Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  “There’s no reason for us to meet,” she said, “and I don’t have the time.” It was a no. She was saying no. “That’s my other line, Charlotte, I have to go,” she said. “Good—”

  “I’m coming to your office,” I said. “At the Post. I have your card. It’s four-thirty. I’ll be there in—”

  “No!” she said sharply, and I thought she sounded afraid. “Don’t do that.”

  My God, I thought, was I really that bad? Bad enough that the notion of my arrival at her office was actually frightening?

  “I’ll come to your apartment,” Irene said, her voice gritty with resentment. “What’s your address?” I provided it. “I’ll be there by six,” she said, and hung up before my ironic “I look forward to it” had landed.

  I sat on my couch looking over my balcony, trying to make sense of our exchange. Something was at work here that I didn’t understand, some missing fact.

  I pulled open my balcony door and let cold wind scour the apartment. Then I peeled off my clothes and abraded myself against a scalding shower. The past was up for sale.

  Irene arrived ten minutes late, stepping into my apartment with visible trepidation. She wore a gray wool skirt and jacket. Her tortoiseshell hair hung loose, just as before, but she wore mascara today, and light blue eyeliner which was back in style that season, though I doubted she knew it. The sight of her there in her too-dark stockings and clunky loafers and ridiculous gray wool filled me with unexpected pleasure. I was glad to see her.

  I settled her down in a comfortable nook of couch and poured her a glass of water, which she chose over my offer of wine.

  “So,” I said, sitting across from her and cradling my first drink of the day, a Riesling that winked at me so alluringly that I felt like dousing my face with it. “What’s new in the world of crime?”

  She told me she was finishing a piece on private detectives.

  “I know a private detective!” I cried, with bizarre urgency. “His name is Anthony Halliday.”

  Irene gave me an odd look. “I never came across him,” she said.

  “Just wondered,” I said mildly. And then, without further ado, “Listen, Irene, I have a business proposal for you.” I laid it out: Ordinary. Extraordinary. Options. Access. $80,000. $300,000. Exposure. Media. Soup. Nuts.

  “I’m asking you to be the writer,” I concluded. “We’d split everything fifty-fifty, beginning with the option. I’ll get a check for seventy-five hundred as soon as I sign the contract.” I felt like Thomas. Except that Thomas believed his project would revitalize the world, whereas I believed—well, I didn’t believe that.

  Irene’s face underwent myriad changes while I spoke: confusion, intrigue, disbelief. Finally she said, “That’s one of the more surreal things I’ve heard lately.”

  “I knew you would say that!”

  “Charlotte,” Irene said, and then sighed. “I’m used to writing things for some purpose. This really doesn’t have one.”

  “It has a purpose,” I assured her. “Its purpose is to make us rich.”

  “That’s not enough,” she said ruefully.

  “But wait a minute. Remember those things you talked about before, when you tried to interview me? About identity and … and identity? Things like that?” I concluded feebly. “You seemed very interested.”

  “I am interested in identity,” Irene said. “But assembling your life story for some Orwellian on-line service that’ll probably never see the light of day is not a viable way of exploring that interest.”

  And now I saw the problem. The missing fact. With breathtaking clarity, I gleaned it: Irene didn’t like me.

  “It doesn’t have to be my life, exactly,” I hedged, determined to sustain my breezy tone despite the wounded sensation I felt. “We wouldn’t have to see each other much. I’d give you the raw material and the rest would be up to you; you could tell it any way you want, you could make it up. In fact I’d rather you did make it up.…” My breezy tone was intact, but I’d leapt to my feet and was standing on tiptoe. Irene began to laugh.

  “Come on, Charlotte,” she said, burying her face in her hands. “Why me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Rubbing her eyes had smudged Irene’s mascara, and she looked perplexed. But despite these outward signals of noncapitulation, I felt an irrational quiver of hope (or was it the Riesling slipping into my bloodstream?). Irene was here, in my apartment, arguing with me. She could have been at home with her husband, or working at the Post, or a hundred miles away, but she was here, on my couch. I had learned enough about seductions over the years to know this: real desire, the kind that gnaws and lasts, was nearly always mutual. It seemed conceivable that whatever was compelling me to talk to Irene would also make her want to listen.

  “Frankly, Charlotte, even if you get someone to do this thing for you,” she said, “and for the money you probably will—I can’t see you going through with it. You won’t answer questions—you think interviews are a sham. You gave me a lecture about it!”

  “I’m going to change,” I said stiffly. “I’m in the process of changing.” After a moment I said, “I’ve changed.”

  She eyed me skeptically.

  I excused myself and went to the kitchen to refill my glass. I poured a glass of wine for Irene, too, just in case. Then I stood at the sink and strategized. Either I would make some headway in the next few minutes, or it was over. It was over, and I was alone in my apartment with a face full of titanium.

  Back in the living room, I handed Irene the wine, which she took. Good sign, I thought. “Irene, ask me anything,” I told her very seriously. “And I promise I’ll answer truthfully.”

  It was a show of good faith, a free trial of my services. I sat on the couch and waited in dread for her to speak. There was a long silence, and then she sipped the wine. Good sign, I thought.

  “Okay,” she said, with disheartening indifference. “How did you get in your accident?”

  I nodded, indicating readiness. Then I fought the urge to lie down, as I’d done when she interviewed me before. No, this time I would sit. I would look at her. At least a minute passed while I tried to organize my thoughts. Where were the facts? My memory, the pig, just smirked at me.

  “You can’t,” Irene said. She was smiling now. “Look at you. You actually can’t.”

  “I can.” My body was grinding with the effort. Answer the question. I had a frightened sensation I remembered from certain tests, foreign language tests in which the questions were spoken aloud, vanishing even as I clutched at them with my mind.

  “You can’t! You can’t do it,” she said, and laughed. Her light, laughing shadow self—there it was. I felt her relief, her eagerness to return, unencumbered, to the husband she loved.

  I gritted my teeth, resisting the urge to retreat to my bedroom and shut the door. You brought her here, I reminded myself; she’ll be more than happy to go. “Okay,” I said weakly, and decided I would make something up. Except that sheer avoidance was my game. Feinting and darting, that was my game. Finally I shut my eyes, which helped. “I met a man,” I began, my voice emerging like a bark, or a yelp, “called Z.”

  Breathless, I cracked an eye to look at Irene and found that her laughter and even her smile had disappeared. She was listening.

  “Z,” I said, and with the repetition of his name I felt myself collapse against the inside of a door—I’d taken that bit of ground. “At first, I hardly noticed him,” I advanced, with great effort. “But at some point I realized he was watching me. I could feel it. Sometimes I felt it even when I couldn’t see him.”

  I opened my eyes. She had slipped off her shoes. Good sign, I thought. They were worn and scuffed, the scarred leather inked in with a black Magic Marker.

  “One night,” I went on, squeezing the words from my solar plexus, “I saw a shape inside his shirt, like a shadow. It was a wire. You know, like a microphone. He’d been taping me. Taping everyone I knew, for months. I didn’t know why.” />
  I swallowed dryly. I’d heard people describe withdrawal symptoms, the dreadful convulsing of it. But what was I withdrawing from?

  “I wasn’t angry,” I said. “Or scared. The opposite, almost.”

  I stopped, exhausted. After a moment Irene turned to me, her cheeks flushed. “So, what happened?” she asked, and I felt the warm reach of her curiosity.

  “I was enthralled,” I said. “It was like falling in love.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Michael West stood at the chalkboard in front of the words “Inscribed Angles” and watched Mary Peterson punch out a wad of blue gum between her big serrated teeth. He felt the possibility of anger in himself and glanced at her covertly, hoping it would catch. The Walther was strapped to his calf.

  “Henry is correct,” he said. “An inscribed angle is an angle whose vertex is on a curve, and whose sides contain chords of a circle. What does the angle do to the arc? Someone, please.”

  They stared at him with their helpless mouths, their freckled cheeks and moist pale eyes. “Intercept,” said Marcie Blum.

  “Precisely.”

  The lesson continued. The blue gum looked poisonous, disinfectant. Michael raked himself against it, desperate to locate the anger that had lived in him like a hot coal for much of his life. In his eagerness, he’d begun watching news reports from the part of the world he had come from: dust, rage, starved zealous faces, languages he had trained himself not to think in anymore but occasionally still did, when he dreamt. The images jogged memories of his own rage, years ago, hearing English words in the street, or spying the bustling, clandestine trade in videotapes of Hollywood movies: cloudy, illicit, the apparitions barely visible through the murk of amateur recording devices used surreptitiously, heads of moviegoers sometimes blocking the picture. Yet infused with a promise that was like the sting of a scorpion. There was no recovery. Capture desire and the rest will follow. Wars, weapons; they were messy, obsolete. Feed people a morsel of something they’ll crave the rest of their lives, and you won’t have to fight them. They’ll hand themselves over. This was the American conspiracy.

  “Are there additional questions?” he asked. Then, disliking his formal diction, he amended, as another hand went up, “Lemme guess. You wanna know if that’s gonna be on the test.”

  Titters. A wad of blue gum. Michael lifted his foot, feeling the weight of the Walther at his ankle. He wore it often to school, secreted against different parts of himself, liking the sense of power, the implicit threat. The gun held the place where his anger used to be.

  When the bell rang, they shuffled from the room in their winter boots. It was January, and the paroxysm of Christmas, that product America had packaged and exported nearly everywhere (he’d heard the streets of Istanbul were full of Santas) had subsided at last. Snow was predicted for later in the day, and Michael West looked forward to this. He had never seen it at close range.

  The room emptied, and Lori Haft stood at his desk. She often required his help after class, and her scores had improved. Michael sought this avidly, to maintain good relations with her mother: the fool who sees everything. He dreaded to confront her in his present, weakened state.

  “So,” Lori said. She wore a tight green sweater with little rabbits woven into it. She twirled her hair on a finger. “What’s important?”

  “You tell me what you think is important.”

  “Um.” Her hair was sugary, soft. Michael noticed this, noticed the shape of her breasts through the sweater, but felt nothing. Deadness. Without the anger, his desire, too, had mostly vanished.

  “I guess the part about the angles … ?”

  He crossed his legs, resting one hand on the Walther, excited by the thought of how easily he could remove it, unmask himself and cause the whole ghastly charade to fall suddenly, cleanly away. “You tell me, Lori,” he said, looking into the flower of her face. “You tell me what is important.”

  Ricky lay spread-eagled on his back in the dead winter grass outside Paul Lofgren’s rec room, holding his breath so they wouldn’t see him pant. One hand on his Tony Hawk, he listened to the crack of boards against the empty swimming pool. The pool was getting repainted in the spring, so now they were allowed to skate it raw, fuck it up as much as they wanted.

  The hash was making him sweat, even in just a T-shirt. He shouldn’t have smoked, but it was Paul’s private stash, Paul’s jade-green pipe with the bowl like a wind god puffing out his cheeks, Paul yanking him into the powder room with the circles of pink soap in a white shell by the sink, yanking him in while the others were microwaving Cheeze-Corn in the kitchen. Then firing up a dense little pellet and smoking it with Ricky alone, because Ricky was Paul’s man. Even though he was an eighth-grader and Paul was a junior, age was irrelevant. Paul liked him best. Ricky had stopped wondering why.

  He deserved it, that was why.

  He could do a backside grind on Paul’s tricky pool, that was why.

  “Cathouse,” someone said, and Ricky muttered, Shit. Not that again.

  He staggered to his feet, ears ringing, nosed his Tony Hawk to the pool’s edge and dropped in, cold air knocking through his T-shirt. He swooped into a frontside grind on the pool’s edge (metal trucks abrading the concrete) but coming back down the board squirted out from under him and he was flung into big looping steps to keep from slamming against the turquoise concrete (Paul didn’t wear pads, so neither did anyone else), pinwheeling his arms, panicking for a second because the Mediport was under the skin of his chest—what if it shattered inside him? But no, they’d taken it out last summer, which was why he could skate.

  It bugged him, how he kept forgetting that.

  He collected his board and hoisted himself from the pool straight into the evil beam of Jimmy Prezioso’s grin. Ricky beamed back his secret weapon, a face devoid of emotion. He’d learned this trick from Charlotte back when he was going to school with no hair, half his eyebrows gone, a baseball cap over his head and so scared all the time it was like trying to carry a live hen in his arms. Charlotte told him, “No one knows what you feel—no one can see behind your face.” In the bathroom mirror, they practiced: “Tell me what I’m thinking,” she said, her eyes flat and narrow and mean, and Ricky said, “You hate me,” about to cry like always back then, and Charlotte put her arms around him and said, “No, you dumbolt. The opposite.

  “You can hide behind your face,” she told him, and that’s what he did. That’s what got him through all of it.

  Charlotte had powers, to what extent Ricky still wasn’t sure. He respected them.

  They dropped in one by one. Paul flew up the pool’s curved side and did an air, clutching the board to his feet with the kickflip indie grab they’d seen on the Toy Machine video—as a skater Paul was egregious beyond all measure—landed hard on the board and scraped back down having nailed the trick effortlessly. Cacophonous applause, everyone flapping their boards up and down with their feet. Paul had the same things all of them had: hair, eyes, legs (he was taller than Ricky by at least a foot), but in Paul some alchemy had happened, and he was better. A king among men.

  “What time does it open?” Paul, calling from the pool to Jimmy Prezioso, his slave. Talking about the cathouse, or what they thought was a cathouse.

  “Sundown.”

  “Soon.” Mark Smallwood, stating the obvious.

  Ricky dropped in again, loose in his knees, riding the munchy sound of his Pig Wheels. He leaned, twisted, shimmied back up the pool’s parched side and rocked the fakie, then swooped back down into the bowl, in a zone, finding lines he’d memorized—he’d try an air if Prezioso weren’t standing there waiting to laugh if he slammed—up again for a frontside ollie, his body singing, dancing.

  “Thought bubble: Why is little Ricky stalling?” Prezioso, of course, who hated him, who was jealous of his skating, his bond with Paul. Ricky ignored him, skating because it felt good (Paul was watching), because he felt strong and light, he was firing lightning bolts from the top of h
is head that spelled out the words I’M NOT SICK!

  When he lost speed at the bottom of the pool, he finished it off with a little kickflip, landing softly on the board.

  “Lush, bro.” Paul.

  “Dire.” Chris Catalani, clanging his Richard Angelides.

  “Egregious.” Mark Smallwood, going with the majority.

  “Pretty.” Prezioso—who else? In a sweet, nasty voice. “Very, very pretty.”

  Ricky hefted himself from the pool and stood in front of Jimmy. He smoothed his face flat as a bedsheet. “And,” he said. It was Paul’s favorite word, his universal comment—“And”—just that, floating by itself, meaning anything, everything. Until his association with Paul, Ricky had been blind to the word’s potency, its vast expressiveness.

  “And, you look pretty.”

  Ricky tossed his Tony Hawk onto the concrete in front of Prezioso, where it collided noisily. He was stalling, waiting for Paul to pick a side. Jimmy waited, too. They all waited, exhaling arms of steam.

  In the very long pause, Ricky heard someone sawing trees.

  “Like you know Thing One about pretty, you rank mofo.” Paul to Jimmy, shoving his arm, and everyone laughed, even Jimmy did, he had to. He was Paul’s slave.

  After school, Michael drove to McDonald’s on Alpine Road and sat in his car in the parking lot. He had done this many times since arriving in Rockford, had visited all eighteen McDonald’s in and around the city, including Belvedere and Machesney Park, but had never eaten the food—never in his life—having always believed the internal result would be combustive, violent. Now he longed for that.

  He gazed through his windshield at the fake red-brick exterior, the debased shrubbery surrounded by wood chips. Beijing, Moscow—they were all over the world, McDonald’s, colonizing, anesthetizing, and it was said that no country containing one had been at war since. Of course, they were already defeated.

  Today was the day. Michael went inside and stood in the long, slow line. After surgery, the stomach had only two weeks in which to begin functioning again, or it lost the ability. People died that way. For Michael, the anger was like that; deprived of its logic, its livid energy, he questioned his survival.