Everyone Is Beautiful

by Katherine Center

  When he stepped off his machine, I forced myself to keep walking. He was my husband! He had watched me give birth—three times! I was not going to hide at the water fountain like a thirteen-year-old girl. My heart was absolutely pounding as he started walking in my direction. I couldn't look. I may even have held my breath.

  But something happened as he left the gym that I never would have expected—something that left me wondering if we had let ourselves float so far apart during these baby-raising years that we had, on some level, truly become strangers. Because Peter walked right past my treadmill to head out of the gym. Just walked right on by, three feet away, and didn't even notice I was there.

  Chapter 16

  The very first time I ever heard Peter play piano was in college—a few days after he ‘d sketched my picture in Life Drawing. That day in class, I had thought he might give me the drawing. But he didn't. He just took it down after the critique, made his way back over to his easel, and slipped it into his portfolio. I was too shy to ask him for it. I was too shy to even try to talk to him again. Instead, I just messed around with my supplies, acting very busy and preoccupied, until he left.

  Once he was gone, I went to the window to look at the sidewalk down below, and when he appeared on the path, I watched him work his way toward the cafeteria. My stomach was in a fist. I had blown it. He had drawn my picture in art class, and I hadn't even thanked him. I had barely even spoken.

  If I were a smart girl, if I were the girl I wanted to be, I'd have walked right over to him after class, brought my body up next to him, and put my mouth to his in a great passionate kiss there in front of everybody. If I had risen to the moment, I would have done something as brave as he had. At the very least, I could have carried his drawing supplies to lunch.

  But now he was limping down the path to the cafeteria alone. A guy on a bike waved at him, then hopped off to walk alongside and carry his things. I stood at the window until they had rounded the arts building, and then I slowly packed up my stuff, dropping my own uninspired drawing of our class nude in the trash can on the way out.

  After that, I was sure I'd lost him. He had put himself out there in the most exceptional public way, and all I had said to him was, “I think you're going to get in trouble.” What I should have offered was encouragement, some kind of gesture to bring him closer. But I'd been too scared. I revised the moment over and over in my mind, making myself braver each time. But what had happened had happened. I had missed my chance.

  I kept an eye out for him everywhere after that. With those crutches, he should have been easy to spot. But as the days went by and I didn't see him, I started to worry that I'd been wrong to see his drawing as a gesture of love.

  “Don't be stupid,” Connor said. “Of course he likes you.”

  “Maybe he was just uninspired by the model,” I said.

  “No,” Connor said.

  “Maybe his final project will be to draw every person in the class, and he just started with me.”

  Connor thought about that one. “That's more plausible,” she said.

  Peter and I were, in fact, the two students that Shane liked best in that class. In any given critique, Shane pointed out our drawings as examples to everybody else. I was an art major, so I was hungry for the praise and encouragement. Peter, of course, was a music major, so he didn't really care.

  It was conceivable that Peter had worked out some kind of funky, real-people final project with Shane. I was still stewing over what mine would be, and we didn't have to decide for a month yet. But Peter had a kind of enviable, easy brilliance like that. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that I was just a drawing project.

  “But what about the other day in my room?” Connor demanded.

  “Maybe we misread it,” I said. “Maybe we wanted to believe so much I was the person he liked, that's what we saw.”

  Suddenly, we could think of a hundred reasons Peter might have seemed nervous in Connor's room.

  “Maybe he suddenly remembered he'd forgotten to turn in a paper,” she offered.

  “Maybe it was an instant headache,” I said, building momentum. “Or a stomach cramp. Or a wave of nausea.” What had we been thinking? We were stupid girls. We could so easily have conjured the whole thing. In seconds, we had come up with more alternate reasons for his behavior than I cared to count, including a forgotten tutorial, a previously unrevealed shy streak, a panic attack, a toe cramp, and—Connor's suggestion—a sudden bout of diarrhea. But when I thought about his eyes that night at the moment he saw me there in her room, I wanted it to be love so badly that I had to rest my head in my hands.

  Now I was desperate to see him. I needed new interactions to help me judge his feelings. But I was also discouraged. Connor and I had talked up a love and then talked it away. And that's why, on the night I found him playing piano in the lobby of their dorm, I could not bring myself to say hello.

  It was late. I had missed dinner working in the printmaking studio, and on the phone, Connor had offered me some of the apple strudel her mother had just sent. I had bundled up and walked over to her dorm, anticipating, as I always did, the detour I would take to walk past Peter's door and the tingle of fear I'd feel at the possibility that I might see him—but also at the idea that he could be in his room, just feet away from me, only a door between us. He had a bumper sticker on his door that said SAVE THE SKEET, a photo of him as a child in a cowboy hat, a photo of Bob Dylan, a quail feather, and a number of New Yorker cartoons that mocked classical musicians.

  But Peter wasn't in his room. He was in the lobby. I heard the music before I'd even walked into the building.

  The sound seemed to fill up the dorm. I knew it had to be him. I'd never heard him play, but I just knew. I stopped walking just inside the dorm doors and froze. I couldn't decide if I should walk past the common room or sneak up the back stairs and avoid the issue altogether. In the end, of course, I had to see him playing. I had to peek for myself.

  Peter was alone at the grand piano in the corner. His back was to me, and his crutches leaned against a nearby chair. I stood behind the doorway, just edging around. I was even afraid to look. I didn't want him to feel my eyes on him and turn around.

  But I didn't have to worry. The longer I watched him, the more I realized he was barely even in the room. His whole body was moving—his fingers and hands and arms, his good leg as he pumped the pedals, his shoulders. There was something so athletic about it. It was as if he were trying to climb into the keys somehow. As if he were more inside the music, pushed around by its currents, than he was making it. It was like nothing I'd ever seen.

  And the music itself. These days, in Cambridge, he played classical music, but back then, he played a lot of jazz, too. Even though almost everyone else in the music department played classical, Peter loved ragtime. Other music majors called him Joplin. He was a little bit famous.

  Right then, he was obsessed with a thing I'd never even heard of called stride piano, which was a way of jumping back and forth between octaves. He'd hit a chord down at one end, in the high notes, and the next second, he'd hit a corresponding chord in the middle with the same hand. His hands leapt out to the ends of the keyboard and then back together as if he were conducting an orchestra. I could not for the life of me imagine how he could move his hands that fast and hit the right keys every time. I knew next to nothing about music. But after that night I knew one thing for sure: He was incredible.

  And it turns out, he was incredible. At the end of the year, I wound up with one of the art awards, but he wound up with every music award there was.

  Watching him that night made everything worse, because now I knew what I was dealing with. He wasn't just a cute guy from the library. He was something special. There was a reason that I wasn't on fire for Rob Garrison and Steven McFarland or the other comparable boys in his dorm. It was because they weren't Peter. It was because Peter Coates, I knew, in that clearheaded way that only twenty-one-year-olds
can know things, was the only person I would ever love.

  I felt sick to my stomach after that. I couldn't even eat my apple strudel. I poked at it with a plastic fork while Connor talked about her anthropology paper on Australopithecus. I fidgeted to get back downstairs. I listened to determine if he was still down there playing.

  “These early hominids,” Connor was going on. “They're just really a mystery.”

  “Sure,” I nodded.

  “Don't you like the strudel?” Connor pointed at it.

  “Um,” I said. “I just walked past Peter.”

  She raised her eyebrows. A much better topic than hominids. “Did you say hi?”

  I shook my head.

  “Dammit!” she said, swatting at me. She resolved to send me back downstairs—I could see it in her face as she got up and moved to her dresser. She pulled out some hairspray and a comb and started to mess with my hair. I closed my eyes and wrinkled my nose. “Don't make me look like a drag queen,” I said.

  “I'm just freshening you up,” she said. “You look a little limp.”

  After hair, we did lipstick and eyeliner. Then she made me switch out my sweater for one of hers that was slightly tighter.

  When she sent me back downstairs, she had to push me out the door like a baby bird. She said, “Be brave!”

  “Come with me,” I begged.

  “Nope,” she said. Though I could tell she wanted to. “It would ruin the effect.”

  Peter was still playing. I could hear it, even up on the third floor. I steered myself down the stairs. I'd just tell him I loved his drawing. Easy. And then we'd either start chatting, or we wouldn't. He'd either reel me into conversation, or he wouldn't. We'd either have a spark, or we wouldn't. But all I had to do was say that one sentence to him, now with slightly better hair. “I loved your drawing.” Or maybe “loved” sounded too desperate. But “liked” seemed lukewarm. I settled on “really liked.” Then, judging from his reaction, I could convey extra passion by adding, “Really. A lot.” If that seemed appropriate.

  My hands felt clammy, and I shook them a little as I made it to the bottom of the stairs. The music was all around me now. I moved toward the common room—and it was suddenly full of people. Two guys—friends of Peter's—were tossing a Frisbee back and forth across the room, and a gaggle of girls were standing around the piano, talking to Peter and bobbing to the music.

  I froze, then turned and walked out of the dorm. Out on the sidewalk in the cold night, I could see Peter through the windows. The room was lit warm and yellow, and for the first time all night, I could see his face. He seemed cheerful and happy, and he was chatting a little with the girls. But he also seemed far away, like his mind was elsewhere, like the music was a louder voice to him than any person's in the room.

  Chapter 1 7

  On the night I had my free personal training session, I lost my wedding ring.

  It was a plain gold band, half of a his-and-hers matched pair that we ‘d bought from an estate jeweler for two hundred dollars. My ring was inscribed with the name “Herbert” and Peter's was inscribed with “Geneva.” I had insisted to Peter that I didn't mind having a pre-owned ring, that I liked the idea of its history, which was true. We'd had our own initials engraved in the rings to put our own stamp on them, but sometimes we called each other by those other names when we were feeling ornery.

  “Herb,” I'd say to Peter, “can you bring me a glass of water?”

  I'd squeezed my training session into the last hour before the gym closed. Only a few other people were there, including the couple I loved so much and Ted Koppel. I was a little embarrassed to have my ass kicked in front of Ted Koppel for some reason, and I kept wishing he would go home. The last thing I needed was someone taking note of how out of shape I was. Though that's exactly what the trainer was doing—on a clipboard. And not just any trainer. The ass-slapping trainer.

  He had turned out to be just as much of a flirt as Ted Koppel had promised that first night. I'd kept an eye on him. He flirted with absolutely everybody. His hand had been on every single ass in the room. His flirtatiousness was so broad, it was meaningless.

  But not when he was working. Now we were in training mode. Now he was a hard-ass turning me into a hard-body—in fifty-five minutes or less. He put me through a series of tests—how many push-ups I could do (five), how many times I could go up and down the stairs in two minutes (three), and how many times I could jump rope without tripping (forty-six)—marking everything off on a clipboard. It was deeply humiliating. I knew I was out of shape, but I had never quantified it in this manner. If I'd known he was going to be measuring me like this, I'd probably have declined the session. After a while, he put me back on the treadmill, tilted it as high as it would go, and had me walk on it until I thought my lungs might collapse.

  The next test was sit-ups. The trainer pulled out a mat and said, “Let's see how many you can do. Three minutes. Go.”

  First, let me say that I know how to do a sit-up. Everybody knows how to do a sit-up. It's a simple motion. But even though I knew exactly what to do, and even though I commanded my body to do it, I couldn't. It was a strange kind of paralysis. My brain was giving the command it always gave, but my body just didn't follow.

  “Go,” the trainer said again.

  “I can't,” I said.

  I'm sure the trainer, by virtue of his job, had met many people in his work who told him that they “couldn't” do something that he told them to do. I am equally sure that he thought those people were wimps. I did not know how to explain to him that I wasn't exaggerating. It wasn't that I didn't want to sit up. It was that I couldn't. Whatever muscles I had called on in the past to make that very same motion just weren't there.

  “They're there,” he said. “You just have to find them.”

  I lay flat. I told my body to move. Nothing happened. I thought about the dark brown stretch marks that had crisscrossed my belly like brambles each time I'd been pregnant. I imagined the muscles underneath looked just about as bad. Maybe I'd broken them. Or ruined them. Maybe my abdomen had just said, “Enough!” and thrown in the towel.

  Whatever was going on, I had to lie there for five excruciating minutes while he tried to pep-talk me into the five sit-up minimum.

  In the end, I got one—if we rounded up.

  So by the time we made it to the pull-up bar, I was ready to try extra hard, to show this perky fitness enthusiast that I didn't have a bad attitude. I gathered every ounce of gumption I had and pulled my chin up to the bar. But somehow, as I squeezed the bar, I managed to pinch the skin between the bar and my wedding ring. I dropped to the ground to look at my hand.

  “We ‘re not even close to done,” the trainer started to say, but I turned my hand, now pooling a dark blood blister under my ring, toward him. “Damn,” he said, a little impressed. I wasn't making this one up.

  He made me take off the ring and offered to hold it for me. He wasn't sure how big that blood blister was going to get, and it was clear that my jewelry was getting in the way of my personal best. But I wasn't going to hand off my wedding ring to a total stranger. In nine years of marriage, I had never taken it off. Instead, I tied the ring to the drawstring of my pants in a carefully tightened triple knot.

  At the end of the evaluation, we had learned many things about me: I had a strong back, biceps, and calves. My “areas for improvement” included my triceps, hamstrings, nonexistent stomach muscles, and pretty much everything else. We had also learned that I had a tendency to become sarcastic in the face of intimidating physical challenges, and that my positive attitude was questionable.

  I walked home, deciding that the whole point of “one free session” was to humiliate people into taking out loans to finance personal training. I hadn't expected such a graphic depiction of my state of disrepair. I'd just thought we were going to mess around on some of those machines for a while and wrap things up.

  It wasn't until I was almost home that I remembered to put my r
ing back on. I reached down and found the drawstring on my pants. Then I found that, despite my three very tight knots, it had come untied. My ring was gone.

  I turned and sprinted back up the hill to the gym doors, my muscles, which had already been quivering, screaming in protest the entire way. I couldn't remember the last time I'd run so fast. I didn't know then that the next day, and the day after it, and the day after that, I was going to be so sore I could barely make it up the steps or lift the baby. I didn't know then that my muscles were about to hurt so badly I wouldn't want to touch, much less use, them. All I knew was that I had to find my ring. Right away.

  The gym doors were locked when I got there, and everybody seemed to be gone. The lights were off inside. I knocked, and then banged, hoping maybe the trainer was in the back, wondering what Peter would say when I arrived home with no wedding ring—wondering if he would even notice, in fact. Or if he would just assume it to be there and fail to notice its absence the way I always failed to notice he ‘d gotten a haircut: I knew what his hair looked like. My eyes knew what to see without even looking.

  After a few minutes, I bent over to catch my breath and regroup. It was September now, and starting to get chilly. My T-shirt was wet with sweat, and I noticed suddenly that I was cold. And that's when Ted Koppel pulled over to the curb in his Jeep and rolled down the window.

  “Can't stay away?” he teased.

  I could not disguise the panic in my voice. I said, “I lost my wedding ring!” and then I turned to bang on the door some more.

  He made a sharp whistle like you might make to a dog.

  I turned around and he was holding it up to me. “I was just on my way to hock it,” he said.

  He leaned out the window and then, to my absolute disbelief, tossed the ring to me. I watched it fly up and then curve back down, and I had the sinking feeling I used to have in softball that, despite the importance of rising to the moment, I would drop it. I raised my hands, even as I imagined the ring flying past them, hitting the ground, rolling into the gutter—even as I wondered out loud what kind of a person would toss another person's wedding ring through the air like that.