Cherries and a big blond dog

Toni Schlesinger has a very funny and slightly unnerving piece up at the Observer about one man's experience of living with a model in a Chinatown loft--here are the opening paragraphs:

Behind a locked gate, a floor up from a street in Chinatown where men stare down at green vegetables and octopuses and woman carry parasols in the heat of the day, the model Emily Sandberg was eating cherries and her husband was watching her eat the cherries and a big blond dog had his eye on both of them. It was quiet except for the dog breathing.

To live with a model must be like living with a precious vase or something really valuable, like the Unicorn Tapestry. “She’s always easy on the eye,” said the husband, Gary Gold, a longtime drummer and music producer who has played with Keith Richards, B.B. King and Chuck Berry, and made albums for Smokey Robinson (the 2007 Grammy-nominated Timeless Love), Bonnie Raitt and the Neville Brothers. “I know a lot of models,” he said. “She’s just a special one from the bunch for me. Sometimes I see her”—maybe standing near the piano that Mr. Gold used to play for comedy acts at Catch a Rising Star, where John Belushi broke the piano keys—“and I’ll be struck, and she looks like a statue to me, like an alabaster statue, like wow. I just wonder.”

Neither Mr. Gold nor Ms. Sandberg would give their ages. She is tall and pale, otherworldly, sort of pre-cog: as if she has just risen out of the Philip Dick story where those psychic people live in a tub of water in a constant state of sleep. She is in magazines most of the time: Vogue, Elle, and in ad campaigns ranging from Barneys to Fendi to (soon) Banana Republic. Of course she has been on every runway from New York to Paris to Milan, which is where she met Mr. Gold, who had been brought by friends—“one of us was a movie star”—in sort of an Entourage situation, to a Donatella Versace after-party in 2000.