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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 assert 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 circumstances, 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.
It transfixed Moose to imagine those early years of quickening sight made possible by the proliferation of clear glass (perfected in Murano, circa 1300)—mirrors, spectacles, windows—light everywhere so suddenly, showing up the dirt and dust and crud that had gone unremarked for centuries. But surely the most shocking revelation had been people’s own physicality, their outward selves blinking strangely back at them from mirrors—this is what I look like; this is what other people see when they look at me—Lacan’s mirror phase wrought large upon whole villages, whole cultures! And yet, as was the case with nearly every phenomenon Moose observed (his own life foremost), a second transformation followed the first and reversed nearly all of its gains, for now the world’s blindness exceeded that of medieval times before clear glass, except that the present blindness came from too much sight, appearances disjoined from anything real, afloat upon nothing, in the service of nothing, cut off from every source of blood and life.
i love this
What these qualities meant, how they conjoined to form a human being who looked and moved a certain way, I had no idea. As a teenager, I first became aware of people’s eyes catching on me as I walked down Michigan Avenue with my mother and Grace during shopping trips to Chicago. They glanced, then looked—each time, I felt a prick of sensation within me. I knew how transistors worked; my father had shown me a picture of the very first one, at Bell Labs, a crusty, inauspicious-looking rock that had performed the revolutionary feat of transmitting and amplifying electrical current. The jabs of interest I provoked in strangers struck me as an unharnessed energy source; somehow, I would convert them into power.
Can there be anyone left on earth who remains ignorant of the details of a fledgling model’s career? Interview agency. Test shots. Absences from college for jobs. Photographers. “You’ve got it!” Cocaine in tiny spoons, in amber vials. Expensive dinners no one touched. The world in which I found myself afforded an unbroken vista of pure triviality, but it had a lazy, naughty appeal, the allure of skipping dinner and eating a gallon of ice cream instead, of losing a whole weekend prone before the TV set. I enjoyed the inconsequence of this new life even as I scorned it for being nothing; I enjoyed it because it was nothing. Chin down. Stop scrunching your hands. Don’t stare, relax your eyes. Stop talking. It’s harder to see you when your face is moving.
“I’m happy,” I said, moving to the music as much as possible while holding my face still for Ellis. And I was; happiness leaned against me from inside. I reached for my purse, took out two Merits and offered one to Ellis, who lit them both with a malachite lighter. Then he stood back and gazed at my face, smoking meditatively. I glanced at myself in the mirror, a stranger in beautiful makeup, and felt a twisting excitement I would forever associate with my first years back in New York after Paris, years during which an exquisite tension had gathered around me and begun to tighten, slowly lifting me up. When Oscar commenced to negotiate a three-year contract on my behalf with a major American designer, the tension reached its apogee, and I enjoyed the epistardom accorded those whom everyone believes will soon be stars. I was beloved. The air smelled like money. So close did I feel to the mirrored room that I experienced an anticipatory nostalgia for the sweet, small life I would soon cast off; its every detail felt precious. And much as I longed, now, to take credit for the failure of that tension to coalesce into something coherent, longed to be able to say, It was my fault, I blew it all with one massive and outrageous fuckup, vomiting on a designer’s head, gamboling naked onto the runway—those horrors one dreams of half longingly, half in terror—I could never find a connection between any behavior of mine and the result, or lack thereof. The designer in question pulled out at the last minute and signed another girl whose grinning physiognomy was now a fixture on the wall calendar—exercise video circuit, and from that point on, my momentum began to ease, or drift. A subtle change at first, a calm that was almost welcome after the maelstrom that had surrounded me. But the spreading quiet soon assumed a creepy, menacing note—where had everyone gone? Like someone in an elevator whose cable has snapped, I began wildly pushing buttons, sounding alarms, but nothing could halt the sensation of rapid, involuntary descent. “Who took you to St. Barts?” I hollered at Oscar when he called to report my cancellation by a photographer whose support was mandatory for any model aspiring to the highest tier of success. “Who bought you a Claude Montana jacket with zebra-skin lapels?”
And that was basically that, although it took several more years before I was truly a catalogue girl with no prestige whatsoever. Just how many years I wasn’t sure, exactly, because at that point, the point at which my acceleration began to reverse, time started running together—there was no more arc of ascension by which to measure it. The years began passing in clumps, so that one day I was twenty-three (to the world) standing at the threshold of the mirrored room, and the next, ten years had passed and I was twenty-eight and a professional beauty, by which I mean a person in possession of phone numbers of sumptuous homes around the world where she (or he) will be welcome, a person adept at packing on a half-hour’s notice for a trip to Bali or a sailing cruise off Turkey’s southern coast, a person who will never have to pay for her dinner as long as she doesn’t expect to choose the company. Indeed, understanding how much she can reasonably expect is key to the professional beauty’s continued circulation, and requires the use of an obscure algorithm involving the variables of how good she looks, how easy she is to be around, and what, exactly, she’s willing to give in return. As the years go on and one’s looks and novelty wear off, one had better start cultivating some other skills. Of course, the professional beauty’s existence was generally an anteroom to some more permanent arrangement, and the ones with any sense married well as expeditiously as possible, while their stock was high. Such transactions weren’t necessarily base or grotesque; there were plenty of stops on the road to trading looks for cash before you arrived at the old carp at the end of the line whose breathing was audible at dinner and whose daughters were nearer your mother’s age than your own. In my case, marriage to money would certainly have been the prudent route, and yet I couldn’t seem to do it. Having forgone a marriage of love, how could I promise those very same things out of mere practicality? It seemed dull and frightening. Try as I might to interest myself permanently in the real estate owners I met, owners of yachts and islands and seventeenth-century castles, of Bonnards and Picassos and Rothkos and vintage cars and zoo animals, private screening rooms and fleets of chestnut horses, my concentration always broke; my mind wandered, another man came along, and the prior one fell away or married someone else or simply vanished.
Back on Broome Street, I walked without knowing where I went. I stared through boutique windows at couches, at vases of blown glass, letting the cold air clear my head. It’s over, I told myself repeatedly, not knowing quite what this meant. I turned up West Broadway, a lunchtime murmur roiling behind the windows of restaurants. The models were out in force, their spindly doe’s legs splayed beneath short winter coats. They looked so young—younger than I’d ever felt in my life. I noticed one with short, raven-colored hair who looked not unlike myself (we are interchangeable—the first lesson one learns as a professional beauty). She and I reached the corner of Houston at the same time, but I let her go ahead. From behind, I noticed people glance at her as she passed them crossing the street, their eyes holding her an extra moment, then reluctantly pulling away. The girl pretended not to see them, just as I used to do, but she felt the power I remembered feeling—I saw it in her walk, the way she held her head, a self-consciousness that made her every move look studied.
But was that really power? I wondered, following behind as she turned left, onto the north side of Houston. Or did it only feel like power? She made her way along, eyes straight ahead, the shape of her portfolio visible in her small backpack, and hovering around her, something only I could see: the nimbus of her faith that she had earned an extraordinary life, and would have one. No, I thought, it was wrong—there was no such thing as the power of beauty. Only the power to surround yourself with it.
I flicked on the lights, and my apartment ambushed me. I can sell the apartment, I thought. I can sell the sectional couch. I could sell the expensive necklaces and bracelets and earrings I’d been given over the years by rich, insolent playboys. I could sell my kitchen appliances. My towels, my makeup. My purses. My clothing! My Halstons and Chanels, my Gallianoses and Isaac Mizrahis. I could sell my stereo, my TV, though neither was state-of-the-art anymore. My furniture, the antiques I’d bought in Europe. I could sell my Japanese woodblock print of a snowy rural landscape.
And if I sold all of that, would I have enough?
Enough for what?
[...] It had started at a dinner party in Gordon’s house, a memory Ellen hoarded, allowing it to open only rarely, at special times, like a music box whose tune fades imperceptibly with each playing: herself standing by a windowsill crowded with African violets, looking out at the yard. Gordon touching the small of her back and saying very softly, close to her ear, “I think about you constantly.”
Ellen had never repeated that phrase to Dr. Alwyn in therapy because she knew how cheap it would sound, and refused to hear it that way. At the time, the words had ricocheted through her like a box of marbles flung against a wall, had initiated nearly a year of surreal, pornographic encounters in locations that only rarely featured beds, and then only guestroom beds; she and Gordon were both too squeamish to offer up their connubial beds or the beds of their offspring for such purposes, though Gordon had once dropped to his knees and brought her to orgasm inside her bedroom closet. And yes, he had made her happy, or rather, the agony of guilt and eroticism he’d brought to her life had given it a new, exquisite focus. [...]
She lit a second cigarette, narrowing her eyes at the lawn, the very same lawn where she’d played as a child. Here she was, at thirty-six; with the brutal efficiency of a Greek tragedy she’d been thrust into the very life she had sought to escape. Ellen had dragged Harris back to Rockford—true, true—when the children were young, Ricky just a baby. She’d done it for Moose, to be near him after his unspeakable disaster. But Moose, it soon became clear, didn’t like to be near Ellen anymore. For years, she’d made regular detours in the course of her days to look for her brother’s car, tracking his movements from the college to Versailles to the public library. It had relieved her, somehow, just to know where he was. But nowadays she rarely did that. Almost never.