Smoke and Mirrors
By Eve Marx
“I don’t know how you guys do it,” Harold said, his tone at once admiring and contemptuous. “You two are a regular pair of magicians, aren’t you? You’re all smoke and mirrors.”
I hung my head in shame, thinking, for fucks sake we’ve got to get a new accountant.
My husband laughed nervously and motioned for me to fetch Harold another cup of coffee. In the kitchen, I thought of how everything odious Harold said was true. He had been my accountant before I got married and I disliked him intensely, but he was the only accountant I knew. He came highly recommended through a friend of mine who worked at The Daily News. I dreaded Harold’s February arrivals the way, years later, I would dread the arrival of stinkbugs.
He drove a Lamborghini, a ridiculous car, and once he arrived he required endless cups of coffee, which I prepared for him like a barista.
Tutting and huffing over our receipts and expenditures, Harold felt it was his duty to reprimand us for living beyond our means. We nodded in agreement and made conciliatory noises about mending our ways, but the minute Harold was out the door and back in his ridiculous car, we did a little jig. Smoke and mirrors, we laughed. We were illusionists and once again we’d pulled off our magic trick! Our delusions, our shared sense of success, was based on our idiosyncratic belief that everything works out for the best, despite obvious signs to the contrary.
I come from a long line of delusionists, illusionists, and possibly circus side show performers. On my mother’s side, there is a strong Hungarian influence. My mother was profoundly superstitious, always looking for what she called signs; she often dropped hints that her own grandmother worked as a gypsy fortune teller. My father, a musician, pretended to be a lawyer. He went so far as to get a law degree and opened a practice but spent most of his time in the entertainment industry, a sanctified illusion. He owned a couple of movie theatres and his legal clients owned nightclubs and burlesque clubs. I was in my 40’s before someone told me his legal specialty was handling his clients’ arson cases. And yet we masqueraded as a perfectly respectable family of three, at least until my father died and a mob guy showed up at the door.
“Take care of yourself, Gerri,” the guy said, handing her a little suitcase. It was filled with hundred dollar bills, her annuity you might say.
As a young professional writer and editor in what was politely called “men’s sophisticates,” I quickly adopted the identity of illusionist. At Penthouse, we weren’t selling pussy, I was made to understand, as much as the illusion you could have pussy, that it was all just there for the taking. The pussy itself, it turned out, was never entirely clear. Penthouse nudes were famously about Vaseline, the more obscure and opaque the better. It was Bob Guccione’s brilliant idea to grease up the camera lens. That way, he could give readers what they wanted, on his terms. Pink, he’d say, it was all about pink.
Deep down, I don’t think he thought pussy was all that pretty. Or maybe the artist in him (he was a talented oil painter) felt some need to embellish. When you put Vaseline on the camera lens, the vagina is thrown into soft focus. You weren’t really sure what you were seeing. Was that a clit or some other bit in the fog of beige and pink? In those days, women still had pubic hair and that was also obscuring.
When I met my husband, he was working as a screenwriter. Making shit up was his stock in trade. Half the things he said to me seemed like he was testing out character dialogue. He sold me on the dream of moving to L.A. and marrying a film writer. Talk about deluded.
Our years in L.A. were dreamlike. It’s where I learned the phrase, “Fake it, until you make it.” We were great at faking. We rented a tiny bungalow in east Venice that once was the home of an actor who played a doctor on “Hill Street Blues,” a show I’d never watched. While my husband spent his days in development meetings, I started hanging out with another kind of film crowd at my local gym, the crowd that focused on skin. My new best girlfriend’s husband was a porn director of renown. Before he became a director, he’d been an actor who won a lot of awards and not just for his immense schlong. My friend asked if I would help her on set behind the scenes. The performers and crew had to eat, and I helped her with the catering.
The illusion that we were making it in L.A. was shattered with the sudden and unexpected death of a famous comedian set to star in a film my husband wrote. My response to this tragedy was to move back to New York. We returned to another stage set, this time a woodsy suburb north of the city. I took up horseback riding again. I studied Reiki. I constructed a careful house of mirrors in our home deep in the woods where I silently communed with deer. I only saw what I wanted to see, which was the good stuff. Somewhere deep down I knew I was blowing smoke up my own ass, but at the time it felt awesome.
When we pulled up stakes again and returned to the west coast, I knew we were heading towards a deeper immersion in delusion. We relocated to coastal Oregon, an area where a devastating earthquake is anticipated at any moment. According to geologists, it’s hundreds of years past due. And when there’s an earthquake, there will most certainly be a tsunami. Because the region is almost entirely dependent on a tourist economy, there is a collective local delusion to pretend it will never happen. It’s that delusion that keeps adding investment in tourist attractions and new hotels while disregarding the lack of infrastructure and the fact there is only one road leading in and out and we’re all going to die here. In local novelty shops mugs that say, “In case of earthquake, run like hell” are very popular. Thanks to climate change, if it’s not an earthquake/tsunami that kills us, it’ll be a wildfire.
Last September we were smoked in for five days and the combined ash from the eastern Oregon and California fires lay an inch deep on the lawn. Catastrophe is always just around the corner and we thrive on it. That’s delusional.
Eve is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex.
