The Hungry Mirror

by Lisa de Nikolits

  I washed my face, and thought Mathew must be in bed but he was nowhere to be seen.

  So, I got dressed and went down to the bar. It was nearly 3:00 a.m. I found him laughing with a group of equally drunk American tourists.

  “Little girl,” he said, looking delighted to see me. “Come and sit down. These guys are great.”

  I just stared at him, turned around and left.

  I was hurt and angry. Didn’t he care how ill I felt? I asked him the next day and he shrugged.

  “But I knew where you were and that you’d be fine,” he said, confused and irritated. “You just had too much to drink, that’s all. And I met some really interesting people. I don’t see why you’re upset.”

  I couldn’t argue the point.

  I hadn’t found much I could eat in Hungary; the food is meat-based and heavy on rich sauces. So I lived on white bread smothered in chili sauce, boiled potatoes, tiny pieces of chocolate, and very strong coffee. I constantly eyed the pastries and desserts. When the trip-end neared, I was going to indulge in a big slice of Dobos cake, a layered sponge and chocolate cake in the shape of a drum, hence its name. I was also going to have a huge plate of palacsinta, crêpes with various fillings. Yes, I was saving myself for a grand finale.

  Mathew was happy with McDonald’s, beer, brandy, and cigarettes. He had also discovered Unicum, a uniquely Hungarian “digestive liqueur” made of forty herbs and spices in a secret recipe; it was a Hungarian institution and Mathew told me the entire story repeatedly. Designed to “alleviate the royal digestion in 1790,” he carried a bottle with him everywhere, and had a good shot every now and then. It smelled absolutely vile and was also known as the “national accelerator” although it didn’t seem to get him going much. I wasn’t sure how much it agreed with his constitution either, because every time he picked up our suitcases, he’d let loose a series of flatulent blasts which I found very funny. He wasn’t as amused, and commented that I was acting like a child. But it was so funny – he’d stoop to pick up a bag, and off he’d go, firing a series of pops. I said, perhaps it was the Unicum. But he said, nonsense, if anything, that was helping.

  The day after we met my relatives in Budapest, he repacked our things a few times and we took the train to a distant town to find my aunt.

  The train was jolting and noisy, filled with people in thick, wiry, woollen coats who held brightly-painted wicker baskets fragrant with smoked meats and fresh bread. The air was thick with steam and exhaled breath and I couldn’t see out the window to the falling snow beyond. Hungary smelled of freshly-ground coffee, newly-turned earth, the dew of an early morning, and the oil of warm woollen undergarments.

  I noticed the women had great legs: firm, shapely, long and strong. I wondered how this was so, since their diets weren’t exactly what you would call “low-fat,” or “low-cal.” And, unlike us Canadians, who were covered in thick, shapeless jeans for most of the winter, these women wore sheer hose stockings, crossed their finely turned ankles, and exuded feminine grace with the curve of a smooth calf.

  I looked down at myself. Thick jeans, thick faux fur coat, faux fur boots. I was shapeless. I was swaddled in a scarf, hat, and gloves while the women wore thin cloth headscarves, no more. Their bare hands, and fine, long fingers gracefully held their baskets as the train swayed and bumped along. I felt as though I were looking at another world through a pane of glass, a movie of another time.

  Mathew was silent. I had no idea if he was enjoying the trip or hating every second and I felt guilty for dragging him into the bleak post-Communist rural ruins.

  I didn’t know what to say to him, so I was silent, while guilt gnawed at my gut.

  My aunt met us at the train station and immediately took us on a tour of the village. Her car became stuck in a snow bank along the way and Mathew had to help her get out. She took us to the cemetery and led us around. We had no relatives there. She just found it peaceful, she said.

  Mathew asked where he could buy some beer and brandy.

  I wished I had a muffin. I told my aunt I could make some if she liked. She shrugged and drove us to a liquor store.

  We got to her home and found my two young cousins waiting.

  “Ah, they get their blonde hair from you,” Mathew said to me, jokingly.

  “Impossible,” my aunt snapped. “She’s not a blood relative you know. My brother adopted her when he married her mother, and she was already two years old.”

  I had forgotten that. Well, not forgotten, exactly, but it’s never at the forefront of my mind; to me, my father is my father; I have known no other, and never wanted to. I had also forgotten my aunt’s need to bring it up whenever she could.

  Later, in private, I explained this to Mathew, my face flushed, but he didn’t seem interested either way.

  We settled into the basement for the night.

  My aunt said she hoped we’d sleep well, that she was sorry we couldn’t stay for longer, and I must remember to thank my father for the money he sent. Times were tight and her husband was experiencing difficulties at work.

  My father had sent money? I had no idea.

  I wondered if Mathew would be interested in some warm-up sex; the basement was damp and cold but when I turned to him I realized he was fast asleep.

  Yes, never a dull moment.

  When we got back home, I was amazed at the picture Mathew painted of the trip. You’d have thought we laughed nonstop the whole time. Trudging through the slippery, cobbled streets of Szeged in the icy sleet, with all the coffee shops and bars closed; shivering in a freezing basement in Baja in the early hours of the cold morning; getting hopelessly lost in the back ends of industrial Budapest because we couldn’t find a cab, and then walking for two hours in the wrong direction right into the face of the howling gale; all of these became delicious anecdotes, amusing tales to be dined out on for months.

  Everyone wished they could have been there, myself included. I wished I had known what a great time we were having when we were actually having it.

  But it’s my fault, and no one else’s that I didn’t have the best of times. Obviously Mathew had enjoyed himself, and I had just been stupid and worrying all the time, I had ruined it for myself. I really needed to take things less personally.

  When we got home I put all our souvenirs in the right places, arranged the new ornaments, hung the painted plates, filled the jugs with flowers, and draped the embroidered cloths over the sofa and bed.

  Everything had its place. Whenever I look around at the things we brought back I think of Mathew’s stories of the good times we’d had. I wish I had the photos, too, but the hard drive Mathew copied them to had corrupted and so that was that. No pictures. They were all lost, and he was sorry he said.

  It wasn’t his fault. These things happen and I am not going to get hung up on the small things. Don’t sweat the small stuff, I think, the bigger picture is that he loves me, he’s my husband, our life is perfect, and even perfect lives aren’t absolutely perfect.

  I decide to stop thinking about Mathew and focus on my job instead.

  Kate Moss does some damage

  THE NEW SALES GUY STARTED on Monday. “Yes, I retired,” he says into the phone. “But the wheels fell off, so I got my butt into gear and now I’m back in the driver’s seat again.”

  I am at a different job, and no longer have to work with Frances and her sparkly-eyed ways of dealing with things. I am art directing a women’s health and fitness magazine. I’ve been here for a six months. When I was offered the job, Mathew said it wasn’t a bad move career-wise but he warned me to expect a weird ride. When I asked him what he meant by that, he said I’d see for myself.

  I look over the top of my computer at the sales guy who is hunched over his desk across the room from me.

  I am sure he is as surprised as I am at having to share my office. His head is bent down over an ancient handwritten diary and he is doodling on a desk pad as he speaks into the phone tucked under his ear.

 
; He might think he’s back in the driver’s seat, I think, but he’s on the wrong side of the road going in the wrong direction and he doesn’t have a clue. I wonder what it is exactly that made the wheels fall off. I think he is being terribly forthright about what was obviously a decline in fortune but perhaps he hopes to increase ad sales by incurring sympathy from his old drinking buddies. I estimate, by his florid skin tone and slight hand tremor, there is no shortage of either sympathy or drinking buddies. I glance around my windowless office and resent him being here.

  “I don’t like him,” I tell my editor right from the start. “I bet he drinks a lot. I think he’s past his prime; he’ll never deliver. He’s only here because he goes way back with the publisher.”

  My editor laughs and caresses her bare thighs with affection. She was a Glamour girl, had been their features editor for over a decade until power broker Maia Rosenthal donned her matchmaking cap and told my publisher she had the perfect editor for him. This was after our launch editor, a change-the-world and make-women-feel-better-about-their-bodies lass by the name of Jean Mackie had to be escorted weeping out of her office. The pressure proved too much, she said. She broke down, and just sat at her desk and cried. I went in one day and found her staring out the window, her desk pristine, her office immaculate.

  “You want to take a look at this, Jean?” I said, offering her the layout I’d been working on.

  She turned to me, a river of tears flooding her face.

  I had no idea what to do. “I am so sorry,” I said, wondering all the while what I was sorry for or about. Truthfully, I wanted to run the other way as fast as I could. “Your office door was open, but if now isn’t a good time, I can come back later.”

  She responded by wailing softly, dolefully. “I failed. I wanted to do something important. I wanted to change things, make things better for real women. But the advertisers aren’t interested and now everybody hates me because I have ruined the magazine.” She began to cry with increased volume.

  I pushed a box of Kleenex at her, sat down and sighed.

  “I don’t think people want reality,” I said. “They want to escape into a fantasy world where everybody looks like they stepped out of Swimsuit Illustrated. People will pay anything for a fantasy.”

  That just made her cry harder and I wished I hadn’t said anything.

  I sat across from her and tried to figure out what to do but thankfully the publisher arrived and motioned me out the door.

  I exited with relief, closed the door quickly behind me, and escaped to my office. The next time I looked up, tall sodden Jean was being walked out. That was the last I ever saw of her.

  So Bullard, the publisher, called Maia and asked for help. Maia rushed to his aid, and offered to guest edit an otherwise missing issue of the magazine, as well as promise to find him his perfect editor.

  I worked with Maia for two months and I thought she was a bit psycho but since it was short term, it was manageable, even entertaining. Maia was a sex-addict, drug addict, attention addict, and I got the feeling she had her eye on a night with Mathew and myself in the biblical sense, if you get my meaning, which was just bizarre.

  I told Mathew my suspicions and he laughed. “Wouldn’t put it past her,” he said. “I’ve heard she’s very into that kind of thing.”

  Maia seemed to like me, because, as I say, she had designs of a certain nature and I also think she found my intensity amusing.

  Eventually, she found us our editor, the queen of features from Glamour, and then she went back to working the industry. She had her eye on a bigger prize than our small mag, Maia did.

  In my opinion, our new editor is a bit too old to be wearing the miniscule black leather mini-skirts she favours, even though her legs are still nothing short of spectacular.

  “I would never date a man who doesn’t have a Porsche,” she told me once. “And a yacht, and a condo downtown, and a cottage on the lake, and takes at least two trips to Europe a year.”

  She’s in her early forties, never married, so I guess her dream man hasn’t shown up yet.

  Ellen Barkin look-alike, ageing beauty queen; that is Shanda Mayo, my editor, in a nutshell.

  I am not sure about her though. I mean, I don’t really know if she is as into men as she says she is. I think this because of the way she rubs her legs whenever I’m around and how she brushes up against me when we meet in the hallway. She claims to like touching me because I am so small while she is so tall. She is slender as a willow and vicious to boot, unpredictable as a weather change on the east coast.

  One thing for sure though, she certainly feels entitled. To the good life, the finer things, to being showered with all things material. She hails from the backend of trailer-trash Chilton, Alabama, and is poorly educated but street-smart and savvy. Plus, her body is stunning, absolutely perfect, and that’s why, bad attitude and hard face notwithstanding, she feels as entitled as she does.

  But entitled though she might feel, I have studied Shanda carefully and clearly not all is going according to plan. She still wakes up alone in her rented apartment on the just-short-of-fabulous side of town. She takes out her garbage and heads for the beat-up old Lexus she’s had for a decade. And while the job at Glamour isn’t bad for the perks and prestige, she certainly hadn’t figured it would take her as long as it had to land her own gig. And then, to her poorly disguised disappointment, her own gig hadn’t even turned out to be one of the stylish big glossies; no, she was stuck making do with Bullard and his lower echelon empire and a game of lets-pretend-it’s-the-real-deal.

  So, clear to me, and increasingly apparent to Shanda herself, her dreams of wealth, power, and a polished couture-lifestyle have yet to come to pass. And the bitterness she feels because her expectations have not been met, is beginning to show and this, I want to tell her, is not a good look.

  Fiercely territorial, Shanda likes to keep her finger on the pulse of the latest trends, and she keeps a tight rein on sourcing cover models and is generally disinterested in my opinions. But I luck out; I have found an obscure shoot with the new model, the new “Kate Moss”: a tiny new waif, elfin, wide-eyed.

  In the same way Kate Moss had heralded “heroin chic,” this tiny new girl now offers translucence. Gossamer, insubstantial ephemeral beauty is the newest craze. Beauty that cannot last; beauty that is so fragile it exists only for a moment before it vanishes. By its very insubstantiality, such beauty is valuable beyond measure.

  Angelica Rose embodies it all. She is the face of the luminous moment, just as Kate had once been.

  I mock up a few Angelica covers and pin them to Shanda’s door – my usual way of presenting ideas, as it allows her a moment of privacy to get her runaway emotions and generally volatile reactions under control.

  But I have no warning of what is about to come my way.

  I hear her stop in front of her office door and I listen for her reaction. Shanda is not one for reticence. But this time, there is an ominous silence.

  Then I hear the sound of the covers being torn off the door and ripped to shreds. Shanda storms into my office, her briefcase swinging in one hand, her face twisted with fury.

  “Never,” she shouts, “ever show me this girl again. She is a nothing, and a nobody. I don’t ever want to see her again.” She throws the torn covers on the ground and stamps on them for good measure.

  Yes, she stamps on them. Then she goes to her office and slams the door.

  I guess I should applaud her, because who knows how much damage tiny, waif-like Kate has unwittingly done to all our psyches and there’s no doubt that Angelica’s almost alien beauty would do the same. And yet, I don’t think this was what had angered Shanda. Frankly, I have no clue as to why she is angry at all.

  “You could have just said no,” I say out loud to myself. I feel pinned to my desk in shock, my eyes glued to the floor littered with scraps of Angelina’s torn-up face.

  The publisher, a wizened, scaly, skin-flaking man of about seventy-plus
rushes in. He has developed a sixth sense for Shanda’s outbursts.

  “I heard the noise,” he says, almost breathless. “What has she done now?”

  He hates Shanda even though he was the one who hired her. Two weeks after her arrival, he refused to talk to her and used me as a go-between instead.

  “Why,” he asked me time and time again, “must her office be such a mess? Talk to her, tell her to clean it up.”

  I always said, yes, okay I would, but of course I never mention it to Shanda.

  I am about to explain to him what had happened with Angelica and the covers when the managing editor arrives. Magda is a tall, somewhat Amazonian woman of exotic Eastern European descent, although she will never say exactly where her family is from.

  We’d acquired Magda to help Jean but Jean had been beyond help. Magda had harboured hopes of being appointed editor herself, particularly in the face of Jean’s demise, but the publisher could never remember her name and when pressed, he said that Magda wasn’t the right face to represent the magazine and by that he really did mean “face.” That’s what he told me when I suggested he make Magda editor, although, of course, I have never told Magda.

  Magda is in the process of having her teeth straightened, a gift from her husband, and I am constantly disconcerted by the incongruous flash of metal whenever she speaks. She always wears extremely high-heeled shoes, which puts her at about six foot two. Like Shanda, Magda favours very short skirts but, while her legs are long, they are heavy and solid. Her frizzy ginger hair is a veritable explosion of thinly-spiralled energy that cannot be quelled. Her large, beautiful golden brown eyes are closely set, her nose is long and wide, and she has a fondness for startlingly sharp red lipstick upon which she layers lacquered lipgloss. Finally, she has, at some point, suffered from bad acne.

  When Maia did her stint as guest editor, it was clear that she had no designs on a night with Magda and indeed hardly seemed to register her presence.

  Now Magda is hoping Bullard will fire Shanda and turn to her. I want to tell her that her hopes are slim to zero but it’s none of my business.