B as in Beauty

by Alberto Ferreras

  The agency had lost a lot of clients and was in pretty bad shape since she took over, but Bonnie—who was an expert bureaucrat—knew that as long as she stood in everybody’s way and controlled communications, she could take credit for whatever worked and blame others for whatever didn’t. How could anybody tell the Chicago Boss what was going on if we couldn’t even say good morning to him without having our eyes poked out?

  After the copy-machine incident—when I refused to work late on Friday—Bonnie had stopped talking to me, but I knew that the wise thing to do was to lie low and wait for the next shoe to drop. On Tuesday, I stayed out of her way and did everything correctly from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Then I went home to prepare myself for the third full night at Simon’s.

  At 9 p.m. sharp, Alberto picked me up and dropped me at Simon’s studio. I let myself in, prepared the couch, and waited for him to show up. But that night something completely unexpected happened. That night Simon couldn’t sleep.

  He arrived looking more stressed than usual, sat next to me, and closed his eyes, but twenty minutes later he was huffing and puffing, trying to get comfortable.

  I looked at him from the corner of my eye: his eyes were closed, and he was fighting to fall asleep.

  Sitting there next to him, I couldn’t help noticing that Simon had really long and dark eyelashes, the kind that women wish for, that seem to be wasted on men. His nose was big, but elegant—one of those Greek noses, descending in a straight line down from his forehead. I had never noticed any of this before because his heavy-framed eyeglasses covered his face like a mask. Then I focused on Simon’s lips. He had a robust pair of kissers. You could hardly notice them when he was awake, since he was always biting on them, or pressing them together in a tense grimace. But as he sat there next to me, his mouth was relaxed, and his lips were broad and rather full. They were nice, very kissable lips. He’s not that bad looking after all, I told myself.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he said abruptly.

  “What? What are you talking about?” I replied, looking away from him as fast as I could and faking total surprise.

  “I don’t like it when you look at me like that.”

  I blushed to a deep shade of purple. Of course I was checking him out, but I did it for barely a split second, and his eyes were closed! Was he a mind reader or something?

  “I could feel you staring,” he said with his eyes still closed.

  “I don’t stare,” I lied. I would rather die than acknowledge that I was lusting after him.

  There was a minute or two of uncomfortable silence, while he changed positions three more times in his narrow sixteen and a half inches. Now I was uncomfortable, and when I’m uncomfortable, I talk.

  “Can’t sleep tonight?” I said.

  Silence.

  “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No!” he ordered.

  I didn’t like the tone of his voice, and he must have noticed that, because he immediately softened it to an almost apologetic whisper and added, “Please don’t leave.”

  His voice carried a tone of desperation that I had never heard before.

  “Do you want me to count sheep for you?” I joked.

  He chuckled. He actually chuckled, and getting that reaction out of such a serious guy made me feel as if I had won the lottery. I noticed that he looked very cute when he smiled, and I wished that he did it more often.

  “Wanna talk?” I asked.

  “About what?”

  “Anything—art, local news, the weather…But I must warn you, I’m bit of a talker, so if I start I might not be able to stop.”

  He chuckled again, and for the first time looked me in the eyes.

  “I’ll take the chance. What do you want to talk about?”

  “It’s your money, you tell me what you want to talk about,” I joked.

  “Well, money is one thing I don’t want to talk about.”

  I extended my arm, gesturing at his elegant apartment, as if I were presenting a brand-new convertible on The Price Is Right.

  “You have money problems?” I asked, incredulous.

  “A lot of money brings a lot of problems,” he answered.

  “Damned if you have it, damned if you don’t,” I said.

  “That’s life.”

  “My grandmother used to say: That’s life—no one gets out of it alive.”

  Simon laughed again.

  “That should help you relax,” I joked.

  “I wish,” he said.

  “Well…would you want to try a visualization?”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a technique that I learned to?—” I stopped myself in the middle of the sentence. There was no need to tell him that it was a weight-loss method. “It’s a relaxation technique. Wanna try it?”

  He said “sure,” and I immediately adopted the tone of my shamanic teacher.

  “Okay, close your eyes, and think of a beautiful beach…”

  “I don’t like going to the beach.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a long story,” he said, and by the tone of his voice I knew that he wasn’t planning to share it.

  “Okay, let’s think of a mountain, then. A mountain by the sea. I’m sorry, but I do love the beach.”

  He laughed again, and I felt good. Making him laugh was no small victory with someone as guarded as Simon.

  “Okay: picture a mountain by the sea. Have you been to Big Sur in California?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have you been to Hearst Castle?”

  “I lived in San Simeon for two years. I worked in the Castle’s archives.”

  My jaw dropped all the way to the floor. “Did you get to swim in the Neptune Pool?” I asked, trying to control my excitement.

  “Twice,” he said.

  Parenthesis. I’ve learned that sometimes coincidences are just that: coincidences. But sitting there, with Simon telling me that he pretty much lived in my favorite place on earth, was too much of a thrill.

  Back to the couch. I didn’t want to go any deeper into the Hearst Castle conversation, because otherwise neither one of us would sleep that night, and this guy was paying me to help him sleep, so, biting my lower lip, I asked him to close his eyes again, and I started with the visualization.

  “It’s a bright-blue day. And we’re at the patio next to the big house.”

  “By the pool?”

  “No. We’re at the back of the house, and we’re going to enter through the kitchen door. We cross the kitchen…and we get to the spiral staircase. We walk up the steps all the way to the second floor…To the right we have Marion Davies’ bedroom…but we are going to make a left, to enter the small living room that connects it with Hearst’s bedroom…Do you know where that is?”

  He nodded, his eyes firmly closed.

  “Okay, we stop in the middle of that living room, and we walk to the window…we open it…There are a couple of steps that climb out to the terrace…”

  “Are there really steps by that window?” he asked, his eyes still shut.

  “Trust me, there are steps by that window. Now we’re going to climb them—one…two…-three—and now we’re stepping out to that little terrace. Feel the breeze. Breathe in. We’re going to sit right by the edge. Look, the patio is down there, and if we look to the right we can see the Neptune Pool. Now we’re going to look at the horizon. The ocean is light blue, and it turns into silver at the horizon. You can hardly see the difference between the sea and the sky in the distance. There are seagulls flying slowly above us. And there’s nothing to worry about. The past is gone, and we don’t know anything about the future, so all we have is the present. And now, right now, we are happy. Completely happy. Now we are happy…and all we have…is now.”

  It was the first time that I had conducted a visualization for someone else, and I must have done something right, because at that moment I turned around to ask him if it was working and I realized that he was already sleeping like a baby.


  But here’s the best part: now that he was finally sound asleep, I could look at him for as long as I wanted without his knowing. And that’s exactly what I did. And that was the night I realized that Simon was cute. Very cute.

  Then I picked up my book and read it until I fell asleep on his shoulder.

  CHAPTER 21

  My mother is a workaholic. I’m not embarrassed to say it, because she is not embarrassed to be it. She works proudly, like a mule, and she raised me to work like one as well. She worked full-time with my father in the family business, and still managed to make sure that not one particle of dust could settle on her furniture. She could catch an atom of filth in midair. We could eat three meals a day directly off the floor knowing that there was not even a slight chance of swallowing a germ. I saw my first cockroach when I was ten years old and had spent the night at my friend Victoria’s home—her mother was a poet and a midwife with very little time or interest in household chores. Roaches wouldn’t even come near our house. They knew better.

  I believe that this obsession with labor is the remnant of my mother’s immigrant experience. Like so many others, she came to America to work hard, and she would not stop, no matter what.

  My brothers and I grew up brainwashed by a quite unreal image of Christmas—inspired by TV shows like Family Ties and such—where everybody gathered around the piano, singing Christmas carols and gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes. In these fictional families, parents had time for their kids and they sat on the bed to have heart-to-heart talks with them while a very moving soundtrack played in the background. Their conversations always ended with lines like “Whatever happens, just remember that I love you and that I’m proud of you.”

  Well, we didn’t get any of that at home.

  On Christmas Eve—or Nochebuena, as we called it—my mother spent the whole day cooking and the whole night cleaning. The kitchen door never stopped swinging, and my father never stopped yelling at Mom, “Can you please sit down for a second and eat?” But resting and enjoying the moment was never part of her agenda.

  I often tried to help her, but she always sent me back to the table. She didn’t want to share the burden. She kept compulsively bringing dishes in, and taking dishes out. When she finally sat down—if she finally sat down—she would do it for five minutes, just to complain about how tired she was. Having said that, she’d get up and start cleaning the table, insisting on hand-washing everything. God forbid she should ever use her dishwasher. The bigger the sacrifice, the better she felt.

  We’ve tried everything to sabotage her Christmas routine, from demanding reheated pizza for dinner, to threatening not to come home for the holidays ever again. But for Mom, work is like a bottle of Scotch, and we have no right to pull that away from her. My theory is that she’s afraid of intimacy and she needs to put something between you and her. And if that something is hard work, how can anyone complain?

  Bitching aside, I’ve learned to love her the way she is, because the one thing I know above everything else is that she loves me truly—she just has an odd way of showing her affection. And since there’s no chance that she will ever sit on my bed to tell me, “Whatever happens, just remember that I love you and that I’m proud of you,” the best time to have a heart-to-heart with her is when she’s busy. Actually, let me rephrase that: the only way you can talk to her is by following her around when she’s busy. She’s at her best when she’s multitasking. Her advice and intuition are right on the mark, but if you want a piece of either, you have to chase her around while she’s cooking, cleaning, or gardening. Don’t even try to corner her or make her slow down: it won’t work. The best of Mom’s wisdom is shared while she’s scrubbing the bathroom tiles, or replanting a young willow, so just follow the rules and don’t take it personally.

  I bring all this up because this is precisely one of the things that Madame has in common with my mom. Madame is always busy, always in a hurry. “I have a business to run,” she told me one too many times, until I understood that she came from the same school of immigrational trauma that trained my mom. The only difference is that Madame came from the Russian chapter.

  So, when Madame asked me to go shopping with her, I realized that it was not just a mission to find clothes. She was using this field trip as an excuse to catch up. I met her after work on Wednesday at a very fancy department store around the corner from my office.

  “Hi, honey!” she said, kissing me on both cheeks. “Is everything good?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Great. Then let’s look for summer blouses,” she instructed.

  Shopping with Madame was like taking a course at Harvard. Calling her picky would be an understatement. This woman took the store apart with a scalpel. No garment was left unturned. Utterly unimpressed by brand names or designer labels, she analyzed clothing from every possible angle—fabric, cut, stitching—she would actually turn things inside out to see how they were made.

  It was a bit embarrassing for me, because every time I was attracted to something flashy or trendy she would simply dismiss it by whispering, “garbage,” as she walked right by it.

  “Clothes are an investment that has to be made very consciously,” she explained. “Oh, look! This is decent,” she said, picking a skirt from a rack. Not even once did she look at the label.

  “See?” she told me, showing the hand-rolled inseams of the chosen skirt. “I like designers who invest in their clothes, not in advertising. Advertising is for stupids,” she said, frontally attacking my line of business. “How can anyone buy a product because its manufacturer tells you that it’s good? Of course they’re going to tell you it’s good, they want to sell it to you.”

  “How are things at work?” she asked, referring to my actual day job.

  I took a deep breath and started explaining the complicated web of intrigue that Bonnie was knitting around everybody: “Well, I discovered that my boss, who is this horrible woman, has been sabotaging not only my career but…” I went on to babble every unnecessary detail of my personal soap opera: “…and then I heard her in the bathroom explaining that she has this evil plan to oust the big boss, who’s a really nice guy, but I had a tape recorder with me and…”

  Madame, who—visibly bored by my yapping—was examining a silk scarf, finally interrupted me mid-sentence to close the case with a simple piece of advice.

  “Just choose your boss.”

  “What?” I had no clue what she was talking about.

  “You’re good at what you do, right?”

  “I guess…”

  “Well, then, anyone you work for would be delighted to have you as an employee. You are not going to change that woman, so stop wasting your time, and find someone you want to work for, someone who has ethics, and who doesn’t feel threatened by your talent.”

  It never crossed my mind that I had that power to choose my boss. Same as in love, I always waited to be chosen.

  “I know you are right, but first I have to settle one piece of business with this bitch.”

  “Don’t hurt yourself trying to hurt others,” she finished.

  She left me speechless with that line: it was short and direct, and it explained with frightening accuracy my previous experiences with revenge. She noticed my reaction, smiled, and dived into a rack of summer blouses.

  “Tell me something fun. Tell me about your customers,” she asked.

  I told her everything about every client: Lord Arnfield and his socks, Mr. Akhtar and his gowns, and the seduction battle with Richard Weber. She laughed and nodded, listening carefully—though acting as if her true concern was the thread count of the Egyptian-cotton sheets.

  “Can you interpret dreams?”

  “I can try,” Madame replied.

  “Well, I had this dream where I was having sex with a man and a woman, and the bed was on top of a tall tower of mattresses floating on the sea.”

  Madame looked at me for a second as if she was studying me and finally dec
lared, “In dreams I always interpret the sea as love. That tall tower of mattresses that separates your bed from the sea would be the distance that you put to separate sex and love.”

  Immediately I began making free associations that began all the way back with Monique in second grade and took me all the way to Richard Weber’s sex chamber. If sex was a despicable activity, it could only be practiced with despicable people (Dan Callahan included).

  If Madame was right about my dream, then my Russian pimp could have saved me thousands of dollars in psychotherapy. But before she could continue with my analysis, she found something on sale and left me in the middle of the cosmetics department trying to cope with my suppressed memories.

  “Smell this,” she commanded, bringing a bottle of some new, trendy perfume endorsed by some dubious celebrity.

  “Hmmm, it smells a little like bubble gum…” I said.

  “What woman in her right mind would like to go around smelling like bubble gum!” she exclaimed, disgusted.

  It didn’t smell so bad to me, but, then again, I do like bubble gum.

  “Women are deep, mysterious, profound. We are life givers. Why should we go around smelling like candy?”

  “What perfume do you wear?” I asked, intrigued.

  “I make my own.”

  “Really?”

  “I use a base of Eau Impériale from Guerlain, but I add a few secret ingredients.”

  “Secret ingredients like what?” I asked.

  “Honey, if I told you the secret ingredients, they wouldn’t be secret anymore,” she said, smiling. “I don’t like these new fragrances that are made by committee. A parfumeur is an artist, and no artist can perform with twenty executives breathing down his neck and telling him what to do. And don’t even talk about these celebrities who put their names on the bottle not even knowing the difference between vetiver and bergamot. There’s no tradition anymore. There’s no artistry. Everything is a scam,” she concluded.