I was now wearing Tom Kelly’s latest creation, which he’d designed with my new ambition in mind. It had been messengered over in an enormous, glossy, silvery cardboard box, almost a trunk, embossed with a subtle geometric pattern of Tom’s initials. The dress had been nestled within hundreds of sheets of lightly crushed, acid-free, archival tissue paper, the kind they use to preserve historic textiles in museums, and the outfit included a high-necked, sleeveless red silk sheath with a matching red coat, a small red hat and red calfskin gloves. Taken as a whole the look was covered up and appropriately modest but the color and curves made it high-voltage Rebecca.
“Could I?” Rocher repeated in a small, straightforward voice. “Just for a second? Please?”
As I slipped off the red silk coat and gestured for Rocher to turn around so I could help her into it, I tried to remember how old I’d been when I’d first noticed not just what people looked like, but which people looked better. I’d always thought that Rocher looked wonderful but she’d hated her bushels of thick, kinky red hair and her generous buckets of freckles and her long, wiry arms. Rocher thought she was a prancing sock monkey or an overgrown shrub but when we were little, I’d never rated her looks because she was Rocher, who I’d talk to a million times every day and who sometimes got overexcited about, say, a new elastic bracelet comprised of miniature baby-doll heads, or who’d gotten royally pissed off when a boy she’d had a crush on called her a creepy caterpillar.
It was only later, when we were around twelve, that we’d started to consult each other about stuff like whether Rocher should get her hair chemically straightened or shaved off completely, or about how soul-slashingly horrible it would be, and about how we’d stab ourselves to death with forks, if either of us sprouted a mustache like Connie-Gwen “El Diablo” Whitby.
My mother had warned me about spending too much time looking in the mirror “because you might fall in.” But the real reason I’d begun avoiding the mirror hadn’t been my mom’s advice, but her size. For years I’d overheard all of the nasty, ignorant names that the other kids, and sometimes the other kids’ parents, had aimed at my mother and I never got used to the sting of “lazy cow,” “hungry hippo” or “gross fat pig.” But the phrase that floored me had been my third-grade teacher’s; Ms. Hibble, who was otherwise totally nice, had taken me aside and told me that my mom was “morbidly obese.” I’d asked her what that meant and she’d said that my mom was so overweight that she might die.
Anyone who says that looks don’t matter or that it’s only what’s inside that counts never saw Selina, or my mom, or Rocher’s face, with her eyes squinched shut and her lips murmuring the most heartfelt prayer, over and over again, as I slid my red coat or Tom Kelly’s red coat or, most significantly, Rebecca’s red coat, over Rocher’s skinny shoulders.
Rocher pulled on the red coat over her favorite shredded jeans, her I HATE YOU MORE T-shirt, her mustard-and-green-striped polyester cardigan and her many clustered strands of beads and chains, from which dangled, among other things, an oversized crucifix that Rocher had hot-glued with rhinestones, a tiny pipe-cleaner giraffe and a large electroplated golden initial R. We were facing the full-length mirror, which had been set up in the middle of the room, and with her eyes still closed, Rocher asked, “So? Tell me the truth. How do I look? No, that’s wrong — what do I look like? Do I look like me, or you, or me plus Tom Kelly? Am I the most beautiful red-haired woman who’s ever lived? Has anything, you know, happened? Who am I?”
Rocher opened her eyes. She looked exactly the same. No, she looked like Rocher playing rainy-day dress-up in her mother’s or her older sister’s fancy wardrobe. The coat didn’t suit her, and it hadn’t changed her, and I felt guilty and disgusting because a part of me was relieved.
“You look great,” I said.
Rocher eyed me in silence. She knew everything I’d been thinking, and she understood. She slowly took off the coat, with divided emotions. She loved touching it and sliding the richness of the fabric against her skin, but having tried it on, having made the attempt, she knew for certain that the silk, and Tom Kelly’s alchemy, would never be hers. Rocher was really smart and she knew that envying Rebecca was useless; envying Rebecca was tossing darts at the moon. So instead Rocher gently, almost reverently, held the red coat by the shoulders and helped me into it. This was a gesture of both abject surrender and true friendship. Rocher would let me be Rebecca — she could deal with that — but only me.
I started to say something, to offer some syrupy, useless reassurance, but Rocher held up a hand and said, “It’s okay.”
There she is,” said Prince Gregory as I was presented to him in the huge central hall of the British Museum.
“Your Highness,” I said.
“Why are you laughing?”
“I wasn’t laughing!”
“Yes you were, although you tried to stop so now you must tell me — what was so amusing?”
I had a choice. I could make up a convenient lie, or just toss my hair, but when I saw the prince smiling at me, I took a risk. At the hospital the prince had valued honesty and he’d had a terrific sense of humor. So I decided that if I was going to spend any amount of time with the guy, let alone marry him within a very few months, I was going to, sort of, be myself. I’d look like Rebecca but I’d dare to behave like Becky.
“I was laughing because where I grew up in the States, every guy dreams of being called Your Highness. My friend Rocher’s stepfather sometimes pats his crotch and calls it King Rodney.”
The prince glared and then burst out laughing, insisting, “You say the most impossible things!”
“I’m sorry — it’s just, I’m still not all that clear on royal protocol. I’m not sure if I should keep my head bowed when I’m around you or stand a few steps behind you or just pretend that you’re a person.”
“Well, I’m not at all sure how to behave around you. Should I try not to stare or should I keep reminding myself that even if you’re so beautiful, you might want to have a conversation or should I simply dissolve into a puddle of adoration at your feet.”
“All right, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to pretend that you’re a guy and you’re going to pretend that I’m a girl.”
“Very good. So how are you? Do you live nearby? May I get you a drink?”
“Are you hitting on me?”
“Perhaps.”
“Do you have a job?”
We were joined by Ivor St. Hallaby, the museum’s director of acquisitions, who would be serving as our protector and tour guide. His slicked hair, prominent nose and ramrod posture lent him the air of a pedigreed greyhound and he spoke with a grand yet unplaceable accent, as if he’d absorbed the native languages of every artwork on the premises.
“Your Highness,” Mr. St. Hallaby said as I pictured him grandly unfurling a satin-lined cape. “Thank you so much for joining us this evening and for visiting with our ladies.”
He swept a hand toward large, scripted letters on a nearby wall, which read THE FEMALE IDEAL. “We’re paying tribute to the most beautiful women who’ve ever lived. And this must be Ms. Randle, whom I must say, truly completes our exhibition.”
I’d learned from Jate to accept such overblown compliments with a nod and a smile, rather than deflecting or denying them. “Don’t be a snot,” Jate had said. “Let them enjoy you.”
“Our signature piece,” intoned Mr. St. Hallaby, taking Prince Gregory and me into the first gallery space and introducing a canvas that had an entire wall to itself. “On loan from the Uffizi in Florence, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. We had to have her. She’s our hostess.”
“She’s a bit chunky, wouldn’t you say?” commented Prince Gregory and while I resisted kicking him, I had to agree. I’d never been to this sort of world-class museum or any museums at all, outside of a seventh-grade field trip to a restored plantation and the attached Jamesburg Historical Society Collection, which had been a small, clapboard building filled with
faded rag rugs and framed ancestral silhouettes. But I recognized The Birth of Venus from reproductions in books and parodies in comics and lingerie ads, where the goddess would be wearing a push-up bra or suffering from dry, itchy winter skin.
“You truly are exceptional,” the prince told me, “and no, I’m not talking about what you look like. It’s just that when most people are at a museum, they’re instantly bored and they spend all their time on their phones, searching for some other activity, or they run for the gift shop or the snack bar. But you’re actually looking at the paintings.”
“Well, it’s interesting,” I replied. “Because, if you read the label it says that Venus wasn’t just the goddess of love and beauty but that she was born from the foam on the waves of the sea and that she arrived all grown-up, but here’s my favorite part — she was born laughing.”
“I like that,” said the prince and when he smiled at me, I smiled right back. The prince was turned in my direction so he didn’t notice that the portrait of Venus had altered and that the ancient goddess was now in fact observing us and chortling with delight.
“Hello, Marilyn,” said Mr. St. Hallaby, gliding us into the next room and toward a six-foot-square Andy Warhol silk screen of Marilyn Monroe’s face, in which the star’s complexion had been inked into a flat, sizzling hot pink with acid yellow hair and half-mast eyes, drooping with hormones and mascara; she was a beach towel of herself, a Day-Glo-frosted holiday cookie.
“My mother loved Marilyn Monroe,” I told the prince.
“As did mine.”
“My mom read all of these trashy books about her.”
The prince paused and then admitted, “As did mine.”
“Really?” I said, tickled at the thought of my mom and Princess Alicia with the same taste in paperbacks. Over the prince’s shoulder Marilyn awoke, offering me a sly, sexy, conspiratorial wink.
“And that Warhol fellow also did a portrait of my mum,” the prince told me. “All in bright blue and orange, as if he’d used crayons. If Warhol was still around he’d be after you like mad. The way everyone is. People have been warning me, you know. They claim that you’re a gold-digging, predatory Hollywood siren. They say we’ll end up in the tabloids, shouting drunken filth at each other across a nightclub dance floor. They say that you’ll drag me into a fiendish morass of narcotics and cheap publicity and deviant sexual practices.”
“And what do you tell them?”
“I tell them, ‘God, I hope so.’”
Then he leaned down and kissed me, as Venus and Marilyn exchanged a knowing glance.
I’d been kissed before, but never as Rebecca and never by a prince and certainly not outside of Missouri. I was caught off guard and I began observing the kiss, through Rebecca’s eyes, as Becky. Prince Gregory is kissing her, I thought, he’s kissing me, I should kiss him back, Rebecca, do it, kiss him back, that’s perfect, that feels lovely, that’s just the right, perfect first kiss, and now we’re all daring each other, the prince and Rebecca and Becky, to see who’ll end the kiss first, to see who’s in charge of the kiss. I want it to last forever, but Rebecca is so much smarter than me, she has a master’s degree in Advanced Premarital Kissing, and after all, she kissed Jate Mallow, or Renn Hightower, now it’s all getting so confusing, and now, without any of us making a conscious decision, we’re not kissing anymore. But Prince Gregory is looking at me as if he’s still kissing me, or her, he won’t let the moment end, he can’t bear to, because it’s like he’s just discovered ice cream and fast cars and great American kisses.
“Good Lord, that was just dreadful,” said Prince Gregory, not taking his eyes off me. “It was like kissing my brother.”
“That’s so strange,” I replied. “Because I was going to say the exact same thing. Except your brother’s taller.”
For a flicker, this outraged the prince. People weren’t allowed to speak to him this way. Then he grinned.
“If we’re ever going to get this kissing business in order,” he decided, “we’re really going to have to work at it. Because right now it’s hopeless. Embarrassing. We’ll need hours. Days. Full semesters. Exams.”
“Moving on,” I said to Mr. St. Hallaby, remembering Rocher’s instructions about keeping the prince at a constant, desperate simmer. Was I a girl on a date or a monster on a mission? Was there a difference? Was I bewitching the prince into falling in love with me so I could remain Rebecca and help the world, or was I getting way too attracted to a seriously dreamy guy?
The answer to all of these questions, especially after the rest of the evening went even better, was yes.
Everything went straight to hell the next day when two photos raced their way across every English website, tabloid and TV show. The first photo commemorated what became known as That Kiss, which every columnist, commentator and citizen insisted had occurred too early and too publicly. In the words of Mrs. Beryl Slasger, “a homemaker and volunteer for the elderly and the sadly infirm in the extended Hastely-on-Snegs area,” as quoted in the Daily Monitor, “When I saw that pic of our Greg snogging that American harlot, I became physically ill, and since that moment I have only been able to ingest two small almond crackers, one of which immediately repeated.” Cheryl Meers-Trambley, an entertainment correspondent for the BBC, reported that “Once again, an imperialist American force invades a foreign land, as Rebecca Randle all but consumes a helpless Prince Gregory.” From the floor of Parliament, Lord Charles Benderley announced that “The photo in question can justly be termed pornographic. When my dear wife, Clairesse, viewed this explicit embrace, she became disoriented and incontinent. Are there no limits?”
The second and more seriously offensive photograph had been snapped literally behind my back. After our tour had finished, Mr. St. Hallaby had whisked Prince Gregory off for some additional pictures posed beside the museum’s most deep-pocketed benefactors. Left on my own I’d wandered into a nearby gallery which hadn’t been associated with The Female Ideal exhibit. I’d stood before Portia, a life-sized, full-length portrait of a raven-haired woman whose alabaster shoulders rose proudly from her wasp-waisted, strapless, black satin gown, accented with glinting opal earrings and a brooch shaped like a crescent moon, nestled in her powdered and impressive cleavage. The woman in the portrait was being deliberately flirtatious, daring the viewer to disapprove of her lusciously exposed flesh, her lavender-tinted eyelids and a star-shaped beauty mark applied just to the left of her knowing half smile. Even though the portrait had been completed almost two hundred years earlier, the woman was a do-me-now centerfold, or an early ad for, say, Infidelity by Tom Kelly. Portia had only increased her allure by raising her slender fingertips to her champagne-moistened lips and blowing me a kiss.
I heard my mom’s ringtone and I saw that, in Portia’s other hand, she was now holding a cell phone.
I’d thought that Venus and Marilyn and Portia had been welcoming me to an ongoing parade of portrait-worthy femme fatales but it turned out that they’d been warning me about the collateral damage of beauty. Venus, through her meddling, had kicked off the Trojan War, while Marilyn, at thirty-six, had died alone in a shabby Los Angeles bedroom and it seemed that Portia had been a married American who’d been the long-time mistress of Prince Gregory’s great-great-grandfather King Stanley. She had borne the king two bastard sons and after her divorce, she’d been exiled to Pennsylvania, where she’d supported herself by publishing a bestselling and scandalous memoir, revealing, among many erotic details, that the king had enjoyed being spanked while dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl called Little Naughty Nancy. In England, it had been the Catholic angle that had caused the greatest outrage.
In the photo that filled the entire front pages of the Monitor, Early Examiner, National Notation and Spinning Globe, I was standing with my back to the camera and my head tilted upward, considering Portia and offering, according to the Morning Spectacle, “A WHORE’S SALUTE!” The Evening Express, in a three-column editorial, accused me of demonstrating “the g
rossest and most malign insensitivity, along with a shocking and near-inconceivable lack of even the most primitive moral code.” The television coverage snowballed, as various Concerned Persons Speaking on the Street called me “an insult to the crown,” “a cheap and steaming little slice of American popular culture” and something termed “a naff and a half.” There were constantly updated online polls, in which I was rated as either A Blundering Moron (15 percent), An Ignorant Strumpet (37 percent) or The Most Vile American Import Since Cold Milk (48 percent).
“What were you thinking?” asked Tom Kelly as I tried to disappear into his town house couch later that day, already on my second box of Kleenex. “How could you be such an idiot?”
“I don’t know!” I wailed. “All I did was kiss him! And it was such a nice night!”
“Excuse me,” said Tom, who was wearing a gray cashmere sweatshirt, Tom Kelly jeans and bare feet. “But haven’t you heard of Tall Poppy Syndrome?”
“What?”
“Jesus! What do they teach you in those East Trawley schools?”
“Math! Biology! Maybe I was absent the day they covered how to marry a prince!”
“Years ago, centuries ago, England owned everything. America, India, Canada, Australia, South Africa, half the planet. But there were wars and uprisings and tiffs and gradually, it all went away. And now the English have nothing. They’ve even lost their shoulders, their chins and their ability to carry a tune.”
“But why are they mad at me?”
“They’re mad at everyone. They’re festering and bitter because all they have left are non-folding umbrellas, decent skin and their pride. Which they take very seriously. So if anyone, on their home turf, attempts to achieve anything, let alone succeeds, they become extremely irate. If someone paints a masterpiece, or becomes a pop star, or even bakes a decent pie, England declares that person vain and self-important and vulgar — a tall poppy. And a tall poppy gets its head chopped off. To teach it a lesson.”
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