B as in Beauty

by Alberto Ferreras

  She made a small pause, thinking that that was my cue to start begging forgiveness. I just smiled at her and placed my tape recorder on the desk. She looked at me as if I had two heads. I smiled again and pressed play. Then we both heard her voice from the conversation with Christine in the bathroom.

  “…she’s too fat to work here. That’s reason enough.”

  “You can’t say that!”

  “Oh, I’ll set her up. I’ve done this before. How do you think I got rid of Miller and Jessica? Nobody, I repeat, nobody fucks with me.”

  Just to annoy her for an extra minute, I faked surprise and said: “Oh, I’m sorry, that was the wrong tape.”

  I popped another cassette in the machine, and we heard her distinctive squeaking, setting the ultimate trap for the Chicago Boss.

  “Kevin is so stupid he doesn’t even know how stupid he is. If we don’t get UK Charms—and trust me, I’ll make sure that we don’t—he better start looking for a retirement home in Florida.”

  “Do you have that much pull with the board?” asked Christine.

  “Watch me! I’ve got those idiots of the board in my back pocket.”

  The plan was finally unveiled. Bonnie was actively sabotaging the tampon presentation to kick the Chicago Boss out of his own company and—most likely—take his position as the president of the agency. I used to think that she was evil, but I was being too nice: she was the Antichrist.

  I stopped the recording. For once she was speechless. I leaned over the desk—still smiling—and very carefully explained my intentions:

  “Bonnie, now I’m going to go back to my ‘dungeon,’ and I’m going to pack up all my things. And you have half an hour to decide if I’m in fact leaving the company, or if I’m moving to the window office with my new title of creative director. Got it?”

  She tried to utter a word, but I stopped her with another line.

  “Oh, by the way, if I’m not at my desk by the time you make up your mind, I could be at the post office, sending copies of this tape to a couple of friends in Chicago, so don’t hurry, but keep me posted.”

  I smiled one more time. I could tell she was grinding her teeth. I was hoping that they would fall out.

  Before I left, I turned around one last time and left her with one more line: “We have one thing in common, Bonnie. Nobody fucks with me either.” I know. I overdid it—I’m such a drama queen—but how could I miss such a Bette Davis moment?

  I walked out triumphant and felt like the queen of the world, but before I got to my desk—just like the princess of the fairy tale—I felt a pea hurting the small of my back. Could I be feeling guilty about blackmailing Bonnie? “Nonsense!” I told myself, ignoring the pea, and I started packing my belongings in my green trash can for recyclable paper.

  Needless to say, Mary came over to my cubicle fifteen minutes later with a big smile and announced that Bonnie wanted me to move my things to the window office.

  “The official reason is that she wants you to work in a more comfortable environment so you can concentrate on the UK Charms campaign, but everybody in Facilities is saying that you got the job.” Very discreetly, Mary high-fived me before she left.

  But the pea was still hurting my back. I’m telling you, there’s something about revenge that doesn’t sit right with me.

  Bonnie deserved to get screwed. She deserved it for all the damage she had done, for all the pain she had inflicted. But blackmailing her felt weird. “I’m not used to standing up for myself; that’s why I feel like this,” I mumbled while I crossed the hallway, my arms full of manila folders, and pushed the door of my new office with my butt.

  The news of my unofficial promotion spread like wildfire that afternoon, so I wasn’t surprised when a blast from the ugly past stopped by my new office. There he was, none other than Dan Callahan.

  He stepped in without knocking, leaned on the archway, and watched me unpack as if I were stripping for him. What a moron.

  “Wow! Congratulations!” he said.

  I was busy arranging my things and dealing with the pea stuck on my back; the last thing I wanted to do was engage Dan in any type of conversation, so, without turning around, I replied with a simple “Thanks.”

  Then, giving me a master demonstration of masculine stupidity, he threw the following line: “So let’s go for a drink tonight to celebrate.”

  The nerve. I stopped for a second, turned around ready to send him to some place where the sun never shines, but something in me kept me from being a bitch. It was the pea on my back, and the pea was warning me that I was turning into a Bonnie. So, hiding my recently developed claws, I decided just to answer to Dan with complete and profound honesty: “Dan, I’m sorry, but I can’t go out with you.”

  I guess he didn’t understand complete and profound honesty, because he came back with another stupid line.

  “Let’s do it tomorrow, then…”

  I was shaking my head no, but he wasn’t even looking at me. He was writing it down in his BlackBerry, while probably admiring himself for being the suave swinger that he thought he was. So, convinced that the date was a fact, he started giving me instructions for tomorrow’s rendezvous.

  “I’ll pick you up at eight, and we’ll go for a quick bite?—”

  I had to interrupt him. “Dan, I don’t want to go out with you.”

  Okay, parenthesis: I never had sex with Dan, and I’m sure I never will. But either he has a huge penis or he thinks he does, because he looked at me as if I were just insane. He went from disbelief to anger to sarcasm, while trying to process the fact that I was turning him down.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked, still in shock.

  “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with me,” I replied, knowing that my words had more relevance than he could even imagine.

  He tightened his lips and finally uttered, “Well, congratulations again.”

  And I just replied, “Thanks again,” and continued unpacking my stuff. Sorry, Dan, no time for this crap. The world is a big place, so good luck in all your endeavors, and may you find a woman who puts up with your narcissistic bullshit.

  As I was preparing myself to fill my cabinets and go back to the silent biopsy of the pea on my back, Lillian—on the verge of a nervous breakdown—stepped into my new office.

  “B, I need to talk to you right now.”

  “About what?”

  Lillian closed the door—it’s a good thing I finally had a door—and then moved close to me and, in the lowest and most dramatic tone of voice that she could find, announced, “I Googled your friend Natasha Sokolov. They call her ‘the Russian Madame.’ Did you know that she’s been in jail?”

  Oh, shit.

  CHAPTER 26

  Awareness is a bitch.

  I’m not a psychic, but I’m going to tell you something about your personal past: you were a little kid, and you were running around in the backyard, or the playground, or the living room, and your mother warned you, “You’re going to trip and fall,” and, like magic, you did. Your mother said it, and it happened, right?

  Was your mother a psychic? Maybe—I suspect all mothers are—but that’s not the reason why you fell. You fell because suddenly you became aware that you could fall.

  When we were kids, we all did stupid things. I remember being in Miami, and, while trying to impress the friends of my cousin Virna, I walked on the ledge of a sixteen-story building. Pretty stupid, huh? It never crossed my mind that a sudden gust of wind could send me over the edge. But I’m convinced I didn’t fall—mainly—because I didn’t realize that I could. If my mother had been there, she would have screamed, “You’re gonna fall!” and there would be no more B, just a crater in the asphalt, and a bunch of Cuban relatives saying things like:

  ¡Pobrecita! She had her whole life ahead of her!

  She was so nice!

  Chubby, but, yeah, nice, very nice.

  Why would she jump off that building?

  And inside my coffin I would b
e yelling, “I didn’t jump, you idiots! I fell off because my mother told me that I could!” Nothing jinxes you faster than common sense. When you do something stupid but you don’t know how stupid it is, you are somehow protected by your imbecility. As my aunt Carmita used to say: “God protects the drunks and the idiots.”

  That’s exactly what I was thinking about when Lillian took me downstairs to the smokers’ corner in front of the building. I knew that she was probably right to warn me, but I was afraid that she was going to make me aware of things that I wanted to be completely oblivious to, and jinx the hell out of me.

  Good old Lil was so frantic that I had to drag her to the park across the street, where we sat on a bench to discuss my life of crime. I don’t know exactly how we got to it, but at some point I heard myself presenting a rather lame argument. “For God’s sake, Lillian! Even Martha Stewart has been in jail!”

  The truth is that Madame had been arrested in the past, but she had not been convicted—just as she confessed that first day in Coney Island. But for Lillian the fact that I knew about it and still willfully joined her comfort-providing service was a sign that I was going slowly mad and I needed professional help. She may have been truly concerned for my well-being, but—that moment, to me—it just felt like she was raining on my parade.

  “Stop it, B! You’ve been keeping this a secret because you know that I would never let you go through with something like this. Are you insane?”

  Okay, I could appreciate her concern, but I could do without the condescending attitude. So, without fighting, I tried to turn the tables around.

  “Lil, you were the one who told me, right here—actually, over there by the ashtrays—that I was going through all this shit with Dan Callahan and Bonnie and my ripped pants to learn a lesson, and that nothing was an accident, and blah, blah, blah…”

  “But I didn’t expect you to become a prostitute!”

  When I heard those words, my blood pressure dropped, and an acrid taste of bile filled my mouth. I didn’t have a mirror handy, but I suspect that my face must have turned white like a bathroom tile.

  “Lillian, first of all, lower your voice,” I managed to say without strangling her. You see, it’s one thing to be a prostitute, but something very different to be called a prostitute in public. Screw sticks and stones, certain words can totally break your bones. I felt cornered, and angry, and judged. In the back of my head, I heard the words of my aunt Fronilde: If you don’t want people to know what you did, then don’t do it. Too late for that advice, right?

  Half of me wanted to send Lillian to hell, while the other half wanted to make her understand my reasons, and yet a third half—if that is possible—realized that the priority was to shut her up to prevent serious and well-founded rumors. I didn’t like the idea of having a hysterical Asian model revealing the nasty details of my secret life across the street from my office. So—trying not to get carried away by the anger—I took a deep breath and explained in my lowest audible voice, “All I can tell you is that, yes, I’ve been working for her, but I haven’t done anything illegal, and I haven’t had sex with anybody.”

  “You haven’t had sex with anybody yet, but that’s the next step!” she replied, pissing me off even more.

  “Lillian, you don’t know what you’re talking about. These guys pay me just to be there.”

  “They pay you?” she said with the most annoyingly high pitch that human ears have ever registered. “Can you hear yourself? You’ve turned into a hooker!”

  This time she’d really done it. I was ready to kill her, so I looked her straight in the eye and—with an exaggerated overbite—I spelled it out.

  “Listen, Lillian. Men pay good money to spend time with me, and they pay good money to spend time with you too, okay? You and I are not different, so get off your high horse and face the facts.”

  “What?” she asked, putting her right hand over her chest to underline her shock and awe.

  “Come on, Lillian, you bounce from bed to bed, and you don’t even look at their faces, you just look at their bank accounts!”

  “That is not true…” she said, on the verge of tears.

  Driven by an anger that might be illegal in some states, I slashed her with one more comeback: “Lillian, you’re always looking for a boyfriend with a bigger car, a bigger dick, or a bigger wallet.”

  Lillian started crying quietly. I started crying too. I was embarrassed about what I had just said. I tried to put my hand on her shoulder, but she brushed it off. That gesture made me understand how unfair I had been with her, so, with my hand on my heart, I spoke with complete honesty.

  “I’m sorry, Lil, I shouldn’t have said that. I’m confused. I’m excited, and afraid of all this at the same time. But I can tell you that I’ve learned to love myself more in these few days than in all these years of psychotherapy.”

  She kept crying in silence. The only way to make her understand was to get her to put herself in my own shoes. So I spilled the beans.

  “Lil, I’ve always envied you. I love you, but I’ve envied the hell out of you—if that makes any sense. Every time we go out and I’m neglected while you’re surrounded by all these men who make you feel desired, I…I…I want to die. These guys I have met through the Madame have made me feel sexy and wanted. Some are young, some are old, some are handsome, some are ugly, but they’ve opened my eyes. I have learned that I have an audience, and I didn’t know that!”

  The funny thing was that as I was talking, a very good-looking guy walked by and gave me one of those looks that can burn through twenty layers of pantyhose. It was so obvious that he was checking me out, and not Lillian, that even she had to acknowledge that I was on to something.

  “But, B,” she said, “I’ve always told you that you were beautiful!”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t feel it! Now I feel it! And it’s making me look at life in a completely different way. I needed this, I needed to meet these guys who are dying to admire me—who would pay a lot of money just to have me sit next to them, or give me a massage, or even smell my feet!”

  “Eeeeew!” she said, disgusted “Is that what they do?”

  “Yeah,” I sighed, “some of them.”

  “Listen, B” she said softly, “so maybe I’ve had more men after me than you’ve had, but I go out with them a couple of times, and if I have sex, I never hear from them again, and if I don’t, I don’t hear from them again either. So what is all this attention good for? I don’t need hundreds of men. I only need one, a good one.

  “They come after me because I’m skinny, right? And they go after you because you’re fat…So what’s the difference? They just look at the outside. And the one thing I’ve learned is that I’m never going to find true love with someone who only looks at the outside. I want true love. What is it that you want? Dates? Flings? One-night stands? What do you want?”

  I thought for a moment, and finally replied.

  “I want…a Sunday kind of love.”

  I guess that Lillian also knew that old song, because she smiled and hugged me.

  Now that I had the capacity to feel attractive and desired, I could go from man to man, gorging on these attentions, or I could use my recently acquired powers to find the one love that could make me truly happy. Gorging on attentions sounded really tempting, but…Who the hell was I kidding? I wanted to find one good guy too.

  “Yep,” I said, hugging Lillian, “I want a Sunday kind of love”

  “Then maybe it’s time to put your heart where your mouth is,” she whispered.

  “I’m afraid of being rejected,” I confessed.

  “Fear is the opposite of love,” Lillian said, delivering the exact same advice that Madame had given me just hours ago.

  Was I brave enough to follow their advice?

  CHAPTER 27

  Saying that my day had been hectic would be a hell of an understatement. However, in case you haven’t guessed it already, the biggest thrill was yet to come. That same night,
I was meeting Simon for our first “date.”

  I was halfway ready when Madame called me.

  “So are you going through with the date?” she asked.

  “Of course I am! I’m getting ready right now. Why?”

  “I just want to make sure that you know what you are doing. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  What the hell was going on? Was it “kill-my-buzz” day or something? Here I was at the top of my game, getting the credit I deserved at work, putting my evil boss in her place, and actively pursuing the man I liked. I had never been so positive and assertive in my life.

  “I know what I’m doing! I’m not going to get hurt!” I tried to calmed her down.

  “If you say so,” she said, not sounding terribly convinced. “So what happened at work?”

  I briefly told her about my victory over the evil empire.

  “Isn’t that great?” I finished, convinced that she would applaud my bravery.

  “Great? You are still working for that crazy bitch, who now hates you even more, and who’ll do anything to destroy you.”

  “But the human resources department…” I tried to cut her off.

  “The human resources department is neither human nor resourceful,” she said. “They are there to protect the biggest fish, not you. All they care about is preventing lawsuits. From this moment on, somebody is going to go through your e-mails, your phone calls, and even your trash can. And if they can’t find anything, they will plant it. If you are lucky—in a month or two—they’ll promote you to a higher position in a different city, or in a worse department, and your new supervisor will be confidentially warned against you.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said to myself, realizing what I’d gotten myself into.

  “Honey, they could call it ‘a bunny race,’ but they call it ‘a rat race’ for a reason.”