Pretty Scars

by CD Reiss

  I listened again. She didn’t say the company. And—of course—“Danny” didn’t call himself because I’d know his voice. I could just call back and ask. If they were reporters, they’d have to identify themselves. Except a guy had already lied to my mother.

  I called my assistant, Cherie. I’d found her through the Bienen School job board and we only worked over the phone. At least she wouldn’t break my balls over a song.

  “Mr. Brate,” she chirped. “Hi. Your flight to New York is set.”

  “Thanks. Any calls?”

  Calls to the business number went to Cherie, and she listed the usual suspects. I gave her the number that had been left on my machine.

  “His name’s Danny Mankewicz,” I said. “I knew him in college. Give him an hour. Let him pick the time and place.”

  “Okay. I got it.” She cleared her throat. “One more thing. I have my audition for the Phil on the seventeenth.”

  “What are you playing?”

  “Dvorak. Got any tips?”

  “Slow practice. And the…” I stopped myself. I couldn’t actually show her the difficult thumb positions. When we’d started working together, she asked me for lessons as payment and I’d snapped at her like an impatient parent. I didn’t want to do that again. She was a great assistant who understood my work and my needs. “Dvorak’s about endurance. Working out isn’t a bad idea.”

  “Slow practice. Endurance. Got it.”

  “Good luck.”

  “I’ll call Danny now and get right back to you.”

  Something important came to me as I was about to release her. “Cherie, to him, my name is Gabriel Marlowe.”

  That was the first time since Venice that I’d told anyone my name, and the syllables terrified me.

  Chapter 33

  VENICE, ITALY - 1993

  Without sight, I relied on my mother’s visits and the warmth of the sun on my body to determine the time of day. She read the International Herald Tribune to me. Told me the Caruso Fellowship board had approved me for attendance the following year. Chatted about the weather and sometimes wept.

  “Today is the day,” she sang one morning. “Bandages off. Tap your finger if you can hear me.”

  One for yes.

  I heard the doctors shuffle in. I’d learned to identify each of them. The best English came from a woman doctor’s voice. Doctor Perla DeMineo went by her first name. I later learned she had round features and deep brown eyes that she lined with a bright blue that matched the velvet headband keeping the tight curls off her face. But in the darkness of those first days, she was the doctor who stuck her tongue on the roof of her mouth when she was thinking and released it with a tk before she spoke.

  “How are you feeling today, Mr. Marlowe?” Perla asked as they shifted me to a sitting position.

  One for yes.

  “Are you ready?”

  Two for no.

  She made a little laugh.

  “He’s ready,” my mother said.

  One for yes.

  “Bene, I’m going review this again. All right?”

  Outside the bandages, in the real world, a cart was wheeled in and instruments clicked.

  One for yes. Tapping twice was pointless. She was going to do it anyway.

  “You experienced wounds to the left side of your face.”

  I experienced. Passive voice. As if the polizia hadn’t come around asking me a hundred yes or no questions until I thought my finger would fall off.

  “Your left zygomatic arch was smashed and partially reconstructed. The blade pierced it and entered your orbital cavity. The eye has been lost.”

  She paused, waiting for my reaction. I didn’t have one. Yes or No couldn’t tell the story of my fear. I was in love with a woman so beautiful she could have any man she wanted.

  When those bandages came off, I would be ugly, scarred, damaged.

  Carrie. Curious Carrie. A tender, compassionate soul who would pity me. How could I be her equal in life and her master in love? A one-eyed freak who could only ever see half her beauty would never be worthy of her.

  If—by some miracle—she was alive, I had to leave her. Let her find a man she could be seen with. Someone she wouldn’t have to explain to her friends. That was the noble thing to do.

  I didn’t know if I could ever be so honorable, but for her sake, I would try.

  The doctor had explained the destruction half a dozen times and the shock had worn down to a smooth, hard anxiety, but she went through it again as if she knew she was wearing down a stone.

  She’d saved the eyelid so I could have a glass eye, and even though she kept her voice flat and businesslike, I heard her pride in the rescue.

  “The left side of your jawbone was cracked,” she continued. “It’s still wired shut, so you won’t be able to open your mouth even after the bandages are off. Trying to speak may stress the hardware, so you’ll have a pencil and paper to communicate. The most concerning injury was to the left carotid artery. The scarring there is significant, and healing has been slow. So what you’ll be seeing, if you want to see today, is all that damage to the left side of your face. But I want you to know that with surgery and care, you can have a normal face. Don’t look at yourself today as if this is the final product. All right?”

  One for yes.

  “Bene.”

  In Italian, she requested scissors. The bandages shifted right before the familiar snipping shh-click. Layers were unwrapped and light filtered through.

  “Your brain is an amazing thing,” she said. “It will become accustomed to seeing from a single eye. It will make adjustments to your field of vision.”

  “Last layer,” my mother said, holding my wrist so she wouldn’t keep my tapping finger down. Her voice was thick, and I knew she was crying.

  My skin felt the prick of dry air, and a shade of dim orange light came through my right eyelid.

  Mom was trying to keep it together, but her gasp was a sound I’d never forget. I listened for her as the staff removed gauze from my neck, muttering in Italian medical terms I couldn’t understand outside “yes” and “good.”

  “Keep your eye closed for a moment,” Perla said before she told the nurse to shut the room lights and close the blinds. Then she took the last bit of wrapping from my eye. “Okay. Open.”

  Their masked faces hovered in the dimness. I held up my hand and pantomimed writing. A nurse placed a pencil in my hand and a pad in my lap.

  I wrote one word.

  CARRIE

  Perla glanced at my mother. Pain shot through my neck when I tried to see her reaction.

  I wrote again.

  CARRIE

  I scratched a line under it.

  “Gabriel,” Mom said, coming around to face me.

  I feared the worst. She’d been murdered. She’d spent her last moments a few feet from me and I couldn’t help her. She was gone. Dead. Snuffed from the world.

  “She went home,” my mother said, poorly hiding a hot rage. “She left you here.”

  Hope is the key signature the song of despair is built around. Without it, everything falls apart.

  I’d hoped that when I showed her my ugly face, she’d say it didn’t matter.

  I’d hoped to keep the girl and get credit for my noble offer to leave.

  She’d spared me the trouble of hope, and at that moment, I hated myself for it.

  Chapter 34

  NEW YORK - 1995

  Cherie had gotten me a chartered flight to Teterboro so I could meet with the technical crew at Lincoln Center. I was allowed to drive without depth perception, but I told myself it still wasn’t safe. The fact was—I didn’t want to retake my driver’s license photo.

  So Herv went to New York ahead of me to get a car. Too much of my money was spent maintaining my anonymity, but it was my most precious possession. And now that I’d seen her and played for her, the woman I loved in the third row, I had to protect it more jealously than ever. Not from any identifiable outs
ide threat, but from my own temptation to unmask myself so I could see her.

  “Transport’s on its way, sir,” the pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker.

  I looked out the window, shoving a stick of gum in my mouth. To the west, piles of sand and rock lined up as a border for the construction of a new runway. Big machines dug and scraped, while a water truck was filled from a reservoir.

  A long black car coasted along the tarmac. I assumed it was mine until it stopped by a Lear with its stairs dropped. I almost turned away, but something kept my eyes on it. Even when a second car came behind—most certainly Herv—I watched the first one as if my curiosity had ever been anything but a punishment.

  She appeared at the top of the airstairs, holding the railing with a kid-gloved hand. Bare legs under her skirt. Sunglasses. Knee-length pink coat. Scarf around her neck. Red hair flying in the winter wind. She was dressed as if she didn’t know how cold winter really was.

  And she didn’t.

  She’d never know how cold it could get.

  She smiled with a mouth I’d kissed a hundred times. I’d kissed them a thousand times in my dreams, a million in my despair.

  Twice in as many weeks, she’d appeared.

  She got in the back of the limo.

  Twice in as many weeks, she was gone.

  And for the first time since I signed on the dotted line, I knew I wouldn’t allow it again.

  Drazen was an unusual enough name that my assistant could find one. Margaret. Her sister. She had an unlisted number, not that I’d call it. She also had a desk at a law firm.

  I wouldn’t call there. That would be insane.

  But I’d wait outside.

  “Do you want to get out?” Herv said over the intercom between the back and front of the car, his voice gruff from decades of cigar-smoking. He was an egg-shaped man in his sixties with a full head of hair and black-rimmed glasses. He had a family he adored so much, he’d tried to quit working for me when his wife got breast cancer so he could take care of their daughter. I wouldn’t let him. I paid for his wife’s care and canceled all my appointments for a month while he stayed home with her.

  I did all that for my own good, but also to beat back my envy.

  “Wait here for a minute.”

  What did I want from her? She’d moved on. She didn’t want to see my face. Didn’t want to know about the surgeries I’d refused so that I could punish myself for losing her. I had nothing to offer her but awkwardness. Nothing to offer myself but regret.

  Bile bubbled up in my throat. More gum to mask the taste of loss. I stuck the wrapper in my coat, watching the glass door of the building for signs of life.

  The doorman hailed a cab, and the redheaded sisters came out, chatting apparently happily.

  It was getting late. I needed rest.

  I knocked on the glass between Herv and me. “Go where that cab’s going.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  We followed. There was little chance we’d be noticed in the Manhattan traffic, circling the block around the nightclub where they’d gotten out. Every time the club was out of sight, I wondered if she’d left, but like a man possessed, I kept sending the car around the block. Even as I told myself this was wrong—disrespectful to her, unhealthy for me—I did it anyway.

  Just another glimpse. One more, and I’d know if she’d been disgusted by me.

  Maybe her husband would show up. Maybe I’d get a sense of them. Maybe I’d get high on the rage of seeing them together. Drink my impotence like a thick, green liqueur.

  “Stop,” I said.

  She stood on the sidewalk, arms crossed, shivering like a tuning fork as she talked to her sister. No man came. No husband to put his coat over her shoulder.

  If I’d asked myself what I was thinking when I took off my coat in the back of the limo, I would have told myself I was thinking of her comfort. Of making her world right for a moment.

  That was what I was thinking.

  It wasn’t what I was doing.

  I pressed the button to roll down the glass between my driver and me, sitting behind him so he couldn’t see me.

  What I was doing was acting on a decision I hadn’t admitted to when I saw her at Teterboro Airport. A decision that was taking shape even as I denied I’d made it.

  “The woman with the pink jacket gets this,” I said, pushing the coat to the front. “Give it to the bouncer to pass to her and come back.”

  I closed the window before he could turn around to see me.

  I watched as he got out, gave the coat to the club’s security, and dashed back.

  “Go,” I said, as the bouncer approached Carrie with my coat.

  Herv drove off as she received the gift, and before she could try to thank the stranger behind the tinted window.

  Chapter 35

  VENICE, ITALY - 1993

  The men came to the hospital before my mother came for the day, soon after the wire was removed from my jaw. Two lawyers. I knew their profession from my father’s firm. The way they swaggered as if they’d already won a war I didn’t know was being waged.

  “Mister Marlowe?” one of the lawyers said once the door closed. He didn’t have a trace of an Italian accent. American. He’d flown across an ocean to stand in my hospital room.

  “Who’s asking?” I said, trying not to move my jaw too much. Talking still hurt.

  “We represent someone who would like to help you.”

  “With what?”

  He smirked as if anyone with eyes could see what needed help around here. “You’re going to need surgery. Quite a bit. Strictly aesthetic procedures aren’t usually covered by insurance.”

  “So?”

  The second man stood by the door with his hands folded, and I started to doubt he was a lawyer at all.

  The first man said, “My client is prepared to offer you a choice. Both options are very generous.”

  “Who’s your client?”

  “He’s offering all the reparative work you need at no cost to you. Alternately, you can take a lump sum and use it to start a new life. Jump start a career. Just about anything.”

  Just about. The vague restriction wasn’t lost on me.

  I looked him up and down. I didn’t need both eyes to see the creases in his jacket where it would have been folded in a garment bag. He’d come straight off a plane. This offer—whatever it was—was important to his client.

  “In exchange for what?”

  “Simply,” he said as if he was about to propose a new brand of toothpaste or a promise to swear off eating hot dog turds left on the sidewalk, “you agree to avoid all contact with Carrie Drazen.”

  Nothing was as gut-twisting as the white-hot rage that filled me when I heard the lawyer’s proposition.

  She’d never love me like this, and I had to leave her. It was the noble thing.

  But on my terms. Not her father’s. Not the lawyer’s.

  My terms.

  “Tell your client to shove his offer up his ass.”

  Nighttime was the most frustrating. Hospitals were a terrible place to rest. Nurses felt no compunction in waking me to check vitals and ask questions. The lady I shared the room with groaned in the middle of the night from the other side of a curtain.

  The beeping of the instruments fell out of time, making it hard to listen to the music in my head. The last movement of the Ballad of Blades was a deep pit of minor chords and spiraling gloom.

  He came in the dark hours of the morning, after a shift change.

  I knew who he was right away.

  Carrie had her father’s eyes.

  I’d always remembered Declan Drazen in a snappy suit and imagined that his trousers were cut to make room for a tail. As a kid, I’d wondered how he’d style hair to hide his horns. But the second time we met, he wore a polo shirt under a sports jacket. He had an unremarkable manila envelope tucked under one arm and looked too exhausted to be the devil.

  “Gabriel.” He smiled with a disarmingly wa
rm sincerity. “I believe we’ve met.”

  “Yeah.”

  “May I sit?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He suited himself by sitting on the edge of the chair with the envelope dangling between his legs—looking right at my face. No pity, which I was grateful for. But no compassion either.

  “I’m the client,” he said.

  “No shit.” I tried to look away, but his stare pulled me back. “How is she?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Did they hurt her?”

  “Bump on the head.” He touched a place above his ear as if it was important to know her face wasn’t injured. “Carrie. My daughter. She’s sensitive but strong.”

  His tone and word choice was clear. These were facts. Like the square footage of his house or the number of dollars in his bank account. She was his property.

  “You didn’t come out of it as well,” he said.

  “I just wanted to know if she was okay.”

  “She is.”

  The honorable thing to do would have been to send a message back with him. Say goodbye. Tell her it was over. Eat shit for the sake of her life. So what if it made Declan Drazen happy? Or if it satisfied his sense that his way was the only way? Or that Carrie was his property? What right did a monster have to pride?

  “Tell her I was asking about her.”

  “No.”

  The refusal was so flat, it was like a slap in the face.

  “I’m not going leave her for money.”

  He scoffed with a tight laugh he couldn’t suppress. “You seem like a smart boy, so I’m not going to insult your intelligence. I’m going to do you the favor of being honest with you.”

  “Don’t do me any favors.”

  “Your father was Keith Marlowe?”

  “Yes,” I growled, angering the wound in my throat.

  “A decent lawyer. I knew him.”

  “You killed him.”

  He looked down as if he didn’t want me to see him smile, but did it a second too late as if he wanted to make sure I did. “You know,” he said before looking up, “the Catholic Church isn’t full of creationists. We can follow the Canon, be devout members, and still believe in evolution. Which is good. Sensible. Because I see evolution at work every day. The strong survive. The weak fall in line. But when the weak overestimate their strength? When they fight with lions? That’s when they find out they’re as weak as lambs.”