Cutting Steak With Spoons

On Kate Moss and Care

Ruth took the knives away in an oven mitt, like they might bite her. For a year afterwards, I used a spoon to cut my food. Steak, tempeh, chicken sausage. You can tear a steak apart with two spoons if you’re patient enough — leave it ragged and bleeding. A knife makes everything so easy. I think about that a lot.

This was 2006. Our flannels smelled like Le Labo. George Bush was president. American Apparel ads were everywhere. Pelvis bones and peroxide shags. Girls in lamé panties looking bored. We were told it was radical. That showing your ass was was a feminist act.

On the fifth anniversary of 9/11 I put a knife to my wrist. The next day Ruth sat with me beneath a tree while I drank mashed banana blended with avocado and honey. We lay in her bed wearing thongs. This is intimacy, she said, because I didn’t know. That was the month I saw Adrien Grenier draped over the pool table at The Gramercy. He thought everyone was looking at him. But really they were looking at Zach Braff.

D. had just died, and Dolores appeared right afterwards like a replacement model. Like, here, sorry I was so mean, try this one. Dolores was his penance. She wore a fur hat and satin ballet slippers. I found her at the Pink Pony reading a script, saying “ennui” like it tasted good. I nodded like I got it, then looked it up in the dictionary when I got home. This was back when we still had dictionaries.

Dolores smoked. Of course she did. Smoking was still cool then — before it got eaten alive by wellness and oat milk and hairy breathwork influencers. Back then, wellness was something fringe, vaguely dorky. Women with backpacks and mason jars of rutabaga.

But in private we were wholesome. Laughing until our stomachs hurt. Rice and beans. Back to Black. Sweatpants. Yoga in a dank basements. She didn’t make a big deal at Balthazar on her thirtieth birthday when I was the only one who toasted with water. That felt like love.

We went to the farmer’s market and no one recognized her there. That’s when I thought she was most beautiful — barefaced, hair a little damp and stringy, holding carrots in one hand and a Strand tote in the other. Her clogs made her look like some hippie that had gone to my high school. Afterwards we went to see a movie called “Fur” starring Nicole Kidman. Sat in the dark, knees touching. Sucking down slushies. Thumbs up if we liked the trailer. Thumbs down if it sucked.

I decided I wanted to live. It was that simple. But I kept it a secret. Like a mouse nesting in the wall. Furtive attempts at survival. Meetings in churches. Chataranga Dandasana. Three fish oils, three times a day. Louise Hay CD’s. I thought if I didn’t say it out loud, it wouldn’t break the spell. The Olsen twins drifted around in ocean-colored silk pants, skeletal and weightless, like ghosts who used to be girls. Ashley. Lohan. Kate Moss. Always Kate Moss. There was no wellness. That wasn’t even a word we used then. Everyone wanted to be empty. To be worshipped for our hollowness. It had been this way since the nineties. The goal was to be half-dead, transparent. Something a man might use to blow his nose. Beauty meant bruises blooming like violets beneath your eyes. Girls looked like they'd been drained — thin skin, twitching veins, that stunned, fucked expression. Like someone just slammed your body into a brick wall.

Kate Moss was the face of the Calvin Klein campaign when I was a teenager. Herb Ritts shot her shirtless, straddling Mark Wahlberg. Black and white. Nirvana was number one on the radio, but that ad was the antidote to grunge. No noise. Just a boy and a girl wearing blue denim in a dim lit room. Back then we didn’t know what production was. What it took to make a photo. The amount of people. Money. We really thought love looked like that.

By the time I had my own children, Kate Moss told the BBC that she felt objectified during that shoot. She literally used that word. Objectified. She said no one took care of her on set. I never thought about the word care until I became a mother. Until I tried to imagine what it would feel like being cared for, specifically and ferociously, like I cared for my own child. Someone to tuck me into bed and bathe me. To bring me bowls of cold cherries. At its root, care is bound up with grief—with the ache of attention, the cost of love, the weight of concern. It didn’t originally mean comfort.

I remember every word I’ve ever written. All the projects I abandoned. The books that choked up old floppy discs. Novels that never made it past page fifty. Scenes I dismantled word by word until they disappeared. Hours I handed over to someone else’s chaos. I remember being eleven, standing by the coat rack while my father told M.I. that artists were useless. I remember the thick grease of potato pancakes rising in her small house, the heat behind my eyes. How I froze, thinking freezing might make me vanish, or save me. I remember believing that if I could just be brilliant enough, beautiful enough, good enough, he’d take it back. He never did.