Look

by Zan Romanoff

  I could be anything, Cass had said.

  Lulu has a lot of ideas about who she isn’t and doesn’t want to be: She doesn’t want to be like her mother, whose life stalled out when her looks started to go, and has never been able to figure out what else about her might be interesting. She isn’t like Naomi, who never cared about having looks in the first place. She isn’t like Bea, who’s smart and determined and knows, at least, that she wants to be someone, even if she isn’t sure who she is yet.

  Eventually, Lulu grabs her phone from where it’s charging on her bedside table and jams her earbuds into her ears. She knows blue light isn’t helpful when you’re trying to sleep, but she’s only looking at it for long enough to find the Connie Wilmott episode of the Beauty, Power, Danger podcast. Once it’s playing, she turns her phone over so it can’t glow at her, and stares up into the darkness, listening.

  “Constance Wilmott was born right before the turn of the twentieth century in a tiny mining town somewhere in dusty Nevada; she moved to Los Angeles when she was eighteen, was cast as the wife in a silent film adaptation of the Bluebeard story that year, and married Avery Riggs before she turned twenty. She never made another film.

  “So why do we know her name?” Christine L. Tompkins asks. “Most silent film actresses faded into obscurity as their talkie counterparts rose to prominence. In fact, most films of that era no longer exist, due to careless archivists and the film’s extreme flammability.”

  Lulu finds it weirdly comforting to think that even the things people have tried to save have disappeared off the face of the earth. Like an accidental Flash, almost. Eventually, no one will ever be able to watch her kiss Sloane ever again. It might be a long while, but it will happen. Probably. Right?

  “The answer to this question comes, as it so often does, in the form of her husband. Avery Riggs made sure that the film was preserved. He bought a then-unheard-of professional projection system so that he could screen it at his first hotel property, The Aster, every year on her birthday. The hotel, by the way, was named for Wilmott’s favorite flower; the storied space ultimately couldn’t hang on to its glamour, and was shuttered due to bankruptcy in the early 1990s.”

  So much for avoiding blue light. Lulu flips her phone over again and googles “the Aster hotel Los Angeles Riggs.” The photos she turns up show a structure that’s bigger and much more elaborate than the one she knows, but Lulu recognizes the landscape, and the thing Ryan’s built to mimic it. So that’s what The Hotel used to look like.

  “Much has been made of Wilmott’s decision not to act again after Bluebeard,” Christine continues in Lulu’s ears. “She insisted that it was a personal choice, rooted in her desire to be a mother first. But those who knew Riggs suggest that he was a jealous man and that, having seen the way the public loved his lovely wife in her debut, he refused to share her like that ever again.

  “Why, though, would he then insist on screening the film repeatedly, creating and maintaining a legacy where he might simply have allowed her to be forgotten?

  “Riggs’s work as a developer was the building of monuments, and his tastes ran to structures that would dominate men, and outlast them. Whether or not he was behind his wife’s decision to leave acting, he found a way to monumentalize her. He turned her into something lasting, attached to his name and under his control. Connie would age and fade; she would become a woman and a wife instead of a celluloid fantasy. But he would always own the vision of her body as eternally nubile and functionally mute.

  “Riggs’s real estate empire was, in some sense, built on the back of Connie Wilmott’s beauty; the money she earned from that film funded his earliest forays in that world. Interest in Bluebeard has remained feverish in part because of her reluctance to appear in public to support or discuss it. Her silence has allowed a cult-like obsession with the film and with her to build up. Instead of remaining a woman, Connie became an icon onto which fantasy is eternally and seamlessly projected.”

  Lulu is more awake than ever. She picks up her phone again. Bea just messaged her a picture of herself in her hotel room with the texts:

  so switzerland is boring and cold everyone here really is a blond GIANT the skiing is good but that’s all there is everything is just so . . . white

  Lulu doesn’t know what Bea means by that—if she’s talking about the whiteness of the mountain, or the people. Bea talks about race so infrequently that Lulu forgets Bea isn’t white sometimes, which she told Bea once, and Bea didn’t like. So she doesn’t know what to say to this. If she makes a joke about snow, will she be missing the point again? Or by not saying anything, is she chickening out, the way she did with Ryan at The Hotel when he was talking about Gypsies and she basically let him off the hook?

  Considering this, Lulu scrolls up idly and sees something that makes her flinch: The last time she messaged Bea was the night of her party. It’s been a full week and Lulu has been radio silent on her best friend. Shit.

  Ughhhhhhhhhh I’m sorry, she writes back.

  Bea responds right away. I guess LA must be pretty interesting

  I’m sorry about that too, B

  I promise

  you haven’t missed anything

  You and Cass been hanging out a lot?

  Lulu stares at her phone screen. She doesn’t know what Bea means by that.

  Bea sends I haven’t seen you in any of the usual suspects’ flashes as if to explain herself.

  Yeah I guess, Lulu sends, because she doesn’t know what else to say.

  When the Sloane Flash went up, Bea messaged, Heyyyy what’s going on? everything okay, and Lulu sent back, I’m okay, I promise. She was lying, but she wasn’t not-okay in any ways Bea could help with.

  She didn’t want help, because she didn’t want it to be happening. Nothing about the Sloane Flash made sense in Lulu’s life, which she had constructed so carefully. In a fraction of a second, she had undone all of her work to make herself a pretty girl, with pretty friends, and a nice, hot boyfriend—all of her efforts to only ever be seen in this one particular, legible way.

  So what she wanted was to never have done it, or, barring that, to at least be able to pretend it away the way she’d pretended past every other inconvenient fact in her life.

  Lulu thinks about Bea defending her at that party, being sharp and rude to Jason and then distracting and charming to Oliver. She would never have asked Bea to do those things for her—to take care of Lulu’s messiness instead of leaving her to clean up after herself. But Bea did them anyway, and that’s worth so much that it scares Lulu sometimes. To think that Bea loves her more than she loves her own social status, or her own rules. That Bea just loves her, just because.

  I’m not up to anything cool, Lulu sends Bea. I miss your face.

  Well feel free to FaceTime me whenever then

  I got international data for dayssssssss

  Don’t answer your phone while you’re skiing please B

  Lol never, Bea says. Def no.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  IT FEELS LIKE Cass is giving the days to Lulu like gifts: afternoons on the balcony, or down by the pool while Ryan practices skateboarding and takes pictures. Sometimes Lulu will wander off to the sunlit greenhouse and wait for Cass to come find her. Cass always does, and when she appears in the doorway, Lulu’s heart kicks against her ribs. She’s overcome with the sweetest, hottest ache: that Cass noticed she was missing, and wanted to know where she was.

  Work on the property seems to have stalled out for the season. The Hotel looks finished, but there’s nothing in it: no furniture except what Ryan’s brought in for his own personal use. For days and days, nothing changes, and it’s a relief. The days keep getting shorter, sliding into each other so fast sometimes Lulu feels like she can barely keep up, so it’s nice that this one thing has arrested itself for her, just a temporary lacuna where she can sit still.

&n
bsp; The tent has been relocated to The Hotel’s lobby. It’s too cold to sleep out of doors anymore. On the day they bring it in, Cass insists on stringing Christmas lights around the inside so they can get stoned and lie on their backs and watch the colors blink. Ryan takes a video of the scene, panning across their faces and then up to the lights.

  He usually asks before he takes any pictures. “You guys good?” he’ll say, and Lulu has never said no, but more and more she’s been thinking about it.

  She doesn’t, though, because then he would ask why, and she wouldn’t have a good answer. She’s still filming herself basically every minute she’s not at The Hotel—when she’s getting dressed, or taking off her eye makeup, or little funny family things, like when she stops by her dad’s to pick up a sweater she forgot and Olivia is putting on a fashion show in their living room—so she doesn’t have that defense. She just doesn’t want to, is all.

  For just a little while, she just wants to be allowed to forget that anyone is looking, or that anyone cares what she looks like.

  Plus, she’s started listening to Beauty, Power, Danger from the beginning, and it’s giving her all kinds of weird ideas about images and who owns them, and how and why it matters. She doesn’t listen to it at The Hotel, but she’s started reading the things Christine L. Tompkins mentions in the show notes—online articles, and sometimes even parts of actual books. Lulu can’t believe she’s reading, like, academic texts over vacation, but then, they’re academic texts about interesting things: women and power and sex.

  And she’s a feminist, right? Or she’s always thought she basically was, anyway. With Naomi for a sister you kind of had to be. But increasingly, Lulu realizes she didn’t really have a sense of what that meant, other than for her own limited, personal purposes: that she wanted to be allowed to wear pants and own property and go to school and stuff.

  Now when she goes to the mall with Naomi to try to get their mom a Hanukkah present and a man walking by says, “Pair of you, look at you, nice-looking girls,” for no reason other than that he thought they might want to know what he thought of them, instead of ignoring him, brushing it off like she always does, Lulu thinks: God, what a fucking pig.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ON FRIDAY, RYAN has a project for the three of them. “What, you thought this would just be a free ride?” he says.

  He’s wearing paint-splattered khakis and a T-shirt with a rip at the collar. Even Lulu has to admit it’s a good look on him: work-worn but not shabby. He’s still so young-prince handsome. Those cheekbones. On his way to hug Cass he comes so close that Lulu scents the sweat of him: the funk of boy-skin, some kind of cologne. Sandalwood, maybe? Probably expensive. He smells good.

  He doesn’t touch Lulu. Instead, he says, “The painters fucked up the color in one of the rooms, and they can’t get back in time to fix it, so I figured we’d take a crack at it.”

  “I’m an expert painter,” Cass reports. “When I turned twelve my parents let me repaint my room, and I was going through a goth phase, so I went black, which was a mistake. Fixing it really sucked.”

  “Let me guess, Lulu, you’re not as experienced.” Ryan smirks at her dress and tights, her shearling-lined jacket, like she would have worn them if he’d just been a normal person and warned her about what they’d be doing.

  Lulu’s not going to be cowed. “What, Ryan, did you go to art school for this? Still photography and intermediate abstract wall painting?”

  “I’m a regular Rothko,” he says. “Nah, my dad made me do this stuff growing up sometimes. Builds character, whatever. Plus, that way you know if the guys you hire are lying to you, or being lazy. You know what a good job looks like and how long it takes.”

  The way he says it makes Lulu’s skin crawl. She hates the idea of Riggs Senior teaching Ryan to dabble in manual labor, and how to keep an eye on his workers to make sure they don’t slack or cut corners on his dime. It occurs to her that even as she’s watched The Hotel transform in the last few weeks, she’s been shielded from the sight of the men who’ve been making that happen. Like their work is shameful, or strange.

  “I have clothes for you guys to wear if you don’t want to get dirty,” Ryan says. “Come upstairs so you can change.”

  * * *

  Ryan’s shirt hangs loose on Cass: It fits like proper boyfriend clothes. Lulu remembers the way he wrapped himself around her when they set up the tent that first night. It’s hard not to feel like their bodies make sense of each other: his proportions and hers. One large, one small; one girl, one boy. On Lulu’s curves, Ryan’s clothes just look dumpy.

  The job isn’t hard, though. Dip a roller in paint; glide it up and down a wall. Stand close and check for evenness; wait for it to dry and check again. Layer after layer after layer. They turn the room from a pale yellow Easter color to a gemstone-y rose quartz pink.

  “We get, like, sweat equity on this, right?” Cass says, midway through the afternoon. “This is the Shapiro and Velloro Memorial Suite. It’s ours whenever we want it. The VellShap. The ShapVell.”

  “You guys looking to book a staycation together?” Ryan asks. There’s acid on his tongue, and Lulu doesn’t understand why. She’s wearing your T-shirt, she wants to tell him. She’s asking you a question.

  “I’ve been thinking I want Lulu to teach me how to be a better girl,” Cass says. “Manicures. Face masks. Loofahs? I don’t know other kinds of girl accessories.”

  Lulu laughs. “That’s a good start,” she says.

  Cass turns to Ryan. “We can do your makeup if you want,” she says. “I bet Lulu could contour the shit out of you.”

  “I have highlighter in my bag,” Lulu offers.

  Instead, Ryan reaches down into the tray of paint and uses one finger to streak each cheek rosy. “How’s this for contour?” he asks.

  “Very good,” Cass says approvingly. “I like a man who knows his angles.”

  Ryan smiles, but when Lulu turns back to the patch of wall she’s been working on, he leaves, probably to go wash it off. She feels like she’s won some obscure victory, though she couldn’t say exactly what it was.

  “I’ve been thinking about that conversation, actually,” Cass says to Lulu. “About how you asked what I thought of you when we first met.”

  “You’ve come back around,” Lulu deadpans. “It was JAP-y bitch. I knew it.”

  “Lulu!” Cass brandishes her roller at Lulu, but she isn’t really trying, and it’s easy to dance out of her way. “No,” she continues. “What I was going to ask was why you wear that stuff if you think it makes you look so dumb.”

  Lulu paints a long stripe up the wall, pressing the roller from bottom to top. She looks at the pink streak she’s left in her wake. She says, “I mean, I don’t hate it or anything. But mostly it’s just easy: I can do it without thinking about it. And when I do, no one thinks too much about me.”

  “It’s, like, private school girl camouflage.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay but so then: What are you hiding?”

  Lulu doesn’t say anything. Cass uses her roller to go over Lulu’s line of paint, turning it darker and more solid.

  “The fact,” Lulu says, “that I’m not very interesting.”

  “I think you are,” Cass says. “Interesting.” The sun is already starting to slide in the western sky, and the room is suffused with a rosy glow that makes Cass’s cheeks look particularly pink.

  Lulu shrugs.

  “Okay,” Cass says. “Fine, don’t believe me. But I guess I should say—um—that you’re only kind of right. The first night when I met you? Your camouflage worked. At first, I didn’t notice you at all. But when I did, it was because of what you did. When I saw you sneaking upstairs—that’s when I started wondering what your deal was.”

  Lulu forgets her self-pity instantly. She narrows her eyes. “Wait a minute! So when you found m
e, did you—”

  Cass is definitely blushing now, the color coming on fierce and sudden. “I didn’t know you were in the bathroom,” she says. “I wasn’t trying to follow you in there. I just wanted to know where you were going. I wanted to know what else there was to do at a party like that one.”

  “Not much.”

  “See,” Cass says. “I had thought the options for that type of thing were to go, or not go. And then I saw you leaving without leaving, and it was like, I don’t know. Like I hadn’t imagined there could be this third thing.”

  “Well, I had never imagined I could really not go,” Lulu says.

  “Not going is my specialty.”

  Cass leans over to dip her roller back into the paint; somehow, when she straightens, she and Lulu are standing closer than they were a moment ago.

  It’s weird to remember that night. Lulu was a different person then, in certain ways. She never would have imagined when she walked into Patrick’s that a few weeks later she’d be so far from anywhere she’s ever been before, wearing someone else’s clothes, looking at a girl in this soft, gold, late afternoon light and feeling almost like she would be allowed to reach out and touch her.

  She hasn’t changed enough to do it, though.

  Cass takes her roller and applies it to the next patch of wall. Ryan reappears in the doorway. “I Postmates’ed us some snacks, and it should be here in a few if you guys want to take a break,” he says.

  “Oh thank god.” Cass puts her roller back down. “I think the fumes are starting to go to my head.”

  “I’m just gonna go over this once more so it can dry while we eat,” Lulu says.