Born Round Page 22

  The delivery would come, I’d make my way through all of it, and then I’d think: dessert. How can I resist the temptation of dessert during my forthcoming diet if I don’t treat myself to some right now?

  There was an all-night 7-Eleven about six blocks away, and I’d drive to it, because it would be one a.m. at this point and I’d need to wrap up all of this eating and get to bed. I’d buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a chocolate-covered ice cream bar and some Nutter Butter cookies to boot. Each was something I relished, and the smart thing to do on a night like this was to have everything I relished and be done with it.

  These last-hurrah meals happened as often as once a week. They’d undo whatever progress I’d made since my last last-hurrah meal. And they put me in a laughable bind with a ludicrous solution.

  Fourteen

  Shortly after the election I signed a contract to do a book for HarperCollins that would mine all the time I’d spent watching and interacting with Bush. It was to be an anecdotal, impressionistic portrait not so much of Bush the governor or of Bush the novice commander in chief as of Bush the guy, a sometime stumblebum with an informal nature seemingly at odds with the lofty office of the presidency.

  I worked furiously on the book from January through June 2001, taking only one five-week break from my White House duties for the Times and otherwise staying up late or sacrificing any weekend fun in order to sit at my computer in that dingiest of rooms in my Georgetown house. The book was like a whole second job, stress piled on stress, and by the time I finished a full draft, I hadn’t lost any weight.

  But I was due, already, to have my book jacket photograph taken.

  That was my bind. I couldn’t let an accurate image of me get out there and let all the old acquaintances I’d been avoiding see me this way.

  So I called my friend Barbara, a former photojournalist living in Austin, and asked her if she could hook me up with someone adept at using special poses or crafty angles or smoke and mirrors—whatever it took—to transform the round into the oblong, chubby into chiseled, gone-to-seed into come-to-Papa. I told Barbara that it wasn’t really a photographer we were looking for; it was an illusionist. Fit for Diane Arbus, I needed David Copperfield.

  Among friends, fat but not happy.

  She sent me to someone in Austin, which I still occasionally passed through for work. Although she had already prepped him on the challenge at hand, I wasn’t taking any chances, so I prepped him anew.

  “The goal is thin,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” he replied.

  “Emaciated, even,” I said. I figured you should always set the bar high, so that in falling short, you still ended up somewhere satisfactory.

  “Got it,” he answered, with a bit of an edge.

  He had me turn my face to the left and to the right. He had me tilt my head a few degrees forward, then a few degrees more, then a few degrees beyond that. I could see that my shoelaces had come untied.

  He repositioned the lights he was using, swapped one camera lens for another. He took pictures from three feet away and six feet away. He kept stepping farther and farther back, stopping only when he hit the wall.

  “Is it working?” I asked.

  No answer. Good, good: he was too focused on the task to respond. I needed him to be focused.

  A few days later the head shots came to me as e-mail attachments.

  They were an improvement on what was in the mirror. But they weren’t improvement enough.

  “We’re not done,” Barbara said.

  She sent the digital images to a friend of hers who was an expert at photo manipulation. Her friend stretched the images vertically, treating my face as if it were Silly Putty, making it longer. She e-mailed me a sample to see if I approved.

  My face was significantly less round than in the prior batch of images, but it wasn’t anywhere close to angular. I’d been fantasizing about angular.

  “Do you think,” I asked Barbara, “we can stretch the images a little more? Just a little.”

  “When’s the last time anyone at the publishing house saw you?” she said.

  “The people I’m dealing with there have never met me,” I said. “They’ve just talked to me on the phone. And by the time they do meet me, I’ll in fact be much thinner. This jacket photo just snuck up on me. I’m planning on some serious dieting.”

  “Then we can get away with a little more,” Barbara said.

  We stretched the image a little more.

  I printed out several of the altered images and happened to have them with me one day as I walked to my seat in the press section of Air Force One.

  When one of my colleagues asked me how my book was coming, I reflexively hauled out the pictures.

  “I’m considering one of these for my jacket photo,” I said. “What do you think?”

  As she stared at them she looked baffled. “When were these taken?” she asked. “Five years ago?”

  “No!” I answered. “They’re more recent than that.” I snatched the pictures from her and hurried to my seat, a few rows from hers, before she could ask any more questions.

  And I went ahead and sent the pictures to HarperCollins, because they weren’t really lies, just forecasts of the physical improvements I’d effect by the time the book tour came along.

  The publication date was initially set for the fall of 2001, but after the terrorist attacks of September 11, HarperCollins pushed the date back to March 2002 so we could make changes to the book, too light- hearted in the context of what had happened. We ditched the planned title, Bushed, and the planned cover, a photo of the president that made it look as if he were hurtling sideways through space. The new image we chose showed him striding across a red carpet in the White House. The new title was Ambling into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush.

  Around the turn of the year, with March approaching, I confronted the fact that I’d be booked on a morning television show or two and many political talk shows and that people I’d avoided for years might now catch a glimpse of me. And I couldn’t photo-manipulate my way into presentable shape.

  My self-styled diet of choice this time around: salmon fillets and skinless chicken breast halves—which I could buy in bulk at Costco and cook on my slanted, fat-reducing George Foreman grill—punctuated with Balance nutrition bars. It was sort of Atkins, sort of not, built yet again on the notion that I could still permit myself a significant quantity of food by focusing on foods with particular qualities. The salmon and chicken steered me clear of carbohydrates. And the Balance bars, well, they promised at least to be balanced—that was their point, their packaging. Besides, each one was only about 200 calories. Never mind that I sometimes ate three in a row.

  Since I’d left the White House beat and started writing instead for the Times’s Sunday magazine, I was working frequently at home and had more control over my hours, so I could not only cook myself lunch and dinner on that grill but also carve out more time for exercise. This exercise wasn’t as regular as it needed to be. But I increased the frequency and the distance of my runs. I mapped out two- and three- and four-mile routes along the Potomac or through Georgetown, and I did one or another of them at least twice a week.

  By late February, the 42s were history, and the 40s were loose. So with a hope I hadn’t experienced in years, and with a confidence I hadn’t fully earned but yearned to feel, I went to buy a new suit. I chose Brooks Brothers because I knew its clothes were generously cut, but I willfully discounted that as I tried on different suit pants, intent on being reassured by what I could fit into. I managed 38s. And they weren’t even all that tight!

  I stepped in front of a mirror. The person staring back at me wasn’t as thin as I had imagined he would be, but maybe it was the mirror. Or maybe my self-critical bent. I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t want to be sure. I wanted only to dwell on the fact that I’d put those 42s behind me. And while there had been a time in my life when 38s were a cataclysm, I reminded myself that I’d been young
er then, and I supposed that bodies changed as they aged, getting more solid and squarer. I supposed that the 38s I was wearing in the Brooks Brothers store might be the equivalent of a younger man’s 36s. And for all I knew Brooks Brothers had in recent months begun tailoring their clothes less forgivingly than they once had.

  I studied the mirror again. I squinted, cocked my head, shifted my stance. I didn’t look so bad. In fact, if the lighting in the dressing room hadn’t been so harsh, and if I had shaved that morning, and if I had a tidier haircut, which I resolved to get, I’d look better still. I’d look like a man with no need whatsoever to fear a TV camera.

  Midway through my book tour, I sat one night in a greenroom at the CNN studios in New York, waiting to be interviewed. I was pumped up by all the radio and TV interviews I’d already made it through, by an Amazon ranking in the low double digits. I was pumped up even more by my new suit, which was a bit looser than when I’d purchased it just two weeks earlier. The adrenaline of the tour had somehow quieted my appetite, and facing TV cameras day after day had kept my worst impulses in check.

  A dark-haired, doe-eyed man in his midtwenties came into the room to say hello. He introduced himself as a junior correspondent for CNN and said we’d met once during the Bush campaign. We talked about the campaign, the book, politics. More than ten minutes went by and he made no motion to leave.

  Was he flirting with me?

  It was a question I hadn’t asked about any handsome man—about any man—in years. But was it really such a crazy thought? Maybe not anymore, considering my slimming dark blue suit and the winnowed me inside it and my briskly selling book. Maybe I had a whole new currency.

  I was pretty sure he was gay: he’d made a few references that suggested as much. And the intensity and duration of the attention he was showing me certainly seemed to go beyond friendliness.

  I made a point of mentioning that I’d be in New York for a few more days. He asked me if I’d be up for a drink.

  The next night we met in the bar on the ground floor of my hotel. It took me one martini to get to talking, another to hold his gaze for more than a few seconds, and a third to do what I really wanted to.

  I asked him if we should have one last drink in my room.

  He didn’t respond at first, just blushed and laughed awkwardly. He looked away. And then he noted how late it was, saying he could stay with me in the bar for a few more minutes, but then had to get going.

  “That’s actually better, I’ve got an early morning, too,” I said, too emphatically.

  I searched for the waiter. I signaled for the check. I signaled a second time just fifteen seconds later. I wanted to get out of there.

  The next morning I called a friend to recount my humiliation.

  “It’s not you,” she said, telling me what friends almost always do. I was great, I was a catch, I shouldn’t think about it, he probably had a boyfriend.

  “It’s his loss,” said another friend, going through the same stock litany.

  Then, back in Washington, I recounted the story to my friend Maureen, who did something more honest—and, really, kinder. After listening to me, nodding sympathetically and shaking her head on cue, she pulled out her checkbook. She grabbed a pen. And she began writing out a check.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m buying you two sessions with my trainer,” she said, and she wrote down his name and phone number as well.

  That’s how I met Aaron. And that’s when I really turned the corner, accepting that if I wanted to do more than merely whittle at the edges of my excesses, I had to put real energy into the effort. I had to be methodical about it, and it had to hurt.

  For the first fifteen minutes of my first fifty-five-minute session with Aaron, we only talked.

  “What do you want to get out of this?” he asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” I said. “I need to lose weight.”

  “Here’s the deal,” he said. “We can only do so much in fifty-five minutes. They’re going to be an intense fifty-five minutes. But before or after—you choose—you owe me thirty minutes on one of those StairMasters.”

  He pointed to two machines right inside the door of his exercise studio. “You can come early to use them,” he said. “You can stay late. But you’ve got to give me those thirty minutes. And on the days when you don’t come in here, you’ve got to be doing cardio on your own. StairMaster, running, I don’t care. Not biking—I don’t want you sitting when you’re exercising. Not walking—I want your heart rate up. No easy stuff.”

  He told me that if I was going to use him and stick with him, he wanted to see me twice a week. And he told me to be prepared for several months of twice-a-week sessions, plus good behavior in between them, if I wanted serious results.

  I used the two sessions Maureen had bought for me. I bought myself ten more, and then another ten after that. They were seventy dollars a pop, an expense that definitely added up, but the payment I’d received for my book meant that I had extra money, and I couldn’t think of any better way to spend it.

  Aaron’s exercise studio spread out over several floors of a yellow brick town house in the Adams Morgan section of D.C. It wasn’t a conventional gym: you had to be working with Aaron or with one of about a half dozen other private trainers in his employ to use it, and during any given hour no more than four clients and four trainers would be present. Sometimes there’d be only two trainers and clients. That created a sense of privacy that helped me. I had often talked myself out of visiting a gym in Georgetown that I’d joined a year and a half earlier by deciding that I had to lose some weight before I went, lest I be embarrassed in the midst of so many less flabby exercisers. At Aaron’s studio I could jiggle in something closer to solitude.

  Aaron had a barrel chest, a tiny waist and not an ounce of fat on him. Although he was twenty-nine, he had an oversize mane of overlong, overfluffy hair that sometimes made him seem five to ten years younger and that belonged in a 1970s time capsule. I jokingly told him that he looked like the lost Cassidy brother, an amalgam of Shawn and David, ready for a seat in the front of the Partridge Family bus. He told me to shut up and do another bench press.

  During our fifty-five-minute sessions, he never let me rest. We rushed without pause from one Cybex or Body Masters weight machine to another or we used free weights or he plunked me down on a section of padded floor.

  “Here!” he bellowed as he raced ahead of me to our next location, our next station, our next grueling exercise. Then it was on to the next: “Here!” I felt alternately like a cowed spaniel in obedience school or like a misshapen, misbegotten recruit in basic training, the John Candy character in Stripes. For his part Aaron was a combination of drill sergeant and garden-variety sadist: the Marquis de Sweat.

  We did crunches, about twice as many as I ever would have gotten through on my own. We did squats, but with a heavy bar of as many as sixty pounds balanced on my shoulders. We did curls, and we did them until my arms quivered like the strings of a clunky cello. If I stopped before Aaron thought I humanly had to, he kept me pressed in place and made me resume.

  I would pout and sneer and wail and sometimes even scream at him. It was part of this whole comedy routine we developed, a way of making the torture go down easier and the minutes go by faster.

  “I’m getting dizzy!” I’d shriek.

  “Good,” he’d say.

  “I’m going to pass out!” I’d warn.

  “I’ll make sure you don’t hit your head on anything too hard.”

  “I’m going to throw up!”

  “Great. It’ll mean you’re really working.”

  “I’m going to throw up on you!”

  “Not if you know what’s good for you.”

  The other trainers tended to move their clients to a floor of the town house that Aaron and I weren’t using. They found us too disruptive, and a few of their clients were put off by my tendency to shout out curse words to cope with my fatigue and pain.<
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  I frequently told Aaron my body wouldn’t twist in the manner he was prescribing. He’d twist it for me as I sputtered, “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!”

  I’d seek his congratulations for a set of exercises well done. He’d counter that it was proof of what a superior trainer he was.

  “A modest one, too,” I’d say.

  “Save your words for writing,” he’d snap.

  One day he didn’t have a trainee after me and, as I climbed onto one of the StairMasters, he left the gym to go to the post office.

  “Thirty minutes,” he reminded me. “You owe me thirty minutes.”

  After ten minutes I was exhausted, and I climbed down. What were the chances he’d return in the next twenty?

  By the time I arrived home, there was a message on my voice mail.

  “Quitter!” Aaron was shouting. “Wimp!”

  If I showed up for one of my twice-weekly sessions looking no slimmer than I had at the last one, he said so, asked me what I’d eaten the day before, told me it had been too much and suggested I give him thirty-five minutes on the StairMaster instead of thirty.

  If I tried to hold on to the StairMaster’s rails while I pumped my legs up and down, he raced over and swatted my arms back to my sides. Then, as punishment, he increased the tension on the machine by another level. And glared at me, for good measure.

  I despised him and adored him and knew either way he was my best hope. Not just because of the paces he put me through when I was with him but because of the extra conscience he provided for me, the mirror I couldn’t hurry past. He was my yardstick, my checkup, my one-man Weight Watchers. With Aaron I couldn’t lie or stall or drape myself in something baggy. He saw me twice every week, and he saw me in a T-shirt and shorts. He could tell whether I was behaving, and he was never shy about telling me what he saw.