Look at me: (19 page)

Where had I heard about this? Somewhere recently; I groped the white empty corridors of my immediate past, and then I remembered: Oscar’s North Korean girl. The one who wouldn’t eat the orange.

“Wow,” I said, and turned to look at her again; the girl was so oblivious that outright gaping seemed permissible. “So she’s part of this shoot?”

“She’s the backup.”

“Backup what?”

“Model. You know, in case someone’s not comfortable.”

“Oh, is it nude?” I asked, surprised that Oscar wouldn’t have mentioned this.

“Nude? No no!” Lily said, distracted by the rack of dresses. “Did you see? Here’s my favorite.” She pulled one off the rack and held it to her neck, a waterfall of crushed yellow velvet. “My girls would go ape-shit for this stuff.”

In the makeup room I met Ellis, a buff Australian with a deep tan, fragile blue eyes and a beaten looking face. His long, dirty-blond hair was pulled back in a beaded leather thong. He’d just finished Daphne, a new girl whose face I’d been seeing everywhere: white-blond hair and a rotten, downturned mouth. I sat in the makeup chair, feeling a thrum of pleasure at each familiar detail: the hot bulbs around the mirror, smells of hairspray and powder and hair dryer exhaust. The big slovenly makeup box.

To my alarm, Ellis began swabbing off my base. “Do you have to do that?” I asked. Since the accident, no human outside the medical profession had seen me without it.

“Spiro wants to use this real hypoallergenic one,” he said.

“Believe me,” I said, “mine is hypoallergenic.” But Ellis continued to work, pinching the dainty cotton pads between fingers that looked organic, like roots.

When my base was gone, Ellis drew himself back and looked at me. “Something happened to you,” he said.

“I had a little accident.” I was forcing myself to hold still.

He took my face in his hands, moving his eyes over it as if he were reading. His palms were warm, almost hot, and the feel of them on my skin had an instantly calming effect, like the touch of a magician. “Little?”

“Well, medium-sized.”

“Brave girl.” He let me go and began applying the other base, a lighter one, nudging it over my skin with a fresh latex sponge. “This covers really well,” he said, I thought to reassure me. His touch felt so warm. It was hard to believe this was work.

In the adjoining room, Lily had spiraled Daphne’s hair around scores of the tiniest curlers I had ever seen, and was blowing them dry. The girl’s exposed ears were covered with crimson powder. “Freaky ears,” I said to Ellis.

“Spiro’s a freak,” Ellis said.

“Hey, Charlotte,” Lily called through the doorway, over the dryer. “After your article comes out, will you possibly write a book?”

Ah, yes. The article. “I don’t even read books,” I said.

“Who cares? An interesting thing happened to you.”

“You’d think it would be interesting,” I said, “but it’s actually pretty boring.”

“But you know—to look different all of a sudden, overnight,” she said. “Everyone imagines that.”

“Do they?” I flicked my eyes at Ellis, hoping he would proffer an opinion, but he was absorbed in his work on my face.

“Close,” he said, and shadowed my eyes.

“You can tell us what it’s like,” Lily said. “What happens next.”

“But if what happens next is that I write a book, won’t I be writing a book about writing a book?”

Ellis was pinning up my hair. “Ears,” he said, dipping a giant soft white brush into a tub of scarlet powder. “Don’t get ticklish.”

“I have this friend you should talk to,” Lily said. “She’s with a big firm. She knows exactly how all those things work, getting published, getting in the news.”

“Sure.” I was barely listening. Ellis was brushing the red powder onto my ears, an experience I found almost unbearably sensual. I shut my eyes and let the dance beat judder through me. I imagined Ellis kissing my mouth, a long deep kiss, his warm tongue. Then leaning forward, unzipping his black jeans. Blood rushed to my face and made it ache.

I sensed a commotion of nervous energy, and knew that Spiro was near. When I opened my eyes, he was examining Daphne’s hair in the next room. Lily had removed the tiny rollers and now was spraying the resulting bubble bath of curls into a sharply defined mass that hugged the top of Daphne’s head like a bonnet. “You did it!” Spiro breathed ecstatically. “Lily, you’re a totally gifted supergenius, do you know that?”

Lily smiled. “Yes I know that.”

Spiro nudged Daphne’s curls. “Spray them really shiny,” he instructed. “It should be exactly like marble, only it’s hair. Look what a supergenius Lily is,” he called through the doorway to Ellis and me.

“What’s the story with that hair?” I asked.

“Flavian,” Spiro said. “From ancient Rome.” He was throwing off nervous energy like heat. “Wherever they have those Roman busts, like in museums?” he said. “You’ll always see a few girls with this Flavian hair. I was in Naples last summer, and I went to the big archaeological museum there, and I looked at all that Flavian hair and I screamed! I mean it, I screamed out loud. I screamed, OH, MY GOD. OH, MY FUCKING GOD!!”

“The Catholics must have liked that very much,” said Lily.

“Then? In this gallery on Madison Avenue? I found one of these busts, and I bought it. Didn’t I, Lily?”

“Yes you did,” Lily said.

“I showed it to Lily so she’d know exactly what I wanted. She told me something I didn’t even know: she told me the Romans used drills to drill into the marble to make the middle part of each curl. I mean, obviously not electric drills, but … God, I wish I could show you,” he said to no one in particular. “Shit, why didn’t I bring that bust? Richard!” he called to an assistant. “Can we messenger for a Roman bust, or is it too risky?” He left the room to consult with Richard, but was back a moment later, plucking the Camel from Daphne’s mouth. He took a long hit and replaced it. “The vibe in here is getting good,” he said, dancing a little, popping smoke rings at the mirror. “Richard, can you turn up the sound? What about you folks?
Stai contenta
, Charlotte?”

“I’m happy,” I said, moving to the music as much as possible while holding my face still for Ellis. And I was; happiness leaned against me from inside. I reached for my purse, took out two Merits and offered one to Ellis, who lit them both with a malachite lighter. Then he stood back and gazed at my face, smoking meditatively. I glanced at myself in the mirror, a stranger in beautiful makeup, and felt a twisting excitement I would forever associate with my first years back in New York after Paris, years during which an exquisite tension had gathered around me and begun to tighten, slowly lifting me up. When Oscar commenced to negotiate a three-year contract on my behalf with a major American designer, the tension reached its apogee, and I enjoyed the epistardom accorded those whom everyone believes will soon be stars. I was beloved. The air smelled like money. So close did I feel to the mirrored room that I experienced an anticipatory nostalgia for the sweet, small life I would soon cast off; its every detail felt precious. And much as I longed, now, to take credit for the failure of that tension to coalesce into something coherent, longed to be able to say, It was my fault, I blew it all with one massive and outrageous fuckup, vomiting on a designer’s head, gamboling naked onto the runway—those horrors one dreams of half longingly, half in terror—I could never find a connection between any behavior of mine and the result, or lack thereof. The designer in question pulled out at the last minute and signed another girl whose grinning physiognomy was now a fixture on the wall calendar—exercise video circuit, and from that point on, my momentum began to ease, or drift. A subtle change at first, a calm that was almost welcome after the maelstrom that had surrounded me. But the spreading quiet soon assumed a creepy, menacing note—where had everyone gone? Like someone in an elevator whose cable has snapped, I began wildly pushing buttons, sounding alarms, but nothing could halt the sensation of rapid, involuntary descent. “Who took you to St. Barts?” I hollered at Oscar when he called to report my cancellation by a photographer whose support was mandatory for any model aspiring to the highest tier of success. “Who bought you a Claude Montana jacket with zebra-skin lapels?”

And then, from one day to the next, I gave it up. It’s gone, I thought, it didn’t happen, not this time—not this way. Fuck them, I thought. And I meant it.

Did I need a shrink to help me then? No, I did not.

And that was basically that, although it took several more years before I was truly a catalogue girl with no prestige whatsoever. Just how many years I wasn’t sure, exactly, because at that point, the point at which my acceleration began to reverse, time started running together—there was no more arc of ascension by which to measure it. The years began passing in clumps, so that one day I was twenty-three (to the world) standing at the threshold of the mirrored room, and the next, ten years had passed and I was twenty-eight and a professional beauty, by which I mean a person in possession of phone numbers of sumptuous homes around the world where she (or he) will be welcome, a person adept at packing on a half-hour’s notice for a trip to Bali or a sailing cruise off Turkey’s southern coast, a person who will never have to pay for her dinner as long as she doesn’t expect to choose the company. Indeed, understanding how much she can reasonably expect is key to the professional beauty’s continued circulation, and requires the use of an obscure algorithm involving the variables of how good she looks, how easy she is to be around, and what, exactly, she’s willing to give in return. As the years go on and one’s looks and novelty wear off, one had better start cultivating some other skills. Of course, the professional beauty’s existence was generally an anteroom to some more permanent arrangement, and the ones with any sense married well as expeditiously as possible, while their stock was high. Such transactions weren’t necessarily base or grotesque; there were plenty of stops on the road to trading looks for cash before you arrived at the old carp at the end of the line whose breathing was audible at dinner and whose daughters were nearer your mother’s age than your own. In my case, marriage to money would certainly have been the prudent route, and yet I couldn’t seem to do it. Having forgone a marriage of love, how could I promise those very same things out of mere practicality? It seemed dull and frightening. Try as I might to interest myself permanently in the real estate owners I met, owners of yachts and islands and seventeenth-century castles, of Bonnards and Picassos and Rothkos and vintage cars and zoo animals, private screening rooms and fleets of chestnut horses, my concentration always broke; my mind wandered, another man came along, and the prior one fell away or married someone else or simply vanished.

And at a certain point, after many years at this sort of life, I began to sense that my poor concentration wasn’t really that. I’d compromised, God knew—I’d forfeited my hope for the mirrored room and settled instead for the chance to rub shoulders now and then with some of its inhabitants. But what made these compromises bearable was some last expectation I hadn’t relinquished. I was waiting. Waiting and watching for a new discovery to refashion my life.

A signal. A mystery. Something deeper and more true than anything else. In nightclubs, those smoky boxes full of promise, and even on the street, I would find myself scanning faces, expecting one to stand out, to look back at me in a particular way, a way I would recognize only when I saw it. I wasn’t desperate. I never doubted it would come, if I waited long enough.

Ellis brushed a last layer of rice powder onto my face, and I thought about waiting—how vulnerable it made you. Because eventually you got tired. You got tired and you made a choice, you picked someone—or worse, someone picked you—and you believed he was the person you’d been waiting for. And you gave him everything.

Spiro came in to look at me. “There’s something new in your face, Charlotte,” he said, approvingly.

“The whole face is new.”

“No, but see, it’s real now, you know?” he said. “It’s like all that prettiness has burned off, and you’re left with something deeper. Just the very bare essentials.”

“Terrific,” I said.

When I left the makeup chair (reluctantly, wishing I could prolong my tenancy there just another few minutes), I saw the Korean girl standing in the doorway, waiting to take my place. I’d forgotten her. I smiled, but her eyes looked unfocused, as if she couldn’t see me. I went to the adjacent room and sat in the chair before Lily, who pinned three long brown hairpieces to my head and began setting them in the same tiny curlers she’d used on Daphne. Her fingers moved over my scalp with a ravenous life of their own.

“Close,” I heard Ellis say to the girl, and then, “Your eyes, dear.”

“She looks so unhappy,” I murmured.

“I don’t think she speaks any English,” Lily said. “But she’s getting some amazing work. Calvin Klein’s started using her.”

“What’s her name?”

“Something complicated,” she said. “Everyone just calls her Kim. Oh, before I forget!” She pulled a computerized address book from her bag and scrolled through it. “You have to call this friend of mine,” she said, copying something onto the back of her business card. “Victoria Knight,” I read.

“She does what again?” I asked.

“PR. Call her now, before your article comes out, so you can make the most out of it. Tell her I said to call—she can really help you, Charlotte.”

My need of help was the one thing everyone seemed to agree on.

“How about some red ears?” I heard Ellis cajole the girl. “Everyone else has red ears …”

After a while, Lily pulled out the rollers, teased my hair, then used a pick to wind the curls into tight little coils, which she sprayed until they looked shellacked. Soon I was wearing my own strange bonnet of hair. From the set I could hear the flash, a light popping sound like the explosion of a bubble made of glass. I was dying to get out there.

A doorbell rang, and one of Spiro’s assistants buzzed someone in. A moment later I heard the elevator, and then Spiro himself bounded into the room bearing aloft with shaking arms the marble bust of a woman’s shoulders and head, about half the size of life. “I had to have it here, to remind myself,” he said, cradling the bust in both hands and looking at it in the mirror. The marble woman wore a stack of curls very much like my own. Spiro held her up to my head and studied the two of us together in the mirror. “How’s that for a little historical accuracy?” he asked.