Imperfections

by Bradley Somer

  “I am. I never realized how little I knew until I looked at other people’s lives,” Leonard said. “And you only really get to see what anyone does with their life after they die, otherwise they’re still a work-in-progress. A finished life is at its maximum. It can’t be anything greater.”

  I nodded, glanced sideways and caught a pair of beady eyes staring at me. They shifted as the porcine face they were embedded in moved awkwardly to face the tabletop.

  “You know,” Leonard yelled over the din of the music and people, “there are more people dead on earth than live ones? Like fifteen times as many dead people.”

  Spittle landed on my face whenever Leonard used a word with the letter P in it.

  “And each one of them had a life as full as yours or mine,” he yelled.

  I nodded and thought of the skunk I killed.

  “I want to know those people, know what they did. I want to know their lives. You can know everything there is to be known about them. You can even know everything through them.” Leonard was excited. His eyes sparkled.

  I glanced sideways and caught the man staring again. Again, quickly, he looked away.

  Leonard’s gaze followed mine with no pretense of discreetness. “Maybe he’s a cop,” Leonard said.

  “He’s looking?” I asked. My pulse quickened.

  Leonard lifted his beer. “He’s getting up and coming this way.”

  “No,” I said but Leonard nodded. I couldn’t bear to look. I was seventeen, with a beer and we had five hundred kilometres to go until we broke the city limits and got home. All this and I was being approached by a cop to be arrested, tossed in the tank, have Uncle Tony’s Magic Wagon impounded and my licence revoked.

  A hand clamped down on my shoulder. I jumped, my muscles snapped taut. I looked to the source of the arm. White smile, tanned skin, blue eyes, earring, hair that looked like it was cut yesterday, fashionable wireless glasses. Probably not a cop. “I saw you,” he said.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. I pushed my beer as discreetly as possible toward Leonard, on the off-chance he was an undercover cop.

  “Yeah. My name is Chester Leroy, I’m with the Agency. I was wondering if you’ve ever considered a career in modelling?” Chester extended a card and gave my shoulder a squeeze.

  There was a pause so I filled it with my name. “Richard,” I said.

  Leonard’s smug look slid into one of shock. I must have looked similar because Chester moved to fill in the silence with a stream of uninterrupted chatter.

  “Yes, we represent hundreds of fashion models and a gaggle of actors and actresses. You have a look we could really sell. Things are changing right now, they always are really, but there is a shift coming, a big one, and I think the times are ready for you and you are ready for the times. There is a harmony to your features that I think the Agency could really promote. I represent several of the firm’s top models and, for you, I see paycheques ranging into the tens of thousands per show if we position you right. I don’t want you to rush and there’s no obligation. Even if we meet later, there’s no obligation to sign up or anything though I think a contract could be a very real option for someone with your look.”

  I glanced at Leonard who shrugged, still with a confused expression on his face.

  “Sure, I guess,” I said. “But we’re leaving town tonight.”

  “Not after those beers, surely,” Chester said.

  Leonard closed his eyes and nodded.

  “Take my card,” Chester said. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning at my office before you go.” Without another word, Chester spun on his heel and exited the bar. As the door closed, I saw the old biker outside nod and tip his head, a cigarette held between his fingers glowed in the dark.

  “We’ll sleep in the van.” Leonard smiled. “We’ll leave tomorrow after your interview.” He waved his empty mug for more beer and pointed a finger at mine, too. We still had seventy dollars of gas money to drink.

  Mother and Father grew up in the sixties with icons like Burt Reynolds, Sean Connery and Christopher Reeve. Likewise, the models they saw in fashion magazines had ill-defined but undeniable musculature. The women were thin but still had curves and breasts. In the eighties, I grew up with icons like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Likewise models became beefier. The women became gothic muscle action figures like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens and Grace Jones.

  A face and body that was erotic in one generation may be repulsive in the next. Overall though, the basic tenants of beauty remain unchanged. A healthy body—one in which the combination of parts is balanced and in harmony—is beauty.

  I never got bigger like Father had wanted. Luckily the perception of beauty changes. My slim stature, the bane of my and Father’s relationship, became a boon to my career. The “contrast effect” in marketing accounts for these swings. Basically one phenomenon, Schwarzenegger, is a foundation for the rise in popularity of the opposite phenomenon, me. Popular perception is framed in the context of the milieu so if everyone is beefy, the slender stands out. There was no planning on my part, no attempt to sway my body into a smaller pair of jeans or a tighter shirt—I just happened to coincide with what would soon be deemed beautiful. I would become the new foundation. The by-product me happened to fit into what was going on at the time. Models started to swing from chiselled men and shapely women to androgynous and childlike. The contrast effect. Had I been born five years earlier or five years later, none of this would have mattered and I would have been nothing more than an attractive barista or handsome accountant.

  None of this was going through my mind when I woke up in the Magic Wagon in the bar parking lot, head pounding, grimacing against the early morning sun powering through the windshield. I stepped out of the wagon to stretch and pee. Leonard woke and drove us to the address on Chester’s business card.

  The receptionist let me freshen up in the bathroom, seemingly unfazed by my stale alcohol and body odour smell, as if strangers regularly wandered in to wash themselves as best they could in the cramped two-piece bathroom.

  There were three people in Chester’s office, all sitting. Being that there were no extra chairs, I stood. The office was small, close and crowded. I became very conscious of the smell of my underarms.

  “Richard, right on time,” Chester smiled, stood and extended his hand. Someone closed the door, which made the air seem heavy. “Welcome to the Agency. We represent hundreds of models, many of whom I am sure you will recognize. It all started with this woman, Stella Supernova,” he waved a hand at a picture on the wall. It was of a forty-something looking woman who may have been a drag queen. “Stella pulled this agency out of the limelight and into the spotlight over twenty-five years ago and she is still actively modelling. Here’s our information package,” he handed me a folder, “here is a benefits sheet,” he handed me a sheet, “and here’s a recent client list,” he handed me some more paper, picked up a camera, and clicked a few shots of my face. “Now take your shirt off, I need a picture.”

  I lifted my T-shirt over my head, trying to limit the escape of the strong smell of my underarms and the nutty smell of my hungover, unwashed skin. Nobody in the room seemed to notice. Chester looked from me to the two unintroduced people sitting close by. They looked me over.

  There is a mathematics to beauty that I didn’t understand at the time. Apparently, Pythagoras mathematically answered the question: What is beautiful? The answer was 1.618. That is the ratio between two quantities as well as between the sum of those two quantities which, when seen in human features and proportions, is consistently and particularly more appealing than any other. It is a complex addition of both the individual parts as well as the combined effort of these parts to create a harmonious whole. It is inherent that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, it is in the eye of some subconscious calculation that recognizes variation around the symmetry and proportion of parts related to this, the golden ratio.

  Chester and the two unintroduced were mathematic
ians examining my face and body with the cold calculation of any master physicist or actuarial scientist.

  Chester clicked a picture.

  Symmetry, in artworks, in bodies, in faces, is the basis of what is beautiful. It portrays an absence of defects. Symmetrical growth is portrayed in our subconscious, good genes, good for breeding and therefore attractive on an animalistic level. Greek and Roman men, considered the classics of beauty by many artists and other mathematicians, were tall and muscular.

  “He’s skinny,” one of the unintroduced said.

  “And small,” the other said. “Malnourished with an intrinsic sadness. Like those kids you are supposed to adopt from those villages on TV. Except he’s without the bloaty belly.”

  Greek and Roman men with full heads of hair and strong jawlines were considered virile. The handsomest of them had bodies that portrayed health.

  “I love it. Positively anemic,” the first unintroduced said. “It is unhealthy. I think we have a new look for the Agency to get behind. We will make a beauty the likes of which the world has never seen. This is an opposite to the beauty that’s on the market today.”

  Greek and Roman statues portrayed intelligence through high, wide foreheads and wide-set eyes, strong mouth lines and sharp noses, not unlike predatory birds.

  Chester moved and clicked a profile picture.

  “He has nice, thick hair. A good brow line. Nice and strong. Broad but not Cro-Magnon.” Chester started his inventory. “There is a mysterious seriousness in those green eyes, not so much an intimidating intelligence but a misplaced one. If I could remove them and put them on a plate at a party, no one could deny snacking on them,” Chester said.

  “His nose is classic though his face is anything but,” the unintroduced said. “Its angles are sharp and perfect and very similar in slope to that of the jaw.”

  “The lips are a little thin but seem to work well with the rest of him,” Chester rejoined. “There is a lot here to work with. I’m a little concerned about the body though, the weight.”

  “He’s positively emaciated,” said an unintroduced one.

  “We need an extreme counterpoint if he’s to stand out,” Chester said. “Five foot eleven and one hundred and ten pounds if I had to guess. It’s good now but we’ll have to watch that he doesn’t grow into his height. If he fills out, we could lose him. Right now, we should get him into suits and swim trunks. His broad shoulders angling to the narrow hips, that’s perfect for formal ware and beach ware. He’s like a walking coat hanger. He’s the perfect simulacrum for the new masculinity. His ass will send the swim trunks flying off of the shelf. It’s sculpted.”

  “His hands are too plain, too workman,” the unintroduced piped in. “And that weird patch of hair on his stomach will have to be dealt with.”

  “His hands would exclude him from product shots,” the second said.

  “Come on,” Chester said. “With looks like his, I wouldn’t waste him on hand modelling even if he had spectacular glamour hands. And there are ways of dealing with that stomach hair.”

  This went on for half an hour. At first I was concerned by the compartmentalization of each of my body parts. After signing with the Agency, it became normal to me. It should have been all along. I was signing the health plan when I realized the treatment of a body as parts is institutionalized. The health plan was compartmentalized too. I could claim from a dentist, a dermatologist, an ophthalmologist, a psychologist for work done on my teeth, skin, eyes and brain. The accidental death and dismemberment forms showed me exactly what one foot is worth. I was insured for 50 percent of the principle amount if I lost a foot. One eye, 50 percent. Both hands and feet, 100 percent. A thumb or index finger, 25 percent given that severance happens on the closest joint to the wrist. A fingertip doesn’t pay out. You can’t cash in on a pinky either.

  All the parts, well, Chester was ready to represent them 100 percent. Every piece of me would be marketed and cashed in on. Every last little bit.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Handsome Boys’ Modelling Guide to Beauty, Poise and Personality

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard flight zero-four-seven to Moscow. We’d like to ask for a few minutes of your time while we outline some important safety features of this aircraft.”

  Lately, life could have used a few safety features. Since signing with the Agency a year ago, I had spent most of my time strapped in the bellies of various Boeings beside beautiful co-workers. I had heard the safety speech to the point I could recite the American Airlines version, the Air Canada version, the Lufthansa version, the British Airways version. All the speeches were pretty much the same, being written by various federal transportation agencies. The words were best coming from between the lips of the most beautiful stewardesses ever to seduce the skies, those of Singapore Airlines.

  Singapore Airlines… I had sex twice in their washroom over the Pacific Ocean. Air Canada, sex once somewhere over Saskatchewan. Lufthansa, once over the Atlantic and once over Central Europe. British Airways, just before descending into Amsterdam. It’s a very short flight from Heathrow to Schiphol. American Airlines, seven times over the continental US and once over the non-contiguous states.

  “This aircraft has five exits, two at the front, two over the wings and one at the rear. Please take a moment to note the exit nearest you.”

  I had been driven directly from a shoot to the airport to catch flight zero-four-seven. The shoot was for Jungo undergarments. It was fabulous and took place in an abandoned parking lot downtown. A generator-powered bank of lights was the sun and a generator-powered fan was the wind. It blew my hair as I stood on a boat that sat on a trailer hooked to a tow truck. The driver sat waiting in his greasy overalls, chewing on a toothpick and tugging on a hangnail. I hung from ropes and draped myself across various pieces of nautical hardware, not knowing how any of them functioned but knowing how to look amazing with them. My skin was sticky with glycerine ocean spray. The generator had chugged and roared, not seeming to bother a guy who slept in a puddle of his own piss in the corner of the parking lot.

  A photographer clicked black and white freeze-frames, stopping time’s progression for an instant. Each photo captured a singular moment. Each moment held the promise of another to come and, along with it, the eventuality of celluloid immortality.

  From the camera angle, I was in clear ocean air with virgin white sails billowing all around me. The line between reality and fantasy was altered merely by the way the shot was framed. Reality was a matter of perspective, what the photographer allowed the viewer to see.

  “In the event of an emergency or sudden power loss, this aircraft has been equipped with in-floor lighting that will guide you to the nearest exit. In the unlikely occurrence of a loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the panels located above your heads. Secure the mask over your mouth and nose and tighten the elastic straps. The bag may not inflate, which is normal. We assure you that oxygen is flowing. Please don your own mask before assisting those in need around you.”

  That homeless guy, the one sleeping in his own piss near the roaring generator, I thought, would I assist him? Well, it wasn’t so much that I wouldn’t, it was that I didn’t. Which, in the long run, is the same thing because I could have assisted him. I got paid well. I could have bought him lunch or a bottle of Big Bear or something.

  I fastened my seatbelt.

  Not helping him was the same as not wanting to. Did that make me a bad person? Well, nobody else was helping him.

  “Please take a moment to ensure your seat belts are fastened, your chair backs and tray tables are in the upright and locked position, and your carry-on baggage is stowed under the seat in front of you or in the overhead compartments.”

  There is a safety reason for storing all of your baggage. It can cause harm if not stowed properly. Stowing your baggage securely, out of sight and out from underfoot, is a healthy practice. I vowed not to think of the less fortunate anymore. I vowed to live in the
now, for the moment, without consideration for the past or the future. I vowed to let it all slide. I would live my own life. I was independent, free and jetting all over the world. Cameras were pointed at me. People were beginning to notice the new look.

  “Transport and safety regulations dictate that this is a non-smoking flight. The bathrooms are equipped with sensitive smoke detectors. It is a federal offence to tamper with or disable them. We’re glad to have you aboard. If there’s anything your attendants can do to make your time with us more pleasurable, please press the attendant button and one of us will be happy to help.”

  I had smelled smoke when Leonard lit a cigarette on our ride from the Jungo shoot to the airport for me to catch flight zero-four-seven. He had parked the Magic Wagon beside the generator and stood there smoking while we finished. Leonard had just graduated. He got a position with the Times, but often had afternoons off so he drove me places. Leonard was an obituary writer. His co-workers called him names.

  “Hey, Dr. Death,” I said as I approached.

  “Nope, this week I am Harold, of Harold and Maude fame,” Leonard threw the butt to the concrete.

  “Here, I found this at a used bookstore.” He handed me a copy of The Handsome Boys’ Modelling Guide to Beauty, Poise and Personality with a shrug. “Figured you could use it.”

  Leonard edged the minivan into traffic. He scratched his goatee and seemed distracted.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Oh, Kurt Cobain died and I didn’t have a pre-obit done so I had to scramble,” he said.

  I looked at him quizzically.

  “Yeah, I write up famous people who’re going to die so when they do, we can go to press quickly. It avoids rush mistakes,” he said. “Problem is, there are so many famous people you can’t get them all. Some are easy to predict, the ones that have pre-existing conditions or are really old, but others…” he chewed his fingernail, signalled and changed lanes.