Gorgeous

by Rudnick, Paul

  I wasn’t on duty when Jate Mallow checked into the Royal Criterion one Tuesday at 4:00 A.M. under an assumed name. The Rebecca madness had finally been eclipsed when Jate had fallen in love, and a paparazzi using a zoom lens had sold both the stills and the video of Jate lying in his lover’s arms and having sex on what Jate had been guaranteed was a secluded and off-limits private beach in Tangier. Although at first Jate’s people had scoffed and insisted that all of the pictures were fakes, the lover had soon sold his own “shockingly exclusive” story to both a tabloid and a publisher, and Jate had been undeniably outed.

  Jate had a new movie called Death Tracker, which took place in the future after the planet had been decimated by a nuclear war. The radioactive fallout had created mutants, and Jate played a bounty hunter who captured these creatures, until his rugged, gun-for-hire character fell in love with a beautiful female half vampire. The film was set to open in two days, and it was planned as the first chapter of a projected trilogy, so the studio was frantic. Jate had been besieged by every news show, talk show, magazine and gay rights organization; these various factions wanted Jate to either announce his sexuality, in an upbeat, what’s-the-big-deal-duh-I’m-gay cover story, or confide that he was entering an intensive, two-week program of Christian rehabilitative therapy to “correct the problem.” Jate had responded to all of these offers, the online meltdown and the unauthorized sale of his sex tape, which the packaging called “An XXX Date with Jate,” by vanishing from the face of the earth.

  When Mr. Taldecott told me that a Mr. Wibblewort had checked into suite 1718 and was not to be disturbed under any circumstances, I said, and not as a question, “It’s Jate Mallow,” because Wally Wibblewort had been the name of the pet cockatiel which had cooed from Jate’s shoulder on Jackie + Jate. Mr. Taldecott was no longer surprised by my psychic gifts regarding celebrities and he nodded as I compiled a list of Jate’s favorite Sun-Brawny bronzer, lip-plumping Tangy Lime ChapStick and a product called Head Scum, which was guaranteed to give the user “thick, pungent, swamp-stylin’ hair.”

  From glancing at Mr. Taldecott’s encrypted, most confidential hotel log, I saw that Jate hadn’t left his suite for three days and had refused all letters, calls and packages. I knew that if I got caught trying to contact Jate personally on hotel property, I’d be fired on the spot. But Jate had been so good to me and he was having a really rough time, so I had to do something. I knew what it was like to be riding ridiculously high and then to have everything come crashing down. And besides, if I couldn’t come up with a way to help Jate Mallow, Rocher and my mom would never forgive me.

  I studied the hotel log and I found out exactly when Mr. Taldecott would be off duty. Then I swapped shifts with another assistant and right after my work hours ended at 2:00 A.M., I snuck up to the seventeenth floor and used my pass card to enter Jate’s suite.

  “Mr. Wibblewort?” I said, stepping into the darkened rooms. I could hear distant dialogue from a TV, so I made my way through the front parlor, which was ordinarily the image of a formal reception room at a Tuscan villa. But now the heavy red-and-green-striped damask draperies were duct-taped shut, obliterating the high, mullioned windows that would have overlooked Central Park. The deep, down-filled damask sofas were buried beneath mounds of unwashed clothing and stacks of barely touched room-service meals. A lamp was overturned, and there were opened wine bottles balanced precariously along the edges of a desk. Even though the entire hotel was non-smoking, every surface held soda cans that had been used as makeshift ash trays and there was a thick haze in the dank air, as if Jate’s suite had become a Los Angeles overpass at rush hour.

  Using my foot I nudged aside a discarded leather jacket embroidered with the Death Tracker logo, and I approached the bedroom. The door was being held open by a never-worn cashmere sweater with the tags dangling, which had been shoved under the door itself. The light from the flat-screen TV, beaming from within an armoire, barely illuminated Jate, who was slumped in the king-sized bed beneath a heap of bedding. Jate was hovering somewhere between being drunk and stoned, and being theatrically drunk and stoned, with one arm flung across his eyes as he leaned against the quilted headboard. He was ignoring an episode of a syndicated medical show, where Dr. Whoever was helping a single mom cope with her Lyme disease by assuring her that having Lyme disease didn’t make her a bad person. What worried me as the most genuine hint of Jate’s anguish was that his hair, which was ordinarily so time-consumingly and radiantly spiked and awry, was now truly and dejectedly messy. It was, in fact, lifeless and limp, it was hair that had lost the urge to swirl. And if Jate didn’t care about his hair anymore, then he was in real danger.

  “Mr. Mallow?” I began.

  Jate grunted, lowering his flung arm slightly to prove that his eyes were resolutely shut. Then he said, “Look at her. That chick on TV. She’s all upset because she’s got Lyme disease.” He opened his eyes and looked right at me, shouting, “I wish I had fucking LYME DISEASE!”

  “Mr. Mallow, do you need anything?”

  “What? Do I what? Oh my God, are you a reporter? Did you sneak in here? How did you find me? I’m calling security!”

  “No, no, please don’t!” I said as Jate fumbled for the phone. “It’s fine, I’m with the hotel! I’m Becky Randle!”

  “Becky Randle?” said Jate, holding the phone in midair. “Like Rebecca Randle?”

  “No relation.”

  “Too bad. ’Cause that’s just what I’m doing.”

  “What?”

  “I’m pulling a fucking REBECCA RANDLE!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do I mean? Haven’t you been out there? In the world? Haven’t you watched TV or checked out, oh, I don’t know, a few billion magazine covers and I Hate Jate websites and fan tweets and fan sites and fan blogs? Look at me! I’m Jate fucking Mallow! The big Hollywood homo!”

  “Okay …”

  “Okay? OKAY? It is not OKAY!”

  “But there are plenty of gay actors. And lots of them have come out and everybody’s fine with it.”

  “EXCUSE ME? I’m a LEADING MAN! Those other actors, they’re all supporting or old or funny or talented. I’m a MOVIE STAR! And I’ve got a flick coming out this weekend, where I’m a bounty hunter from the future and in two weeks I’m supposed to start shooting another movie, where I play a fucking MARINE!”

  “But — they repealed that law, so now people can be gay in the Marines….”

  “I know, but not in the MOVIES! So I’m gone! I’m outta here! Just like Rebecca Randle!”

  Waving the remote, Jate shut off the TV and resumed disappearing by whomping the covers over his head. Only a few drooping stalks of his once-fabled hair remained visible, like a retreating militia.

  “Mr. Mallow?” I said, moving tentatively toward the bed.

  “Jate,” he said, his voice muffled by the covers.

  “I knew Rebecca Randle, I mean, not well, but she was often a guest at the hotel and I would assist her with theater tickets and plane reservations. And do you know what Ms. Randle and I talked about? All the time? For hours?” Jate’s head lump rose a few inches, from curiosity, because no one loves gossip more than a movie star.

  “You.”

  “Me?” asked the muffled heap.

  “Of course. She adored you. She thought that you were so handsome and so smart and such a great actor, and she said that she owed all of her success to you.”

  The lump jerked from side to side, as a modest, no, no.

  “And I knew that she was right about you because she knew you personally, and I could always tell that you weren’t just, you know, a legendary star and an inspiration to people all over the world but that you were also a really decent human being. I mean, I just knew it because — I’m your biggest fan.”

  I waited, unsure if I’d played the wrong card and if the lump was panicking at being trapped in a bunkerlike hotel suite with a deranged stalker.

  But then after a few suspe
nseful seconds, Jate’s eyes and then most of his face appeared, with his fingertips clutching the top sheet. It was like a puppet show, starring the increasingly hopeful head of Jate Mallow.

  “You are?” he asked, as if I was his only fan left in the world.

  “Oh, yes! When I was growing up I cut out hundreds of pictures of you and I made this huge collage over a whole wall of my bedroom. And when you got that frosted perm, with the tight ringlets, I got one too.”

  “You did? I wasn’t sure about it at first, ’cause a perm is really hard to pull off, and maintain. Especially with any sort of humidity.”

  “Totally. And then two weeks ago, I heard that you were gay.”

  Jate went pale and without his touching it, his hair seemed to cringe in fear and he began to dip back under the covers.

  “And at first I was so confused and I didn’t know if it was true or not.”

  “But then?” asked Jate, his voice cracking.

  “But then I thought, he’s still Jate. He’s still unbelievably gorgeous and famous and generous and a really good guy. And I thought, sure, fine, maybe some idiots are gonna have Jate hate just because you’re gay and they’re not gonna go see your movies. But then I thought, in your new movie, the one that’s opening this weekend, you meet a mutant girl from the future, who’s a vampire on her mother’s side, right? And you fall in love, even though humans and vampires are supposed to hate each other, right?”

  “Yes, because that’s the whole point of the movie, it’s like, even though I’ve been assigned to round up her relatives and keep them in partial sunlight, I realize that the daughter is also still human. And so together we protect the last remaining medical researcher on earth, who has the formula that allows vampires to live on contaminated water and bark.”

  “And so it all works out! And you prove that there are all kinds of love. And so maybe when people, even straight guys, when they go to see Death Tracker, maybe they’ll understand all of that.”

  There was a pause and then Jate said, “You are so full of it.”

  “Find out. Don’t be like Rebecca Randle. Don’t run away. Give the world a chance. I mean, what’s your choice? Do you just want to hide in here forever? What if you got up and maybe took a shower and air-dried your hair and scrunched in some of that fantastic new scrunching gel, called Pus Muss, and you went outside?”

  Jate looked down at his hands and I saw that he was now completely and maybe far too sober. “I know what you mean,” he said, “but I’m not even sure if it matters. Because do you want to know something? The most insane part of all of this? The kicker?”

  “What?”

  “That guy? On the beach? The one in all the photos and the video? The guy who sold me out? I … I loved him. Or I thought I did. He was this rich kid, he’d worked as an assistant art director on one of my movies, and we weren’t together for all that long, but we were having such a great time and I just thought, fuck it. I mean, I know I’m Jate Mallow and I should know better, but do you remember how on my TV show, I’d always be meeting someone and we’d hold hands and make out? Well I just thought, what if, for once in my life, I really did that. What if for once I didn’t call my manager or a private investigator to check the guy out and I didn’t make him sign a confidentiality agreement. What if I just went for it.”

  “So you did?”

  “Yes. And for a little bit, for those few weeks, it was wonderful. Because you know what’s so great about falling in love?”

  “What?”

  “I stopped thinking about myself. When you’re a star, it’s so easy to forget about everything but your career and your image and the money, and how to keep it all going. But for at least a little while, I thought about someone else. And all I wanted to do was to make him happy.”

  I knew just what Jate was talking about because I still thought about Gregory all the time.

  “But here’s the problem. And I don’t know if you’ll be able to understand this, but for almost my whole life, I’ve felt like I was two different people. And I was always so scared that if the world found out who I really was, that no one would like me. Does that make any sense?”

  “Yes,” I said quietly. “It makes perfect sense. And it sounds like it would drive you crazy.”

  “Becky?” said Jate. “I still don’t really know who you are but — you seem really sweet. And smart, about all of this.”

  “I just … I just work here.”

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  As I was about to answer, my phone went off.

  It was Rocher. “Becky, I know it’s really late and I’m so sorry but they wouldn’t even let me have my one phone call for hours and I don’t know what to do and Beck — I’m in jail.”

  Rocher had been arrested during a sweep of street vendors in Midtown and while all of her coworkers had run, she’d loyally stood beside her folding table stocked with fake Tom Kelly sunglasses and those dorky Peruvian hats with the knitted balls dangling from the earflaps, which only look good on bicycle messengers. “I stayed because I’d just gotten everything perfectly folded and arranged by color,” Rocher explained. She didn’t have a phone number for Marcus, her boss, because he’d always contacted her and blocked his own information, and now the police were holding her at the precinct on West 52nd Street.

  When I got there the sergeant at the front desk wouldn’t let me see Rocher and he told me that the department wanted to make an example of her, and that bail had been set at twenty thousand dollars. “Maybe your little friend thinks it’s just about selling those crappy Peruvian hippie hats,” said the sergeant, “but it’s about the law. How do we know that every time your buddy makes five bucks off some fake Tom Kelly purse, that half of that money doesn’t go right back to the terrorists?”

  I was only making an entry-level paycheck at the Royal Criterion so Rocher and I could barely scrape together each month’s rent. I’d run through my tiny East Trawley savings and all of Rebecca’s money had been spent while I was still Rebecca. Because I’d been so beautiful, and because I was going to marry Prince Gregory, I’d assumed that money would never be an issue; my face had been my bank account.

  I knew that there was just one way I could pull together twenty grand because I only knew one person who’d have that kind of cash on hand. And he was the last person on earth I wanted to see: Tom Kelly. But Rocher was in police custody and I had no other prospects so I told myself, just brace yourself. And I wouldn’t be begging because Tom Kelly owed me.

  I took a cab over to Tom’s compound and all the gates swung open. I had the cab drop me out on the pier inside the white graveled courtyard, where Drake was waiting. As he paid my cab fare and led me inside the glass pavilion, he said, “It’s good to see you. Tom told me not to worry but I’ve been thinking about you a lot.”

  “Why does anyone ever listen to Tom Kelly?” I asked, although I knew I shouldn’t blame Drake for his employer’s evil.

  “Rebecca,” said Lila, meeting me in the lobby. As always she was sleekly and forbiddingly dressed — today, in a sleeveless white linen sheath outlined in black piping.

  “It’s Becky,” I said, correcting her. “And I need to see Tom, right away.”

  As Lila brought me into the black glass elevator, I could tell that she wanted to say something but she was hesitating.

  “What?” I said. “What is it? And please, whatever you do, don’t try to make excuses or explain Tom’s behavior. Because I swear, I will punch you.”

  “There are no excuses,” Lila said. “And I’m not going to tell you that everything that happened is for the best. Because why would you believe me?”

  As I watched Lila, with her flawless chignon and her infinitesimal waistline, I wondered: I knew she was devoted to Tom, and that she was probably in love with him, but what else did he have on her? Had she robbed a bank, was he supporting her family, what could explain his hold over her?

  “Why?” I finally asked. “Why do you stay with him?�
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  Lila smiled, because she wasn’t about to reveal anything. “Free clothes,” she said.

  When the elevator doors parted, I saw Tom seated on one of the low black leather couches near the blue flames of the glass fireplace. He was wearing a fitted denim work shirt, unbuttoned halfway and partially tucked into the faded jeans that hung off his hips, for a Hamptons cowboy lankiness. It was as if he’d done nothing but lounge, tended to by his slavish staff, ever since I’d met him. And because he’d returned to his compound, to his black-and-white garden of hatefulness, he looked better than ever. He was about to greet me, but I cut him off.

  “I need twenty thousand dollars right now,” I said as I crossed the miles of glossy white flooring. I stopped ten feet away from Tom because I didn’t want to be anywhere near him. “Rocher is in jail and I have to bail her out. And you owe me.”

  “I owe you?”

  “Don’t. Don’t even try. Don’t even start.”

  I didn’t run at him or kick him or slap him and I didn’t start sobbing and falling apart and here’s why: because I couldn’t complain. Tom had promised to make me the most beautiful woman on earth and he’d delivered. He’d offered me the world and I’d grabbed it. My only problem was I’d cheated. I’d cut in line. As Tom had always told me, beauty is unfair, it’s sheer genetic roulette, but I’d hacked the system.