Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  “Coincidence,” he remarked at last.

  “The world is full of them,” I replied. I was regretting the brandy. Or perhaps I should have drunk more of it.

  Mercifully, there was a knock on the door, and the girl in stone-washed jeans pushed it open. “Tony, I’m so sorry,” she said, “but Leland’s here. He just, like, showed up.”

  Halliday looked at the girl, then at me. He seemed briefly immobilized. Then he shut off the recorder, hove a sigh and stood. And as he walked past me from his office, eyes set in the direction of his unheralded guest, I saw it: the enraged shadow. A contortion of anger, like a scream.

  Then I relaxed.

  Halliday must have taken his guest into the hall, because I never saw the mysterious Leland and heard not a word of their interaction. I waited, listening to a pale bleat of sirens from Seventh Avenue, sounds that seemed filtered through the linty gray light that fell through Halliday’s lone window. I grappled with the urge to leave, to breeze past the detective, “Sorry Tony, had to run!” knowing he wouldn’t be able to stop me. But the gesture seemed craven, overdramatic; an admission. Most of all, I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to sit a while with this detective, even if it meant answering questions.

  I would lie, of course. I lied a lot, and with good reason: to protect the truth—safeguard it, like wearing fake gems to keep the real ones from getting stolen, or cheapened by overuse. I guarded what truths I possessed because information was not a thing—it was colorless, odorless, shapeless, and therefore indestructible. There was no way to retrieve or void it, no way to halt its proliferation. Telling someone a secret was like storing plutonium inside a sandwich bag; the information would inevitably outlive the friendship or love or trust in which you’d placed it. And then you would have given it away.

  The detective returned to his office a different man: fretful, preoccupied and possibly afraid, all of which he concealed behind a careless smile. The conversation had been personal, I thought, not business. Who was Le-land? Halliday sat back down and turned on the recorder. “Now,” he said. “Where were we?”

  I told him that Z was a Greek, from Santorini, he’d said. Silver wedding band on his left hand. He was one of those people whose physical description required liberal use of the word “medium”: height, build, hair, tan. The overall effect was of a decent-looking European playboy. His one intriguing feature had been his eyes: wide and dark and watchful but also sardonic, as if everything fascinated him and everything, his own fascination included, was somehow ridiculous.

  I’d noticed him for the first time at Pollen, a restaurant on the Bowery where the mystical collision of fashion and celebrity had erupted briefly the previous spring. And in a matter of weeks, with a sudden ubiquity that was possible only in a world without memory, Z had become a fixture. He had money, the universal calling card, which he began putting into evenings at certain clubs. He gravitated inevitably toward Mitch and Hassam, the promoters, and soon the three of them were partners in something new, bigger than anything New York had seen in years, or so the rumors went.

  “Did you talk to him?” the detective asked.

  “He was not a big talker,” I said.

  “You had no idea what he was doing there.”

  I shrugged. “He was a playboy.”

  “But beyond that.”

  “I don’t mean to shock you,” I said, “but to some men, the pursuit of women is an end in itself.”

  The detective leaned back and smiled. I wondered if the brandy was making me witty, or if this was going to be God’s way of compensating me for the loss of my face.

  “You should talk to Mitch and Hassam,” I told him.

  “They hired me,” he said. “He walked away with a nice chunk of their change.”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty-five. The perfect amount, really—enough to make a difference, but not worth chasing after for too long.”

  “Then why are you chasing him?”

  Instead of answering, Halliday turned to the window. I noticed a silver picture frame aslant among the clutter of his desk. I wished I could see who was in it.

  “Thank you very much,” he said, startling me. I sensed his frustration, as if he’d counted on me for something and I had disappointed him. I was sorry.

  He came around the desk and saw me to the door. Standing, I revised my estimate: six-one, three inches taller than myself. I hesitated, swaying a little (the brandy), while the cold, empty day barked at me from beyond the walls. “That’s it?” I asked, moving slightly closer to him. “There’s nothing else?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I could start making things up.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I save my fiction for bedtime.”

  “Call me then,” I said shamelessly. “I tell excellent stories.”

  “Somehow I knew that.”

  We shook hands. I sensed him waiting for me to go, and yet I lingered, absurdly. Desperation upon desperation, I thought, but was too drunk to care.

  Back on Seventh Avenue, I pulled the mask over my face and decided to let it be a lost day. I wandered north, my head down, but the wind clobbered me and the lower part of the ski mask grew soggy and cold with my condensed breath. At Twenty-eighth Street, I turned east, so the wind was behind me. I raised my head in search of some flag of color, some blink of relief from the gray-brown vista of tottering trucks and greasy brick.

  And then, as if my eyes had suddenly refocused, I spotted an old painted sign like the one I’d seen a week ago, with Oscar—a series of ads directly across Sixth Avenue, stacked one atop the other in a column on the exposed side of a weary building. “FURS & WAISTS,” I made out in giant letters near the top, and at the bottom, “Hollander Ladies Underwear,” with many illegible others in between. It’s a sign, I thought, the wind gulping my laughter. A sign in the form of a sign.

  At the corner of Sixth Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street I stopped and turned slowly around. They were everywhere—signs and the possibility of signs, many faded to translucence, as if I’d gained some new power that allowed me, finally, to see them. “Harris Suspenders Garters Belts.” “Maid-Rite Dress Co.”; mementos of the gritty industrialism I’d come to New York to escape. But today the signs looked honest, legible in a way that the negligéed models I’d seen this morning in Vogue, prone in a parking lot surrounded by broken glass, would never be.

  East, then south in search of more signs (“Harnesses,” I saw. “Stables.”). Finally, shaking spastically from the cold, I peeled the ski mask from my head and ducked inside one of those bars invisible to all but those seeking alcohol at midday, bars whose stools are sparsely occupied by men with hypertrophied noses and timid, watery eyes. My entrance caused a minor stir that subsided the moment I myself claimed a stool and ordered a drink—a brandy. Brandy was the order of the day. A fish tank gurgled in the window, overwhelmed with algae to the point where the presence of fish inside was anyone’s guess.

  Beside the tank was a pay phone. When I’d finished my brandy, I called my voice mail for messages, skipping past Grace (who left one each day to cheer me up), hoping, irrationally, for a call from Anthony Halliday. No such luck. But there was a message from Oscar, left only minutes before. “Call me immediately,” he said. “I have extraordinary news.”

  “Extraordinary,” I said, when he came on the line after a mere five seconds (I counted). “Not a word I’ve been hearing too often these days.”

  “Lady Luck has arrived and we are in her debt,” Oscar informed me.

  Within the last hour, he said, a reporter from the New York Post (a real one this time, though at first he’d thought it was me bluffing again) had called the agency. Like every other publication in America, the Post was doing a feature on models, but with a twist: they wanted a model whose appearance had changed radically in the very recent past.

  “They probably mean a new haircut,” I said, to withering silence. Then I added, meekly, “But I’m sure you already thought of th
at.”

  “Thank you,” Oscar said. “They most assuredly do not mean a haircut; they mean a radical transformation like what’s-her-name in the eighties with the scars. It’s truly uncanny; if you didn’t exist they would have to invent you.”

  It was, indeed, uncanny. And it was a measure of my own desperation, and Oscar’s on my behalf, that we never questioned this uncanniness, nor considered the unlikelihood of such a coincidence actually taking place.

  “But Oscar,” I said. “If we tell people I’ve had this accident and I look completely different, won’t it be harder for me to get work?”

  “No, dear,” Oscar said, almost pityingly. “Because if this article flies, you’ll be a Real Person, a person in the news. From there I can wangle you some TV, maybe a longer feature—a cover, ideally. And that’s your relaunch, sweet. There it is. I have goose bumps, God’s truth.”

  I had goose bumps, too.

  “Now listen,” he said, “call this girl. Meet her as soon as possible—today, if you can. Her name is Irene Maitlock. I’m warning you right now, she sounds a teeny bit drippy—writers usually do. Be nice, Charlotte. Nice nice nice.”

  “Irene,” I drawled. “What a name.”

  “It’s the name of an angel who’s descended from heaven to save your ass,” Oscar replied.

  Irene Maitlock was one of those women I found difficult to look at without imagining how much they would profit by dropping just a few pounds, wearing a less pointy bra, a minimum of makeup, and clothing that had, if not personality, at least some semblance of an identity. Because the raw material was there! She had thick light brown hair that begged for highlights, a decent figure, lovely blue eyes. She also wore a wedding band, and so, I gathered, was not exactly desperate for my help. But I was less troubled by Irene’s physical shortcomings than the annihilating side of my own personality that raged in the presence of women who invited the descriptive “mousy.” Fortunately, I’d had time to stop at Ardville Wines and Spirits on my way home.

  But Irene Maitlock refused my offer of Pouilly Fuissé—five demerits right there—and sat tentatively on my sectional couch. Mousy women felt an instinctive terror in my presence that had the unfortunate consequence of exacerbating their mousiness. Snip snip snip, I thought, watching her. Now you have bangs.

  “So, you’re a journalist,” I said. “What do you write about?”

  “Oh, all kinds of things. Drugs, cops, the Mafia. I’m fascinated by crime. And law enforcement.”

  “Where do I fit in?”

  She smiled nervously. “Well, this story is sort of a departure. To tell you the truth, it was given to me. Not that I’m not interested—”

  “Obviously you’re not.”

  That surprised her. “What do you mean?”

  “Obviously you’re not interested in fashion.”

  She laughed, and I gave her ten points for sportsmanship. “No,” she said, “I’m definitely not interested in fashion. But this story isn’t about fashion. It’s about identity.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m interested in the relationship between interior and exterior,” she said, “how the world’s perceptions of women affect our perceptions of ourselves. A model whose appearance has changed drastically is a perfect vehicle, I think, for examining the relationship among image, perception and identity, because a model’s position as a purely physical object—a media object, if you will”—she’d risen out of her slouch and was sitting up straight, a spot of red on both her cheeks, discharging words in a cannonade—“is in a sense just a more exaggerated version of everyone’s position in a visually based, media-driven culture, and so watching a model renegotiate a drastic change in her image could provide a perfect lens for looking at some of these larger—”

  “Beep!” I said loudly, cutting her off.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That was my boredom meter,” I said, although in truth it was my utter bewilderment, rather than boredom, that had caused her speech to grate on me. “You were nearing a danger point.”

  “Oh.” She looked mortified. “I’m sorry.”

  Now I was sorry, too. Would it have been such a hardship to let her finish? Why should the fact that she’d flouted an opportunity for natural-looking blondness so offend me?

  “So, let’s see …” She was halting, diffident once again. Nice work, I told myself.

  “Well, this is my face,” I said briskly, framing it with my hands. “I’ll take off my makeup if you want to see what it really looks like.”

  “Okay, or we could—”

  “You’re the boss,” I said. “Tell me what you want to do.”

  “I thought I’d start by asking you a few questions.”

  “Oh,” I said, and was overcome by an abject sensation of dread. “Will it take long?”

  “Do you have to be somewhere?”

  “No. I just—I hate talking about myself.”

  “Me, too,” she said, and smiled. “Luckily, I don’t have to.”

  “Let’s be quiet a minute,” I said. “I want to look at you.”

  “At me?” She seemed alarmed. I took a long drag on my cigarette and gazed at her intensely. “What do you see?” she asked.

  “Stop talking, and I’ll tell you.”

  She did, and I looked again, and immediately I saw a light, laughing presence. I saw her leaning against someone, putting her arms around him, kissing his neck.

  “You love your husband,” I said.

  She looked astonished, then relieved. For a moment the laughing presence eclipsed the hesitant drip who’d occupied my couch thus far, and she looked—I never would have thought it possible—she looked beautiful. “Yes,” she said. “Very much.”

  “Okay,” I said, calmer now that I’d seen her shadow self and taken a liking to it. “Fire away.” To prepare myself, I lay flat on my back on the couch, cigarette jutting from my mouth at a right angle. I shut my eyes.

  “Tell me how you came to be a model.”

  “Oh, God,” I said. It seemed so complicated, such a long reach into the past. “Can we come back to that one?”

  “Ah … how large a role would you say your appearance has played in your identity?” She was reading the questions from a notebook.

  “How can I answer that?” I asked. I opened an eye to look at her. “Can you answer that?”

  “Have you ever been married?”

  Ten points for not rising to the bait. “Almost. Once.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Many years.”

  She waited, obviously hoping I would go on. Then she asked, “Do you think your appearance has played a major role in your relationships with men?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “The determining factor has always been my intellect.”

  No reaction. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Me, too,” she said, with surprise. “We’re the same age!”

  More or less.

  “Did becoming a professional model change your feelings about your appearance?”

  “I think so,” I said. “It must have.” I strained to recall, but my memory smirked and refused to budge. It was a lazy creature, that memory of mine, and, since its exertions during my Rockford convalescence, more phlegmatic than ever. “Let’s come back to that one.”

  I heard her sigh, and peeked to find her rubbing her temples. “Have you participated in the fashion-world nightlife here in New York?”

  Trick question, for sure. “Yes …”

  “You’ve gone to nightclubs, that sort of thing?”

  “Yes … ?”

  “And what role do you play? In that nightlife.”

  “There’s only one,” I said. “I’m a girl.”

  “At twenty-eight you’re a girl?”

  Oh, spare me, I thought. “It’s just an expression.”

  “Do you feel like a girl?”

  “I feel like an old dog,” I told her.

  “What kinds of people do you
meet in these nightclubs?”

  “All sorts,” I said. “Literally, every kind you can imagine.” I looked at her again. “What do nightclubs have to do with it?”

  “This almost-marriage you had. Did it begin after you started modeling?”

  “I’d rather not talk about that.”

  “Why do you dislike talking about yourself?”

  At last, a question I could answer. A topic I was itching to address. “I’ll tell you why,” I said, swinging around and planting my feet on the rug so I could look at her directly. “Because everyone is a liar. Including me.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “We lie,” I said. “That’s what we do. You’re selling me a line of bullshit and you want me to sell you a line of bullshit back so you can write a major line of bullshit and be paid for it.” I said this with utmost collegiality.

  “What makes you such a purist?”

  “I’m not!” I cried. “That’s the irony—I’m the biggest liar of them all! But I don’t pretend to be anything else.”

  “What, you tell people you’re lying and then lie to them?”

  I laughed. I was starting to like her better. “I avoid pseudo-earnestness. How did you start modeling? How do you feel about your appearance? Blah blah, here’s my sad story, now get out the violins—I can’t bear it.”

  “In other words, you’re afraid of serious conversation.”

  “Afraid.” I shook my head. “Afraid?”

  “Sounds to me like a pretty standard defense mechanism.”

  “Irene,” I said quietly, and leaned very close to her. “Can you look at me and swear that everything you’ve said is absolutely true, that none of it is bullshit? There’s no agenda hidden underneath, no ulterior motives—everything is exactly the way you’ve described it? Can you swear to that, say, on your husband’s life?”

  She blanched, averting her eyes. There it was: comprehension.

  I lay back down, satisfied. I was ready for the next question, but the reporter was on her feet. “I think I’d better go,” she said, slipping her notepad into her bag.