Because She Is Beautiful

by Cameron Dougan

  "Perhaps you might show us four or five evening suits now," he said to the woman.

  Kim began to see that statements like these were directed as much to her as to the salesperson. They were part of a subtle education, and if she said something to reflect her study—"Those buttons are too decorative for daytime," or "It's a gorgeous linen, but not for dinner"—his eyes would sparkle. He seemed to take the greatest pleasure in teaching her.

  "Your perfume should be softer," he said. "I know a man. He will choose your fragrance."

  She wanted to share Robert's taste. She would receive compliments from strangers—women behind makeup counters, in dressing rooms—even her tailor noticed the changes in her clothes. They were people who didn't have to say anything, but they did. It seemed that Robert was always correct.

  The first time he visited her apartment was the first time they made love. He brought four bottles of wine.

  "Are we going to drink all that?" she said.

  "I want you to taste," he explained.

  She went to the kitchen and smoothed her skirt. She looked through the drawers for a corkscrew, digging through handfuls of unmatching silverware. Finally, she found one. She bent to check her hair in a metal tray by the sink and returned to the living room and sat down next to him.

  "What should we start with?" she said.

  "I thought the La Tour. It needs to be decanted."

  She hesitated.

  "Shall I help?" He kissed her. "Come, now."

  He led her back to the cramped kitchen and started to go through the cupboards. The paint on the doors was chipping, and a fingernail-sized fleck fluttered to the floor like a leaf. He seemed not to notice.

  "Let's see what we can do," he said. He moved some glasses and took down a vase. "Perfect, right? You're blushing."

  He touched her chin lightly, coaxing her face toward his. It was the purest gesture of tenderness, she thought.

  "You look lovely," he said. "Now, glasses. Do you not have red?"

  "Sorry?"

  "That's fine."

  He ushered her back to the living room and removed the foil from the neck of the first bottle. "After this, you will be spoiled. We'll finish the one you like best."

  He got the cork off and poured the wine into the vase.

  "That's splendid. We'll let it sit. I want to see the rest of your apartment. Do you have snaps?"

  She showed him the back of her dress. "They're buttons," she said, and he laughed.

  "Darling, I mean pictures."

  She took out the photo album her father had sent and began to flip through it.

  "Slower," he said, putting his hand over hers. "I want to savor them." He pointed to one. "Your mother and father?"

  "Just after they married."

  Her parents were holding hands. Her mother always looked great in photographs. It was a look she could sustain for the blink of an eye, without lines of worry—a dimpled smile that never appeared in life, only in pictures. It was how she wanted to be remembered. The smiles would endure. They would tell a different story. Her father was in uniform, dark jacket, white gloves, his head shaved to a bristle, a dusty shadow that would never again change length.

  "He fought at Okinawa," she said.

  Robert nodded gravely.

  "I don't know why I feel I always have to say that," she said.

  "You should be proud."

  "I guess I am."

  He looked at the photo some more.

  "You say he fought in the Korean War, too?"

  "Inchon."

  Robert shook his head. "I have to confess, I don't know where that is. Was that a specific fight?"

  "It's where the marines first landed, before we took back Seoul. Anytime there was an invasion, they'd send in my dad."

  "I'm sure he's an honorable man."

  "He says the military has changed."

  Robert nodded as if he agreed. His eyes were unjudging. She wondered what he was thinking.

  He turned the page to a picture of a young girl in a white dress, squatting in a sandbox with a shovel. A bow captured her bangs.

  "Now who's that?" He grinned.

  She liked the way he gestured, the way he held his wineglass, fingers split around the stem. The glass would tip, not out of carelessness, she thought, but playfully, as if he were teasing the wine to the rim. His movements were never sudden or distracting. She let his fingers trace the soft lines in her forehead.

  "You're too young to have these," he said.

  He stared and then turned back to the photo album.

  "So thin—look here, like a little match girl. Those knees: I bet the boys teased you. If they could see you now. I try to tell my son—but he won't listen—'If they look like a pinup at twelve, they won't later on.' It's the ones like you. Time is an artist. You will become more and more beautiful." He paused and touched her forehead playfully. "Unless you worry too much."

  She kicked off her shoes and folded her feet beneath her. Bit by bit, she began to lean against his shoulder. When she kissed him, she kissed softly, then forcefully. He allowed her to lead. He explained about the wines, their châteaus and the types of grapes used, what she should be tasting. Whispers tickled her ear. She began to undo his tie. His jacket slipped off. She unbuttoned his shirt and kissed the gray hairs on his chest and grasped his zipper. The photo album fell to the floor. She swung her feet out from under her and reared back, elbows digging into the buckling cushion for support. She began to pull up her skirt—the lace of her stockings, then white cool-bumped skin, revealed one walking finger at a time. His hands eased over the tops of her thighs. His jaw tensed. She could see the patience in his lips ebbing, the sudden pull-back nods of his head as he caught himself like a sleeper fighting for consciousness; only his face was alert, prickling with desire. His eyes were probing, she thought, even as his muscles grew taut, as he put himself inside her and pushed. It was over quickly. A rush of air escaped his lips. A strand of white hair fell into his eyes.

  "I was too excited," he said.

  She had on his shirt. They lay with their heads at opposite ends of the sofa, and he massaged her foot and sipped wine and looked about the apartment. A poster of Greta Garbo was pinned to the wall as carelessly as a note on a refrigerator: a shop girl turned beauty queen turned movie star, so full of sadness, so rich with knowledge, eyes gazing up as if the camera hung above her. A spider plant sat in a yellow bowl on the windowsill, one long dangling offshoot wavering in the draft. The heating pipes knocked, filling with steam. The creaks of the neighbor's footsteps, the wind rattling the window—all seemed amplified. Robert's eyes roamed. Stacks of magazines rose from the floor, old dog-eared Vogues with torn-out pages protruding: pictures of Dietrich and Hayworth, studies in glamour; ads that she saved because of a specific haircut or pair of shoes. They leaned against the wall like the used collections of a street vendor. Then there were the towers of books. She still didn't have shelves or cabinets. The books climbed the walls, precariously balanced as though the removal of even one might send them all crashing down. Robert was used to so much better, she knew.

  "Have you read all of these?" he said.

  "I want to."

  "Treasure Island?" He pointed.

  "Yes."

  "You read it?"

  "Is that odd?"

  He pointed again. "Madame Bovary?"

  "Someday."

  "You have many children's books. Is there something I should know? Someone hiding in an apple barrel?"

  She shook her head and remained still.

  "They surprise me," she said.

  "Happy endings?"

  "I know how Madame Bovary ends."

  His forehead wrinkled slightly as he considered this, then relaxed.

  "Our vase worked well, didn't it?" he said.

  She swung her legs around and lay with her head on his shoulder. She curled his chest hairs between her fingers. His sweat had no scent.

  "I'm not used to having company," she s
aid.

  "Are you happy here?"

  "I feel safe."

  "Back when I was in my twenties, before you were even born—"

  "Oh, please."

  "I was in Geneva."

  He looked about suddenly and she sat up. "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing, nothing." He smiled and kissed her forehead.

  He got down off the sofa and pressed his cheek to the floor. His buttocks were pale and folded slightly where they joined the back of his thighs—two crescent shadows that twisted as he crawled. His hipbones protruded.

  "What are you doing?"

  "One of my links is missing. It must have fallen out—earlier."

  She twisted the shirt cuff around and checked the empty eyelet.

  "Don't you see it?" she said.

  "Not yet."

  "I think you just wanted to show off your bottom."

  He looked back over his shoulder, and she laughed.

  "A-ha!" He held the gold knot up to the light. He turned back and leaned against the sofa, resting his chin on her thigh. She held her wrist out and he worked to refasten the cuff.

  "So where was I?" he said.

  "In Geneva."

  "That's right, at a dinner. There was a young woman sitting alone in a long hall, draped across a chair, wearing a white gown and gloves. I walked past her. I remember the way her elbow rested on the arm of the chair. Her one hand pointed up to heaven as if she were holding a cigarette, but she wasn't. Her dress pooled on the floor in front of her and I couldn't see her feet. Something about the angle, maybe the expression, her eyebrows—I had to walk by again, and then a third time. She finally noticed me and smiled, and it was one of those racking smiles, heartbreakingly spontaneous—"

  "Do I ever smile like that?"

  "Not that I've seen, but—"

  She stood up sharply and went to the bedroom. She sat on her hands on the edge of the bed in the dark. She heard footsteps, a drawer in the kitchen, and then more footsteps—sounds that were strange because she was not making them, because in stillness she was accustomed to a mirroring stillness, not to movement and bumps and clicks that she could not control. She heard him sifting through plastic cassette cases; then music started and he appeared in the doorway, holding another bottle of wine.

  "Let me finish," he said. He sat with the bottle between his thighs, working at the cork. "All I meant is that there's nothing more beautiful, more devastating, than a girl in a white dress, alone in a hallway in Geneva . . . and that I imagine you there . . . and how helpless you make me."

  He kissed her.

  "Are you going to decant that?" she said.

  "You make me helpless, darling."

  Kim would lay over a night in London, a weekend in Paris. She never stayed anywhere more than two days. She spent half her time in cookie-cutter hotels with a babbling television for company. She'd wake to language she couldn't understand, sometimes not knowing where she was. She'd open the curtains to still-dark skies and shuffle bleary-eyed into fluorescent-lit bathrooms in plastic travel slippers. Wrappers from used wafer-thin soaps stuck to the wet countertops like stamps. She'd run water and peel them off and throw them in the trash along with the scattered Q-tips and strands of floss, the mascara-stained swabs from the previous night's undressing. She'd go through the courtesy bags to see if there were shampoos worth saving or compact sewing kits. She'd remove the black and white threads and discard the rest. Always there was the disposable shower cap folded into a tiny square envelope like a condom. These were the souvenirs of her travels.

  She remembered glimpses of cities like dreams: flower beds shaped like states, an iron statue of a horse running through a fountain of water, postcards of fairy-tale castles with pointed turrets, palm-tree sunsets, and Mickey Mouse greetings. She knew cities the way she knew people, always departing.

  Jennifer was another stewardess. She'd grown up in a small town called Perdue, South Carolina. Her father had been in the Air Force, a decorated fighter pilot in Korea. He was shot down, his body never recovered. All her life, planes fascinated her, partly because they sent her mom over the edge.

  "When she heard I'd taken this job," Jennifer said, "she wouldn't talk to me. Finally she broke down crying. She told me she'd been cheating on my father, right up to the day of his death. That's why she can't even look at a plane, she told me. I couldn't believe it, but I was proud of her for admitting it."

  Jennifer knew about Robert. Sometimes when they worked the same flight they would share a hotel room.

  "Robert finds the best of everything," Kim said. "He even suggested a hairdresser for me here in Paris."

  Jennifer was painting her toenails, feet arched over the edge of the bed.

  "Who cuts his wife's hair?" she said.

  "He hates his wife's hair."

  "He should make her change."

  Jennifer flexed her toes and examined her work.

  "He can't tell her things," Kim said.

  On television, an actor was being interviewed. The dialogue cut to a clip of his new film—him running along a track in a tunnel, the light of a train behind him, and the grating squeal of metal wheels—then back to the studio, a microphone held close to the actor's smiling face, the interviewer mock-biting his nails.

  "Do you think he'll leave her?" Jennifer wiggled her toes and put the cap back on the polish. "Do you?"

  "I love the sound of French," said Kim. "Sometimes I make up what they're saying."

  She stared at the television set, the actor's clean-cut features and the way he spoke. She knew he was promoting the film. Even if she couldn't understand the language, his words sounded confident, lighthearted. She shut her eyes and listened and felt she understood the man. Sometimes language didn't matter at all. Words only confused. There were other things to hear.

  Jennifer turned to look at the screen. "Now, why can't I meet someone like that?" she said.

  The words floated from the tiny TV speaker like a lullaby, but the audience was laughing.

  For as long as Kim could remember, her grandfather had been dying. At least that's what she'd heard. She could still see her mother's stricken face as she clutched the letter telling of his first stroke. Somehow he kept going, outliving his daughter by twelve years.

  Kim's father telephoned with the news of the death.

  "Call your grandmother," he said. "Don't even think about not coming to the funeral."

  She sat in the living room, stretched her feet to the floor, and pushed herself into the sofa cushions. Disdain for her father, not illness, had kept the man from his daughter's deathbed. Or was it pride, a grotesque stubbornness that had always kept him distant while his daughter suffered? Was it punishment? Should Kim now dignify his passing and comfort a woman who at the very least had remained in tow all those years, had done nothing? The rug bunched around Kim's treading feet.

  "Don't start with that silent bullshit," her father said.

  "Why would she even call you?"

  "She has no one."

  "He didn't go to Mom's funeral."

  "He was sick."

  "Oh, Daddy."

  "She's your grandmother."

  "I can't get off work."

  She could hear him struggling to control his feelings. Work was the inarguable excuse. He would never force her to do anything that might jeopardize her career. All his talk of responsibility and duty; he'd preached himself into a corner, and he would die before he contradicted himself.

  "I've been busy, Dad. Last week I had to fly two double shifts. I saw Hong Kong. It was just as you described it."

  "Are you putting money in the bank?" he said.

  "Of course."

  "I don't believe you. When are you getting married?"

  She imagined herself far away, farther than the miles that separated her from her father, because they were not enough. She projected sounds between them, noises to dampen his verbal grating—the rasping rush of a jet turbine spinning to life, sucking his words into a vacuous r
oar. With the sounds came smells, fuel, tarmac heat snaking to the sky, vibrating the horizon. She could feel the first bump of touchdown, the nose of the plane settling, the pop of her ears as she pulled the lever to release the door, fresh air stealing over her face, permeating her clothes in a heartbeat, and the glare of the sun.

  "You could try calling more," he said. "Who else treats their family like you?"

  "Okay, Dad. Did you see they sent a woman into space? The first American woman. It was in all the papers."

  "Maybe if you'd gone to college, that would have been you."

  "Maybe."

  "I'll pass your condolences on to your grandmother. Is there anything I can help with? Are you still my Princess?"

  "Yes, Daddy."

  She left the receiver off the hook. There was wine in the refrigerator, an open bottle from the night before. She took the bottle and a glass out onto the fire escape and drank and listened to the birds and the rising and falling hum of traffic. Across the courtyard, on the fire escape of the opposite apartment building, stood a ceramic statue of a cat, one paw lifted to a window as if to enter. She'd thought it was alive at first. She couldn't imagine anyone wanting to live with that fake thing peering in.

  Above and beyond the chipping brick row of rooftops, a skyrise cut into the sun, and then for a moment the sun was whole again and round. It bled into the uneven skyline slowly and disappeared, leaving the courtyard in shadow. Out there in space was a woman—Sally Ride was her name—and she was looking down on the world. She was looking down on millions of people, families stacked upon families with all of their struggles and hates, their tiny lives in cities, in countries that from where she floated were nothing but vast swirls of blue and gray, a ball of color against a sea of black.

  Kim gathered the bottle and glass and climbed back through the window into her apartment. She brushed soot from her dress and hung up the phone. It was teasing her, daring her to smash it, and she pictured it in pieces, bits of shattered plastic scattered across the floor like a thousand glittering stars.