Pretty Is (24 page)

When I moved to Chicago I sent Gail a portfolio shot I had defaced (mustache, black teeth—very mature; I’m not even sure what point I wanted to make). I left an address with Grandma Mabel, but I knew it would only be temporary. For Daddy I left nothing. I didn’t know what to say, and I was hurt. He had given up on me, it seemed, which didn’t feel fair.

Within a few weeks in Chicago, I moved again, into an apartment with a bunch of other girls. I didn’t let my family know, but at that point they could still have tracked me down pretty easily if they had really wanted to. Which apparently they didn’t. A few months after that, I left for New York, and I legally changed my name to Chloe Savage, which I’d already begun using professionally. I was done with Carly May. After a year in New York, I moved out to LA. I haven’t seen anyone from Nebraska or heard from them, not one of them, since I left.

Until now. Looking out my back window at the tiny garden my neighbor planted out back, I hold the envelope like it might explode. In big, loopy, childish handwriting, the letter is addressed to Carly May “Chloe” Savage, and I wonder how Gail arrived at that particular hybrid. She wanted the letter to get to me, but she also wanted to make a point. “Fuck,” I say loudly to the empty apartment. “What the fuck.” It’s not a thick envelope; I guess there’s a single sheet of paper inside, folded into thirds.

Whatever Gail has to say, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to hear it. But I can’t just throw away the envelope, either. I put it on my dresser, neatly in the center.

Lois

About two weeks after the rendezvous in the bowling alley, I’m in the coffee shop grading a stack of papers when Delia swoops down on me out of nowhere. And I do mean swoops, as if I have been chosen for dinner by a powerful bird of prey. There’s trippy, slightly eerie ambient music playing in the background. An appropriate soundtrack.

She wastes no time. “I’ve seen you three times now with that student,” she says. “The one you originally told me was harassing you. What are you up to?”

I put my pen down and take a sip of my coffee. There’s no pretense of friendship here. This is something else entirely. Which gives me permission to respond accordingly.

“I’m not sure that’s any of your business.” I keep my voice as level and neutral as I can make it. She’s wearing a long Indian skirt of cheap printed cotton and lots of clunky jewelry; her face looks haggard. How could I ever have thought we would be friends?

She sits opposite me, not waiting for an invitation, and fixes her big dark bird-eyes on me. “There’s something about you I don’t quite get. Something that doesn’t fit.” Is she talking to herself? I wonder. I lower my pen to the page in front of me and scribble a note.

“You’ve been meeting with him alone,” she continues, undeterred by my rudeness. “You have to admit that it looks very strange. If he’s threatening you, you know, you have to tell someone. I mean, if you think you’re in any kind of danger, it would be a huge mistake to try to deal with him on your own. But honestly, what I find myself wondering is—who’s stalking who?—or should I say whom,” she adds, lightening her tone ever so slightly for the first time since she plunked herself down. “Who’s stalking whom.”

“That’s a rather offensive thing to imply.” I wipe up a tiny coffee spill with my napkin.

“I’m not implying anything. I’m asking you a direct question, which you aren’t answering. But I’ve seen a lot of crazy things in my line of work. And there’s something off about this. Something that worries me. And I do know that kid, actually. I didn’t want to say anything, but now I think maybe I should. A girl accused him of stalking her a few months back. Nothing ever happened—there was no proof, and eventually she said he just stopped. But he seriously creeped her out, with good reason. And I believed her, I might as well tell you. Also with good reason.”

I make another mark on the essay I’m grading. It’s a hint she can’t possibly misinterpret, and I feel a twinge of guilt; I have nothing against Delia, after all, and I’m sure she means well. But I resent the earnestness of her tone. I am not enjoying this conversation, to the extent that it is a conversation.

Delia is undaunted. “You know, I’ve worked with a lot of women who’ve experienced some sort of trauma. Often as children. If I had to guess … no, never mind. You’ll just get pissed off. But remember: if you want to talk—or if you decide you need help—you know where I am. And I’d stay away from that kid if I were you. Seriously. He’s bad news.”

She gives me another of her unnervingly penetrating looks, as if she can read something in my face that I’m not even aware of. Then she stalks out, the door jangling shut behind her. I don’t like the idea that she came into the coffee shop purely to deliver this warning. And how did she see me three times with Sean? I only noticed her the first time we met, at the bowling alley.

As for the stalking bit? Sean has a skulking gait that makes him look like a stalker, and his customary attire doesn’t help. But it’s a small town, and girls can be paranoid; someone could easily have misconstrued multiple Sean sightings, however coincidental, as stalking. Nothing was proven, after all, as even Delia had to admit.

Am I under surveillance?

*   *   *

I rent
For Worse
the day it comes out on DVD and invite Brad over to watch it. We get Chinese takeout.

Brad lets himself in, and I hear him stomping up the stairs. He arrives smelling noticeably of beer. “Went out with some guys from History,” he says, taking his coat off and tossing it on an antique chair. I pick it up and hang it in the closet.

“Have a seat,” I say soothingly. He seems riled up—or what counts as riled up in Brad terms. Visibly ruffled, shall we say. “You smell a bit like a frat boy.” I arrange the food on the table and bring him a small glass of wine. “Drink this. But not fast. You’ll want your wits about you. Tonight we have the final installment in the never-before-seen, soon-to-sweep-the-country, exhaustive Chloe Savage film series!”

“You know,” Brad says, “you should really keep your downstairs door locked. Anyone could just waltz right in.”

“Like whom? Besides, I keep the upstairs door locked. As long as my apartment is safe, the entryway is irrelevant, don’t you think?”

“No,” he says stubbornly. “The upstairs door is flimsy. Anyone could kick it down. You could do it yourself, I bet.”

“But there’s no doorbell downstairs,” I point out. “And I have a hard time hearing a knock from up here. What if someone came to see me, and I wasn’t expecting them?”

It’s a weak argument. Brad knows he’s the only one who comes to see me. The truth is impossible to explain, though. When the downstairs door is locked I feel like a recluse. I might as well live on an island. I could die, and no one would find me for days. The unlocked door is a gesture of belonging. One locked door between me and the world is enough.

Brad tears the paper wrapper from his chopsticks. He is getting exasperated. “If someone were here, they would text you to come down.”

“What if they didn’t have my number?”
What if Carly May showed up at my door?
Could that be what I’m waiting for?

“So install a doorbell. Better yet, ask your landlady to do it.”

I spoon rice onto my plate. “What’s gotten into you? Has something happened? I hardly recognize you. And you don’t seem nearly excited enough about this movie.”

“So maybe I’m not,” he says darkly—and, as far as I can tell, absurdly. He serves himself distractedly, glopping heaps of everything on his plate. “Maybe I actually want to be serious for once. Or
maybe
”
—
he takes a gulp of his wine—“
maybe
I just saw that Sean kid hanging around outside when I came in. And maybe I saw him lurking out there a few nights ago, too, when I happened to be driving by.”

“Okay, okay! I’ll lock the door. I’ll lock it right now, all right? Will that make you happy? And I’ll talk to the landlady about a doorbell, I promise. Better? Jesus. And Brad, don’t worry about Sean. He’s a weird kid, but he’s harmless, I’ve decided. He probably lives in the neighborhood.”

Brad pokes at his rice, carves a crater down the middle, watches it fill with brown sauce. Finally he says slowly: “You’re a mysterious woman, Lois Lonsdale. I hang out with you all the time, and I swear, sometimes I wonder if I know you at all.”

“Of course you do.” I wave my chopsticks at him. “Now eat. Watch. Prepare yourself for
La Sauvage.
”

“It’s
le sauvage
. It’s masculine.”

“Oh, shut up, I know. Don’t be such a pedant.” Actually, though, I’m relieved. Brad sounds more like himself. I hope his mood has passed; loner or not, I’d rather not lose my only ally.

*   *   *

I have been telling stories to psychiatrists and psychotherapists of various descriptions for years. Not in this town, though; it didn’t strike me as advisable to acquire a shrink in a small college town, where you would have the same therapist as practically everyone you knew, and you would probably run into her at the grocery store, the coffee shop, the movies. I like to keep my life more compartmentalized than that.

Oddly enough, I haven’t missed it. I relinquished long ago the idea that a psychiatrist might
help
me in any way, might cure me, improve my ability to function. I am not sick, for one thing. And I am extremely functional. A very strange thing happened to me, long, long ago, that’s all. That does not constitute illness. I don’t dispute that it has shaped me, helped to make me who I am. But so what? Must that process be endlessly probed, analyzed, investigated? To what end?

No one has ever suggested that Richardson’s Pamela was traumatized, despite the amount of time she was forced to bed down with Mrs. Jewkes and suffer her master’s peculiar assaults, despite the current trendiness of trauma theory in literary studies. No, Pamela just gets on with her life. As have I.

The truth is, I only kept up the therapy as long as I did because I enjoyed the audience: a weekly storytelling forum, an open mic at which I was always the featured performer and the audience was small, rapt, and sworn to secrecy. I liked to talk it over: how we spent our days, Carly and Zed and I, what we read, what we ate. I stuck to the truth, but I didn’t dig too deep. I have no idea whether it did me any good, therapeutically speaking, but it gave me pleasure. If anything, that’s what I miss.

And now I have Sean. I can’t imagine that this book he plans to write will ever materialize—and if it did, who would read it? The boy can hardly string two coherent sentences together. I’m safe. I can tell him whatever I want, blend fact and fiction with abandon. This is a closed circle. No stories escape.

Sean’s own story remains something of a mystery; he’s extremely guarded. But the more I see of him, the better sense I have of what it must have been like to be Zed’s son. To lose him so dramatically: first to his parents’ breakup, then to me and Carly, finally to a bullet; to grow up with horror stories instead of a father. Sean is permanently damaged; something is awry in that boy. I’m lying when I tell Brad he’s harmless. But he will not hurt me. He needs me; I can feed him stories until he explodes. And I think he is on some sort of threshold. I can’t say how I know this, but I am convinced that I do. I think he will find that it is time to take the next step.

As Gary is doing now.

Should I be afraid? Am I unleashing some kind of monster? Should I warn Carly? Chloe, I mean?

If I am honest, I think that what I want most is to find out what happens next. How long will mere words be enough—for Gary or for Sean? Their trajectories are coming into alignment.

*   *   *

For Worse
is a good movie—Chloe’s best, maybe. Brad enjoys it in spite of himself. We polish off a couple of bottles of wine and an obscene amount of Chinese food—I can’t remember when I last ate so much. He hugs me before he leaves, and I feel dangerously close to crying. “See, I’m not a monster,” I hear myself saying into Brad’s shoulder.

“No one ever said you were a monster,” he says, sounding surprised. He smooths my hair, gives my back a couple of staccato thumps intended to be reassuring.

But I feel as if someone has said precisely that. The question is who, and why.

Chloe

I haven’t taken every role I’ve ever been offered; I don’t mean to give the impression that I am a complete whore, career-wise. I’ve turned down plenty of parts—one, for instance, in an unbelievably stupid romantic-comedy-slash-art-heist pic that actually went on to make a ridiculous amount of money. I don’t do nudity—or I haven’t; I would, for the right role—but that movie would have required me to cavort naked around a museum for absolutely no good reason. Essential to the plot? Um, no. Essential to the development of the character? Only if it was essential that the character be a dimwit exhibitionist floozy. Which apparently it was. (The actress who did take the part has played pretty much nothing but dimwit-exhibitionist-floozy roles since then. Sure, she’s a household name, but so is Velveeta.)

I do have standards—I really do—though I also take plenty of jobs purely for a paycheck. I’m not ashamed. I need my paychecks. And that’s why this afternoon finds me posing with a shampoo bottle, gently shaking my golden curls while smiling seductively at the camera. “Try it again,” orders the director. “I want your dress to swirl more when you make that turn.” Next, he complains that a strand of my hair has slipped behind my back due to overenthusiastic twirling. The hair people rush in and smooth my outrageously silken locks. (Whatever they’ve done to my hair has nothing to do with Sauvage shampoo, just so you know. It’s all a big fat lie.) Somebody tweaks an eyelash that has apparently gotten stuck to its neighbor. Then we do it again. And again. “Honey, stop acting,” Sebastian yells at one point, and I know that
honey
is not what he means. “For fuck’s sake. This is about pretty. Be pretty. Be sexy. Don’t act. Be. It’s about your fucking hair. Don’t upstage the hair.” By
act,
I think he means
look human.
Humanity is not the point. Personality is not the point. I get it. “Am I crazy,” he asks the room, “or did we have this conversation last time? Is it too much to ask her to remember that
one … little … thing
?” His voice rises as he gestures dramatically at his largely imaginary audience. I flip him off. I know exactly what I can get away with.