The Egg-Shaped Room
Page 3
Part III: Misery
Now let me tell you about the oldest: her name was Misery Tone, but she went by Missy and refused to tell anyone what it was short for. This is how she dealt with having a forgettable face: constant blonde hair dye treatments; blue contacts; base and blush and eye shadow applied to the blurred edges; skin that was tanned and bleached and tanned and bleached and tanned and bleached; any cosmeticism that would make her the rough mean of all celebrity beauty. She desired to be told, but she focused only on the means of telling. Boys noticed her and gave her presents, never expecting to get them back, and she would sell them, keep the money to finance her single goal, and she’d leave the boys in an eternal state of lack-of-gratification. But the memory of Missy Tone was seared in their brain. She could eventually afford to pay doctors and physical trainers to sculpt her body into something familiar and make all men go, “Haven’t I seen you on TV? I can’t place it exactly,” and she’d squeal in her brain, “I’m famous!” She got gifts from richer and richer men, up and up until she achieved a very famous head of a predatory multi-national: it was all a scandal; his wife threatened to leave, but he kept giving Missy large diamonds and her own houses. This very famous head of a predatory multi-national only knew how to express love by giving painfully expensive gifts. But all Missy really wanted was the means. Missy lost him; she couldn’t go higher.
She looked in the mirror each morning, frightened; she kept having to work harder and harder, she was worn; she, for years, worked to turn herself into this perfection of Hollywood plasticity, and it was wasted, by time, by entropy. She found Doctor Tobey Stevenson who promised her she would never die, something no rich man could promise, even though some of them tried. She refused to question the particulars. She went with Doctor Tobey Stevenson everywhere. He was the one she decided to quit with. She wore his pearls around her neck and his big oval diamond on her finger. He was making his big important presentation at the Peyzer Center, and she was sitting there smiling while people took her picture. And then her cell phone vibrated. She stepped out to the lobby to answer it. She heard an almost forgotten voice, “Hey, Misery.”