Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  And then, from one day to the next, I gave it up. It’s gone, I thought, it didn’t happen, not this time—not this way. Fuck them, I thought. And I meant it.

  Did I need a shrink to help me then? No, I did not.

  And that was basically that, although it took several more years before I was truly a catalogue girl with no prestige whatsoever. Just how many years I wasn’t sure, exactly, because at that point, the point at which my acceleration began to reverse, time started running together—there was no more arc of ascension by which to measure it. The years began passing in clumps, so that one day I was twenty-three (to the world) standing at the threshold of the mirrored room, and the next, ten years had passed and I was twenty-eight and a professional beauty, by which I mean a person in possession of phone numbers of sumptuous homes around the world where she (or he) will be welcome, a person adept at packing on a half-hour’s notice for a trip to Bali or a sailing cruise off Turkey’s southern coast, a person who will never have to pay for her dinner as long as she doesn’t expect to choose the company. Indeed, understanding how much she can reasonably expect is key to the professional beauty’s continued circulation, and requires the use of an obscure algorithm involving the variables of how good she looks, how easy she is to be around, and what, exactly, she’s willing to give in return. As the years go on and one’s looks and novelty wear off, one had better start cultivating some other skills. Of course, the professional beauty’s existence was generally an anteroom to some more permanent arrangement, and the ones with any sense married well as expeditiously as possible, while their stock was high. Such transactions weren’t necessarily base or grotesque; there were plenty of stops on the road to trading looks for cash before you arrived at the old carp at the end of the line whose breathing was audible at dinner and whose daughters were nearer your mother’s age than your own. In my case, marriage to money would certainly have been the prudent route, and yet I couldn’t seem to do it. Having forgone a marriage of love, how could I promise those very same things out of mere practicality? It seemed dull and frightening. Try as I might to interest myself permanently in the real estate owners I met, owners of yachts and islands and seventeenth-century castles, of Bonnards and Picassos and Rothkos and vintage cars and zoo animals, private screening rooms and fleets of chestnut horses, my concentration always broke; my mind wandered, another man came along, and the prior one fell away or married someone else or simply vanished.

  And at a certain point, after many years at this sort of life, I began to sense that my poor concentration wasn’t really that. I’d compromised, God knew—I’d forfeited my hope for the mirrored room and settled instead for the chance to rub shoulders now and then with some of its inhabitants. But what made these compromises bearable was some last expectation I hadn’t relinquished. I was waiting. Waiting and watching for a new discovery to refashion my life.

  A signal. A mystery. Something deeper and more true than anything else. In nightclubs, those smoky boxes full of promise, and even on the street, I would find myself scanning faces, expecting one to stand out, to look back at me in a particular way, a way I would recognize only when I saw it. I wasn’t desperate. I never doubted it would come, if I waited long enough.

  Ellis brushed a last layer of rice powder onto my face, and I thought about waiting—how vulnerable it made you. Because eventually you got tired. You got tired and you made a choice, you picked someone—or worse, someone picked you—and you believed he was the person you’d been waiting for. And you gave him everything.

  Spiro came in to look at me. “There’s something new in your face, Charlotte,” he said, approvingly.

  “The whole face is new.”

  “No, but see, it’s real now, you know?” he said. “It’s like all that prettiness has burned off, and you’re left with something deeper. Just the very bare essentials.”

  “Terrific,” I said.

  When I left the makeup chair (reluctantly, wishing I could prolong my tenancy there just another few minutes), I saw the Korean girl standing in the doorway, waiting to take my place. I’d forgotten her. I smiled, but her eyes looked unfocused, as if she couldn’t see me. I went to the adjacent room and sat in the chair before Lily, who pinned three long brown hairpieces to my head and began setting them in the same tiny curlers she’d used on Daphne. Her fingers moved over my scalp with a ravenous life of their own.

  “Close,” I heard Ellis say to the girl, and then, “Your eyes, dear.”

  “She looks so unhappy,” I murmured.

  “I don’t think she speaks any English,” Lily said. “But she’s getting some amazing work. Calvin Klein’s started using her.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Something complicated,” she said. “Everyone just calls her Kim. Oh, before I forget!” She pulled a computerized address book from her bag and scrolled through it. “You have to call this friend of mine,” she said, copying something onto the back of her business card. “Victoria Knight,” I read.

  “She does what again?” I asked.

  “PR. Call her now, before your article comes out, so you can make the most out of it. Tell her I said to call—she can really help you, Charlotte.”

  My need of help was the one thing everyone seemed to agree on.

  “How about some red ears?” I heard Ellis cajole the girl. “Everyone else has red ears …”

  After a while, Lily pulled out the rollers, teased my hair, then used a pick to wind the curls into tight little coils, which she sprayed until they looked shellacked. Soon I was wearing my own strange bonnet of hair. From the set I could hear the flash, a light popping sound like the explosion of a bubble made of glass. I was dying to get out there.

  A doorbell rang, and one of Spiro’s assistants buzzed someone in. A moment later I heard the elevator, and then Spiro himself bounded into the room bearing aloft with shaking arms the marble bust of a woman’s shoulders and head, about half the size of life. “I had to have it here, to remind myself,” he said, cradling the bust in both hands and looking at it in the mirror. The marble woman wore a stack of curls very much like my own. Spiro held her up to my head and studied the two of us together in the mirror. “How’s that for a little historical accuracy?” he asked.

  But I wasn’t looking at the statue’s hair, I was looking at her face. It was oval-shaped, peaceful, distant, the eyes empty and flat as sky. She looked entirely absent—untouchable, as if she and this fashion shoot could not be made to overlap, despite Spiro’s furious efforts. The centuries between us were simply too many. Her detachment lent an utmost dignity to the marble woman, even with Spiro’s trembling hands at her throat. “History,” he murmured softly. “You know? It all comes down to that.”

  Kendra, the stylist, brought in a couple of dresses and held the fabric to my skin. “Let’s do purple,” she said, and I left my chair and disrobed. Kendra helped me into the purple dress. The velvet felt cool and a little damp, like moss. The dance beat was rousing, insistent, a giant key winding the anticipation tighter and tighter in my chest. I popped a beer and had a sip, my first drink of the day.

  On the set, Spiro’s assistants were musing over a Polaroid of Daphne. I joined her inside the plastic cube, the two of us dancing together while the lights were adjusted. The cube was just high enough for us to stand in. At Spiro’s prompting, we assumed tragic poses, fingers splayed, heads back. Our collective anticipation made a pressure in the room. I’d forgotten what this felt like; it had been so long since I’d had a job in which anyone cared about the pictures.

  “Okay, Char, now sink down until your fingertips touch the floor,” Spiro said. “Look at me, sort of cruel. Bitch goddess. There you go.”

  As he snapped the Polaroid, I noticed that the Korean girl had returned to the room, now fully made up and Flavified, draped in yellow crushed velvet and a foamy white collar. She was watching us dully from a chair—or not watching, for her eyes were as flat and empty as the marble Roman woman’s eyes. I felt a jerk of
anger. Girls spend their lives dreaming about being where you are, I wanted to say. Where’s the fucking tragedy?

  One of Spiro’s assistants waved the Polaroid dry and pulled it open for him to study. “Oooh, look at Charlotte,” Spiro said. The assistants, along with Ellis, Lily and Kendra, gathered around the Polaroid, then looked at me. I felt a rushing sensation inside as the old transistor kicked to life; I pictured sparks raining from my hair and eyes. I can do anything, I thought. I can recast the world in a different shape. I can make that camera burst into flame.

  “You know,” Spiro said, shaking his head as he looked at me, “Oscar told me about your accident and I was like, Book her. I didn’t need to see a picture, I fucking knew.”

  I crouched demurely, waves or particles—which?—issuing from my skin.

  “Ellis, can you shadow them a little more before you start?” Spiro said.

  I closed my eyes and drew Ellis toward me, smelling his presence inside the cube, pressed powder, sweat, mint on his breath. As he shadowed my eyes, I felt myself controlling him from behind my face, guiding his hand irresistibly.

  At an odd snapping noise, I opened my eyes. Ellis was pulling a pair of latex gloves over his gnarled hands. He crouched beside me, tore open a packet and removed a razor blade. My confusion amassed only gradually, so deep was my sense of control, my faith that my own lunar commands were moving everyone else. I watched Ellis, expecting him to snip a loose thread from my dress. Instead, he touched my face, exploring the skin gently with his latex-covered fingertips. The razor blade, in the other hand, hovered near me. “Hold it,” I said, fighting my way to a standing position in the copious dress. “What’s going on?”

  Startled, Ellis turned to Spiro.

  “He’s going to cut you,” Spiro said, as if this were self-evident.

  “Cut me where?”

  “Your face.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?” My hands flew involuntarily to my cheeks.

  Spiro, Ellis and Lily exchanged looks of bafflement. “Did Oscar not tell you?” Spiro asked.

  “No,” I said. “He didn’t.”

  “He cuts everyone,” Daphne said.

  I gaped at her. “And you don’t mind?”

  She shrugged, leaning against the side of the cube.

  “I don’t cut deep at all,” Ellis said softly. “You’ll hardly feel it.”

  “Does it bleed?”

  “Well, of course it bleeds,” Spiro said. “That’s the whole point.”

  “This is insane,” I said. Imploringly, I turned again to Daphne. “How do you expect to get work with cuts all over your face?”

  “They don’t leave scars,” she said. “They usually take about a week to heal, as long as you don’t pick them. Last time he cut me I worked twice that same week. People like, wanted the scabs on.”

  I stood in dumbfounded silence, wanting very much to be convinced. But it was my poor face, my abused, still-tender face with its hidden cargo of titanium. “Can’t you use fake blood?” I pleaded. “I’ll buy it myself!”

  The word “fake” induced a collective flinch, as if I’d used a racial slur. “Fake is fake,” Spiro said.

  He handed his camera to Richard and came inside the cube to where Ellis and I were standing, so the three of us made a tight little triangle. “Charlotte, listen to me,” Spiro said, with uncharacteristic calm. “I’m trying to get at some kind of truth here, in this phony, sick, ludicrous world. Something pure. Releasing blood is a sacrifice. It’s the most real thing there is.”

  I nodded, waiting for it to seem true in the way he said, for comprehension to overwhelm my vision like the tilt of a kaleidoscope. I leaned on my reluctance and waited for it to die, to be extinguished by the enormity of this opportunity, the absolute necessity that I triumph.

  “Everything is artifice,” Spiro went on. “Everything is pretending. You open a magazine, what is all that crap? Look how pretty I am, look how perfect my life is. But it’s lies, nothing is really like that. And politicians, too, spin this, spin that, pulling something over on people—I’m sick of it. It literally makes me nauseous.”

  I listened with a teetering feeling inside me, as if I might sneeze. It makes sense, I thought. I agree. I wanted desperately to proceed, to reclaim the power I’d felt only minutes ago, with everyone looking at me. As if sensing he was close to persuading me, Spiro took my arms in each of his trembling hands and dropped his voice to a whisper. “I want to cut through that shit to what’s real and fundamental,” he said. “And I want you to be part of it, Charlotte, that’s why I chose you. This isn’t about fashion—we’re way past fashion here. This is about finding a new way to live in the world.”

  I looked beyond Spiro’s frantic jaws at the towering lights, the silver umbrella reflectors, the three assistants, the ladders and tripods and cameras and models in gushing velvet dresses and foaming collars and Kabuki makeup and Flavian hairdos. “It’s too bad Oscar didn’t call you when my face was mashed to a pulp last August,” I heard myself say. “Every bone was crushed, you would’ve loved it.”

  Spiro released my arms. “She doesn’t get it,” he told Ellis, who jerked the rack of his shoulders as if to say, We tried.

  My palms were still pressed to my face. For so long, the skin had been numb, too numb to feel anything. “This face has already been through so much,” I said, in apology.

  “Fair enough,” Spiro said. He turned his back on me and signaled the North Korean girl. “Kim! Kimmy!” He waved his arms, and she jumped to attention as if she’d been slapped. “It’s your lucky day, honey,” Spiro called.

  I vacated the plastic cube and the Korean girl stepped tentatively inside it. “Lily, can you touch up her hair?” Spiro said.

  Without even glancing at me, Lily bustled into the cube with her pick and comb and can of spray and began elevating the girl’s curls, which had drooped. I noticed that the girl was trembling, making the whorls of her lace collar shake. When Lily was done, Spiro eased the Korean into precisely the position I had occupied just moments ago. The atmosphere in the room was fragile, raw.

  “Where?” Ellis asked.

  “High on the cheek,” Spiro said. “And a long one on the forehead.”

  I wanted to walk away, but I couldn’t seem to do it.

  Gently, Ellis lifted the blade to the girl’s brown cheek, then dipped one corner under her skin like a swimmer testing the water with a toe. The girl flinched, but didn’t make a sound. With delicacy and swiftness, Ellis pulled the blade through her skin. His shadow self appeared without my even looking for it: the gentle butcher, who massages his victims to loosen their flesh before putting in the knife. Blood dropped from the wound, and at the same time, tears rose in the girl’s eyes and spilled from the corners. “Lily!” Spiro said. “Get those tears.”

  Lily darted over and dabbed at the girl’s eyes with a tissue. Daphne moved close to her and put an arm around her shoulders. The Korean girl seemed not to notice. She looked straight ahead, enduring this assault with the incomprehension of one who accepted long ago that suffering has no purpose. I felt something in me collapse, a prickling around my eyes and nose. I turned and went to the makeup room, where I yanked the hairpieces off my head, twisted out of the dress and threw it all on the floor. I thought I would vomit—wanted to—but when I stood over the toilet, no release came. As I pulled on my clothes, I heard the dense click of the shutter, followed by Spiro’s voice. “Beautiful, Kimmy! Ooh, look at that!”

  I had left my coat on a barstool near the zinc countertop; I went there now with eyes averted and slipped it on, trying not to look at the set. But I had to look. The Korean girl was standing in the box, blood running from her cheek down her neck, soaking the white ruffles of her collar. A second cut on her forehead bled into one of her eyes and back out, down the side of her face. Daphne stood behind her, head flung back in a pose of ecstasy. There was a sweet, vulnerable feeling in the air, a postcoital tenderness.

  “Okay, Daphne,
straighten up,” Spiro said. “That’s it—now look at me. Kim, give me those eyes. Strong, both of you … feel your strength and your power. You’re goddesses, all right? You rule the fucking world … good … good. Eyes, Kimmy … good.”

  All at once, for the very first time, the Korean girl looked at me directly. I felt the engagement of her sight physically, as if she’d grabbed me. While the shutter clicked, we stared at each other, our gazes inter-locked, and something passed between us: a wordless acknowledgment of the depravity that surrounded us. It felt like a full minute before the girl blinked and moved her eyes, just slightly. Then they were blank, as before.

  “I’m leaving now,” I said in a normal speaking voice, but no one seemed to hear.

  In the elevator, I noticed my face was wet. Red makeup came off on my hands when I wiped it, and I recoiled, thinking at first it was blood. I felt like I’d barely escaped with my life. And Oscar had known, of course. Had chosen not to tell me, hoping that when the moment came, I would find the pressure too great to resist. Had provided Kim, just in case. I couldn’t blame him, really; before the accident, I might well have said yes.

  Back on Broome Street, I walked without knowing where I went. I stared through boutique windows at couches, at vases of blown glass, letting the cold air clear my head. It’s over, I told myself repeatedly, not knowing quite what this meant. I turned up West Broadway, a lunchtime murmur roiling behind the windows of restaurants. The models were out in force, their spindly doe’s legs splayed beneath short winter coats. They looked so young—younger than I’d ever felt in my life. I noticed one with short, raven-colored hair who looked not unlike myself (we are interchangeable—the first lesson one learns as a professional beauty). She and I reached the corner of Houston at the same time, but I let her go ahead. From behind, I noticed people glance at her as she passed them crossing the street, their eyes holding her an extra moment, then reluctantly pulling away. The girl pretended not to see them, just as I used to do, but she felt the power I remembered feeling—I saw it in her walk, the way she held her head, a self-consciousness that made her every move look studied.