Gorgeous

by Rudnick, Paul

  I took the stairs of our apartment building two at a time. I remembered that Aimee was out at one of her many classes; today was the seminar where she was developing a one-woman show based on her own life. Suzanne was off polishing her audition technique with a woman who charged a lot to yell at her clients and to teach them to yell at themselves; this woman had self-published a paperback guide called Be Your Own Bully. For a second I envied Aimee and Suzanne because at least they knew what they wanted and they were working hard and who knows, maybe someday one of them might get a job as an actress and she would’ve earned it. I hadn’t earned anything and now karma was cackling with vengeful glee.

  I shoved open the door and there was Rocher, who was supposed to be out searching for a new job.

  “Um, Becky …,” she began.

  “Rocher, I’m really sorry, but I can’t talk and I can’t really explain anything but I’m getting out of here, I mean, out of the city, out of everywhere….”

  “Becks …”

  “I know, I’m sorry, I should be here to help you with your court case but please, I’ll try to dig up some more money and send it to you, but I have to go….”

  “BECKY.”

  Rocher stepped aside and standing a few feet behind her was Prince Gregory.

  One phone call to Mr. Taldecott had given the prince my address.

  “Oh my God,” I said and I didn’t know if I was more shocked to see the prince or to see the prince standing in front of Aimee’s aunt Renee’s sleeper sofa. “I’m sorry about your carafe of ice water….”

  “Don’t,” he said. “Stop it. Don’t you dare.”

  “Um, I’m gonna go, maybe into the other room …,” said Rocher, edging toward the bedroom.

  “OUT!” said the prince to Rocher, who ran for the front door. On her way she caught my eye and waggled her arms helplessly and I made an “It’s fine, just go” gesture and she left.

  After the front door shut the prince and I stood staring at each other, in silence.

  “The last time I saw you,” said the prince, “you were standing directly across from me before the high altar at Westminster Abbey, on what was supposed to be my wedding day. You had replaced the woman I loved and then you ran off with your friend, and you both disappeared, seemingly forever. I have spent the entire last year of my life hating you beyond all measure. I have hated you with a passion and a rage I didn’t know I was capable of. I have spent every waking moment plotting your extended and agonizing torture and this was my plan: I wouldn’t just force you to reveal what had happened to Rebecca and why, oh no — I wanted you to suffer. I wanted you to writhe in torment until you begged for death. I wanted your eyes to pop out and your ears to spin and your fingers to drop off one by one….”

  “Got it,” I said. “Got the picture.”

  “You are despicable. You are repugnant. You are immoral, amoral and lower than hyena vomit. You are hyena vomit festering with typhoid and gonococcus and thousands of squirming, brainless white maggots….”

  “Agreed. Moving on.”

  “So if you don’t want me to fetch the burning coals, the rusty ice-pick and the ball-peen hammer, then you are going to tell me one thing. You are going to answer one simple question and you are going to tell me the truth. Or I swear to God I will strangle you with my bare hands and then I will hurl your lifeless body from the rooftop, where it will land directly in front of an ice cream truck and the driver will use what’s left of your gall bladder to create a repulsive new flavor called Apple Strawberry Compulsive Liar Swirl.”

  He’d said all of this on a single, propulsive, merciless breath, barely pausing for my objections and now he needed a moment to refill his lungs and to prepare for an even more satisfyingly ferocious reading of his final words, which he’d clearly reworked over many drafts and memorized. His righteous fury gathered in his curling toes and rocketed upward, causing tremors and quivers, finally attaining full Baptist preacher Judgment-Day’s-a-comin’ glory in his flaring nostrils, his bulging eyeballs and his outraged hair.

  Then all of this powerful and well-rehearsed wrath left the prince’s body as he slumped, and became the most heartbreaking figure. He was a young guy in love and that love had been taken from him and he didn’t understand anything, and he was scared that he never would. His words came out in a yearning whisper and they not only tore me to pieces, they made me love him even more as he asked: “Who are you?”

  My life, in all of its unlikely monstrosity, didn’t flash before my eyes. Instead I saw, as if in skywriting or engraved on granite tablets, every possible, screw-loose, potential answer to the prince’s completely sensible question. I could tell him that Rebecca had been a hologram that I’d projected with my mind. I could say that Rebecca had been my fraternal twin sister who’d died of an undiagnosed heart ailment on her way to the wedding and that with her last breath, she’d asked me to take her place. Maybe Rebecca was me if I parted my hair differently — see? Rebecca was an angel sent to earth to marry the prince but at the last second she’d been reassigned, due to a clerical mix-up, to a prince in another country. If you squinted and spun around hundreds of times really fast, I looked just like Rebecca, once she’d pulled a pair of pantyhose over her head.

  But — Prince Gregory’s face. I couldn’t add one more second of lies and muddle and evasion to his misery. Rebecca, or me, or the two of us working together in unholy concert, had committed a crime. We’d loved him and then without a word of explanation or apology, we’d left. I owed him. And all I could offer was the truth.

  In a feverish, unstoppable geyser of words, I told him everything. I told him about my mom’s death and my discovery of the mysterious phone number. I told him about my earliest trip to New York and about Tom Kelly’s impossible offer. And then I told him about the three dresses and about how everything Tom had promised had come true, and about the Vogue shoot and Jate Mallow and about how after our visit to the burn unit, a royal marriage had become my goal. From that point on, he knew most of the story, until I reached the side room at Westminster, where Tom Kelly had asked me if I loved Prince Gregory.

  “And what did you say?” asked the prince.

  “I said yes.”

  “And then?”

  “And then Tom Kelly turned me back into Becky Randle from East Trawley and I knew, from the look on your face, that I had to run and hide and that there would never be, as long as I lived, any way for me to apologize to you and to everyone else, for becoming Rebecca and then for turning back into me.”

  I was about to say “I’m sorry,” but the words caught in my throat. How dare I say them, as if they could make any difference? As if the prince had believed a single word I’d said? Instead, because the floor had refused to open, allowing me to free fall into hell or more specifically, into the hell reserved for people who don’t just tell lies but who live them, I just stood there. Shaking.

  Prince Gregory was staring at me, and, if anything, he looked even more furious and more confused and more utterly lost. He looked as if he were trying to stop his brain from tumbling out of his skull and rolling across the floor, coming to rest at the webbed plastic tote bag that held a stack of Aimee’s headshots, the pictures of her that had been so airbrushed that she didn’t even have a nose, just two tiny black nostril-dots. Abruptly, the prince turned away toward the bedroom door, which had one of those shiny, erasable memo boards hanging on it, in bright yellow with jolly ladybugs and fat bumblebees wagging their antennae beneath the printed heading, “What’s the Buzz, Honey?” There was a long-dried-up Magic Marker knotted to a strand of frayed orange yarn, which was anchored to the board with a thumbtack. Just as suddenly the prince turned back to face me.

  “Do you know something?” he said. “That is exactly what I thought had happened.”

  “What?”

  “Sit,” he told me. “Sit on that … mucus-colored, humpbacked thing.” As he spoke I remembered how nice he smelled and how his neckties were always yanked to one sid
e but I warned myself to stop thinking about any of that and I dutifully sat on the sleeper sofa, which wasn’t easy; I slid into a corner.

  “Here’s the terrible problem,” said Prince Gregory, swaying and tugging at his hair the way passengers hold on to a subway strap to steady themselves. “The problem is — I believe you.”

  “You do?”

  “And that’s a problem because …” He began speaking more spontaneously, against his better judgment and with more of his natural kindness. “I suppose it’s because I’m a prince. Which is already so absurd and outlandish. And which means that I’m supposed to be the hero of a fairy tale. When I was a child I assumed that fairy tales, that all of those ridiculous stories, were true, because after all, I lived in a castle and there were crowns and scepters and orbs lying about. And whenever the stories mentioned a Prince Charming or a Good Prince So-and-So, I’d assumed they were talking about me. Or, if the prince was awkward or bedraggled or had a limp, about my brother. It all just seemed to follow. But as I grew older I found that I certainly wasn’t a hero and that armor and chain mail looked extremely uncomfortable and that if I wanted to wear a crown to school my parents would laugh at me. And, the way everyone does, I realized that fairy tales never come true. Or more precisely, I learned that regarding life as a fairy tale would require only the very blackest sense of humor.”

  “I don’t understand….”

  “Because in real life, fairy tales always end badly. My mother was absolutely the most caring and beautiful princess. She was a storybook creature who deserved to glide through life, bouncing around in sparkling carriages and consulting with blue jays and bunnies and casting inspirational smiles upon her adoring subjects. But instead she died quite horribly, at a very young age. Which was when it dawned on me that everything I’d been told, every story and fantasy and film that begins with the opening of some enormous, hand-lettered book and the words, ‘Once upon a time,’ was a complete and utter crock.”

  “I’m so sorry….”

  “And then just when I’d become used to the fact that fairy tales were total rubbish and should be outlawed, I meet the most absurdly beautiful woman. And she seemed truly enchanted because she even had a sense of humor. At first I resisted. Rebecca was too beautiful, too entertaining, too onto herself, too ideal. Everything came too easily to her. I wondered if she’d been planted as some sort of sleeper beauty by a foreign government, to win my confidence, convert me to some fundamentalist belief system and then urge me to blow up Big Ben. I said to myself, this is impossible. I can’t be falling in love with a woman who seems, above all else, like perfect casting.”

  “I know….”

  “But then it got even worse, everything became even more unfathomable, because just as I was prepared to dismiss Rebecca as a sort of Technicolor-fueled, Disney-backed, German-engineered mirage, she proved herself. She made me laugh and she saved my life and God help us all, she even survived tea with my grandmother and those wretched little dogs. But beyond all that, there was a rightness. A connection. When I was agitated or unsure, she’d say something unexpected and I’d feel so much better.”

  He bit his lip, because he wasn’t usually this direct and this exposed. But he was determined to be completely honest:

  “She made me feel that I wasn’t alone.”

  I wanted to reach out and touch his cheek, to reassure him, to tell him that I’d felt exactly the same way, but I didn’t dare.

  “And then on my wedding day, it happened again. The lesson of my mother’s death. Because my bride, my sparkling fairy-tale soul mate, didn’t show up. And I blamed myself for allowing it to happen, for imagining that such mythical happiness was ever remotely possible. Because, yes, Rebecca was impossibly beautiful. But she was also impossibly herself. And I didn’t deserve her.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “That’s what I came up with. All I could think, the only conclusion that made any sense, was that Rebecca had realized, at the very last second, and I’m just going to say it, because goddamnit, I’m entitled to, she’d realized that I wasn’t her prince. And I didn’t blame her, not one ounce, because I’m dim and I’m selfish and because marriage to me would have become a living hell, of waving maniacally from dusty balconies and cutting ribbons to open car parks and trying to remain awake and attentive while choral groups of small children stood three feet away and sang droning folk songs in the original Gaelic. I decided that Rebecca simply couldn’t find a way to tell me that she’d changed her mind and that she’d come to her senses and that she didn’t love me. Or that she didn’t love me enough.”

  “But she did!”

  “But we couldn’t discuss it, any of it, her doubts or her fears, because we were always inundated by so much fuss and by so many pairs of Greg-and-Becks souvenir kneesocks. So ultimately I couldn’t fault Rebecca. Because I knew in my heart that she hadn’t been kidnapped or drugged or waylaid. She hadn’t vanished — she’d fled.”

  I wished that the prince was still cursing at me and threatening to electrocute me because that had been easier than watching his despair. I shut my eyes painfully tight and for the millionth time, I tried to pray Rebecca back into existence because maybe she could set things right. But I also knew that even if somehow Rebecca could return, it would be even crueler to everyone but especially to Prince Gregory. I’d be taunting him and proving even more definitively that he’d fallen in love with a cardboard cutout, that he’d been punked as publicly and sneeringly as possible.

  So I opened my eyes and I asked, “And now?”

  “And now, and now, I wish there was some fairy-tale handbook, some large print, ye-olde-magick-for-dummies. I wish I knew how the story ends because I wish that’s all it was — a story. But instead I’m the most useless sort of prince; I’m just an idiot with a closetful of extremely uncomfortable formal clothing and a trunkful of extremely impressive engraved stationery for writing notes of abject apology to everyone. And I have no idea what to do, because after everything you’ve told me and after the fact that I’ve chosen to believe it, I’m still left with only one very real question.”

  “Which question?”

  “Who are you?”

  I was every bit as lost as Prince Gregory. I’d managed to explain Rebecca and her disappearance and he’d bought it. And he’d just asked me the one question I’d never been able to get anywhere near answering. I wondered if anyone, even under far less freakish circumstances, could ever successfully and convincingly answer that question.

  I stood and walked to the cheap, plastic-framed, round drugstore mirror that Aimee and Suzanne had hung at eye level right beside the front door. I looked at myself and I saw a very young woman, someone who was only just beginning to look like herself. Someone who had been terribly hurt but whose features now held at least a hint of hard-won self-knowledge and therefore exhibited at least a glimmer of confidence and maybe even a certain strength, around the eyes and the jaw.

  I turned away from the mirror, which was a really good idea, because mirrors lie. This mirror had told both Aimee and Suzanne that they were glamorous stars-of-tomorrow and it had convinced Rocher to get her nose pierced and if I kept asking it to tell me everything, or anything, it would make me want to kill myself, or get cheekbone implants, or slam my fist into its snickering, unreliable, glittering surface. Mirrors are more dangerous than guns or cars or crystal meth, because they’re cheap, readily available and everyone’s addicted.

  “Asking someone who they are,” I told Prince Gregory, “is never a fair question. Because the only honest answer for anyone is ‘When I find out, I’ll let you know.’ But I loved being Rebecca. It was like flying, because I knew it wasn’t possible but I was doing it anyway. And even then I knew it was cheating. But I’m not sorry. And I have no idea who or what you fell in love with. But I do know one thing, for beyond certain: Rebecca didn’t love you.”

  “I know that….”

  “I did.”

  “I hope you guy
s folded up the fucking sleeper sofa,” barked Aimee, barreling through the front door. “Because my one-woman-show class didn’t go very well. I did my whole show about my life and then there was a critique and the teacher said that I should use someone else’s life.”

  After dumping her many shoulder bags, most of them silk-screened with the logos of not-for-profit theater companies, and her plastic grocery sacks filled with I-didn’t-get-the-part comfort snacks all around the room, Aimee began chugging from a carton of soy milk and caught sight of Prince Gregory. I hoped that as an actress, Aimee would remember this moment in detail because it was the only time I’d ever seen anyone actually perform an unpremeditated spit take, as the soy milk blasted from Aimee’s mouth, spewing all over the prince.

  “What the hell …,” Aimee began, wiping her mouth with her hand. “Oh my God. OH MY GOD.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Prince Gregory, reaching for a paper towel and delicately dabbing at his dripping jacket. “I’m intruding, I was just leaving….”

  “Are you HIM?” said Aimee as if she’d just run into Jesus in the marketplace a few days after Easter. “Are you PRINCE GREGORY? Of ENGLAND?”

  “Yes I am and I’m so sorry to be trespassing in your … lovely … home….”

  Then for the second time in under a minute, Aimee looked like she’d been struck by the most thrillingly joyous lightning.

  “Oh my God,” said Aimee. “Are you here because I got the part? In the cable movie about your wedding? I mean, I told my agent to submit me but he keeps saying that he hasn’t heard back and I thought that maybe they were going for a star, you know, instead of a real actress, but oh my God! Did you come here to tell me that I have the lead? Are there cameras here? Are you like the guy who shows up with one of those six-foot-long checks and huge bunches of balloons, when someone wins the lottery?”

  “I’ve told you people not to leave the fucking front door open,” growled Suzanne, appearing in her audition costume for the role of a stressed-out young mom in an ad for nerve-calming, chamomile-scented air freshener; this meant that Suzanne was wearing a beige pantsuit and toting a grimy plastic baby doll in a carrier on her chest. “People come in and steal things, we have valuables, there’s the sleeper sofa and that really nice watch my father gave me when I lost the first three pounds at fat camp….”