Look at me: (20 page)

But I wasn’t looking at the statue’s hair, I was looking at her face. It was oval-shaped, peaceful, distant, the eyes empty and flat as sky. She looked entirely absent—untouchable, as if she and this fashion shoot could not be made to overlap, despite Spiro’s furious efforts. The centuries between us were simply too many. Her detachment lent an utmost dignity to the marble woman, even with Spiro’s trembling hands at her throat. “History,” he murmured softly. “You know? It all comes down to that.”

Kendra, the stylist, brought in a couple of dresses and held the fabric to my skin. “Let’s do purple,” she said, and I left my chair and disrobed. Kendra helped me into the purple dress. The velvet felt cool and a little damp, like moss. The dance beat was rousing, insistent, a giant key winding the anticipation tighter and tighter in my chest. I popped a beer and had a sip, my first drink of the day.

On the set, Spiro’s assistants were musing over a Polaroid of Daphne. I joined her inside the plastic cube, the two of us dancing together while the lights were adjusted. The cube was just high enough for us to stand in. At Spiro’s prompting, we assumed tragic poses, fingers splayed, heads back. Our collective anticipation made a pressure in the room. I’d forgotten what this felt like; it had been so long since I’d had a job in which anyone cared about the pictures.

“Okay, Char, now sink down until your fingertips touch the floor,” Spiro said. “Look at me, sort of cruel. Bitch goddess. There you go.”

As he snapped the Polaroid, I noticed that the Korean girl had returned to the room, now fully made up and Flavified, draped in yellow crushed velvet and a foamy white collar. She was watching us dully from a chair—or not watching, for her eyes were as flat and empty as the marble Roman woman’s eyes. I felt a jerk of anger. Girls spend their lives dreaming about being where you are, I wanted to say. Where’s the fucking tragedy?

One of Spiro’s assistants waved the Polaroid dry and pulled it open for him to study. “Oooh, look at Charlotte,” Spiro said. The assistants, along with Ellis, Lily and Kendra, gathered around the Polaroid, then looked at me. I felt a rushing sensation inside as the old transistor kicked to life; I pictured sparks raining from my hair and eyes. I can do anything, I thought. I can recast the world in a different shape. I can make that camera burst into flame.

“You know,” Spiro said, shaking his head as he looked at me, “Oscar told me about your accident and I was like, Book her. I didn’t need to see a picture, I fucking knew.”

I crouched demurely, waves or particles—which?—issuing from my skin.

“Ellis, can you shadow them a little more before you start?” Spiro said.

I closed my eyes and drew Ellis toward me, smelling his presence inside the cube, pressed powder, sweat, mint on his breath. As he shadowed my eyes, I felt myself controlling him from behind my face, guiding his hand irresistibly.

At an odd snapping noise, I opened my eyes. Ellis was pulling a pair of latex gloves over his gnarled hands. He crouched beside me, tore open a packet and removed a razor blade. My confusion amassed only gradually, so deep was my sense of control, my faith that my own lunar commands were moving everyone else. I watched Ellis, expecting him to snip a loose thread from my dress. Instead, he touched my face, exploring the skin gently with his latex-covered fingertips. The razor blade, in the other hand, hovered near me. “Hold it,” I said, fighting my way to a standing position in the copious dress. “What’s going on?”

Startled, Ellis turned to Spiro.

“He’s going to cut you,” Spiro said, as if this were self-evident.

“Cut me where?”

“Your face.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” My hands flew involuntarily to my cheeks.

Spiro, Ellis and Lily exchanged looks of bafflement. “Did Oscar not tell you?” Spiro asked.

“No,” I said. “He didn’t.”

“He cuts everyone,” Daphne said.

I gaped at her. “And you don’t mind?”

She shrugged, leaning against the side of the cube.

“I don’t cut deep at all,” Ellis said softly. “You’ll hardly feel it.”

“Does it bleed?”

“Well, of course it bleeds,” Spiro said. “That’s the whole point.”

“This is insane,” I said. Imploringly, I turned again to Daphne. “How do you expect to get work with cuts all over your face?”

“They don’t leave scars,” she said. “They usually take about a week to heal, as long as you don’t pick them. Last time he cut me I worked twice that same week. People like, wanted the scabs on.”

I stood in dumbfounded silence, wanting very much to be convinced. But it was my poor face, my abused, still-tender face with its hidden cargo of titanium. “Can’t you use fake blood?” I pleaded. “I’ll buy it myself!”

The word “fake” induced a collective flinch, as if I’d used a racial slur. “Fake is fake,” Spiro said.

He handed his camera to Richard and came inside the cube to where Ellis and I were standing, so the three of us made a tight little triangle. “Charlotte, listen to me,” Spiro said, with uncharacteristic calm. “I’m trying to get at some kind of truth here, in this phony, sick, ludicrous world. Something pure. Releasing blood is a sacrifice. It’s the most real thing there is.”

I nodded, waiting for it to seem true in the way he said, for comprehension to overwhelm my vision like the tilt of a kaleidoscope. I leaned on my reluctance and waited for it to die, to be extinguished by the enormity of this opportunity, the absolute necessity that I triumph.

“Everything is artifice,” Spiro went on. “Everything is pretending. You open a magazine, what is all that crap? Look how pretty I am, look how perfect my life is. But it’s lies, nothing is really like that. And politicians, too, spin this, spin that, pulling something over on people—I’m sick of it. It literally makes me nauseous.”

I listened with a teetering feeling inside me, as if I might sneeze. It makes sense, I thought. I agree. I wanted desperately to proceed, to reclaim the power I’d felt only minutes ago, with everyone looking at me. As if sensing he was close to persuading me, Spiro took my arms in each of his trembling hands and dropped his voice to a whisper. “I want to cut through that shit to what’s real and fundamental,” he said. “And I want you to be part of it, Charlotte, that’s why I chose you. This isn’t about fashion—we’re way past fashion here. This is about finding a new way to live in the world.”

I looked beyond Spiro’s frantic jaws at the towering lights, the silver umbrella reflectors, the three assistants, the ladders and tripods and cameras and models in gushing velvet dresses and foaming collars and Kabuki makeup and Flavian hairdos. “It’s too bad Oscar didn’t call you when my face was mashed to a pulp last August,” I heard myself say. “Every bone was crushed, you would’ve loved it.”

Spiro released my arms. “She doesn’t get it,” he told Ellis, who jerked the rack of his shoulders as if to say, We tried.

My palms were still pressed to my face. For so long, the skin had been numb, too numb to feel anything. “This face has already been through so much,” I said, in apology.

“Fair enough,” Spiro said. He turned his back on me and signaled the North Korean girl. “Kim! Kimmy!” He waved his arms, and she jumped to attention as if she’d been slapped. “It’s your lucky day, honey,” Spiro called.

I vacated the plastic cube and the Korean girl stepped tentatively inside it. “Lily, can you touch up her hair?” Spiro said.

Without even glancing at me, Lily bustled into the cube with her pick and comb and can of spray and began elevating the girl’s curls, which had drooped. I noticed that the girl was trembling, making the whorls of her lace collar shake. When Lily was done, Spiro eased the Korean into precisely the position I had occupied just moments ago. The atmosphere in the room was fragile, raw.

“Where?” Ellis asked.

“High on the cheek,” Spiro said. “And a long one on the forehead.”

I wanted to walk away, but I couldn’t seem to do it.

Gently, Ellis lifted the blade to the girl’s brown cheek, then dipped one corner under her skin like a swimmer testing the water with a toe. The girl flinched, but didn’t make a sound. With delicacy and swiftness, Ellis pulled the blade through her skin. His shadow self appeared without my even looking for it: the gentle butcher, who massages his victims to loosen their flesh before putting in the knife. Blood dropped from the wound, and at the same time, tears rose in the girl’s eyes and spilled from the corners. “Lily!” Spiro said. “Get those tears.”

Lily darted over and dabbed at the girl’s eyes with a tissue. Daphne moved close to her and put an arm around her shoulders. The Korean girl seemed not to notice. She looked straight ahead, enduring this assault with the incomprehension of one who accepted long ago that suffering has no purpose. I felt something in me collapse, a prickling around my eyes and nose. I turned and went to the makeup room, where I yanked the hairpieces off my head, twisted out of the dress and threw it all on the floor. I thought I would vomit—wanted to—but when I stood over the toilet, no release came. As I pulled on my clothes, I heard the dense click of the shutter, followed by Spiro’s voice. “Beautiful, Kimmy! Ooh, look at that!”

I had left my coat on a barstool near the zinc countertop; I went there now with eyes averted and slipped it on, trying not to look at the set. But I had to look. The Korean girl was standing in the box, blood running from her cheek down her neck, soaking the white ruffles of her collar. A second cut on her forehead bled into one of her eyes and back out, down the side of her face. Daphne stood behind her, head flung back in a pose of ecstasy. There was a sweet, vulnerable feeling in the air, a postcoital tenderness.

“Okay, Daphne, straighten up,” Spiro said. “That’s it—now look at me. Kim, give me those eyes. Strong, both of you … feel your strength and your power. You’re goddesses, all right? You rule the fucking world … good … good. Eyes, Kimmy … good.”

All at once, for the very first time, the Korean girl looked at me directly. I felt the engagement of her sight physically, as if she’d grabbed me. While the shutter clicked, we stared at each other, our gazes inter-locked, and something passed between us: a wordless acknowledgment of the depravity that surrounded us. It felt like a full minute before the girl blinked and moved her eyes, just slightly. Then they were blank, as before.

“I’m leaving now,” I said in a normal speaking voice, but no one seemed to hear.

In the elevator, I noticed my face was wet. Red makeup came off on my hands when I wiped it, and I recoiled, thinking at first it was blood. I felt like I’d barely escaped with my life. And Oscar had known, of course. Had chosen not to tell me, hoping that when the moment came, I would find the pressure too great to resist. Had provided Kim, just in case. I couldn’t blame him, really; before the accident, I might well have said yes.

Back on Broome Street, I walked without knowing where I went. I stared through boutique windows at couches, at vases of blown glass, letting the cold air clear my head. It’s over, I told myself repeatedly, not knowing quite what this meant. I turned up West Broadway, a lunchtime murmur roiling behind the windows of restaurants. The models were out in force, their spindly doe’s legs splayed beneath short winter coats. They looked so young—younger than I’d ever felt in my life. I noticed one with short, raven-colored hair who looked not unlike myself (we are interchangeable—the first lesson one learns as a professional beauty). She and I reached the corner of Houston at the same time, but I let her go ahead. From behind, I noticed people glance at her as she passed them crossing the street, their eyes holding her an extra moment, then reluctantly pulling away. The girl pretended not to see them, just as I used to do, but she felt the power I remembered feeling—I saw it in her walk, the way she held her head, a self-consciousness that made her every move look studied.

But was that really power? I wondered, following behind as she turned left, onto the north side of Houston. Or did it only feel like power? She made her way along, eyes straight ahead, the shape of her portfolio visible in her small backpack, and hovering around her, something only I could see: the nimbus of her faith that she had earned an extraordinary life, and would have one. No, I thought, it was wrong—there was no such thing as the power of beauty. Only the power to surround yourself with it.

The girl turned north, into the Village, but I continued west to Sixth Avenue. I think I knew where I was going before I let myself admit it. People had flocked to the streets in their puffy coats. The snow was almost gone, sucked away by the gigantic furnace seething deep beneath the city’s concrete. At West Fourth, I watched a basketball game through a chain-link fence; the sight of male bodies in motion, even bodies completely indifferent to my presence, cheered me somewhat.

Above Twenty-third Street, I was tantalized once again by the profusion of old painted signs; every building, it seemed, bore several faded tattoos, many superimposed and legible only faintly, only in parts. “5” “Hand.” “Fish.” I was in the flower district now, shop doors releasing humid, jungly currents into the cold, cats tangled behind steamy windows. I turned west and walked to Seventh Avenue.

Anthony Halliday’s receptionist wasn’t on duty, so I took the liberty of bypassing her desk and knocking directly on his door, which was closed. I opened it. The detective was leaning back in his chair, feet on his desk, reading a paperback. “Charlotte,” he said, obviously taken aback by my unheralded arrival. He sat up and set the paperback aside. “This is a surprise.”

He was looking at me oddly, and I remembered my red ears and pale, weird makeup. “What are you reading?” I asked.

“Something extracurricular.” He seemed embarrassed.

I went around his desk and picked up the book.
The Long Goodbye
, by Raymond Chandler.

“Slow day,” he said.

The office was a quiet, forgotten place, light streaking lazily through the window. From my vantage point beside the detective, I was able to see the contents of the photograph I’d noticed on his desk the last time: two redheaded girls who looked identical. Twins. Three years old? Five years old? I was terrible at guessing children’s ages. They were laughing, sitting side by side on a swing.