Free The Botox Diaries by Janice Kaplan, Lynn Schnurnberger

first night—the very first night we met—we took a bubble bath together in a luxuriously large tub that overlooked a moonlit ocean. Only a Frenchman would know to reserve a bathroom with a view. And that’s how it all started. I was barely twenty-four, still the proper wait-for-three-dates-before-you-kiss-him Jess my mother had raised me to be. But I’d been at my first job long enough to earn this one-week vacation. And why not make it a wild romance with an exotic Frenchman on a balmy Caribbean island? I was so free, so unlike myself. Almost as if the FBI had relocated me with a new name and identity. For seven days, I could be whoever I wanted to be. Or, as it turned out, whoever Jacques wanted me to be.
    So there I was that first night, naked in a frothing tub, gazing at the stars, with a hunky man massaging every inch of my body. And then he said,
“Je veux laver les cheveux belles.”
“I want to wash your beautiful hair.” Could that be what he was saying? My high school French was pretty
mauvais
. For all I knew he was saying he wanted to wash my beautiful
horses
. They both made about the same amount of sense to me—until Jacques actually began sensuously caressing my hair, working us both up into a lather.
    Lucy thinks she’s infatuated? I’d put my first-week obsession up against hers any day. When my vacation was over, I wanted to die, but instead I went home to Ohio, and that p.r. job at the museum didn’t seem so glamorous anymore. Then Jacques started calling. He had an apartment in New York so why didn’t I come live with him? He missed me. He wanted me. He needed to feel me in his arms again. Just ashort visit, I told my mother, as I bought my plane ticket and packed up the biggest bag I had.
    For six months, maybe a year, the passion never cooled. We drank wine, made love, ate dinner, made love, took a bath, made love. For variety, we went to restaurants, drank champagne, and kissed passionately, waiting to get home so we could make love. He stroked my arm so frequently that a friend quipped that like a piece of velvet, my skin would wear out. Getting married was a formality since we were never apart.
    Oh, Lucy, you won’t believe me if I tell you that the frenzy won’t last forever. That the sex might continue to be great but that, eventually, other things will matter, too. One day before Jacques proposed, I made a careful list of the pros and cons of our relationship. The negatives: Language, Religion, Political Differences. He Doesn’t Want Children. He Always Expects to Get His Way. Never mind that the French are perversely fond of Jerry Lewis. And on and on for eighteen lines. On the plus side, one lone entry: He Makes Me Feel Alive. That was enough to swing the balance, to change my life, and to carry me over the threshold.
    Feeling alive again. Is that the draw of Hunter Green, Lucy? If so, I get it. And what I wouldn’t give to feel that way again.

Chapter FOUR
     
    THE WAY LUCY’S FEELING when she gets back from L.A. is lousy. She takes to her bed for two days—a distinctly un-Lucy-like move.
    “The whole world is just spinning,” she whispers when I come over with a pot of freshly brewed green tea.
    “Are we talking physical or the metaphysical here?” I ask.
    Lucy looks at me blankly. I decide to rephrase the question. “I mean, are you dizzy? Do you feel sick? Or is Hunter making you crazy?”
    “What, are you nuts?” she says, jumping out of her king-sized sleigh bed and smoothing out the six hundred thread count Egyptian cotton blue toile Frette duvet. “Don’t talk about Hunter in here.” Her eyes dart around the room as if she’s looking for microphones, a minicam, or James Bond’s secretly recording martini glass that Dan might be monitoring.
    “Do you think Dan suspects?” I ask, truly concerned.
    “Would you shut up!” Lucy hisses. “I’m not kidding! Just shut up in here!” She pointedly turns away from me and goes back to smoothing out the duvet. Her