Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

There are photo spreads where the models’ heads are shaved, where they look straight into cameras, unsmiling, daring. The colour grey becomes the It colour of the fall season – fashion weeks all over the Western world look like communism.

Then there’s the first controversy – a big interview and a photo spread with baby-faced $isi, the tumour girl herself. The photo spread is in LOVE magazine – with photographs of various Baldwins and other kids of celebrities – where $isi poses with her chin defiant, her head bald. In one photo she lights up a cigarette – this photo is accompanied by a pull quote in which she announces that her tumour is dead and she no longer fears death. The interview makes the news. There are essays written about $isi being controversial or $isi being brave or $isi exploiting her disease or $isi being irresponsible and a bad example to stupid girls everywhere.

$isi does another interview where she denounces smoking.

It’s an old publicity trick: sin, repent. Gloria’s PR team is trying to prove they’re better at spinning than Piglet was; $isi is their first major celebrity client.

I’m pleased.

$isi becomes a proper celebrity. She starts getting spotted with various famous dipshits with greasy hair and surfer bods. She is photographed leaving Chateau Marmont early in the morning; five minutes later, James Franco skulks out in a wife-beater, hiding under a toque.

We start to receive movie scripts and hundreds of pitches for products. Products get released. The products are, in order: a fashion line of hats, a M.A.C. grey-ribbon makeup line, sneakers, grey push-up bras, lululemon Walking Cure pants and, eventually, the top achievement for anyone in the music business – a fragrance launch. The perfume is called Grey , naturally, and according to the press release, it incorporates “Mutsu apple, nectarine, bergamot, rose, amber, blond wood and hot sand.” Gloria doesn’t find my this is what cancer smells like joke funny, but that’s what I think whenever I get a whiff of it on the street.

MEANWHILE, AS I BECOME MORE AND MORE ABSORBED WITH the campaign, trying to wrap it all up before my contract with $isi is officially up, Gloria decides to say that she’s pregnant. She refuses to take the test to prove it, yet insists on an imaginary bulge in her belly. I try not to show my anxiety. Once, I scream into a pillow like a crazy lady in a movie. I want to remind Gloria that she’s past forty, but I know that would be insensitive of me, so I keep quiet and pent up. Then, when Gloria gets her period, I try not to show my relief. To celebrate, I go out that evening all by myself and pay a stripper to not rub against my new Paul Smith suit while I stare at her tits for the duration of two songs.

The stripper reminds me of Dolores – she is small and much prettier, but she is a mouth-breather and has the same round eyes.

“Can I call you Dolores?” I ask.

“Whatever you’d like, honey,” she coos. Her breath smells faintly of alcohol. I don’t call her anything. I do nothing when song number three starts.

After the fake pregnancy, Gloria subscribes to inspirational podcasts telling her to live in the now . She dyes her hair even lighter to further resemble her favourite celebrity, Gwyneth Paltrow. She cooks food from Gwyneth Paltrow books; every morning, she swirls coconut oil in her mouth. She becomes allergic to gluten.

She starts doing yoga more diligently, and I often wake up in the morning to the bed empty and sounds of whispery plinking coming from the living room, where she twists her body, her ass in the air, her legs spread, her red face hanging between her legs.

I let her hang a framed quote in the kitchen: Life is the dancer and you are the dance . I pirouette in front of it once and bang my shin against the counter.

“Let me tap your leg,” she says when I come into the bedroom limping and explain what happened.

I roll up my pants. She taps my leg. “Everything is made out of energy, out of molecules interacting with each other,” she says as she taps, her head bent down, hair brushing against my leg. With the desperate new blond shade, her roots seem to be growing out faster – there are many grey hairs among her natural muddy blond. I’m curious about what she’d look like if she were not to dye her hair. I would probably find her aging look exotic – the oldest woman I’ve been with is Mildred, but she dyes her hair orange.

Right now, Gloria goes on about “the quantum theory of matter and energy being aspects of the same reality” and “life energies flowing through us via a series of paths, known as the meridian system , that are mapped out by four hundred acupressure points located on the body,” one of them on my shin. Her soft voice, along with the tapping, lulls me to sleep.

When I wake up, it’s dark in the room. Gloria is gone. There’s a note on the kitchen table that says to try the chickpea salad in the fridge, and she’ll be back after her tea-appreciation class.

Gloria gets a therapist whose job – I hope – is to dissuade her of the notion that there is ever going to be a baby. As she starts to make peace with the idea, she focuses more on Dog. I have to sign forms that allow him to join such extraordinary activities as Dog & Mommy and Urban Dog School classes, as well as Dog Yoga.

An enormous monogrammed Marc Jacobs dog crate is ordered online. Gloria buys Dog outfits made by Prada.

But Dog isn’t enough to keep her occupied, and she insists there is still more of herself to be found. She signs up for various meditation groups. Her favourite is mindful meditation, where people learn how to pay attention to their breathing and focus on chewing a single raisin – everything can be combined with reflection; there is wisdom to be found even in bricks that your fingers brush against. Bricks speak to people as do trees and pigeons, and dreams are a source of wisdom. You can go inside your head and find peace there, a haven from what was outside your head; the inside of your head can be an oasis.

There is also a group that Gloria starts attending where she sits in the circle with other women who talk about not having children but wanting them and about not being able to have children, period. Non-moms.

I don’t think the group is a good idea – it seems Gloria only comes back sadder and more distressed from it – but I am never asked for my opinion, so I don’t give it.

I watch her get smaller and gloomier, collapsing inside herself like those raisins she chews mindfully. I can’t get through; the walls of her are yielding but remain impenetrable. There are many mornings when I say, “Is everything okay?” like I’m reciting lines in a movie, and like in a movie, she sighs and looks away and says, “Everything is fine.”

One day, I come across a piece of paper where she has written about me, about how much it hurt her to see me moving on with my life after the pregnancy. She calls me “callous, insensitive”; the non-pregnancy is deemed “a tragedy.”

I want to say something to her about it, about how there has to be an actual event – an actual lost pregnancy – for it to be a tragedy, but I’m not cruel, not callous, not insensitive.

I feel panic, then relief when her Non-moms group and her therapist decide that it is time for Gloria to take a break from me because I’m an awful man; a man who is insensitive. There is a part of me that wants to convince her that it’s not true, that she and her group are wrong about everything, but I know that my motivations for trying to convince her are only so I could prove to myself that she loves me – that I’m still the kind of man that women love. After the months I’ve spent focusing solely on Gloria, the weight of her pronouncements seems more significant, dangerous even, to my identity, and I have to remind myself that she is only one woman. And her feelings toward me don’t represent how other women feel toward me.