Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  “Well well well,” Oscar said, glancing at me. “Well well.”

  “Well?”

  “Better than I expected.”

  “Thanks,” I said dryly. “Different, though.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Did you recognize me?”

  Oscar snorted. His business, after all, was the business of sight, of recognizing what he’d never seen before. “Through the window,” he said haughtily.

  At this news, I relaxed. “Different how?”

  His eyes moved over me in the appraising survey peculiar to my line of work, when someone takes in your face, your bones, your eyes, and calculates their worth. You hold very still for that look. “Uneven,” he said, “for one thing.”

  “Oscar, you have to tell me. I need to know.”

  “Oh, Oscar will, darling,” he said. “Just give him time.”

  Oscar had been my booker since I first came to New York at twenty-one, claiming to be nineteen, with a few Marshall Field’s ads in my book. He’d masterminded my rise to almost-almost-stardom, then partnered me through my slow minuet down a gauntlet of catalogue jobs whose end, mercifully, I still had not reached. I’d known him fourteen years in all, during which I’d allowed myself to age at approximately two-year intervals, so that now, at thirty-five, I was allegedly twenty-eight. And as my career trajectory had flattened and begun to sink, Oscar’s had risen steadily, and I’d followed him from agency to agency until now, at Femme, he booked mostly stars. But he’d never been a shit to me. We’d known each other too long.

  I ordered escargot, and Oscar filled me in on rumors of drug addiction, plastic surgery and egregious behavior among “huge girls,” as top models are admiringly known by their colleagues. Girl-girl affairs were the new fad, he told me; models shacking up together over the violent objections of their rich, powerful and occasionally gun-toting boyfriends.

  “Have you ever done that?” Oscar asked. “Been with a girl?”

  “Never,” I said.

  “Nor I,” he said, and laughed.

  My escargot arrived, and I let one slide down my throat, luxuriating in the taste of garlic. After the accident, my sense of taste had been dulled; then, in the past few weeks, flavors had begun rocketing across my palette.

  “Business is good?” I asked.

  “Strange,” he said. “This mania for real people is becoming a full-fledged pain in the ass.”

  “You mean powerful women in pantyhose, that kind of thing?”

  “That was unpleasant enough,” Oscar said. “Now it’s people in the news. You haven’t heard?”

  “Oscar,” I said. “I’ve been in the Midwest.”

  A few months ago, he told me, a booker at Elite had spotted a beautiful, starving Hutu refugee in Time. Somehow, through Doctors Without Borders, this booker managed to track the refugee down and fly her and her eight children to New York, where “Hutu,” as she was known (her name having been deemed unpronounceable) promptly shot covers for Marie Claire and Italian Vogue and garnered an avalanche of publicity for Elite. Not to be outdone, Laura, the CEO of Femme, noticed a beautiful North Korean girl in a story about famine.

  “She says to me, ‘Oscar, get me that girl,’” Oscar said, in a perfect imitation of Laura’s heavy Czech accent. “So I embark on this mad goose chase, coming home from work and ordering dinner for my Korean translator, Victor, so the two of us can start calling North Korea, where it’s already the next day, looking for the girl in the picture. After a week of this we track down her father, and Victor tries to explain that we want to fly the girl in the New York Times picture to New York, her father thinks we’re threatening to kidnap her, he’s begging us, No, please, I have no money … Lord give me strength to go on! Anyhow, she’s living in my guest room as we speak. Five-foot-one.”

  “How weird,” I said.

  “Oscar is in complete accord.”

  “Is she working?”

  “Mademoiselle did something, Allure. We’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, Laura has me chasing these two Ukrainian studs she saw on CNN working on an oil rig that capsized. My fervent hope is that these two can inherit my guest room from Miss Korea. But I’m not sure I’ll have the heart to move her—she sobs in there every night, poor angel. She bought this enormous Sunkist orange that she keeps on the windowsill, and I keep telling her, ‘Eat it, darling. There are hundreds of thousands of these in New York City. Eat the frigging orange, already!’ But she just holds it in her hands and looks at it.”

  “Why don’t you send her home?”

  Oscar shrugged. “She’s desperate for money,” he said. “Her family sells kim chi, for pity’s sake.”

  “But how long can it last, this reality thing?” I said. “I mean, let’s face it: most people just don’t look that great.”

  Oscar shook his head. “It would appear there’s a new layer.”

  “The bullshit layer.”

  “Yet it exists,” Oscar said, with a sigh, “and we must contend with it.”

  The lunchtime crowd at Raw Feed was beginning to thin. Now and then I noticed tourists peeking in from outside, cupping their hands around their eyes and squinting through the glass.

  “What kind of work do you think I’ll be able to get?” I said this nonchalantly.

  Oscar was lighting a cigarette. The waiter, I noted, did not intervene this time. “I’ve been watching you,” he said, “asking myself if it’s possible.”

  “I love it! You’re booking five-foot-one Koreans and you have to ask yourself if you can book me.”

  “Two different matters entirely,” Oscar said mildly. “She’s a fad.”

  “And me?”

  “You’re an old dog,” he said, with affection.

  “I have a crazy idea. Want to hear it?”

  “Always, darling.”

  “Relaunch me,” I said. “Pretend I’m a new girl. Because Oscar, no one recognizes me.”

  This revelation did not appear to shock him, as I’d thought it would. “You’re too old for a new girl,” he said.

  “I don’t have a single line on my face! It’s like I’ve had a facelift—I could be twenty-three.” I was leaning forward, raising my voice, thus violating one of my cardinal rules: never let people see what you want.

  “Twenty-three is too old,” Oscar said, exhaling smoke. “And you don’t look twenty-three, dear, much as Oscar loves you.”

  A wave of exhaustion felled me; if I’d closed my eyes, I think I could have slept. “Will you think about it, please?” I asked, as he paid the bill.

  “Certainly,” he said. “But you should think about your alternatives. As I imagine you were already doing, before your accident.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You’re a reasonable person,” Oscar replied.

  Outside the restaurant, he pulled the lapels of his beautiful coat tight around him. He wasn’t wearing a scarf, and the skin on his neck looked chalky and dry. As his breath appeared in white plumes, the death’s head blinked at me, a tattered ghost escaping from its rictus mouth and melting into the atmosphere. “Where are you headed?” he asked.

  “To the dogs, apparently,” I said.

  I walked Oscar west, in the direction of Femme, along streets that might as well have photographed in black-and-white, so empty were they of color. Car alarms went off in whooping succession, birdcalls in a strange mechanical forest.

  “Have you considered seeing a shrink?” Oscar asked me.

  “Oh, that’s great,” I said, turning to him. “You can’t figure out how to relaunch me, so I should see a shrink.”

  “No.” He sighed heavily. “Because you’re in la-la land.”

  We circled the block where the agency was, yet avoided walking past it. I sensed Oscar’s reluctance to go. “You’ve been through something terrible,” he said. “That’s why people go to shrinks.”

  “Do you? Go to a shrink?”

  Oscar beamed his white smile at me, but the anguished shadow face was rig
ht there, peering out from behind it. “Nothing bad has ever happened to me,” he said. “My life has been one enormous bottle of Karo syrup.”

  “Poor you,” I said, and laughed, my head back, so that suddenly I was looking above the buildings, up at the winter sky. And then I saw the sign. It snagged my gaze and held it, an old advertisement painted on the side of a brick building. Griffin’s Shears, it read. The paint was faded but still legible, a faint chalky blue, and beside the words I made out the silhouette of a pair of scissors. Without realizing it, I had stopped walking. We were on Seventh Avenue at Twenty-second Street.

  “What?” Oscar said.

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know. “Look at that,” I said.

  Oscar looked up and down, then swiveled his head. “What?”

  “That old ad! Griffin’s Shears.”

  Oscar looked at me.

  “It’s like a ghost,” I said.

  We stood there, looking at the ad. I felt moved by it in some way I couldn’t explain. It reminded me of Rockford, of its factories and smokestacks and industry. A glimpse of New York’s shadow face.

  “I have eighty titanium screws inside my head,” I said, still watching the sign.

  “Don’t say such things,” Oscar murmured.

  “The bones were all crushed.”

  Now he turned to me, with surprise, admiration, maybe, and something else: love, I guess. We’d been close for so many years, that confluence of work and social life that makes for a certain kind of friendship. But I knew, as Oscar did, I think, that we wouldn’t go on as we had.

  “If you give up,” he said, “I’ll lose my faith in everything.”

  “I never give up,” I told him.

  I hadn’t brought a man home with me since before the accident, but no sooner had I hugged Oscar good-bye that afternoon than I sensed my months of abstention coming to an end. A knot of desire had formed in my belly, tightening as day went on so that by evening I’d forgotten everything but the need to cut it. I was not like most women. For me, the sexual act had nothing to do with love, or rarely. On the contrary, the less I cared for or even knew a man, the more easily I lost myself in his physical company. I didn’t mind awkwardness—I was good at asking for what I wanted and making sure I got it. I liked not knowing what he would do or want, and I didn’t worry much about my own performance; as I saw it, any man who succeeded at picking me up with so little effort, with no strings attached and without having to pay for it, should consider himself to be having an extremely good day. I’d been a safe-sex practitioner since before the phrase existed, not for health reasons so much as a basic squeamishness at the idea of mingling cells. Embracing, kissing—even the grittier exchanges I had no problem with, but the things I couldn’t see, the molecules and atoms—those should stay apart, I felt. The onslaught of AIDS had made this qualm easier to justify; men had finally stopped bitching about the condoms.

  There are lots of ways to find casual sex, but I had a favorite routine. It began with dining alone at one of several East Side restaurants near my apartment, places frequented by businessmen and diplomats with some connection to the United Nations. I would order a salad and wait for a glass of wine to arrive at my table. Then I’d either wave my thanks, or, if I found the man attractive, make my greeting slightly warmer, so that he knew he was welcome at my table. I kept conversation to a minimum; if I let it go on long, I’d found, the man ceased to be attractive no matter what he looked like.

  Tonight I was relieved to discover that even with my new, indeterminate face, the ritual took no longer than usual to complete. His name was Paul Shepherd. He had a pale blond beard and hair just a shade or two darker, like sand. He worked for the World Bank in Hong Kong but was originally from Minnesota. Despite his courtly, diffident manner, it was obvious he was a regular cheater. So many were. I felt glad to be the treat, rather than the one they slunk home to.

  Inside my apartment, I poured us each a glass of scotch. Paul Shepherd wandered to the living room, stood at the sliding-glass door to the balcony and looked outside at my (I must say) spectacular view. The balconies in my building were staggered, which made for a jumbled exterior but gave the impression, from inside, that you were the only one with a balcony, that there was nothing above you.

  “You’re midwestern,” Paul Shepherd surprised me by saying.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “This apartment, the feel. I don’t know. Am I right?”

  “I’m from Chicago.”

  Like all men in my experience, Paul Shepherd vastly enjoyed being right. “Oh, yeah? What part?”

  “Actually, not Chicago,” I said, to my own surprise. “Rockford, Illinois.”

  “Never been.”

  “It’s hell on earth.”

  His brows rose. “Bad luck, talking that way about your hometown.”

  I laughed. “That may explain the last five months of my life.”

  Paul Shepherd said nothing. We looked at the view, Queensborough Bridge to the north, Long Island City’s broken industrial silhouette to the south. I thought of the few things I’d brought with me when I first drove to New York in my battered green Fiat: my grandfather’s gold watch, packed in a suitcase that was stolen while I stopped at a Denny’s on my way; my grandparents’ letters to each other from the summer my grandmother spent in New York before they married, letters full of wit and play, her confidence in the safety of writing by lamplight at 135th and Riverside. But I’d lost them during one move or another, and now all I remembered was the sepia tone of their ink and my grandmother’s neat, ruled penmanship. I felt a thud of regret. Oh, for God’s sake, I chided myself, how often do you think about your grandparents—once a year? Would you look at those letters if you had them? Weren’t keepsakes just a wee bit quaint in a world where you could travel anywhere in a matter of hours; where you could call Bangladesh from a pay phone on the beach? I’d had a diamond necklace ripped from my throat years before, a present from Hansen, my fiancé. After that, I gave everything I had of value to Grace. Let her keep it, I’d thought—in Rockford, land of small objects, where my valuables would be safe, at least, if not really mine.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Paul Shepherd said, and I jumped. I was lapsing into reveries without knowing it—a form of mental incontinence I associated with spending too much time alone. He was sitting on my couch, and I sat beside him, now, tucking my legs under me. I hadn’t seen his shadow self. Often I found it by asking myself what the person’s opposite would be; what he was working against, compensating for. But so far Paul Shepherd was a nice man with a sandy beard and a wife and several children he hadn’t mentioned. I could always tell. Divorced men spoke up instantly, proclaiming their status. The rotten ones (and I could usually spot these, too) implied or even said they were divorced, but were actually married. I’d occasionally had the urge to track down one of their wives and give her a call, for her own protection. “Your husband doesn’t love you,” I imagined saying. “I suggest you get rid of him.”

  I leaned close to Paul Shepherd. This was always interesting: the moment when the surface first peeled away and what was underneath—desire, perversion, whatever it might be—moved into the light. The truth. I wanted to see it. Everyone was a liar, blah-blahing their way through life, pretending to be good and constant, to have and to hold and all that. Everyone was a politician, wearing a pious face until the last possible moment when the press unearthed a taste for child amputees or a beheaded mistress chained to a radiator. And I’d been pious, too, at first—I’d believed my own act until the pressure of sustaining it became too much. Since then, I’d sought out the opposite: I wanted to be the child amputee or the mistress, to make my domain the dark corners where I could see the things people took such pains to hide from everyone else. I put my hands on Paul Shepherd’s chest and kissed his neck. He groaned and leaned back. We were strangers, with nothing to hide from each other.

  We adjourned to the bedroom. I was in something of a lathe
r, having been deprived for so long of not just sex, but any sort of physical contact. I felt clumsy, irrationally afraid that my face would be damaged. Paul seemed pretty starved himself, and the whole thing was over quickly. We lay there awhile and I thought we might begin again, but he stood up to go, murmuring something about an early meeting.

  And it was only as he rose from the bed, his body illuminated by the colored lights of the city, that I caught the glint of calculation behind his eyes, a cold, blank set to his face. His shadow self, and not a nice one.

  When all else failed, I found it by looking at people when they thought they couldn’t be seen—when they hadn’t arranged themselves for anyone.

  He dressed, used the bathroom, then joined me in the living room, where I sat in my silk kimono, smoking. He leaned down from behind me and put his arms around my neck, and in the bright light he was kindly again. But I’d seen it.

  “I have to go,” he said, retrieving his coat and scarf and briefcase. It was ten forty-five. I was grateful not to be the one heading back out into dark New York. At the door, he handed me his card. “Give me a call if you’re ever in Hong Kong.”