Pretty Is (6 page)

Which is why, several hours after meeting with Sean, I arrive at a rather imposing brick house on Main Street, wearing a not-especially-professorial red sweater dress and high-heeled black boots that are treacherous in the snow. I don’t want to please the Kate LeBlancs of the world by looking dowdy and professorial; I don’t want the young women to tower over me. I make my way through a small crowd, carrying a cup of tea, pretty cookies balanced in the saucer. I attend politely to an extremely earnest state senator, a prized special guest, who regales me with details about a controversial planned development on the outside of town that should interest me more than it does. From that conversation I ricochet across the room to the corner inhabited by a tall, dark-haired woman who turns out to be the director of the rape crisis center. I find her entertainingly caustic. “Nice life, right?” she says at one point, surveying the room, with its soft lighting, delicately upholstered chairs, and self-conscious air of civilization.

I am flattered by her assumption that I share her attitude toward this studied atmosphere of privilege. But I’m not sure she’s right about the students; you never know what darkness lurks behind clear, bright undergraduate faces. We all know the statistics about rape on college campuses. Throwing me a quick, sharp glance, the rape crisis center director reads my mind. “Of course you never know,” she adds quickly. “Violence against women is hardly limited to certain social spheres. It’s just my own prejudices speaking. I can’t stand this kind of thing.” She sips her tea with manifest irony. “I bet tomorrow night they’ll be at some fraternity mixer wearing lingerie and togas, drumming up clients for the center. They had to beg to get me to this little shindig.” She’s wearing a chunky black sweater over a flowing, flowery skirt and far more practical boots than mine. Delia, her name is. Impulsively, I suggest having a drink sometime, thinking she seems refreshingly different from my female colleagues. The murky aura of a darker world hovers around her, glowers in her critical, sideways glances. She has seen what people can do to each other. I want to claim her as an ally; I feel the need for one.

“I don’t drink,” Delia says. “Coffee, maybe?” I accept her politely proffered card, say I’ll call. She places her china teacup carefully on a spindly end table and announces that it’s time for her to mingle. She sounds like someone facing a firing squad. Guiltily, I acknowledge that I, too, should leave the safety of my corner.

I scan the room for students I recognize, or even the senator. Glossy-haired young women in demure dresses—all in muted colors, as if by agreement—stand in loose clusters, chatting with glassy animation. Such clusters are more structurally impenetrable than they look, I have learned; standing on their peripheries does not guarantee acceptance. A shred of chemistry comes back to me: something about noble gases, unable to react with other elements.

I wonder what is noble about such gases.
Noble: nasturtium, nadir, nescience.

No one comes to my rescue.

Carly would know what to do. She always did. She was the opposite of noble, in the atomic sense.

*   *   *

My editor is excited about the sequel; this is why I got a two-book deal. “I’d love to see you confront the aftermath,” she’d said at lunch in Manhattan. “Not the immediate aftermath, I mean, but the lives of these girls—after they’ve been returned to their families, their small towns, tried to reassimilate, et cetera. What becomes of them? What kind of connection do they have? Wouldn’t they always have a kind of bond? What could bring them back together?” She had pressed on with questions like these, as apparently a whole novel unfolded itself in her excitable (but also practical) imagination.

Back at home I exchange my red dress for warm layers, including the knitted fingerless gloves I have taken to wearing in the evening. I pour myself a glass of wine and settle at my computer. My fingers arrange themselves on the keyboard. I will need to enter a more purely fictional realm than I have inhabited as yet. The kidnapper’s son will serve as the mechanism that brings them back together, and he’ll provide a fresh menace. He will want to destroy them, of course. But first he will need to lure them to him. Outside my window, thick snowflakes have begun to drift down; every now and then a gust of wind sends them whirling madly past.

Yes, a jealous son. I’ll give the kidnapper a son, and I’ll make him jealous. Our abductor
did
have a son, according to the papers, so it isn’t much of a stretch. All his life this son has envied the two little girls his father abducted and adored, the girls he preferred to his own child. The girls with whom his father shared his final days—who, afterward, were on TV, in the papers, everywhere, while he was forgotten, living in his grandparents’ trailer, not even sharing his father’s last name. The girls who stole his father. He’s always wanted to make them pay.

The sorority fund-raiser settles obediently into the background, along with Delia and the faint strains of the landlady’s television in the room below mine.

I will start with snow. The jealous son. In a trailer. In the snow.

*   *   *

When Brad texts me later that week on a gloomy February afternoon, inviting me to the local pool hall, I agree to tear myself from my computer and go. In addition to the sequel, I have been working on the final revisions of my scholarly book. It’s basically my dissertation. To have had it accepted by a major university press so swiftly on the heels of landing my first job is wildly impressive in this field. It’s good enough for tenure, which is years away. It’s the Oscar of academe, practically; it makes me a rising star. This is not a secret, though I am quiet about it and self-deprecating. The department is officially enthusiastic, but I detect more complicated emotions in some quarters. I have a not-altogether-paranoid suspicion that Kate LeBlanc is rallying her forces against me. That’s to be expected. You’re supposed to pay your dues in this world, and I have not. No doubt there is concern that I will make demands, expect preferential treatment. Or that I will leave for a more prestigious job.

I might do any of these things. I like being a rising star.

Only Brad seems truly happy for me. We spent an inordinate amount of time at the pool hall our first semester, but we haven’t been back since we returned from Christmas break. I have missed our excursions. Brad doesn’t
truly
know me; I’ve kept many secrets from him. He knows the basic outline of my childhood, but he thinks I’ve put the abduction behind me; he knows about the book but not the movie. He knows me better than anyone else, though, that’s for sure, and he is the only person in my life capable of reflecting back at me a recognizable Lois; or, at least, a Lois I would like to be.

As I shut down the computer and tidy my desk, I come across Sean’s latest offering. He has been slipping photocopies under my office door: press from my abductee days. The first one sent me reeling. It was from the
Hartford Courant:
“Local Girl Returned Home, Apparently Unharmed,” reads the front-page headline. There’s a grainy picture of me walking with my parents, face in shadow. My mother looks regal and defiant and warlike; my father looks folded inward, absent. I am blurry; you really couldn’t say anything about me at all, based on this photo. The most recent one is earlier, and it’s from the local
Gazette:
“Community Rallies in Search for Missing Girl.”

I’ve seen the clippings before, but it’s been a while. They’re as jarring as ever, referring to a world in which I was central but absent. My parents never spoke much about those weeks. “We were terrified,” they said, but I have never been able to grasp their terror, to imagine Miranda and Stephen Lonsdale stricken by fear and loss. It’s not that I don’t believe it; I simply cannot see it. “We looked everywhere,” they said. Where? I have tried to picture them in sturdy shoes and jeans, sleepless and haggard, searching the woods, circling the pond, roaming the village—while I, miles away, settled all too readily into a new life. I resent Sean for reviving this fruitless speculation, this belated guilt—but the precise nature of his offense is difficult to define: I have not been harmed; he hasn’t even threatened me. Not in so many words.

Chloe

They gave me the part. I knew they would. I’m not religious; I don’t think things are meant to be or not meant to be. But lately it feels like things are coming together in a way I’m not completely in control of.

It’s not that I believe in shit like that, because I don’t.

So I know it sounds crazy. But I
knew
the part was mine. I still went and read the hell out of a couple of scenes and did my best to make a good impression; I didn’t go wandering in after a couple of martinis and leave myself in fate’s hands. But I knew. I couldn’t imagine anyone else playing Lois’s detective. If this movie had to get made, I had to be in it. Obviously.

When the phone rang, just two days after my audition, it was all I could do not to say yes before they made the offer.

What I don’t know is what to do until then. We shoot this summer in British Columbia. I have months to fill. Martinis to resist, bridges not to burn. And while I’m not broke, things aren’t exactly rosy. My last film flopped. Which was too bad; I actually thought it was a pretty decent movie. A little indie neo-noir-type picture, not the kind of thing I usually get asked to do, but I thought some artsy cred would be a good career move. And maybe it would have been if anybody had seen the goddamned film. I played a woman who finds out that her fianc
é
killed a girl, among other sordid activities, and covered it up pretty successfully—until suddenly someone’s snooping around, putting the pieces together, blah, blah, blah. But it was good and dark, with no cheeseball happy ending. And it was set in the seventies: great hair and costumes and a general willingness on the part of the cast and crew to get high on a regular basis.

But it was badly marketed, no one saw it, and I got paid shit. If I have to hang out in LA till the end of June, I really will be broke.

*   *   *

I used to like LA—back when I was new on the scene, and everything seemed to be coming together, and I was half convinced that I was one step away from being the Next Big Thing. I had an outrageously pure faith in my looks and my talent. I felt like the world owed me something, and I thought that what I felt mattered. I’d had a couple of very lucky breaks, and based on those I assumed that the world was planning to make good on its debts. I had a good part in
Destiny Wars
, a space movie with a modest budget that became a surprise summer blockbuster. I wasn’t one of the leads, but I was one of the small group of astronauts who were at the center of the plot, and I was one of the few characters that got to live all the way through the movie, dressed in one of those tight shiny jumpsuits that filmmakers seem to have unanimously decided are what we will be wearing in the Future. I was invited to the MTV Viewer’s Choice Awards; I did the red carpet thing. I was featured in magazines—no covers, but a few full inside pages—got some modeling jobs, more scripts to look at. One magazine even tagged me as the next It Girl. I thought I had made it. A few years of this, I thought, and I could return to New York in triumph: the stage would be waiting for me.

In
Destiny Wars 2: Ascension
, they killed me off in the first five minutes. I barely made it past the opening credits before a treacherous crew member launched me into space in my sleek silver astronaut nightie, a lethal futuristic space particle bullet through my head.

I wanted to do a romantic comedy, but my destiny, it seemed, was to be an action sidekick. Sub-sidekick, really. Not the ass-kicking, wise-cracking, all-important main sidekick. The expendable sub-sidekick. It turned out that people liked to watch me die. I came across an unauthorized fan site once that had put together a montage of all my deaths.

In the indie flick, not only did I actually get to act, but I was allowed to wear normal clothes—jeans and turtlenecks—instead of black pleather and stilettos. And I got to live. I was in the first scene and the last scene. I suffered, I learned, I grew.

No one saw.

My faith wavered. My faith in Chloe Savage. The only faith I have.

Still, I haven’t yet sunk to sitting around my Silver Lake bungalow drinking my face off and moping about the past every night. This is LA, after all. Tonight, for instance, I have a date. A good old-fashioned pick-you-up-at-eight kind of date. The guy isn’t even an actor. He’s a writer, which for all I know might be worse, but at least it’ll be different. I’ve sworn off actors. They’re always looking at themselves through your eyes.

Lois

It’s late afternoon, and Ivan’s pool hall is crowded. It is also hazy with smoke, despite the statewide smoking ban. Brad and I claim the only open table, with faded felt and old-fashioned leather pockets; we order beers and select our cues. Ivan appears out of nowhere to rack the balls.

Brad is good. I am not that good, but I’m generally considered “pretty good for a girl,” which is good enough at Ivan’s.

I actually play better than usual today, though not well enough to win. But winning isn’t the point. The point is that Brad is happy, shooting expertly, giving me occasional pointers. My willingness to play pool is a peace offering, which Brad accepts by attempting more difficult shots than he needs to in order to keep me in the game. Brad is excellent at this kind of communication, and I almost love him for it.

Brad and I like the pool hall because it seems worlds away from school; we never see other faculty there. The only danger is students. Because it’s a liquor-serving establishment, someone is always stationed at the door to make a show of checking IDs, but some undergrads manage to get in anyway—mostly, I imagine, local kids who have been going there for years. Until now I have never seen a student of mine here. I’m startled, then, when I’m crouching low to make a long tricky shot across the table and I see Sean leaning against the opposite wall, watching me. I swing my hair out of my eyes, adjust my focus, measure the angle with my eyes again, and flub the shot anyway. Brad sinks his last ball then double-banks the eight ball into a corner pocket, and as I lean forward to give him a mock handshake, I say in a low voice, “My student is here. The one I told you about—the ‘Pamela is a slut’ one. Don’t look—but behind you, by the wall, torn jeans and Docs and a ratty trench coat.”