She jumped, then gaped at me, startled and guilty, as if she were the one who’d been caught. It was the girl from the pictures, a sadly average-looking girl with thin, drab hair and insect-like glasses on her face. She pulled off her earphones.
“Who are you?” she said.
“I’m an old friend of your mother’s,” I replied as casually as I could manage. “I was passing through town and thought I’d stop by. But I guess she’s not home.”
This flimsy pretext seemed, oddly, to satisfy her. I saw how unlike her mother she was; Ellen would have been all narrow-eyed suspicion. But this was an open, curious girl. Thank God.
“She won’t be back for a while,” she said.
“Darn,” I said, and then, because it seemed only natural, “Where is she?”
“Chicago, at the hospital.”
“Nothing wrong, I hope.”
My ignorance clearly surprised her. “Ricky had leukemia? But now he’s in remission.”
“Oh, that’s good,” I said. “That’s terrific. The house is beautiful. I haven’t seen it since your grandparents lived here.”
“I’ll show you my room, if you want.”
I followed her down the hall. She had a light, skipping step. Her room was Ellen’s old room, painted blue now and a little dark; she was one of those girls who pulls the shades and burrows in bed with a book (not the sort I ever knew well). Indeed, there was a pile of books heaped by the bed and even on top of it. The covers were mussed, as if she’d been underneath, reading.
But the place where she led me out of pride or habit was a large rectangular fishtank. The water bubbled merrily. A chair was poised beside the tank, as if the girl spent time there, watching her fish. And they were beautiful fish, I had to admit, though I wasn’t fish-inclined. The two smallest were a phosphorescent blue, like peacock feathers. “Those are damsels,” she said, seeing me notice. “Blue damselfish.”
“What’s that?” I asked dutifully, pointing at a fish with sharp prongs curved around its tail like a comma.
“An angel flame,” she said, then added proudly, “This is a saltwater tank.”
Having no idea what difference that made, I kept quiet.
The girl stood across the tank from me, eying my face through the percolating water. “Why do you wear sunglasses inside?” she asked.
“I had an accident,” I said. “A car accident.”
“I thought something happened,” she said. “Your face looks kind of strange. Does the light hurt your eyes, is that why you wear the glasses?”
“No,” I said. “They just look bad.”
“Can I see?”
“You don’t want to,” I said. “Really.”
“Yes, I do.”
She did. She wanted to see my eyes, this girl, and came back around the tank for that purpose, slim, wiry, her head about the height of my chest. I’d been wrong about her age: she was older than thirteen. She seemed almost like an adult. “Believe me,” she said, “I can handle it.”
I took off the glasses. The room wasn’t nearly as dark as I’d thought. The girl looked evenly into my eyes: the gaze of someone who has already seen her share of pain, and knows what it looks like.
“How will you look after it heals?” she asked.
“Like I looked before, more or less. These doctors, you know, they’re fantastic.”
She nodded. I had the feeling she didn’t believe me.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Charlotte,” she said.
I thought at first that I’d misheard her. I didn’t ask again—just let the surprise ricochet through me once, then dissipate. “No kidding,” I said. “Mine, too.” Right away I saw my mistake; she would tell Ellen, and Ellen would know what had happened to me.
“That’s incredible!” she said. “I don’t know any other Charlottes. Only one Charlene.”
“Charlotte is a better name.”
“I think so, too,” she said. “It’s fancy.”
There was a pause. To distract her, I asked, “And your uncle? Is he still called Moose?”
The girl smiled, blood rising to her cheeks. Same old Moose, I thought.
“You knew my uncle?” she asked, with excitement. “Before?”
“A little,” I said noncommittally. “Before what?”
“Everything that happened,” she said, and some memory grazed me, then, some disturbing thing I’d heard about Moose. I couldn’t call it back. “He’s still called Moose,” was all she said.
I had been trying, in as relaxed a manner as possible, to steer us from her room in the direction of the front stairs. But just as I began my gimping descent, just as I was beginning to rejoice at having slithered from this potential debacle without having so much as roused the suspicions of my young hostess—just then, a shadow of prudence fell over her. “Don’t you … want to leave a message? Or a note?” she asked, pattering down the stairs behind me.
“No, that’s okay.” I was struggling with the front door.
“But I—I thought you—” Even as she helped me open it, I felt the beat of worry in her, which provoked in me a corresponding guilt, as if I’d nabbed the family silver and were about to make a run for it.
“Tell your mom I’m sorry I missed—”
“What’s your—”
But I was out the door, loping across the lawn—a freakish sight that must have been—away from her.
As I hurried back to Mary Cunningham’s, I was gripped by jealousy so sharp and unexpected that it felt like sickness. I wanted that girl. She was mine, she should have been mine; even her name was mine. I wanted that house, that life; the kid with cancer—I wanted it. I wanted children, people around me. I wanted to send a young Charlotte into the world to live a different life from mine.
Such feelings of envy and remorse were so alien to me that I hardly knew how to respond. There was a voice that spoke to me at times of internal duress in exactly the way I spoke to Grace: briskly reassuring at first, and if that didn’t work, brusque to the point of bullying. All my life I had heard that voice, and when its scolding was not enough to still the fear in me, I took action—walked, danced, made phone calls—whatever was required to stop the whining. I despised whining, my own more than anyone’s.
But now I was too tired to move. I collapsed onto the daybed Mary Cunningham kept in her front room, unable yet to attempt the stairs, and decided I would inquire that very evening about the precise contents of that swank liquor cabinet I’d noticed in her living room. In the Midwest you could usually count on a decent stock, even at an old lady’s house. My face ached and throbbed; I’d stayed out too long. Upstairs, when I wiped off my pancake makeup with the special creams Dr. Fabermann had given me, my monstrous reflection looked more angry and swollen than it had in days. Like a newborn, I thought, exchanging looks with my frantic, scalded eyes—a newborn howling in pain and outrage.
I soaked a cotton pad in vitamin E oil and gently swabbed my face. I spoke to it in tones that were uncharacteristically soothing. “There, there, come on now,” I said, “it’s not so bad,” dabbing the oil on my hot skin. Everything will be fine. This is the angry healing phase, that’s all. It will end and then you’ll have a new face—your old face but new again, like Ellen’s house. This is your Charlotte, I thought, looking at myself in the mirror. This is your Charlotte, and you must take good care of her so she’ll grow up to be a beautiful girl, and live an extraordinary life.
Chapter Two
It was almost a new year, 199–, by the time I ceased malingering and returned to New York. There, Dr. Martin Miller, plastic surgeon-cum-society dinner guest, performed a second operation to “fine tune” my bone-grafted nose, my crooked eyelids, and my cheekbones: the tools of my trade, you might say. Dr. Miller, who was married to a model, normally devoted his reconstructive powers to making wealthy, attractive people look even more attractive—not scrapping with the “gross disfiguration” that follows cataclysmic trauma to the face. But he’
d given nips and tucks and blasts of suction to enough of my friends that he took me on as a favor. He worked from photographs, which of course I had in bulk, and would do his best, he said, to make me look like myself.
“After such a trauma, Charlotte,” he warned, “restoration will always fall short of perfection.”
“I was never perfect,” I said. “In fact, I’m expecting some improvements on the original.”
Grace came back to New York with me in mid-December so I wouldn’t have to face my empty apartment alone. I had lived for seven years on the twenty-fifth floor of a modern high-rise at the end of a cul de sac on East Fifty-second Street, so my view encompassed the East River, the bottom of Roosevelt Island and Long Island City. The apartment was in better shape than I’d feared; Anastasia, my alcoholic cleaning woman (as I had discovered when the vodka in my freezer turned to solid ice), had gone so far as to shampoo the wall-to-wall carpet, so the place looked better than usual. The doorman had been forwarding my mail and Grace had paid my mortgage and bills from my savings, so aside from the diminished balance in my account, no awful surprises awaited me. Grace stayed two weeks, nursing me through my second operation until the bandages came off and the ointment was out of my eyes. On the day before she left, we took a cab to Central Park and wandered in the aching cold, I wearing my now standard uniform of a head scarf (wool, for the change in season), dark glasses and pancake makeup, Grace in the black mink coat Frank had given her last Christmas.
“Watch out no one sprays that coat,” I said.
“Sprays it?”
“With paint. You know, animal rights.”
Grace laughed. “I thought you meant someone might pee on me.”
“Jesus. Is that what you think goes on in New York?”
“Worse,” she said sweetly.
A weird sequence of weather events had left a thin skin of ice around every tree and branch and twig. Each time the wind blew, a splintery groan issued from all directions at once.
“What will you do after I leave?” Grace asked.
“Finish getting better,” I said, pulling the scarf tighter around my face. “Unleash myself on the world.”
“And then what?”
“Isn’t that something? Considering where I started?”
“I mean what will you do? How will you live?” Her face was sharp with worry.
“Stop,” I said.
We stood in silence. Grace looked at the sky. She was one of those people who so overestimate their own subtlety that they end up divulging their worst fears in detail. I knew she thought my life was ruined.
“You can always come back,” she said, “if you feel like it.”
“After five months in Rockford! I’ll have convulsions if I go back.”
“Oh, please,” Grace said, “spare me that act.”
During my recovery from my second operation, I let my machine answer the phone, watched a lot of TV and became an unofficial monitor of East River boat traffic. It was far too cold to sit on my balcony, so I watched the slow parade from the soft white upholstery of my sectional couch: bright red tugboats and blue-and-white police boats and long flats of garbage held down by nets. I smoked Merits into a giant zinc ashtray. When I called people, I pretended I was still in Rockford, and when sirens or honking horns from the FDR managed to vault the twenty-five floors to where I sat, I pressed the mute button.
Why didn’t I urge my friends to bring me casseroles and groceries and lounge with me on my sectional couch? Because I was weak. Oh, yes, that is the time when you need people most, I assured myself as the silence thumped at my ears. But you have to resist. Because once they’ve seen you like this, once they’ve witnessed your dull, uneven hair and raspy voice, your hesitancy and cringing need for love, your smell—the smell of your weakness!—they’ll never forget, and long after you’ve regained your vitality, after you yourself have forgotten these exhibits of your weakness, they’ll look at you and still see them.
Late one afternoon, I heard the machine pick up as I watched the early darkness fall over Long Island City. It was Anthony Halliday, the detective. I’d forgotten him.
“You returned a call from me a couple of months ago,” he said. “I’ve been leaving you messages since then.”
I had a dim recollection of someone telling me this detective was in a mental hospital, but my memories of the Rockford convalescence were already so muted and strange that I couldn’t be sure. He sounded sane enough. I waited a half hour and called him back.
“Anthony Halliday,” he answered.
“Charlotte Swenson,” I countered.
“Charlotte Swenson.” He sounded pleased to hear from me. “Are you back in New York?”
“Not yet.”
“I understand you had a serious car accident.”
“Yes,” I said, then faltered, unwilling to elaborate. “So what’s this about?”
“A guy disappeared a few months ago,” the detective said. “He went by the name of ‘Z.’ I understand you knew him.”
“I knew who he was.”
In the small and protean circle of nightclubs where for years I’d spent a portion of my time, Z had become something of a fixture in the months before my accident. He was one of those people whom it was impossible, and slightly unpleasant, to imagine in daylight.
“What does that mean?” I asked. “Disappeared.”
“No one’s seen him since August.”
“Do they think something happened to him?”
“‘They’ is me, at this point,” he said. “The police aren’t really involved.”
“Why are you looking for him?”
“Hey,” he said, and laughed. “I’m asking the questions.”
“Well, that’s not much fun for me.”
Was I flirting with this detective, this Anthony Halliday? It had been so long, I wasn’t even sure.
“I’d like to meet with you when you’re back in New York,” he said. “When will that be? ”
“Couple of weeks.”
“I’ll call you in three,” he said. “Meantime, take care. Get well.”
“You, too,” I said.
There was a startled pause. He hung up without saying good-bye.
It was not until late January that I finally made a lunch date with Oscar, my booker. By then my face had been healed, or “settled,” as I thought of it, from the second operation, for almost a month. But I’d postponed its reckoning with the world for the simple reason that I still didn’t know what I looked like. I’d spent as long as an hour staring through the ring of chalky light around my bathroom mirror; I’d held up old pictures of myself beside my reflection and tried to compare them. But my sole discovery was that in addition to not knowing what I looked like now, I had never known. The old pictures were no help; like all good pictures, they hid the truth. I had never kept a bad one—this was one of my cardinal rules, photographically speaking. One: never let someone take your picture until you’re ready, or the result will almost certainly be awful. Two: never keep bad pictures of yourself for any reason, sentimental or otherwise. Bad pictures reveal you in exactly the light you wish never to be seen, and not only will they be found, if you keep them, but invariably by the single person in the world you least want to see you that way.
Now I’d made a new discovery: bad pictures were the only ones that could show you what you actually looked like. I would have killed for one.
Eventually I gave up, and made the date with Oscar.
We met at Raw Feed, a restaurant in the West Twenties whose front man was Jess DeSoto, a garrulous male model and my friend. I arrived early and stood outside for several minutes, touching my hair and face, leaping away from the glass doors each time people approached to go in or out. It felt like years, not months, since anyone had seen me.
Jess DeSoto was part of my generation of models. I’d worked with him countless times over the years, slept with him twice while waiting out a rainstorm in Barbados, attended his wedding, and bought
a silver rattle at Barney’s when Geo, his little boy, was born. Now he gave me one of those warm, flustered hellos you give to people you know you should know, but don’t. I looked straight into his eyes and told him I was meeting Oscar, awaiting the crack of recognition, his embarrassed laughter and passionate hug of apology. Nothing. “This way,” he said, and with his swaggering walk led me to a booth along the wall and set two menus down. “Enjoy,” he said, and hurried off to greet another party.
I slid into the booth. My encounter with Jess affected me like a cuff to the head, leaving behind it a slightly blinkered calm. I watched the winter light pour through the plate-glass windows and waited for Oscar to come and set things right.
Other people I knew passed my table: Annette Blanque, my Paris agent; Sutie Wa, a model friend; Mitch and Hasam, club promoters-cum-Hollywood consultants on a remake of Saturday Night Fever that hovered perpetually on the verge of production. Each one of these people looked at me in the particular way people do inside the fashion world: a quick, ravenous glance that demands beauty or power as its immediate reward. And then they looked away, as if what they had seen were not just unfamiliar, but without possibility. I ordered a vodka martini and lit a cigarette. The waiter came and asked me not to smoke.
Oscar kissed me hello on both cheeks and slid into the booth, sitting at such an angle that we weren’t facing each other directly. Oscar was the only black man I’d ever seen who truly looked as if he’d been raised by East Coast bluebloods. Anyone can wear J. Crew, of course; what set Oscar apart was the disregard with which he wore far more expensive clothing—rumpled blazers, shoes without socks, cashmere slacks—all of which managed to suggest a lifetime of money. This was a triumph of pure self-invention. Oscar had begun his life as someone else, but who that was seemed impolite to ask, when Oscar had taken such pains to efface him. The only clues I had were two thick scars on his left forearm, a tinge of a Caribbean accent (audible when he was tired) and, of course, his shadow self: that caricature that clings to each of us, revealing itself in odd moments when we laugh or fall still, staring brazenly from certain bad photographs. After the accident, I had lost the power to see people’s shadow selves, but as my vision improved, and as the fog burned off whichever cerebral lobe I required for this visual archeology, the shadows had slowly been returning. Oscar’s was a portrait of sheer grief, a face so anguished it resembled a death’s head. Not that Oscar himself looked anything like this; he had a lively, beautiful face and perfect white teeth (not a single cavity, he’d told me). It was only occasionally, when he dragged on a cigarette, that I glimpsed the other—a nagging, flickering presence. I had been studying people’s shadow selves for many years, but Oscar’s still had the power to shock me—so gaping was its contrast to his apparent self. Yet this was often the case in the fashion world, where beauty, the best disguise of all, was so commonplace.