Beautiful You: A Novel

by Chuck Palahniuk

Later that night, something snapped Penny awake. A muffled noise. She held her breath, listening to the silence of the penthouse bedroom. The air-conditioning stirred the drapes in the window. Max stretched beside her, asleep against the satin sheets, his bedside clock reading three eighteen a.m. Before she could drift back to dreamland, the sound came again: a male voice, mumbling.

  Maxwell was talking in his sleep. In words that were hardly more than groans, he said, “Maybe.” Perhaps it was two words: “Feed me.” Penny couldn’t be certain. She raised herself onto one elbow and leaned closer. He mumbled again. “Need me,” he said.

  She leaned closer. Too close. As if in warning, his voice hoarse with panic, now he cried, “Phoebe!” And the force of his frantic outburst stunned Penny. The word rang in her mind. Phoebe. After that he was silent.

  It would appear that the still waters of C. Linus Maxwell ran deep. Within the pale skinny chest of that scientist beat a real heart. If he could only share his secrets, Penny thought wistfully, maybe then their relationship could rise above fantastic sex and blossom to become a true romance.

  It never ceased to amaze her how Maxwell could act so petty. Outwardly, he remained a geeky, science-obsessed boy of a man. A distant tyrant, withholding his heartfelt emotions and affections. His skin was odorless and as cold as metal, like a robot from some science fiction movie. But when he stimulated her…

  When Max stimulated her, the feeling was like hearing a big-name tenor at the Paris Opera House, or like dining alfresco on some scrumptious Italian thing. Even if Max didn’t love her, when he stimulated her glands Penny couldn’t help herself. Despite his coldness and cruelty, she felt herself fall temporarily in love with him. When his Beautiful You tools stirred the passion within her, Penny gazed into his remote blue eyes and desired nothing in the world but him. It was as if he’d cast a spell over her.

  Penny wanted to believe that making love was more than just fiddling with nerve endings until harum-scarum chemicals squirted around limbic systems. Real love, she knew, was something lasting and soulful. It sustained and nourished a person. The “love” that Max engendered seemed to evaporate as her orgasms petered out. Despite their delightful effects, the Beautiful You products generated merely a powerful love substitute.

  Her darkest fear was that the world’s women wouldn’t know the difference.

  The next day, inspiration hit. She phoned her mother in Omaha.

  “How’s Paris?” Her mother asked this teasingly. “Please tell me you’ve missed your period!”

  “How do you know I’m in Paris?” Penny challenged.

  Long-distance, her mother clucked her tongue. “Honey, you’re on the front page of the National Enquirer every day with the Eiffel Tower behind you!”

  Penny shuddered. For weeks she’d been phoning into work sick. She’d told Brillstein she had hepatitis C. Unless everyone at BB&B lived under rocks, they had to know she was lying.

  “They’re calling you ‘the Nerd’s Cinderella,’ ” her mother shouted. She always shouted on long-distance calls.

  “Mom?”

  “Did you see that picture they ran last week of President Hind?” her mother shouted. “She looks terrible!”

  Penny ventured, “Maybe she has hepatitis.”

  “And that Alouette D’Ambrosia looks even worse.” Penny’s mother cautioned, “Don’t let Maxwell get away. The ladies who break off with him all go to hell.”

  Penny tried to steer the conversation. “That’s the reason I’m calling, Mom. Do you have any back issues of the Enquirer?”

  “Name a date,” her mother said proudly. “I have every issue going back as far as 1972.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It’s my life’s work,” her mother boasted.

  “I’d like to surprise Max,” Penny said, “but I don’t know much about him—you know, his childhood, his likes and dislikes.”

  “Why don’t you just use the Wiki-thing?”

  “Wikipedia, Mom. That’s no good, either.” Her voice heavy with resignation, Penny explained that “Climax-Well” employed teams of hackers who did nothing but comb the Internet and manage his public image. He controlled every detail that could be found. “I’m looking for little anecdotes from before the Internet age.”

  Her mother sounded doubtful. “It’s the Enquirer, honey, not The New York Times.”

  “Please, Mom.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  Penny thought a moment. “The names of his childhood pets. Old hobbies. Maybe something sweet about his mother; was her name ‘Phoebe’?”

  “She’s dead.”

  Penny insisted, “I know, but it would be sweet to find an old nickname. A favorite flavor of ice cream. A lullaby. Something along those lines.”

  Penny’s mother sounded energized, thrilled to be recruited on such a project. “I’ll head down into the basement right now.”

  “Thank you, Mom.”

  The truth was, once Penny had faked one orgasm she found herself questioning all of them. She’d stopped trusting her own physical reactions. With every nightly session, she worried that she was under- or overreacting to his ministrations. She’d never loved Maxwell, but she’d loved what he could generate in her body. Now even the orgasms were losing their hold over her.

  She wondered whether this was how his affair with Clarissa Hind had ended. And Princess Gwen. And Alouette.

  Only sixty-seven days were left.

  Whether or not she did it intentionally, Penny continued to fake it occasionally. On those nights not even the steamy memory of Alouette’s hot mouth clamped between her legs could bring on a climax. A few times, she convinced him. More often, she couldn’t. He knew more about her body than she did.

  The times she was caught—betrayed by her baseline heart rate, the pH of her sweat excretion, her skin lividity—Maxwell would summarily extract the prototype. He’d rip the applicable pages out of his notes and make a big show of tearing them into bits and sprinkling them into the trash can beside the bed. He’d open his laptop and begin reviewing the first generation of marketing materials for Beautiful You.

  Once, to defuse his silent anger, Penny looked pointedly at his notebook and asked, “Are they all in there?”

  “Who?” Max asked, not looking up from a screening copy of a television commercial. To Penny, these videos all looked the same: manically smiling women, their eyes gleaming, running home from the store or the post office carrying the same bright pink box printed with the curlicue Beautiful You logo. The voice-over tagline at the end of each commercial was a dulcet female purr saying, “A billion husbands are about to be replaced!”

  “All of your former lovers,” Penny clarified. “Are they all in there?” She nodded at the notebook filled with his spidery shorthand. “The president, the princess, the steel heiress?”

  She knew they were. Maxwell collected data like a magpie.

  “That’s only the latest of many notebooks,” said the man who was scrolling down through mock-ups of print ads that would run in every women’s magazine in the world. The Beautiful You logo in Basque, French, Hindi, Afrikaans, Mandarin Chinese. “Are you certain you want to hear this?” he asked coldly.

  She wasn’t sure, but she nodded.

  “I have, indexed and cross-indexed, the forensic specifications of seven thousand, eight hundred, and twenty-four females, ages six through two hundred seven.” Turning to meet her gaze, he added, “Before you phone the child welfare authorities, my encounter with the six-year-old occurred when we were both that age and playing ‘doctor’ in the basement of her family home in Ballard.” The centuries-old subject was a mystic who lived high on Mount Everest.

  He smiled. “I’ve trained myself with the abilities to please any woman,” Max said flatly. He wasn’t bragging, not in his own mind. “Young or old. Fat or thin. Any race. From any culture. I can quickly and efficiently bring any woman to greater levels of orgasm than she has ever dreamed possible.”

 
; Turning back to his computer screen, he continued. “I’ve collected data about the sexual responsiveness of high school girls, college coeds, young professionals. I have studied the erotic tricks of Tajikistan temple prostitutes … German sex therapists … Sufi belly dancers. The women you know of, the rich and powerful, are only the tip of my sexual iceberg. By the time I bedded them I was already very well rehearsed in a thousand ways of providing pleasure.”

  Penny realized that with numbers like that, very few of his partners had gotten more than a few minutes of Max’s attention. “Is that why you pursued Clarissa Hind?”

  “No, the purpose of women such as Clarissa and Alouette was not research. It was testing. Testing and connections. Not to mention advertising. I’ve found it very useful to know the president and the queen of England on such an intimate level. And the prestige of knowing them has lured many more test subjects into my grasp.”

  “Subjects like me?” Penny asked, at once honored and revolted by the idea.

  Maxwell looked at her kindly. He was sitting cross-legged on the bed, the laptop open in front of him. “No, my good girl. You were my victory lap.”

  He’d pioneered the most extraordinary collection of erotic tools in the history of the world. He knew they worked. In fact, some worked too well. The pleasure they generated might kill an average Jane Doe. This final round of trials was intended to blunt the power of the most dangerous toys. Now the Beautiful You collection could enter the world without fear of lawsuits.

  “Before you feel yourself ill-used,” he continued, “please remember that you’ve gotten great enjoyment from our time together. You’ve been feted by the world press. And your wardrobe has grown to become quite impressive.”

  Penny couldn’t deny any of his statements, but she could understand why a woman like Alouette would file for fifty million dollars in compensation for emotional distress.

  “If it helps your pride, my girl,” Maxwell said, “you should know that you’ve saved innocent lives.” He pecked away at a few keys, bringing up a new selection of adverts. “However,” he added, “I do use the term ‘innocent’ loosely.”

  Within hours of each marathon session of erotic bliss, Penny felt her muscles tighten and flare with soreness. It felt as if she’d climbed to the peak of Mount Everest or swum the English Channel. Some episodes, the more extreme, left her feeling as if she’d rebounded from polio. More sex was out of the question until she’d recuperated; Maxwell knew that. He didn’t push. Some of the positions they achieved required her legs to be as limber as a circus contortionist’s. A pulled muscle or ruptured tendon would delay further testing for weeks.

  A battalion of physical therapists streamed through the penthouse. To aid in her rapid recovery, masseurs stroked her for hours with scented oils, working their muscular, intuitive hands deep into her. Acupuncture specialists performed miracles by pricking her with their thin needles. Only when she was fully revitalized did Maxwell approach her with the next piece of equipment or aphrodisiac. He inflicted his sweet, consensual torture and left her gasping and aching, and once again the recovery team would nurse Penny back to health in time for another round of crippling pleasure.

  “I do not want fatigue to dim your senses,” Max told her. As a burly Turkish brute fingered the inside of her aching thighs, Max stood by fully dressed in a twelve-thousand-dollar bespoke suit and examined her nude body for bruises. “It is of the utmost importance that you be fully rested and responsive when we engage in our experiments.”

  He stepped closer to the massage table, where she lay faceup, glistening with oil. Her labia were ruddy and distended from the sensual abuse they’d taken the previous night. Bowing low over her body, he placed his lips against her inflamed clitoris.

  Penny winced.

  “The lactic acid must dissipate. You are still too tender,” Max declared. “We will postpone further trials for two days.”

  Over the past few weeks, Penny had lost track of how many Beautiful You products he’d tested on her body. A few had proved mediocre, lackluster, unremarkable. But most had left her drained and limp with satisfaction. Fearful for her own safety, she’d even asked Max to dial back the effects of some. She was young, a fit, healthy girl just out of law school. On an older woman or someone with a preexisting health condition, those most effective products could prove fatal.

  On the evenings when recent erotic play had left her too damaged for more, Penny lay in bed and asked Max to read to her from his notebook of test results. Freshly massaged and sipping a glass of Côtes du Rhône, she’d curl in her nest of satin sheets. Max would sit on a straight-backed chair beside the bed. Attired in a tuxedo and white bow tie, he’d lick a fingertip and page forward and back in his book until he found just the right test subject.

  “ ‘Date: June seventeenth, the year 20—,’ ” he read. “ ‘Test site: the Mall of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Product: Beautiful You item number two sixteen, the Veggie Play Shaper, a food processor that quickly turns any raw vegetable into an erotic tool.’ ” In his flat, robotic voice, Maxwell described standing at a folding table as a stream of shoppers moved past. A few lingered, watching as he inserted uncooked carrots and zucchini squash into a plastic housing. With a single deft movement, he pressed a lever. Unseen blades within the device shaped the vegetable and out popped a phallus engineered for maximum fulfillment. As curious shoppers coalesced into a crowd, Maxwell demonstrated how the internal blades could be adjusted to make the resulting sex toy longer or shorter, thicker or thinner. Other blades carved channels and ridges that would excite the vaginal opening. His audience giggled and gasped with amusement, but they didn’t leave. A voice near the back of the crowd called out, “Will it work on eggplants?”

  Maxwell assured them it would.

  “How about potatoes?” asked another shopper.

  Max asked for a volunteer.

  Reading to Penny, seated on a straight-backed chair beside her bed, his legs crossed primly at the knee and his notebook balanced atop them, he said, “The test subject, number seventeen sixty-nine, gave her name as Tiffany Jennifer Spalding, a twenty-five-year-old mother of three and homemaker. Height: a hundred and seventy centimeters. Weight: sixty-one kilos.”

  There in the Mall of America, he dialed the adjustment knobs. “How thick do you like it?” He grinned lecherously. “Your potatoes, I mean.”

  She blushed. “Not too big around. Medium.”

  “Smooth or textured?”

  Tiffany Jennifer tapped a finger against her temple and thought for a moment. “Textured.”

  “Ridges or nubs?”

  She asked, “Can you do both?”

  The crowd held its collective breath as he lifted the device’s top and wedged the tuberous vegetable into the chopping chute. Like a magician performing a trick onstage, he ceremonially asked his volunteer to press the blade-activation lever. “Is this your first time?” he asked.

  She nodded, trembling. Reality slowed to sex time.

  To steady her, he slipped an arm around Tiffany Spalding’s waist. He placed both her hands on the lever, then laid his own atop them. “You must shove it quickly and smoothly.” On the count of three, they pressed together and the onlookers gasped.

  Maxwell lifted the safety panel to reveal a perfect phallus. Sleek and slightly curved, it didn’t suggest the rude Idaho spud that had gone into the top of the device. With sufficient sanitary precautions and a thorough cooking, he assured the onlookers there was no reason it couldn’t go from the farm field to the bedroom to the family dinner table. For a young mother on a tight food budget it would pay for itself in a matter of weeks.

  “Now,” he boasted, “you can have your good times and eat them, too!”

  Several people laughed. Everyone applauded. Money in hand, they surged forward to buy. No one recognized him. They never did. The disguise he donned for such occasions was simple and effective. Even when his false mustache fell off during cunnilingus, as it often did, test subjects
never realized whom they were cavorting with. It was too impossible that C. Linus Maxwell, the richest man in the world, was the stranger fishing his prosthetic facial hair from their bedclothes.

  Still reading in his Paris penthouse, Maxwell edged his chair closer to the bed. Holding the open notebook with one hand, he reached between the sheets with his other until his fingers found Penny’s weary groin.

  “The Veggie Play Shaper sold briskly. Even when the stock was gone, one shopper lingered.” Test subject number 1769 had asked, “What about me?” Her voice descended to a sex-drenched murmur.

  In the penthouse bedroom, Maxwell’s fingertips carefully traced the soft contours of Penny’s overtaxed pussy. With small circling motions, he provoked moisture to rise from deep within her.

  Test subject 1769 still clutched her sculpted potato. Eyeing him from beneath her fluttering lashes, she said, “You’re quite the pitchman.” She wore Avon Pink Palace lipstick and held the potato suggestively near her mouth. From her skin tone, Maxwell estimated she was seventeen days from estrus. According to his notes, she asked, “Do you have anything else I might be interested in? Another labor-saving device?”

  His voice still droning on, even and monotone, Max dipped his fingers, milking at Penny’s hot wetness. Unlike earlier in the day, she didn’t wince. In fact, she groaned and rolled her battered pelvis against the weight of his hand.

  “ ‘Test subject seventeen sixty-nine,’ ” Max read aloud, “ ‘proved to be a willing and eager participant in preliminary evaluation of the champagne douche product.…’ ”

  There was more. Maxwell kept reading for hours. But as his hand worked its customary magic Penny was no longer listening.

  On another night of recovery, Maxwell pulled a chair to the side of the bed where Penny lay. That night, from among the recollections of geishas and singsong girls and courtesans, he read to her about a nondescript homebody recruited almost at random. “ ‘Test subject thirty-eight ninety-one,’ ” he read. “ ‘Place: Bakersfield, California, the auditorium of Hillshire Elementary School. Time: seven p.m., October second, 20—.’ ”