Elegance and Innocence: 2-Book Collection. Kathleen Tessaro

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       F Fur

      If women are honest with themselves, they would admit that the fascination they feel for furs is not only due to the warmth they provide. After all, a fur is never just a fur – it is also, more than any other garment I can think of, a symbol, and a mink coat is the most easily identifiable symbol of them all. It stands for achievement, both for the man who bought it and the woman who wears it, as well as status and undeniable luxury. It has been said with a great deal of truth that a mink is the feminine Legion of Honour.

      Furs are important milestones in a woman’s life, and in general they are purchased only after a great deal of thought and many comparisons. So make your selection with care. After all, men come and go but a good fur is a destiny.

      There’s a story about a famous opera diva rehearsing for a production of Tosca at the Met. At the end of the rehearsal, she sends her dresser to collect her things and the poor woman comes back clutching a black wool coat.

      The star is appalled. She tosses her head and fixes the woman with an icy stare. ‘Honey, you know I don’t wear no cloth coats!’

      Divas and minks have a lot in common. You have to kill something to make a mink. Its beauty is horrible to behold. Divas are like that too. And while you don’t have to be a diva to wear a mink, it helps.

      I got my first mink when I was nineteen years old. It was given to me by a friend of my mother’s, whose own mother had recently died of Alzheimer’s. She’d been a tiny woman and no one else in the family could wear the coat. Or wanted to.

      It was a full-length mink; glossy, heavy, stinking of musk when it rained. It was the most un-PC garment it was possible to own. And yet it had both authority and a powerful, threatening, glamour. People reacted violently to it; they were infuriated, offended, jealous, or lustful. It was a coat of almost biblical symbolism. It hid nothing, accommodated no one. If you hated it, it was there to be hated. If you loved it, it couldn’t care less. The very thing that made it repulsive was the same thing that gave it its splendour. And it fitted me like a glove.

      The trouble with a coat like that is it can take over your life; dominate your whole personality. If you don’t know who you are, you can easily become a mink coat.

      I had a boyfriend at the time. He’d been a car thief in high school and was now two years ahead of me in drama school. He wore a denim jacket that had been in police chases, that still had bloodstains on it from when he’d been arrested. Badly worn, it hung together in places by threads.

      We looked like brother and sister, he and I, with the same pale hair and green eyes. Neither of us knew who we were or who we wanted to be, so we became actors. We spent our nights eating at an all night diner called Chief’s, he in his threadbare denim and me in my mink, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer with our eggs, and arguing about iambic pentameter and if Pinter was really a genius or just a fraud. We were going to be great actors, famous and rich. We made up stories about ourselves, wore costumes, acted in scenes. And we were our own favourite characters.

      Only, I was always the mink and he was always the denim jacket. We met wearing them, parted wearing them and despite all the drinking, fucking, and fighting, we just couldn’t manage to take them off.

      He performed Romeo in his end of term project with a black eye. He got it smashing in the face of a man who propositioned me in an all night drinking club over the Christmas break. It was three o’clock in the morning. We’d been drinking since six. The man had said something I hadn’t quite heard and then all of a sudden we were outside in the bitter cold.

      They rolled around in the frozen black snow in the middle of the road, punching and kicking, blood forming pale pink pools between the patches of dark grit. A crowd gathered and cheered them on; shouting and jeering – full of exactly the kind of people you’d expect to be strolling around at three in the morning.

      I hated to be upstaged. Pulling the mink around me tightly, I walked away, staggering in my high heels over the snowdrifts to the car.

      We were doing a close up, just the mink and me, when I saw him running towards me, limping. His nose was bleeding and his knuckles smashed. The guy had been wearing a ring and the side of his face was cut.

      ‘You cunt!’ he shouted across the car park. ‘You filthy, fucking cunt!’

      So, we’re starting with Mamet.

       DENIM JACKET: I fucking defend your fucking honour and you fucking walk away!

       MINK: Get in the car.

       DENIM JACKET: Fuck you!

       MINK: Get in the fucking car!

       DENIM JACKET: I said, fuck you! Or maybe you didn’t fucking hear me. Maybe you were too busy walking the fuck away!

       MINK: I didn’t ask you to fight him, did I?

       DENIM JACKET: No man takes that.

       MINK: It was about me!

       DENIM JACKET: No man fucking takes that, understand? You’re my girlfriend. A man says something to you, he says it to me. Understand?

       MINK: Fuck you!

       DENIM JACKET: Fuck you too.

      (Pinter pause.)

       DENIM JACKET: You walked away.

       MINK: I couldn’t watch you do it, Baby. (Tears welling up in eyes; gin tears; three o’clock in the morning tears.) I just couldn’t watch you get hurt.

       (Grabs me by the shoulders; moving rapidly into Tennessee Williams territory now.)

       DENIM JACKET: You gotta have faith in me, Louie. Please. (Bloody head on mink.) I need you to have faith in me. (sotto voce) I need you, Baby. I need you.

      (Curtain.)

      Only the curtain never fell.

      We broke up just before I came to England, exhausted. I discovered I wasn’t a diva, that I didn’t have the endurance for grand opera. And there are only so many ways you can say ‘Fuck you’ to someone before you start to really mean it.

      I had imagined that passion, drama, and love were all one and the same – proof that the others existed. But the opposite was true: drama and passion are just very clever disguises for a love that has never taken root.

      I gave the mink away to a friend in New York. It was a heavy coat to wear and I was relieved to get rid of it. But very soon after it was gone, I began to feel that something was missing.