I say, “Kwvne wivnuw fw sojaoa.”
“No,” Brandy says and puts up her foot-long index finger, six cocktail rings stacked on just this one finger, and she presses her jeweled hotdog up and down across my mouth the moment I try and say anything.
“Not a word,” Brandy says. “You’re still too connected to your past. Your saying anything is pointless.”
From out of her sewing basket, Brandy draws a streamer of white and gold, a magic act, a layer of sheer white silk patterned with a Greek key design in gold she casts over my head.
Behind another veil, the real world is that much farther away.
“Guess how they do the gold design,” Brandy says.
The fabric is so light my breath blows it out in front; the silk lays across my eyelashes without bending them. Even my face, where every nerve in your body comes to an end, even my face can’t feel it.
It takes a team of kids in India, Brandy says, four-and five-year-old kids sitting all day on wooden benches, being vegetarians, they have to tweeze out most of about a zillion gold threads to leave the pattern of just the gold left behind.
“You don’t see kids any older than ten doing this job,” Brandy says, “because by then most kids go blind.”
Just the veil Brandy takes out of her basket must be six feet square. The precious eyesight of all those darling children, lost. The precious days of their fragile childhood spent tweezing silk threads out.
Give me pity.
Flash.
Give me empathy.
Flash.
Oh, I wish I could make my poor heart just bust.
I say, “Vswf siws cm eiuvn sincs.”
No, it’s okay, Brandy says. She doesn’t want to reward anybody for exploiting children. She got it on sale.
Caged behind my silk, settled inside my cloud of organza and georgette, the idea that I can’t share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems.
“Oh, and don’t worry,” Brandy says. “You’ll still get attention. You have a dynamite tits and ass combo. You just can’t talk to anybody.”
People just can’t stand not knowing something, she tells me. Especially men can’t bear not climbing every mountain, mapping everywhere. Labeling everything. Peeing on every tree and then never calling you back.
“Behind a veil, you’re the great unknown,” she says. “Most guys will fight to know you. Some guys will deny you’re a real person, and some will just ignore you.”
The zealot. The atheist. The agnostic.
Even if somebody is only wearing an eye patch, you always want to look. To see if he’s faking. The man in the Hathaway Shirt. Or to see the horror underneath.
The photographer in my head says:
Give me a voice.
Flash.
Give me a face.
Brandy’s answer was little hats with veils. And big hats with veils. Pancake hats and pillbox hats edged all around with clouds of tulle and gauze. Parachute silk or heavy crepe or dense net dotted with chenille pompoms. “The most boring thing in the entire world,” Brandy says, “is nudity.”
The second most boring thing, she says, is honesty.
“Think of this as a tease. It’s lingerie for your face,” she says. “A peekaboo nightgown you wear over your whole identity.”
The third most boring thing in the entire world is your sorry-assed past. So Brandy never asked me anything. Bulldozer alpha bitch she can be, we meet again and again in the speech therapist office and Brandy tells me everything I need to know about myself.
CHAPTER TEN
Jump to Brandy Alexander tucking me into a Seattle bed. This is the night of the Space Needle, the night the future doesn’t happen. Brandy, she’s wearing yards and yards of black tulle wrapped around her legs, twisted up and around her hourglass waist. Black veil crosses her torpedo breasts and loops up and over the top of her auburn hair. All this sparkle that bends over beside my bed could be the trial-sized mock-up for the original summer night sky.
Little rhinestones, not the plastic ones pooped out by a factory in Calcutta but the Austrian crystal ones cut by elves in the Black Forest, these little star-shaped rhinestones are set all over the black tulle. The queen supreme’s face is the moon in the night sky that bends over and kisses me good night. My hotel room is dark, and the television at the foot of my bed is turned on so the handmade stars twinkle in all the colors the television is trying to show us.
Seth’s right, the television does make me God. I can look in on anybody and every hour the lives change. Here in the real world, that’s not always the case.
“I will always love you,” the queen of the night sky says, and I know which postcard she’s found.
The hotel sheets feel the same as the hospital sheets. This is thousands of miles since we met, and the big fingers of Brandy are still smoothing the blankets under where my chin used to be. My face is the last thing the go-go boys and girls want to meet when they go into a dark alley looking to buy drugs.
Brandy says, “We’ll be back as soon as we sell out.”
Seth is silhouetted in the open doorway to the hall. How he looks from my bed is the terrific outline of a superhero against the neon green and gray and pink tropical leaves of the hallway wallpaper. His coat, the long black leather coat Seth wears, is fitted tight until the waist and then flares from there down so in outline you think it’s a cape.
And maybe when he kisses Brandy Alexander’s royal butt he’s not just pretending. Maybe it’s the two of them in love when I’m not around. This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve lost him.
The face surrounded in black veil that leans over me is a surprise of color. The skin is a lot of pink around a Plumbago mouth, and the eyes are too aubergine. Even these colors are too garish right now, too saturated, too intense. Lurid. You think of cartoon characters. Fashion dolls have pink skin like this, like plastic bandages. Flesh tone. Too aubergine eyes, cheekbones too defined by Rusty Rose blusher. Nothing is left to your imagination.
Maybe this is what guys want. I just want Brandy Alexander to leave.
I want Seth’s belt around my neck. I want Seth’s fingers in my mouth and his hands pulling my knees apart and then his wet fingers prying me open.
“If you want something to read,” Brandy says, “that Miss Rona Barrett book is in my room. I can run get it.”
I want to be rubbed so raw by the stubble around Seth’s mouth that it will hurt when I pee.
Seth says, “Are you coming?”
A ring-beaded hand tosses the television remote control onto the bed.
“Come on, Princess Princess,” Seth says. “The night’s not getting any younger.”
And I want Seth dead. Worse than dead, I want him fat and bloated with water and insecure and emotional. If Seth doesn’t want me, I want to not want him.
“If the police or anything happens,” the moon tells me, “the money is all in my make-up case.”
The one I love is already gone out to warm up the car. The one who will love me forever says, “Sleep tight,” and closes the door behind her.
Jump to once a long time ago, Manus, my fiancé who dumped me, Manus Kelley, the police detective, he told me that your folks are like God because you want to know they’re out there and you want them to approve of your life, still you only call them when you’re in crisis and need something.
Jump back to me in bed in Seattle, alone with the TV remote control I hit a button on and make the television mute.
On television are three or four people in chairs sitting on a low stage in front of a television audience. This is on television like an infomercial, but as the camera zooms in on each person for a close-up, a little caption appears across the person’s chest. Each caption on each close-up is a first name followed by three or four words like a last name, the sort of literal who-they-really-are last names that Indians give to each other, but instead of Heather Runs With Bison…Trisha Hunts By Moonlight, these names are:
&
nbsp; Cristy Drank Human Blood
Roger Lived With Dead Mother
Brenda Ate Her Baby
I change channels.
I change channels.
I change channels and here are another three people:
Gwen Works As Hooker
Neville Was Raped In Prison
Brent Slept With His Father
People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future. I hit a button and give Gwen WorksAsHooker her voice back for a little soundbite of prostitute talk.
Gwen shapes her story with her hands as she talks. She leans forward out of her chair. Her eyes are watching something up and to the right, just off camera. I know it’s the monitor. Gwen’s watching herself tell her story.
Gwen balls her fingers until only the left index finger is out, and she slowly twists her hand to show both sides of her fingernail as she talks.
“…to protect themselves, most girls on the street break off a little bit of razor blade and glue it under their fingernail. Girls paint the razor nail so it looks like a regular fingernail.” Here, Gwen sees something in the monitor. She frowns and tosses her red hair back off what look like pearl earrings.
“When they go to jail,” Gwen tells herself in the monitor, “or when they’re not attractive anymore, some girls use the razor nails to slash their wrists.”
I make Gwen WorksAsHooker mute again.
I change channels.
I change channels.
I change channels.
Sixteen channels away, a beautiful young woman in a sequined dress is smiling and dropping animal wastes into a Num Num Snack Factory.
Evie and me, we did this infomercial. It’s one of those television commercials you think is a real program except it’s just a thirty-minute pitch. The television camera cuts to another girl in a sequined dress, this one is wading through an audience of snow birds and Midwest tourists. The girl offers a golden anniversary couple in matching Hawaiian shirts a selection of canapés from a silver tray, but the couple and everybody else in their double knits and camera necklaces, they’re staring up and to the right at something off camera.
You know it’s the monitor.
It’s eerie, but what’s happening is the folks are staring at themselves in the monitor staring at themselves in the monitor staring at themselves in the monitor, on and on, completely trapped in a reality loop that never ends.
The girl with the tray, her desperate eyes are contact lens too green and her lips are heavy red outside the natural lip line. The blonde hair is thick and teased up so the girl’s shoulders don’t look so big-boned. The canapés she keeps waving under all the old noses are soda crackers pooped on with meat by-products. Waving her tray, the girl wades further up into the studio audience bleachers with her too green eyes and big-boned hair. This is my best friend, Evie Cottrell.
This has to be Evie because here comes Manus stepping up to save her with his good looks. Manus, special police vice operative that he is, he takes one of those pooped-on soda crackers and puts it between his capped teeth. And chews. And tilts his handsome square-jawed face back and closes his eyes, Manus closes his power-blue eyes and twists his head just so much side to side and swallows.
Thick black hair like Manus has, it reminds you how people’s hair is just vestigial fur with mousse on it. Such a sexy hair dog, Manus is.
The square-jawed face rocks down to give the camera a full-face eyes-open look of complete and total love and satisfaction. So déjà vu. This was exactly the same look Manus used to give me when he’d ask if I got my orgasm.
Then Manus turns to give the exact same look to Evie while the studio audience all looks off in another direction, watching themselves watch themselves watch themselves watch Manus smile with total and complete love and satisfaction at Evie.
Evie smiles back her red outside the natural lipline smile at Manus, and I’m this tiny sparkling figure in the background. That’s me just over Manus’s shoulder, tiny me smiling away like a space heater and dropping animal matter into the Plexiglas funnel on top of the Num Num Snack Factory.
How could I be so dumb.
Let’s go sailing.
Sure.
I should’ve known the deal was Manus and Evie all the time.
Even here, lying in a hotel bed a year after the whole story is over, I’m making fists. I could’ve just watched the stupid infomercial and known Manus and Evie had some tortured sick relationship they wanted to think was true love.
Okay, I did watch it. Okay, about a hundred times I watched it, but I was only watching myself. That reality loop thing.
The camera comes back to the first girl, the one on stage, and she’s me. And I’m so beautiful. On television, I demonstrate the easy cleanability of the snack factory, and I’m so beautiful. I snap the blades out of the Plexiglas cover and rinse off the chewed-up animal waste under running water. And, jeez, I’m beautiful.
The disembodied voiceover is saying how the Num Num Snack Factory takes meat by-products, whatever you have—your tongues or hearts or lips or genitals—chews them up, seasons them, and poops them out in the shape of a spade or a diamond or a club onto your choice of cracker for you to eat yourself.
Here in bed, I’m crying.
Bubba-Joan GotHerJawShotOff.
All these thousands of miles later, all these different people I’ve been, and it’s still the same story. Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that’s usually how you end up crying? How is it you can keep mutating and still be the same deadly virus?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jump back to when I first got out of the hospital without a career or a fiancé or an apartment, and I had to sleep at Evie’s big house, her real house where even she didn’t like to live, it was so lonely, stuck way out in some rainforest with nobody paying attention.
Jump to me being on Evie’s bed, on my back that first night, but I can’t sleep.
Wind lifts the curtains, lace curtains. All Evie’s furniture is that curlicue Frenchy provincial stuff painted white and gold. There isn’t a moon, but the sky is full of stars, so everything—Evie’s house, the rose hedges, the bedroom curtains, the backs of my hands against the bedspread—are all either black or gray.
Evie’s house was what a Texas girl would buy if her parents kept giving her about ten million dollars all the time. It’s like the Cottrells know Evie will never make the big-time runways. So Evie, she lives here. Not New York. Not Milan. The suburbs, right out in the nowhere of professional modeling. This is pretty far from doing the Paris collections. Being stuck in nowhere is the excuse Evie needs, living here is, for a big-boned girl who’d never be a big-time success anywhere.
The doors are locked tonight. The cat is inside. When I look, the cat looks back at me the way dogs and some cars look when people say they’re smiling.
Just that afternoon, Evie was on the telephone begging me to check myself out of the hospital and come visit.
Evie’s house was big—white with hunter green shutters, a three-story plantation house fronted with big pillars. Needlepoint ivy and climbing roses—yellow roses—were climbed up around the bottom ten feet of each big pillar. You’d imagine Ashley Wilkes mowing the grass here, or Rhett Butler taking down the storm windows, but Evie, she has these minimum-wage slave Laotians who refuse to live in.
Jump to the day before, Evie driving me from the hospital. Evie really is Evelyn Cottrell, Inc. No, really. She’s traded publicly now. Everybody’s favorite write-off. The Cottrells made a private stock offering in her career when Evie was twenty-one, and all the Cottrell relatives with their Texas land and oil money are heavily invested in Evie’s being a model failure.
Most times it was an embarrassment going to modeling look-see auditions with Evie. Sure, I’d get work, but then the art director or the stylist would start screaming at Evie that, no, in his expert opinion
she was not a perfect size six. Most times, some assistant stylist had to wrestle Evie out the door. Evie would be screaming back over her shoulder about how I shouldn’t let them treat me like a piece of meat. I should just walk out.
“Fuck ’em,” Evie’s screaming by this point. “Fuck ’em all.”
Me, I’m not angry. I’d be getting strapped into this incredible leather corset by Poopie Cadole and leather pants by Chrome Hearts. Life was good back then. I’d have three hours of work, maybe four or five.
At the photo studio doorway, before she’d get thrown out of the shoot, Evie would swing the assistant stylist into the doorjamb, and the little guy would just crumple up at her feet. It’s then Evie would scream, “You people can all suck the crap out of my sweet Texas ass.” Then she’d go out to her Ferrari and wait the three or four or five hours so she could drive me home.
Evie, that Evie was my best friend in the whole world. Moments like that, Evie was fun and quirky, almost like she had a life of her own.
Okay, so I didn’t know about Evie and Manus and their complete and total love and satisfaction. So kill me.
Jump to before that, Evie calling me at the hospital and begging me, please, could I discharge myself and come stay at her house, she was so lonely, please.
My health insurance had a two-million-dollar lifetime ceiling, and the meter had just run and run all summer. No social service contact had the guts to transition me into God only knows where.
Begging me on the telephone, Evie said she had plane reservations. She was going to Cancún for a catalogue shoot so would I, could I, please, just house-sit for her?
When she picked me up, on my pad I wrote: is that my halter top? you know you’re stretching it.
“You’ll need to feed my cat is all,” Evie says.