Gorgeous

by Rudnick, Paul

  I got so overwhelmed that I jerked into a quivering ball, and I called Rocher on my cell. I didn’t use the hotel phone because I wanted to talk to her on my terms and not Tom Kelly’s. It was as if I were sharing a bedtime fairy tale with a five-year-old, because Rocher kept gasping and interrupting and saying, “WHAT? WHAT? He actually SAID THAT? To YOU?” And once I’d finished, I brought the phone even closer to my face and I whispered, “So what should I do?”

  Rocher got angrier than I’d ever heard her and I’m talking about her spitting and cursing and making such disgusted, high-pitched yelping noises that sometimes there wasn’t any sound at all. “What … should … you … do?” she began in a low, ominous voice. “WHAT SHOULD YOU DO? YOU ASSHOLE! YOU ASSHOLE! Listen to me, you little cracker-headed ass-wipe, and I’m only calling you that because you’re my best friend in the whole world, and because I love you so much, but you DUMBASS FUCKING WHOREHEAD!!! Your mom is dead, you’re not going to college, you live in a condemned trailer and you work checkout at the most raggedy-assed about-to-close supermarket in three counties. So when some incredibly rich dude whose name I am looking at right now on my bra strap, when that guy asks if you want to be the most beautiful woman on earth, here’s what you do: YOU FUCKING SAY YES!!!”

  “So you really think I should do it?”

  “Can you feel them? Can you feel my fingers reaching millions of miles right through this phone and grabbing your throat and trying to strangle some sense into you? Becky, what do you want to do with your life?”

  “I don’t know, I was just dealing with graduating and with my mom, and I guess I thought that I’d, I don’t know, maybe work really hard and apply myself and get a better job, and maybe become an assistant manager or something.”

  I was lying and Rocher knew it. I wanted to do so much with my life, but I tried as hard as I could never to think about it. I hadn’t been able to talk about my insane ideas with my mom, because I’d never wanted her to feel like she was holding me back or that she should feel guilty because we never had any money. And I couldn’t talk about anything with the other kids at school because if I said what I really felt, if I called any attention to myself, I’d become a target. And I never really told Rocher about what I was after because I knew that she’d be totally on my side, and that was the scariest thing of all. Here was the truth: In secret, when I wasn’t being careful and gutless, I wanted the biggest life I could possibly get, a life far beyond what East Trawley had to offer. I wasn’t sure of the details, but I wanted to see the entire world and meet every possible kind of person and dive headfirst into every possible adventure, because once all of that had happened, I’d have turned into whoever I was meant to be.

  But aside from being eighteen and scared of my shadow there was something else stopping me, and an hour later I was staring at it, in the mirror of the hotel bathroom. I know that looks aren’t supposed to matter, or to stop you from living your life, but an awful lot of people would disagree. So I decided that before tomorrow, before I gave Tom Kelly my answer, I wanted to determine, once and for all, what I really looked like.

  So I stood, in my limp East Trawley Tigers T-shirt and my saggy gray sweatpants with the stains from buttery-flavored microwave popcorn, and I stared not just into my eyes but into my face. The problem was, the harder I searched and focused on my whole face and not any one feature, the more everything became a blur or like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle tossed on a tabletop, with an eyebrow here, the nose off in a corner, and the lips somewhere on the floor. I knew that I wasn’t hideous and Rocher and my mom had sometimes said that I was pretty but they were my mom and my best friend, so they didn’t count. Being supportive was part of their job descriptions.

  I kept staring, trying to decode how I’d be described to the police, if I went missing: lank brown hair stuck behind mouse-like ears, cautious brown eyes, grudgingly unshaped brows, a not completely straight nose, some lingering forehead acne, okay teeth with one snaggly renegade, chapped lips, not the greatest posture, average height and weight and what? I remembered Nicole Debra Galtrow, a girl from my high school who’d been anorexic. Of course, Rocher had said that any girl from East Trawley who was under two hundred pounds could be considered anorexic, but Nicole had been painfully thin. When I’d researched anorexia online I’d read about something called body dysmorphia. Anorexics have it and also those seriously bulked-up bodybuilders. Dysmorphia is when someone looks in the mirror, and sees something else. While I studied my own whatever I was, I decided that maybe everyone has at least a touch of dysmorphia; maybe it’s impossible for anyone to ever truly know what they look like.

  I remembered something that Cal Malstrup, this guy in my class, had scribbled under my picture in our yearbook: “I like your smile.” So I smiled, but I kept looking goofier and more like a cartoon sketch of myself and that was when I burst out laughing. Which made me catch something in the mirror: When I was laughing, my mouth was huge and gaping, like a hyena’s, and my eyes didn’t match and my nose got all squinched up so I could see right up my nostrils to where my brain should be, but still, that’s how I wished I’d looked in my yearbook photo instead of all stern and stiff with my hair draped over one shoulder like cold, dead spaghetti. When I was laughing I couldn’t tell if I was pretty or not, but I looked happy.

  That’s when a part of me urged, just take off, get yourself out of New York as fast as you can, who gives a shit about being unbelievably beautiful? I had friends and a little bit of money saved up, but then another part of me remembered when Cal Malstrup had hoisted me up on the tailgate of his pickup and talked to me, eye-to-eye, about going to prom, in what he’d termed “a preliminary possibility consultation” and an “availability check.” I later found out that he’d had the exact same no-commitment conference with Caroline Getterschmidt and Kristin Cranmere, but the front-runner had been Shanice Morain, who everybody thought was so hot because she’d been voted Miss East Trawley Memorial Day Picnic Corn Queen.

  Right after I’d had my conversation with Cal, Shanice and her posse had started a webpage called Pretty Or Shitty? They’d posted pictures of every girl in our school and then everyone got to anonymously critique them.

  I’d sworn that I’d never click on the page and Rocher and my mom had warned me not to, but finally trying to ignore the whole thing had been obsessing me even more. At first I’d checked out some other girls’ pictures, with comments like “Pig’s snout,” “Looks like her dad, after his stroke” and “Maybe it would help if she put her head on upside down.” Everyone was topping each other in nastiness, which had made me unbend; the page was a joke. So I’d scrolled to Shanice’s picture and I’d suspected that most of the comments were from her buddies, because they’d said, “Totally cute, but not stuck-up,” “Should go on one of those Top Model shows, cuz she’d win!” and “If I looked like that I’d be so happy and she’s also really sweet!” There had been only one negative comment, which I’d known was from Rocher, because it said, “Mutant alien attempting to pass as human, or world’s only ugly vampire? You decide.”

  Without giving myself even a split second to log out, I’d scrolled to my picture. The first comment had clearly been Rocher’s: “So cute!!!” Then came everyone else: “Not just uggabug — boring uggabug.” “At least she’s not an elephant like her mother.” “Ugliest girl in our school, no question.” There was a final comment and I’d had the feeling it was from Shanice. Because the other comments had been so spiteful, this was her pretending to be a good person: “I don’t think Becky is the ugliest. She’s not Suellen Sheever, who was in that five-car highway collision thing, so half of her face droops, even after the surgery — that’s why Suellen’s picture is in profile. Becky just always sits in the back of the class, all hunched over in her hoodie and her jumbo T-shirt, so that no one can see her fat rolls. And she has her hair in her face to cover the zits. Becky just looks like she’s somebody’s sad cousin, the one who never got married and maybe is a lesbo, if she�
�s lucky. I’m not saying she should kill herself, but it would be cheaper than lipo. She’s just nada special.”

  I’d slouched back from my computer, as if the page had ejected an iron cannonball at full force right into my gut.

  The next day, Cal had asked Shanice to prom and they’d strolled through the halls together with his arm protectively around her shoulders and their foreheads touching as they shared intimate stuff that the uggabugs would never understand, because Cal and Shanice didn’t speak Uggabug.

  Back at the hotel I looked myself in the eye and I said, Becky, don’t do this. Don’t buy into it. Don’t let Shanice and all of the Shanices and the fraction of you, okay, maybe more than a fraction, that agrees with them be right.

  I thought about how sometimes, after my mom had gotten really big, she’d fall asleep on our couch and I’d watch her, I’d analyze her face and I’d try to decide if she hated her life and felt trapped in the folds and heft of her body, and if she watched the pretty, skinny girls on TV and wished she could be just like them. But my mom had never complained, and I wished more than anything that she was still here, so she could tell me what to do. But since she’d left me that phone number maybe she already had.

  Because what if, and I was just throwing it out there, just for shits and giggles, and because I couldn’t not think about it, what if I called Tom Kelly and said yes, and what if I could become the most beautiful woman in the whole goddamned world.

  Beautiful.

  The most beautiful.

  Me.

  Take off your clothes,” said Tom Kelly.

  I was standing on a round platform at one end of a workroom in the compound, encircled by eight full-length mirrors. I felt like a miniature plastic ballerina, her arms curved over her head, in a little girl’s music box. The workroom was long, narrow and painted laboratory white and it held rows of rectangular worktables with their surfaces upholstered in smooth, flat, white linen. There were sewing machines and every possible dressmaker’s tool set out on the tables, and a silent workforce of mostly Chinese women stood beside their stations, all wearing crisp white lab coats over their black T-shirts, black slacks and black low-heeled shoes.

  I’d called Tom from my hotel at 2:00 A.M., before I could lose my nerve.

  “Okay, I don’t trust you,” I’d told him, “and I don’t believe for a second that this is going to work, not in one million, trillion years, and I know that this is all going to end up on one of those tabloid TV shows on a segment called ‘Becky Randle Has the Brain of a Sea Monkey,’ but let’s do it.” I could hear him smile as he said, “Oh, my sweet girl, this will be fun.” And then, just as I was about to ask for more details and whether I should talk to a lawyer or a priest or a psychiatrist, he hung up, and a few seconds later Lila called and began to schedule my fittings.

  I had stripped to my underwear, which was tidy but not especially new, as Tom and Lila stood on opposite sides of me, managing to surgically assess me while ignoring me completely. My body was, well, it was my body, and I waited for Tom and Lila to pick up Magic Markers and outline problem areas on my thighs and lower back, as if they were planning a rump roast and a loin of pork. Tom glanced up and a Chinese woman in a lab coat approached. Her hair was cropped into a shining pageboy and she wore her lab coat as if it were a Chanel suit, the kind which I later learned have tiny silver chains tucked into the hems of the jacket and skirt so that the garment will hang properly.

  “Becky, this is Mrs. Chen,” said Tom.

  “Good morning, Miss Randle,” said Mrs. Chen, briskly unfurling a fabric tape measure with a sharp snap, as if it were a lion tamer’s whip. I tried not to squirm as she efficiently measured every inch of my body but I begged her, “Please don’t say the numbers out loud,” so she murmured them to Lila, who inscribed them into a small leather-bound journal. Once this torture was completed, Mrs. Chen told me, “One more item. Give me your hand.”

  As I held out my palm, Mrs. Chen swiftly removed a needle from the small round pincushion she wore on an elastic band around her wrist, and gripping my forearm, she pricked my forefinger. She used a small spool of silken white thread to absorb the blood and the thread was instantly soaked through.

  “But why do you need my blood?” I asked, yanking my hand back.

  “This is couture,” explained Mrs. Chen, depositing the spool in a test tube. “Every garment will be custom made, only for you. You will become a part of each dress.”

  Then Lila and Mrs. Chen retreated as Tom sat backward on a white metal chair, still staring at me.

  “Fine, I’m a lump,” I admitted as I gratefully tugged on my T-shirt, jeans and down-filled vest. “I like potato chips and rocky road ice cream and chocolate-covered pretzels, the kind that look like doggie treats. And I know I should eat healthy and exercise, but as my friend Rocher says, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow and refined sugar is good for healing.”

  “You’re not a lump,” said Tom. “But I just want to remember what you looked like, before. It’s like alchemy, when scientists in the Middle Ages struggled to turn lead into gold. They tried to find the formula.”

  “I’m lead?”

  “In a way. You’re raw material. Cookie dough. Sand. With a very few helpful characteristics, thanks to your mother.”

  Tom’s insults, which I knew were going to continue, made me bold.

  “Can I ask you something? I know I said yes and I’ll wear the dresses and I’ll do what you tell me but, huh? Three dresses? And I’m suddenly gonna be the most beautiful woman in the world? What makes you think you can do it? I know that you’re rich and you were a big deal and all, but do you really believe that you have some sort of power?”

  Tom had flinched when I’d used the past tense about his having been a big deal but when I asked about his power he sat bolt upright and said, “I’m Tom Kelly,” and then he swung one of his long legs over the chair and strode out of the room.

  There was a pause as all of the Chinese seamstresses eyeballed me, as if my WANTED poster had just been downloaded onto all of their phones for a crime involving schoolchildren, or worse, the destruction of blouses. To appease the seamstresses, I ran after Tom calling out, “I’m sorry!”

  The hallway from the workroom kept taking sharp turns and the white walls, ceilings and floors became dizzying, as if I were chasing someone through an abandoned Swiss clinic or a maze constructed from freshly bleached laundry, but then I turned a corner into an interior garden, open to the sky but enclosed on all sides by unclimbably high whitewashed brick walls, which were densely layered with the darkest black-purple ivy. The garden itself was a perfect square, but I couldn’t figure out how large it was because it kept seeming to expand and contract around me. There were white gravel pathways, and the plantings were severely manicured and blooming exclusively with white flowers set against more gleamingly near-black foliage. There were the deepest green boxwood topiaries, pruned into spheres taller than me, hosting trembling camellias, beside black-enameled trellises tumbling with fat white roses, falling toward beds of white freesia and white tulips and lilies that resembled beckoning hands or exotic sex organs. There were ebony-burgundy Japanese maples frosted with white moss and there was a central, round, black slate reflecting pool darting with especially snotty piranhas. The garden was alive yet so artificial that it had to be the hothouse, where the top-of-the-line Tom Kelly fragrances began. And here was the creepiest part: I felt like I’d stumbled into the most haughty, vicious cocktail party because all of the black-and-white blossoms and leaves and vines were undeniably listening.

  Tom was standing with his back to me. He turned abruptly and said, “Look at this lily.” He bent to caress a flawless white flower, which craned upward, anticipating Tom’s touch. “This flower is at the peak of its beauty. Which means that, in an ordinary garden, it would have begun to die. In perhaps an hour, its petals would begin to curl and yellow, invisibly at first, but it would inevitably droop and brown and rot.”

  “
Because that’s what flowers do,” I said to inject a note of, if not Botany 101, then at least common sense.

  “Not here. These flowers, my flowers, everything you see here, and not just the original plantings, but each bloom is over twenty years old. And yet they remain perfect. Unblemished. Eternal. Always beautiful.”

  Tom inhaled again, and the full garden leaned toward him. I knew it was a mechanical trick, a super-refined Disney attraction, and that if I looked hard enough or started to grab and rip the various stems and roots, I’d find bundled cable and buried electrical boxes. At least that’s what I wanted to believe because otherwise, if Tom Kelly was telling the truth, if he could keep a lily obediently alive and perfect for decades, if he could truly create beauty from his fingertips, then … what could he do to me?

  I glanced at my own fingertip and saw that despite Mrs. Chen’s having just taken a blood sample, the wound was already not merely healed, but gone.

  Drake arrived at 9:00 A.M. the next morning with Tom in the car’s backseat.

  “We’re off to see the wizards,” Tom explained as I climbed in beside him.

  “What wizards? I thought you were the wizard.”