The Longest Date: Life as a Wife by Cindy Chupack Page B

travel test. For example, no sooner had I passed my Central American test and established myself firmly as Ian’s girlfriend than I had to start training for the international competition that was being held in the south of France.
    We had been invited by Ian’s best (and frankly, most beautiful) friends, Philippe and Amy, to celebrate Philippe’s fortieth birthday at his family’s sprawling summer home in the south of France. We would be joining their fabulous international friends, eating delicious French food, and swimming at the gorgeous French Riviera, and I was dreading it, because Ian said there was talk of a surprise Amy was planning for Philippe’s birthday, a show or performance of some kind, and all the women would be participating, me included, and we might be topless.
    Excuse me,
what
?
    The details were vague, and as I was getting them through Ian, I never got anything like the full picture, but the partial picture was enough to start giving me anxiety about the trip. I asked Ian to tell Amy that if the women would be doing a topless “can-can,” his girlfriend “can’t-can’t,” but we were still very much looking forward to the trip.
    He said, “Let’s just go and see what it is,” which I took to mean that he didn’t want to seem uncool (like his girlfriend was uncool) to these people, his coolest of cool friends.
    The details continued to be slow in coming even once we got to France. We were all much too busy enjoying the food, wine, cheese, bread, beach, pool, and view, but I never stopped secretly dreading the “show.”
    I finally learned that it wasn’t a show, it was a
tableau vivant
, which is a live reenactment of a painting. I don’t know if there was an actual painting we were reenacting—if there was, I never saw it—but I gathered there would be topless women at the center of it, fanned out like a flower.
    I finally worked up the nerve to tell Amy that although I was so appreciative to be included in the festivities, I really didn’t feel comfortable being topless. And that is when Amy assured me that I wasn’t supposed to be—I was going to be in a toga serving grapes or reading books or something equally benign on the fringes of the “painting,” while she and her friends who had been models like her (did I mention she had been a model?) would be topless.
    I was torn between being insulted and relieved. It was like breaking up with someone who didn’t know he was dating you. But there was no time to be embarrassed. The men were already sequestered inside the house, and the women were scurrying around the grounds, spreading out flowers, preparing to become a living painting that may or may not have existed in real life.
    The models stripped down to their G-strings and sprayed themselves with gold paint as nonchalantly as if they did this every day. I was given a sheet with which to fashion a toga, and I was told I could put it on over my sundress, making me feel like the least naked person in the south of France. And then I was spray-painted gold—maybe as a consolation prize—and given a book of poetry and positioned to look as if I was reading to my friend Liz, and she was finding the whole thing (and my nervousness) hilarious, which worked for her character, because she was supposed to be midlaugh, enjoying the poetry I was reading to her, as our friend Christina (also in toga) stood by holding a ceramic pitcher.
    Finally Amy announced that we were ready, and we all held perfectly still for five minutes as the men (and Philippe’s parents!) viewed us from the house’s wraparound porch. I am told it was quite breathtaking from above. I felt silly, not because I was in a toga spray-painted gold, but because I had wasted so much time and energy worrying about this
tableau vivant
when there was so much more to worry about.
    There was all-night dancing (in clubs and at the summer house), techno music (in clubs and at the summer house), chicken fights in the pool (and