Gorgeous

by Rudnick, Paul

  “You called her Mummy?” I was following his lesson but I was also a fan and I’d always wondered if royal children had to call their parents “Your Highness.”

  “Yes, I called her Mummy. And when I asked her why I had to be so much better than all of the other children, in the entire world, which really didn’t seem fair at all, she said, ‘Because that is what a prince does.’”

  I thought of that photo, my own mother’s favorite, of Princess Alicia kneeling beside the mother of the dead African child. That grieving mother would have been more than justified in telling the princess, “please go away” or even “fuck off.” But maybe that woman had sensed through her despair that the princess was there to help, or at least to listen.

  “Your mother was wonderful,” I said.

  “And she packed quite a wallop. I recall thinking, I’m going to ring up all the newspapers and tell them that Mummy has struck me. And then I went further, and I decided that once I got to be king I would stick her in a tower somewhere until she apologized to me on national television. But I was like everyone else — I adored her. And, of course, most people loved her because she was a royal and because she was so pretty. The combination was so unlikely. Although you’re far prettier. My mother would’ve pummeled you, pulled your hair, tossed you down the stairs and said, ‘Rebecca, I have two choices. I can hate you, because you’re so attractive, and I can have you deported, or you can come with me to Haiti.’”

  “What was it like for you? When she died?”

  “Hideous, beyond belief. For weeks, I refused to believe that she was gone and I kept telling my father that her plane had gotten lost and that it would be landing shortly. Everyone tried to keep me away from the telly and the papers, but there were windows and I could see the mobs and the hand-lettered placards and the mountains of flowers, and at night there’d be thousands of candles. I hated those people, all of them, because they kept insisting my mother was dead. And finally, because he thought it was important, my father took me and my younger brother and he brought us outside. We weren’t surrounded by guards, it was just the three of us. And we walked, directly into the crowds of people. The thousands of people. At first no one was quite sure if we were, you know, who we were. And then all of those people, they grew very quiet. And my dad began introducing himself, and us, one at a time, to this person, and the next person, and the person after that.”

  “My mother told me about it. She said that no one could believe that your father was doing that.”

  “But everyone was so … I’m not sure what the word might be, because people weren’t just kind, or understanding. They were with us. And it wasn’t that we were better than anyone else. We were a father and his children, and we’d lost someone. And a little girl came up to me and she offered me a stick of gum. Not the entire pack, mind you, she made that clear. But she said, ‘Take this,’ and then she said, ‘Sorry about your mum.’ And I can’t say I felt any better but I did feel, let’s call it, my mother’s presence. Because that stick of gum, and the faces, and the good intentions of all those people, that’s what my mother had believed in. And she’d wanted me to be a decent person, just like that little girl.”

  He stood up.

  “So to answer your question, yes, when my mother died, everything went to shit, and I suffered. But it was nothing compared to what has happened to Selina.” He held out his hand.

  “But I look awful.”

  “You look like a monkey’s rectum.”

  “A what?”

  “You heard me.”

  I stood and I shook my head, returning every bountiful strand of chestnut hair to its sublimely impossible perfection.

  “That’s extraordinary,” said the prince, regarding my hair. “How that happens.”

  “And you said I didn’t have any skills.”

  I stood beside Selina, leaning slightly forward so she could see me. She spoke in a hoarse, almost inaudible bleat, as the fire and smoke had severely damaged her lungs and larynx. “You’re … pretty,” she told me.

  “I’m not as pretty as Prince Gregory,” I said.

  “No you’re not,” the prince, standing beside me, agreed.

  “I’m … not pretty,” Selina wheezed, and the moment was beyond heartbreaking. Selina was using her only superiority, as the victim of such a terrible act. She was challenging us, daring us, to disagree with her, to try to make ourselves feel better at her expense, to lie.

  “You’re going to be pretty,” I said, “because you have the best doctor in London.”

  “Just London?” murmured Dr. Barry, a bit put out, since she had been, more than once, short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

  “The best doctor in the world,” I said, and I forced myself to look directly at Selina, at my opposite, at someone who’d been so cheated of everything, at someone who, far more than me or anyone else, deserved Tom Kelly’s magic. And as I looked at her single, darting eye, I knew only one thing. I knew what I was supposed to do with my life, with the fairy-tale wish I’d been so unexpectedly granted, by the unlikeliest of wizards.

  “Rebecca?” said Selina, although continued speech was exhausting her.

  “Yes?”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course. Anything you want.”

  “Is … is …”

  I leaned closer, because Selina’s voice was now barely an urgent whisper. “Is what?”

  “Is … is … Jate Mallow gay?”

  Prince Gregory and Dr. Barry were both watching me, every bit as eager for my answer as Selina. Gossip, I decided, trumps everything, including royal grace, immortal beauty, advanced medicine and unbearable physical pain.

  “Excuse me?” I told the prince and Dr. Barry. “But could you please wait outside? This is between me and Selina.”

  Later that day, back in my hotel suite, I called Rocher, waking her up, because it was 6:00 A.M. in East Trawley, but I knew she wouldn’t mind. She’d instructed me, “You’re allowed to call me any time, anywhere, if it’s about a famous person.”

  “Roche,” I said, “I have to tell you something, because nobody else knows it yet, because I only just figured it out. I know why my mother left me that phone number and why Tom Kelly made me so beautiful and why God put me on this earth.”

  “What? Why? And please don’t tell me it’s some spiritual bullshit, that you’re like the Golden Child or like right after the aliens made up Scientology they invented you.”

  “No, it’s nothing like that, not really. It’s better. It’s perfect.”

  I was thinking about a TV documentary I’d watched with my mom about Princess Alicia. There’d been clips of the princess as a child at Buckingham Palace, in a little blue tailored coat, with a gleam in her eye. Then had come footage of her hell-raising teenage period, when she’d failed to graduate from three different schools, danced drunkenly at a St. Moritz disco with shady, polo-playing Argentinians and been photographed topless, via a paparazzi’s zoom lens, at the Barbados retreat of a notorious Dutch financier. “She was a kid,” my mom had said. “People should have left her alone, to grow up.”

  But then Alicia had traveled to the Sudan, where she’d been introduced to girls her own age who’d suffered from genital mutilation and lives of extreme poverty. For the first time Alicia had been ashamed of her privileged background and she’d vowed to change her life. “At first she thought she should just quit being a princess, and go to medical school or get a job at the UN,” my mom had told me. “But then she decided that as a royal, she’d have all sorts of access and she’d still get to go to parties.”

  The documentary had included a famous clip of Alicia, a few years later, waltzing with the president of the United States in the ballroom at the White House. Alicia was wearing a clinging blue gown, with a tiara secured to her blond upsweep. “She’d gone full princess,” my mom had commented. In the clip you could see the president’s hand inching toward Alicia’s backside and the world had watched as A
licia allowed a few strategic seconds of contact before repositioning the president’s grip. Later that week the president had appeared before Congress, speaking in support of Alicia’s international effort to prevent childhood blindness in developing nations.

  “Alicia knew what she was doing,” my mom had told me. “She knew that because of her past and because she was so gorgeous, people would underestimate her. But she used all of that to her advantage and she surprised everyone.” Because I’d been only eleven at the time, my focus had wandered and I’d asked my mom to change the channel so we could catch a rerun of Jackie + Jate. My mom had refused, and she’d said to me, in a surprisingly tough tone of voice, “Not yet. This is Alicia. Pay attention.”

  “So what’s the deal with your life?” asked Rocher, on the phone. “What’s the master plan? What are you gonna do?”

  I looked across the hotel room at a mirror and there was Becky, nodding her encouragement. I picked up a magazine, with Rebecca’s face filling the cover, and I held it up so that her face appeared in the mirror beside Becky’s. Because to make things happen, to achieve what I was after, they’d have to work together.

  “I’m going to help people. I’m going to change the world, as much as I can. I’m going to have the biggest life I can get.”

  “Wait — bigger than your life right now? I mean, come on, everything’s been going pretty damn great.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t just keep being the most beautiful everything. It’s not enough. I have to use it, just the way my mom would’ve wanted. It explains everything.”

  “But how are you going to do all that? I mean, what would make people listen to you? How can you get there?”

  I took a deep breath, because when I said what I was about to say out loud, the idea, and the dream, would start to seem real.

  “I’m going to marry Prince Gregory.”

  First there was silence and then an eerie gurgling, as if a goldfish were drowning, if that ever happens.

  “Roche? Are you okay?”

  There was pitiful whimpering, a puppy with its paw caught in the screen door.

  “Roche?”

  “You … you … you are going to marry Prince Gregory? You are going to be …”

  Thundering dry heaves, from the largest mammal ever, some tyrannosaurus whatever getting dragged into a tar pit and summoning every beast in the jungle.

  “A PRINCESS?”

  I spoke over Rocher’s jubilant screams.

  “Rocher, I was at this children’s hospital and I met Prince Gregory and he was incredible, he looks like his mom, and it just came to me, that being the most beautiful woman in the world was just the beginning. Because even doing what Tom Kelly said I had to do, if I wanted to keep being Rebecca, you know, finding some guy and falling in love and getting married, that can’t be all my mother wanted. And sure, I guess I could try and do good stuff all by myself, but there wouldn’t be any reason for people to pay attention and get on board. And I could run for president but I don’t think people would vote for Rebecca.”

  “That’s true. Because I don’t think the president is supposed to be that hot.”

  “And so when I thought about Princess Alicia it all came together. I can try and do what she did only maybe I can take it even further. I can try and help everybody everywhere because if I marry Prince Gregory then I can be …”

  We said it together:

  “PRINCESS REBECCA!!!”

  My phone went dead and a few seconds later it buzzed.

  “Rocher?”

  “I’m sorry, I was jumping up and down and screaming and my stepfather came in and told me to shut up so I had to throw a lamp at him.”

  “But, Roche, here’s the problem: I only have nine months left and I don’t know anything about royalty and how it all works and the whole princess deal. So I need, like, a princess authority. An expert. A princess person. So, Roche, and I know it’s a huge thing to ask, but if I send you a ticket and money and everything, can you get over here and help me do this?”

  “Okay. Okay. Let me think about this. Because at the Shop-A-Lot, Chad, remember, that new assistant manager with the one long eyebrow and the stud in his tongue, he asked me if I wanted to see his new nipple ring, before it healed completely, and he said that he was considering me for a position in poultry, which would mean I’d get to wear a hairnet, a bloodstained white coat and rubber gloves, which I could really rock. So I have to decide if I want to smell like chicken parts and E. coli or do I want to take an all-expenses-paid trip to London?”

  I heard Rocher’s stepfather come back into her room and he told her that he was watching wrestling and that she was going to pay to fix the lamp.

  “Excuse me, just a second …”

  Then I heard Rocher’s stepfather start screaming in a really high-pitched voice because something heavy had hit him in the crotch, or in his words, “My dickshooter! You fucking bitch, you aimed right for my dickshooter!”

  “I think I’m free,” said Rocher.

  Before I’d called Rocher, I’d already had a text from Lila telling me what time I was expected to meet Tom Kelly. I’d assumed that Tom already knew about my introduction to Prince Gregory and I wanted his blessing because I’d need his full arsenal of couture magic to burrow my way into the Royal Family.

  Drake had been imported and he picked me up a few hours later outside my hotel. “So now you’re a movie star,” he said, grinning as he adjusted to steering from the opposite side of the front seat. “And I hear you’ve got other plans as well.”

  “So what does Tom think, about the prince? Does he approve?”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” said Drake, “I am not about to speak for Tom.”

  “Can I ask you something? You knew my mom, right?”

  “Sure. Such a great girl. The best.”

  “Was she scared of Tom?”

  Drake thought for a moment. He was about to answer but he stopped himself.

  “Ask Tom.”

  Tom Kelly owned homes throughout the world and they were all kept in perfect order and fully staffed even though Tom hadn’t visited any of these locations since he’d retired. His London place was a granite town house on a secluded, pristine block where the street curved and all the buildings were carved from the same severe stone and I could tell that only the very richest people lived there, the Taiwanese tech magnates and the Australian media barons and the occasional deposed dictator, the folks who might spend only five days per year in any of their multiple outposts. The street was forbidding, without children, nannies, sightseers with guidebooks or any signs of life beyond the idling, bullet-proofed black limousines.

  Lila let me in, saying, “We’ve been expecting you. It’s the top floor.” Then she added, under her breath, “I love the whole princess idea. Go for it.”

  Tom’s town house wasn’t furnished in his trademark surgically stylish mode but with hunter green flannel walls, gleaming mahogany woodwork and carefully edited, masculine antiques with the seating upholstered in a woolen tartan. It was like entering a gentlemen’s club so exclusive that Tom was the only member.

  There was an airless, coffin-sized elevator paneled in burgundy velvet with nail-head trim. Tom was waiting for me in his parlor, sitting in a carved mahogany armchair beside a black marble fireplace with an open fire, which was weird, because I knew that working fireplaces had been outlawed in London due to air pollution, but, of course, this was Tom Kelly. He was wearing a black T-shirt, a skinny black velvet blazer, dark stovepipe jeans and riding boots. On anyone else this would’ve come off as a costume but in Tom’s house, on his terms, it worked. Today he was a semiretired rock star, living obscenely well off his royalties and reissues, endorsing a men’s cologne sold in a deliberately tarnished silver flask, called Perverse by Tom Kelly, or maybe Tom Kelly’s Cyanide Pour Homme.

  “Rebecca,” he said, standing to greet me. Tom being polite was scarier than Tom being arrogant.

  “Hi?” I began, because even after my
months of stardom and luxury, when I was near Tom, I became Becky, dragging my backpack across the floor.

  Tom walked toward the fireplace, leaning against the mantel for a country squire effect. All he needed was a snifter of brandy, a riding crop and his accountant crouched at his feet.

  “So you’d like your white dress.”

  I hadn’t thought about it but Tom was right. We were talking about my next dress. My second dress of the three. My wedding dress.

  “Yes?” I said, half asking and half hoping that I could muster an ounce of Rebecca’s oomph.

  “You’d like to marry Prince Gregory.”

  “I know I only met him yesterday but he’s so terrific, I think you would really like him….”

  “I’ve met him,” said Tom, cutting me off. “When he was a child. I knew his mother. I dressed her.”

  No matter how hard I tried, Tom was always so many steps ahead of me. Of course he’d known Princess Alicia. He knew everyone. I wanted details but I knew not to ask.

  “And you want to become a princess.”

  “Yes. Because that way I’d be able to use everything you’ve given me and I know that it’s what my mom would’ve wanted. I’d be taking Rebecca and positioning her to do the most possible good.”

  “Why do I feel like you’re trying to sell me a used car?”

  “No! It’s just that I need to know if you think it’s the right idea and if you’ll help me.”

  “If you pursue Prince Gregory, if you aim that high, there can be consequences. Look what happened to his mother.”

  “She died in a plane crash. It was an accident.”

  “Which has never been entirely proven. What I’m saying is, when a beautiful person attempts to become a very powerful person, things can happen.”

  “Like what?”

  “The people in charge of things, especially the men, they like to stay in charge. Would you like to know what happened to Drake?”