Look At Me_ A Novel Part 11

"If you watch them when you go to sleep, they'll give you good dreams."

This got his attention. Dreams were a problem-not only did they curdle his nights, but at times left a troubling residue that touched his days. He preferred not to dream at all.

"Maybe you would always have good dreams," he said. "Fish or no fish."

"I'm telling you," she said.

He leaned against the sink, watching her. There was some response between them; he felt it each time she was near. Michael respected the power of chance, of vibrations, all the things one couldn't see. Occasionally, those things were more powerful than all the rest-you either bowed to them, let them in, or their force would break you. But this vibration was nothing like that. This was one of hundreds you sensed between yourself and other people.

Obviously he must send her away yet again. But he delayed. She was reaching into the pocket of her jacket for a cylinder of fish food, explaining at what times and in what quant.i.ties the fish should be fed. Michael didn't listen. Sending her away would not be enough; he'd done that already, twice. This time, he would deliver the message more strongly. He must shake her, but not frighten her deeply enough that she would turn to someone for help. Although he doubted she would. She could absorb it on her own, this girl. He watched her pale face and neck.

"Let's take them where you sleep," she said.

"That isn't necessary."

She picked up the fish with a quiet insistence that angered him and aroused his curiosity. If there was a single impulse Michael West found hardest to curb in himself, it was the desire to know every fact about a situation before he acted-to wait, test his beliefs about human nature and psychology against the bracing force of reality. He had suffered for it-more than once-yet the impulse remained, perhaps had even strengthened over time. So often he knew more than the people around him, sometimes a great deal more, and yet some part of him still longed to have his own predictions confirmed, or, better yet-and this happened rarely-to be surprised. There was something engaging, now, about allowing this young American girl to believe she could trick him.

"Upstairs," he said.

She went first. He followed her into the sound of the TV, and noticed from this vantage point her a.s.s and hips and her smell, a clean smell, like the sea. He felt a first intimation of something overtly physical toward the girl, and it was simply the thought that he would like to smell her again.

"Wait," he said at the top of the stairs. He was picturing his room. "It's not clean. Give me the fish."

"Turn off the light," she said, "and then I won't see."

"You'll fall down, and my lovely new fish will die."

"I can walk in the dark."

He paused, taking his own mental temperature once again. There was plenty of time to get rid of her. But curiosity stopped him, he was unwilling to end the story so soon. Who was this girl? He'd met her before, of course-there was no one in the world he hadn't met before, usually many times. And yet he found her difficult to place. She stood in the half-light, holding her bowl of fish, and a moment later, Michael found himself inside the room, switching off the light. On the window sill stood a little k.u.mquat tree he'd bought, and it filled the room with a citrus smell much sweeter than the taste of k.u.mquats. He snapped off the TV. A terrific hush settled over room and house, a sound of its own. He hadn't pulled the shades, and a bright, hard moon thrust its light between the clouds. "Okay," he said, opening the door. He found that he was nervous-it was eerie, somehow. The girl came in and shut the door behind her.

"Wait-," he said. But apparently, moonlight was enough, because she made her way to the window and set down the fish beside the k.u.mquat tree. Moonlight filled the bowl, and the flowing, dreamy movement of the fish seemed to capture Michael's own state of mind, as if he were swimming among them, as if he himself were the bowl in which they swam. The girl sat on his bed and kicked off her sneakers. Her back was to the window. Except for a slim black silhouette, he couldn't see her.

"Come here," she said.

It was time to stop, to draw the line draw the line, he told himself (a TV phrase), yet it also felt too late. Too late: the story was unfurling like a scroll. "It's time for you to go," he said, his accent strong in a way that startled him.

"Just sit here for a minute."

He sat. And only then did he feel the Walther against his ribs and remember it there. "Wait," he said, standing again, moving to the dresser. He opened a drawer, slipped out the Walther, and put it where it had been, under his socks.

"What are you doing?" she asked, and he heard a guttering of fear in her voice, slight but distinct. She was alone in a stranger's house, a stranger holding a gun, and she'd brought with her nothing but a bowl of fish. Stupid, he thought, desperate, crazy-the words arced through his mind, but he was also thinking, brave. Strange. It moved him. She had placed herself entirely in his hands while pretending not to know it, pretending to think she was in charge. And he had believed her.

And at that moment he decided, or rather, accepted the decision that had been made without his knowing. He would set down this coordinate, though it conformed to no picture he could recognize. In an empty universe, everyone must choose a few coordinates, and Michael West-or Z, as he had been until last August, and before that another name, a series of other names-chose to sit beside this girl.

She was lying down, arms at her sides, staring at the ceiling. He lay beside her, not touching. He breathed her smell. Plums, he thought, plums that grew by the sea. "Is that perfume?" he asked.

"Lotion," she said. "From Florida." She was terrified; he felt the mattress trembling underneath her. She'd been afraid all along, but he hadn't known.

"I love it," he said, and took her hand, which was hot and shook in his, and she rolled on her side to face him and he held her. They held each other very tightly. He felt her strength, the pounding heart inside her small frame, and in that moment he recognized her at last: the innocent. He felt an impulse to protect her, shield her from some proximate and overwhelming danger. But there was only himself.

Chapter Seven.

On the morning after my abortive interview with Irene Maitlock, Oscar called and read me the phone numbers of two psychiatrists. In a show of devastating restraint, he made no mention of the fact that I had hounded a after my abortive interview with Irene Maitlock, Oscar called and read me the phone numbers of two psychiatrists. In a show of devastating restraint, he made no mention of the fact that I had hounded a New York Post New York Post reporter from my home, thus dashing my last, best hope of resuming my former life. "We'll speak again when you've met with one of these excellent doctors," he told me. "Or both." reporter from my home, thus dashing my last, best hope of resuming my former life. "We'll speak again when you've met with one of these excellent doctors," he told me. "Or both."

I had no intention of calling a shrink; in my present, incomeless state, I couldn't have justified seeing a shrink even if I'd thought it would do any good, which I did not. Was a shrink going to succeed where the combined expertise of Doctors Fabermann and Miller had fallen short-namely, in restoring me to my pre-accident state? No. A shrink was going to make me, or "help me," as Oscar so delicately put it, accept my present circ.u.mstances. And I could do that alone-I'd done it all my life. My problem was that I didn't yet know what those circ.u.mstances were, exactly.

I waited twenty-four hours before calling Oscar back. "I saw Mitzenkopf," I reported. "And you know what he told me, Oscar? He said getting a few jobs would do more for my peace of mind than a hundred hours of therapy. Can you believe the honesty of a shrink saying that?"

"Dr. Mitzenkopf is female," Oscar replied, and hung up without further comment.

After that exchange, which concluded at ten-thirty-five on a Friday morning, I did not speak to another human being for seventy-two hours. A colossal silence broke open and spread around me, a silence whose dimensions felt global, seismic, planetary; a seeping quiet that was familiar, I supposed, to astronauts and Antarctic explorers, but not to me. I sat on my sectional couch looking out at a snowstorm, jillions of white dots hurling themselves against my sliding gla.s.s door in a subatomic frenzy.

By Monday morning snow lay piled along the East River, heaps of gold in the slanted morning sun. And then the phone rang. "I have two words for you," said Oscar, when I answered in a voice grown froggish from disuse. "Italian Vogue Vogue."

I must have screamed.

"Careful of your face," he said. "It has to last until tomorrow."

The blood was beating against my cheeks. I sat down, light-headed.

"There's just one tiny thing," he said. "They believe you're the subject of an upcoming feature story in the Post. Post. Let us not enlighten them." Let us not enlighten them."

I let this go. "Who's the photographer?"

"Spiro. Who happens at the moment to be incandescent."

"Not paparazzo Spiro," I said, referring to a fairly desperate second stringer whose postage-stamp-sized photos had freckled the lower-tier gossip pages for years.

"The very same," Oscar said. "My, how things change in a few short months."

Spiro's fortunes had turned last fall, Oscar said, when he'd had a one-man show at Metro Pictures displaying work he'd been shooting on his own: an homage to Gordon Parks consisting of black-and-white photos of a sixteen-year-old gang leader called Honey B. Reviewers praised the show's gritty authenticity, its unblinking portraits of urban violence rendered in magisterial tableaux reminiscent of Goya. Bazaar Bazaar immediately hired Spiro to reprise the series in "Girl Gang," a now-infamous fashion spread featuring models in Martine Sitbon and Helmut Lang posing as gang members. ("Execution," a shot of Kate Moss holding a sawed-off shotgun to the head of a blindfolded and kneeling Amber Valetta, had caused a particular frisson of outrage and commentary.) Since then, fashion a.s.signments had been coursing into Spiro's life without interruption. immediately hired Spiro to reprise the series in "Girl Gang," a now-infamous fashion spread featuring models in Martine Sitbon and Helmut Lang posing as gang members. ("Execution," a shot of Kate Moss holding a sawed-off shotgun to the head of a blindfolded and kneeling Amber Valetta, had caused a particular frisson of outrage and commentary.) Since then, fashion a.s.signments had been coursing into Spiro's life without interruption.

"Strong women, that's his thing," Oscar said. "No more of this I'm-a-f.u.c.ked-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 ma.s.saged 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: 510, weight: +/-125, measurements: 35-25-36. Hair: short (always), thin and straight, but redeemed somewhat by a natural dark brown l.u.s.ter. Eyes: green. Facial features: delicate, somewhat pixieish, the sort of features that register, at first glance, as young. Neck: long. b.r.e.a.s.t.s: unremarkable-not especially large-but compared with the b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 a.s.s and hips. Hands: long-fingered, p.r.o.ne 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 looked-each time, I felt a p.r.i.c.k 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 gla.s.s 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 encompa.s.s 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 cla.s.s. 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 soph.o.m.ore 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 r.e.t.a.r.ded 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 gra.s.s 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 being discovered, rather than discovering something myself, should prove the decisive event of my life. Being discovered felt like a discovery. 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 p.r.o.ne before the TV set. I enjoyed the inconsequence of this new life even as I scorned it for being nothing; I enjoyed it because 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. 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 pa.s.sive, 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 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 m.u.f.fins 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 a.s.sembled 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, not 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 a.s.sistants 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 f.u.c.k 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-s.h.i.t 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.