Gorgeous

by Rudnick, Paul

  Lila led me into an elevator where everything, including the ceiling and the floor, was made of black glass. Even though there were no visible buttons, Lila knew just where to lightly tap her forefinger along a wall, and the doors closed and we began to rise. All I could see through the black glass were tiny, distant, flickering lights, as if there was some midnight traffic jam at an airstrip hundreds of miles away. Then the doors opened, and Lila made a small gesture with her hand and her head, to direct me, and I stepped out, into nothing.

  When I say nothing, I mean acres and acres of the purest whiteness, as if the elevator had zoomed to the Arctic Circle during a blizzard. At first I went snow blind but as my vision cleared, I could tell that I was in a room, or maybe I should call it an area, or a zone, because it was the size of a football field. The walls were pure white, unveined marble, with no visible seams, and the floor was drenched with super-high-gloss white enamel, and I hesitated to step forward because the floor was so glossy it looked wet. But when I turned to Lila for instructions, she was gone, and I couldn’t see where the entrance to the elevator had been.

  I shoved off my sneakers and I began walking, in just my little, only slightly grimy, white half socks. I could see that, miles away, at the far end of the room, there was a soaring, completely transparent glass fireplace, an almost invisible cylinder set out from the wall, where pale blue flames leaped twenty feet into the air from a bed of crystals, booming and crackling even higher the closer I came. Around the fireplace was a grouping of long, low, sort-of couches, and a large, blocky, sort-of chair, all covered in that kind of obscenely soft black leather, which a host on one of the home shopping channels is always calling “the finest, unborn, triple-grade-A dee-luxe Italian kidskin.”

  “Becky,” said a voice, and then, as I got closer to all of that black leather furniture-type stuff, I saw that there was a man, not exactly sitting on one of the couches and not exactly lying on it. I’d have to say he was lounging, with one bare foot on the leather, and the other on the floor. Despite the unbelievable self-consciousness of the room and the fireplace and the lack of color scheme, and the fact that the man had clearly arranged everything from the furniture to his feet for maximum effect, he looked comfortable, because he owned all of it.

  “I’m Tom Kelly,” said the man, and then he stood up. He wasn’t being polite; it was more like he wanted me to get a good look at all of him, as a dare. Most guys introduce themselves with a hey and a handshake, but Tom Kelly used his entire body. He was staring at me clinically, as if he could twist or erase or vaporize whatever he didn’t like about me with his eyes. I felt like a rabbit, being eyeballed by either a scientist with a syringe, or a master chef with a cleaver. I started to shiver and I almost threw up, but then I remembered something that my third-grade teacher had once said, about how all people are created equal, and so I tried to see if I could believe it and I stared right back.

  Tom Kelly was tall and rangy and seriously handsome, but not like Drake, because Tom Kelly wasn’t ridiculously, uselessly beautiful. There wasn’t anything boyish or innocent or simple about him. He was a great-looking man, and he knew it, but that was only one of his advantages. He was wearing a white T-shirt and cream-colored canvas pants, with the cuffs casually rolled up, and both of us were very aware of his body. He was somewhere in his thirties and proudly athletic. I’d never been so conscious of a guy’s neck and ankles and forearms.

  “Welcome,” he said as he sat back down on the couch and pointed me toward a black leather-upholstered cube. I stumbled and managed to perch on the cube, but then I leaned back, into thin air, which wasn’t a good idea. I jerked upright and fumbled with my backpack and finally just let it slump to the floor beside me.

  “You look a bit — only a bit — like your mother,” Tom continued. His voice was both masculine and insinuating, and everything he said sounded like a compliment, a come-on and a challenge. “Your mother — oh my Lord. She was so gorgeous. Beyond belief.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, seriously pissed off. “I know she’s gone, but I still wish you wouldn’t be mean.”

  “Mean? You really don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?”

  Tom picked up a bone-like chunk of hammered silver, which turned out to be a custom-made remote control. He pressed a few recessed buttons and the entire room went inky, bottomless black.

  Then an enormous photograph was projected across one of the endless white marble walls. It was a picture of a stunningly beautiful nineteen-year-old, with her long dark hair flying around her face. She was looking right at the camera, right at me, and at first I thought, why is this guy showing me a picture of some total knockout, and then I gasped as I made the connection: It was a picture of my mother.

  Tom continued to point his silver remote at the walls and at a forest of glass panels that slid from both the floor and the ceiling, and soon I was surrounded by more cascading photos of my mother, hundreds of them, and she was always slim and dazzling and wearing the most out-there fashions of twenty years earlier. Some of the photos were from magazines but others were snapshots of my mother on a grand sailboat or sauntering down the steps of a museum or sitting on a bench in Central Park and hugging a collie.

  Then, unbelievably, from a far corner of the room, my mother came walking toward me. She was fresh faced and skinny and she was wearing a black ribbed turtleneck, tight jeans and a floor-length, laser-cut, weightless suede coat that billowed around her, and she was smiling at me, and I’d never seen her so happy. But as I stood and reached out to touch her or hug her, the life-sized, three-dimensional hologram from a fashion show runway flickered and vanished. From another corner, a second hologram, in a wisp of an evening gown, approached me and then countless other catwalking versions of my mom appeared, all in different but equally impossible outfits until I was spinning, but as quickly as they’d filled the room, swirling around me like a theme park exhibit devoted only to my mom, the images left, the gloom lifted and the white glare returned and I felt like my mom had died all over again.

  “I met your mother when she was sixteen,” said Tom. “I was waiting for my car in Times Square and I looked across the street and there was this girl. Oh, she was a total hick, she was on a field trip to the city, her high school had flown everyone up north to see some godforsaken musical. But I could tell she was dazzled, by the show and the city and by being away from home for the first time. She was wearing tight, acid-washed jeans and a hot pink puffy jacket and all sorts of I LOVE NEW YORK crap, oh, and one of those green foam rubber Statue of Liberty headbands, with the spikes. Her hair was nothing and her makeup was drugstore overdose but I took one look and I said that’s it. That’s her. That’s the next great American face. And so I dodged a few taxis and I ran over and I told her, ‘Look, I’m Tom Kelly, and you’re going to assume that I want to drug you and fuck you and sell you to an Arab, but I don’t. I want to put your face on every public surface, perfume package and magazine cover in the world. Call me.’ And I gave her my card.”

  “And she called you?”

  “From her little Midtown Holiday Marriott Best Western hellhole and she said that she knew I was a liar and a fake, because there was no real Tom Kelly.”

  As Tom said this, I realized that until a few seconds earlier I’d been just like my mother. Because like most people, I’d grown up in a world saturated with the name Tom Kelly but I’d had no idea he actually existed. Tom Kelly was like sugar or TV or God. He wasn’t a man, he was a thing, and he’d always been there. His name appeared on the back pockets of both premium and discounted designer jeans, on the waistbands of men’s boxer briefs and on the seams of women’s black lace thongs. There were perfumes with names like Tom Kelly’s Expectations, Arouse by Tom Kelly and TK Surprise. His name was woven into socks and pantyhose and wedding gowns and basic gray eighty-dollar T-shirts with the Tom Kelly logo either almost undetectable along the side or dead center and the size of a hubcap. His name was stamped across frozen d
inners and special limited-edition sports cars and sunglasses and shoulder bags and workout gear and sneakers and Designer Collection Barbie Strapless Weekend in Aruba Fantasy Gowns. Tom Kelly, or sometimes just his initials, could be found on barely-there camisoles and the most cuddly, oversized boyfriend sweaters; worked in twenty-four-karat diamonds and glinting gold embedded in the front teeth of rap stars; embroidered over the left nipples of enough polo shirts to prep out mainland China; and often, I’d seen the name all by itself, the silver letters barely visible against the gray background, as if the Tom Kelly brand was so steamy and desirable that it only needed to whisper, showcasing nothing but Tom Kelly–ness and all of the status and sizzle it promised.

  The Tom Kelly ad campaigns featured only top-echelon models, both male and female. Becoming the face of Tom Kelly, everyone knew, was the modeling pinnacle, the modeling equivalent of not just an Academy Award but the Nobel Prize for looking unbearably sexy, blank faced, and sluttishly yet elegantly disinterested. The models were always very young and sometimes naked, which led to the ads being protested by parent groups and Christian coalitions and congressional subcommittees on moral decay. One notorious series of ads had used pouting, topless girls barely shielding their exposed breasts while squatting in prison cells, where the Tom Kelly logo had been scratched into the blood-spattered cinder-block walls. This had been declared kiddie porn, terrorist chic, misogynist, satanic and worse. The ads had been pulled but the cologne they’d been promoting, First Offense by Tom Kelly, had sold out instantly in over fifty-eight countries.

  “Oh my God,” I said and even as the words were leaving my mouth, I knew how idiotic they sounded. “You’re Tom Kelly.”

  “Yes,” said Tom, and I could tell that he both understood my confusion and that he was thinking about kicking me into the fireplace and warming his hands with my screams. Then he tapped his remote and, from the darkness, another set of pictures blasted over me as I began to discover that before I was born, Tom Kelly had been the face of Tom Kelly. I saw that for thirty years Tom’s handsome, slightly mocking features and his lean, defined body had been a mainstay of the Tom Kelly campaigns. There he was in a tux, leaning against a split-rail fence on a New Mexico prairie and then he was wearing a ripped sweatshirt and ragged jeans, galloping on horseback through some pounding California surf and then he was naked, with his crotch barely covered by the biceps and elbows of a pileup of equally naked, blissed-out male and female models, in the snow, in a grove of evergreens: This last image had been from a holiday campaign and the caption read, SAVIOR BY TOM KELLY.

  Everything vanished except for a projected photo of a three-story-high Times Square billboard of Tom standing shirtless on some whitewashed Greek balcony with his arm around the bare, tan shoulders of my stunning young mother, who was wearing only the filmiest white mesh midriff-baring top over a crocheted white string bikini bottom. They made an overwhelmingly beautiful couple; they were Adam and Eve with money, a personal trainer and a great dermatologist.

  Tom, the real Tom, stood up, so the billboard image was layered over his face and body. Even though he was now many years older, the faces were almost identical. Maybe this was because he was so rich — was that how he’d managed to either stop, or certainly slow, time? Then, with a click of the remote, the projected image was gone and all of that white marble returned.

  I still had no idea why Tom Kelly was showing me all this or why he’d brought me to his — I didn’t even know what to call it. His home? His domain? His — maybe compound was the right word, because everything was so industrial and off-limits and well guarded. But before I could even begin to make sense of where I was, there was something I had to know.

  “What … what happened to my mother?” I demanded. “What did you do to her?”

  “What did I do to her?” Tom replied, with an edge of incredulity. “I gave her, I offered her, everything. I found her. I created her.”

  “But what did she think about all that? About you? And I’m sorry, I know I should shut up, it’s just, well, when I was growing up, I loved my mom, and she was so good to me, but she didn’t look like that. And I’ve never seen any of those pictures. And she never told me. She never told me anything.”

  Tom smiled, and placed his palms together. “Try to understand her,” he advised. “You have to think of her back then, at sixteen. I tracked down her teacher, and I gave her some numbers to call, to check me out. And so your mother decided to at least talk to me. And that first morning, when she came here, she was shaking. And I said, look, I will buy you a bus ticket and you can run right back to wherever, to …”

  “East Trawley. Missouri.”

  “That’s right. East Trawley.”

  He said the name as if it were a dental procedure or something he’d found on the bottom of his shoe.

  “But then I said, or you can stay. And see what happens. You can see who you might become. I told her, you don’t look like anyone else. Don’t act like them.”

  I was trying to imagine my mom, or anyone at sixteen, faced with that kind of decision.

  “And so she stayed?”

  “For three years. And then something happened. Something scared her. Everything changed. And she ran away. And I never saw her again.”

  “But what happened? What was so horrible? What scared her?”

  I was excited and fearful and desperate, because now I understood why I’d come to New York and why I was meeting Tom Kelly. All of my questions about my mother’s life, and her fear, and her sadness were about to be answered. I’d been waiting for this moment for eighteen years.

  “What made my mother hide for the rest of her life?”

  “I can’t tell you that. Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you wouldn’t believe me.”

  He smiled, which made everything worse, because I didn’t just want to wipe the smile off his face, I wanted to shove dynamite up his nose and blast it off.

  “Let’s talk about you,” he said. “You’re eighteen years old, you’ve finished high school and you couldn’t be more ordinary. Yes, you have the tiniest hint of your mother, but don’t kid yourself. You’re nothing. You’re no one. And you look like — anyone. You don’t exist.”

  I knew I should punch him or shoot him or at least disagree but I couldn’t, for one simple reason. He was right.

  “So here’s my offer,” he said, sitting up straight, as if he was about to conduct serious business. “I will make you three dresses: one red, one white and one black. And if you wear these dresses, and if you do everything I say, then you will become the most beautiful woman on earth. You will become, in fact, the most beautiful woman who has ever lived.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  At first I couldn’t even process this proposal; I couldn’t begin to wrap my brain around what he’d just said. He was a rich and successful man and, in his way, a major force. He’d known my mother. And he’d insulted me and tried to make me feel like shit. But aside from all that, I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

  Or maybe I did know, maybe I’d understood him perfectly and maybe that’s why I felt like I was choking and drowning and like I had to get out of there, I had to run, even if it meant bashing myself against the marble walls and scratching to find the elevator or a hidden emergency exit and a staircase.

  “I’m leaving,” I said, standing. But once I was up, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t leave. And he knew it.

  “And I’m not talking about a makeover, or surgery, or about having you lose some weight and then hauling in a team of hair and makeup people. Because then you’d still look like you, on a good day. Which isn’t enough. Which isn’t anything. No.”

  I wanted to kill him and I wanted to nail-gun his mouth shut, but my feet were still refusing to obey me, to run and escape.

  “I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about everything. I’m talking about beauty.”

  “Beauty
?”

  “Real beauty. Indescribable beauty. Beauty as a gift, and an art, and a superpower. I’m talking about handing you a passport, and the keys, and the credit limit, to everything you could ever conceivably want. To everything that you, or anyone else, might ever dream of. You could rule the world. You could own it. Three dresses.”

  I was relieved. Tom Kelly was obviously crazy. Completely gone. Certifiable. He was just some hard-up, forgotten pervert, probably trying to get into my pants and assuming that I was the easiest mark ever.

  “Does this whole thing,” I asked, “this I-can-make-you-the-most-beautiful-woman-in-the-world deal, does it ever work? Are there other girls who fall for it?”

  “I’ve never asked any other girls.”

  “You’re ridiculous. And pathetic. And nuts.”

  “Then turn around. Walk away. Drake will drive you right back to the airport and East Trawley and your mother’s trailer. Or he can take you to a hotel, where you will have twenty-four hours to consider my offer. And after that, the offer will be withdrawn, forever.”

  Drake brought me to a fancy hotel just off Fifth Avenue. I recognized the main entrance with its brass lampposts, because sometimes my mom had looked at websites for places she’d seen on TV shows. Only now I wondered — had she stayed here?

  The hotel dated from the early 1900s and was supposed to look like a French château, only it had boutiques displaying three-thousand-dollar Italian sweaters and even pricier Swiss watches in the lobby, and all I kept thinking was, a few of those watches could buy health insurance, and SUVs, for everyone in East Trawley. The bellman took me up to my room, handed me a plastic key-card and then left me alone with my backpack. I’d never been inside any hotel before, let alone a suite.

  At first I didn’t touch anything but stood in my down-filled vest in the parlor section. Finally I lowered my backpack very gently onto the desk, which was trimmed with bronze scroll-work, and the desktop was inlaid with scenes of French aristocrats playing cards. Then, tentatively, I sat on the overstuffed, brocade-covered couch and then I tried the matching armchair, which was like curling up in Santa’s lap, if Santa were French and tasteful, and then I worked up my courage and tiptoed into the bedroom, where I stuck out my arms like a scarecrow and I fell flat out on my back, onto the bed, which had a quilted brocade headboard, a ton of different-sized cream-colored damask pillows edged with gold rope, and so many layers of airy coverlets that I felt like I was sinking into a king-sized, formally dressed bride or maybe into an entire wedding party.