Gorgeous

by Rudnick, Paul

  “But what if I’d rebelled? What if I’d hated you and everything you stood for? What if I’d become a surgeon or joined the Peace Corps or worn other labels?”

  “Foster care.”

  “But then what happened? How did you get better?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “What do you mean? Look at you!” As always, Tom was handsome, youthful and athletic. The real word for Tom Kelly was vigilant. He refused to age or gain an unnecessary ounce or to look anything other than effortlessly, devastatingly, unapproachably great.

  “I never got better. I died.”

  “What?”

  “Almost twenty years ago. At the compound. I knew it was happening and all I wanted was as much morphine as I could get. Your mother was with me. And I was satisfied that the company was intact. Which meant that in a way, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, Tom Kelly would never die. Not as long as anyone was wearing sunglasses or cologne or simple, modern, twelve-hundred-dollar A-line skirts.”

  “You … you’re dead?”

  “Yes. And stop looking so dumbfounded, this isn’t your first brush with, what shall we call it, the supernatural? Rebecca would certainly understand.”

  “But … but …”

  “Stop it. Becky, look at me. And I’m not being presumptuous, only accurate. My face. My body. My enviably thick head of hair. Did you really think that God, or whoever is behind all this, would really let Tom Kelly go to waste? Without a fight?”

  He was almost laughing, not just at my slack-jawed disbelief but at the sheer insanity of what he’d just told me. Could it be true, any of it? All of it? Tom Kelly was sitting right there, a few feet away. And he didn’t look like a man in his seventies or barely his thirties.

  “On the day that I died, just before the drugs made me completely unreachable, your mother made a request. No, she made a nonnegotiable demand.”

  “What? What did she want?”

  “Well, it wasn’t money, because I’d offered her a fortune, so she’d be taken care of. But she wouldn’t accept it, not a penny. She said that wasn’t the point.”

  “So what did she ask for?”

  “She couldn’t save Alicia, or me, but her baby, our child, was going to be protected. She became this rampaging lioness and she told me, ‘I don’t know where you’re going or if there’s a next step, for anyone. But you’re this baby’s father. And you have to help her in any way you can, to make sure that she’s not like me. I don’t want her to be afraid of anything. I want her to know that she can take on the world. But most of all, I want her to fall in love, with someone wonderful, and I want that person to love her right back, no matter what she looks like. You have to guarantee that our baby, once she grows up, you have to make sure that she falls in love, for all the right reasons.’”

  “So what did you say?”

  “I promised to try. I said I’d do what I could. Your mother was fragile and I wanted to make sure that she could handle my death. So I promised her your life.”

  “I’m not sure she believed you.”

  “Which is probably why she ran right back to, what was it called? East Trawley. Where she could hide and keep you safe. And that’s most likely why she gained so much weight. So she’d never be recognized and have to answer questions, about me, and you. And also because after her time as a model, she was undoubtedly very hungry.”

  “But she kept that phone number. Your phone number.”

  “Your mother also believed in knocking on wood or in the case of your trailer, wood laminate. She was also convinced that space aliens had landed on earth millions of years ago and married Mormons.”

  “But when I showed up, at the compound, why didn’t you just tell me? About you and my mom? About all of this?”

  “Because you wouldn’t have believed a word of it. And because that wasn’t what I’d promised your mother. I had to equip you for the world. I had to show you what was possible and how things work. I had to let you make all of your mother’s mistakes and learn from them. I had to make you three dresses. Because if you hadn’t worn them, if you hadn’t become Rebecca, you’d still be back behind the cash register, at the Shop-A-Lot.”

  “The Super Shop-A-Lot.”

  “So sorry. And you never would’ve met Alicia’s son. And fallen in love.”

  “With a man who hates my guts. And I don’t blame him. Because that’s where your plan backfired. Because he fell in love with Rebecca.”

  “Did he? Drake?”

  From the front seat, Drake activated a video screen that flipped down from the car’s ceiling. The screen was carrying live coverage of Prince Gregory’s speech at the United Nations. The prince was wearing one of his slightly ill-fitting, navy blue worsted suits, and his hair looked like he’d just fallen out of bed and onto a broken comb. He was working his boyish, neck-scratching, what-am-I-doing-up-here charm. He was being respectful enough to come off as a well-tutored royal and squinty and casual enough to melt teenage hearts. He was addressing the full international membership in support of an eco-sensitive global initiative.

  “… And surely, a commonsense approach to clean energy and green living is something, and perhaps all, that every nation can agree on.”

  He looked up from the teleprompter as if he’d done his duty, pleased his family and his homeland and was ready to veer off-road onto more what-the-hell terrain.

  “And while I personally support the research and development of myriad sources of renewable energy, I can’t say that I find any of them all that terribly interesting. I mean, we’ve got solar, wind, methane, everyone in China patting their heads at the same time to power the Hong Kong skyline — who really cares?”

  Once their earpieces had transmitted a translation, there was an audible, disconcerted buzz from many of the delegates, who were mystified and secretly entertained by the prince’s cavalier attitude.

  “I mean, here I am, yakking off at the United Nations and you’re all thinking, ah, yes, another willfully rumpled, vaguely well-meaning, undoubtedly inbred and brain-damaged royal, young Prince Potato Head. And, of course, you’re correct, but today I do have something genuinely important and of true global impact on my tiny, regal, genetically hopeless mini mind. Because against the strongest of odds, I have done something unspeakable. I have done something which many of you, in all of your equally nonsensical native tongues, may also be guilty of. I have done something I feel required to confess, for the simple reason that I’m on television and that is what one does. Because ladies and gentlemen of the world, I have fallen in love.”

  Oh my God, I thought, he’s going to do it, he’s going to propose to Lady Jessalyn on live TV. And while I knew I should be happy for Prince Gregory and even for Lady Jessalyn, all I could think about was how much I hated anyone who’d ever been in love.

  “Turn this shit off,” I said.

  “Never,” said Tom Kelly. “Just keep watching.”

  “I can’t,” I said, and I opened the car door and stepped out into the stalled gridlock of Times Square traffic.

  “Becky!” said Tom from his window. “You have to see this! Trust me!”

  “Trust you?”

  “I’m your father!”

  I couldn’t even begin to respond to what Tom had just said and besides, I was distracted by the enormous crowd that was now pin-drop silent, overflowing Times Square and staring up at the same huge LED screen that I’d been watching a few months ago, when I’d seen Rebecca’s face obliterated by a fiery red question mark. The screen was now broadcasting the prince’s proposal.

  “And there’s a bizarre dimension to my announcement,” the prince was saying, “especially for those of you with vivid tabloid memories. Because I have fallen in love with the most marvelous person and her name is …”

  I tried to run but the crowd had grown so jam-packed that I couldn’t move to escape this ultimate moment of worldwide humiliation.

  “Oh, I’ll just blurt it right out,” said Prince Greg
ory. “Her name is Becky Randle. And yes, I know that sounds just like the woman who, as a very few of you might dimly recall, left me high and dry and sobbing at the altar. But this is a very different Becky Randle. A Becky Randle who has a far firmer grasp on both reality and my heart. And clearly, I am willing to risk a second, fully webcast, interplanetary disgrace. I may very well become the hero of a bleak comic fairy tale, entitled ‘The Idiot Prince Who Kept Getting Dumped.’ I am risking the manufacture of inflatable, full-sized rubber clowns, printed with my face and designed to be punched again and again, yet always returning to a moronically eager, upright position. Because right now, here at the center of this supremely august and dignified assembly, I would like to ask the following question….”

  I was craning my neck to catch every inch of the prince’s face and every single word, as I battled all urges toward hope and wonder and jumping up and down and screaming.

  “Becky Randle,” said the prince, looking directly into the camera with an expression that managed to combine abject hopelessness and desperate belief. “Will you marry me?”

  As the prince bowed and left the podium, all of the delegates began laughing, then applauding and then cheering, and this response was amplified by all of the people filling Times Square, with the addition of celebratory car horns, hooting office workers hanging from skyscraper windows and the especially victorious shrieking of single women, fueling a mass roar, which when measured later in the day, topped the decibels recorded on the previous New Year’s Eve. As thousands of newscasters from all over the world began dissecting the timing, content and sincerity of the prince’s proposal, I was clawing through the mob to try and reach Tom Kelly’s limo. But even though the traffic was still a parking lot, the limo had vanished or managed a crosstown escape, or maybe flown off.

  As the crowd hubbubed over the prince’s speech and questioned his mental state, more than one person demanded to know, “Who the fuck is Becky Randle?” But within seconds everyone was back to sightseeing and nibbling giant pretzels and hunting for miniature souvenir license plates from their home states as I was shunted off to a side street, where I was backed into a corner between a parking garage and a large, family-style restaurant specializing in tube steak and cheesecake.

  I knew that I should be over the moon about the prince’s proposal but instead I felt worse than I had at any point since I’d left Westminster Abbey. How can I marry Prince Gregory, I asked myself, I’m just some nothing, some distant runner-up, some impossible fluke from Missouri. What if I can’t handle becoming a royal? Gregory had put all his faith in me and what if I let him down? What if I messed up everything all over again?

  I began walking purposefully toward the Port Authority Bus Terminal and an appropriate and welcome oblivion. As I waited for the light to change at an intersection, I was standing beside the plate-glass windows of an electronics outlet, the kind of store which, on its opening day, ten years earlier, had posted banners proclaiming, GOING OUT OF BUSINESS!!!, EVERYTHING MUST GO!!! and NO REASONABLE OFFER REFUSED!!! The windows were stacked with flat screens and the very latest must-have phones and tablets, with every monitor tuned to a highly rated, late-afternoon women’s talk show, which was too popular to ever be preempted, even by a surprise royal marriage proposal. The hostess of the show was a big-bosomed, universally revered, epically relatable woman, and one of my mother’s greatest addictions.

  The most forceful aspect of this show was the lighting, which was so blindingly generous that it made every guest appear lovingly unlined and rested, which was why at first I didn’t recognize that the hostess was deep into a searchingly heartfelt one-on-one with Jate Mallow. The flattering glare made Jate look like a twelve-year-old, as if the show was a rerun from the heyday of Jackie + Jate. As the hostess tilted sympathetically forward, Jate was telling her about the moment when he’d first known he was gay.

  “I was, like, five years old,” Jate was saying. “And I remember reading a Spider-Man comic and thinking, whoa, Spider-Man is in really good shape.”

  “Did you think that Spider-Man was gay?” asked the hostess supportively.

  “I hoped so,” Jate replied. “But then, and I just have to say it, I dumped him for Aquaman, maybe because Aquaman was more naked. I guess in a way, I wanted Spider-Man and Aquaman to fight it out over me.”

  “I love it!” exclaimed the hostess as the studio audience applauded, which they tended to do every time a guest paused. “But, Jate,” the hostess continued, “aren’t you worried, now that you’ve told the world you’re gay, that audiences won’t accept you as a leading man? That you won’t get to make any more of those terrific Renn Hightower movies?”

  “Well, I’ll admit it, at first I was scared out of my mind,” Jate confessed as the camera cut to an Idaho homemaker and her mother in the studio audience, nodding ruefully, as if they were also major male movie stars coming out on national television. “But then I met this amazing girl at my hotel,” said Jate. “I think she was a chambermaid or a waitress or something. And she was a fan.”

  Jate was getting choked up, so the hostess took his hand.

  “And I told her that I’d been trapped in a lie and that I felt like I was two different people. And she said that she totally understood.”

  “Wow,” said the hostess, “that must’ve been some smart chambermaid.”

  “She was,” Jate agreed, “because she convinced me that just maybe, if I was honest about everything, that people might understand.”

  The women in the studio audience were now passing around boxes of Kleenex.

  “Because you know what?” Jate continued. “Everything I have — the movies and the worship and the houses and the cars, none of it means anything.”

  There was a pause, as the camera located an audience member, a plump, sweet-faced dog groomer from Milwaukee, looking puzzled by Jate’s last remark.

  “Unless I also have the right to fall in love!”

  The audience was silent. Had Jate crossed a line? Everyone looked to the hostess for guidance.

  “God bless America!” crowed the hostess, who was very big on affirmations and lightbulb moments and happy endings. She opened her arms as if she were the worldwide audience for Renn Hightower films, and she gave Jate a mighty, record-breaking-box-office hug as the Idaho homemaker yelled, “We love you, Jate!” and another woman, not to be outdone, yanked her husband to his feet and called out, “Take him, Jate!”

  I turned away from the set and the store window and against all of my knee-jerk, hard-earned caution, I thought, if Prince Gregory, who was probably the most publicly jilted man in recorded history, can propose to me after charting the half-life of radioactive waste at the UN, and if Jate Mallow can risk something even more important than his life, by which I meant his career, if they could both manage to be so fearless in the face of being condemned by world leaders and by the eleven-year-olds who might post seriously cutting remarks on their Facebook pages, then maybe I’d better step up to the plate.

  I thought about my parents, as a couple, about my mom and Tom Kelly, and how they’d come through for me. Like so many moms and dads, they’d wanted what was best for their kid and they’d been relentless in helping me to find happiness. Only unlike other moms and dads, they’d managed to provide their most heartfelt and powerful support after they were dead. If I had known that much love, love that had defied, well, just about everything, then maybe I was worthy, or at least prepared, to become a princess and maybe someday, no, I couldn’t even think about someday. Because I still had to give Prince Gregory my answer.

  “There you are!” yelled Rocher, snapping me out of my Times Square reverie. “I’ve been looking all over! What the fuck are you doing, just standing there? Prince Gregory asked you a question! Go find him!”

  Once I got to the Royal Criterion, Mr. Taldecott was behind the counter and not pleased, telling me, “Ms. Randle, I am sorely disappointed with you on several counts. First of all, you were asked to provide a guest w
ith a carafe of ice water and you did not. Secondly, I fear that you have wasted your many months of training and you may in fact never become a deputy concierge. And finally, and this defies all understanding, why are you standing here when His Royal Highness is expecting you?” Mr. Taldecott burst recklessly into his version of orgiastic plea sure, which involved the almost microscopic upward curl of the very farthest corners of his lips as he murmured, “As you are no longer on duty, you may run.”

  As I bolted from the elevator out onto the twentieth floor, there were bodyguards holding open the door to the Royal Suite. I cannonballed inside to find Prince Gregory standing in the grand parlor before a full-length oil portrait of his grandmother, stone-faced in her coronation robes, crown and scepter. I skidded to a halt a few feet away, as if I were a cartoon coyote kicking up a whirlwind of red clay and dust.

  “Why?” I asked, or really, demanded. “Why did you ask me to marry you?”

  “Because I love you.”

  “Do you love me, or Rebecca?”

  “You.”

  “Good answer. But what would you do if Rebecca came back, right this second? Would you beg her to stay?”

  “Yes. And then once we had reached the altar, I’d abandon her and leave her a voice mail of me laughing maniacally, to teach her a lesson.”

  “Very nice. So if I say yes, then we’ll really get married and everything?”

  “Yes. But only if you stop asking ridiculous questions and if you promise to stop changing into other people.”

  “Deal. But I just have one more ridiculous question. Why do you love me and not Rebecca?”

  “Because Rebecca was perfect in every way. Which made her just the skimpiest bit inhuman. I know that unthinkably beautiful people are now a protected species, and so I really shouldn’t say this, but Rebecca was too beautiful. It was daunting. She was astounding, but she didn’t need anything, or anyone. There were no raw edges. But what she had, and I told her this when I proposed, was mystery. I knew that there was something else, or as things turned out, someone else, lurking beneath that flawless exterior. And after you and I spoke at that horrid little apartment, something clicked. Something became clear. Because as I thought about it I realized — you’re Rebecca’s soul.”