Judith Thurman - Cleopatras Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire

I am grateful to Robert Gottlieb, who brought me to The New Yorker in 1986; and to David Remnick, who brought me backor, as it now feels, homein 1999, and promoted me to staff writer a year later.

I am grateful to The New Yorker staff, and, in particular, to the heroic checking department, but above all to Sharon DeLano, my editor between 1999 and 2004, and to Virginia Cannon, my current editor. Both have enriched my work immeasurably.

I am grateful to the many good friends and colleagues who have helped to give these essays focus, polish, and directionand only they know how much.

I am grateful to my son, Will Thurman Naythons, who is now eighteen but who was ten when I took up full-time journalism againand I dont think he can know how much.

And finally, I am grateful to my publisher and old friend Jonathan Galassi for his faith in this book. It, too, feels like a homecoming.

The Wolf at the Door

T he Italian performance artist Vanessa Beecroft lives with her American husband, Greg Durkin, and their seventeen-month-old son, Dean, in an isolated house off a dirt road on Long Islands North Shore. Durkin, who has worked in the movie industry as a financial analyst but is currently a graduate student in sociology, found the place by searching the Internet for properties that were within commuting distance of Manhattan and had an indoor pool. Beecroft suffers from exercise bulimiaa compulsion to burn off calories that she considers excessiveand until recently she liked to swim a hundred laps every day. She also used to take ten-hour hikes, and she still goes for vigorous long walks through the nature reserve that surrounds her house. Before the baby started to toddle, she sometimes carried him along, slung on the ledge of a bony hip. When I was pregnant, I didnt allow myself to relax for a minute, she says. I spent all day swimming, training, and doing aerobics. Ive since slacked off a bit, because I find that yoga is the only workout that doesnt make me too hungry.

Bulimia is an eating disorder epidemic among young women. (Beecroft is thirty-three.) In its most common form, a ravenous bingeequivalent to several meals, or even to several days worth of foodis closely followed by a session of self-induced reverse peristalsis. The practice is both psychologically addictive and socially contagious. According to an unscientific survey of my friends under thirty, there isnt a dormitory bathroom in the country that doesnt reek ofvomit. Older women suffer from bulimia, too, probably in smaller numbers, although treatment statistics do not, obviously, provide a reliable head count. Actors, dancers, and models are particularly susceptible, and so are young male athletes, like wrestlers and jockeys, who have weight goals to meet. There is an extensive clinical and self-help literature devoted to the disorder (which is commonly medicated with antidepressants), along with dozens of websites and chat rooms, some of them clandestine trysting places for defiant anorexics and bulimics, who fondly call themselves by the dollish names ana and mia, and who warn intruders seeking to cure them or girls in recovery not to enter. Members of the sisterhood trade pictures of their idols (Calista Flockhart and Lara Flynn Boyle are especially admired), proud accounts of their sometimes lethally ascetic practices, and advice on concealing them.

It is hard to think of a human stainan addiction, sin, perversion, or taboothat doesnt, in a shame-free age, have its bard. Bulimia, however, is one of the most intractably unglamorous of dirty secrets, as humiliating as incontinence. Bulimics transcend their own threshold of disgust, although not easily the repulsion of others: they are a stealthy tribe. Clogged plumbing or rotten teeth sometimes give them away, but I have known women who have managed to conceal their daily rituals for years without getting caught by a parent or spouse. This interesting subject, one of proprietys last frontiers, has been largely neglected by creative artists, with a few exceptions, Beecroft being among the most notable. She has been working since her adolescence on a project called XXX Book of Food : 360 watercolors and drawings that she intends to publish in the form of a cube-shaped book divided into colored sections. (Bulimics often separate the courses of a binge with markers of taste and texture so that each stratum is visibly discrete and, during gluttony interruptus, can be carefully ticked off the elimination manifest.) I used to eat by color, she explains, all orange one day, all green, yellow, or red the next. I wanted my obsession made formally explicit. She started the book as a diary in the early 1980s with the intention of showing it, one day, to a doctor. The first four years of entries were lost by a typist, but the remaining six (198793) make up a log of every morsel (or nearly) that she consumed, and a journal in words and pictures ofthe feelingspredominantly self-loathingthat her struggle with a recalcitrant appetite aroused, and still does. I found the cumulative tedium of this strange artifact poignant and compelling. So, perhaps, will anyone who, like Beecroft, has wished demonically for something horrible to happen to me just to make me thin, and who has weighed every one of my lifes experiences on the scale of how many kilos I have gained or lost from it. In the end, I dont even care if people say Im a good artist. I only care about whether or not Im fat.

Beecrofts self-discipline is Spartan, though she told me that she has to have something very bad every day, like a piece of cake or a drink. Most of the bulimics I have known or read about arent so abstemious. They, too, gauge goodness and badness on a kitchen scale, and they may diet as strenuously as she does, but they relieve themselves of the tension inherent in long-term deprivation with vast quantities of delicious, forbidden junk. A woman in her seventies who has been a compulsive eater for most of her petty, claustrophobic life once told me that her daily sprees were its only source of spontaneity and free choice, and while she knew they were sick and wasteful, she couldnt bear to give them up for that reason. Beecrofts diary, however, covers a period when she lived on a monotonous regimen of the same health foods day after day: a bowl of unseasoned brown rice, an apple, a serving of raw carrots or home-baked bread. I tried to throw them up, she recalls, but I couldnt, and when I started retching blood, I had to stopwhich is why she switched to extreme exercise as a purgative. In my diary, I use the word vomit metaphorically. It stands for the violence of the intention. Not merely, however. Once, as a teenager, she smashed a bag of walnuts with a hammer and ate the contents shell and all, winding up in an emergency room with acute peritonitis. The doctor told her that she needed a psychiatrist. She found one who had belonged to the Red Brigades. I got really fascinated by his politics, she recalled. Unfortunately, he was too expensive. (Eating disorders and Maoism seem to share a common ground: they are a form of utopian moral extremisma belief that, with enough ruthlessness, it is possible to achieve perfection.)

Beecroft plans to exhibit the book at a major retrospective of herwork that opens in October at Italys leading museum of modern art, the Castello di Rivoli, outside Turin. She is also willing to discuss her enthrallment to food with passionate candor, and to describe its role in the tableaux vivantssome fifty to datethat have made her a controversial star of the performance-art world. These spectacles, the initial ones produced on a shoestring, the later ones expensively staged, have been widely admired by curators and critics (but also frequently condemned as voyeuristic and exploitative). They feature large groupings of nude or undressed girls who stand mutely for several hours in a gallery or museum, occasionally breaking ranks to stretch or to sprawl, but remaining, in principle, strictly impassive to an audience that is, of course, fully clothed. In the earliest works, Beecroft assembled an eloquently motley collection of fleshy and slim bodies. Emboldened and enriched by her success, she hired scores of uniformly thin, depilated beauties and arranged them as human colonnades. (I think of them as architecture, she says.) On different occasions, their trappings have included white bras, black body paint, Heidi wigs, control-top briefs, G-strings, gladiator sandals, panty hose, fedoras, faux-mink chubbies, and four-inch stilettoes. A percentage of the women, especially at the beginning, suffered from eating disorders, and they were all volunteersfriends, fellow art students, or interesting-looking female specimens whom she picked up on the street. Yet even when she started recruiting professional models and paying them their going rate, they had to be willing to undergo a painful (if boastworthy) trial of extreme discomfort and exposure. Beecroft herself doesnt participate in a performance once she has given her instructions to the troops: shes a general rather than a first lieutenant. Her charisma, however, has increased with her visibility, and women gladly, one might even say hungrily, do her bidding and become her tools. Designersamong them Miuccia Prada, Tom Ford, and Manolo Blahnikhave been eager to contribute props. A photographer and video crews document the pieces (Beecroft used to do the photography herself), and those images are the commodity that Beecrofts dealers market to collectors. Reproduction glamorizes the experience and leaches it of ambiguity and emotion, she says flatly. Im sorry its necessary. Pictures of the girls out of context make the work look too sexy. To me, the actual performancesarent sexy at all. Theyre about shame: the shame of the audience and, to a lesser extent, of the girls, but most of all my own.