Thin Skin

by Emma Forrest

  ‘Aslan,’ I breathed, cornering him ‘by accident’ at his local bodega, ‘I know you’ve made a decision about me, and I respect it. I understand it. I mean, I don’t understand it. Not at all. But I understand that it has been made with what you deem good reason, and I would not disrespect you by asking you to bend your rules for me, who is nothing, who is no more than a silly little film actress.’

  He felt bad and started defending me against my own harsh judgment. He was more friendly for a while. He tolerated me. He went record shopping with me, smiling slyly when the manager asked for my autograph. We ended up with a fifty percent discount and Aslan, for all his money fears, could not have been more thrilled. Piling record on top of record, he selected a beginner’s introduction to the music of John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. No words. Notes all over the place. I tried desperately to find the rhythm because I thought that if I could I would be able to find him.

  We were walking down Rivington when two men doing research for Ford cars asked us if they could pay us ten dollars to ask us some questions. The researcher was a nervous young man. He took a breath as though trying not to mess up his big break, and then asked, ‘What do you think of when I say “Chevy”?’

  I tilted my head and smiled reassuringly, wondering if the young man was bugged out because it was me, or because of Aslan’s eyes.

  ‘Chevy? I’d say “All American”.’

  The young man cleared his throat again.

  ‘And what do you think of when I say “BMW”?’

  Aslan blinked his see-through eyes at the blue sky. ‘Bob Marley and the Wailers.’

  The young man gave us the money. Aslan, of course, would not touch it.

  ‘You hold it for me.’ And I had such hope in my heart that he asked me to hold it so that I could owe him something which meant we would see each other again, which was almost the same thing as being in a relationship.

  He so did not want to have a relationship with me. He glowed with the aura of ‘Just doing my duty by a troubled youth’, although he was a month younger than me. Any time I tried to touch him, even brushing his elbow to make a point, he pulled away. He pulled far, far away like the seats at a Rolling Stones show that are so far back, the curve of the earth obscures your view of Keith Richards. At first he answered my questions in half sentences, half hearted, half heard. After a week of me dropping by unannounced, he would answer the door with his hand in front of his face. Talk to the hand ’cos the ears won’t listen. It could have been a Jerry Springer gesture. But it wasn’t Jerry, it was Jedi.

  The second to last time I saw him, we went to buy a sandwich at a mangy café near Chinatown. We were sitting at the counter as all around us dope deals went down in between bites from tofu rolls. Veganism and drug addiction. That sums up the neighborhood. The guy serving us was preternaturally angry, with tattoos all up his arms, which made me laugh. You can’t look that nasty and then actually act that mean too. The guy with the arm tattoos is supposed to be a pussycat. But not this one.

  Aslan ordered vegetarian sandwich number two before changing his order, after conferring briefly with a pot of twizzle sticks, to vegetarian sandwich number one. ‘Well which is it?’ barked the man and all eleven of his arm tattoos stared daggers at us.

  ‘Vegetarian sandwich number one. Um, no, number three.’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ spat the man.

  Aslan looked up from the twizzle sticks, his eyes turning gray, the pupils approximating something like anger. ‘Forget about the sandwich,’ he hissed. Rising from his stool at the counter, he began to hook his backpack over his broad shoulders.

  The guy got all hard-style, bellowing, ‘You’re still going to have to pay for the sandwich, you little fuck – I’ve already started chopping the tomato.’ Without a word, Aslan took money from his back pocket, slammed it on the counter and began to back out of the café, never taking his newly gray eyes from the waiter. The guy and his eleven tattoos looked suddenly confused and I even felt sorry for him when he meekly asked, ‘So do you want the sandwich to go?’ Aslan just held his hand in front of his face and walked out. I followed him and asked what was up. ‘I don’t give a damn about the money,’ his voice was trembling; ‘money is dirty. There’s too much bad energy coming from that guy for me to eat a sandwich touched by his hands. I couldn’t allow that kind of energy to enter my body.’ And he stormed off up the street. I went back in and rescued what had become vegetarian sandwich number one. Handing it to a homeless man who didn’t seem too bothered by bad energy, I rushed to catch up with Aslan.

  Charging down Avenue B, he picked a café he found to be acceptable, and sat down at a table. He carefully peeled the remaining three dollars from his pocket and laid them down on the table so he could give me a detailed explanation of the problems with a one-dollar bill. Flipping a bill over with his knife, he gestured to the pyramid on the back. ‘See that pyramid? I mean, what the fuck is that doing there? I’ll tell you: it’s a masonic symbol. And see the writing beneath it, in Latin? Do you know what that means in English? Well, I’ll tell you: it means “New World Order”.’

  He was interrupted mid-flow by the waiter bringing us water. Aslan gulped it down in one go. Wiping his mouth on his baby-blue sleeve, he turned to me and, leaning close enough to kiss, whispered, ‘Drink lots of water.’

  ‘OK.’ I didn’t ask why, but he felt it his duty to tell me.

  ‘The head of the New World Order lives in a building in Connecticut. That building has the highest water bill in all of America. No one knows why. I know why.’

  He waited for me to ask, taking pleasure in my presence for the first time since the night he had fondled my breasts.

  ‘Why does it have the highest water bill in America, Aslan?’

  His mouth turned up at the corners, his lips erect with delight.

  ‘Because the New World Order is stealing all the water. Humans are made up of seventy percent water. The earth is made up of seventy percent water. They’re stealing it. So, please, Ruby … drink as much water as you can.’

  ‘OK. Um, can I kiss you now?’

  ‘No, baby, no you can’t.’ And he leant his forehead on mine. Then he got up and left, the miso soup he had ordered ending its life as Aslan’s second uneaten snack of the day, as inconsequential as Rupert Everett’s second lover in a Merchant Ivory film. A thought struck him as he closed the door of the café, and Aslan popped his head back inside.

  ‘Ruby?’

  ‘Yes, Aslan? Yes?’

  ‘Remember to drink lots of water.’

  maybe he just doesn’t fancy her

  Ruby? What can I say? I mean. Wow. What can I say? She’s got the power. She’s got the power. She’s got the ruby slippers, right there on her beautiful Ruby feet. And she doesn’t even know it. I can’t mess with her, you know? I ain’t gonna mess with her.

  part two

  a challenge

  Ruby’s cards came postmarked from New York, although they might as well have been postmarked Hades. By that time, I had built Ruby into a Roman goddess of desire, risen up from the underworld to take my husband away. I imagined her carved from white marble, standing in a museum, schoolchildren giggling at her naked white breasts.

  I was going through Scott’s briefcase, looking for this month’s Vanity Fair, when I found the first card. It was a picture of the Statue of Liberty. At first, I was so crazed that I thought Ruby had written on the back of a photo of herself. And then I remembered New York and Staten Island, something about a ship full of immigrants and a lady with a lamp welcoming them. The cold. The hungry. The disillusioned by ten years of marriage.

  ‘Hope all is well on the West Coast. I will see you soon.’ I pictured her living in the torch, peering, cold, across the water, marble in oxidized copper. ‘Of course,’ I reasoned, ‘statues don’t line up for stamps,’ and I adapted the story in my head, so that the white marble was in fact an elaborate Alexander McQueen dress. Knowing what I did about her, it would not b
e too far-fetched to imagine Ruby wearing Alexander McQueen to run her errands.

  I saw her once in real life, at a black-tie charity gala. Ruby was wearing jeans, moccasins and a ripped Sex Pistols tank top. Scott had commented on how dirty she looked. The next day she was photographed shopping for groceries in a $5,000 backless Halston gown.

  The beautician, dutifully, ran the current through the sparse, pale hairs on my upper lip. I jolted and shivered and thought about how much I hated my life. Every time my skin was steamed and squeezed, I prayed that the beautician would leap back, alarmed by the hideous black sludge emerging from my pores. But nothing came out. It wasn’t a completely wasted session. It hurt just enough to make my eyes tear and heart harden.

  I didn’t care a damn about Scott, not anymore. I cared about what he was doing, and who he was doing it with, why and what I had done wrong, but not about him. He was irrelevant now.

  I found it when I got home, in the sleeve of an Elvis Costello record. Scott kept his vinyl proudly, as if to say, ‘I may be a fuck-off powerful Hollywood producer but I can still get down.’ He had the CDs too. He had them both, just in case. In case he met a vengeful God. As if buying more, rather than less, would save him.

  It was a postcard of Brooklyn Bridge.

  ‘It is so beautiful, I thought this was a good reason to write. This is just a quick note to say “hi!”, lighter than the last time I wrote. I miss you. I will see you soon. Love Ruby xoxo.’

  ‘But “xoxo” does not mean anything,’ I fumed, hating Ruby more than ever before. It’s so arbitrary: some random letters from a typewriter because there is no way to express what we really feel. It is an attempt to abbreviate emotion, to make it small and unthreatening. The x is a stamp of desire and the o, what is that anyway? A hug? A never-ending circle of insecurity and need?

  I felt suddenly sorry for her, grasping at a reason to write to him. I needed to know why this was so much lighter than the last time she wrote. I thought about her all the time. When me and Scott did make love, not only was he imagining I was Ruby, but so was I, trying to remember what it was to be wanted.

  This invisible girl-child, ripped Halston ghost-woman, had become the focus of my life, of my work. My mother was dead. My father was long dead. I had no career. My marriage was in tatters. Ruby was all I had to live for.

  a ghost

  I saw Ruby in the uptown Prada, the night before Christmas, but at first I didn’t believe it was her. I hid in the dressing room and peered out from between the curtains. Surely Ruby was thinner than that? Taller? Didn’t Ruby have famously beautiful skin and hazel eyes? This girl was sawn off at the knee, her eyes were dead and her skin was blotchy. Would I rather that was Ruby and she was uglier than I had thought, or that it was too ugly to be Ruby and wasn’t her at all? I had wanted to come face to face with her for so long, but not if she wasn’t beautiful. Not if she couldn’t give me something to stew over, an excuse to dawdle, daydream and procrastinate. Now how was I going to waste the next six months?

  I turned back to the mirror, willing her to vanish before I did something stupid. And just as I was zipping myself into a pencil skirt, trying to concentrate on loftier things, like rowing machines and reading groups, the curtains were pulled apart and there she was. It was definitely her: blotchy, stocky and luminous. Nothing was in place. Not her hair, not her body, not her ill-fitting clothes. Her parka was soaked and she was trailing snow all through the store. I grabbed at a shirt to cover my breasts.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ slurred Ruby, ‘I didn’t know anyone was in here.’

  I stared at her transfixed, until Ruby giggled, ‘Do I know you?’

  Still holding the blouse against my breasts, which I assessed, in a glance, to be smaller and firmer than Ruby’s, I whispered, ‘I’m Scott’s wife.’

  Ruby was unruffled. ‘Oh yeah. Scott from LA. How is he?’

  ‘We’re getting divorced.’ It sounded rather merry when I said it out loud. ‘What are you doing here?’ That sounded ruder than asking how the husband who was divorcing me was. Something about Ruby makes every response an attack. All Ruby’s questions, on the other hand, no matter how nosy or insensitive, are always retreats, unquestions that demanded nothing more than silence.

  ‘I’m buying my Christmas presents,’ said Ruby, more than happy to chat to the woman whose marriage she had destroyed months earlier.

  ‘Who are you buying for? My husband?’ I asked, turning away to put on my bra. Before I could stop her, Ruby had leaned forward and hooked the ends of the brassiere together for me.

  I shivered as her fingers touched my back. She admired her work, then snapped out of her reverie as I asked her again. She answered, dreamy, as though she and I were lying side by side at a slumber party.

  ‘Who am I buying for? Myself. You probably read about it in Page 6.’

  ‘No,’ I said, pulling my polo-neck over my head, ‘I don’t read the tabloids.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I’m the teenage starlet spending Christmas alone because my mother killed herself, tragically, some years ago, and I don’t get along with my dad. My agent let me go just recently. I loved someone once but he went away. I had someone who loved me, but I asked him to leave. It’s so stupid. I haven’t been a teenager for two years now. And I’m fucking Jewish, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Jewish, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t celebrate Christmas.’

  ‘I see.’

  Her pupils dilated as she brought me back into focus. ‘Scott and I aren’t together anymore. We were never together. Can you see us together?’

  ‘Can you see us together?’

  ‘No.’

  Ruby waited for me while I lined up my purchases on the cash register. I wanted to shoo her away like the bedraggled sex kitten she was: ‘Go away, you silly little slut!’ But I didn’t.

  She trailed me out the door, a grubby hand at my elbow, like a child. Outside, a photographer began to snap at Ruby. And then, to my horror, I realized he was photographing us together.

  the hustle

  Ruby grabbed Rachel by the arm and hustled her into a cab. Shocked, Rachel turned to her travel companion and asked, ‘Do you know where you’re going to?’

  ‘Do you like the things that life is showing you?’ grinned Ruby, believing herself to be infallibly endearing. Her gums were bleeding.

  Rachel gritted her teeth and asked again: ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ruby shrugged her sloping little shoulders. ‘With you, I guess.’

  She didn’t ask Rachel if she wanted her to, or if that were OK. It was the night before Christmas and she had nowhere else. Rachel was supposed to be going for dinner at the home of another secular Jew. Like her, she was a woman who celebrated by spending money on herself, fighting and having make-up sex. There would be no make-up sex for Rachel this time around and, more regrettably, not even any fighting, which she secretly believed was what kept her invigorated and slim.

  Ruby was curvy with no hint of muscle at all beneath her milky white skin.

  Rachel, in contrast, was tall, slender, with long legs and taut arms. The extreme New York cold made her hair shinier than ever. Ruby’s hair was starting to grow in from the scissor-nail disguise she had given herself when she walked out on Scott, and it fell in waves around her eyebrows, which were plucked in silent-film-star semicircles. They were the only manicured part of her body, and these she had had tended only because there had been a friendly make-up artist at the photo shoot three days before.

  The magazine stylist was not so kind. She had been unable to hide her disgust at Ruby’s inability to fit into a size four. Angrily tearing at the racks of beautiful clothes, she picked out a gold lamé sheath that fit, but made Ruby look like a Las Vegas hooker. As soon as the editor saw the contacts, the pictures were killed.

  Rachel pulled her polo-neck past her chin as she took in the extent of Ruby’s blotches and bloating. She couldn’t imagine Scott wanting her. She cou
ldn’t imagine him having any patience with her. And then, the more she thought about it, the more she realized that she couldn’t imagine him, period. Not what he looked like, or smelled like, or how his voice sounded. He was gone from her memory bank after barely three months apart. And she didn’t feel sad about it. Not about that. But she did feel sad, unutterably so, because she knew what wasn’t making her unhappy. ‘Knowing what doesn’t make you unhappy,’ she thought, ‘is more painful than knowing what does make you unhappy. It leaves you with greater responsibility toward your own state of mind.’ She could tell that Ruby fell into the former category.

  Ruby shifted from shoe to shoe outside Rachel’s apartment. ‘So, Scott’s ex, can I come up?’

  Rachel, liking the sound of ‘Scott’s ex’, decided she could.

  appraisal

  They looked at each other for a while.

  Ruby looked at the photos on Rachel’s dresser table. She looked at her computer that hadn’t been switched on. The maple wood desk held rows of framed photos of babies gurgling, an elderly couple on a sofa, a hard-bodied man playing with a wrinkly puppy in front of a fire.

  ‘Is this your family?’ asked Ruby.

  Rachel steered her away from the desk. ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. Well, who are they?’

  ‘Those are just prints from photo sessions I did.’

  ‘You’re a photographer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And these are the pictures you’re proudest of?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well then, why aren’t they on your walls, blown up big? Why are they on your desk, by your computer, in these funny little ornate frames?’