Gorgeous

by Rudnick, Paul

  “I’m her soul?”

  “Yes. You’re everything that wasn’t perfect. You’re the part that’s angry and funny and unsure. The part which I might not worship but which I can understand. The part which can’t be photographed. The part that needs me. No, you’re not Rebecca, thank God.”

  He smiled with delight, as if he’d finally solved a puzzle so that his life could make sense. “You’re Becky.”

  When he said that, I gasped. I wanted to kiss him, but we’d both been through an awful lot and I needed to be absolutely sure about just what was going on.

  “Wait,” I said. “So you’re saying that you proposed to me because I’m a mess and I’m a person and because we need each other, while Rebecca was — something else? I get it, I follow you, but I’m also thinking, is the bullshit getting a little deep in here?”

  “Yes, it is. You’ve caught me. And so fine, I will come clean, and I will tell you the absolutely true and naked reason why I want to marry you and only you, and not Rebecca.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when I’m with you, I’m the pretty one.”

  I walked over, reached out to take Prince Gregory in my arms and instead I punched him really hard in the stomach. Punching a prince was deeply satisfying because almost no one ever gets to do it. Then, once he’d stopped moaning and stood upright, I kissed him for a very long time, while his grandmother watched approvingly. Like those Ideal Females at the British Museum, the portrait seemed to have changed its expression, as if beneath her sumptuous robes the Queen had slipped into comfortable shoes or maybe bare feet, and she was sighing with satisfaction.

  Later that night, just before Gregory and I made love, I was apprehensive.

  “I’ve never done this before,” I told the prince as I joined him, naked, on what he loved calling his king-sized bed.

  “When you say that do you mean that you’ve never made love, or that you’ve never made love to such an inspiring, well-endowed, impossibly sensuous prince and humanitarian?”

  “Oh, no, I’ve had sex with your brother.”

  “Did I deserve that? Really?”

  “I’m scared. I’m from Missouri.”

  “So you’re scared because we’re not related? No, I’m sorry! Don’t hit me again! I take it back!”

  Before either of us could say anything else, I kissed him, and after that everything went well, really well, for the following reasons: I loved Gregory, and that included his body and his surprising shyness and the fact that he was really hot for me. I may even have been his fantasy commoner. But beyond all that I was ecstatic because thanks to Rocher’s advice, Rebecca had never had sex with Gregory. There was no way I could’ve lived up to that. No one could. The idea of following Rebecca, particularly in bed, was so overwhelming that I got stupid and afterward, as Gregory and I were lying in each other’s arms, I asked, “So do you wish that had happened with Rebecca?”

  “Oh, yes,” said the prince. “Of course. Absolutely. Don’t you? I mean, do you remember what she looked like? Who she was? Wouldn’t you rather have had sex with Rebecca than with me?”

  “Okay, we both know that I have to punch you again. You have three seconds to pick a body part. One …”

  The prince leaped out of bed, and I laughed as I swore silently that I’d never ask a question like that again, not just because no one could ever compete with Rebecca but because comparing myself to myself would only give me an existential headache.

  “You know,” said Prince Gregory, climbing back into bed and reaching for me, “this really is a full-service hotel.”

  The next morning I went back to the apartment to pack my things for my return to England and to analyze everything with Rocher. “So now you know who your dad was,” she said. “But I guess, if you’d known sooner it would’ve made a big difference. Especially since you probably would’ve gotten a humongous discount on everything.”

  “Roche, I know that you’ve been through a lot, but will you come with me? To London? To help me with everything?”

  “I would love to but I’m still out on bail. I can’t go anywhere. I mean, you’re gonna be a princess and I’m gonna be in jail for selling bogus earmuffs to nurses from Wisconsin.”

  “But I asked Gregory if we could use his lawyers. I mean, they got his brother off after he got caught selling weed to the Vienna Boys Choir, so I bet they can help you. And he said sure.”

  “Oh my God. I love rich people. And royalty are the best because they’re rich people who can’t be fired. But, Beck?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I have to tell you something, because it’s been eating me up, and because I’m a terrible person. But I just have to say it and just sort of get it out there, so you can hate me.”

  “Roche?”

  “Okay, I know that, before, I loved being around Rebecca, because she made me feel special, like she was my permanent guest pass to the best party ever, and because I knew that when I died, people would say, ‘Rocher must’ve been pretty amazing, because she was Rebecca Randle’s best friend.’ And when you were Rebecca and the prince fell in love with you, I just thought, perfect. Duh. I mean, who wouldn’t fall in love with Rebecca?”

  “And now?”

  “And now — I’m glad that she’s gone.”

  “You are?”

  “Because now that the prince is in love with you, I mean, with normal, regular Becky you, with the you I grew up with, it’s just better. Because now I sort of feel like maybe, someone could fall in love with me.”

  That was when Aimee and Suzanne returned from their latest class. They took one look at me and howled, “WE HATE YOU!!!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t plan for any of this to happen and I’ll keep paying our half of the rent until you can find someone.”

  “I can’t believe that Prince Gregory is marrying you,” said Aimee, staring at me in total disbelief. “And no offense, but are you pregnant?”

  “No …”

  “Was there, like, a raffle or something?” asked Suzanne. “I mean, we like you and everything, you’re fine, but Prince Gregory?”

  “Okay, here’s what I think happened,” announced Aimee. “I think that the prince was still totally heartsick over Rebecca Randle, it was like the tipping point of his life and he’s never gonna really recover. So he decided that to protect himself and to make sure that his heart would never get broken like that ever again, he decided to marry someone who was the total opposite of Rebecca in every way.”

  “Okay …,” I said.

  “No offense. He just wanted someone who was, you know, simple. And good-hearted. And so he was staying at the Royal Criterion and he saw you behind the desk and he said, that’s it. That’s her. That’s the safest choice in the world. I’m gonna marry that little assistant concierge mouse.”

  “Aimee?” said Rocher.

  “That wonderful little assistant concierge mouse! And when he asked you to marry him, how could you possibly refuse? Even though you barely knew him. And, in a way, that makes the whole thing even more romantic. It’s like, if it was a movie it would be called The Prince and …”

  “The Prince and the Peon?” suggested Suzanne.

  “No, it would be called The Prince and That,” Aimee said, pointing to me. “Am I right? Is that how it happened? I mean, I’m really good at this, at figuring out psychological motivations. So is that how it happened?”

  I knew I couldn’t tell Aimee and Suzanne anything even approaching the truth and because it would give both of the girls hope, and satisfaction, I smiled and said, “Yes. That’s exactly right. Are you psychic? You’re incredible.”

  “Good save,” said Rocher after Aimee and Suzanne had bustled into their bedroom, trying to decide which of them should play me in the revised cable movie. “I mean, maybe you should do it,” Aimee informed Suzanne. “Because if it’s Becky it’s really more of a character part.”

  “But I just thought of something,” said Rocher. “What about
the third dress? The last one?”

  I’d already shoved most of my T-shirts and jeans into my backpack, and just as Rocher asked her question I was prying open the door to the one narrow closet that Rocher and I had been allowed to use. The door had been repainted so many times that it stuck and Aimee and Suzanne had filled the lower regions of the closet with cartons of clippings from their high school drama club productions, their old tap shoes and a stash of self-help paperbacks with titles like Listening to Your Stomach, Sing Yourself Thin and Stop Chafing Today!

  I’d left my down-filled vest hanging on the closet’s crossbar but it had been replaced by a silvery-gray garment bag printed, across a wide diagonal band, with the shadowy Tom Kelly logo. I unzipped the bag to find the simplest black dress, a cap-sleeved shift in a weightless blend of finely spun silk and wool. At the bottom of the bag, from Anselmo, there was a pair of classic pumps in the most supple black leather, along with a single strand of rare black pearls, from Madame Ponelle.

  “Put it all on,” urged Rocher.

  It was the sort of dress that looked like nothing on the hanger but once I was wearing it, I felt the wicked embrace of couture. My body sighed, as if it had come home after months in scratchy, shapeless acetate and denim. For a second I panicked, and I checked the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door to see if Rebecca had returned, but there was only Becky, wearing a dress that would cost half a year’s paychecks.

  “What do I look like?” I asked Rocher.

  “You look like you,” Rocher decided. “Only I guess, more grown-up. It’s like there’s always something creepy about anyone our age wearing a black dress, unless they’re being like a goth or Vampira, for Halloween or whatever. A dress like that just looks too fancy or too serious or something. But I don’t know, it looks right. It doesn’t look like you stole it or borrowed it or like you’re wearing your mom’s clothes. It looks like it’s your dress. Like you’ve earned the right to wear it.”

  In a pocket hidden within a seam, Archie had left a tiny perfume bottle shaped like a black crystal lily and labeled TOM KELLY’S FAREWELL. As I opened the bottle and inhaled, I was confused, because there was no scent at all.

  “But what do you think it means?” I asked Rocher.

  “Ask Tom Kelly.”

  Wearing the dress, I took a cab over to Tom Kelly’s compound. I could’ve taken the subway but I told myself that a Tom Kelly original demanded a taxi. I had the driver leave me on the highway beside the first barrier of chain-link fence, which was now coated with rust; chunks of the fence were missing, or bulging, or sliced and corroded and gaping inward, as if someone had stomped on them.

  I found the entry where the gates had always parted for Drake’s limo but now the security cameras were dangling and disabled. By turning sideways I slipped through the gap where the gates had once meshed and headed out onto the pier.

  The outer walls of the block-long warehouse had once been artfully and expensively weathered but now they were dilapidated, with jagged holes where the metal had worn thin and layer upon layer of story-high, looping, spray-painted graffiti. I wondered if all of this extremely realistic decay was an art piece Tom had commissioned, but that didn’t feel right because Tom hated age and grit.

  “Hello?” I called out. “Drake? Lila?”

  There was no response, so I circled the building until I came to an opening at least eight yards wide. A corrugated iron panel was lying on the ground nearby. Stepping over some crumbling cinder blocks and a pile of empty, crushed beer cans and the shards of broken wine jugs, I made my way inside the building itself.

  Tom Kelly’s compound was gone. It hadn’t been changed, or re-thought, or downsized — it wasn’t there. In the few days since I’d last come by to borrow the cash for Rocher’s bail, the pavilion had vanished, or moved on. There were no layers of glass, no ghostly lobby, no core of workrooms and guest quarters, no undying black-and-white garden, and no evidence of Tom’s lavish, arctic greeting zone with its soaring glass fireplace. The warehouse’s interior was echoing and empty and looked as if it had been that way for many years. There were a few halfhearted clumps of the white gravel that had once been so meticulously raked and furrowed, but otherwise there were only cracked concrete slabs, tufts of valiant, scraggly weeds and a small orchard of those hardy urban trees that take root in any abandoned building, nurtured by puddles of gasoline and gusts of bus exhaust. The debris was illuminated by shafts of grayish-white sunlight streaming from the gaps in the building’s rotted roof, and a pigeon squawked and flew out.

  “There’s been nothing here, for almost twenty years,” said a voice, and Brant Coffield, Tom Kelly’s business partner, stepped out of the gloom and stood a few feet away in a camel-colored cashmere topcoat, with the raw light glinting off his highly polished wing-tip shoes.

  “After Tom died, I thought about keeping everything just the way it was, as a sort of memorial,” said Brant, “or a museum. But I knew that people would get suspicious. And Tom and I had made a deal: He’d wanted everyone to believe that he was still alive, that he’d live forever. So I let people think that Tom was always out of the country or at his house in New Mexico. I said that he was tired of this place. Bored to tears.”

  “Did they believe you?”

  “Of course. Pretty soon I didn’t even have to start the rumors, they’d just spring up, from all over the world. People would claim that they’d seen Tom meditating at some mountaintop ashram in Nepal or scuba diving with a hot Australian lifeguard along the Great Barrier Reef or sketching outside a tent pitched on a glacier in Greenland. As long as he never showed up, people would believe anything.”

  “And you knew my mother?”

  “Yes. She was so beautiful, just heart-stopping, but she had something else. She was the only person, male or female, who could make Tom, not relax, or even behave himself, but she could make him, I suppose the only word is — happy. She delighted him. He once told me, ‘This girl, she knows exactly who I am, she knows that I’m the most cunningly constructed pile of horseshit known to man. And she loves me anyway. And I still can’t figure out what’s wrong with her.’”

  “What happened to everyone else? What about Lila?”

  “Lila needed Tom more than anyone. So when he died, she couldn’t function. Your mother tried so hard to comfort her, but two weeks later Lila killed herself. Pills. She left a note, it was mostly just random words and cross-outs, but there was one complete sentence: ‘I don’t know what to wear.’”

  “Jesus …”

  “Your mother found the body. And she left the next day. I didn’t blame her. All of those deaths, Tom, and Alicia, and then Lila. And your mother was still so young.”

  “And Drake?”

  “Drake was lucky. Tom had left him money and a beach house. So Drake lived to a ripe old age. He died a few weeks ago. Natural causes.”

  “But how did all of this happen? What allowed it? Or who? I mean, do you think it was God?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t think we’ll find out, until we get there, to wherever, although I’m sure that wherever Tom ended up, things are very exclusive.”

  “Of course. He’d never go to heaven, unless there was a VIP room.”

  “But I do have a theory. I think I know who might be behind everything. Someone like God or Allah or Buddha, one of that crowd.”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Chen.”

  I smiled. Maybe he was right. Mrs. Chen had been aloof but very good at her job, and she’d been the only person Tom had listened to. Maybe Mrs. Chen had designed Tom himself and Rebecca and the rest of us. Maybe only Mrs. Chen had the necessary skills to create not just some extraordinary dresses, but so many far less chic human beings, for a far-ranging Fall collection. Or maybe, like Lila and my mom and me, Mrs. Chen had worked for Tom, and the larger answers lay elsewhere. But I did know this: If my red dress had embodied, as Tom had told me, the sometimes violent, occasionally cinematic and always vivid spectacle
of life itself, and if my white wedding gown had called for truth, especially in matters of the heart, then my black dress was definitely this season’s uniform for an elegant lesson in loss and grief and acceptance.

  When my mom died I’d been heartsick, but even more, I’d felt angry and frustrated. I hadn’t understood why she’d hated doctors, and why she’d found refuge in sour-cream-and-chives-flavored corn chips and orange soda and old TV shows, but most of all, I’d felt that my mom had let herself die and that she hadn’t even put up a fight. But now I was even more amazed — at how long she’d held on, and at her cheerfulness, and at her belief in the ultimate goodness of the universe. I almost loved her more now that I knew the details of her own breakneck joyride outside East Trawley. For such a reluctant person, she’d dared so much, and just like me, she’d fallen in love with someone she never would’ve met in the canned goods aisle of the Super Shop-A-Lot.

  “But what about you?” I asked Brant. “Why did you keep Tom’s secret, for all of those years?”

  “A deal’s a deal. And Tom was right, his plan was good for business. But when I saw him that day, oh my God. I had missed him so very much. I’d even missed fighting with him.”

  “And when you saw Rebecca?”

  “I saw your mother.”

  “But just now, how did you recognize me? I mean, come on — things have changed.”

  “You’re right. Rebecca was quite something. She was pure Tom Kelly, showing off. But while Rebecca was extraordinary, I mean, simply staggering …”

  “I remember.”

  “You’re not bad yourself. You look just like your parents. I’d have known you anywhere. And they’d be so proud of you.”