Friday, November 4, 2016 — Manhattan
* * *
I bought new bras on Thursday.
Not because I wanted to.
Because I had to.
The La Perla balconettes that had fitted me perfectly for a year — the black lace, the ivory silk, the blush satin I wore on days when I needed armour and nobody would see it — no longer fitted.
The cups were tight.
Not uncomfortable, not painful, but tight in the way that a position is tight when it’s moved against you and the margin is compressing.
My breasts had grown.
Not dramatically — I wasn’t suddenly a different woman.
But the firming compound had done more than firm.
The tissue was denser, fuller, the volume redistributed upward.
Where I’d been a comfortable 34D for three years, the cups were now straining at the seams, the underwire pressing into newly expanded flesh, the lace gapping at the top because the upper pole had filled out beyond what the cup was designed to hold.
I went to La Perla on Madison Avenue during my lunch hour.
The same fitter — Marguerite, French, sixty, the kind of woman who’d measured ten thousand breasts and was no longer impressed by any of them — put the tape around my ribcage and then around my bust and looked at the numbers and then at me.
“You’ve gone up,” she said.
“I know.”
“A 34DD.
Perhaps an E in some of our styles.” She looked at my chest with professional interest.
“Have you gained weight?”
“No.”
“Implants?”
“No.”
She raised an eyebrow.
The French eyebrow, the one that says I’ve heard everything and I believe none of it.
“I’d like to try the Maison balconette in 34DD,” I said.
“Black, ivory, and the blush.”
I tried them on in the fitting room.
The new size was correct — the cups contained my breasts without compressing them, the underwire sat in the crease, the straps held the weight without digging.
I looked at myself in the fitting-room mirror — the blush satin balconette, my breasts sitting high and full in the cups, the upper swell visible above the lace trim, the cleavage deeper and more prominent than it had been a month ago.
They were beautiful.
I wasn’t being vain — I was being accurate.
My breasts had been an asset for fifteen years and they’d just appreciated.
The firming compound had rebuilt the internal architecture — the ligaments, the connective tissue, the collagen matrix that held breast tissue in position — and the result was breasts that sat like they had when I was nineteen, except fuller, rounder, with a density that was visible even through lace.
I bought six bras.
Twelve hundred dollars.
An investment.
Walking back to the office, I crossed Madison at 65th and caught my reflection in the window of a gallery.
I was wearing a camel Max Mara wrap coat, belted, over a forest-green silk Equipment blouse and black Vince straight-leg trousers.
Black Gianvito Rossi pumps, four inches, suede.
My hair fell in waves past my shoulders, thick and glossy, the honey-gold deepened by the hair treatment into something richer — not darker, not lighter, just more saturated, the way colours look after rain.
The woman in the gallery window looked expensive.
She looked cared for.
She looked like a woman who slept nine hours and drank two litres of water and had a dermatologist on retainer and a Pilates instructor who came to her apartment.
She didn’t.
She had five jars.
At the office, I closed my door and stood at the window and unbuttoned my blouse to the waist and looked down at my breasts in the new bra.
The blush satin against my skin — my skin that was dewy and translucent and caught the afternoon light — was a contrast I hadn’t seen before.
I’d always been fair-skinned with a warm undertone.
Now the surface had a quality that made the undertone visible, a flush beneath the translucence, like light through a peach.
I buttoned my blouse and sat down and picked up my phone.
I’d been applying the body hair prevention compound for three weeks.
The protocol said twice weekly for the first two weeks, then once weekly.
I was now on the once-weekly schedule, and the results were complete.
Complete.
I hadn’t shaved in twenty-four days.
I hadn’t waxed in twenty-eight.
My legs, from ankle to hip, were bare — not stubbly-bare, not recently-shaved bare, but bare the way a child’s legs are bare, as though follicles had never existed in that skin.
I ran my hand under my trouser leg, up my calf: silk.
No texture, no resistance, no shadow of dormant hair.
The same was true of my underarms — smooth, soft, no trace of the follicles that had required attention every other day since puberty.
And between my legs — the strip remained, trimmed and neat, but everything around it was smooth and bare and permanent.
I would never shave again.
I would never wax again.
I would never sit in a salon chair with hot wax on my bikini line, making small talk with a woman named Yelena while she ripped hair from my labia.
The time I’d spent on hair removal over the course of my adult life: conservatively, fifteen minutes a day for fifteen years.
That was ninety-one thousand minutes.
Sixty-three days.
Two months of my life spent managing hair that a man in a barn had eliminated with a compound in a black jar.
I texted him.
How.
One word.
No punctuation.
Because I needed to know and I didn’t know how to ask the question that was actually behind the question, which was: What are you, and how is this possible, and why does my body feel like it belongs to me for the first time since I grew breasts and leg hair at thirteen?
His reply came in four seconds.
Keep going.
I stared at the text.
Two words.
The same two words he’d sent last time.
No explanation, no elaboration, no clinical data, no molecular diagram.
Just the instruction to continue, delivered with the same certainty he’d shown at the Pierre when he’d told me I wouldn’t switch to scotch.
I put my phone down.
I pulled up the AURA scenario analysis I’d been building.
Revenue projections, market penetration curves, pricing models.
I’d modelled three scenarios: conservative, base, and aggressive.
Conservative hit a billion in year three.
Base hit three billion in year three.
Aggressive hit ten billion in year five.
And those numbers assumed a product portfolio of five SKUs.
He’d told me at the lab that the current products were fourth-generation formulations.
Which meant there were earlier generations, which meant there were other compounds, which meant the five products on my bathroom counter were the tip of something much larger.
I saved the file and closed my laptop and sat in my office with the lights off and the city outside the window and thought about what it felt like to have a body that was changing in ways I hadn’t asked for and couldn’t stop and didn’t want to stop.
My phone buzzed.
Naomi.
Update??
I typed: Breasts went up a cup size.
No surgery.
No explanation.
I bought new bras today.
Naomi: WHAT
Me: I’m not joking.
Naomi: Eliana.
That is not possible without surgery or significant weight gain.
Me: I know.
Naomi: Have you slept with him yet?
Me: No.
Naomi: But you’re going to.
I looked at the text.
I looked at the city.
I looked at the blouse buttoned to my sternum, the fabric sitting differently now over breasts that were fuller than they’d been when I bought it.
I typed: I’m going to run a hundred-billion-dollar company with him.
Naomi: That’s not a no.
I put my phone away.