ties. No connection to product. No rules. Call him. He’s serious.
Waldo , Ginger thinks. Waldo. Dinner. No rules. What’s he talking about? What’s he mean?
She calls. They agree. The restaurant Waldo names, Frisee, specializes in exotic salads, salads with goat cheese, chanterelle mushrooms and vodka vinegars. When she arrives Waldo is pacing by an aquarium. “Thank God! I thought you wouldn’t come,” he says.
“Why?”
They sit and order. Ginger thinks Waldo seems different—without Clay—and says so.
“Well, hey, we’re not the same person—you know,” Waldo says. He takes a deep breath—one of many since Ginger’s arrived and possibly before. “You’ve become very beautiful,” he says, then adds: “I’m separated.”
They go out for three nights in a row, kiss awkwardly once. Waldo has the mouth of a terrier, Ginger thinks.
Clay —in any of their work-related encounters—becomes edgy, silent, more watchful. At the next weighing and photographing, Clay steps in front of Waldo to walk Ginger to the elevator. “Something’s going on,” he observes.
Ginger studies his ears, his hair.
“ Don’t say I-don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about or Nothing. Because I can sense—I have the ability to sense, you know, which I try not to abuse, but…” Clay’s eyes become mean and sad. His pupils are the pupils of a snake in the oculus of a hound dog. “Okay: I’m not going to be coy; I’m not going to freak around. Why him not me?” Clay asks.
Ginger imagines then quickly rejects Clay as her sweating partner in the pornographic weight-loss movie.
Waldo calls early that evening and asks: What did Clay want? Why had he walked her to the elevator? But then he doesn’t wait for her response. “He’s a prick, you know!” he says then immediately asks if he can come over.
Ginger invents a mother, a doting mother in Daytona Beach . It’s her first lie since she started weight loss. “I would take better care of you than Clay,” Waldo says before hanging up.
Ginger stands with her hand around the phone-shaft—as if it w ere a dog-bone or a penis. Her eyelids drop, like rolling metal warehouse doors. If there were liquor in her house, she thinks, she’d drink it. Like a movie alcoholic—gulp after desperate gulp—until she slid to the floor and passed out. But she hasn’t stashed any—only Almond Joys and bags of Lay’s potato chips. She drops onto her couch, shuts her eyes, tries to re-imagine the weight-loss video pornography she’d imagined before—herself center stage and the object of inexhaustible hunger and lust. Strange lit-and-shadowed protean images start to generate and move. Someone has his mouth on her breasts—she can almost smell the saliva. Then someone else has a gun in his hand. She’s on an animal-skin rug. And—? Is she laughing or crying? Ginger reaches for and hugs a small pillow. Then she opens her eyes, rises and goes to the kitchen sink, runs cold water, which she lifts continually to her face.
Ginger buys a three-way mirror, thinking that—after it’s installed and because she’s now visible—when she stands in front of it she will have choices, a mix-and-match trio of Gingers. Instead, what the glass alcove does is relentless. It says Ginger/Ginger/Ginger back and then back again to her and is unequivocal. What she sees is a still-young and beautiful woman—yes—yet undeniable shadows fly out in flocks from what-must-be-caves in her skin—like bats or purple martins—shadows all the colors of bruises. And there’s the dim smell as well—of faint infection or overripe nectarines. Yes: She owns her life now, certainly; some kind of spell’s been broken; still this is a world which aches—self-possession aside—and she’s a part of it.
I need to do something , Ginger thinks . Install a sauna. Something. Change banks. A sudden idea strikes her. She wants some kind of release ... climax ... exorcism. Seeing the birdlike shadows dispersing from the shadows of her at the three-way mirror multiplies something—a question, a hope, a need.
She goes to her closet, opens it. She can see the Escada jacket, the Liberty scarf, the pistachio-colored knit of the St. John’s dress, the Tiffany pearls. With one hand on the Wolford pantyhose, the other on the Ferragamo shoes, she begins to laugh. So many clothes have been given to her. So she mismatches herself—on purpose, subversively—and goes out to dinner—choosing a restaurant with the first name of its owner, Warren ’s— wondering whether the specialty dish there might not be rabbit.
Though she’s not a whiskey drinker, Ginger starts with an old-fashioned.
“Maker’s Mark or Jacob’s Creek?” the waiter asks.
Ginger opts for the Jacob’s Creek. She likes the sound the two words make. The drink arrives, and its first sip feels hot and meaty in her mouth, then throat then belly then beyond belly—deep inside. Something about herself-in-the-world has become delicious. The word cannibal appears then glides like a snake through her brain. She becomes sexually lubricated, becomes aware that others in the restaurant have identified her.
“How’s the Jacob’s Creek?” the waiter stops by and asks.
“Exquisite,” Ginger says, then smiles—because it’s the first time in her life she’s used the word. “It tastes like a man’s teeth.”
Something snaps in her brain, like a bird’s wing.
The waiter lowers his head and angles away. Soon he’s back, though, asking if she’s ready. She says, no; no, she needs to read the menu; give her a minute. Then, with barely a syllable’s pause, she says: Actually—on second thought, no; don’t give her a minute; she’s decided; she’ll have one of each of the appetizers, one of each of the entrées; no desserts.
The waiter hovers, seems like kelp caught in an eddy or maybe a lodgepole pine in a windstorm. “It would seem I have misheard you,” he finally says.
Ginger makes her order unequivocal. “Just spread them out over the table—bring them in any sequence; it doesn’t matter.”
“But—!” The waiter—doing some quick math—estimates a bill of almost $3,000.
“I can afford it,” Ginger says. She extends the menu.
She orders seven of the most expensive bottles from the wine list as well.
Now she has a staff of at least four devoted to her. The plates begin to arrive. There’s the goat cheese with snow peas and balsamic. There’s the scallop and fruit salsa. There’s the sashimi and blood orange. There’s the fettuccine alla dolce. There’s the bison and aromatic herbs in a reduction sauce. Ginger savors the word reduction.
She takes one small bite from each offering, keeps it in her mouth like a long and deep kiss. With each—and with each taste of wine—she registers an appreciation or disinterest. Pretty soon, Warren himself is standing by her table. And others dining there—when Ginger smiles—are asking, “What was that wine she just tasted?” “What did she just sample?”
When she goes home, she pleasures herself with a device that’s been sent to her for an endorsement and sleeps in a way she’s never slept before. In the morning, the flowering plum trees in her yard stand out against the blue aquatic western sky with the high definition of an LED video screen. Ginger showers and over a cup of espresso, reads about her night at Warren ’s in the morning paper. Someone took a picture, and there she is! Lovely! Unmistakable! More visible than either hunger or poverty. More visible than Madonna or the Vice President of the United States could ever be.
Within hours, men with names like Emeril and Wolfgang and Todd and Daniel are extending invitations to her—echoing each other and saying Please! and Carte blanche! Carte blanche! So she signs agreements and begins her life—leaving Waldo and Clay and the generous interests at PoundSolve, gratefully, but necessarily, behind.
She signs agreements with men named Andre and Eric and Joel, makes appearances in their restaurants in New York, Miami, San Francisco and Las Vegas, where she sits in the center of incredible décor and only samples, doesn’t eat: Sometimes she takes a duck confit or chambord reduction sauce between her fingers and sets just a dab of what she’s squeezed at the top of her throat or behind her ears.
And it’s glorious. It’s the life she’s only imagined—and it’s hers!