Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  “I’m not,” I protested. “It’s a real career.” And it was! At least, if you judged it by the sheer amount of effort it required: My growing audience was voracious, demanding original content eight, nine, ten times a day. I’d hired a pair of social media assistants whose primary job was to identify Instagram-able outfits and locales, before the influence-aspiring hordes found their way to them and turned them into middle-America clichés. But as for profitability…the truth was that I was getting paid more in merchandise than I was in actual cash, and the cost of a staff adds up fast.

  My new friends were a quartet of social media stars. Besides Saskia there was Trini, a bikini model descended from German nobility; Evangeline, a celebrity stylist whose fashion signature was that she never, ever removed her sunglasses; and Maya, originally from Argentina, famous for her live makeup tutorials and boasting more followers than all of us combined. We were frequently invited to do things as a pack: Fashion houses would fly us to Thailand, to Cannes, to Burning Man, where we were wined and dined and spent our days gallivanting around picturesque locations in sponsored “looks.” These girls understood the odd pace of the documented life: Spontaneous moments that had to be replicated over and over until they were captured correctly. Pretending to take a sip of espresso, but never actually drinking it because it would ruin your lipstick. Ten minutes to walk across fifty feet of grass.

  I had made dutiful study of Saskia’s talents: learning from her how to swan and preen like an exotic bird when performing even the most mundane tasks, how to twiddle with my hair as I talked to the camera so that I wouldn’t look inert, how to tilt my head to disguise the soft flap of my weak chin. Exclamation points in your captions were important, I learned; as was a gushing appreciation of the wonderful things in life; and so my persona online was upbeat, excited, #blessed. I took up the practice of live video fashion feeds, panning the camera up and down my body, all the while reciting in a practiced voice: “The shoes are Louboutin, the dress is Monse, the bag is McQueen!” The words in my mouth were a mantra, a security blanket that protected me from the world that existed beyond the tinted windows of my town car, the things I didn’t want to see.

  I loved everything about this new life, the whirlwind of activity that kept me spinning from morning until night: fashion shows, exotic vacations, music festivals, shopping expeditions, magazine galas, film openings, pop-up restaurants. Social media was an emotional roller coaster that I was eager to board every day. It made me feel alive, the way each new post (and its response) sparked tiny emotions into billowing flames of gratification. And yes, I’d read all those doom-and-gloom features written by the Boomer scolds; I knew that to them I was little more than a rat pushing a lever, waiting for my next endorphin hit. Did I care? Bien sûr que non.

  I had regular followers, who I knew primarily by their Instagram handles and the emojis they favored. My own personal community! When the low moments came around now, I’d just cruise through the comments on my posts, sending smiles and kisses, basking in the superlatives. Obsessed. Dying. Covet. Gorgeous. Everything. Need. Love. Nothing in my new world was half-felt; everything was observed to the extreme. Everyone was a bestie.

  After a few years of this, though—perhaps inevitably—the constant high began to wear off. And my pendulum moods returned: A week of parties in São Paulo would be followed by a week in which I couldn’t get out of bed. I’d come home from a dance club, look at the twenty-eight posts documenting my #epic evening, and burst into tears. Who was that woman, and why didn’t I feel as happy as she looked? Sometimes, when riding on a gondola in Venice or walking down a street in Hanoi, I would study the local people, living their simple private lives; and even though I knew they struggled in ways I couldn’t fathom, I wanted to weep with jealousy. Imagine the freedom in being invisible like that! I would think. Imagine not caring whether anyone cares!

  Sometimes, when I was alone, lying in a dark hotel suite in a foreign country or listening to the insomniac hush of a private jet’s air filters, I would even wonder, Isn’t there more than this? Have I forgotten what it feels like to be in the moment? Who is watching me and do they honestly care about me at all? A storm cloud descending to ruin the picnic. As I was slipping off to sleep, I’d tell myself, Maybe tomorrow I will turn the Internet off forever. Maybe tomorrow I will give everything away. Maybe tomorrow I’ll become a better person.

  But then the sun would rise on another day and Gucci would invite me to preview a line of sequined bomber jackets (so now!) and someone would offer to fly us all to their vacation home in Barbados and fifty thousand strangers would tell me how amazing I was. And all that melancholy would pass like the temporary squall that it was.

  * * *

  —

  And then, a few years in, I met Victor.

  I was thirty by then, with a growing awareness of my own expiration date: My following had plateaued at just over a half million, and there were now a dozen girls a decade younger who had leapfrogged past me into the limelight. Increasingly, as I was walking around my neighborhood, I would find myself gazing wistfully at the babies that I passed. Their mothers smiled knowingly as they looked at me over their strollers, the sidewalks clearing before them, as if they knew a universal secret that I had somehow missed myself. They had love they could trust to last, forever: a child’s love.

  I recognized that curious tug—the itchy longing for soft, pliable flesh—for what it was. My biological clock, perhaps, but more than just that: I wanted to build a whole new family, to replace the one that had been lost. That’s what I had been missing; that was what was going to dispel my nagging ennui. I needed a baby, and soon. Maybe two, or three.

  It’s hard to date when you’re in a different city every week, but I made a concerted effort, and eventually I met someone at a party. His name was Victor Coleman. His mother was a senator from Maryland and he worked in finance, so on paper he was everything that an eligible bachelor should be, an excellent potential father of future children. On camera, he also excelled—his face chiseled and shadowed like a classic sculpture, the perfect Nordic sweep of his wavy blond hair—although at first I found I wanted to keep him mostly to myself, rather than letting my ravenous community devour him in the comments.

  Where he didn’t excel: in bed. We fumbled drily in the dark, reaching for each other but never quite mastering the proper grips. Our relationship was perfectly easy in all other ways, though, our tastes and routines well aligned. We did wonderfully mundane things together: walks with my dog, Mr. Buggles; brunch over Sunday Styles; TV in bed. It felt like what I think love must feel like.

  Victor finally popped the question, during a morning stroll through springtime Central Park. He got down on one knee in the grass—“Vanessa, you are so vibrant, so full of life, I can’t think of a better partner”—but I could barely hear his words because of the high-pitched buzz in my ears.

  I chalked this up to adrenaline.

  “Oh, good call, girl,” said Saskia, when I told her that I’d gotten engaged. We were sitting together in the waiting room of a Palm Springs spa, waiting to get stem cell facials after a long morning of posing in crocheted bikinis by pools we didn’t dare swim in. Our photographer slumped over her laptop nearby, dutifully photoshopping zits and bulges to make us look twenty-five percent prettier than we actually were. Saskia clapped like an eager child. “Oh! This gives you a whole new narrative line. Wedding dress shopping, flowers, picking the venue. And of course, we’ll throw an engagement party! Invite all the big names on social media, so it goes wide. Your fans are going to go bonkers. And think of the sponsors.”

  It was at this moment that I realized that I hated Saskia a little bit. “Wrong response,” I said. “Try again.”

  She stared blankly at me. She’d recently gotten mink eyelash extensions and they were so long that she had to open her eyes extra wide to see through them. She looked like a stunned alpaca.
/>   “Congratulations?”

  “That’s better.”

  “OK, grumpy. You know I’m happy for you. I didn’t realize I had to say it out loud.”

  “I’m getting married because I love him, not because it’ll make a good Insta-story,” I said.

  She turned quickly away to smile at the approaching beautician but I could have sworn I saw her roll her eyes. “Of course you are.” She squeezed my hand and then stood. “Now please tell me that I’ll get to pick out the bridesmaids’ dress? I’m thinking we talk to Elie Saab.”

  * * *

  —

  But of course, Saskia was right, and the posts about my engagement were among the most popular of my career. My following started to creep up again. At first Victor was obliging, letting me bring my photo assistant along on our tours of the reception rooms at Cipriani and the Plaza. But at our cake tasting, when I asked him to pretend to pop the red velvet in my mouth, already imagining the caption I might use (Practicing for the big day! #weddingcake #nosmashplease), he suddenly balked. He glanced sideways at my latest photo assistant, Emily, a twenty-two-year-old NYU grad who was poised with her camera at the ready. She smiled encouragingly at him.

  “I feel like a trained seal.” He grimaced.

  “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”

  “Why do you have to do it?” He stuck a finger into the frosting of a chocolate-raspberry mousse cake, dug around a little, and then sucked it off his thumb.

  I was struck dumb by this. He’d never expressed doubts about my career before. “You know the answer to that question.”

  “I just think…” He hesitated, slowly withdrawing the thumb from his mouth. He wiped it clean on his napkin, and lowered his voice so Emily couldn’t hear. “I just think you can do more than this, Vanessa. You’re smart. You have resources at your fingertips. You could do anything you want to do. Make the world a better place. Find something you’re good at.”

  “This is exactly what I’m good at,” I told him. And to prove this point I pulled the cake toward myself, and artfully moved it toward my lips, offering a perfect sly expression—I’m so cool and down-to-earth, I’m not even thinking about the calories in this thing—for Emily to capture.

  The red velvet was too sweet. The sugar burrowed painfully into my molars.

  * * *

  —

  Our wedding date was five months away when my father called to tell me he was dying: “Advanced pancreatic cancer, cupcake,” he said. “The doctors say this is it. I’ve got weeks, not months. Any chance you can come home?”

  “Oh God, Daddy. Of course. Oh God.”

  He was uncharacteristically subdued on the other end of the line. “Vanessa—I just want to say it now—I’m sorry. For…everything.”

  My eyes were dry but I couldn’t breathe. I felt something sharp and insistent tug at my center of gravity, ready to drag me downward. “Stop it. There’s nothing for you to be sorry about.”

  “Things might get hard but do not doubt your strength. You’re a Liebling.” There was a thin, pale wheeze on the other end of the line. “Don’t forget that. You need to push through, for Benny’s sake. And your own.”

  I flew back to San Francisco and collected Benny from the Orson Institute and we settled into the mansion in Pacific Heights for a swift but agonizing deathwatch. My father’s organs were failing fast. He slept all day, drugged up on morphine, his body so puffed and bloated that I was afraid he would pop if I hugged him hard. While he napped, Benny and I careened aimlessly through the house we grew up in, touching familiar surfaces with the lingering fingers of impending loss. Our childhood bedrooms, unchanged since our mother’s suicide, remained shrines to the people our parents once believed we would become: my Princeton banner and tennis trophies, Benny’s ski medals and chess set. The family we were before.

  My brother and I kept watch over our dying father together. One night, as he grunted and whimpered in his sleep—fighting death with all the force with which he fought life—we sat side by side on the couch and watched TV reruns from our youth: That ’70s Show and Friends and The Simpsons. When Benny drifted off, numbed with exhaustion and meds, he slipped sideways until his head rested on my shoulder. I stroked his shaggy red hair, as if he were still my baby brother, and felt profoundly at peace despite it all.

  I wondered what my brother was dreaming about, or if the medications he took robbed him of dreams altogether. And then I wondered if the loss of another parent would set Benny off again. If it did, who would I have to blame this time?

  “Don’t be afraid,” I whispered. “I’m going to take care of you.”

  He opened one eye. “What makes you think that I’m the one who needs taking care of?”

  And then he laughed so that I knew he was joking, but something about this unsettled me anyway. As if Benny recognized something inside me that was also inside himself, something that had been inside our mother: how close I was teetering to that edge.

  * * *

  —

  Our father died abruptly, slipping away with a soft rattle of his chest and a convulsion of his limbs. I had assumed we would have a moment before he died—the movie deathbed scene, where my father would tell me how proud he was of me—but in the end he wasn’t lucid enough. Instead, I gripped his frail hand until it grew cold in mine, wetting both with my tears. On the other side of the bed, Benny rocked back and forth, arms wrapped tightly around his chest.

  The hospice nurse tiptoed back and forth, waiting to nudge us toward the inevitable next steps: doctor, funeral director, obituary writer, lawyer.

  At a loss, I did what I knew how to do best: I tugged my phone out of my pocket and took a photo of our still-entwined hands, something to document this final thread of connection before everything was irretrievably gone. Almost without thinking, I uploaded this to my Instagram, #mypoordaddy. (Thinking without thinking: Look at me. Look at how sad I am. Fill this hole with love.) Within seconds, the condolences started rolling in: So sad 4 U—what a touching photo—Vanessa DM me for virtual hugs. Kind words from generous strangers, but they felt about as personal as the letters on a movie marquee. I knew that within seconds of commenting each person had already moved on to the next post in their feed and forgotten me.

  I shut the app down, and didn’t open it again for two weeks.

  We were alone now, Benny and me. We only had each other.

  * * *

  —

  Victor flew out for the funeral and held me while I cried; but he had to fly back immediately in order to attend a political fundraiser for his mother, who was being groomed as a VP candidate for the upcoming presidential election.

  I was still in San Francisco, dealing with my father’s estate, when Victor called me a week later. After a few minutes of benign small talk, he dropped his little bomb: “Look, Vanessa, I’ve been thinking, we should call off the wedding.”

  “No, it’s OK. My father wouldn’t have wanted me to postpone. He would have wanted me to go on with my life.” There was an uncomfortable silence on the other end and I realized that I had misunderstood. “Wait. You’re kidding. You’re dumping me? My father just died and you’re dumping me?”

  “The timing, I know…it’s bad. But waiting would have made it worse.” His voice was strangled. “I’m really sorry, Van.”

  I had been sitting on the floor in my parents’ bedroom, sorting through old photo albums; when I stood up a cascade of pictures came tumbling out of my lap. “What the hell? Where is this coming from?”

  “I’ve just been thinking,” he began, and then he stopped. “I want…more? You know?”

  “No.” My voice was ice, it was steel, it was fury. “I don’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about at all.”

  There was another long pause. He was in his office, I was sure, because I could faintly hear the caco
phony of Manhattan below outside his window, the taxis bludgeoning their way through the midtown traffic with their horns. “That photo, of your dad’s hand after he died?” he finally said. “I saw that on your feed, and it made me go cold. That this was going to be our life, you know? Everything out there on the table for the world to see. Our most private moments on display, being monetized as clickbait for strangers. Because I don’t want that.”

  I looked at the photos scattered around me. There was one of newborn Benny just days home from the hospital. I was three years old, and carefully holding him in my tiny lap as my mother leaned protectively over us both. She and I had intent expressions on our faces, as if we were both aware that the line between life and death is just a matter of a slip of the wrist. “This is coming from your mother, isn’t it? She thinks I’m bad for business, for some reason. Too much in the public eye?”

  “Well,” he said. Through the line I could hear an ambulance siren, and I couldn’t help but think of the person trapped inside it, approaching death as the ambulance went nowhere in the rush hour gridlock. “She’s not wrong. Vanessa, your lifestyle…it’s just…The optics are bad. A trust fund kid who’s famous for traipsing around the world in expensive clothes—it’s not so relatable. With all the talk of class warfare right now…I mean, you saw what happened with Louise Linton.”

  “Dammit, I’m self-made! I did this all myself!” (And yet, even as I was screaming this into the receiver, I remembered with a twinge of guilt the monthly trust-allocation check sitting on my desk in Manhattan.) “So, what, your mom thinks it wouldn’t do for her son to be seen running around with an heiress on private jets even though she would’ve taken my dad’s money for her campaign in a heartbeat? Hypocrite. Don’t you see? People are angry at us when really they would trade their lives for ours in an instant if given the opportunity. They want to be us; they would kill to climb aboard a private jet. Why do you think I have a half-million followers?”