B as in Beauty

by Alberto Ferreras

  But Simon didn’t say a thing. He stood back for a few seconds, looking at the floor, while Sandra recovered from the incident—she would have fallen on her face if it weren’t for the model next to her, who stepped in to help. The studio assistants quickly replaced the light, and then Simon continued taking his pictures, but standing at a safer distance from the girls and avoiding their eyes. I’m telling you, the guy was odd. Very odd.

  Romina, Simon’s young, slim, cute, and Italian-accented assistant, approached me.

  “May I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Simon.”

  “He’s busy right now. May I take a message?”

  “Well, I believe that he’s waiting for me, but if he’s busy…” I replied, tempted to use that as an excuse to leave. This guy’s attitude was totally rubbing me the wrong way.

  At that moment, Simon noticed me, and he walked right up to us. He looked me up and down, and, without addressing me, told Romina, “Take her upstairs,” as if I were an additional piece of lighting equipment some delivery man had just dropped off.

  Okay, how rude was this guy? Very rude. As Simon walked back to his models, I couldn’t help asking Romina, “Is he in a bad mood?”

  “He’s always like that,” she answered.

  Great! A grumpy one, I thought, and followed Romina back into the elevator. She took me to the third floor, where Simon had his apartment. For someone who supposedly had a lot of money, his place was terribly humble: a couch, a coffee table, a TV, a couple of chairs, and tons of books and CDs. What was very cool, though, were the photographs he had on display. Even though Simon was a famous fashion photographer, there was not one fashion shot hanging on any of the walls; instead, he had a beautiful series of huge portraits featuring commuters sleeping in trains. I immediately remembered seeing a couple of them at some famous SoHo gallery. They were in a book called Sleeping Beauties that came out a few years ago.

  “Did Simon take these too?”

  “Of course,” said Romina, and she excused herself to go back to work.

  I remained in the apartment, mesmerized by those photos on the wall. They were the portraits of working people who had fallen asleep in the trains during their commute. If you’ve ever been in the New York subway during rush hour, you know there’s a good number of people who snore their way to work every morning. When I lived in Brooklyn, I had a longer commute, and I would share close quarters with quite a few sleeping passengers; almost every single day, I ended up with someone drooling on my shoulder. Not only is it a real annoyance, but it’s gross as hell. The fascinating part is that all the sleepers managed to wake up automatically when the train arrived at their stations. It’s as if they had built-in alarm clocks in their heads.

  Watching the sleeping commuters was an enormous voyeuristic pleasure. Young and old, men and women, they all had the innocent expression of sleeping babies. These photos made you feel like it doesn’t matter how old you are, there’s an innocence that seems to overcome all humans when we sleep. I was impressed that this rude guy could be capable of capturing such delicate beauty.

  The sound of the door pulled me out of my trance. Simon walked in, avoiding eye contact at all cost. I decided to avoid it too, since—as Madame used to say—the customer is always right.

  “Sorry for making you wait. I just needed to finish something downstairs,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, I was admiring these pictures. They’re wonderful.”

  “Yeah, I wish they could pay the rent,” he said, dismissively.

  I didn’t know what to reply to that, so I just said, “Well—I love them anyway.” And when he heard me say that, he stilled.

  “Thanks,” he said without looking at me.

  “My name is B.” I extended my hand, but Simon avoided the handshake. Okay, he doesn’t shake hands, I said to myself while trying to figure out what to do with my hand suspended in the air. But after seeing the way he treated the models downstairs, I had no reason to take this personally. Whatever made him act like that was entirely his problem, not mine.

  To avoid the awkwardness of the moment, Simon turned around and started shuffling magazines from one table to another. While doing this, he said in a low but audible voice, “Nice to meet you.”

  I smiled at no one, since he was still avoiding my eyes.

  “Do you need anything? A glass of water? The bathroom, maybe?” he offered.

  “I’m fine,” I replied.

  “Okay, so let’s start.”

  Here’s where the big mystery began. Simon took a large pillow and put it against the armrest of his couch. Then he pulled out a measuring tape and carefully measured sixteen and a half inches from the pillow.

  “Can you sit over here?” he asked me.

  I walked over to the couch and sat near the spot he was marking.

  “Closer,” he said. “Your right leg should be right here.”

  He tapped his finger on the sixteen-and-a-half-inch mark. I hesitated, but finally managed to slide down the couch to the exact mark he had measured. Apparently satisfied with the placement, he asked: “Did you bring a book?”

  “Yeah, it’s in my bag…”

  As I made an attempt to get up to reach for my bag, which I had left by the entrance, Simon jumped: “Don’t move!”

  I froze. What a control freak! I rolled my eyes and remained in place while he nervously brought me my bag. Without looking at him, I pulled out my book and waited for additional instructions. But he didn’t say one more word. He just picked up an alarm clock, set it to ring in three hours, and put it in front of me on the coffee table. Then he took a couple of steps back to look at the scene, as if he was going to take a picture. I could almost hear him thinking: Clock in place, pillow in place, fat girl in place…I just sat there witnessing this, waiting for something to happen. And it finally did.

  Simon came over and squeezed himself into the tight sixteen and a half inches that were left between the pillow and me. He took a deep breath, let out a sigh, closed his eyes, and—almost immediately—fell asleep. That was it.

  I sat there wondering if anything else was going to happen, but after ten minutes or so, I realized that my job was to sit there and read a book while he slept. And so I did.

  He slept for three hours and I read for three hours, interrupted only by his peaceful snoring.

  Thank God my book was great. Gabriel García Márquez is—in my very humble opinion—a genius. He wrote my favorite novel ever: One Hundred Years of Solitude. But this book, lighter than that novel, was a collection of short stories called Strange Pilgrims. One of my favorite stories was about an aging prostitute who was so lonely that she trained her little dog to go weep at her grave, thinking that no one else would miss her when she died.

  The story made me think about my recent adventures, and myself. Was I going to be like her? Would I ever find love? On a night like this, sitting next to this strange guy—who couldn’t even give you a decent handshake—I very much doubted that love was anywhere in sight. The novelty of my new profession was starting to wear off. I could appreciate the small changes that it had inspired in my life, but how long could I continue doing this?

  Lost in the book and my thoughts, I barely noticed when Simon’s head started resting comfortably on my shoulder. I thought about shaking him off, like I have often done with subway commuters, but I was getting paid here. So I let him lean over comfortably. That’s when I realized how long it had been since I’d had anyone sleeping peacefully next to me. It’s a wonderful sensation. We are so vulnerable when we sleep, I believe that sleeping next to someone is the ultimate proof of trust. I was surprised that this guy, who barely knew me, could feel so comfortable next to me. Then again, I was hired as a “comfort provider.”

  After three hours, the alarm clock went off. It took a few seconds for Simon to react. When he was fully awake, he realized that he was leaning on me, and—abruptly—he took his head off my shoulder and got off the couch in a hurry.
/>   Without saying a word, he reached for his wallet, paid me, and showed me to the door. I went back to the limo, where Alberto was patiently waiting for me.

  “How did it go, Miss B?”

  “Ugh…” I answered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This guy is so…I don’t know…he’s weird.” And that was saying a lot, considering the guys I had met recently through the Madame.

  “Was he rude to you? Do you want me to have a talk with him?”

  “No, he wasn’t intentionally rude…He…he’s just very guarded.”

  Alberto dropped one of his favorite lines, “There’s a lot of lonely people in New York.”

  “Yes, indeed,” I said.

  As Alberto drove me home by the riverside, I mumbled his words once again: “There’s a lot of lonely people in New York.” But at that point I wondered if I was referring to Simon, or if I was referring to myself.

  CHAPTER 17

  The morning after my sitting stunt at Simon Leary’s studio, I went shopping for lingerie. I wanted to treat myself, because the previous night had been kind of depressing. Hanging out with that guy brought me down big-time.

  So I was browsing through these pricey negligees, and when I asked for an extralarge to try on, the clerk looked at me as if I had asked for a spare kidney.

  “I don’t think that we carry your size.”

  Inspired by Myrna and the Diet Coke incident, I just gave her a nasty look and said, with my best New York attitude: “You don’t think you carry my size? Well, stop thinking and start checking, because I want to try it on.”

  Realizing that I was “big” trouble, the clerk retreated. “Let me see what we have in the back.”

  The clerk momentarily disappeared, and I turned my attention to an embroidered push-up bra without padding. That’s when I started feeling weird. I remember once in school a teacher reading the fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea” to our class. From then on, whenever something didn’t feel right to me, I imagined I was just like the princess feeling a pea under a tower of mattresses. That pea usually hinted that I was avoiding my feelings.

  I’ll never forget something I saw years ago on one of the shopping networks. They had a caller who was asking about some fantasy jewelry collection. The woman in question was calling from Hawaii. She was out there on her honeymoon.

  I could picture the view from the balcony of her hotel room: the red Hawaiian sun setting in the ocean, the palm trees softly bending under the tropical breeze, the gentle volcanoes blowing their pink smoke on the horizon, her brand-new husband taking a hot shower, preparing himself to exercise his recently acquired love rights…So why the hell was this woman glued to the TV, making a long-distance call to discuss a pair of amethyst-nugget heart-drop earrings? I could be wrong about this, but my feeling is that this lady was in denial. She was afraid of the unknown: the married life, the tropical island, even the body of her husband must have felt like a foreign object. So what did she do? She looked for comfort in something she knew very well, her shopping channel.

  I thought about her at that particular moment because I suspected that I was doing something similar. I was shopping to avoid my feelings. I was using my credit card as an antidepressant.

  At that precise moment, my cell phone rang between my boobs.

  “How was last night?” asked Madame.

  “Mellow,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t know what you did to that man, but he wants to book you for the next five nights in a row.”

  “What?”

  “Five whole nights, starting Sunday. Are you okay with that?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess? You can buy yourself a Jaguar with the money you’re going to make. Are you crazy?”

  Madame had a point. Though five nights of sitting on that sofa with that guy sounded like a major pain in the butt, turning down such an absurd amount of money was insane, right? And I clearly needed that money to buy unjustifiably expensive negligees from stores that didn’t want to sell them to me in the first place.

  “Okay,” I sighed, “I’ll do it.”

  If nothing else, a mellow client like Simon would give me time to figure things out. It’s not often that I have time to sit down and ponder why, if everything in my life is moving in the right direction, I still feel a pea hurting the small of my back. I left the store—without buying anything—and headed home to prepare myself to earn the first payment on my Jaguar.

  CHAPTER 18

  On Sunday, Alberto drove me back down to Tribeca. That night, I didn’t even stop by Simon’s studio. Romina came down in the elevator and took me straight to Simon’s apartment. She seemed nice, and I would have loved to talk to her a little, but I really didn’t know how to engage her. “Hi! I’m a fat escort and your boss hires me to sit next to him on the sofa” could have been a hell of an icebreaker, but I wasn’t going to open that can of worms.

  As I waited for Simon, I observed the portraits on the wall. Once again I was fascinated by the images of the Sleeping Beauties. I remembered what he’d said about those photos: “I wish they could pay the rent.” It was an interesting choice of words. Simon’s apartment was in one of the most expensive buildings in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Manhattan. Why would this guy be worried about paying the rent?

  On the coffee table in front of me, there was a Vogue magazine opened to the middle, and a dirty coffee mug on top of it. I lifted the mug and noticed that there was a story about Simon and his fashion photography. He’d carelessly left the coffee mug on top of the very page that praised his work. Either he was incredibly sloppy, or he didn’t buy into his own fame.

  As I was entertaining these thoughts, Simon showed up.

  “Hello…” I said.

  He said nothing.

  “Hello?”

  “Huh?” he mustered.

  “How are you doing?” I said with a smile. The least I would expect from someone who’s going to spend five nights with me is to say “hi.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m thinking about this job that I’m doing tomorrow.”

  “It’s okay,” I replied, even though it really wasn’t. And then I started to feel stupid for agreeing to five nights with him. Something about this guy made me very uncomfortable.

  He was wearing a pair of partially destroyed jeans, with a plain white T-shirt that was in pretty bad shape too. Some rich people like to dress in carefully chosen rags, but he was just wearing totally random rags. There was nothing stylish about what he had on. I also noticed that he looked older than the night before, but maybe he was just tired, because he did look exhausted. He sat there without making eye contact with me, set the alarm clock, put the pillow in place, measured the sixteen and a half inches, and squeezed in next to me for the next seven hours.

  But something very interesting happened that night. Even though I wasn’t a fan of Simon’s, the moment he sat next to me, let go a couple of sighs, and dozed off, his energy changed. Awake, he was as dry as a piece of Sheetrock, but when he was sleeping he had the same angelic quality as the people he photographed in the subway.

  I must have read until about three in the morning, but then, at some point, I fell asleep, and I had an extremely strange dream.

  I saw myself in bed with a man and a woman. The three of us were there kissing and caressing each other, but the weird thing was that it wasn’t really a sexual dream. I can’t remember the details, but what I do recall is that I had a very pleasant sensation of being physically accepted by these two people who were in bed with me. Now, here’s the weirdest part: I looked over the edge of the bed and noticed that the bed was on top of a tall tower of mattresses, and the whole tower was floating on the sea. The tower was so high that there were clouds around us, as if we were up in the sky. The dream was strange but beautiful—so much so that I made the effort to remember as much as I could and find out what it meant. Maybe I could ask Madame, I thought. She had a few doctorates in psychology. She shoul
d know about these things.

  At 6 a.m., Simon’s alarm clock woke us up. That’s when I realized that my head was resting on his shoulder.

  “What the fuck!” he said, jumping off the couch.

  Okay, I never expected him to wake me up with a kiss on the forehead, or by tenderly caressing my face with his fingertips. I understand that he must have been a bit surprised when he found a stranger’s head snoozing next to his, but he could have said “Oops,” or even “Excuse me, can you take your head off of my shoulder?” I felt that “What the fuck” was uncalled for, and it deeply pissed me off. I might not be a Miss Universe, but I’m not the Creature from the Black Lagoon either.

  Simon stood next to the couch, looking at the floor and frantically searching for something in his pockets—my fee, I suspected. In the meantime, I gathered my book and my purse with a deep frown that I didn’t even try to hide.

  “Don’t worry about the money. You can send it to Madame later,” I said, throwing my book in my bag and getting up from the couch without looking at him.

  He stood there like a statue as I walked up to the exit. When I tried to open the heavy metal door that protected the elevator, I realized that it was locked, so I stood there, took a deep breath, and looked at the ceiling.

  “It’s locked,” I announced through a clenched jaw.

  “What?” he mumbled.

  “The door is locked. I can’t get out.”

  He rushed to the door and proceeded to unlock it. For about ten never-ending seconds he fumbled with the key—still looking at the floor—while I kept looking at the ceiling. If he had looked at the ceiling I would have looked at the floor. Anything to make it clear I had no interest in making eye contact with this idiot, I thought to myself.

  What did he think? That I had put my head on his shoulder on purpose? Oh, please! I stepped into the elevator, wondering whether he would cancel the rest of the nights that he had booked with me, and, truthfully, hoping he would.

  He hid behind the main door as the elevator’s doors started closing, and that’s when I heard a barely audible word coming from him.