Look at me: (5 page)

Chapter Two

It was almost
a new year, 199–, by the time I ceased malingering and returned to New York. There, Dr. Martin Miller, plastic surgeon-cum-society dinner guest, performed a second operation to “fine tune” my bone-grafted nose, my crooked eyelids, and my cheekbones: the tools of my trade, you might say. Dr. Miller, who was married to a model, normally devoted his reconstructive powers to making wealthy, attractive people look even more attractive—not scrapping with the “gross disfiguration” that follows cataclysmic trauma to the face. But he’d given nips and tucks and blasts of suction to enough of my friends that he took me on as a favor. He worked from photographs, which of course I had in bulk, and would do his best, he said, to make me look like myself.

“After such a trauma, Charlotte,” he warned, “restoration will always fall short of perfection.”

“I was never perfect,” I said. “In fact, I’m expecting some improvements on the original.”

Grace came back to New York with me in mid-December so I wouldn’t have to face my empty apartment alone. I had lived for seven years on the twenty-fifth floor of a modern high-rise at the end of a cul de sac on East Fifty-second Street, so my view encompassed the East River, the bottom of Roosevelt Island and Long Island City. The apartment was in better shape than I’d feared; Anastasia, my alcoholic cleaning woman (as I had discovered when the vodka in my freezer turned to solid ice), had gone so far as to shampoo the wall-to-wall carpet, so the place looked better than usual. The doorman had been forwarding my mail and Grace had paid my mortgage and bills from my savings, so aside from the diminished balance in my account, no awful surprises awaited me. Grace stayed two weeks, nursing me through my second operation until the bandages came off and the ointment was out of my eyes. On the day before she left, we took a cab to Central Park and wandered in the aching cold, I wearing my now standard uniform of a head scarf (wool, for the change in season), dark glasses and pancake makeup, Grace in the black mink coat Frank had given her last Christmas.

“Watch out no one sprays that coat,” I said.

“Sprays it?”

“With paint. You know, animal rights.”

Grace laughed. “I thought you meant someone might pee on me.”

“Jesus. Is that what you think goes on in New York?”

“Worse,” she said sweetly.

A weird sequence of weather events had left a thin skin of ice around every tree and branch and twig. Each time the wind blew, a splintery groan issued from all directions at once.

“What will you do after I leave?” Grace asked.

“Finish getting better,” I said, pulling the scarf tighter around my face. “Unleash myself on the world.”

“And then what?”

“Isn’t that something? Considering where I started?”

“I mean what will you do? How will you live?” Her face was sharp with worry.

“Stop,” I said.

We stood in silence. Grace looked at the sky. She was one of those people who so overestimate their own subtlety that they end up divulging their worst fears in detail. I knew she thought my life was ruined.

“You can always come back,” she said, “if you feel like it.”

“After five months in Rockford! I’ll have convulsions if I go back.”

“Oh, please,” Grace said, “spare me that act.”

During my recovery from my second operation, I let my machine answer the phone, watched a lot of TV and became an unofficial monitor of East River boat traffic. It was far too cold to sit on my balcony, so I watched the slow parade from the soft white upholstery of my sectional couch: bright red tugboats and blue-and-white police boats and long flats of garbage held down by nets. I smoked Merits into a giant zinc ashtray. When I called people, I pretended I was still in Rockford, and when sirens or honking horns from the FDR managed to vault the twenty-five floors to where I sat, I pressed the mute button.

Why didn’t I urge my friends to bring me casseroles and groceries and lounge with me on my sectional couch? Because I was weak. Oh, yes, that
is
the time when you need people most, I assured myself as the silence thumped at my ears. But you have to resist. Because once they’ve seen you like this, once they’ve witnessed your dull, uneven hair and raspy voice, your hesitancy and cringing need for love, your smell—the smell of your weakness!—they’ll never forget, and long after you’ve regained your vitality, after you yourself have forgotten these exhibits of your weakness, they’ll look at you and
still see them.

Late one afternoon, I heard the machine pick up as I watched the early darkness fall over Long Island City. It was Anthony Halliday, the detective. I’d forgotten him.

“You returned a call from me a couple of months ago,” he said. “I’ve been leaving you messages since then.”

I had a dim recollection of someone telling me this detective was in a mental hospital, but my memories of the Rockford convalescence were already so muted and strange that I couldn’t be sure. He sounded sane enough. I waited a half hour and called him back.

“Anthony Halliday,” he answered.

“Charlotte Swenson,” I countered.

“Charlotte Swenson.” He sounded pleased to hear from me. “Are you back in New York?”

“Not yet.”

“I understand you had a serious car accident.”

“Yes,” I said, then faltered, unwilling to elaborate. “So what’s this about?”

“A guy disappeared a few months ago,” the detective said. “He went by the name of ‘Z.’ I understand you knew him.”

“I knew who he was.”

In the small and protean circle of nightclubs where for years I’d spent a portion of my time, Z had become something of a fixture in the months before my accident. He was one of those people whom it was impossible, and slightly unpleasant, to imagine in daylight.

“What does that mean?” I asked. “Disappeared.”

“No one’s seen him since August.”

“Do they think something happened to him?”

“‘They’ is me, at this point,” he said. “The police aren’t really involved.”

“Why are you looking for him?”

“Hey,” he said, and laughed. “I’m asking the questions.”

“Well, that’s not much fun for me.”

Was I flirting with this detective, this Anthony Halliday? It had been so long, I wasn’t even sure.

“I’d like to meet with you when you’re back in New York,” he said. “When will that be? ”

“Couple of weeks.”

“I’ll call you in three,” he said. “Meantime, take care. Get well.”

“You, too,” I said.

There was a startled pause. He hung up without saying good-bye.

It was not until late January that I finally made a lunch date with Oscar, my booker. By then my face had been healed, or “settled,” as I thought of it, from the second operation, for almost a month. But I’d postponed its reckoning with the world for the simple reason that I still didn’t know what I looked like. I’d spent as long as an hour staring through the ring of chalky light around my bathroom mirror; I’d held up old pictures of myself beside my reflection and tried to compare them. But my sole discovery was that in addition to not knowing what I looked like now, I had never known. The old pictures were no help; like all good pictures, they hid the truth. I had never kept a bad one—this was one of my cardinal rules, photographically speaking. One: never let someone take your picture until you’re ready, or the result will almost certainly be awful. Two: never keep bad pictures of yourself for any reason, sentimental or otherwise. Bad pictures reveal you in exactly the light you wish never to be seen, and not only will they be found, if you keep them, but invariably by the single person in the world you least want to see you that way.

Now I’d made a new discovery: bad pictures were the only ones that could show you what you actually looked like. I would have killed for one.

Eventually I gave up, and made the date with Oscar.

We met at Raw Feed, a restaurant in the West Twenties whose front man was Jess DeSoto, a garrulous male model and my friend. I arrived early and stood outside for several minutes, touching my hair and face, leaping away from the glass doors each time people approached to go in or out. It felt like years, not months, since anyone had seen me.

Jess DeSoto was part of my generation of models. I’d worked with him countless times over the years, slept with him twice while waiting out a rainstorm in Barbados, attended his wedding, and bought a silver rattle at Barney’s when Geo, his little boy, was born. Now he gave me one of those warm, flustered hellos you give to people you know you should know, but don’t. I looked straight into his eyes and told him I was meeting Oscar, awaiting the crack of recognition, his embarrassed laughter and passionate hug of apology. Nothing. “This way,” he said, and with his swaggering walk led me to a booth along the wall and set two menus down. “Enjoy,” he said, and hurried off to greet another party.

I slid into the booth. My encounter with Jess affected me like a cuff to the head, leaving behind it a slightly blinkered calm. I watched the winter light pour through the plate-glass windows and waited for Oscar to come and set things right.

Other people I knew passed my table: Annette Blanque, my Paris agent; Sutie Wa, a model friend; Mitch and Hasam, club promoters-cum-Hollywood consultants on a remake of
Saturday Night Fever
that hovered perpetually on the verge of production. Each one of these people looked at me in the particular way people do inside the fashion world: a quick, ravenous glance that demands beauty or power as its immediate reward. And then they looked away, as if what they had seen were not just unfamiliar, but without possibility. I ordered a vodka martini and lit a cigarette. The waiter came and asked me not to smoke.

Oscar kissed me hello on both cheeks and slid into the booth, sitting at such an angle that we weren’t facing each other directly. Oscar was the only black man I’d ever seen who truly looked as if he’d been raised by East Coast bluebloods. Anyone can wear J. Crew, of course; what set Oscar apart was the disregard with which he wore far more expensive clothing—rumpled blazers, shoes without socks, cashmere slacks—all of which managed to suggest a lifetime of money. This was a triumph of pure self-invention. Oscar had begun his life as someone else, but who that was seemed impolite to ask, when Oscar had taken such pains to efface him. The only clues I had were two thick scars on his left forearm, a tinge of a Caribbean accent (audible when he was tired) and, of course, his shadow self: that caricature that clings to each of us, revealing itself in odd moments when we laugh or fall still, staring brazenly from certain bad photographs. After the accident, I had lost the power to see people’s shadow selves, but as my vision improved, and as the fog burned off whichever cerebral lobe I required for this visual archeology, the shadows had slowly been returning. Oscar’s was a portrait of sheer grief, a face so anguished it resembled a death’s head. Not that Oscar himself looked anything like this; he had a lively, beautiful face and perfect white teeth (not a single cavity, he’d told me). It was only occasionally, when he dragged on a cigarette, that I glimpsed the other—a nagging, flickering presence. I had been studying people’s shadow selves for many years, but Oscar’s still had the power to shock me—so gaping was its contrast to his apparent self. Yet this was often the case in the fashion world, where beauty, the best disguise of all, was so commonplace.

“Well well well,” Oscar said, glancing at me. “Well well.”

“Well?”

“Better than I expected.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “Different, though.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Did you recognize me?”

Oscar snorted. His business, after all, was the business of sight, of recognizing what he’d never seen before. “Through the window,” he said haughtily.

At this news, I relaxed. “Different how?”

His eyes moved over me in the appraising survey peculiar to my line of work, when someone takes in your face, your bones, your eyes, and calculates their worth. You hold very still for that look. “Uneven,” he said, “for one thing.”

“Oscar, you have to tell me. I need to know.”

“Oh, Oscar will, darling,” he said. “Just give him time.”

Oscar had been my booker since I first came to New York at twenty-one, claiming to be nineteen, with a few Marshall Field’s ads in my book. He’d masterminded my rise to almost-almost-stardom, then partnered me through my slow minuet down a gauntlet of catalogue jobs whose end, mercifully, I still had not reached. I’d known him fourteen years in all, during which I’d allowed myself to age at approximately two-year intervals, so that now, at thirty-five, I was allegedly twenty-eight. And as my career trajectory had flattened and begun to sink, Oscar’s had risen steadily, and I’d followed him from agency to agency until now, at Femme, he booked mostly stars. But he’d never been a shit to me. We’d known each other too long.

I ordered escargot, and Oscar filled me in on rumors of drug addiction, plastic surgery and egregious behavior among “huge girls,” as top models are admiringly known by their colleagues. Girl-girl affairs were the new fad, he told me; models shacking up together over the violent objections of their rich, powerful and occasionally gun-toting boyfriends.

“Have you ever done that?” Oscar asked. “Been with a girl?”

“Never,” I said.

“Nor I,” he said, and laughed.

My escargot arrived, and I let one slide down my throat, luxuriating in the taste of garlic. After the accident, my sense of taste had been dulled; then, in the past few weeks, flavors had begun rocketing across my palette.

“Business is good?” I asked.

“Strange,” he said. “This mania for real people is becoming a full-fledged pain in the ass.”

“You mean powerful women in pantyhose, that kind of thing?”

“That was unpleasant enough,” Oscar said. “Now it’s people in the news. You haven’t heard?”

“Oscar,” I said. “I’ve been in the Midwest.”

A few months ago, he told me, a booker at Elite had spotted a beautiful, starving Hutu refugee in
Time.
Somehow, through Doctors Without Borders, this booker managed to track the refugee down and fly her and her eight children to New York, where “Hutu,” as she was known (her name having been deemed unpronounceable) promptly shot covers for
Marie Claire
and Italian
Vogue
and garnered an avalanche of publicity for Elite. Not to be outdone, Laura, the CEO of
Femme
, noticed a beautiful North Korean girl in a story about famine.