Because She Is Beautiful

by Cameron Dougan

  "Are you still with what's-his-name?"

  "Robert, Dad. That's why I'm not there with you, remember?"

  "What does he do again?"

  "I've told you."

  "He's a trader, right?"

  "Yes." It was easier not to explain.

  "When am I going to meet him?"

  "You'll come to New York sometime."

  "Is he there now? Put him on."

  "Dad, he can't come to the phone."

  "I want to talk to the man."

  "He's busy."

  "Ask him to come to the phone."

  "I won't do that."

  "Ask him."

  "Dad, I'm going now."

  He went quiet.

  "I have to go now, okay, Dad?"

  "Did I tell you I can see the Golden Gate from my kitchen window?"

  "Dad, Merry Christmas."

  "I love you," he said. "You never come see me."

  "I love you too."

  She shut her eyes and listened to the engine sounds of traffic coming from the bridge nearby, motorists on their way to visit family.

  Profound loneliness—people confused it with self-pity. But loneliness could be beautiful. There was an illustrated Bible that she used to look at as a child. Her mother would be in the kitchen, making dinner, and she'd lie on the floor, looking at the pictures, tracing them with her finger so as to remember them. There was one of Jesus on the cross, mourning women at his feet with their arms thrown up. When Jesus died, did Mary cry for her loss or for the suffering her son had endured? For the loneliness of the world? Was she ever as breathtaking as at that moment? The loneliness was pure grace. The slightest drop of self-pity would have defiled it.

  There was one Christmas when she was young. The tree had seemed especially large that year, thick, reaching to the ceiling.

  "It's too big," her mother had said.

  Her father surrounded it with packages. In slippers and a robe, he sat next to her on the floor. She remembered the hardness of his knee as she leaned against him, turning to his glowing smile as he marveled at each present she opened. She received everything she'd asked for.

  "Santa knows," he kept saying.

  That Christmas was her ideal. Her mother had puttered around the room in her robe, collecting bits of wrapping paper and folding them, smoothing them.

  "What are you doing that for?" her father had said.

  "It's perfectly good paper. It can be used again."

  "Are you kidding me?"

  She could see her father's eyes rolling conspiratorially. She had been so happy, so pleased by the attention, the approval. Santa knew.

  Years later, from the hospital bed, her mother had confided that that Christmas had been the hardest. "The Christmas of the sure thing," she called it. Her father had lost his year's savings at the track. All the presents had been bought with borrowed money.

  Even the finest memories were fragile. Why, after so long, had her mother decided to tell her? Before, her mother had been at the periphery of the memory. Afterward, she was the highlight. Instead of the tree and the presents, the expressions of her father's love, she now saw only her mother, sulking, silent, presentless, picking up the used wrapping paper in an effort to save it, and her father having the audacity to call her mother cheap.

  Afternoon turned to evening. She was well into a second bottle of wine. There was nothing on television worth watching, but she kept switching channels. She started to think about the fur coat. Why hadn't Robert called? The card that accompanied the gift wasn't even in his handwriting. Until we are together, it read. She took it into the living room and looked at it again in the silvery light from the window and then tore it to pieces.

  Robert could tell her how good she was, but he could never say that she was better than Nicole, even if he wanted to believe it. He always returned to his wife. He could take off his wedding band, but the mark on his finger would be there. He could rub it, but it wouldn't go away.

  She scooped up the coat, bundled it into a trash bag, and knotted the opening. She dragged the bag downstairs and out the door, stuffed it into a trash can, and slammed the lid on it. A gust of wind blew a shower of icy droplets down from the waving tree branches. Then the tree became still. The sky was the color of the street. She stood there until she realized how cold she was.

  The next morning her head hurt. She lay in bed with the lights off and her eyes closed, waiting for the throbbing to subside. Robert called. He was free for a few hours and wanted to come over. She stumbled out of bed. The bathroom tiles were freezing. She stood on a towel as she rinsed out her dry mouth and examined her eyes. She sifted through the medicine cabinet for something to take and filled her cupped hands with water and splashed her face and looked at herself. Then she clutched the edge of the sink. She hurried to the living room and saw the empty coat box and went to the bedroom and spun around and bit her lip and tried to think.

  She threw on a robe and rushed down to the street. The garbage cans were filled beyond capacity and she staggered back a step, pressing her lips to the back of her fist. She dug through trash, bits of potato, and bones, cold against her knuckles. "Thank you, God," she stammered, finally finding the knot of her bag. She pulled on it and the whole can fell over. Somebody yelled. "You keep it down!" Kim shouted back. A window banged shut. She dragged the stinking bag up to her apartment, dumped it in the bathtub, and washed herself off. Then she ripped into the bag. The coat smelled a little, and she sprayed it with perfume. She hung it to air out and washed her hands again, leaning against the sink. She lowered herself to the floor and sat with her back to the wall. The sash to her robe had come undone and snaked across the tile.

  "What's wrong?" Robert said when he arrived. Specks of mascara dotted her cheek. She shook her head against his shoulder.

  "I'm so glad you're here," she said.

  "Did you open your present?"

  "I had to," she said. "It was too tempting."

  "Well?"

  "It's beautiful."

  "It's sable. Let me see. Mmmm, like a princess."

  "Open yours now."

  He put his hands on her cheeks. "Can't they wait?"

  Kim began receiving messages on her answering machine from people she'd never met, offering unneeded services. "Robert Sanders recommended me."

  That's how she met Michael.

  "He's a decorator," Robert said. "I told him you were redoing your apartment."

  The man called and they met for lunch. He strolled up to the table in white linen pants and a blazer with a patch over the breast.

  "This?" he said, looking at the patch. "My high school emblem." He shrugged. "I was feeling old. Voilà, young again."

  He took a cigarette from a case and offered her one. They talked briefly about a house he was working on in Southampton. There was a man he recognized at the other end of the restaurant.

  "Quite the naughty one," he sang under his breath. "Hearts will be broken."

  He leaned across the table.

  "I know the man he's with. He has the most horrible taste in shoes. You can't see from where you're sitting, but if you get up, take a peek. They're exceptionally hideous."

  "Do I really want to?"

  "Oh, you must. It's like my patch here. Those shoes will make you feel better about yourself."

  He sat very straight with his shoulders back, as if he were regarding himself in a mirror. He looked her age. His short brown hair was parted on one side, perfectly combed. His smile was thin. His lips could almost disappear. He gazed at her with sweet brown eyes. It was the rest of the world he scorned, and he seemed so pleased when she got up to look at the man's shoes.

  "Aren't they glorious?" he said when she returned, rolling his eyes from one corner of a whitening smile to the other. "They belong in a medicine cabinet."

  He amused her with stories and didn't bring up her apartment until they were finished eating.

  "So you're not redecorating?"

  She began to
apologize, but he stopped her. His eyes were still bright.

  "You're lucky you're such a sweetheart," he said.

  A week later, he invited her to dinner.

  He took her to lunches, introduced her to women clients. He drove her up to Tuxedo Park to show her one project. The foundation of the house hadn't even been poured yet, but he walked her around, describing the insides of the rooms as he envisioned them. Bits of orange tape fluttered from the ends of stakes. Pine needles blanketed the ground. He told her to imagine herself sitting just so before a window facing a gap in the pines. The lake glittered below. They dined that evening with the couple that was building the house, newlyweds. For both, it was their second marriage, their second home, and the woman kept raving, "Isn't Michael the best?"

  After dinner, Michael drove Kim back up to the lake. They parked and walked along a road by the water and stopped and sat on a stone wall. The moon was almost full and starting to sink. It lit the edges of clouds. He told her that both his parents had died in a fire.

  He was twenty-two when it happened, just out of college. His parents owned a beach house in Nantucket, the number written with whale's ivory on the door. He was visiting for the summer. His room was on the third floor. He'd been out drinking with friends. The doors were locked when he got home, and he'd forgotten his key, so he climbed in through a living room window. He remembered looking up the stairs and thinking he'd never make it, then stumbling back to the living room and collapsing on the couch.

  The fire started upstairs. Both his parents smoked and liked to drink. Perhaps they'd passed out. One could imagine the fluttering curtains, curious, stretching to the nightstand to see what was smoldering in the ashtray. If Michael had made it up to his room that night, he surely would have died. It was the ceiling crashing down that stirred him, his parents' bedroom collapsing into the study and part of the living room. He only just managed to escape through the same wide-open window by which he'd entered.

  "I owe my life to gin," he said. "And people say it makes you mean."

  He'd returned to New York to his job as though nothing had happened. When asked about his vacation, he told people it was uneventful. How were his parents? "We're finally getting along," he'd told them.

  Knowing the extent of Michael's suffering made his affection for Kim seem even more flattering.

  They watched the moon sink, its light skipping down the hill from treetop to treetop to the lake, where it scattered like bits of broken porcelain.

  "Some people die without ever knowing tragedy," he said. "Others pass their lives in catastrophe's shadows. Yet we live in the same world."

  He held out his hand.

  "You and I," he said, "we live in the shadows."

  She would recommend Michael to anyone who needed a decorator. In return, he would send her bouquets, bracelets, and earrings with notes saying he'd gotten a job thanks to her.

  She began to meet his friends, a circle of men, many of whom he'd known from the Rhode Island School of Design. They would start the evenings out as a group. Knees and shoulders touched as they packed around tables that by the end of dinner looked like ransacked villages. An ever-changing collage of appetizers passed from place to place in the spirit of sharing and tasting. Kim would go to the powder room, come back, and find herself sitting on the opposite side of the table. Couples changed. They would play at seeing who could wear their napkin more creatively, tying them into ties or tucking them into shirtsleeves, ruffled about their wrists like lace.

  "A six," they would vote.

  "No, a five and a half."

  "As usual, Bertrand doesn't want to play."

  Bertrand, a sixty-four-year-old ad executive, stood up as though insulted, revealing a huge bulge in his pants.

  "I guess I won't be needing this," he said, reaching into his trousers and pulling out a wadded napkin. The laughter was comforting and infectious.

  "I was watching him this time, too," said a man.

  "Bertrand, you dirty old sneak."

  The joking would give way to gossip as the group thinned, stories brought out like expensive liquor at the end of a party, after most of the guests had gone. They were the merry-go-round spottings, the who-had-seen-who-with-whom rumors that everyone ached to tell and give life to.

  Michael and Kim would wind up alone in dim downtown after-hour clubs and bars, lining up martini glasses, dueling with plastic olive swords. Michael loved to dance, "to lose himself in a crowd," he claimed, so long as Kim was watching. It was an endearing contradiction. Either he was performing for her, or her presence really was liberating.

  There was a new disco he was keen on trying. Robert had already tried to go with Kim. It had taken Joseph thirty minutes just to find the place. It looked like a deserted factory, except that the sidewalk was mobbed, crowded around double metal doors and a man standing on a box. She'd watched Robert confidently push his way through the crowd and saw the bouncer's eyes look straight past him. Robert returned to the limo. "Maybe next time." She heard later that someone had died trying to get in, just like in the old 54. The police found a man's body stuck in a ventilator shaft. He was dressed like a woman.

  When Kim went with Michael, they had no problem. Michael knew the owner's brother. She couldn't wait to tell Robert. Or maybe she wouldn't.

  Inside, mirrors resembled icicles. Bodies were frozen behind back-lit plastic walls, shadows poised to groove to the steady bass and sax, the boyish voice of Evelyn "Champagne" King pleading through stacked black box speakers, "Momma just don't understand, oh, how I love my man." It was disco night. A bouncer led them over crowded platforms and across the dance floor to a mirrored wall. He rapped the glass twice with his knuckle. A panel opened. A woman greeted them with drinks and pulled them in, shutting the door behind. The door was a window to laser light and strobe-flash chaos. People shook and squirmed, writhing to a dampened thud, a vibration in the dark shag-carpeted walls.

  Kim recognized some of Michael's friends and stepped aside, squeezing past the kissing and hip bumping to an open spot on a banquette. She sat next to a man dressed all in white. He was bent over a table with a woman asleep on his shoulder. Kim set her drink down. Encased in the glass tabletop were lines of white powder.

  "How clever," she said.

  The man didn't answer.

  "Do you think—?"

  She was talking to a statue. White hands clutched a straw. Tiny gold pin lights flashed in rapid succession up the straw to its nose.

  The dozing woman stirred and stroked the statue's thigh.

  "My white knight," she cooed, and slumped back.

  "There you are," said Michael, leaning over Kim. He stared down at her, wrinkling his nose. "That dress—"

  "Yes?"

  "It's hideous."

  "You know just what to say to a girl. Besides, you're one to talk."

  He had on a zebra-skin jacket that matched the fabric of the banquette cushion. It was no coincidence. He owned many costumes and loved to dress up. He would put on a sari to go out for Indian, a kimono for Chinese.

  "You'd probably wear a kilt to McDonald's," she said.

  "You should see my tartan. Move over."

  He sat, elbowing her teasingly, waving to someone.

  "Did you read about the Great Wall in space today?" he said. "I know you like that sort of thing. How could you miss it? Right on the front page." He flipped his cigarette case open and snatched out a cigarette and offered one. "They've detected a narrow 'sheet'—yes, that was the word—of connected galaxies frolicking through space. Imagine, a giant sheet in space and, on either side, inexplicable emptiness. The astronomers are perplexed. They can't figure out the gravitational attraction. So." He lit his cigarette. "How long has it been?"

  "What?"

  "Robert—the two of you."

  "You shit. Are you high?"

  "Please."

  "I've told you everything."

  "What's it like being with a married man? Answer the question, Miss Reil
ly."

  "You're awful."

  "Curious."

  "Have you ever been with a married man?" she said.

  "Of course."

  "And?"

  "He was always looking over his shoulder."

  "I'm sure."

  Michael stuck out his tongue.

  "He can't cheat on you," she said.

  "Only with you. I know the rules of infidelity well: no thank-you notes to the apartment, no lipstick kisses after he's washed up. . . . How many years has it been?"

  "I like to be alone. I have everything I need. I can do anything—"

  "Not quite anything."

  "I'm living a man's life, free to see anyone."

  "Is there someone else?"

  "I don't want anyone else. I told you, I have everything I need."

  "I believe you."

  "You don't."

  He kissed her forehead.

  "Did you make up that stuff about the wall in space?" she said.

  "Of course not, darling."

  By the end of the night, most of the room had cleared. Kim lay on the banquette with her head in Michael's lap. She formed binoculars with her hands and looked up at him.

  "You're so close," she said.

  He mussed her hair. She made no effort to straighten it. She folded her hands beneath her cheek and shut her eyes.

  "Good night, love," she said.

  "I'll wake you if something outrageous happens."

  "So wonderfully outrageous."

  If Joseph wasn't driving Robert or Nicole, he was available to Kim. She had the car number and called as needed. If Robert was in the car, Joseph would pass the phone back and they would talk. If Nicole was in the car, Joseph would just say, "I can't."

  Joseph would lie to Nicole and say it was his wife on the phone. Later, when he'd pick up Kim, the car would smell of perfume. Even with the windows down, the lily-of-the-valley scent would linger. Sometimes it was fresh, as though Nicole had just gotten out. She might be around the corner or down the block.

  "Joseph?"

  He glanced over his shoulder.

  "Her perfume," she said. "She's wearing a lot today."