B as in Beauty

by Alberto Ferreras

  “But, Madame,” I said, trying to defend my point, “I can’t let her win! I have worked my ass off for years, and I have invested all this time…”

  “You can’t invest time! You can put money in the bank and get more money five years later, but If you say, ‘I’m going to be miserable for five years, and then I’m going to be very happy in the sixth year,’ guess what? A truck can run you over after those five years of misery, and you won’t see a second of happiness. You have to choose happiness, not more years of misery working for that same woman.”

  “But she deserves this. She’s a monster,” I said.

  “Yes, she is a monster, but now you are a blackmailer.”

  “How do you think she got where she is? Blackmail!” I replied.

  “So if she jumps off a cliff are you going to jump after her too?” Madame said, making me feel I was ten years old.

  There was a second of uncomfortable silence.

  “B,” she said tenderly, “my favorite writer, Jorge Luis Borges, used to say, ‘Your revenge will never be better than your peace.’ You are smart, talented, and hardworking. Choose happiness, not revenge.”

  That was the pea that was stuck at the small of my back. But just like the night when I went on my first date, with Mr. Rauscher, I didn’t want to hear Madame. So, for the first time, I was the one in a hurry to get off the phone.

  “Madame, I’m sorry for cutting you short, but I have to get ready.”

  “Do what you have to do, and call me if you need to talk,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “You are welcome,” she said affectionately, and we hung up the phone.

  I remained on the couch for a few seconds, trying to analyze my feelings. I felt volcanic and powerful, but childish and vulnerable at the same time. That was a sign that my passion horse was pulling too hard. And as much as I enjoyed riding that stallion—just like the ancient Greeks advised—it was wise to restrain it. But how could I do that when I was getting ready to see Simon? I felt savagely tormented by my own thoughts.

  “Fuck thinking!” I said, and went back to my bedroom to get ready for my date.

  CHAPTER 28

  The first time I saw Simon, I didn’t like him at all: his nose was too big, I couldn’t see his eyes—covered by those thick glasses—his shaven head made him look like a refugee, and his tall, skinny, slouching body just seemed out of proportion with the world around him. But what can I say? By the end of night number five, all I could think of was having those long and skinny arms wrapped around me.

  Hoping for that, I fixed myself up to look spectacular. I was wearing a see-through blouse with rather long and flowing sleeves, over a cute skin-tone tank top. I chose a trendy peasant skirt, and bought new sandals that were both stylish and comfortable. I wore just a drop of makeup and gelled my hair to have that wet-curl look that makes you look as if you just stepped out of the shower. I added a touch of Shalimar behind my ears, and I headed to Simon’s house in a taxi.

  That night I brought another Fellini movie, Nights of Cabiria. For those unfamiliar with the plot, it’s the story of a prostitute who’s always looking for love. What can I say? It sounded like a familiar theme to me.

  When I got to Simon’s place, I noticed that he wasn’t wearing the same old paint-stained jeans that he wore all the time. He was wearing a different, slightly less destroyed pair of jeans, and a button-down shirt instead of a worn out T-shirt. It might sound silly, but that small detail made me very excited. He had been anticipating my visit. Good.

  “Would you like something to drink?” he asked.

  “Do you have red wine?”

  I’m not sure what he usually drank—if he drank at all—but it certainly wasn’t red wine, because he started running around as if I had asked for a pint of blood. After walking back and forth a few times scratching his head, he started digging in a closet where he kept winter coats, skis, a pair of Roller-blades, and varied sports equipment.

  “Somebody gave me a bottle last year,” he mumbled. “Here!” he said triumphantly, pulling a bottle out. “I hope it’s still good. You are gonna have to try it, ’cause I wouldn’t know.” He must have been nervous: he just gave me the bottle as if I could open it with my bare hands.

  “Do you have a cork-screw?” I asked innocently.

  “Oh my God!” he said, realizing the faux pas. He ran to the kitchen, brought two glasses and the corkscrew, and proceeded to open the bottle.

  The wine was good—very good, as a matter of fact. Simon went back to the kitchen for a couple of minutes and came back with a bowl of popcorn; then he sat next to me, in the narrow space that he was accustomed to, and we started watching Nights of Cabiria.

  I didn’t know it then, but the musical Sweet Charity was based on the same story. The difference is that Charity is lighter, and funnier. Cabiria was funny at times, but when it got sad, it got really sad. We sat there mesmerized. We didn’t hold hands, but we held each other’s arms very tenderly throughout the whole movie, and at the end we were both in tears. Then, in the last few seconds of the movie, I saw something totally unexpected on the screen.

  “Did she look at us?” I asked Simon.

  “What?” He’d been busy crying, so he’d missed the spot I was talking about.

  I was convinced that, at the end of the movie, Cabiria looked at the audience and smiled. To double-check, we went back to that scene to see the ending one more time.

  Yep. She smiled. This was particularly strange because this is a very realistic drama, not one of those MGM musicals where actors look at the camera and smile. In a movie like Cabiria the actors never acknowledge the audience to keep the illusion of reality.

  But Cabiria does it.

  I don’t want to ruin the movie for you if you haven’t seen it, but toward the end, just when you think that she’ll be alone and bitter for the rest of her life, she smiles again. She looks at you and she smiles. It’s as if she was trying to tell you, “No matter how many times you’ve been hurt, you can’t lose hope. Keep smiling. Life goes on. It’ll get better.” I still get goose bumps just thinking about it.

  “Yes, she looks at you,” Simon acknowledged. Then he looked at me tenderly through his thick glasses and asked with a tiny thread of voice, “Would you see it again with me?”

  Naturally I said yes—one, because I loved the movie, and, two, because who could say no to that big boy from Arizona, with his Coke-bottle glasses and his refugee haircut?

  So we ended up seeing the movie twice—from beginning to end—and then we went back and started picking up scenes that we particularly liked, watching them over and over.

  Cabiria was petite and cute, but Wanda, her best friend in the movie, was more my size. There’re a couple of show-stopping scenes in the movie where you see Wanda walking with her voluptuous legs, boobs, and ass across the screen. Wanda had a feminine magnetism that no Hilton sister could ever achieve in her lifetime. As we were watching Wanda in action, Simon froze the image, and then he suddenly turned to me.

  “Could I take your picture?” he asked.

  “My picture?” I gasped.

  The number-one fashion photographer in the world wanted to take my picture? Holy shit!

  “Yeah. I’d love to,” he said with an intensity that I had never seen in him before.

  “Sure,” I said, flattered.

  In the meantime, Simon’s eyes were studying me with the detail that a surgeon dedicates to a patient.

  “But would you mind if I…” he started saying, and then he stopped while still analyzing my features.

  “Would you mind if I…” he started again, leaving the sentence in half one more time, and looking at me with that mad sparkle that artists have when they come up with a great idea.

  “Would I mind if you…what?” I asked, trying carefully not to interrupt his thought process.

  “If I…” he started again. But there was no need to continue, because I knew exactly what he was trying to ask me.
A deep chill went down my spine, and I felt that I was standing by a sharp cliff.

  “You want to take my picture naked, don’t you?” I asked.

  He nodded, but I could tell that he wasn’t with me anymore. He was in his head, planning it all, setting the lights. We were still in his living room, but in his head he was taking my pictures already. In my head, I was fighting every ghost of my childhood, every fear, every cause for shame, and every single perception of my body as a despicable and embarrassing object.

  But that night I was strong. That night I could fight them all. Yes, I pictured my father having a heart attack, and my mother banning me forever, but this whole thing wasn’t about them, it was about me. If they truly loved me, they would understand that I needed to exorcise my demons, that—once and for all—I needed to feel proud of my body, proud of being big, thick, and voluptuous.

  Proud of being the way I am: fat.

  So, having said that, it was time to put my ass where my mouth was: naked, and in front of a Rolleiflex 2.8.

  I followed Simon downstairs feeling nervous but excited. Simon’s studio was huge, and it changed constantly depending on the shoot he was working on. Every day he had a different contraption built by prop masters and stage designers to use as a background for his models. That night he had a beautiful mountain landscape hanging by strings from the ceiling, a grand staircase that climbed up to nowhere, and an impossible room made out of silks and plywood. In a corner he had a pile of absurdly modern chairs that no human being could sit comfortably on. He took a chaise longue from that corner and asked me to lie on it. He thought about mimicking the majas of Goya. He painted the same model twice in the exact same position, but in one she is completely dressed up, and in the other one she is stark naked—shamelessly lying on her back, with her arms above her head.

  But before I could sit on the chaise longue Simon had already changed his mind.

  “Wait a minute, can you swim?”

  “Sure” I answered, wondering what he had in mind.

  His crew had built a huge fish tank for some photo shoot where the models were dressed up as mermaids. The tank was still there, so he proceeded to set it all up. I sat there observing Simon changing the background, turning on the lights, and taking measurements with his light meter. It was fascinating to see a genius at work, and it was incredibly flattering to think that all this work was devoted to taking my photograph, to immortalizing this body that I had hated for so long.

  Do I deserve all this attention? I kept asking myself.

  When he was done setting it all up, I got up, took off my clothes, and let myself into the tank.

  I’ve heard that our bodies are more than 60 percent water, and it doesn’t surprise me. Obviously, I’ve been in the water many times, but always with a purpose: I was going to bathe or exercise, or I was jumping in and out of the pool just to cool off on a summer afternoon. But this was the first time I allowed myself just to be in the water, letting it caress my skin, enjoying the delicious experience of weightlessness. When you are in the water, it doesn’t matter if you are skinny or fat. You become part of something bigger than you. It’s like stepping into another dimension where the sounds, the light, and the speed of things are completely different. In the water you can’t set the pace, you need to go with the flow. “Going with the flow”—what a beautiful thought. That night, the fish tank was a place for introspection, a place to stop the fight against others and against myself.

  Next time you go to a pool, take a few minutes and—very slowly—let the air out of your lungs and allow yourself to sink to the bottom. There’s not a more peaceful place anywhere, there’s not a safer space in the world. I suspect that the reason why humans can’t breathe under the water, is that, if we could, then we would never leave that place. As you lie at the bottom of the pool, try to open your eyes, and just look up, and see the light coming through the bubbles and the ripples of the surface. I don’t know if you are religious or not, but then and there you’ll see God, I promise.

  I don’t know how long I was in the water, but Simon must have taken hundreds of pictures of me. I even forgot that he was there. He never gave me an instruction, or a direction. He just stood there taking picture after picture, while I floated in the tank as if I were floating in my mother’s womb. When I finally got out of the tank, I felt completely reborn.

  When he did his fashion shoots, Simon used a digital camera, but when he did his artwork, he preferred to use his old-fashioned Rolleiflex, his first professional camera.

  “When will you develop them?” I asked him while I wrapped myself in a towel that he had set by the tank.

  “Right now. Don’t you want to see them?” he said, excited.

  Like children playing with a brand-new toy, we went into his darkroom, to start the developing process. We stood side by side when he finally inserted the photographic paper in the developer fluid, and we held our breath together as the first image appeared before our eyes. The image was too beautiful to be described. To think that this body that I had hated for so long could look so beautiful through the eyes of this man, gave me a chill.

  I was so moved that I spontaneously turned around and kissed him on the cheek. But when I was about to separate myself from him, I noticed that his face followed my mouth, as if he wanted to be kissed again. So I kissed him again. But this time his face followed my mouth again, and turned slightly to the right. Then he placed his lips near mine. Someone had to take the initiative, so I kissed him on the lips. And I kissed him again. And he opened his mouth, and we kissed with our lips, and our tongues, and our hearts. And it was the sweetest kiss I’ve ever had.

  I turned to face him, and I made him face me. And I hugged him while I kissed him. But his arms remained at his sides, as if he didn’t dare hug me back. His arms said no, but his mouth kept saying yes. So I held his face in my hands and whispered softly in his ear, “Simon. I want you to lift your arms…A little higher…Even higher…Right around my torso, yes, just like that. Perfect! Now I want you to wrap them tightly around my body. Tighter, tighter, tighter, tighter…Aha! Good. That’s a good hug. I want you to remember this…and I want you to hug me like this every time you feel like it.”

  I don’t know how I did it, but I opened the floodgates. Simon hugged me and kissed me as if he had never hugged and kissed anyone in his life. And I hugged him and kissed him back as if he were the only man I’d ever known. And the kisses turned salty with the taste of tears, and I couldn’t tell if they were mine, or his.

  CHAPTER 29

  I vividly remember the first time I heard Madonna singing “Like a Virgin.” It wasn’t when the song first came out, but when she released her greatest hits album, The Immaculate Collection. I was in Miami with my cousin Mariauxy—her actual name is Maria Auxiliadora, but she shortened it because she says that her name was too long and no one could pronounce it (as if “Mariauxy” was any easier). Anyway, we were in her bedroom, we were having fun painting our toenails and trying on crazy hairdos. I wasn’t crazy about Madonna at the time, but Mariauxy was her biggest fan. She kept playing that album over and over, to the point where she actually scratched the CD.

  When I like a song—don’t ask me why—I get hooked by the music first, and much later I pay attention to the lyrics. That first time I heard “Like a Virgin,” I thought that it was catchy, but since I didn’t pay attention to the words, it took me a while to realize what it really meant.

  As I was lying in bed with Simon (yes, I ended up in bed with him), I felt that I was being touched for the very first time. It’s going to sound totally corny, but I felt as if being with Simon made me a virgin once again.

  I knew that this was something special because when we kissed I lost track of time. We could have kissed for minutes, hours, or days—all I knew was that I could keep kissing him forever.

  If you think I’m going to describe in detail what happened in bed, I’ll have to disappoint you. I am not going to get all graphic here, and
I’ll tell you why:

  First, because I think that sex is overrated and closeness is underrated.

  Second, because I think that good sex doesn’t require extravagant displays of gymnastic skills.

  And, third, because what I do in bed is nobody’s business. If one day I’m in the mood to talk about it I will, but very likely we will be sitting at my kitchen table, with a bottle of bourbon and a bag of corn chips.

  But the point is that having sex with Simon was awesome. Sometimes when you’re lying in bed with a guy, your arm doesn’t fit right around his back, or your leg cramps under his leg, or he rests his head on your chest and you can’t breathe. You don’t want to ruin the magic of the moment, and you try to keep quiet about it until you’re almost ready to pass out in pain. Well, none of that happened that night. His body and my body fit so perfectly that it truly felt like one breathing, loving being. I caught myself thinking that from above we must have looked like the yin-yang sign: a perfect complement for each other. I heard bells, violins, trumpets, foghorns—you name it, and I heard it.

  There was music playing, but it wasn’t Madonna’s. It was a Rickie Lee Jones album of standards called Pop Pop. If one day I meet Rickie Lee Jones I’ll have to thank her personally for this fabulous night. We sang along with her, and kissed, and told each other how much we liked this part or that part of each other’s bodies, and kissed again and again. I felt that every inch of my body was loved, desired, and accepted.

  That night, time stood still. We made love, fell asleep, made love again, fell asleep again…It was incredible. Madame was right once again: I’d thought I had never had bad sex because I had never had good sex.

  Later, we were lying there, intertwined, and I felt comfortable enough to ask Simon a question. I moved my mouth close to his peaceful face and whispered in his ear.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Why do you hate the beach?”