Look At Me_ A Novel Part 7

"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 bulls.h.i.t and you want me to sell you a line of bulls.h.i.t back so you can write a major line of bulls.h.i.t 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 bulls.h.i.t? 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.

I didn't move. "Why?"

"Because you're right. This makes no sense."

"So you're giving up journalism?" Languidly, I rose to a sitting position.

"No," she said. "This."

"Jesus. You've written about cops and muggers and Mafiosi and you're running away from me?" I was beginning to sweat.

"I'm not running."

She wasn't running, but she was definitely on the move. "Thanks for your time," she called from the door.

I moseyed after her, careful not to look fl.u.s.tered. The locks on my door were many and complex; she wouldn't get out on her own. I was fighting the sense that I'd f.u.c.ked up something major, that Oscar would never forgive me. But what exactly had I done?

"Good luck finding another model who's had eighty t.i.tanium screws implanted in her face," I said, unlocking the door and pushing it open.

She looked impressed.

"Eight-oh. Write that down," I said.

She brushed past me into the hallway.

It was seven o'clock, but it might as well have been midnight. The sky and river were black. To h.e.l.l with the diet-I ordered a pizza and ate it. I finished the bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse. Sometime later, I opened another bottle and began watching The Making of the Making of The Making of the Making of, a doc.u.mentary about how doc.u.mentaries were made about the making of Hollywood features. Against a backdrop of camera crews shooting camera crews, an announcer in pancake makeup intoned his gravelly stand-up. "As movies about how movies are made become more popular, experts speculate that some day, every movie will bring with it a brother, or sister movie: the unique story of its own creation. But how are these these stories made? What are the technical challenges, the dangers? What are the rewards? In the next hour, we'll take you behind the scenes ... into the studios ... onto the locations ... where directors face the challenge of filming other directors ... making films!" stories made? What are the technical challenges, the dangers? What are the rewards? In the next hour, we'll take you behind the scenes ... into the studios ... onto the locations ... where directors face the challenge of filming other directors ... making films!"

I stared at the set. I wondered seriously if I might be hallucinating, a relapse into double vision induced by too much brandy in one day.

I muted the TV and called Grace, hoping she could elucidate the meaning of the program. Frank answered and informed me that she was in bed.

"At nine o clock?" I was skeptical.

"She's still recovering from her visit to New York."

"Or avoiding you-and who could blame her?" I bellowed, then rushed to slam the phone down before he did. It was sort of a contest between us: who could hang up first.

I was feeling very antsy. Before the accident, such a mood would have propelled me outside to a club, then more clubs. But I no longer had the energy. The city looked dark and corrupt and I was glad to be in my silk kimono and fuzzy blue slippers with the heat on full blast. Central heating was a must, I thought, as I padded around the apartment turning on lights. And plenty of good strong electrical outlets!

I lay on my bed with the lights on, Jacques Brel serenading me from the CD player. The TV was still on; Unsolved Mysteries Unsolved Mysteries, one of those shows you could watch without watching it, as if it were one story looping around and around. "Penny was fifteen when she rode into these woods and disappeared ..." A shot of a blond girl riding a bicycle, pinkta.s.seled handlebars. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, a psychic was leading the police to young Penny's remains, a racc.o.o.n-eyed woman in a head scarf, humming as she stepped through crackling underbrush.

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That night I dreamed about Hansen. I felt his arms and smelled him, and we were together in some familiar, beautiful place, possibly one of the towns on the Jersey sh.o.r.e where we used to go on weekends. Was the Jersey sh.o.r.e actually beautiful? I didn't know. I had made a point of never going back.

On the few occasions when I recalled myself with Hansen, I saw a girl whose energies and affections were trained entirely on one human being, but I credited my devotion less to Hansen himself than to the fact that we'd fallen in love before I discovered who I was-or was not. He represented the last time I had believed in something that I no longer believed in.

There was no denying that Hansen was terrific. Smart, great in bed, a landscape architect and fanatical gardener who knew everything a person could know about soil and plants. Even now, resting my eyes on a dusty vase at the dry cleaners or walking past the public library in the flush of spring, names of plants and flowers would startle me like someone whispering into my ear: coleus, baby tears, dahlias, jasmine. We met a few weeks after I came to New York, at the Metropolitan Museum. I would wander through the rooms of European paintings and stare at the canvases until my head ached, waiting for them to reveal themselves to me. Hansen introduced himself by murmuring, as I gaped at some frigid Poussin, "Are you trying to make it combust?" He took me to lunch in the cafeteria. He was twenty-five, a year out of graduate school. I was twenty-two, posing as twenty, but I told him twenty. Even after we were engaged, I never corrected myself.

There was no denying that Hansen and I were happy. We were perilously happy. We lived in a ground-floor apartment on Bank Street, two blocks from the Hudson. Our street had cobblestones. Hansen grew roses in the backyard, blah blah blah. The picture was coercive in its perfection. Pasta in the evenings, weekends tooling around in Hansen's baby-blue vintage Oldsmobile. Endless discussions of our love; its quality, its texture, its indestructibility. Fights, tears, jealousy over feeling ignored by the other at a party, followed by reconciliatory lovemaking. Presentation to one another's parents, who nodded sagely as they noted our clutched hands under the tablecloth. It was someone else. When I thought of it now, I was filled with a sense that it couldn't have been me.

At that time, a sojourn to Paris, usually for a year, was a critical part of every model's development. I put it off for many months so as not to be parted from Hansen. Finally Oscar set a date and announced that I was leaving.

On my last weekend in New York, Hansen and I drove to the Jersey sh.o.r.e. It was a rainy spring, and we holed up in our bed and breakfast room for two days, crying, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g, staring morosely out our small round window at the sea. Hansen proposed to me in the dining room of a nineteenth-century beachside hotel, striped awnings on the windows. By the world's account, I was twenty-one. That night, while Hansen slept, I lay awake and listened to the sea's fitful breath. My life felt absolutely pure. Can it really be this easy? I wondered-you met someone, you fell in love ... like an old story? It seemed too lucky, and for that reason, or some other reason, it provoked in me a tiny beat of disappointment. I had always believed my life would unfold in some more angular fashion. Instead, I'd virtually stepped from my childhood into this happiness.

In Paris, I shared a minuscule apartment with a model named Ruby, who had a cocaine problem and almost never slept. I put a sock over each of my ears, trying to repel her nocturnal phone chatter, her giggles and rages and tears as she shifted west with the hours, seeking out time zones where men she knew were still awake: New York, Aspen, Los Angeles, Honolulu, finally Tokyo, which she reached at dawn. But Ruby played only a bit part in the pageant of my lovesickness. I went to castings, I landed little jobs with Elle Elle and and Marie Claire Marie Claire, I walked beside the Seine, and invariably I was miserable. The unfamiliar sights hurt my eyes, the words I couldn't understand-I felt exiled, with no way to connect. In occasional lucid flashes, I was dumbfounded to find myself in such a state. Here I was in Paris, after all! Paris, where French people lived! And yet the fulcrum of my existence was the hour, usually around seven, when Hansen would call at lunchtime from his architectural firm. Hanging up was like being lopped from him physically. "I can't stand this," I told myself repeatedly throughout each day. I felt like I was dying, like the blood was being drained from me slowly. Clients complained about my listlessness, and there was talk of sending me home. Oscar begged me to stick it out. He offered to advance Hansen a plane ticket, but Hansen was designing his first project, a small park in Queens, and couldn't get away until July.

One Sat.u.r.day, while I was walking by the Seine in my usual morose haze, I saw a man standing at an easel. When I stopped to watch him paint, he barely acknowledged me. I'd been hounded by men since the moment of my arrival, the usual rich compulsives whose particular drug (or one of them) was the presence of teenage girls in large quant.i.ties. But the lone painter's oblivion made it feel safe to stand beside him. Even I could see he had no talent. "You like?" he asked, turning to me suddenly.

I shrugged, which made him laugh. He was attractive in a muscular, straightforward way, and spoke no English. He pulled a ham sandwich from his shoulder bag and offered me half. We ate side by side on the river's edge, our feet dangling over the water. He opened a bottle of red wine, which we drank in swigs. He seemed perfectly indifferent to me, as if his day were unfolding exactly as it would have without me. Eventually he took out a book and began to read. I looked at the river, feeling a tentative contentment. It was June, sunlight lapping at my face and arms. The ratio of red wine to ham sandwich had left me not drunk, exactly, but dreamy. I leaned back, tipped my face to the sky, and shut my eyes. Then he kissed me. I yelped, my eyes popped open, and except for a lingering essence of red wine and tobacco on my lips, it seemed possible that nothing had happened. The Frenchman watched me, testing my reaction, then seized my face in his hands and kissed me again. Something awful stirred in me. He pushed me gently backward against the concrete and leaned over me, kissing my mouth and neck, whispering into my ears until my mind emptied of everything but a drugged sense that we must get to a place where we could undress. Clearly the Frenchman's thoughts were following this same itinerary; he pulled me to my feet, packed up his paints with alacrity and led me up to the street, where his miniature orange Citroen was parked. We got in, and as he twisted and wove among the Paris streets I tried to think of Hansen, but it was as if one version of me were still by the Seine in a zombie state of missing him, and now a second version had broken off and hijacked me into this stranger's car, where I was counting the moments until we could have s.e.x.

Eventually we reached a run-down apartment house. The Frenchman led me inside by the hand, and we climbed what seemed an infinite number of steps, flight after flight, the stairwell echoing with cries of dogs and infants until, when we reached the seventh floor, I was only nominally clothed. I hardly saw the man's apartment, except to note that it was small and clean. We stayed there until evening, and then he drove me back to the apartment I shared with Ruby. His name was Henri. The next day I returned to the Seine to look for him, but it wasn't until the following Sat.u.r.day, one week later, that he was back at his easel. When he saw me, he began packing up his paints, and the day proceeded similarly. After that, I learned how to get to his apartment by Metro and met him there. I had no idea what the rest of his life consisted of, nor he mine. We couldn't speak.

But the happiness! The cheesiest metaphors could not exaggerate the immensity of my relief; a spell had broken, a weight had been lifted from my shoulders, a large black cloud dispelled from the atmosphere. I'd wakened from the dead to find myself in Paris. I was free! Not from Hansen-I never thought of it that way-but from my misery. I wanted to skip and yell and sing. "You sound so much happier!" Hansen marveled when we spoke, and only then did I realize what a burden my desolation had been for him. I made a better impression at castings, and work began picking up. Of course I was aware that something was wrong with all this, but I tried not to think about it. It was a stopgap measure, I told myself, a drastic coping device until Hansen and I would be reunited. I felt like a part of myself was still with him in New York, holding my place among the hosta and clematis, while another entirely separate part was meeting Henri each Sat.u.r.day for hours and hours of anonymous s.e.x. I never took off my engagement ring.

As July and Hansen's visit approached, I was hobbled by dread. What would happen? Would he guess? Would I feel differently? But when he arrived, the love I felt for Hansen seemed, if anything, more intense. I didn't show up at Henri's that Sat.u.r.day, and he must have known better than to come looking for me. I never saw him again. Hansen and I spent whole days at the Louvre and watched sunset from the Eiffel Tower. We chose a wedding date for one year later, in Paris. As we made love, I would sometimes be stricken by the knowledge that I had done these same things (and other things, too-things I hadn't done with Hansen) with a literal stranger, and so recently, and I would feel a kind of shock-not on my own behalf, but on Hansen's. He doesn't know who he's making love to, I would think, and panic would slash through me until I reminded myself that it was over now, a freakish aberration not to be repeated.

It was Hansen who first made me aware of shadow selves. He would lie in bed watching me for whole minutes, and I would look back into his eyes and wonder, What does he see? How can he not see the truth? Where is it hidden? It made me ask, when I looked at other people, what possible selves they were hiding behind the strange rubber masks of their faces. I could nearly always find one, if I watched for long enough. It became the only one I was interested in seeing.

Hansen stayed three weeks, and after he left, I experienced a modified version of my prior despair. I missed him bitterly, but with each day the bitterness abated and another set of possibilities began to a.s.sert itself, like shifting my weight from one foot to the other. A week after he left, I had dinner with a young playboy, dark-haired and light-skinned like the Carravagian boys Hansen and I had observed so recently. Again, as with Henri, the desire that I felt for this man was like a blanket tossed over my head. We went back to his house, a house in the middle of Paris with tall shuttered windows, and I spent the night without making love all the way, but the next morning I relented, and we began an affair. I felt exactly two opposite ways: gripped by the feverish eroticism of my new circ.u.mstances, and devoted to Hansen in a way that made the other feeling outrageous, inconceivable. In moments, I clutched at the notion of some larger "me" that could contain and justify my contradictory behavior, but more often I simply felt like the scene of two irreconcilable visions, two different people, one unerringly loyal and faithful, the other treacherous and greedy. My affair with Henri had pushed something open in me, and now I felt ravenous, in constant danger of going hungry. Hansen alone would never be enough.

As the weeks progressed, I developed a morbid fascination with the enormity of all he didn't know. I reminded myself incessantly that the happiness I heard in his voice when we spoke each night was predicated upon a trust and faith and mutual understanding that I had already betrayed countless times in countless different ways, ways that would make him scream, were he to glimpse them. The thought tortured me. I felt like a poisoner sprinkling a.r.s.enic on Hansen's food while he wasn't looking, watching him eat it bite by bite. I wished he would guess, but I did everything in my power to keep him from guessing, and it was easy. I sounded the same! He had no reason to doubt me! He believed that I loved him, and he was right! I was made for this treachery! Each night, as I reported to him the jobs I was on hold for, the church I'd wandered into, the croque monsieur I'd had for lunch, I would imagine rescuing him from his ignorance and my duplicity by telling him everything. This fantasy of absolution so enthralled me that at times I completely lost track of our conversation. To say it and have him know, to close the gap between us. I couldn't do it. And yet I knew that it couldn't go on this way, either, that sooner or later I would have to choose between Hansen and everyone else. A lifetime of deceiving a good man was more than even I could stomach.

So I left.

I flew back to New York to tell him. And in the moments after I did (because it was near his birthday, he thought I'd come to celebrate and had filled the apartment with flowers), after I told him everything, after he'd turned in confusion to look at the garden, flooded with sunset (asters, gladiolus, anemones, phlox), after he'd finished his gla.s.s of brandy in one shaking gulp, his first impulse, strangely, was to cleave to me, the person he trusted, the person he loved, and for a tiny pocket of time we held each other and the small life we had made, and I felt the sweetness of that life as I never had before. No! I thought, we can keep this, it doesn't have to end! But my words were already moving through Hansen, seeping through his veins toward his heart. I felt it happening, felt him beginning to seize up in my arms and realized with a kind of horror that I hadn't poisoned him before, as I'd thought; I'd done it now, here, all at once, and my punishment was to sit by and watch it work. I hadn't protected him from anything. As the revulsion overcame him, the disgust and rage, he shoved me, knocking me onto the bricks, and hit my face, and I watched the innocence leave him like a spirit leaving a corpse.

But what had killed that innocence-my betrayal, or the telling? Which was the poison? Ah, philosophy.

After Hansen, I was careful to limit my promises. If I cared about someone, I did my best to mean what I said as I said it. But I'd given up on the whole truth, much less my ability to tell it. Most of the time, I didn't even try. My philosophy, if you will, was eerily suited to what became my life; different cities week to week, a constant flow of settings and people; as my surroundings dissolved and reconst.i.tuted themselves, it seemed only natural that I do the same. I avoided the sorts of places where I'd been with Hansen-museums, for example. Or perhaps I simply lost interest.

Still, I had wondered many times, in the years since leaving Hansen, years during which I had promised almost nothing to a great, great many, whether we might both have been better off if I'd sealed my lips and led a double life, like everyone else.

Chapter Five.

East High School was vast, just as Charlotte had wished, corridors lined with hundreds of red lockers, corridors so long she could barely see to the end of one, even with her gla.s.ses on. Everyone was a stranger, and this infused the air with a glittering sense of promise. Charlotte knew better than to try to sit with the preppy kids in the lunchroom, but she could walk by and smile, and they would smile back. was vast, just as Charlotte had wished, corridors lined with hundreds of red lockers, corridors so long she could barely see to the end of one, even with her gla.s.ses on. Everyone was a stranger, and this infused the air with a glittering sense of promise. Charlotte knew better than to try to sit with the preppy kids in the lunchroom, but she could walk by and smile, and they would smile back.

She met Uncle Moose for one or two hours on alternate weeks at his office at Winnebago College on East State Street, a ten-minute bike ride from her high school. After the crescendo with which their accord had been reached, a certain letdown was inevitable. Her uncle remained awkward, aloof, rarely meeting Charlotte's eyes. Alone with him she felt a spooky kind of banishment, as if she might leave his office, which reeked of tomato sauce and stale Chinese takeout cartons mashed in the garbage, to find that the world as she knew it had ceased to exist. History meant little to Charlotte: facts about dead people. And Moose, deeply attuned to the apathy most people felt toward the pursuits he held most dear, achingly conscious of the erasure of history from this land without context, perceived his niece's indifference and was bewildered; what was she doing here?

Sometimes they met at Moose and Priscilla's apartment in a complex called Versailles, a half mile east of Winnebago College. They sat on Moose's tiny second-floor balcony, just big enough for two chairs and a small gla.s.s-topped table. Below, a boy rode a tractor-mower over the undulating gra.s.s around Versailles, and Charlotte blamed this mower for the many occasions when she and Moose began speaking at once and then stopped-then started-then stopped. But on her next visit the lawn boy was gone and a disastrous silence remained, an enormous stretch of nothing in which she and Moose foundered gloomily, solitarily. No more, Charlotte thought, mounting her bicycle with relief at finding herself back among the wind and cars and trees turning gold. I'm not going back, it's too strange.

At home, she felt the push of her mother's curiosity. Ellen had never been inside Moose and Priscilla's apartment. Were there many pictures on the walls? Did the phone ring often? Was the refrigerator full? Her mother's hunger for news of her brother exposed itself helplessly to Charlotte, and she felt her privilege at being allowed inside her uncle's life. Blue round soaps in the bathroom. Towels smelling faintly of flowers. Once, Aunt Priscilla left a banana bread in the kitchen, and her uncle, barefoot, had cut himself and Charlotte each a slice. She told her mother almost nothing.

In an alb.u.m by her mother's desk, a younger version of Moose stared mockingly at Charlotte from old photographs. One in particular: her uncle standing in water to his thighs wearing neon-green swim trunks, torso broadening toward the shoulders like the flare of a cobra's head. The picture fascinated her. She'd pried it from the alb.u.m and brought it to her room, where she kept it hidden between the layers of her blotter.

Late in September, she began writing short conversational essays on the reading Moose had a.s.signed her, and these helped to alleviate their mutual shyness. Her uncle spoke to the essays and scrawled corrections upon them, waved them in the air and once was robbed of a page by a gust of wind. Moose leapt from his chair and sprinted from the apartment, and Charlotte seized upon his absence to push open the door to the bedroom, which she'd never seen. A bed with a green silken spread, a pair of giant fur-lined slippers poised beside it. A forest of prescription bottles on one bedside table. She peeked in Moose's closet: five worn tweed jackets, three pairs of black shoes. Soft plaid work shirts.

By October, they were able to engage in normal conversation.

"How's the family?" Moose asked with an ironic lilt, as if both asking the question and posing as someone asking the question. And Charlotte told him how the tension in their house rose each month before Ricky's tests, which were later that week. "Your folks must be scared," Moose said.

"It's all they think about."

"And you?"

"It's weird," she said. "I know he'll be okay."

Moose cleared his throat. "I meant: How are you?" he asked, rather stiffly.

Charlotte glanced at him, but her uncle was looking over the balcony, where the lawn boy had raked piles of leaves into orange plastic bags that looked like jack-o'-lanterns. It was the first time Moose had asked a question about herself, personally. Charlotte waited, wanting to take full advantage of this pulse of interest, to answer him with absolute precision.

"I'm waiting for something to happen," she said.

Two Men Take a GambleIn the 1830s, when this part of the world was still untouched, the first speculator came to Rockford: Germanicus Kent. In 1834 he and his partner founded a town on the west side of the Rock River next to Kent Creek, where our downtown is now. They built a sawmill, which was one of the three things you needed for a town (the others were: a saloon and a blacksmith shop). Meanwhile, another speculator, Daniel Haight, settled on the east side of the river that very same year.So Rockford started out as Kentville and Haightville, two almost invisible towns glaring at each other across the river and getting compet.i.tive before they practically existed....

Pedaling home from Versailles, Charlotte wove among the Cadillacs on State Street, cruising the slight downhills standing up, the fall wind boxing her body, stinging her ears. She imagined herself at the opening of a tunnel, tipped forward on its downward slope. Something moved in her: a slow, sweet unraveling of antic.i.p.ation.

After they combined their towns into Rockford, Germanicus Kent and Daniel Haight were like actors in a play with twenty-five different parts: Haight was the first sheriff, first postmaster, first commissioner to decide where the State Road (which is State Street today) should go. Kent was the first election judge, first representative in the Illinois General a.s.sembly, and first ferrymaster across the river....

On the day of Ricky's tests, Charlotte met a strange woman in her mother's dressing room. She'd been listening to Alanis on her Walkman and reading about Rockford's first bridge, a graduate student's paper so old it had been typed on a typewriter. Headphones still on, she wandered into her mother's bathroom to look for the lotion she'd brought back from Florida last spring. White, pearlized lotion that smelled of the beach, of coconuts. And there Charlotte found the woman: a stranger in scarf and sungla.s.ses. "I'm an old friend of your mother's," she said.

Looking back, Charlotte was mortified by the many suspicious details of this "old friend" she had somehow failed to notice: the woman knew nothing of Ricky's illness; hadn't called before arriving or rung the bell; had walked around the house alone; then rushed away (limping!) without leaving any message for Charlotte's mother, whose "old friend" she supposedly was. A thief-what else could she be? And Charlotte had stood there, making conversation. Had shown the thief her fish!

She'd been absorbed by the question of what was wrong with her. The woman wasn't old. She was very tall, but seemed narrow inside her heavy coat. Her voice was raw. A car accident, she finally said. Last August. Then she took off her gla.s.ses, baring to Charlotte her broken, vermilion eyes.

Later, as Ellen was getting dressed for a wedding reception at the country club (an ordeal she dreaded), Charlotte moseyed into her dressing room and loitered there. This was unusual, but Ellen paved over her surprise. Displays of eagerness tended to drive Charlotte away.

"Your jewelry is in this room, right?" Charlotte asked.

"In that drawer," Ellen said, pointing. "Would you like to borrow something?"

"Is it valuable?"

Ellen turned to her, trying to read her shuttered, tricky face. "The really valuable things are at the bank," she said. "Why?"

Without answering, Charlotte went in the bathroom and stood by her mother's sink, scanning the miniature skyline of bottles and lotions and creams and sprays and different kinds of makeup. In their midst she spied the pearlized lotion from Florida. Charlotte opened the bottle, poured some into her palm and rubbed it on her arm. She closed her eyes and lifted the smell to her face.

"Why don't you keep that, honey? I almost never use it."

Charlotte cracked her eyes, glimpsed her mother beside her in the mirror and moved quickly away. The image of herself and her mother together-in a mirror, a window, a photograph-flattened her with a blunt hopelessness, a sense that she might as well be dead. Her mother was beautiful and Charlotte was not; she knew this always, of course, and yet a defiant optimism hummed within her, a faith that she had forfeited beauty for some extraordinary compensation. Seeing her mother beside her annihilated that hope, leaving Charlotte to wonder whether someone so unbeautiful as herself would be allowed to go on, to have anything. Wouldn't someone more beautiful get it, whatever it was?

Stung, Ellen ran a brush through her hair. She was used to Charlotte's rebuffs, but now, after a whole afternoon at the hospital with Ricky, her eyes filled with tears.

"You don't worry about someone stealing the jewelry that's in here?"

Christ, why was she harping on the jewelry? Ellen looped her hair around and pinned it onto her head, waiting for her eyes to clear before she answered. "Not really. I mean, we've got the burglar alarm."