There was an erosion of the sculpted and varnished wood on that edge of the chest, from the thousands of times she’d deliberately struck it. And Tombi had a permanent bruise on her right knee, a knot hard as a doll’s fist, violet as a birthmark.
Outside in the hallway, the cat scratched at the fuzz ball of light creeping under the door. Karloff meowed, his rumbly voice strangely muffled, as if heard through a faulty telephone receiver.
Finally she navigated the few feet, stood before the dresser, let a moan squeeze through her clenched teeth, still looking down, down! She let her eyes stray up but to the left, toward the window and light spilling through a fragile breach between two heavy, dawn-retentive curtains. She glanced up, to delicate dust-lace strung between the brass filaments of a sconce.
Tombi shivered, sang in a very small, childish voice, “Will I be pretty? Will I be plain? Will I be hideous? Que sera, sera…”
Then she sighed, steeling herself for the discovery. She finally brought her line of sight into the reflection. What new face had she grown in the night?
It was a ritual for her, at last allowing her stone fingers to cross the nouveau arches of cartilage, the blue or pale ridges of bone, gingerly stroking ice smooth or coarsely corrugated hide.
Most people were born with visages that lasted them lifetimes in year after geometrically-expressioned year. In sublimity of beauty or profanity of ugliness. They knew without hesitation what they resembled after dreaming was done, what the countenance pressed against their pillow had had whispered into it in rushed headlong mosaic.
But Tombi’s was different at every dawn, stamped with midnight’s unconscious revelry or with the 2 A.M. nightmare. Perhaps this one had been influenced to be a new bright species of Venus, maybe symmetry’s scarred moon.
It hadn’t always been that way. She’d been born with a constant face. But it had been a nothing face, sans definitive curves and hollows. Flat. Merely mathematical, the square root of minus character, as a likeness stamped on a coin. She’d hated it.
««—»»
Mother was of French heritage, daughter of a World War 11 war bride. Her own name was Reine which meant queen, and she gave both her daughters French names. Tombi’s sister (one year older than she) was called Vedette, a word for movie star. Tombi’s real name—as written on her birth certificate—was Tombèe, the word for fall, as in night fall.
One day, when Tombi was small, she went exploring through a suitcase of old photos. There were many of a divine, raven-haired woman—very 1940’s—like an exotic Joan Crawford maybe, posing near the Eiffel Tower. Then playing on a cold-looking beach in one of those old-fashioned, over-constructed one-piece bathing suits. And later waving hello to the Statue Of Liberty.
After that Tombi came across a faded one of a man who looked as if most of his features had been erased.
“Who is this, Mother?” she asked, carrying the picture into the kitchen.
Reine took it from her. “Where did you find this? It is your grandfather. He was an American G.I. See the uniform?”
Tombi persisted. “But what’s the matter with him?”
“He was injured in the war. They couldn’t do much then when shrapnel tore a face. They cut here and pulled skin over to there, as if turning over to a new page in a sketch book. They did grafts to give the semblance of a nose. A glass eye to fill an empty hollow. Dentures to give him teeth again. It made him seem unfinished. But plastic surgery was so new. It really was all they could give him. Many men didn’t even receive that much. My mother met him in a hospital, tended him as his nurse. Then they fell in love and were married.”
“He looked like that before they were married?” Tombi was skeptical. She had, of course, learned quickly as a child that looks were everything.
“Looks aren’t everything,” Reine replied.
“How come I never met him?”
“Well, you did, only once. He visited right after you were born. He leaned over your crib and gave you a kiss. ‘For the blood of my blood’ he told you. He died not long after that. He’d survived twenty-two years after his injury. The doctors hadn’t given him half that long but he showed them.”
Tombi screwed her mouth into a hateful scowl. “So, he did this to me!”
Reine’s jaw dropped and she reached out to hug her child. But Tombi ran from the room.
««—»»
Tombi remembered what it had been like to be a teenager.
She watched as the pretty sister ventured out on dates, received endless phone calls from admiring boys, primped every available second like a graceful but flightless bird. Reine had been beautiful, too, like her own mother. The two of them were so fine, descended from the stunning French nurse with her swept-up hair, big dark eyes, pouty mouth. All that had been left over from the gene pool was grandfather’s ruin. And even if it was argued that you couldn’t inherit erasure, Tombi was convinced she was blood of his blood. Zero was a disease, a curse which could be passed on through the secretions in a kiss.
Vedette and Tombi were both in college. One afternoon Reine was fussing over this comely sibling, wanting to get her clothes, hair, make-up just right. Beauty was a serious endeavor in their house.
“So, you’ve decided not to attend your sister’s recital?” Mother asked with a resigned huff.
The lovely sister was rushing back and forth, stinging the air with hair spray and freshettes of perfume, fluffing out a short skirt of velvet and taffeta. Vedette was to dance a segment from a famous ballet. Naturally it was something French.
“The college doesn’t host recitals for sculpting, so I’ll pass,” Tombi replied coldly.
Mother shrugged. “Well, getting layers of mud jammed under your fingernails isn’t all that ladylike. Although I guess Demi Moore certainly didn’t lose her femininity in that potter’s wheel scene in GHOST.”
“For the last time, I don’t use clay as a medium. I start out with plaster molds and finish in latex and plastics. I intend to do special effects,” Tombi corrected her.
Why couldn’t the woman remember this? There were pieces of Tombi’s work all over the house. Set upon delicate rosewood tables and lining walnut shelves, busts of moments captured adrift between beauty and horror. She was surprised that Reine put up with them, knowing that many of them were disturbing. Especially the ones that seemed unfinished—or were only finished as far as Tombi felt she could take them. Too much like the old photograph of Reine’s father, yet with something indefinable that marked them as individually empty, too.
Mother brightened. “You will be rich and famous and win an Oscar. For movies perhaps Vedette will star in.”
Tombi smiled thinly. “Yes, I would like to create the monsters who will tear her to pieces.”
There was a tap at her shoulder and Tombi turned, grudgingly accepting a kiss on the cheek from this sister.
“I would be ever so honored,” Vedette whispered into her ear. “Your creatures are always exquisite.”
Tombi had been good for weeks now. She hadn’t gone on tirades, smashing all the mirrors in the house—or painting them black, as she’d done on other occasions. She hadn’t tried to alter herself with both minor and drastic actions. Not since Mother had started taking her to see the psychiatrist. And that was because the last time Tombi was carried into the emergency room with self-inflicted ruin that the attending physician had insisted on it. The file on her was so long, going back to when Tombi was only ten. (Presently she was nineteen.) She’d tried drawing on herself with black ink in simple lines, in surreal watercolor, in magic marker complications. She’d used scissors, hobby glue, needle and thread. She’d attempted correction with a razor, a Zippo lighter, corrosives she’d discovered underneath the kitchen sink. She’d only succeeded in scarring the still life face, pitting it like the surface of igneous rock. Surgery had fixed the worst of it—for the methods had improved a great deal since World War II—making smoother seams of the damage, but she still looked unrealized.
The psychiatrist had been Phyllis Wymath. Tombi recalled the first time she’d had an appointment. She’d arrived a little early and had to wait. Eventually the door to the inner sanctum opened and a handsome young man walked out. Tombi had glared at him a little, wondering what his problem could possibly be. Well, she smirked to herself, maybe he was a bed wetter.
The doctor, still seated at her desk, called after him, “Oh, and Mr. Uille… Remember next time, you can’t wear that in here.”
Tombi had been summoned in next. She noticed the cold, white marble tile. Blue velvet upholstery in couch and chairs. Illustrations in ink upon the walls: patient in a straight-jacket, head shot of patient wearing a muzzle, patient crawling into the doorway of an enormous Rorschach print.
She was asked, “Why do you feel this hatred for yourself?”
“Only for my face,” Tombi had specified, one long finger jabbing the air.
Dr. Wymath moistened perfect lip-sticked lips as she pouted in a professional moue, studying the visage in question, eyes betraying no secrets.
“All right then. Why do you hate your face?”
Tombi glared at her, infuriated they had chosen this Neiman Marcus manikin to deliver her up to.
“You wouldn’t understand. Damn it, I want an ugly doctor if I have to speak to anyone. Go get me someone repulsive. A shrink who is also The Elephant Man. Or who was in a car accident once and barely survived going through the windshield. Someone who isn’t one of you, you mistakeless bitch.”
Dr. Wymath patted back a strand of stray blonde hair away from her otherwise flawless forehead. She glanced at her manicured nails, frowning slightly at a tiny chip in the polish. She blinked eyes lacquered with black mascara. And she said, “Most people aren’t satisfied with how they look.”
“Are you?” Tombi demanded to know.
The shrink laughed a light, virtually mirthless laugh, tinged with what at least appeared to be bitterness. She replied, “Only after hours of hard work, dear.”
Great! This stupid butterfly was upset because she had to put a little sweat into it? Tombi curled back her lip in a sneer and leaned forward. “But you get there, don’t you?”
“Only because I fight every inch of the way,” Wymath replied.
“Oh, how you poor Venuses struggle,” Tombi said venomously.
“Venuses in general? Or are you jealous of your sister?”
Tombi scoffed. “Vedette is a goddess of flesh.”
There was a session when the doctor tried to get Tombi to relate her dreams. Tombi knew that, ostensibly, the shrink wanted to use them to measure Tombi with, inventing causes and effects, secrets and more bullshit.
“You want to know if I dream of having sex with my father or of sewing my mother and sister together by their nipples? Sorry, Phyl, no kinky sex or family violence in there. Freud would be bored. You’ll have to get your turn-ons somewhere else.”
Wymath smiled faintly, tongue snaking around the corners of her perfectly-traced lips like a napkin dabbing at pink icing.
“What you do in your dreams may not be all that telling. It isn’t always the actions that reveal the most.”
Tombi shrugged. “Then why do you want to know?”
Wymath crossed her legs, lean thighs rubbing against each other across silk hosery. The woman always wore the kind with seams down the back. One interesting thing that Tombi noted, the seams weren’t black or tan brown to go with the color of the hose. They were scarlet, as if she drew a straight line down the back of each leg with a razor every day when she got dressed, letting it harden into a long clot on each leg that would remain for all the office hours.
“They tell you that eyes are the windows to the soul but that isn’t true,” Wymath explained. “Those windows are really our dreams. Specifically, any dream in which we come face to face with a mirror. The reflection spied there is your soul, Tombi, for good or for ill. Even when it’s not always the same image, it’s a piece of your soul, crying out to be recognized. It has divested itself of the outermost layers to reveal this truth to you. Whatever you see—at least at that precise moment, on that particular night and hour—this is what you are.
“You must retain this image, remember it along with every reflection of yourself which you dream. Keep a journal where you describe them: it is your personal Bible. Or make drawings. Anything, but keep a record. And tell me about them. They are the best identification of what exists in your skinless psyche.”
“My what?” Tombi asked, sparse eyebrows coming up.
Wymath uncrossed her legs and then crossed them the other way, hose on each leg rubbing, producing a subtle, silken static.
“You can never be whole enough to be happy until you give up the obsession with appearance. Flesh stripped, we are all alike beneath. The only thing that truly sets us apart is the individual’s skinless psyche.”
Tombi snorted with derision, finding a conflict in the argument. “Then why be obsessed with what we look like in dreams?”
“It’s the dream mirror that reveals what the psyche is. Don’t you see? The mirrors on this side of reality display what gives us pain, because here in the conscious realm beauty is the logic of an ordered universe; ugliness is chaos. But in dreams, it is the reflection which offers us freedom.”
Tombi stared at her, blankly.
Wymath coughed delicately into her fist, non-chalantly glancing at her watch as she did this.
“No dream reflections, Tombi?” she coaxed.
“Sure I had one last night. I’ve been having it for weeks actually. I get up in the middle of the night in the dream, the darkness stinging me like hornets. I run screaming down this seemingly endless hallway, invisible hands groping me as I hurry past,” Tombi related, closing her eyes as she set her brow and mouth in concentration. “There is the sound of a clock ticking, but it sounds more like a knife rubbing against bone. It just gets louder and louder as I run down the corridor. My face hurts! It feels like its slowly getting hard in concrete until I can’t breathe and my skin is turning to stone!”
Wymath leaned forward. “Go on, dear.”
“The hallway turns suddenly and I round the corner. There is a giant mirror where the glass is a solid wall of smooth ice, and …and…”
“And…?”
“It’s horrible! I can see in the reflection that I’ve become you!” Tombi let out a high-pitched shriek and pretended to faint in her chair.
Wymath frowned, nothing too deep. Just a dip at the corners of her mouth. Nothing that would line the eyes. Not much of a reaction.
Tombi sat back up, chuckling, and asked the doctor, “What do you keep in your psychobabble Bible? Alas, Barbi-lon! The whore of blonde Revelations!”
A few days later Dr. Wymath’s body was found, stuffed into a giant trash bag, dumped into the trash bin behind her office. Her exquisitely maintained face had been virtually ripped away. A knife or a razor or claws or a fistful of penny nails might have been the weapon.
A secretary for another doctor in the building reported sharing the elevator with a workman who was lugging out a large, shiny black garbage bundle. A cap had been pulled low over the face, and all she remembered seeing was a tattoo on the back of a hand, of a red gargoyle.
So Tombi didn’t have to go back. She was subdued for a while, hoping that they wouldn’t just choose another psychiatrist. She took precautions to present a finer demeanor, counting to ten to quell her temper, closing her eyes to picture a cold darkness with which to gauze the heat away. Otherwise, they might simply choose another shrink and pack her off.
Mother and Vedette just thought—because they hoped it and believed they had willed it so—that Tombi was finally coming around to a point of acceptance with who she was. It had only been juvenile angst and she was outgrowing it.
They begged her to come to the recital.
She shook her head as her sister pleaded. “You don’t need me, Vedette. All eyes will be on you. You’ll be suitably worshipped for your talent. Goddess of f
lesh, that’s what you are.”
“Oh, Tombi…” Mother murmured sadly, stretching out her arms.
“My talents are very small, especially compared with yours,” Vedette said, laying her cool cheek against her sister’s hot one. “I can do a few steps without falling over and I look good. Big deal. A lot of people can boast this. But what you do is an art, and art is more selective of genius.”
Tombi pointed to the new, gilt-framed mirror on the wall of the bedroom she shared with Vedette.
“Small talents, small world. Brittle. When held together how like water. When disrupted, how like knives and teeth.”
Tombi picked up a can of the hair spray and threw it with all her strength into the looking glass. The mirror shattered loudly, daggers and fangs of it falling in silver to the floor.
Tombi just turned away and remained facing the wall until she heard them leave. It was to be an afternoon recital but the ladies were going to dinner and the theater afterward. It was only about three o’clock. She swept up the mess and then walked around the house, looking at the head casts and masks she’d made. There was one in particular which caught her eye. It had been a winner in a statewide art competition two years before. It was just the life-sized face of a sleeping baby, like a death mask imprint except it was rendered in glass. The features picked up the light as if it were pure crystal. Such an innocent face, yet the infant displayed was frowning slightly.
She took the piece off the stand to examine it. What had she been thinking when she created this? What thoughts had she imagined were in the sleeping infant’s mind? The frown was faint, just a downturn in the cupid’s bow lips, a tweak in the forehead and between the eyelids. What could be so terrible in someone who hadn’t experienced anything yet? Was it some remembrance of trauma from the previous life? The previous death?
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