Authors: Leah Marie Brown
This is the first time I have ever felt completely, pathetically alone. I feel like a cinder, lacking substance, just waiting for the first breeze to send me floating away.
I return to the couch, grab my phone, and scroll through my contacts, desperate to find some two a.m. friends. Two a.m. friends are the kind of friends you can call in an emergency in the middle of night and you know they will pick up.
Adriana Adams
Nicole Apodaca
Lena Bacon
Curtis Bower
Elizabeth Berg
Victoria Brandt
Nancy Bromley
I keep scrolling, down, down, down, past Happy Bamboo and Ho Min Drycleaners, until I get to the last name in my contacts: World Fitness. Other than Vivian, I don’t have a single two a.m. friend.
I scroll through the list again, and this time I see a potential two a.m. friend: Ashleigh Pratt.
Yes! Of course! Ashleigh Pratt. How could I have forgotten about Ashleigh? She’s totally a two a.m. friend.
I select her name to dial her number and press the phone to my ear. It rings four times before someone picks up.
“Hello?”
“
Coucou
, Ashleigh!”
“Who is this?”
Her question comes out as a croak.
“It’s me, Stéphanie,” I say, only slightly slurring my words. “Your good friend, Stéphanie.”
“Stéphanie?”
“
Oui!
”
“Stéphanie, who?” She lowers her voice. “Look, I think you must have the wrong Ashleigh.”
“Stéphanie who?” Suddenly, I get why she’s whispering. I lower my voice. “Oh, you dirty tramp! You’ve got some hot guy in bed with you. That’s why you’re whispering, isn’t it? You dirty, dirty
shlut
.”
I laugh at my slurred word, but Ashleigh doesn’t.
“Stéphanie? Is this Stéphanie Moreau?”
“
Bien sûr!
Why are you acting so surprised? We’re good friends, aren’t we? Two a.m. friends?”
“No,” she snaps. “We are definitely
not
two a.m. friends.”
I swallow past a thick lump in my throat. “Why not?”
“Why not?” She chuckles softly, though not kindly. “Because we haven’t spoken in six years, remember?”
“What?” I stare out the window and then close my eyes when the lights in the Bay start spinning like a disco ball. “It hasn’t been that long.”
“Yes, it has,” she hisses. “We stopped talking six years ago.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Very sure. We stopped talking right after the birth of my first child because you said that baby talk bored you, and you just didn’t see how we could keep our friendship vibrant when we were pursuing such different life paths.”
“I said that?”
“Yes, you did.”
An infant begins wailing in the background, an ear-piercing, shrill cry.
Ashleigh sighs. “I don’t know why you are calling, but I want you to know that I have no hard feelings. We
were
on different paths. I hope your path has brought you as much joy as mine has. Gotta go. Take care.”
The line goes dead. I open my eyes again and stare out at the lights until hot tears prick my eyelids, until I think I am going to be sick.
That’s it. I finally know what is missing from my life: joy. I am joyless. Joyless Fanny, plodding down the career path with a Blackberry full of meaningless contacts.
Googling for Pleasure
I wonder if Tiffany and Company sells joy tucked into one of their iconic Tiffany blue boxes and wrapped with a white satin bow. If only it were that simple.
I half-roll, half-hoist myself off the couch and stagger toward my bedroom, shedding my clothes along the way.
Once in bed, cocooned between my eighteen hundred thread count sheets and silk duvet, I reach for my iPad on my nightstand and type “joy” into the Google search box.
The search returns 650,000,000 hits, including a link to an IMDB page for the new movie
Joy
starring Jennifer Lawrence. Ugh. I am not taking life lessons from a woman who can’t even manage a red carpet walk. First, she face plants in the auditorium on the way to collect her coveted Oscar, and then she pulls a repeat performance the following year, tripping on the red carpet—while wearing a fab strapless Dior original and three million dollars’ worth of Neil Lane jewels. She’s so not BCBG. (The BCBG to which I am referring is the French slang for
Bon Chic, Bon Genre
, which means a person possessing good taste and a refined style, not the moderately-priced chain store selling truly uninspired garments. J-Law is très BCBG, the store.)
I search again, this time using the phrase “how to find joy” and am pleased when it returns only 366,000,000 hits.
I spend the next hour reading articles about how to find lasting happiness on tinybuddha.com, treehugger.com, meaningfulhappiness.com, and ohmmm.net, until I come to an article titled The Power to Change by Father True Allight. That I am even entertaining notions espoused by a New Age guru—a man named Father True Allight—tells me how very low I have sunk.
The Power to Change
by Father True Allight
Andrew was a handsome young man with a successful career in Finance, a vacation home in Aspen, a vigorous social life, and a pervasive desire to take his own life. Six days after ingesting a bottle of opiates, he sat in my office, his head in his hands, repeatedly asking me what he could do to feel joy.
He said, “I’ve made millions of dollars, bought a warehouse full of sports cars, taken the most luxurious vacations, but I have never felt true happiness. Why? What’s the matter with me?”
I look away from my iPad to the ceiling, staring into the darkness, feeling Andrew’s pain. I’ve never tried to commit suicide—never would—but I understand the hollowness that might drive someone to commit such a desperate act.
I groan.
Or maybe consuming two bottles of wine on a nearly empty stomach has made me as emotional as Nicholas Sparks’s legion of weepy Kleenex-clutching readers.
Still, I am curious to know what wisdom Papa Light dispensed to keep Andrew from swallowing a fistful of Vicodin.
My answer was simple. I told Andrew that joy is not found in the pursuit of fame and riches. True happiness can only be experienced by those who live spherically, those who possess a sense of purpose beyond selfish pleasure, pursue their passions with enthusiasm, demonstrate compassion for those less fortunate, and actively seek to spread joy…
I stop reading and consider whether I meet Papa Light’s criterion for living a joyful life.
Do I possess a sense of purpose beyond selfish pleasure? Not really. Work is my only purpose. Working hard enough to become a luminary in the L’Heure Universe.
Do I pursue my passions with pleasure? Passions? What passions? Do I even have passions? I drop my iPad onto my chest and press my fingertips against my eyelids.
Think, Fanny. Think! You must have passions. Passions. Passions. Fashions.
Yes! I am passionate about fashion. I pursue sample sales and fashion trends with great passion. Somehow, I don’t think this is what Papa Light meant when he wrote about pursuing one’s passions.
Do I demonstrate compassion to those less fortunate and seek to spread joy? I might not have ever volunteered at a soup kitchen like Ethan Catfish Dubois, but I have demonstrated compassion. I have. Just last week, my assistant came to work complaining about having a splitting migraine, and I let him leave an hour early—with pay. Never mind that someone would have to bury a hatchet in my skull before I would leave work early, he was in pain and I demonstrated compassion-like behavior.
Didn’t I?
I imagine Ethan working in a dirty, smelly kitchen, ladling out canned soup to dirty, smelly homeless people, and I suddenly feel less proud of my random act of kindness. Spreading joy and oozing compassion is just not my forte. It doesn’t come naturally to me like it does for people like Ethan and Mother Theresa and…Vivian.
A memory sparks to life in my wine muddle brain of our trip last year to a Scottish sheep farm. One of the guests at the farm was a young mother, a cancer survivor named Lisa. Lisa admired Vivian’s shiny pink rain boots, so do you know what Vivian did? Before the end of our trip, she went into town and bought Lisa a pair of pink rubber boots. Not the cheap Hunter knock-offs, but an authentic pair of Hunter Wellingtons. Vivian’s bank account is Nicole Richie thin. I am talking sadly, perpetually anorexic. That’s just Vivian, though. A people-pleaser who lives spherically, spreading joy and pursuing her passions.
I need to be more like Vivian and Mother Theresa. I need to live spherically. I need a purpose beyond pleasure.
That’s it! Maybe I am without joy because I spend my days pursuing hollow pleasures. My very job is about manufacturing and marketing materialistic pleasures—beautiful but unnecessary luxuries.
What if I just stopped? Stopped pursuing worthless goals, like raising sales, lowering the profit-loss margin, building brand awareness, and shifted my efforts to expanding L’Heure’s philanthropic pursuits.
Last year, L’Heure posted profits in excess of eight billion dollars. That’s enough money to keep the Campbell’s flowing in every soup kitchen in the country. And L’Heure is merely one company in a vast luxury empire owned by the French billionaire Bernard Arnault. Louis Vuitton, Dior, Marc Jacobs, Givenchy, Fendi, Pucci, Donna Karan—they’re all vassals in service to our Lord and Master Arnault.
That’s it. I have found my purpose. I will give the L’Heure Flagship Store at Union Square a new passion: philanthropy over profits. No more selling empty overpriced designer bags to empty souls just to meet sales quotas. I am going to rebrand L’Heure as the designer with heart. We could even rework the L’Heure logo by replacing the E with a big pink heart.
We could give gently-used handbags to women reentering the workforce, shoes to Africans displaced by tribal wars, or perfume to impoverished Indians.
I sit up, invigorated by my new sense of purpose, but the room begins to spin, so I lie back down, open my word processing app, and begin drafting a mission statement.
An hour later, I have crafted an inspiring three thousand-word mission statement promising to put an end to rampant corporate greed and the wanton neglect of the community beyond L’Heure’s privileged clientele. My plan is simple: We donate fifteen percent of our annual proceeds to a local charity and encourage our employees to become more civic-minded through the implementation of an employee-volunteer savings program. When an employee volunteers, L’Heure pays them their hourly rate by depositing the wages directly into a retirement account.
It is a revolutionary business model. It is socially aware and fiscally responsible. It is the sort of plan that will grab old Monsieur Henri by his tortoiseshell bifocals and force him to focus his rheumy gaze on me, Stéphanie Moreau.
I Google San Francisco-based charities and stop when I come to Each One, Teach One, a non-profit organization “committed to eradicating financial, spiritual, and intellectual poverty in communities worldwide through the application of mentoring and vocational rehabilitation.”
Parfait!
I could be a mentor. Everyone in my store could be mentors. Before doubt sets in, I click the contact button, fill out the form, and tick the box next to “Yes, I want to help the downtrodden and disenfranchised by sharing my talents.”
My eyelids feel too heavy to keep open, so I copy and paste my mission statement into an email, choose all of my work contacts, and save it as a draft.
Then, I close my eyes and sink into a heavy wine-and-good-works contented sleep.
One Painful Aha
My phone is ringing, but I am buried beneath a mountain of discarded gowns, shoes, and handbags and can’t reach it. I writhe around, struggling to extricate my arm from the smooth leather straps of a Diorific bag, but my Blackberry keeps ringing, ringing, ringing. When I am finally able to pull my arm free, I reach for my phone, my fingertips barely making contact with the slender plastic device. I jab the answer button and say hello. It’s Anna Wintour calling. Vogue wants me to be on the cover of their annual tribute to Leaders of Fashion for my resounding success in rebranding L’Heure as the designer with heart. “Thank you,” Anna says, “for giving us a new reason to say, ‘J’adore L’Heure.’”
The mournful opening guitar plucks of Lana Del Rey’s “Blue Jeans,’ followed by Lana singing about her blue jeans and white T-shirt-wearing James Dean-like lover, play over and over, blaring out of my Blackberry, until I blink heavy lids and squint at the ceiling.
Foutre!
My hair aches. Literally aches. I drank way too much wine. Years ago in France, someone who drank too much
eau de vie
and woke up hungover would have said he suffered from a
mal aux cheveux
, literally a hair-ache. Today, the phrase isn’t used by anyone under fifty. I don’t know why, because it works. I close my eyes and clutch my head. It
really
works.
Lana is still singing, her desolate voice echoing in my empty apartment, making me sincerely regret choosing her song as my ringtone. I have always loved Lana Del Rey. Now, caught in the brutal clutches of a hangover, suffering from the worst kind of
mal aux cheveux
, I hate Lana Del Rey.
Keeping my eyes closed, I reach for the ends of my pillow and press them against my ears. Lana will not be so easily silenced, though. She keeps on singing, a muffled, melancholy moaning. I am just about to get out of bed and search for my Blackberry when Lana stops singing.
I let go of the pillow, roll over, pull the covers over my head, and am almost asleep when Lana starts again. I throw back the covers and do the blind’s man shuffle into the living room, eyes closed, arms outstretched, until I locate my Blackberry. I crack one eye open, jab the answer button, and switch it to speakerphone.
“Hello?”
I close my eyes.
“Mademoiselle Moreau?”
Oh, no. God, no.
“
Bonjour
, Mademoiselle Salupo.” I really hate that Nicola insists on using French forms of address when she’s not even fluent in the language. “
Comment ça va?
”