A Thing of Beauty

by Lisa Samson

  Is that his secret? Will I have to be known by this man? Does he know me already? Something inside me cries out yes. Something else cries out no. I don’t know who to believe or why it’s even important.

  But pragmatism wins the day, and I remember my home and all that resides therein and yes, Josia Yeu is perfect.

  “Then again,” he says, “the clothes may throw a person off too. That girl there? She might hate metal but only pretends to like it so her boyfriend will be happy.”

  “Or vice versa.”

  “Or vice versa! Yes! Good!”

  We exchange phone numbers.

  I walk him to the door, shake his hand, and remind him the move-in date isn’t until next Tuesday.

  He climbs into a large white pickup truck, older but beautifully kept (a good sign), and soon drives off, easy.

  “Why next Tuesday?” Randi asks.

  “I need a full five days to get the room in shape.”

  “That bad?”

  “Well, you won’t find me on Animal Hoarders, so I guess it’s not as bad as it could be.”

  Randi lets out a low whistle. “Need help?”

  “Nope. But I’d better get to it.”

  This is not going to be fun. The chickens always come home to roost, and one of mine is pecking at my screen door.

  This interview with Deborah Raines should have been done a long time ago. Maybe I just needed a decade to gather the strength. I should tell the whole truth. What Campbell did to me. Jessica’s nonresponse. But really, a perverted director and a young actress is an age-old story in Hollywood, and does anybody really give a damn? I don’t think so.

  As I pack up my things, a younger man hurries toward me from the front door. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he says. “I realize it’s way past ten forty-five.”

  Wait. Josia wasn’t my ten forty-five?

  Three

  I place my tote bag in the plastic woven front basket of my rusty old Schwinn and pedal away from the Bizarre. The rain, now stopped, allows my tires to suck up the water in its grooves and spit it back out, providing a pleasant rhythm. I love riding my bike after a rain with its shippy-ta-shippy-ta-shippy-ta cadence accompanying my journey.

  I should take a left and go directly home, but the thought of the task ahead of me forces my handlebars right. What was I thinking buying such a huge town house in Mount Vernon? What one woman needs that many bedrooms? But it was also the last big purchase with my acting pay. I’m not ready to give that up.

  Already I’m thinking about my hair. That’s going to be the first big change I make with the rent money. My investment account is at an all-time low, and as you might guess, I’ve been drawing from it over the years while I decide what I want to do with the rest of my life.

  I’m still not sure what I’m going to do, other than clean that bedroom and bathroom.

  Such high ambitions, Fiona.

  Hey, it’s better than a week ago. It’s a step in some kind of direction. Forward, backward, I can’t tell. But here’s to something being better than nothing.

  I pedal down Eastern Avenue, cut over toward the Inner Harbor, wing past Harbor Place and the tourist sites, take a left on Light Street, and continue on until I turn left once more onto Fort Avenue.

  I’m reasonably sure there will be several messages on my answering machine at home from my mother, who’ll want to make absolutely sure I understood our conversation the night before.

  Sure, I can sum it up for you, Jessica.

  “When your father and I divorce, it’s pretend. When you divorce, it’s for real, Fiona. It’s time the world knows the truth of what you did to us.”

  She would look so beautiful saying it too, that thick, short hair that once held the golden light of a wheat field in the sun, now more akin to the light of the moon on the snow outside, barely coming to rest on sharp, broad shoulders sprinkled with the intriguing, tiny brown spots of older women who’ve been able to afford years in the sun. On Jessica it happens to be alluring. That impossible waist. Legs still slender and shapely. She’d be looking good in white pants and a red sweater, standing by the sliding glass doors in her feminine but tastefully simple home office.

  “When are you coming back home?” she asks almost every time we speak.

  “Back to what?” I ask. I never even lived at that ranch. Back means a hell of a lot more than Jessica wants to realize. Surely she realizes. She was there, wasn’t she? Wasn’t everybody?

  I stop for a small bottle of chocolate milk at a convenience store on Fort Avenue and read an article by the cash register about rampant sexual abuse in the world of the child star. Wowee, the writers sure got the scoop with that one. They must have been sitting around for three weeks racking their brains for something earth shattering.

  “Do you want that magazine?” asks the cashier, a woman in a red T-shirt with the words It’s not rocket surgery, people across her buxom chest.

  I shake my head and slide the magazine back into the wire rack. “No, thanks.”

  I head outside and tuck the chocolate milk in the basket.

  The point is, Mom knew what Campbell was doing to me, and she not only kept me in the industry, she kept me on his show. At one point, hoping to be alleviated from the horror, I begged to live a normal life.

  “What’s normal?” she asked.

  And now, pedaling as fast as I can toward the interim destination I have chosen for the day, I can’t even pinpoint what normal consists of because surely this life does not fall into that category. I’m thirty-two, with no children, no career, an old house filled with Nutty Bars and junk. This can’t be regular. Please, dear God, don’t let this be regular.

  I’m glad I ended up here, though, in this town. At least there’s that.

  I love the streets of Baltimore, and I look from side to side as I pedal, hoping to obscure visions of Jessica with views of little rowhouses and pots on stair steps, painted screens and sub shops, but nope. She’s not to be denied.

  How can I not hate her a little?

  Can someone tell me how to do otherwise?

  When I first heard Reba McEntire sing that horrific ballad about poor little Fancy, dressed like a tramp, made up like a harlot, then sent into town all by her young teenage self because this was her one chance to make it out of this godforsaken town, this godforsaken life, this godforsaken house—her one and only chance—I wanted to call the country singer and say how that song trivialized matters like that. That when it’s true, it’s nothing to sing about. I knew exactly how poor Fancy felt. Only my mother wasn’t wasting away from some particularly consumptive form of cancer, wearing an old shirtwaist dress with a dime store pin on the collar held up by skin and bones. Jessica didn’t have any such thing as an excuse for what she did. Oh no. She couldn’t have had some reason that, however twisted, made a tiny bit of sense. There couldn’t have been something there for a daughter to hold on to, some small peg sticking out on which to hang forgiveness.

  And I’m supposed to tell the world this?

  I don’t know where I will find the strength.

  After a while, my eyes focus on the stone gates of Fort McHenry, and just the sight of them starts to relax my muscles. This is my thinking spot. This is the space in which I feel an anonymous ownership, as if the fort is mine, each brick, every last stone, but nobody knows it. And when I’m seen sitting on the walls, people just think, There’s a girl out there sitting on the walls, but what they don’t know is that I own the place.

  I zip through the gates and ride toward the museum.

  I haven’t had a big change in a while now. I’ve been quite good at keeping that up since Jade left. Beautiful Jade, with the curly black hair that fell in his eyes. His eyes burned. Those burning male eyes that I find sexier than a thousand boy actors. We’d met at the Fourth of July fireworks downtown and stayed by each other’s side when we both realized we were there alone.

  Those eyes burned when he said three years later, “I can’t stand it in here any
more, Fia. You’re burying yourself yard sale by yard sale.”

  “But it’s for my art. I use these things!” I yelled that day, about five years ago, when we stood in the one room he called his own, up on the third floor, his recording studio.

  Two boxes of old purple tile I’d managed to score at a construction site sat against the wall near the door. He should have been congratulating me for getting it up there on my own. Instead, he raised his index finger and shook it. “One. I asked you. One place. One lousy room to call my own. And I walk in here and look. Look right there!” He pointed to the boxes.

  “I just need a place for these things and I didn’t know—”

  “Know where else to put them? Geez, Fia!”

  That night he left. He calls once a month to see how I am doing and once a month I tell him I’m doing all right, just the same, figuring things out a little more each day.

  The last statement is a bald-faced lie. I know it. He knows it. I probably ruined my last chance for love.

  He was a looker, all right.

  I chain my bike to the rack near the visitor center, then skirt the main fort itself in favor of one of the outer walls, a pointed wall overlooking the Patapsco River. Fort McHenry is an old star-shaped fort, famous for being the place where “the flag was still there,” as sung in “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I’ve always loved Francis Scott Key just a little bit. So does my grandpa. He used to bring me here as a kid when I stayed with my grandparents for summer breaks before I started acting full-time.

  Few people come out to my wall here, but today, down at the water’s edge, I see two teenagers going at it: kissing, kissing, kissing. They’re a beautiful couple really, with their little ski caps clinging to the backs of their heads and their funky jeans and worn sneakers. The glittered waters reflect a sun now fully emerged from the cloud cover, and the trees are stippled with buds. My heart yearns a little. Not for a relationship, which surprises me, but just for beauty, even small, winking shards of the stuff, for beauty all around.

  This world can be such an ugly place.

  The boy takes the girl’s hand.

  I’d never really had a boyfriend before Jade. Lots of dates, okay, and even boys I saw regularly but never committed to. My best friend, Lila, and I didn’t need males tagging along to have a great time together. In fact, they kind of ruined things. No, they definitely did.

  All males? Every single one? This is how preferences become issues, I suppose. Some women know how to pick them, and some women don’t.

  The little couple by the water has settled down, sitting and smoking cigarettes, his head in her lap, her playfully slapping at him, then planting a kiss on his lips. Something closer to the fort, to my left, nabs their attention. I follow the direction of their gaze.

  A film crew has begun setting up.

  I recognize the logo on the equipment. Charm City Radio Pictures. They’ve had a hit homicide detective show, Charm City Killing, for ten years running, and Baltimoreans, particularly those who live downtown, are always talking about a Charm City sighting.

  They sure cast some sexy detectives. Even I have to admit.

  This is my third sighting, and instead of running away like usual, I sit and watch from my perch as the crew sets up minimal lighting, dragging equipment from an oversized van. Jasper Venn, the famous director/producer who owns Charm City, pulls up in a beat-up black Honda sedan, climbs out with a stainless steel travel mug, and starts his part of his shoot by chatting it up with the grips.

  The man is sexy, with gray hair that falls below his chin but stays back from his forehead.

  After an hour in which I lose some interest and return my viewing to the water, two actors arrive, the female lead with her wavy auburn hair and Irish face and a hard-edged, sexy black man who, quite seriously, can work a camera like nobody I’ve ever seen. Charm City Killing is the only show I’ve ever watched with the same faithfulness a widow attends daily mass.

  When they start to shoot, my heart begins to pound in a rhythm I haven’t experienced in a decade. And when I can take it no longer, I climb down from the wall and find my Schwinn. Time to roll.

  Surely there is a way to do the work you do best and be healthy and happy. But if you’re an actor, isn’t that just impossible?

  Please say yes.

  Four

  When I say I’m renting out a bedroom, I actually mean what was once the housekeeper’s room. One small, mullioned window, its corner home for a spider with a quarter-size light-brown body, shines a garbled light down over stacks of my supplies.

  The first step? Remove it all, every little bit of it, down to the smallest pieces of lint cowering by the baseboards. I should ride to the hardware store for a box of contractor bags, heavy duty and able to hold baby rattles, Fisher Price toys, four dust-dripping vaporizers, and who knows what else. I have seven cribs in here too, burdened by no foreseeable planning for their usage, but they’re good cribs, antique, made of fine wood.

  I was going to do a sculpture/installation-type piece devoted to babyhood. I gathered supplies from every other room of my house, each one devoted to a color. A lot came from the yellow room and the pink room and the blue room. I don’t even know what I was thinking now. No picture comes to mind, no ideas. All I see are pieces of childhoods I neither remember nor particularly care about. Junk.

  That’s not true. I do care, but still haven’t figured out why.

  I could pitch it all in the backyard and make this easy, but I just can’t. I don’t want Josia to see an even more unruly backyard, the same jungle I’d hoped to make into something beautiful someday, clay pots filled with begonias and geraniums sitting on the patio by the iron chaise lounge that rests in the corner ready to be painted, at this point of decision, robin’s egg blue. Three fountains, because I have pumps for three, one of them in the pool I found when I first moved here, a black, amoeba-shaped bowl just begging for koi, remind me that plans exist to be followed because if they aren’t, they’re just dreams, and if they’re just dreams, fine, but at least admit it.

  I could just drag the hellish host of debris up to Jade’s studio. It’s not quite filled. After he left, I tried to leave his room free of supplies. But there is a lot of purple junk out there on the cheap. Now the attic is full too.

  Sitting down on the floor of the hallway, I evaluate. The crib ends and sides must be saved. For that kind of lumber to end up in a landfill is criminal. The other stuff? Now I can’t even imagine what I could do with it. Seriously, this stuff looks like so much garbage I might just as well already be at the landfill.

  Well, at least there’s a firm line of demarcation between keep-it and trash-it.

  I start taking apart what cribs are put together and haul the ends and rails to the hallway where I lean them up against the wall. Taking the cribs apart, of course, leaves me with screws and bolts and the iron grids upon which the mattresses would sit. (No, I don’t have the used mattresses. A few standards still remain.)

  The problem with collecting other people’s junk is you just don’t know what to do with it when you don’t want it anymore. You feel bad about throwing it to the curb. It’s too much trouble to sell. So you keep it around, knowing if you can’t redeem it exactly, you’ve at least rescued it. Somewhat.

  Thank goodness it’s March. Normally the lack of heat in every part of the house but my bedroom and the kitchen fails to appear on my gratitude list . . . when I remember to make one. But by four, my grimy hands wiping sweat from my forehead are most likely leaving streaks rendering me far from redcarpet ready. Definitely a “stars in real life” photo that’s not exactly the Starbucks Shot or the Trader Joe’s Capture. A little more raw and even more human.

  See? She’s a people too!

  I drop the hardware into a paper bag and haul it down to my basement workshop, where I toss it on the already overflowing worktable.

  After three hours of labor, I’ve cleared less than half of the ten-by-ten space, but the maple plank flooring
waits to be noticed once again, and will it be surprised when I actually bring in a mop and bucket, assuming I can find either, and swipe up the dirt. How is it I own so much and can never find what I need?

  How does dirt find its way into old houses like it does? Sometimes I think it’s the house itself, old and disintegrating by degrees, breathing out sighs of itself, sighs longing for a little bit of notice.

  Thankfully, there’s nothing personal to assault me here in this room. Every bit of this is stuff I’ve brought in since I moved from California eleven years ago. Imagine, a twenty-one-year-old buying one of the mansions on Mount Vernon Place.

  “I had dreams too, you know,” I whisper. Dreams of collecting the memories of good times, not dust, meeting new people who didn’t know anything about Hollywood, not walking around with ghosts from my past, becoming good friends with locals, and having a neighborhood bar. Artwork—my own, of course, that people would be happy to buy—figured in too.

  If I could ever decide what it is I really want to do with art. There are a lot of different kinds of artists. Maybe even this house, this mausoleum of detritus and rejection, is a work of art unto itself.

  Oh yeah. Definitely that.

  I work steadily until the hour of seven thirty renders it too dark to see and the boxes have stacked up outside on the patio.

  Rain tonight too. Beautiful.

  An adult would have checked the forecast.

  But now it’s time to quit. Time to flip on my bedside lamp, eat a sandwich, drink a glass of chocolate milk, and see if anyone on The List is looking for a connection.

  Will I be happy just to fire off a few e-mails filled with brash, sexy talk, like frayed lines from a bad movie? These men on the other end of the Internet are so prone to respond to what I’ve typed into my insignificant little cell-phone keyboard. I’ve stopped asking why that is. Because I know.

  When Jade pulled open our front door for the last time, a friend’s pickup loaded with his equipment, a backpack carrying the majority of his personal possessions hanging by the top strap from his fingers, he said, “Nobody’s enough in and of themselves, Fia. What we carry makes all the difference in the world. And your load was just too damn heavy. Get rid of it. At least some of it. For your own sake if nobody else’s.”