Gorgeous

by Rudnick, Paul

  Since saving Gregory’s life I’d won the nation’s heartfelt approval. A task force of hackers and private investigators and smuthounds had combed through every moment of Rebecca’s life and had dug up exactly nothing. Rebecca’s official bio said that she’d been born in America, that she’d completed high school and that she was an orphan. As always, Rebecca’s uncanny beauty filled in the rest; her face was all anyone needed to know. Rebecca had hypnotized the world into a global bliss-out and she was on her way to becoming beloved. Because she was a commoner, she gave girls everywhere hope and because she looked like Rebecca, she gave guys everywhere, if not hope, at least someone to visualize while they were having sex with girls everywhere.

  It had taken Rocher and me the better part of an hour to reach Westminster and another two hours to dress for the ceremony itself. Now Rocher was inspecting herself, her eyes misting, because Tom Kelly had proven his supernatural supremacy by becoming the first designer in recorded history to come up with a truly flattering bridesmaid dress. Rocher was wearing a gown of deep cobalt blue velvet embroidered with twenty-four-karat gold thread in a harlequin tracery, with a real pearl nestled in coils of more golden thread at each corner of the pattern. The dress had an ermine collar and madrigal sleeves flowing almost to the floor. Her headpiece was based on a portrait of a Flemish noble-woman and Rocher’s vivid red hair was braided with ropes of pearls and velvet ribbons. “I look like a fucking goddamned fairy tale,” said Rocher as she reached for her reflection. “I look like a fairy tale that’s so magical no one’s even heard of it yet, like I’m Merlin’s little sister or Snow White’s American pen pal. You have got to promise me, you have to make sure it happens, no matter what, I want to be buried in this dress.”

  “Do you like it?” asked Tom Kelly, who was leaning against one of the mirrored walls wearing the morning clothes he’d had hand-tailored to his personal slimness. Even in his vest and tail-coat Tom managed to look as if he was lounging and waiting for a delivery of sex, drugs, cash or all three.

  “I don’t care if you are Satan himself,” Rocher declared. “You are my fucking hero.”

  Anselmo insisted on helping me into my hopelessly fragile shoes, molded entirely of white lace, which he’d crafted himself.

  “Suitable for Cinderella,” he said.

  “And far more appealing than glass,” said Tom. “I’ve never understood the glass slipper concept. It sounds cold and uncomfortable and who wants to see a human foot, even a foot as lovely as Rebecca’s, encased in an aquarium?”

  Madame Ponelle provided a pair of diamond earrings, worked as rosettes. “These were a wedding night gift from King Louis XVI to Marie Antoinette,” she said as I put them on. “She later wore them in prison, to remind herself of more romantic moments.”

  Archie had blended a one-of-a-kind fragrance titled Always Rebecca to be used, Archie said, “Just by you and on this day only.” The bottle was white glass, shaped like a calla lily and the scent combined, Archie reported, “only white flowers — the gardenia, for joy, the white chrysanthemum, for truth, and lily of the valley, which some say was born from Eve’s tears upon being forced to leave the garden. And, of course, the white rose, a symbol of both England and purity.”

  The perfume was delectably feminine but not cloying or prissy. “Jesus,” said Rocher, sniffing my wrist. “That’s exactly the way people think you smell.”

  “And now, Rocher, and everyone?” said Tom to his incomparable team, including Mrs. Chen and her ten lab-coated assistants, who’d been toiling under eighteen-hour-a-day lock-down, stitching and altering and beading. “If you could all just step outside, I’d like a word with Rebecca, in private.”

  “I’m real sorry,” Rocher told me as she glided past, every inch the medieval sorceress. “But I just have to say it: No one’s gonna be looking at you.”

  Before leaving, Mrs. Chen and her staff took a moment to admire their own handiwork. This was a rare event as Mrs. Chen and her assistants were ordinarily both far too modest and far too strict to call attention to themselves. But now, as they allowed themselves to gaze at me, each woman placed her hand over her heart.

  “When we see you, in your gown,” Mrs. Chen explained, “we are seeing our lives and our raw, bleeding fingertips and the sacrifice of a generation of silkworms.” She turned to Tom and offered her highest praise. “Not bad.”

  Then Mrs. Chen did something equally unexpected. She approached me, took me gently by the shoulders and kissed my cheek.

  Once everyone was gone, Tom switched off the lights and the room plunged into absolute blackness. Then, and I felt this before I saw it, a ray of late-morning sun crept, like a laser, from a tiny round window in the room’s high domed ceiling. This pure white light was aimed directly at me, as if a midnight search party had found its quarry, namely Rebecca, in her white Tom Kelly dress.

  I hadn’t been one of those little girls who’d spent every waking moment, and all of her dreams, planning her wedding. That was my mom. She’d made me go out by myself and step into local doctors’ waiting rooms and pretend to be looking for her, just so I could slip tattered copies of year-old bridal magazines into my backpack. She’d use a Magic Marker to slash Xs across the gowns which she’d deemed tacky or skimpy or “just a whole mess of white chiffon crapola.” She’d say that “the perfect gown makes you look as if God made it for you, because He wants you to be happy.” Once, before I’d known better, I’d asked her what she’d worn when she’d married my dad and she’d said, “I had so many pretty dresses, but we never got that far. And that’s why I’m still picking one out.”

  And now here I was, bathed in a biblical glow, as if I were about to be raptured into the hereafter, or some Olympian Bridal Hall of Fame. Tom had challenged himself; he’d vowed to show the world that he could make Rebecca Randle even more beautiful. He hated fuss and flounces so my gown was architectural, a modern cathedral, and while it was constructed from miles of the finest, most flawless matte ivory satin, it seemed to be spun entirely of light. Tom knew that my wedding gown would undoubtedly become the most photographed, downloaded, pod-cast, copied, longed-for and loathed dress ever; he knew that for decades to come, pregnant teenagers and 6'11" transvestites, along with many bookcases of don’t-touch collector’s dolls displayed under glass domes would be wearing some version of this gown. As I saw myself in the mirror, I finally understood weddings on a gut level. A wedding is the day when every woman gets to be Rebecca Randle.

  As I watched myself, my face left the mirror, because I was starting to leave the floor. I was rising, as the endless yards of my train unfolded and began to reproduce. I can’t say that I was flying but my dress was. I held out my arms, spinning, as the room was filled with a whirlwind of delicately twisting white silk, forming ribbony highways and pleated clouds, which were occupied by angels, sewn entirely of the most decadently gossamer white linen, with white chiffon wings. There were flocks of white taffeta doves with taffeta-covered buttons for eyes, swooping past drifting, somersaulting feathers crafted from thousands, no, millions of the tiniest white crystal beads, as the ancient bells of the Abbey tolled with my mom’s ringtone. I started laughing from sheer delight, because thanks to Tom Kelly, I’d ascended into bridal heaven.

  And then just as gracefully, I slowly returned to earth and my white lace shoes touched the floor as the angels and the doves and the fantasy yardage withdrew.

  “Do you love him?” asked Tom from the outlying darkness.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Prince Gregory: Do you love him?”

  “Of course I love him.”

  “Stop looking at yourself. I know that you’re feeling pretty cocky because you’re getting married on the very last day of our agreement. Within minutes, according to your calculations, you’ll be home free. Rebecca forever. But if you remember, I said that you had one year to fall in love and get married. Which aren’t necessarily the same thing. So right now, look me in the eye and convince me, beyond a
shadow of a doubt, and then I’ll be proud to walk you down the aisle and I’ll never ask again.”

  He flipped the switch and the lights blinded me as the glare bounced from one mirror to the next, making any escape, hesitation or lie impossible. When my vision cleared Tom was standing directly in front of me, two feet away. He wasn’t sneering or teasing me; his face was more open, and less certain of every last detail, than I’d ever seen. For the first time Tom was asking me a question he didn’t already know the answer to.

  I noticed one additional development. In shadowing me around the world and supplying me with one ensemble after another, Tom had spent a considerable amount of time outside his compound and the effort was unmistakable. While he still looked impossibly young, a certain fatigue, and maybe the most minuscule creases, had appeared on his face. Time was running out, for both of us.

  “Do you love him?”

  “I love everything about him. I love that he could be so stuck up and snotty but he isn’t. I love that he’s offhand and funny and that he puts everyone he meets at ease. I love his hair and his eyes and the way, even when he’s all dressed up, everything looks a little bit off, like right before he leaves his house, he jumps up and down a few times.”

  “You haven’t answered the question.”

  “I’m nineteen years old! Isn’t Prince Gregory who I’m supposed to be with? Isn’t he what you wanted for me?”

  “I wanted to make a point. I wanted to show you what was available to you. How far you could go.”

  “Exactly! And here I am! And I’ve done everything you’ve said, I wore the red dress and now I’m wearing the white one! And I’ll be able to use all of this, I’ll be able to use Rebecca, to try and help people!”

  “And your mother would be very proud. But I made her a promise.”

  “What promise?”

  “I told her, before you were born, that whatever happened in your mother’s life or mine, that I would find you. And look after you. And she thanked me and she made only one demand, there was only one thing she insisted upon. She said that if I could, if there was any possible route, that I had to make sure that you fell in love.”

  “I don’t believe you! Why are you telling me this, right now? There are thousands of people outside that door waiting for me! I have to get married!”

  “No you don’t. Even if Prince Gregory is wonderful and even if he’s going to become the king of England and even if you’re determined to become Princess Alicia and Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt all rolled into one, you can’t marry a man you don’t love. I won’t let you. I won’t allow it. Because, yes, for a year now, you’ve worn red and you’ve learned something about life, in all its vivid and often bloodcurdling spectacle. And now you’re in white, which demands the purity of truth, particularly on your wedding day. So I’ll ask you one last time and I’ll know if you’re lying, just the way your mother would know. Do you love him?”

  This was the question I hadn’t allowed myself to consider for a very simple reason. If I loved Prince Gregory then I’d have to ask myself: Who did he love? And who was he marrying? Me, or Rebecca?

  I pictured Prince Gregory, who was by now waiting at the altar. Was any love I had for him tainted, or made impossible, by the way we’d met? Was whatever love I felt for him every bit as concocted as Rebecca? If I was being ruthlessly honest — did I love him at all? Or did I only love what he could do for me and the access he represented? Did I just love the image of the two of us dropping by the sick and the needy for a quick photo op and maybe a tribal hoedown? Did I love that he was a prince and that he was rich and good-looking and that he met all of my other top-of-the-wedding-cake specifications? Was I using the prince on every conceivable level but most especially, so I could remain Rebecca?

  While I was trying so hard to be furiously clear-eyed, Prince Gregory kept sneaking into my brain and making his breezy, I-couldn’t-care-less, oh-stop-it way into my heart. Some romantic dam burst and I was brimming with all the emotion I’d been guarding against, and buckets more. For a second I forgot that Rebecca had ever existed and there was only Prince Gregory meeting Becky, meeting me, and kissing me and proposing to me and making me laugh. While I was growing up I’d dreamed about falling in love but all of my ideas had come from my mom’s favorite movies, where love had always been, as she’d liked to say, “sad and beautiful.”

  But now I knew exactly what falling in love was because I knew that love wasn’t a choice, or a decision. Love was the thing you can’t help. The thing that might never be returned. The thing that would probably destroy you, as it had destroyed Drake and my mom. Being Rebecca was the opposite of falling in love because Rebecca was safe. Rebecca knew that pretty much everyone was in love with her so her response was beside the point. Nobody would ever be worthy of Rebecca; she was a fortress. When you’re the Most Beautiful Woman Who Ever Lived, all you can do is bask in the deafening applause and the colossal envy and the warehouses of fan portraits, executed in oil and jelly beans and human hair, and then head home by yourself, exhausted from being all that and more, on such an impossible, paranormal, disconnected scale.

  But I wasn’t Rebecca. I was Becky and I’d made a terrible mistake. And there was nothing I could do about it except own up to it and muddle through. As soon as I answered Tom’s question I’d know that for the rest of my life, Becky would be an onlooker, a third wheel, an eternal spinster, watching Prince Gregory be in love with Rebecca. I guess I’d known it all along, that being Rebecca was my job and it was a lifetime position. The best I could hope for were scraps. I’d be allowed to ask Rebecca, if I caught her in the right mood, what it was like to be married to Prince Gregory. My heartbreak would be this: While Rebecca was married to the prince and eventually, the king, I would be secretly in love with Gregory, the guy I’d never really met and who’d never know I existed. And whenever he called me Becky, I would die a little more because my own name, my real name, would become a dagger. Did I love Gregory? I looked Tom Kelly right in the eye, as if I were strapped into the electric chair and Tom controlled the current.

  “Yes.”

  “Becky?” said Rocher. I hadn’t known that she’d returned or that she’d been staring at me, with her head cocked to one side.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m ready. Everything’s going to be perfect. Tell them, tell everyone that we can get started.”

  “Becky?”

  “What?”

  “Um, Becky, I don’t know how to say this, but …”

  “What?”

  Rocher, tongue-tied, took me by the shoulders, so we were facing one of the mirrored panels, standing side by side. “Look,” she said.

  “What? What am I looking at?”

  As I focused on our joint reflection, I knew why Rocher hadn’t been able to speak. Because I was looking at two girls, Becky and Rocher, from East Trawley, Missouri, both grotesquely over-dressed and clutching each other. Rebecca was nowhere to be found or more exactly, she was nowhere to be seen.

  My thoughts splintered in every direction, like a chandelier that had come crashing to the floor. This was a trick, a brain spasm, a Tom Kelly prank.

  “Tom?” I said, but I knew he wasn’t there. I hadn’t seen him leave but I also knew that sending Rocher out to drag him back would be impossible. When Tom Kelly left a room he wasn’t about to change his mind. I tried frantically to remember everything he’d said; he’d told me that if he believed me, he’d happily walk me down the aisle. And I’d told the truth, I’d confessed that I loved Prince Gregory.

  “Becky?” said Rocher. “Where’s Tom Kelly? Did he do something to you? Is he pissed at you? What’s going on?”

  Had I been warned by my accessories? Cinderella’s dreams had imploded at midnight and my perfume was distilled from Eve’s sobs as she was driven into the wilderness. And as for my earrings — had I been cursed by the doomed Marie Antoinette?

  I went back to the mirror, determined to will the necessary change, to force Tom’s mag
ic to reassert itself. I am Rebecca Randle, I told myself. I have to be Rebecca Randle. I’m about to get married to Prince Gregory and I need to be camera-ready and cathedral-ready and before-the-eyes-of-God-ready. I AM REBECCA RANDLE.

  “Becky?” said Rocher in a hoarse whisper.

  “Rebecca?” asked Lady Veronica Arnstelt-Bowen, the Queen’s secretary, stepping into the room. Lady Veronica had been overseeing every aspect of the wedding and before she could catch sight of me, of whoever I was, I flung my veil over my face and the many layers of pearl-encrusted Alençon lace fell from the veil’s headpiece to my waist.

  “Come along now,” said Lady Veronica. While she’d never liked me, she was set on masterminding an epic and punctual ceremony. Stalling or stammering or begging for a bathroom break were out of the question. I could hear the music begin from inside the cathedral, not yet the traditional wedding march, but a royal processional arranged for a pipe organ, twelve mandolins, fifteen trumpets and a massed choir, including thirty boy sopranos selected by competition from across the country.

  “It’s time,” said Lady Veronica, and with a nod of her head, the side room was flooded with security personnel relaying commands into their headpieces, and other formally dressed staff members, each with a white rose at their lapel or breast — the Ravishing Rebecca — bred in bulk for my wedding. One of these smiling staffers handed Rocher her bouquet, a middle-earth cluster of foxglove, lilies and thistle wrapped with trailing ribbons. As she was led away, Rocher wrenched her head around, shooting me a helplessly supportive look, promising that while we were both scheduled for the guillotine she was praying that her own neck might shatter the blade, so my next-in-line death would at least be delayed.