Look At Me_ A Novel Part 3

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." 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 right 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 t.i.tanium 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 s.e.xual 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-s.e.x pract.i.tioner 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 b.i.t.c.hing about the condoms.

There are lots of ways to find casual s.e.x, 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s of scotch. Paul Shepherd wandered to the living room, stood at the sliding-gla.s.s 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d'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 fiance. 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 a.s.sociated 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 lather, having been deprived for so long of not just s.e.x, 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."

As he stepped from my apartment into the hall, I said, "Just a minute."

He stopped. I sensed impatience, the cool mathematician prowling behind his sandy face. "Yes?"

"How do I look?" I asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Look at me," I said, and he did. "If you were going to describe me, what would you say?"

He took a long look. The light in the hall was warm and flattering. I found myself holding my breath.

"You look tired," he said, and the two halves of him fused in a moment of humanity. It wasn't what I'd hoped for, yet I felt relieved.

"Good night, Paul Shepherd," I said.

Chapter Three.

Toward the end of her bicycle ride, Ellen's daughter, Charlotte, paused in Sh.o.r.ewood Park to watch the water-skiers from beside the spindly bleachers arranged on the riverbank for the Wednesday and Friday night water shows. One wore a red bathing suit. He buzzed in Charlotte's direction, hewing the river in two until she hid her face. But it wasn't Scott Hess. All summer long he had haunted her, and she hadn't seen him yet. of her bicycle ride, Ellen's daughter, Charlotte, paused in Sh.o.r.ewood Park to watch the water-skiers from beside the spindly bleachers arranged on the riverbank for the Wednesday and Friday night water shows. One wore a red bathing suit. He buzzed in Charlotte's direction, hewing the river in two until she hid her face. But it wasn't Scott Hess. All summer long he had haunted her, and she hadn't seen him yet.

Unsure of the time, she resumed pedaling toward home. They were having dinner tonight with Uncle Moose, a biannual ritual that always roused in Charlotte an antic.i.p.atory flutter, some peculiar alloy of expectation and dread. She found herself rushing, now, streaking past the restored portion of Rockford's original marshland-brackish water, broken sticks-past modest houses and raw-throated dogs and lawns that smelled of the river. She skimmed under the Spring Creek Bridge and ploughed the paved jogging path beside the old railroad tracks, tame and manicured now, surrounded by gra.s.s.

Near the YMCA she stopped to cool off. A man in a yellow shirt sat cross-legged on the Rock River's gra.s.sy bank, one arm in a sling. Charlotte leaned her bike against a picnic table and moved closer to him. She took off her gla.s.ses, letting the lush greens mingle with the river's muddy brown. Rockford was a nineteenth-century town, bisected north to south by the Rock River. On the west side, across the water from where Charlotte stood, were a smattering of brick factory buildings and a neglected downtown; north of these were the industrialists' old riverside homes, still cushioned by dense trees and thick, fragrant lawns. A fatigue seemed to hang over these original parts of the city, as if their exertions of a hundred years ago had drained them beyond recovery. Nowadays, the action lay on the river's east side, where Charlotte lived, whose vital artery was not the river at all but State Street, running west to east, accruing strip malls and superstores and condominium spuds as it moved farther from the old city center until, by the time it reached the interstate, five miles out, it encompa.s.sed six lanes of traffic.

The last time Charlotte had seen Uncle Moose, she'd been seated beside him at the country club. He was a history professor at Winnebago College: a handsome, erratic man whose attention she could never fully capture. When he'd opened his wallet to pay for dinner (insisting, despite her father's protestations), she had glimpsed inside it a picture she'd noticed before. Of water. The only picture he carried.

"What's that?" she'd asked, but Moose seemed not to hear. "That picture," she said, more softly. "What is it?"

Moose slid the picture from its cheap plastic sleeve and handed it over. It was a photograph of a river, ancient, sepia-toned, its whites bleached to snow. It had the beloved, handled look of pictures of people's children. But it was a river. river. At the bottom, someone had scratched into the negative "Rock River, 1904." At the bottom, someone had scratched into the negative "Rock River, 1904."

The strangeness of this had affronted Charlotte. "What's the point of it?" she asked.

Moose glanced at her with dark, skittish eyes. Charlotte sensed that she'd disappointed him. "Evidence," was all he said.

It surprised her, how many times she'd thought of that photograph in the intervening months. Rock River, 1904. Rock River, 1904. A domed building-or had she invented it? A riverboat. Church steeples. A domed building-or had she invented it? A riverboat. Church steeples. Evidence Evidence, he'd said. Evidence of what?

The man on the gra.s.s had turned and was looking up at her. "Good evening," he said, with odd formality. Even without her gla.s.ses, Charlotte knew she had never seen him before. He had a long gash down one side of his face. Inside his sling she saw an arm in a cast.

"The girl in perpetual motion," he said. "Every day, on that bicycle."

A weirdo, Charlotte thought, and her interest sharpened. The man rose to his feet, as if it bothered him to sit while she was standing. He wore old khakis and had a tired adulthood about him, a relief from the evil cuteness of boys her age. He moved with a limp. Charlotte wondered what had happened to him.

"Rockford, Illinois," he said, and the curl of his accent, which she'd barely noticed, bent against her city's name. "So very ugly."

"Go back where you came from, if you don't like it," she said.

He smiled. White teeth. "That's not possible."

"Then don't call it ugly."

He studied her. "How old are you, if I may ask?"

"Sixteen."

"You're pretty."

She narrowed her eyes. "I'm not."

"Unusual."

"That's not the same."

"It lasts longer."

Liar, Charlotte thought, but she was flattered. Her build was slight but very strong; "wiry" was a word people used to describe her, though in her own view, she was distinguished by a near-total absence of b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She had waited, hoping they would arrive, erupt, emerge-rise from the bony tray of her chest like two lovely cakes. Last year, she had ordered a pressure device from the back pages of a magazine (it arrived in plain brown paper) and squeezed it between her palms each morning and night; at a later, more desperate juncture, she had swallowed fifty green pills of dubious provenance on successive nights, pills that made her urine smell like lavender.

"Boys don't like me," she told the man, emboldened by the very fact that he was a stranger.

"They'll grow up," he said, "and admire your eyes."

"I wear gla.s.ses." She was holding them in her hand.

He scanned her face as if trying to imagine it. Charlotte resisted the urge to put her gla.s.ses on. "Contacts hurt," she explained.