Pretty Is

by Mitchell, Maggie

  * * *

  Brad comes to pick me up the night of the party. I invite him in for a pre-party drink, an absolutely necessary preliminary for departmental social gatherings. He comes in, removes his jacket, and drapes it across the back of my plum-colored sofa. He accepts my offer of a gin and tonic and then looks around, clearly disconcerted. “Looks like you’ve had your nose to the grindstone,” he remarks, and I detect an odd note of caution in his voice. “Grading? Some new research project?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ah … the clutter? Disarray? I’ve never seen so much as a decorative pillow out of place here. I always feel like I should take my shoes off and be careful not to touch anything. But this is—a slightly different aesthetic.”

  I glance around my apartment, my eyes registering all of the familiar shapes and colors, the imperfections in the woodwork, the soft lamplight. For a moment I don’t even know what he means. Then, for a flash—not more—I see the room as he sees it: stacks of papers, books facedown on the floor, mugs here and there with tea bag strings drooping from their mouths, a sweatshirt on one chair. Crooked paintings. Dust. General untidiness.

  “I’ve been busy.” Since when is it acceptable to walk into someone’s house and criticize her housekeeping? I imagine my mother’s disapproval. (My mother, whom I haven’t called in—how long?) “I’ve been working on all sorts of things,” I say. “If you must know.” My moment of clarity has passed; the apartment looks fine to me again. “How do I look? You haven’t complimented me yet.” I’m wearing a new dress, courtesy of my visit to the mall, and heels, which elevate me to Brad’s shoulder. I’ve made an effort, in other words.

  Brad stands back and surveys me mock-critically. “Stunning,” he pronounces. “Except … just a second. Stand still.” With an index finger he gently brushes the skin beneath one eye, then smudges it a little harder. I can feel his breath on my face. Finally I can’t help taking a step backward. “What?” I hear the sharpness in my voice.

  He shows me the blackened tip of his finger. “Just a little mascara,” he explains apologetically. “You’re good now.”

  I go into the bathroom to make sure, and touch up my face while I’m at it. “Let’s get going,” I call, dabbing my nose with powder, wondering if it’s a trick of the light or if my face really does look sharper than usual, almost gaunt. Surely not. “The sooner we get there, the sooner we can leave.”

  “You have such a positive attitude,” Brad grumbles. “It’s what I love about you, of course.”

  We down our half-drunk drinks and go.

  * * *

  Although Brad’s tone has been gently mocking, his eyes are worried; I resolve to behave so impeccably at the party that he will stop looking at me that way. Fortified with cocktails, I work the periphery of the gathering, holding intense conversations about the relevance of eighteenth-century literature to present-day undergraduates, the danger of regarding students as consumers and education as a product like any other, the evils of the Greek system, and the delights of camping in the Catskills (which I have not done and have no intention of doing). I converse animatedly with Will Duncan, the fiery chair of the department, a Miltonist; Allan Pearson, a hippie throwback who so worships Melville that he talks of little else; Jonathan Meredith, our lone African American prof, who is so wary of being regarded as a token hire that he will talk about absolutely anything but race, politics, or black writers; and Ellen Van Alstyne, a doddering romanticist and the first woman to be tenured at this institution. I drift out to the back patio (the house is a suburban monstrosity belonging to the chair), where the smokers have congregated. I don’t smoke, but I gulp the cool spring night air and try to relax a little.

  And that’s when Kate sidles up to me. I love the word sidles, but you don’t often see it in action. She sidles up alongside me and exclaims with surprise that she hasn’t seen me for the longest time, that she’s so sorry she hasn’t had a chance to congratulate me on my book contract. This is ridiculous, since her office is down the hall from mine and we teach on the same days, but I respond pleasantly anyway. This is what it must be like to be Chloe: managing people so gracefully, moving effortlessly from one sparkling conversation to the next, distributing dazzling smiles like candy … but what is Kate saying? “I’m so pleased that you’ve resolved your difficulties with Sean McDougal,” she remarks. “I saw you two downtown, deep in conversation. At first I couldn’t believe it, but then I realized that you must have taken my comment about his needing extra help quite seriously, which is wonderful. In fact, I want to ask if you’d be willing to speak at one of our lunchtime faculty colloquia. I thought you might do an interesting presentation on the ‘difficult’ student. You could talk a little, for instance, about strategies for adapting your pedagogy to a particular student’s needs—in this case, being willing to take it off campus … I really think it would be a fascinating discussion. And of course as a new faculty member it would be a smart move for you. We do value research here, of course, so we’re all very pleased about—what is it, Abduction in the British Novel?—but at a school like this we’re even more interested in things like innovative teaching methods, so you could see this as an opportunity to demonstrate that you’re not so wrapped up in your research that you have no time for your students, which of course is a perception you really want to avoid.”

  She could almost have been sincere. An objective listener might have thought that she really was glad to have a chance to chat with me, that she was offering a few generous pointers to a junior colleague whose success she genuinely desired. I hear a dog bark in the distance. I notice the cigarette smell in the air. A burst of laughter tinkles from the house.

  Then she delivers the final blow. “Of course, there’s another angle you might consider, too,” she continues, brushing an errant lock of brown hair back with a thin hand heavy with silver rings. “You could look at it as preempting potential criticism that might result from meeting with a student off campus, and a male student at that. This would be your chance to, you know, seize control of the discussion, to offer a constructive reading of the situation before a less constructive one gains any sort of ground. Which of course I’m sure you’d do a great job of.”

  If she says of course one more time—that insidiously coercive phrase—I might actually hit her. My ability to sparkle has well and truly deserted me. “What a fabulous idea,” I mutter. “Of course I can’t possibly do it before the beginning of the fall semester, since this one’s practically over, which detracts somewhat from its value as a preemptive strategy. But sure, put me on the schedule. I’d love to do it.”

  “Oh good. And as for preemption—well, better late than never,” she smiles, and I storm into the house, heading for the bar. Bitch: bouillabaisse, bacchanal, bulbil, bibelot. Wine. Weigela, welkin, wittol. Stop. I sip my wine and try to reel in my word-spinning mind. I try to look perfectly at ease even though I am standing alone in a room full of chattering pairs and groups. I glance around for Brad and don’t see him.

  But then there he is, suddenly beside me, looking concerned, divining somehow that I am not all right. “I need to get out of here,” I whisper, and within minutes we’re gone.

  * * *

  I recover swiftly enough. I don’t care what Kate thinks, really; I imagine she was exaggerating my danger. But the sheer dislike in her sharp eyes unnerved me. “She’s just jealous,” Brad soothes me in the car, reminding me of my mother. He offers to come up, but I refuse. “I just need to sleep,” I tell him. Instead I layer sweaters over my pretty dress and text Sean: “It’s time to wrap this up. I am willing to meet with you once more.” Then I settle myself at the computer with Gary, whose mind seems particularly dark tonight. Even the screen looks a little off. Somehow my font size has shrunk, and my margins have narrowed slightly. Odd. I adjust the settings and try to concentrate.

  Gary appears almost immediately; I don’t have to coax him onto the page. What Gary wants these days is answers, and the
actress doesn’t have any. She is in the trunk of his car. If she had answers, she would have given them up by now. She has actually been quite pleasant, considering. Gary finds this confusing because another thing he thinks he might want is revenge. He is feeling that possibility out, testing what it might be like to inflict suffering on the girls his father preferred to him, the girls his father died for. He wonders what kind of gratification that might offer. He is growing less certain, not more. Soon he will have both of them—both girls. He thinks of them as girls, just as he thinks of himself as something less than an adult, though he is old enough to drink, and they are nearly thirty.

  Chloe

  My progress north is not impressive. A long line of RVs crawls up the 101, stopping at every scenic vista, losing speed on the way up hills, and braking, for no apparent reason, on the way down. There’s no point in getting impatient, so I just chug along, flipping through stations on the radio, even stopping at a few “vistas” myself. I love the big weird rocks that jut out of the water on the West Coast. They make so little sense. Even if you try to think of some far-out geological explanation involving glaciers or volcanoes or meteorites, it’s impossible to imagine how they got there. At one of the stops, I’m watching the waves smash against the rocks—and half keeping an eye on the crazy bastards in wet suits down below, who seem to be trying to find waves worth surfing on—when the woman beside me in head-to-toe turquoise pipes up.

  “You wouldn’t catch me out there, that’s for sure,” she says, waving her bangled wrist toward the ocean as if to include the whole damned thing. Just for a second I picture her surfing among the rocks, turquoise tracksuit and all.

  “Me neither,” I say agreeably. “Where are you headed?” I don’t know why I feel compelled to make polite conversation; it’s not my usual thing. I can’t be that lonely.

  “Our daughter lives up the coast,” she says. “In Oregon.” She pronounces Oregon the way East Coast people do: Or-e-gahn. “You know, dear, you really remind me of someone. I just can’t put my finger on it…” She’s racking her brain. I prepare to admit graciously to whatever she’s about to figure out. Maybe she and her husband (currently walking a tiny dog) watch a lot of action movies. It’s nice to be recognized every now and then, to tell you the truth. It’s not exactly swarms of paparazzi wanting to know what I eat for breakfast, but still.

  “I know!” she says finally. “You look like that girl from the shampoo commercial! Just like her, only your hair’s a little different, but … Clyde! I’ll ask Clyde if he thinks you look like anybody. He’ll be so tickled. What is it, anyway—the one with the wild animals—Savage something—Clyde!”

  It doesn’t occur to her that I could actually be the girl from the shampoo commercial.

  Back in my little silver-blue Prius, creeping up the coast, I sing along with an old Stevie Nicks song, belting out the words with gusto. But what I really want to do is tell someone the story of how I was mistaken by a crazy lady in a turquoise jogging suit for someone who looks like the person I, in fact, really am. And weirdly enough, the person I want to tell is Lois.

  * * *

  I stop in Arcata to get gas, and although there’s plenty of daytime left I decide to stay here for the night. It looks like a pretty town. I’m practically faint with hunger and want to find something decent to eat. I also have a craving for company of some kind—even a crowd of strangers. I need to hear the sound of people laughing and talking, even fighting.

  He liked us to be quiet. Zed. Not a problem for Lois, who was one of those watchful, not-talking girls. It was easy for her to drift around for hours without saying a word. But quiet made me nervous. Makes me nervous—I play music, I turn on the TV in hotel rooms even if I don’t want to watch it. I like traffic, footsteps overhead, dogs barking. In the cabin I would hum some stupid song when I washed the dishes, tap my foot while I was reading, click my pen if I was writing or drawing. I drove him crazy. I would ask him questions just to hear the vibration of my own voice and then his. Lois would make lip-zipping signals behind his back, twisting her face crazily at me. Or neck-chopping signals. Either way, it meant shut the hell up before you get us killed. But I couldn’t take the silence. His silence, the silence of the cabin, the trees.

  Although I’m not exactly in the woods, my solitary trip up the coast is starting to feel very—well—solitary. So I drive straight to the heart of the so-called historic downtown and check into a nice little hotel, nice enough that I’ll be willing to let the carpeting come into contact with my bare feet and the pillows won’t feel like cheap flotation devices. I’ll deal with the credit cards later.

  Gail used to make a big performance of being a very discriminating customer. When we arrived at a hotel for a pageant, the first thing she’d do was go over the room with her sharp, greedy eyes, looking for something to complain about. Usually she’d find it. If she didn’t, she’d make something up. Then she’d call the front desk and complain that the heat vent was too close to the bed or the room had a weird smell or there was a hair in the tub or something, and she’d try to make them give us a better room or comp us something or at least do some serious groveling. This made her feel extremely classy, like a woman of the world who knew what was what and what she had a right to expect. In reality she just sounded like an asshole and embarrassed the hell out of me. Thanks to her influence I will put up with almost any inconvenience rather than complain—in hotels, restaurants, whatever. (She’s also very big on sending her food back at restaurants, although that’s harder for her because she’s such a greedy bitch, and always hungry. If there’s bread to fill up on beforehand, though, you can count on it: back her food will go.)

  She must have convinced Daddy that she was a totally different kind of person from the Gail I saw when we traveled together. In her own way I guess she’s an actress, too.

  But there is nothing in my Arcata room to complain about. Why am I thinking of Gail?

  It’s the letter, of course. The one in the glove compartment.

  * * *

  I stick it in my handbag when I head out an hour or so later. I’m wearing a short cranberry-colored sundress that makes me feel happy and light, and flats that will let me walk anywhere I like for as long as I like. I’m pretty sure Mandy the small-town policewoman would never wear this dress, but I try to reserve a little space for her in my head anyway: a little place where she can peek out, scanning these unfamiliar streets and people with the eye of a cop, specifically a detective. Here’s a weird mental trick, one I’ve gotten good at: it’s possible to be two people at once. I can be Chloe, having a perfectly good time, enjoying this strange freedom and thinking about what I’m going to order to drink when I find myself a bar that strikes my fancy, and also Mandy, who looks at everybody with suspicion—wondering what they’ve done, what their story is, what’s really going on. Trusting no one.

  * * *

  A couple of hours later, Mandy definitely doesn’t trust the guy I agree to have dinner with, even when we’re sitting cozily in a tiny farm-to-table restaurant with a nice bottle of wine, surrounded by totally normal-looking people.

  But I don’t think Mandy approves of me at the moment, either. It wasn’t exactly an accident that I got myself sort of respectably picked up, after all. I know women who would never go to a bar alone, who hate to eat alone, would rather starve. They feel conspicuous or vulnerable or bored or unloved or just embarrassed. I’ve never minded, because I figured out pretty early on that I could control the impression I made, which in turn controls how people respond to me. If you want, you can close off your face and put on a look that says “don’t fuck with me if you value your life,” though you have to take it down a little notch for bartenders and waitresses and such. And then you can just eat or drink in peace. At the other extreme you can easily convey the message that you’re hoping for company. Keep an empty chair next to you, look around, meet people’s eyes, smile if they look back.

  Or you can do what I did tonight. The
happy medium. I sat at a little outdoor bar, sipped my wine, chatted with the bartender but kept my barstool ever so slightly angled toward the rest of the patio so I could keep an eye on people. When Mr. Not-tweedy-but-close got up from the table where he was sitting with what looked like a bunch of college students and moved toward the bar as the rest of them prepared to go, I sent him the most casual of friendly smiles, almost as though we knew each other from somewhere and needed no introduction. “Students?” I asked, glancing toward the now-empty table, and he agreed that they were. “Creative writing workshop,” he said a little sheepishly. “Every now and then I like to hold it off campus. They’re all seniors, so it’s legal. More or less.” Another writer, I thought, almost discouraged. But he was really quite handsome, with a nice lean build, interesting grayish eyes, a smile that managed to be both disarmingly intelligent and boyishly charming. We fell into an easy conversation—food, movies, the kinds of things normal people must talk about on dates—and now here we are, at a restaurant, eating steaks and heirloom tomatoes and artichokes and having a fine time, even though I never went to college and he apparently doesn’t watch the kinds of movies I have tended to be in.

  I mock him for this, only half in earnest. “So you watch serious movies, then, right? Films with a capital F? Not people running around shooting each other.”

  He laughs, thank God. “You make me sound like such an ass. This is a trick question, isn’t it? You know, I like a lot of older films, too. Screwball comedies. Those films were so brilliantly written. I’m sorry, but there’s just nothing like that today.”

  “So tell me what you write,” I say finally, half afraid that it will be all downhill from here. “Have you written a screenplay? Why don’t you write a screwball comedy?”