Because She Is Beautiful

by Cameron Dougan

  A bottle of Sauternes chilled in a bucket of ice on the floor. A bowl of strawberries rested on the bed. In the glass against the sheets, the wine was like gold, honey to the lips. Robert and Kim were naked.

  Robert had been married nineteen years. He had two children, a boy named Davis and a girl named Christine. Davis was a freshman at Deerfield Academy. Christine was three years behind him at Chapin. He never talked about them. His wife, Nicole, was an alcoholic.

  "That doesn't give me an excuse," he'd said.

  Do you love her? Kim wanted to ask. She knew it was best not to. He avoided such declarations. Kim respected him for this. It made the feelings he shared with her that much more meaningful.

  Sorrow was safe ground, though. Occasionally, he allowed himself to discuss the pain Nicole provoked. That was not a betrayal to his wife. As months yawned and passed, she began to feel that it was not sex he sought in her arms but redemption.

  He embraced her in foreign hotel rooms and in the backs of cars. He touched her under the table, kissed her by coat checks with the world behind them. He could neither shun the burden of his marriage nor draw security from it, and she saw his vows as his cross and conscience. In grief, he cared for his wife. It was Kim's role to show him his goodness in other ways. She could absolve him from guilt. She could love him; even the partial self that he offered was enough, was safe.

  "Two nights ago," he said, "in front of everyone, she threw a drink in my face, then calmly gave the glass to a waiter."

  Kim stroked his forehead. "I'm sorry."

  He sifted through the bowl and held a strawberry out to Kim, who opened and closed her lips around it, kissing his fingers.

  "I want to see more of you," he said.

  She trailed a hand through his white hair.

  "I want to see you more too," she said.

  "These parties are a slow death without you. Even if we can't talk, if I could see you there, just to know you're near."

  "Then invite me. I want you to be happy."

  He took her hand and she sat up. The sheet slipped from her breasts.

  "I hate that you're away so much," he said. "Sometimes I have no one to talk to."

  "I want you to have someone to talk to."

  He kissed her.

  "You shouldn't have to work anymore. You need to be taken care of."

  "Robert, darling, I have to work."

  "You don't."

  "I have to think of myself."

  "Exactly."

  "So many things could happen. What if you grow tired of me?"

  "I won't."

  "You can't say that. You may."

  "No."

  "Yes, Robert, and then what will I do? Get my old job back?"

  He pressed her hand. "I swear to you, I will not let that happen. I'll take care of you."

  She looked away.

  His insecurity was comforting: to know that he wanted her that strongly, to see the tinge of desperation in his eyes. This had bothered her with Sam. Why not with Robert? She did not care about her job. Any hesitation was only to prolong the moment, to draw him out further, to hear him say things that now seemed freeing.

  "Why?" she said. "What do I do for you?"

  "It's not anything you do."

  "What then?"

  "Your eyes."

  "That's no reason."

  "The things you can laugh at. You laugh at me."

  "That's easy."

  "You accept who I am. You never ask for anything."

  He reached under the pillow and took out a case. He held it open. It contained an emerald ring.

  "I promise," he said. "Forever."

  He took the ring from its case and slipped it on her finger. She could feel him growing hard under the sheets.

  "I want you," he said.

  He stared intently at her breasts as she straddled his stomach, lifted herself over him, and was still. He concentrated, held himself, and searched. She moved slightly to try to accommodate the misses. Then she took him in her hand. His brow relaxed. She settled onto him, sliding her legs out so that the lengths of their bodies touched. He pinched her breasts between the insides of his arms, hooked his feet around her, rocked to one side, and then rolled her over, hands now beneath her, working downward as he pushed. She held him as he shuddered. She was crying. She was happy. He kissed her fingers. He kissed the ring. She clasped him tightly and kissed his ear. She rubbed his back and pressed his face to her neck and whispered into the growing stillness, "There, there, my poor troubled soul."

  A week later, a man named Conrad Jones called and introduced himself as the Sanders family's attorney. He wanted to meet to discuss the trust that was being set up. Documents needed to be signed. He sounded impatient.

  The night before their lunch, she stayed up reading Peter Pan. She finished it that morning on a spread-out towel on the fire escape, her fingers sooty, marking pages. By the time she jumped in the shower to get ready, she didn't know who she felt more sorry for: Peter, when he realized Wendy was an old woman, or Wendy as an adult, realizing that her daughter would replace her. Was a heavier heart always a more loving heart?

  She met Mr. Jones at a downtown restaurant. He set an ominous black briefcase on the table and began taking out papers as soon as they placed their orders. He had dark eyebrows and a neatly trimmed gray mustache. He took a pair of reading glasses from his jacket and shuffled some pages. He arranged his water glass and silverware so that there was room in front of him.

  "Robert speaks very highly of you," she said.

  "Miss Reilly, you should take these home to read."

  He didn't look at her. Lunch had been his idea, but he seemed bothered by the distraction of it, the waiter pouring water, the salads arriving. One of the pages was out of order, and he fixed it with perfunct coolness.

  "I'm sure it's fine," she said.

  He pushed the papers across the table and double-clicked a pen and held it out. He was staring at a group of Japanese businessmen who were toasting one another, their heads slightly bowed.

  She took out her own pen and left him with his arm extended. She could understand his not wanting to make small talk. Surely he had more serious business to attend to than this. But she wanted acknowledgment, at least politeness.

  "Mr. Jones, you haven't touched your salad."

  He pocketed his pen and picked up his silverware and started to eat.

  "Aren't the walnuts a nice touch?" she said.

  No response. She took another approach. "I understand you have two children. Do you get to spend much time with them?"

  She could hear him chewing.

  "You missed one," he muttered, pointing with his fork to a line on the page.

  She stared at him in disbelief. His mustache twitched as his jaw moved. A phone was ringing. She finished the last signature and stood up.

  "I expect copies of these," she said.

  She took her purse and turned before he could speak. She brushed past the waiter, who was just bringing the entrées. The maître d' looked up from his desk.

  She walked the entire way home, consoling herself: It's not me that he hates. It was just business.

  She'd worn a new pair of shoes, and now the left one was causing a blister. With each step it dug into her heel, but she didn't stop. She passed the courthouse. She wandered through Chinatown, crates of packed ice crammed full of slippery silver fish, ducks hanging like wind chimes. She blocked out the briny smells and the chatter. A man bumped her. She was past him before he could apologize.

  Mr. Jones had suggested she take the documents home. That was thoughtful, wasn't it? She'd only wanted to save him work, not drag it out. But she'd come off like a gold digger, eager for the jackpot. Maybe he'd fought with his wife or children that morning, or had an awful meeting, or a deal had fallen through. Suddenly it struck her as odd—Robert's absence from the lunch—strange and unfair. Stranger still that it hadn't bothered her until now. How differently Mr. Jones would have treated her. Per
haps he'd recommended that Robert not be present, that experience had proved . . . had there been others? Had she seemed like all the rest? She'd wanted to plead, But this was all Robert's idea. I've worked my whole life. Mr. Jones would have been even more revolted.

  Once she'd begun to sign her name, there was nothing dignified she could have said, and she didn't know which hurt more, enduring his disgust or that she'd been so foolish as to desire his respect in the first place.

  And so it goes on, she thought as she walked, her heel stinging, remembering the last line she'd read that morning on the fire escape. Children could indeed be innocent and heartless. She might have quoted Barrie. Would Mr. Jones have understood or even cared? Perspective always came too late. She should be thankful. She should be happy.

  After she left her job with the airline, it became easier to accept money she had not earned.

  The days were wide open, vacationlike weeks, sleeping in, afternoons at the movies. No one telling her what to do. No more carrying trays and cleaning up wrappers. No putting up with rudeness. No headaches from the air pressure, or chronic colds, surrounded by sneezing and runny noses. She could stay up the entire night reading, knowing she wouldn't pay the following day. She could always catch up; time was her friend.

  One afternoon, she walked to the park at Sutton Place to watch the sailboats coast down the East River. Children scampered about with balls, pulled wagons, climbed on the statuary until their nannies summoned them. With wide, helpless eyes, waking babies wailed, searching for their mothers, seeing only the colored faces that occupied their days.

  She liked it here. She could sit on the park bench and read, work her way through the accumulating stacks of books in her apartment. She had been reading about knights, men who possessed titles like the Good or the Lionhearted. There was one who ran away into the forest and emerged stronger than before, one who risked his life to rescue a maiden from a tower, and one who was pure, who deprived himself and in the end discovered what all the others sought but could not find. Hadn't they all been spurred by the strength of love?

  She thought of her father in the war, living by instinct, a code of survival. He had fought that many might live. Her mother had had the Catholic Church, with its dictum of ideals. They both had their quests. They'd both made great sacrifices.

  Kim closed her book. A barge floated past, low in the water from the weight of its load. Where was it heading? Somewhere.

  Kim wondered: What had she ever truly sacrificed? She didn't believe in anything. Still, she had come this far. Had she ever relied on anyone? These men, their gifts—she had not asked for them. But she had accepted them. Wasn't it an accomplishment that she had just managed to survive? Robert would say yes, but what would her father say? She drifted like the leaves in the current below her. What did Robert see in her?

  In the last light of the sun, couples stopped for a view of Roosevelt Island and a fast embrace. A woman she'd seen once with one man, she saw again with another, flipping her hair and staring longingly the same way. Ants swarmed a melting Popsicle, filing in a line to and from a sandy hole between the cobblestones. The sun receded and she walked home.

  The next morning she stopped at the bank. As usual, her balance had increased.

  The trust yielded sixty thousand dollars a year. Robert figured it was about what she had made at the airline. He laughed when he learned it was much more. The irony was that Robert still paid for her shopping, their weekend trips, dinners. . . .

  "If you pay for everything," she said, "what's the point of the trust?"

  He laughed again.

  "To watch it grow."

  She bought a green damask sofa with alternating stripes of holly and ivy leaves stitched so finely that they weren't noticeable unless she put her nose right up to the fabric. It took up an entire wall. She bought a divan for sheer decadence. It was designed not for sitting or even lying, really, but posing.

  It's "Come in" furniture, she told Robert: the type of piece one ran to when the doorbell rang and then, after arranging oneself, called, "Come in."

  Garbo, Dietrich—they'd all been photographed on divans. Now she had one. The dark mahogany frame bowed up to a spillover of carved flower petals. A million gold studs pinned the olive cushion at the edges.

  "My Olympia," Robert said, the first time he saw her in it. "You know, the painting."

  "I look like a painting?"

  "A masterpiece," he said.

  She bought four-foot-tall iron candlesticks and placed them at the ends of the divan, as though it were a great velvet tabernacle. The candle by the window burned down faster, wax rising off the side of its stem like a fin.

  She forced herself to go through the Times every morning. She read about the death of Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, and how in love she and the Duke had been, how he used to wait patiently at the foot of the stairs while she dressed for dinner, so that he would be there when she descended. What a noble gesture, she thought, and pictured him reading a book in the waning half-light of a hall, turning an ear every so often to listen for his wife's footsteps. Her jewels would be coming up at auction, and there was wild speculation about their worth.

  If she wanted to, Kim could kill half a day at the salon. She'd even bought her own set of tools, stored neatly in a black lizard case.

  She tucked the case under her arm like a pocketbook and slipped on a pair of open-toe sandals. Off to Bergdorf's. She liked to think of the 58th Street side entrance as her secret, even if it wasn't. Robert had shown it to her. It was more glamorous than the front entrance. There were never crowds, the out-of-town shoppers milling in from the avenue. It led through the Chanel boutique, and the salespeople recognized her. They'd call out, "Hello, Miss Reilly," or "I put aside something I thought you'd like. Stop back on your way out." On the elevator she thought how they didn't have to do that; it wasn't about selling, or status, but sharing. Yes, she could afford certain items now, but the currency exchanged was taste, not money. They were trying to help.

  The salon was on the seventh floor along with home furnishings. She walked past Chinese lacquered tables, two standing mounted elephant tusks that arched over a zebra-skinned love seat, the same spot that only weeks ago her green damask sofa had occupied. She pushed open the large glass door at the end of the hall. The black leather banquettes were crowded with waiting women. They peered at her over their magazines. Kim didn't have to check in. Her account would be automatically charged. She walked past the doughnut-shaped reception desk, past Frederic's, the salon owner's, station. He was in mid-cut, standing directly behind a sitting woman with his hands flattened to either side of her face like blinders. "Do you see it?" he was saying. "Do you see it?" The woman had tiny bits of shiny foil twisted into her hair. He saw Kim in the mirror and waved with a comb.

  An assistant whisked her off to a private room. A mini-tub of warm sudsy water waited. Kim rolled her tights up one turn and slipped off her sandals. She dipped her feet in slowly and eased back in a chair. Nadia rushed in. She was Romanian, with night-black hair and smooth, creamy skin. Her fingers were long and muscular from years of massaging feet and calves.

  "Did they call?" she said, the words rolling off her tongue. "I could have taken you at nine."

  "It's okay."

  "Are you sure? Ach! Now I make you late. I could have taken you."

  "Late for what? This is perfect. Don't worry."

  An assistant came into the room with an espresso on a saucer and a small cup of steamed milk. She set it on the table next to Kim and left. There was a magazine rack and a telephone, a folded copy of the Post.

  Nadia knelt and lifted one of Kim's feet from the tub. She gripped Kim's calf and kneaded the muscle for a second and ran her fingers down to the ankle.

  "A moment longer," she said, rising. "I don't even say hello, darling!" She wrapped her arms around Kim and kissed her on both cheeks. "All morning like this—rush, rush. My head is crazy. Don't let your espresso get cold."

/>   She ran out of the room. When she came back she sat facing Kim. She took one of Kim's feet from the water and placed it in her lap and began dabbing at the nails with a swab, removing the existing polish with a mild acid. When she finished, an assistant took away the tub. Nadia opened Kim's lizard case and took out a gold shark-nosed scissor and snipped at the dead skin on Kim's heel. She scraped the calluses with a razor-sharp knife and gouged at the corners of the nails with a trowel-tipped pick.

  "Did you read about the Duchess?" Kim said, trying not to wince.

  "Yes," said Nadia, stroking Kim's foot. "Oh, those jewels." Her eyes widened as if she were looking at them in a case. "I can't wait to see the catalog."

  "I think Robert met them once."

  Nadia wrinkled her nose. "I hear she was very boring."

  "I'll have to ask him," said Kim.

  "Are we waxing today?"

  "Do you have time?"

  "I never have time. That is silly question, but you, I do anything for, anything. You remember that. Other foot. We do the hands after, or you want them now?"

  "After."

  Nadia finished the toes: two coats of red. Kim always skipped the base and top coat. They took too long to dry. She spread her toes and Nadia carefully slipped on the sandals.

  "Now up."

  Nadia pulled on a roll of white paper, stretching the long sheet across a black padded table by the window and tearing off the excess. Kim lifted her arms. Nadia tugged at the elastic waistband of her tights. She pulled them down to Kim's ankles and Kim shimmied onto the table, careful not to smudge her toes.

  "I'm always afraid they can see me," Kim said.

  "Who?"

  Kim pointed out the window to the building across 57th Street.

  "The people over there."

  "Where?"

  "In the Crown Building."

  They both peered out the window. Kim had her knees apart and her feet splayed, her pelvis tucked so that Nadia would have a better angle. They looked at each other and laughed.

  "The windows are tinted," said Nadia.

  "Really?"

  Nadia shrugged and they laughed again.