Текст книги "The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty"

Автор книги: Amanda Filipacchi

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

He pauses, waiting for me to say something, but I can’t. I’m too upset.

“My conscience was getting in the way, you understand?” he says softly.

I nod, unable to speak.

“Because you mean so much to me,” he says.

I quickly nod as tears keep spilling, and I finally manage to say, “Can we continue this another time?”

“Really?” he asks, concerned.

“I’m sorry, I have to lie down now. I don’t feel great.” I start walking out of the living room. “Please let yourself out.”

“Barb, can’t we talk about this a little more?”

“Sure, later,” I call out, going to my bedroom.

But he comes after me. “No, wait, Barb.” He takes my arm before I reach my bedroom door. Touching my gray curls, he says, “I admire the system you’ve devised to ensure that your beauty won’t be the cause of your happiness. And I know I didn’t meet you the right way, but isn’t it better to have met you the wrong way and to love you the right way than the reverse?”

I say nothing.

Not giving up, he says, “I’m sorry I found out about your real appearance. I’m sorry because it robbed me of the opportunity to prove that I could pass through your filtering system.”

After hesitating a long time, I gently say what I know to be the truth: “You wouldn’t have passed. If you had believed I really was fat, gray-haired, and the rest, you never would have become interested in me.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because of my years of experience.”

“If I’d gotten to know you as I have, I would have fallen for you. As I have.”

“You wouldn’t have had the slightest interest in getting to know me in the first place. And even if you had, you wouldn’t have been able to think of me as anything but a friend.”

“My feelings for you now have nothing to do with your looks. In fact, I don’t care if I never see your physical beauty again. You could wear your disguise all the time if you wanted to.”

“I do.”

“Yes, but I mean you could keep wearing it if we were involved. And I mean all the time—even during the most intimate times.”

I can’t help laughing through my tears. “It wouldn’t be very practical.”

“I wouldn’t care.”

I shake my head and quickly enter my bedroom and lock myself in, saying, “Please let yourself out.”

I hear the front door close, and then for a long time I hear nothing but my sobs.

Chapter Sixteen

I’m at home, up late working on costumes for a historical drama. Deeply depressed by Peter’s revelation, I’m doing my best to lose myself in work, which is not going well, when the phone rings. I pick up because this time the caller ID says “Out of Area,” not “Peter Marrick,” as it did three times today already.

I answer Lily’s question with the truth: yes, Peter has now told me his secret. And no, I cannot accept him.

In the silence, I hear her breathing. And in her breathing, I hear her anxiety.

“What’s his secret?” she asks.

I tell her what it is.

“Maybe you just need a little bit of time to think about it, and you’ll come round to accepting it,” she says, full of hope, almost as though she’s arguing her own case.

“You know I can’t, Lily.” I wish I could add something to comfort her. But I can’t, because I feel dead.

After Lily hangs up with me, Strad joins her for their first night of sleeping in the same room.

They make love, snuggle, and Strad drifts off to sleep. But Lily lies awake, weeping silently inside her mask.

Strad wakes up to the sound of her crying. He’s kind and gentle. He says, “Are you sure you don’t want to get it over with now, and just tell me what this big skeleton in your closet is? I hate to see you like this.” He’s hugging her, stroking her hair.

“No, no,” she says. “Not yet.”

She feels suffocated by her mask, so she turns on the music and takes off the mask. Strad has no trouble going back to sleep, but she only briefly dips into slumber. The hours pass and the music is becoming unbearable to her. Unlike the mask, which asphyxiates only her lungs, the music is suffocating every pore of her being. And yet, the thought of its elimination tomorrow—and of the mask’s—is even worse.

She rushes to the bathroom, overcome by a surge of nausea.

When she emerges, pale but no less ravishing, Strad is awake, propped up on one elbow, watching her with concern. He taps the mattress. She sits. He pulls her to him, holds her in his arms. Using much patience and reassurance, he tries to convince her not to tell him the truth about her mask, since it’s clearly making her so miserable; not to worry about anything, and to just accept his marriage proposal.

She finally agrees.

LATER THAT MORNING, they drive around the island with the top down, her hair and her music blowing in the wind. Reclined in the passenger seat, her head relaxed against the headrest, she’s holding the mask firmly on her lap, just in case. It caresses her hands with its soft feathers made alive by the breeze. And she caresses it back, no longer hating it—at least not today, not right now. She’s engaged to Strad and she’s rarely been happier. He was right; not telling him her secret was the correct decision. All she had to do was embrace this state of things.

They stop for a picnic on a deserted beach, settling down in the shade of a cluster of palm trees. Lily positions her travel speakers next to them and puts a heavy rock on her mask to prevent it from flying away.

Strad looks blissful, feasting his eyes on her exquisite face framed by the turquoise ocean behind her.

THEY SPEND ALL afternoon in her hotel room with the music playing. They make love, they laugh, they talk about their future. He then settles himself in the easy chair and takes a couple of old magazines out of his beach bag to browse while he waits for her to get ready to accompany him to the pool.

“I love you. I adore you,” he says to her.

“I love and adore you, too,” she says, smiling at him.

As she rubs sunscreen into her arms and legs, she notices that something in one of the magazines grabs his attention. He places it down on the ottoman and pores over it. Lily sees him scratching the page with his thumbnail, as though he’s trying to get something unstuck. He’s frowning.

“What in the world is this,” he mutters. He picks up the magazine again to look at it more closely, and that’s when she sees its cover.

She freezes. She knows what he’s looking at.

As vividly as the previous moment represented a life of romantic bliss for Lily, this moment embodies its end.

Strad is looking at a picture of his transcendentally beautiful girlfriend, Sondra, in the magazine, and clearly wonders why the picture is in an article about Lily Stanton, his supremely unattractive musician friend, and why even the caption under the photograph so confusingly reads: Lily Stanton at her piano.

It’s not as though she hasn’t known the risk of photos—hasn’t known that photographs of herself get beautified by the music just as effectively as her physical self does, and that when the music stops, her beauty on paper fades just as quickly as it does in the flesh. She knew she could never let Strad have a photo of herself because as soon as he took it home with him, away from the music, it would no longer look like the woman he loves but like his ugly ex-colleague. She has guarded against this risk by hiding all photos of herself and forbidding Strad to snap any new ones, ever. But it hasn’t occurred to her that one day, on his own, he might stumble upon a photo of her in an old magazine, and that this might happen while the music was playing. That day is today. That time is now.

Strad tries one more time to remove what he thinks must surely be a photo of his girlfriend Sondra stuck on top of Lily’s photo, because he saw the original photo on this very page before packing the magazine in his suitcase and it was unmistakably a photo of Lily. “I don’t get it. Am I dreaming?” he asks.

“In a sense, you are,” she answers.

They stare at each other wordlessly for a long while. Finally, he says, “I don’t want this to be a dream.”

“It was the only way possible.”

He slowly turns his gaze to the music player, and she can see in his face that he finally understands. He reaches for it. He’s about to stop the music, but she says, “No, please don’t. Not like this.”

And so he doesn’t. Instead, he gets up and says, “I need to be alone for now.”

“I understand.”

He goes to the door.

“Strad,” she says.

He turns to her.

“Don’t take the magazine.” She knows that if he does, he will gawk at the hideous photo as it emerges in the silence outside her door.

Guessing her fears, he says, “I’ve seen Lily before, you know.”

“I know. But never through the eyes of her lover.”

He places the magazine on the bed and leaves.

AN HOUR LATER, she knocks on Strad’s door. No answer. She calls the front desk, asks if he’s checked out. He hasn’t. She goes looking for him. She finally sees him, alone, in the business center, gazing at a photo of her—as Lily, not Sondra—on the Internet. And while he’s staring at the screen, he’s humming her music. She’s tempted to tell him it’s nearly impossible to activate the illusion by merely humming the melody. But she steps away from the door without saying anything and without having been seen.

She goes back to her room, buys a plane ticket so she can depart the next day for New York, packs, checks out, and takes a taxi to spend the night at a different hotel.

That night, she goes on the pontoon boat to the biobay. She swims in the luminescent water, looking down at the shine of her movements. She floats on her back, sinking her ears under the surface so that people’s shrieks of joy are silenced. Tears run down her temples and disperse in the liquid light as she stares at the black sky. She lifts one arm out of the water and admires the glitter sliding down her skin.

Even after she leaves the bay, she will try to continue bathing in the beauty of existence. She will let the universe embrace her, since no man will.

ON THE PLANE back to New York, Lily tells herself that if Strad e-mails her or leaves her messages, perhaps she won’t return them. Perhaps it’s for the best. Their relationship might have worked out for a while, but now that he knows, how can it?

THERE ARE NO e-mails or messages when she lands. Nor are there any later that evening.

She calls me and we talk about her trip.

Worried about her, I suggest we get together. Lily says she’s tired and will visit me tomorrow evening instead.

WHEN LILY ENTERS my apartment the following evening, I scrutinize her. In addition to her customary ugliness, there are lines of stress on her face, and an expression of resignation that amplifies the overall sorry effect.

The first thing she says to me is, “Strad doesn’t care.”

“What do you mean?”

“He hasn’t called.”

“It’s only been two days. And plus, you left suddenly. Maybe he’s afraid you might not want to talk to him after the way he reacted. Maybe he thinks he has a better chance of explaining himself in person.”

“He’s made no attempt to see me in person either.”

“Maybe he needs time to think about things, figure out what he’ll say, especially if he happens to want to continue the relationship. It’s possible,” I tell her.

“Why are you trying to get my hopes up? You usually do the opposite.”

“It’s for your own good when I do the opposite. To manage your expectations.”

“And you no longer care about my expectations?”

“Yes I do.”

“So why are you doing this?”

I answer by looking past her, into my living room. She follows my gaze, which brings her to the large swivel easy chair with its back to us.

Slowly, it turns.

And Strad is revealed.

In Lily’s ear, I whisper apologetically, “He persuaded me to let him do this.”

I tell them I’m going out for an extended errand. And I leave.

What happens then, I’m told later:

Strad gets up and walks over to Lily. She has an urge to hide her face, but she remains motionless.

Without saying a word, he gently kisses her lips. And then he kisses her more passionately. He envelops her and buries his face in her hair.

“Isn’t this great?” he whispers. “We can go to my place and listen to some of my music, for a change.”

She laughs, crying a little.

He gives her another long kiss and takes her hand and pulls her out of the apartment. They fly out of the building.

AT LEAST THAT’S how Lily describes the scene when she calls me the next morning. She says last night was the happiest of her life. “And to think that just the night before, I was so depressed I almost died.”

I grunt sympathetically until I realize she’s not just using an expression. “You almost died?” I ask.

“Yeah. I was playing at my piano, feeling devastated, and my hands started turning reflective again. Clearly it’s the depression that triggers it. It hadn’t happened in a long time, many weeks. The reflectiveness spread up my arms. I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t have the will. And when it got past my shoulders and started spreading onto my chest, I could feel I was dying. And part of me just wanted to let go, let it take me, and be released from the burden of living. I can’t tell you how difficult it was to muster the will to stop the process. I managed it this time, but barely. If it ever happens again, I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop it. Hopefully, I’ll never be that unhappy again.”

THE NEXT DAY, I’m finally ready to return Peter’s calls. I’m still just as disillusioned by his secret and by the fact that he’s not a valid exception, or if he is, there’s no way to be certain of it now.

But in early afternoon I gather my courage and dial his number.

He picks up. I ask him if we can see each other, to talk.

He comes over an hour later.

We sit at my dining table, nothing to drink before us. Neither of us wants anything.

I begin with, “I can never bypass my rule.”

“I know. You told me,” he says.

“But I miss you. And I was wondering if we could be friends. Just friends. But good friends.”

“It won’t be easy for me.”

“I’m not sure I believe you. And actually, there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

“What?”

“Why did you torture me?”

“When, specifically?”

“All the time. Like when you came over with your piece of red velvet.”

“Yeah.”

“And when you kept canceling or postponing our appointments.”

He nods. After a pause, he says, “It was all very calculated. And very difficult.”

I stare at him.

He says, “You’re sort of right that I was trying to torture you. It was an elaborate ploy to get you to . . .” He seems unable to finish.

“Get me to what?”

He looks embarrassed. “I thought that if I could increase your desire and your frustration you’d be more likely to forgive me for knowing what you really look like, once you found out I knew. It didn’t work, of course.”

We talk for hours. When we get tired, we lie on the couch, one of us at each end of the sectional. We keep talking for most of the night, covering countless topics.

The last thing he says to me before we finally fall asleep on the couch is, “Okay, I guess we can be friends. I’ve missed you. Having you in my life in whatever capacity is better than not having you at all.”

Even though I can’t be his lover, I love him more than ever.

PETER AND I get together frequently. It’s usually my initiative, sometimes his.

It comforts me to be with him. So I keep asking him to come over.

When he points out, pleasantly, the abundance of my invitations, I simply say, “I like to be with you.”

He never turns me down. The few times he can’t make it, he makes a counterinvitation, usually for earlier or later the same day.

I CATCH MYSELF staring at him when I think he’s not looking. But sometimes he catches me. Like the time we were sitting on my couch, watching a movie, and I thought the angle would make it impossible for him to know I was gazing at him, and he said, “Why are you staring at me like that?”

Blushing, all I could say was, “You have good peripheral vision.”

“Yeah. So why are you?”

“Just looking at what a good friend you are.”

His eye twitched.

WE MAKE A point of not getting together on Valentine’s Day to avoid the romance aspect. But we make up for it by seeing each other five evenings in a row after that.

I don’t know what Peter did on Valentine’s Day. I don’t ask. As for me, I stayed home working.

FINALLY, ONE DAY, when I call Peter—as I often do to ask him if he wants to come over and hang out—he tells me, “You don’t understand. It’s very difficult. I am practically delirious. I could get killed crossing the street because I have fantasies and I don’t see the cars.”

“Fantasies?”

“Yes, fantasies!” he barks. “Fantasies of running my fingers through your gray curls until your wig falls off. Of peeling that strangely erotic gelatinous monstrosity off you and enlacing you in my arms. I even have fantasies of not peeling that thing off you and enlacing you in my arms anyway and making love to you with that thing still on.”

To this, all I say is, “Please come over. I miss you.”

“Okay, I’m here,” he says, an hour later, covered in snow and carrying takeout sushi.

We watch a movie chastely on the couch. We eat, and chat for an hour about this and that. He goes home.

AND THEN, I feel it slipping. A sadness sets in. He’s less talkative. More pensive. Our frustrating nonsexual relationship seems to be taking a toll on him, and I get a sense it’s affecting other areas of his life as well. He’s less interested in his job. He skips network meetings. His anchoring of the news is detached and glum. I’m worried. I don’t want to be responsible—even indirectly—for any damage to his career, health or happiness.

Maybe it’s selfish of me to want a friendship from him. Maybe I should let him go.

But I can’t. I tried it, didn’t like it.

A COUPLE OF days later, when I’m in Peter’s neighborhood, I call him to see if he’d like me to stop by and say hello.

He hesitates. “Yes, actually. Why don’t you come over. I’d like to talk to you.”

At Peter’s place, we sit on the couch. He looks at me sadly and says, “The time has come for me to stop seeing you.”

I’m taken off guard. “But, you’re not ‘seeing’ me. We’re not dating. We’re just friends.”

“I know. I gave it my best effort, but friendship with you doesn’t work. Not for me.”

I don’t respond.

“It’s better for us this way,” he says. “My frustration at wanting more from our relationship outweighs the delight of your company. In fact, the more delightful your company is, the more unpleasant it is for me to be in it.”

Even though I’m heartsick, I decide to respect his decision.

As I head back home, I try to persuade myself that he’s right and that it was too hard for me, too. I’m so downtrodden that when I enter my building I hardly hear Adam the doorman telling me I’m a shameless display of genetic deficiency. And he throws in “Vile serpent” for good measure.

I KNOW I should move on with my life, try to forget Peter, but I keep pondering our situation, wishing we could remain in each other’s lives.

And that’s not the only thing I’m tormented by. I’m also saddened by Lily’s relationship with Strad, which hasn’t been going well for quite a while now. Since Vieques, he remained nice enough and adequately loving and affectionate, but there was a faint sadness that hung over him most of the time, that Lily couldn’t help but sense. And he hasn’t mentioned marriage since Vieques.

He sometimes makes insensitive comments, which Lily tries not to take personally because she knows she’s not the only one he’s done this to. She often heard him complain about having to walk on eggshells around various customers, friends, and family members, even way back when she used to work with him in the musical instruments store. When she mentioned this to Georgia, Georgia replied, “Walking on eggshells is what stupid people call the effort required not to offend someone. For smart people, not offending takes no effort.”

Lily knew Strad wasn’t stupid, otherwise she couldn’t have fallen in love with him. But as for his emotional intelligence, it did seem a little higher when she was beautiful.

Lily has gone back to trying to compose a piece that will beautify her permanently. But her heart’s not in it. The prospect of manipulating love through unnatural means doesn’t appeal to her as much as it once did.

Even though she fails to compose that piece, in the process of trying she ends up developing a different and hugely significant musical skill: the ability to beautify—and create a desire for—things even when they’re not there.

Yet Lily is barely interested in her new stunning accomplishment. She’s preoccupied by her relationship with Strad.

Georgia, on the other hand, is very affected by Lily’s achievement. “You dwarf me, Lily,” she tells her. “It’s demoralizing. Every time I get over it, you come up with some new and even greater accomplishment that makes all of my accomplishments seem even punier than before. For example, today I was going to tell you guys that last night I finished writing my novel, but now it hardly seems worth mentioning.”

We explode with congratulations and cheer. We ask her if we can read it. She says not yet, but soon. She says she e-mailed it to her agent this morning and wants to wait and hear her reaction.

GEORGIA DECIDES THAT she will throw a party at my apartment in two weeks to cheer Lily and me up. She says she’s also secretly throwing this party for herself to celebrate the completion of her novel and because she hasn’t had a party in a while and it’s overdue.

Georgia has mixed feelings about the parties she throws, which she always holds in my apartment because of space considerations. She invites lots of people from the literary world, yet she has trouble tolerating them. But she can’t help inviting them. It’s a compulsive need—wanting to be in the loop while loathing the loop.

LILY’S RELATIONSHIP WITH Strad continues to go downhill.

There is one thing, especially, that really bothers her.

One night, before they go to bed, she brings it up. “I see you, sometimes, staring at a photo of me while listening to your iPod.”

He looks uncomfortable, feigns not knowing why she’d point that out.

“I know that on your iPod you have the music that changes my appearance. Is that what you were listening to?”

Doing some quick thinking, he answers, “Yes, actually. I find it exciting that my girlfriend is such a virtuoso.”

“Really? It didn’t seem to do much for you that time we went to the Building of Piano Rooms and I—as Lily—beautified the pen. It didn’t make you interested in me romantically.”

“It did do a lot for me. But we’d been friends for so long . . . I didn’t think of you romantically back then . . .”

“And now?”

“Let me show you.” He kisses her and takes it from there.

She’s touched by his effort to be nice, but it feels forced.

Lying in bed afterward, she wonders if maybe she’s simply spoiled. After all, up to about a month ago she’d been made love to by a man who thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. It makes a difference.

She’s grateful at least that he doesn’t ask her to go back to the way things were: with the mask or the music on always. She’d find it humiliating.

But Lily knows their problems have to be faced. Therefore, she decides she will confront him with the beautiful version of herself one last time. She hopes his reaction, whatever it will be, will help her figure out what should be done about their relationship.

So the next day, she takes Strad to the Building of Piano Rooms, pretending it will be fun to redo that old afternoon that didn’t go the way she’d hoped.

At the front desk, Lily asks for the same room as before. It happens to be available. It’s just as small and bare as she remembers it. Strad sits in the white plastic chair, much closer to her than that first time.

For a few minutes, she plays him various short pieces, nothing special. And then, she launches into the piece that beautifies her—the one so familiar to them both.

She watches his face. She can practically see, reflected in his eyes, the hideous mask that is her external appearance lifting from her face.

His eyes fill with tears. He’s clearly devastated by the sight of the girl he was in love with.

Instead of stopping, Lily continues playing passionately until his tears have been running long enough that he won’t be able to deny them.

When Lily stops, she turns her back to Strad, not wanting him to gape at the gradual return of her ugliness.

“I’m sorry to be crying,” he says. “I don’t know why you had to play that piece.”

“Because we have to face things.”

“What things?”

“The fact that you’re unhappy.”

“I’m not unhappy. And I love you.”

“I don’t think it’s the right kind of love.”

“It’s a deep love.”

She turns around and looks at him. “It’s not a helpless, passionate love. It’s a responsible love.”

“So what? I love you.”

“But not the way you did.”

After a long pause, he finally murmurs, “Maybe not exactly the same way.”

Gently, she says, “And it’s because of how I look.”

He flinches. “The way you look makes no difference.”

“Oh? Because you don’t want it to? Or because it really doesn’t?”

“Because you’re the same person.”

“Not visually. And I know that matters to you a lot. You can’t change your nature.”

After a long while, he replies, barely audibly, “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. I feel I’ve lost the person I was in love with. As though she vanished or died.”

Lily nods, resigned.

Suddenly, Strad seems to backtrack. “But it doesn’t matter because you didn’t vanish. You’re here, the same person. In fact, the beauty I saw and fell in love with was your soul.”

“But you no longer see it.”

“Maybe not with my eyes, but I see it with my heart, with my mind.”

“But it’s not the same, is it? For you, it’s not the same.”

He can’t speak, can’t contradict her. He looks miserable. He lets his head drop, in complete abjectness.

Softly, she adds, “I think it might be best if we stop trying to make our relationship work. We should accept that it’s over.”

Hardly raising his head, he nods.

They leave the piano room—she feeling many times worse than she did upon their first disappointing exit.

When they step out onto the sidewalk, he hugs her. In a choked whisper, he says, “I’m so sorry.”

When he releases her, she smiles at him weakly and walks away.

Strad doesn’t move. He watches her go. From the back, she looks the same as when he loved her.

HEARING ABOUT LILY’S breakup sinks me deeper into the dumps. Having finished reading Georgia’s novel only adds to my sadness, even though I loved the book. It’s a funny yet pessimistic novel about a love triangle—a one-directional triangle of unrequited love. It explores attraction, appeal, and desire. It’s about how even the most obsessive love can be fickle, as illustrated when the direction of the love triangle changes.

The book’s final message is that no one ever really finds true love, because such a thing doesn’t exist, but that people can have happy lives anyway, thanks to good friends.

It’s called Necessary Lunacies.

It left me more hopeless about ever getting over my romantic block regarding Peter, though more hopeful that he might be open to resuming contact with me.

I call Peter and invite him to Georgia’s party tomorrow night, even though I know I’m disregarding his wishes.

He says he doesn’t want to go.

I plead with him gently, tell him I’d like to see him.

“I don’t know,” he says.

I ask him to at least think about it.

But he won’t commit to doing even that.

After hanging up, feeling powerless, I decide to turn my attention to something I’ve been neglecting for too long.

I pick up my therapist’s business card and go down to the lobby.

I hand the card to Adam the doorman and tell him he should see this therapist, that she’s very caring. (I should probably see her again myself, but I’m always too busy.)

He strokes the card thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger and says, “Thank you, but I prefer a softer kind of toilet paper.”

“I just want to help you, Adam.”

“You have helped me, actually, by giving me this card. I know I can stop trying to prove myself wrong.”

“About what?”

He doesn’t answer, but his face looks flushed and his eyes look slightly wild.

I say good night uneasily and go back upstairs.