The Profoundly Mundane Life of a Former Glamour Girl, or How I Came to Love My Groovy Old Cronedom

[catelin]

I had the chance to pose for a men's magazine when I was about 20. No shit. It was back when my tits were still firm and I had an ass that would stop traffic. Some guy who looked like Rod Stewart on crack lit my Camel, gave me a business card and started spewing what sounded like the sweaty, desperate ranting of a novice bullshit artist aching for some coos. Turned out to be legit, though. I was interested not so much because I would have ever done it, but because I was bored and it did give me some sick sense of validation to know that "I" had been chosen. I enjoyed all the tittering gossip that the encounter generated amongst even the most blase of my friends. I was beautiful back then. I was also shallow, lazy, and frightened of being alone. I did change, of course, over the years. I accumulated lovers and friends, traveled, created, destroyed, rebuilt. I went to grad school, to law school, and the school of hard knocks. I spent most of my twenties in Hollywood--first, with a rich, uptight, closet homosexual who paid my rent and fucked me once a week; last, with a perpetual boy--a long-haired beautiful genius whom I still miss sometimes even now. I don't live in the city anymore. I moved back "home" to where I'd spent summers with my grandparents growing up. I have two sons and still no husband. It's strange, really. No one even contemplates the possibility that I've never married. Everyone just assumes I'm divorced. I have, for lack of any better description, what I'd call a pseudo-husband. He's the father of my children and we have a relationship, but we live separately and my life is very much my own. So what does this have to do with the dirty pictures that I never took? It's about looking back and trying to make some sort of linear connection with then and now. I have come to the conclusion that I probably will never find my "soul mate" if such a person exists, and that perhaps my lesson in this life is to learn to be alone, to find a completeness within myself, to be my own "better half." I look back and wonder if I somehow missed something, if I am paying now for my vanity then? Or is it just that this is the great universal plan? I dreamed last night that I was being followed in some sort of festival by a dark-haired man who kept offering me an apple. He wasn't particularly attractive, but I sensed immediately that he and I were the same. I knew that he'd recognized me too. I kept motioning for him to wait, because I was busy with my children and talking to friends. He moved behind an oak tree, and I thought that maybe he'd gone until I could see his feet. He just sat there very patiently, knowing that I would be there when I was done. The first thought I had when I woke up was how if you cut an apple just right, you'll see a five-pointed star. I had a feeling that it was a message from the Goddess, letting me know that there was someone for me after all. I thought it was an odd dream because I haven't been lonely, and I haven't felt that awful pang of yearning for something without a name for many years. My life is full to overflowing, and I'm finding that even as I head toward middle-age, I am so much more lovely for the marks of living I've gathered along the way--my crow's feet, my breasts that sag a bit after nursing two children, my belly that's grown softer, my hands that have roughened with age and gardening. So, while Mr. Hefner might not be interested anymore, there's a five-year-old and a three-year-old that think I'm the most beautiful woman in the world. And, hey...who knows? There may be a dark-haired guy bearing apples in my future as well.