Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  But was that really power? I wondered, following behind as she turned left, onto the north side of Houston. Or did it only feel like power? She made her way along, eyes straight ahead, the shape of her portfolio visible in her small backpack, and hovering around her, something only I could see: the nimbus of her faith that she had earned an extraordinary life, and would have one. No, I thought, it was wrong—there was no such thing as the power of beauty. Only the power to surround yourself with it.

  The girl turned north, into the Village, but I continued west to Sixth Avenue. I think I knew where I was going before I let myself admit it. People had flocked to the streets in their puffy coats. The snow was almost gone, sucked away by the gigantic furnace seething deep beneath the city’s concrete. At West Fourth, I watched a basketball game through a chain-link fence; the sight of male bodies in motion, even bodies completely indifferent to my presence, cheered me somewhat.

  Above Twenty-third Street, I was tantalized once again by the profusion of old painted signs; every building, it seemed, bore several faded tattoos, many superimposed and legible only faintly, only in parts. “5” “Hand.” “Fish.” I was in the flower district now, shop doors releasing humid, jungly currents into the cold, cats tangled behind steamy windows. I turned west and walked to Seventh Avenue.

  Anthony Halliday’s receptionist wasn’t on duty, so I took the liberty of bypassing her desk and knocking directly on his door, which was closed. I opened it. The detective was leaning back in his chair, feet on his desk, reading a paperback. “Charlotte,” he said, obviously taken aback by my unheralded arrival. He sat up and set the paperback aside. “This is a surprise.”

  He was looking at me oddly, and I remembered my red ears and pale, weird makeup. “What are you reading?” I asked.

  “Something extracurricular.” He seemed embarrassed.

  I went around his desk and picked up the book. The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler.

  “Slow day,” he said.

  The office was a quiet, forgotten place, light streaking lazily through the window. From my vantage point beside the detective, I was able to see the contents of the photograph I’d noticed on his desk the last time: two redheaded girls who looked identical. Twins. Three years old? Five years old? I was terrible at guessing children’s ages. They were laughing, sitting side by side on a swing.

  “Why not write your own?” I asked.

  “I’m trying,” he said. “This guy”—he apparently meant Chandler—“is teaching me.”

  I went back around the desk and sat in the chair facing it. “Aren’t you supposed to pull out a bottle of brandy and two snifters?” I asked. “Or is it whiskey.”

  He laughed. “In the old days, I would have,” he said. “Although I might not have bothered with the snifters.”

  “The old days.”

  “I’m reformed.” He rapped a knuckle twice against his desk.

  “Shouldn’t you keep some around for your less enlightened clients?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “Don’t trust myself.”

  “But you seem so trustworthy.” Shameless flirtation. I supposed he was getting used to it.

  “What can I do for you, Charlotte,” he asked, “on this winter afternoon?”

  “Hire me.”

  His brows rose. “In what capacity?”

  “Detective. Assistant detective, if you like. Apprentice.”

  He watched me another moment, then burst out laughing.

  “I’m serious,” I said, smiling at him.

  “What are your qualifications?”

  “What are yours?”

  “I’m an ex-D.A. A lot of detectives are retired cops.”

  “I’m a retired model,” I said.

  “Looks like you were working today.”

  “It was my last job.”

  He shifted in his seat. “Doesn’t having been a model make you a little … visible?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “Exactly the opposite. People who’ve known me for years stare at me like they’ve never seen me before.” The smile was hurting my face. I had gone to the detective’s office to cheer myself, to rest my eyes on his handsomeness and forget the rest of today. But for some reason, his presence made me more aware of how terrible I felt. It’s over, I thought, and I knew what it meant: my life. My life before the accident. My life until this moment, and possibly including it.

  “That sounds awful,” he said quietly.

  “I’m trying to view it as a unique opportunity to start over.”

  “Then do yourself a favor,” he said. “Shoot higher than this.”

  For a moment, I thought he was kidding. Then I fumbled for an answer. “Then why don’t you?” I asked. “Shoot higher.”

  “I did. But I landed here.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “You spend your whole life watching other people,” he said. “I have a feeling it eats away your soul.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “I thought being photographed did that.”

  “Maybe both.”

  “In which case, hire me,” I said, “since my soul’s already shot.”

  He laughed, watching me. I sensed him weighing options, though what they were I couldn’t guess. Then he surrendered, I saw it in his face. “How about this,” he said. “It concerns our missing friend.”

  Z again. “Your friend,” I said.

  “I’d like to spend an evening going to the kinds of places he went. Not make a big deal of it, just sort of check out the scene. Is that something you could help me with?”

  I narrowed my eyes, pretending to think. Halliday didn’t need me for this; he was working for Mitch and Hassam. It was a date. The detective had asked me on a date. And yet I felt so sad, so hollowed out, that I couldn’t seem to muster any triumph.

  “Let’s not call it a favor,” I finally said. “Let’s call it a free trial of my services, with an option to purchase.”

  He shook his head. “Call it whatever you want,” he said.

  Chapter Eight

  After eight years in the same one-bedroom apartment, I was suddenly finding it crowded beyond capacity. There was me. There was my unrecognizable face. And there was someone else. It was neither a child nor an animal. It was Despair.

  Unlike the numerous other visitors I had entertained over the years, Despair lacked an outline, or, for that matter, any distinct shape. I couldn’t even see it. But when I unlocked my door after returning from Halliday’s office and stepped inside my quiet apartment, I felt it pull the life out of me.

  I crumpled onto my couch, lit a cigarette and looked at the Pepsi-Cola sign mooning Manhattan from Long Island City. I waited for Despair to leave. But it didn’t leave. It leaned against me, pushing at me from above and below with a drawling, mountainous weight. “When did you arrive?” I asked. “To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure? How long do you intend to stay?”

  But Despair didn’t have to answer to anyone.

  When the phone rang, my new companion leaned on the receiver so that I hardly could lift it from its cradle. Oscar. I had meant to call him even as I dreaded calling him—I needed his advice on where to take the detective that evening.

  “Charlotte, I’m sorry,” Oscar began. His voice, shucked of its usual casing of irony, parody, hauteur and self-mockery, sounded like someone else. Someone sad. Or maybe that was what Oscar himself really sounded like. “I had to try,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “I did it for you.”

  “I know. I just—I couldn’t go through with it.”

  “Of course not.”

  There was a long pause, a pause in which I felt as if Oscar and I were suspended underwater, watching each other through myriad fluttering tides, resisting their pull for yet another moment. Then another. I heard phones bleeping in the background, but Oscar stayed there with me. I’d never heard him so quiet.

  “The Korean girl is in trouble,” I said at last. “Kim.”

  He hove
a long sigh. “She’ll soon be out of my hands,” he said. “I have two Ukrainians from the capsized oil rig arriving on my doorstep any day, as soon as their casts are removed. She’ll go to one of the model apartments.”

  “Oscar, who’ll take care of her?”

  “She’ll take care of herself. She’s not a child—she’s twenty, for pity’s sake. You did it,” he added. “I’ve got girls of fourteen living on their own.”

  I said nothing. I was gripped by an absolute conviction that the girl would die.

  “Charlotte, the beast must be fed,” Oscar said in that same sad voice. “We both know that.”

  I fell asleep on my couch. When I woke, at eleven-fifteen, I was pressed for time. I careened from my apartment at midnight, leaving behind a Daliesque assortment of clothing sliding from lamps and furniture, along with a skyline of empty bottles documenting my search for some bottle—any bottle—with even a finger or two of booze left in it.

  Mercifully, my flask (a slender, ladylike cylinder) was still full of tequila. I shoved it in my purse and gulped a little in the elevator, distressed to find that Despair had followed me there and was planning to chaperone me through the evening—or perhaps the rest of my life. I arrived at a decision whose cruelty and senselessness shocked even me: if I was going to the bottom, I was taking the detective with me.

  All I had to do was make him drink.

  Anthony Halliday was waiting in my lobby. In his black jeans, dark blazer and slate gray shirt, he looked surprisingly good for someone whose business required little or no proximity to the mirrored room. My worries about how to secrete him past club doormen with doctoral degrees in the eradication of poor taste had been unnecessary. He kissed me hello on the cheek.

  His cab was outside. I gave the driver the address of Jello, a nightclub on Gansevoort Street. The wheel of nightlife had turned again in my absence, and the desirable clubs were all new. Oscar had suggested two others, Pollen and the Ga Ga Lounge, Mitch and Hassam’s new club, and I half relished the thought of Despair trying to make a place for itself inside these dens of nightlife, where mere unhappiness was about as welcome as an overweight cousin from New Jersey.

  There was no one outside of Jello, and a lizard-faced bouncer admitted us without a wait. Medium-sized rectangular room. Black walls. Abundant black light staining every white surface purple, but not enough live bodies to create the churning, bearings-eliminating mass essential to nightclub felicity. I steered Halliday toward the bar, which radiated purple light from within its oval rim, underlighting the faces of everyone working behind it. Not ideal for the girl who took this bartending job in hopes of being spotted by a model agent, and there she was—there she always was—a blonde with a tangle of dry, electric-looking hair and weary circles under her eyes.

  I ordered a double vodka tonic and drank it while we made our way to the VIP area. These regions varied from establishment to establishment, but two features were fairly unwavering: that the VIPs be kept separate from the hoi polloi, and that the hoi polloi be able to see them. Jello had met these requirements by erecting a large white cage, inside which the VIPs, few of whom I recognized, danced and yelled to each other over the music, while those outside, such as ourselves, peered at them through the bars. A sullen-faced gatekeeper was in charge of admitting and releasing VIPs from the cage.

  “Is that where he would be?” Halliday asked, gesturing at the cage. It took me a moment to realize he meant Z.

  “Probably,” I said.

  I sensed that Halliday wanted to go inside the cage but was hesitant to ask for fear of embarrassing me. And divested of my usual crowd, unfamiliar with this particular gatekeeper, I wasn’t sure how to effect it. “Let’s go,” I said. “This isn’t the place we want.”

  Back on the street, we hailed another cab. I directed the driver to the Ga Ga Lounge, in the West Twenties near the river.

  “Tell me something about the mentality of the people in these clubs,” Halliday said. “Why do they go? What do they get out of it?”

  “That’s hard to say.”

  “But you’ve done it for years.”

  Had I told him that? I was fairly certain I hadn’t; perhaps he’d simply presumed it. “I used to,” I said.

  “It seems … superficial. Phony.”

  “I think that’s the part I like,” I said, and laughed. “Nobody pretends to tell the truth, they just go ahead and lie. It’s a relief.” “Is that what you do? Just lie?”

  I hesitated. What I loathed—what I’d always loathed—were the conversations people had tried to engage me in countless times over the years: you tell me how your father whipped you with a belt; I’ll tell you how I was left to cry for hours alone in my room, how I wasn’t allowed to play piano, how lonely and sad I felt as a child, and after that we’ll be intimates, because each of us will know who broke the other. There was nothing phonier in the world. It was no one’s business who’d broken me; maybe I’d never been broken.

  “Who wants to hear the truth?” I asked. “It’s usually dull.”

  “I disagree,” he said. “Speaking as someone who listens to bullshit all day long. The truth is almost always more interesting.”

  “I guess you picked the right job,” I said.

  A clot of yellow cabs had formed, all oozing in a kind of agony toward a single destination. Halliday and I joined a restive mob outside a pair of warehouse doors presided over by two black doormen with the implacable look of Zen about their eyes. “Okay, nobody goes in until you calm down, people!” intoned one of these Zen masters, but the crowd’s immediate response was to surge against the velvet ropes, anticipating its exclusion and objecting plaintively, vehemently. Just then, a rented limousine in less than tip-top condition halted outside the club and began disgorging its cargo: Gil Jamais, a middling promoter, followed by the troupe of young models he’d assembled that evening, girls who glistened with a dew of newness, their lovely youth catalyzed by the famished desire of everyone around them into an effervescence that allowed them to pour effortlessly among the panicky, paranoid crowd, past the bouncers (whose job it was to facilitate this pouring) and through the warehouse doors, decanting from car to club in a matter of seconds. There was no stopping them; such effervescence was too unstable a compound to remain among everyone else—its very nature required that it disappear instantly into memory. How clearly I saw this! And the fact that I saw it clearly imparted strange new information: I was not one of the effervescent; I was straining toward it, ogling its wall-and door-defying properties, just like everyone else.

  Indeed, when Halliday and I tried to enter the thrusting, beseeching mob, it repelled us with rubbery impermeability. “People. Relax,” the doormen chanted. Halliday glanced at me—we were nowhere near the door—and I sensed him resigning himself to the fact that there was nothing I could do. And at that point, strangely, Despair shed its adversarial role and came to my aid with a series of potent jabs to my back that sent me careening into the crowd, bobbing and weaving forcibly among petitioners (Halliday’s hand in mine) while Despair admonished me, with a clammy pressure to my heart, that a feeling of extreme rottenness awaited me—the rottenness of a fizzled evening—should I fail to get us through the crowd and past the bouncers and into this fucking club. I blazed a trail all the way to one of the Zen masters, whose arm I went so far as to clasp (but not clutch) while imparting, in a calm, authoritative voice, the news that I was Irene Maitlock of the New York Post. “Feature story,” “Mitch and Hassam,” “Interview” and “Running out of patience” were some additional themes I touched on before handing him Irene’s business card, which I’d saved from her abortive visit purely because it impressed me.

  The doorman, doubtless a connoisseur of prevarication, looked at me with eyes that seemed transplanted from the Flavian statue I’d encountered earlier today. He glanced at Irene’s card, handed it back to me and went inside without a word. He emerged a few moments later in the company of an Englishman I’d met before, a prep-sc
hool type in his mid-forties with chaotic teeth and soiled-looking eyes. The bouncer indicated me with a tip of his head, thus consummating his role as middleman without once invoking the use of his larynx.

  “You’re the reporter?” the Englishman said.

  I shot out my hand in a manner that seemed reporter-like. “Irene Maitlock,” I said, pressing the Englishman’s amphibious flesh. “This is Anthony Halliday.”

  “Apologies,” the Englishman said, with irony. “I’ll get you upstairs.”

  After such a struggle, to have those doors swing open—for you—to fall through them as if they were suddenly, magically porous, as if you had assumed the power to sashay through walls, was an experience that sent a dart of pleasure through me even after so many years, and lent a certain rarefied magnificence to all that lay beyond. Halliday and I trailed the Englishman through the pounding darkness and press of bodies. On the dance floor, the throng moved as one elastic mass, like a school of fish.

  Finally the Englishman delivered us to the foot of a curved flight of stairs manned by a bouncer whose Zen, if any, was the Zen of extreme boredom. “Mitch and Hassam should be up there,” the Brit shouted over the music, and gave us an odd little salute when we thanked him. The bouncer pulled aside the velvet rope and let us pass.