Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  “Strong women, that’s his thing,” Oscar said. “No more of this I’m-a-fucked-up-junkie stuff.”

  “Should I bring my gun?” I kidded.

  “You should praise Allah for this reprieve and give the man what he wants,” Oscar said. “Do you hear me, Charlotte? Are you listening very carefully to Oscar?”

  “I am.”

  “Make. This. Work.”

  I hung up and went straight to the mirror to prepare my aching, indeterminate face for its big day. I massaged it gently, imagining I could feel the sharp little screws under my skin. I swabbed it with vitamin E oil, then stood back and took in the rest of me. Height: 5′10″, weight: +/—125, measurements: 35″-25″-36″. Hair: short (always), thin and straight, but redeemed somewhat by a natural dark brown luster. Eyes: green. Facial features: delicate, somewhat pixieish, the sort of features that register, at first glance, as young. Neck: long. Breasts: unremarkable—not especially large—but compared with the breasts of women my age who’d had children (my sister’s, for example) still relatively lively. Waist: narrow and fluid, with a corresponding propensity to accrete weight on the ass and hips. Hands: long-fingered, prone to redness. Legs: straight, a little gaunt in the calves, in recent years a bit veiny (too much tennis as a child?). Feet: pretty once, increasingly dry and callused with the years.

  What these qualities meant, how they conjoined to form a human being who looked and moved a certain way, I had no idea. As a teenager, I first became aware of people’s eyes catching on me as I walked down Michigan Avenue with my mother and Grace during shopping trips to Chicago. They glanced, then looked—each time, I felt a prick of sensation within me. I knew how transistors worked; my father had shown me a picture of the very first one, at Bell Labs, a crusty, inauspicious-looking rock that had performed the revolutionary feat of transmitting and amplifying electrical current. The jabs of interest I provoked in strangers struck me as an unharnessed energy source; somehow, I would convert them into power.

  As children, Grace and I liked to pretend our life was a movie projected onto a giant screen before an audience who watched, rapt, as we ate our pork chops and finished our homework and went to sleep side by side in our twin beds, Grace rising to shut the closet door if I left it open. Gradually, mysteriously, that fantasy evolved into a vocation—I came to imagine my future not in terms of anything I might do or accomplish, but the notoriety that would follow. During my college years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I would venture into Chicago and gaze up at the glass towers lit into the night. Somewhere among those shimmering panes lay the mirrored room, a place I had never seen and knew little about—the famous people who lived there were not the sort you saw, or could talk to. To the extent that I had an academic bent, it was poetry, of all things, Pope and Keats in particular, who between them seemed to encompass the entire spectrum of sensuality and cynicism available to humankind. I managed to memorize half of “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and would mutter stanzas to myself when I was bored, alone, or at aerobics class. But the pleasure I took in my poets was sharpened by a piquant air of doom; they would never deliver me to the mirrored room, those two—one gnomish and unsightly, the other racked by fits of coughing, both dead—and so I knew I would eventually spurn them for some less worthy partner.

  I was discovered on a Sunday between my sophomore and junior years, a summer I spent in Chicago with two sorority sisters, Sasha and Vicky, all of us working as paralegals for Vicky’s Uncle Dan. We were blinkered on dope, sacked out in Lincoln Park wolfing down marshmallow treats when a woman approached, looking frighteningly businesslike. “Can I talk to you girls a minute?” she asked, to which Vicky, prelaw and paranoid, pinched out our joint with her bare fingers and dropped it down the front of her dress.

  “Uh … sure,” we said, all retarded movements and red goggle eyes; I’d forgotten the Visine.

  The woman turned to me. “I work for a modeling agency,” she said. “Is that something you’ve thought about?”

  “A little,” I said.

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  Vicky, truthmonger, legalist, peered at me cartoonishly—my twentieth birthday was two weeks away. But to my good fortune, the still smoldering joint chose that moment to announce itself inside the waistband of her dress, and she yelped, swatting at her midriff. Sasha yanked her away.

  “Just eighteen?” the woman asked. “Or closer to nineteen?”

  “Um … almost eighteen?”

  I was a natural.

  The woman gave me her business card, and I rejoined Sasha and Vicky, who were piled on the dry, rubbery grass in weepy hysterics over the charred hole in Vicky’s sundress. We tottered to the Farm in the Zoo and watched a patient cow get milked by a machine attached to her udders before an audience of gasping children. White milk shot through translucent plastic tubes. I’ve been discovered! I kept thinking. Someone had recognized me, singled me out. I saw nothing strange in the fact that being discovered, rather than discovering something myself, should prove the decisive event of my life. Being discovered felt like a discovery.

  Can there be anyone left on earth who remains ignorant of the details of a fledgling model’s career? Interview agency. Test shots. Absences from college for jobs. Photographers. “You’ve got it!” Cocaine in tiny spoons, in amber vials. Expensive dinners no one touched. The world in which I found myself afforded an unbroken vista of pure triviality, but it had a lazy, naughty appeal, the allure of skipping dinner and eating a gallon of ice cream instead, of losing a whole weekend prone before the TV set. I enjoyed the inconsequence of this new life even as I scorned it for being nothing; I enjoyed it because it was nothing. Chin down. Stop scrunching your hands. Don’t stare, relax your eyes. Stop talking. It’s harder to see you when your face is moving.

  Being observed felt like an action, the central action—the only one worth taking. Anything else I might attempt seemed passive, futile by comparison.

  Trivial, yes. But I was aiming for the mirrored room. There was nothing more essential in the world; nothing that failed, when placed beside it, to disappear completely.

  I dropped out of college six months before graduation.

  The weather was milder the next morning, the morning of my job for Italian Vogue, so I put my ski mask to rest and hailed a taxi outside my building.

  Broome Street in the bald early light looked broken and gray, like old plumbing. Every gate was down. I trudged and skittered onto Crosby, where the studio was, nearly losing my footing in piles of snow already soused with grime, avoiding the miniature ice rinks that had formed across caved-in portions of the sidewalk.

  An industrial elevator released me into an abundance of yellowy light that caught me by surprise, as if I had stepped outdoors, rather than inside. A loft: white floor, white walls, rows of windows along two sides. Dance music thumped softly; on a zinc countertop lay a spread of muffins and orange juice and coffee. I felt a small detonation near my heart. I was back at work.

  Spiro greeted me as I poured my coffee. He was a man assembled of elbows, tendons and jaw, with heavy-lidded eyes that leaned a little from their sockets. “Charlotte, oh, my goodness,” he said, kissing the air on both sides of my face as if we were old friends. “You look totally different, how intense! Who did your surgery?”

  I told him, emphasizing Dr. Fabermann’s contribution, and he narrowed his eyes with great interest. “Don’t you think it would be so amazing for girls to get regular surgeries on their faces so they’d always look different?” he asked. “Like once a year, at least. I mean this changing the hair color every five months is so tired. Blond, black, blond, red—like oh, you’re such a chameleon! I’m really into tissue, you know, the real human being.”

  “I’m not sure I would’ve done it voluntarily,” I said. “But I’m learning to live with it.”

  “Change hurts, isn’t that right?” Spiro said. “Tissue is where you feel pain, not in your hair, not in your nails, no
t in your eyelashes. That stuff is so easy.”

  “This is true,” I said, although he sounded slightly mad.

  “So look, Ellis is doing makeup. Do you know Ellis?” I did not know Ellis. “He’s just finishing Daphne, then he’ll do you. And the clothes are a riot, take a look.” He gestured at a rack fat with velvet dresses, purple, green, red, gold, all with steep necklines and white ruffled collars.

  “Very sixties,” I said, but Spiro was already halfway up a ladder, conferring with his assistants about lights.

  In the middle of the room sat a giant hollow cube of white plastic. I went to look at it, carrying my coffee, and I noticed a young Asian girl sitting crosslegged in one corner of the loft, smoking into a foil ashtray. She looked too small to be a model—the stylist, maybe? As she smoked, she stared straight ahead as if entranced. Not the stylist, I thought; she was too inert. No one else seemed to notice her.

  A door opened onto a roof deck, and I stepped outside into the cold and peered down at lower Manhattan shuddering slowly to life. Yellow cabs, white sky; a whooping succession of car alarms that seemed incited by the very act of listening. What was this feeling inside me? I wondered. Peace of mind, but without the drunkenness. Peace of mind, but with something added; energy, maybe. I thought it might be happiness.

  The door opened and Lily Cabron, an old hairstylist friend of mine, came outside. “Oh, Charlotte,” she said in her slight accent, and hugged me tightly. “You poor baby! You look great, though. Did it fuck up your hair?”

  “It did,” I said. “They say it’s the anesthesia.”

  “Trauma upsets the hair,” she said. “Hair wants everything the same. No changes ever.”

  “Like people,” I said.

  I hadn’t worked with Lily in ages; I no longer got the kinds of jobs Lily worked on. And because she was married nowadays, with children, I no longer saw her at night. “How are the girls?” I asked.

  “Big,” she said. “Loud. Hungry. They’re eating me alive. You’d be surprised, Charlotte,” she added, “how very wonderful it is.”

  “I would be surprised,” I said, and laughed.

  Back inside, the music seemed louder, a nascent excitement already rousing the room. The Asian girl was still slouched on the floor, gazing at nothing. “Who is that?” I asked Lily, as we headed toward the makeup room.

  “She’s new,” Lily said. “I think she … was in the newspaper or something. From Korea?”

  Where had I heard about this? Somewhere recently; I groped the white empty corridors of my immediate past, and then I remembered: Oscar’s North Korean girl. The one who wouldn’t eat the orange.

  “Wow,” I said, and turned to look at her again; the girl was so oblivious that outright gaping seemed permissible. “So she’s part of this shoot?”

  “She’s the backup.”

  “Backup what?”

  “Model. You know, in case someone’s not comfortable.”

  “Oh, is it nude?” I asked, surprised that Oscar wouldn’t have mentioned this.

  “Nude? No no!” Lily said, distracted by the rack of dresses. “Did you see? Here’s my favorite.” She pulled one off the rack and held it to her neck, a waterfall of crushed yellow velvet. “My girls would go ape-shit for this stuff.”

  In the makeup room I met Ellis, a buff Australian with a deep tan, fragile blue eyes and a beaten looking face. His long, dirty-blond hair was pulled back in a beaded leather thong. He’d just finished Daphne, a new girl whose face I’d been seeing everywhere: white-blond hair and a rotten, downturned mouth. I sat in the makeup chair, feeling a thrum of pleasure at each familiar detail: the hot bulbs around the mirror, smells of hairspray and powder and hair dryer exhaust. The big slovenly makeup box.

  To my alarm, Ellis began swabbing off my base. “Do you have to do that?” I asked. Since the accident, no human outside the medical profession had seen me without it.

  “Spiro wants to use this real hypoallergenic one,” he said.

  “Believe me,” I said, “mine is hypoallergenic.” But Ellis continued to work, pinching the dainty cotton pads between fingers that looked organic, like roots.

  When my base was gone, Ellis drew himself back and looked at me. “Something happened to you,” he said.

  “I had a little accident.” I was forcing myself to hold still.

  He took my face in his hands, moving his eyes over it as if he were reading. His palms were warm, almost hot, and the feel of them on my skin had an instantly calming effect, like the touch of a magician. “Little?”

  “Well, medium-sized.”

  “Brave girl.” He let me go and began applying the other base, a lighter one, nudging it over my skin with a fresh latex sponge. “This covers really well,” he said, I thought to reassure me. His touch felt so warm. It was hard to believe this was work.

  In the adjoining room, Lily had spiraled Daphne’s hair around scores of the tiniest curlers I had ever seen, and was blowing them dry. The girl’s exposed ears were covered with crimson powder. “Freaky ears,” I said to Ellis.

  “Spiro’s a freak,” Ellis said.

  “Hey, Charlotte,” Lily called through the doorway, over the dryer. “After your article comes out, will you possibly write a book?”

  Ah, yes. The article. “I don’t even read books,” I said.

  “Who cares? An interesting thing happened to you.”

  “You’d think it would be interesting,” I said, “but it’s actually pretty boring.”

  “But you know—to look different all of a sudden, overnight,” she said. “Everyone imagines that.”

  “Do they?” I flicked my eyes at Ellis, hoping he would proffer an opinion, but he was absorbed in his work on my face.

  “Close,” he said, and shadowed my eyes.

  “You can tell us what it’s like,” Lily said. “What happens next.”

  “But if what happens next is that I write a book, won’t I be writing a book about writing a book?”

  Ellis was pinning up my hair. “Ears,” he said, dipping a giant soft white brush into a tub of scarlet powder. “Don’t get ticklish.”

  “I have this friend you should talk to,” Lily said. “She’s with a big firm. She knows exactly how all those things work, getting published, getting in the news.”

  “Sure.” I was barely listening. Ellis was brushing the red powder onto my ears, an experience I found almost unbearably sensual. I shut my eyes and let the dance beat judder through me. I imagined Ellis kissing my mouth, a long deep kiss, his warm tongue. Then leaning forward, unzipping his black jeans. Blood rushed to my face and made it ache.

  I sensed a commotion of nervous energy, and knew that Spiro was near. When I opened my eyes, he was examining Daphne’s hair in the next room. Lily had removed the tiny rollers and now was spraying the resulting bubble bath of curls into a sharply defined mass that hugged the top of Daphne’s head like a bonnet. “You did it!” Spiro breathed ecstatically. “Lily, you’re a totally gifted supergenius, do you know that?”

  Lily smiled. “Yes I know that.”

  Spiro nudged Daphne’s curls. “Spray them really shiny,” he instructed. “It should be exactly like marble, only it’s hair. Look what a supergenius Lily is,” he called through the doorway to Ellis and me.

  “What’s the story with that hair?” I asked.

  “Flavian,” Spiro said. “From ancient Rome.” He was throwing off nervous energy like heat. “Wherever they have those Roman busts, like in museums?” he said. “You’ll always see a few girls with this Flavian hair. I was in Naples last summer, and I went to the big archaeological museum there, and I looked at all that Flavian hair and I screamed! I mean it, I screamed out loud. I screamed, OH, MY GOD. OH, MY FUCKING GOD!!”

  “The Catholics must have liked that very much,” said Lily.

  “Then? In this gallery on Madison Avenue? I found one of these busts, and I bought it. Didn’t I, Lily?”

  “Yes you did,” Lily said.

  “I showe
d it to Lily so she’d know exactly what I wanted. She told me something I didn’t even know: she told me the Romans used drills to drill into the marble to make the middle part of each curl. I mean, obviously not electric drills, but … God, I wish I could show you,” he said to no one in particular. “Shit, why didn’t I bring that bust? Richard!” he called to an assistant. “Can we messenger for a Roman bust, or is it too risky?” He left the room to consult with Richard, but was back a moment later, plucking the Camel from Daphne’s mouth. He took a long hit and replaced it. “The vibe in here is getting good,” he said, dancing a little, popping smoke rings at the mirror. “Richard, can you turn up the sound? What about you folks? Stai contenta, Charlotte?”

  “I’m happy,” I said, moving to the music as much as possible while holding my face still for Ellis. And I was; happiness leaned against me from inside. I reached for my purse, took out two Merits and offered one to Ellis, who lit them both with a malachite lighter. Then he stood back and gazed at my face, smoking meditatively. I glanced at myself in the mirror, a stranger in beautiful makeup, and felt a twisting excitement I would forever associate with my first years back in New York after Paris, years during which an exquisite tension had gathered around me and begun to tighten, slowly lifting me up. When Oscar commenced to negotiate a three-year contract on my behalf with a major American designer, the tension reached its apogee, and I enjoyed the epistardom accorded those whom everyone believes will soon be stars. I was beloved. The air smelled like money. So close did I feel to the mirrored room that I experienced an anticipatory nostalgia for the sweet, small life I would soon cast off; its every detail felt precious. And much as I longed, now, to take credit for the failure of that tension to coalesce into something coherent, longed to be able to say, It was my fault, I blew it all with one massive and outrageous fuckup, vomiting on a designer’s head, gamboling naked onto the runway—those horrors one dreams of half longingly, half in terror—I could never find a connection between any behavior of mine and the result, or lack thereof. The designer in question pulled out at the last minute and signed another girl whose grinning physiognomy was now a fixture on the wall calendar—exercise video circuit, and from that point on, my momentum began to ease, or drift. A subtle change at first, a calm that was almost welcome after the maelstrom that had surrounded me. But the spreading quiet soon assumed a creepy, menacing note—where had everyone gone? Like someone in an elevator whose cable has snapped, I began wildly pushing buttons, sounding alarms, but nothing could halt the sensation of rapid, involuntary descent. “Who took you to St. Barts?” I hollered at Oscar when he called to report my cancellation by a photographer whose support was mandatory for any model aspiring to the highest tier of success. “Who bought you a Claude Montana jacket with zebra-skin lapels?”