Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  Abby was studying him over the broad saucer of her margarita. “You seem different, Michael,” she said. “I can’t figure out how.”

  “Really?” he said. “I feel the same.”

  But she was right; at last there was movement within him, a plan taking shape. He experienced it as a burrowing, the tunneling of a small industrious creature wakened after long sleep. He would survive without his anger, after all. More than survive—would thrive, for the absence of anger had left him, in moments, with an almost delirious sense of freedom. And when he glimpsed the part of the world he had come from (occasionally, on the evening news), soaked in rage, locked in anguished and protracted wars, it all looked forced, overwrought. He studied the faces mashed by suffering, the skirmishes and tear-gas clouds and people stunned by rubber bullets and wondered, seriously, whether all of them were pretending. How could anything matter so deeply?

  “Wait,” Charlotte said, “so now you’re all pissed at me?”

  No one said anything. The delicious bathwater of her friends’ proximity had turned coolly gelatinous.

  “I heard you were at school? Like two weeks ago?” Roz said.

  “I was, but—” It was the time she’d seen Michael West, or the person who resembled Michael West. “I was.”

  “You just, like, disappeared at a certain point,” Laurel said, with apology.

  Charlotte said nothing. After the violence of her afternoon with Moose, her friends’ anger felt unbearable, toxic. She knew they were right. She pictured getting out of the car right there, in the middle of traffic, just walking away.

  There was a long silence.

  “So … why tonight?” Sheila said acidly. “You had nothing else to do, so you thought, I’ll like spend time with the little people?”

  Charlotte flung open the door. They were stopped at a red light on State Street, in a middle lane, almost at Aunt Mary’s, where they’d been headed for dessert. She heard the little thump of their surprise as she got out, then ambled calmly among panting Ford Explorers toward the curb.

  Roz began honking her horn. She maneuvered into the outer lane and drove next to Charlotte, slowly. She kept honking, and soon the cars behind her were honking, too.

  A window slid down. “Get in.”

  It was Sheila. Charlotte didn’t even glance at her.

  “Get in, or I’ll take shit for it all night.”

  “That’s a reason not to get in.”

  “Chari?” Sheila said. “Will you please?”

  “If I get in, will you get out?”

  Charlotte turned to the car. Sheila was grinning.

  A universal truth: people loved to speak of their children. “Tell me about your kids, Abby,” Michael said. “How’re they doing?”

  “In Los Angeles, right now. Visiting their father.” She rolled her eyes, only partly offsetting their sudden, lustrous cargo of tears. Yes, he remembered now: The husband who had run away to Los Angeles. The little girl whose toes had suctioned to him like a lizard’s to a wall.

  “Then he hasn’t come back.”

  “Come back?” Abby said, and shook her head. “He has no intention of coming back. He’s gotten into the movie business.”

  Michael received this information with the whole of his body, as if he’d been shoved. “Really,” he said, and set down his drink.

  “Producing, whatever that means. Some kind of movie-Internet-multimedia-blahbiddyblah.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Who knows? He’s optioned a book, he’s got someone writing a script. Keeps saying all you need to know is how to tell a story. Which sounds a little pat, but on the other hand, if Darden can do it, or convince people he’s doing it, then frankly it can’t be all that hard.”

  Michael smiled, holding very still. “He’s making movies?”

  “So he tells me.”

  “He went there without training?”

  “He’s a litigator! I put the guy through law school!” She smiled, baring anger and white, imperfect teeth.

  Michael’s whole body tingled, a forest full of breathing animals. “How does he describe it?” he asked carefully.

  “Tediously,” she said. “He goes on and on about how there’s a revolution happening. Keeps talking about cross-pollination and globalization and channels of communication and new media. And ‘Renaissance,’ that’s my favorite. This is the new Renaissance, he’ll say, like he has the remotest idea what the ‘old’ Renaissance consisted of.”

  “What else?”

  “Everything is about to change,” she intoned. “In ten years you won’t recognize the world we live in. People’s lives will be totally different … yeah, right. Like having some life-sized computer screen in your living room showing interactive horror films is going to bring you closer to God. I mean, how about feeding some hungry people? How about paying some attention to the Third World, or even just dirt-poor Americans trying to survive without welfare? For them, life is an interactive horror film!”

  She looked beseechingly at Michael, and he nodded gently, sympathetically. But he hardly heard her. He was memorizing Darden’s phrases.

  “I don’t have friends there,” Charlotte said. “I don’t.”

  They were sitting in a booth at Aunt Mary’s, a spectral wariness still flickering among them as they forked their desserts—all but Laurel, who was dancing in “The Corsair” and had ordered a fruit cup. She cut open each black grape and removed the seeds before eating it.

  “Bullshit,” Sheila said.

  “I mean it.”

  “Then it’s a boy,” Roselyn declared, with carnivorous approval.

  When Charlotte didn’t deny it, Roz shrieked until Laurel clapped her mouth shut with the flat of her hand.

  “The screamers,” Sheila explained to Charlotte, rolling her eyes. “They got bigger, and now she has to have an operation.”

  “Might,” Roselyn corrected her. “Might have to have.” She was speaking very softly now. “At East?”

  Charlotte hesitated. How to explain her secrecy, her failure to produce the boy for their collective inspection? “No,” she said. “He’s older.”

  “College?”

  “… No.”

  The implications of this disclosure sifted over them gradually. “Wow,” Roz breathed. “So he’s like, a man.”

  They stared at Charlotte, and she felt herself suspended, afloat in their collective amazement. And guilty as it made her to smuggle forth these bits of contraband, the pleasure of release—of bragging aloud, of telling someone, finally, what the hell was going on—more than compensated.

  “Is he like … married?” Laurel asked.

  “No.”

  “Divorced?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Would we know his name? If you said it?”

  Charlotte paused again. She should lie, of course, but she didn’t want to lie; she wanted to say the name aloud—finally, to someone. To say it and hear it said. “Probably.”

  The girls looked baffled. There was a long, circuitous silence.

  “Is he … famous or something?” Laurel asked, in a small voice.

  Charlotte laughed, but the others regarded her with wistful awe. Anything had become possible. “That’s completely screwy,” she said. But watching her friends, she felt the tiny strands of their conviction affix to her like silk. For an instant she saw herself differently—someone glamorous, whose life was crammed with remarkable event. A person she herself would envy. And Charlotte grasped something then, for the very first time: people would believe almost anything.

  “Look at me,” she said, serious now. “You guys? Yoo-hoo. Look.”

  They did, all three. In thoughtful silence.

  “She’s blushing,” Sheila said.

  “Meanwhile, he did come out here and pick up the kids,” Abby said. “I wouldn’t send them alone on the plane, they’re just too small. And that was great. I mean, they need a dad.” And here she looked away.

  “How l
ong have they been in L.A.?”

  “Four days,” she said. “They’re in love—they don’t want to come home.” Again, that quivering brightness; tears, Michael thought, and hoped they wouldn’t fall. “Colleen says on the phone, ‘Mommy, it’s warm every day here. You should come, too.’ I guess he lives right by the ocean.”

  “Maybe you should,” he said. “Go there, too.”

  “Never!” Abby said fiercely, and the pressure of her smile finally shoved the tears from her eyes, a single strand veering haplessly down each cheek. “The people out there have no souls. They’re not really people—they’ve got plastic in their faces, their legs, their breasts. Even the men, they put it in their calves to give their legs a better shape. I mean, these are not human beings in the traditional sense.” She blotted her eyes with a napkin. “How could I live in a place like that?”

  Michael crammed a last bit of fajita into his mouth and washed down the chicken and green peppers with margarita slush. The food made sweat prick to the surface of his face. He was tired of Abby, of her anger. It felt tedious, like something not just he but all the world would soon be rid of.

  “The good news,” she said lightly, as if in apology, “is I’m finally getting some money out of the guy. I reupholstered the entire living room, even the rocking chair! Now I’m redoing the outside, putting flower beds in the front, and in back? That big concrete patio with the grill? I’m having them jackhammer that away, and I’m putting in grass.”

  Michael listened with approval. He remembered the area, and she was right, grass would be far, far better than concrete. He swilled the last of his drink and wiped a napkin over his hot, pounding face. Then he had an idea: “You ever thought of doing prairie?” he asked.

  He walked Abby to her car under a black sky, a big spongy moon off to one side. He kissed her cheek and received in exchange a puzzled look, as if she were remembering before, and wondering why—or why not.

  “Thanks,” he said, “for keeping me company.”

  “Thank you for dinner. It was perfect timing—I’ve been a little lost without the kids.”

  How did she survive, Abby Reece, with her transparent face? How had the world not stamped her into pieces and ground her to a fine, glittering silt? Yet here she was, intact, tears in her eyes and a heart so tender that Michael imagined he overheard its gentle beating; she had survived, and showed every sign of continuing to do so. And there had been a time, he knew—perhaps just a moment—when exhaustion had tempted him to lay down his small bundle at the threshold of Abby’s flat yellow house, to uncoil himself among the modest dimensions of her life. And then the girl had come along and startled him, distracted him. Yes, he had Charlotte to thank for the fact that now, as a plan amassed within him, he would not have to leave Abby Reece and her children behind, not stun them with his sudden, inexplicable departure.

  “Howard told me you aren’t coming back next year,” she said, looking up at him in the darkness.

  “No.” A revolution is happening.

  “You’re teaching somewhere else?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I think … probably not.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I haven’t decided. Something different. Something new.” Everything is going to change.

  “That sounds exciting,” she said.

  Michael nodded, looking into her eyes. He was eager to be rid of her. At last she got in her car, and he waved to her as she pulled away.

  Charlotte could hear the party, a bass line seeping up through the car, thumbing her insides. Laurel opened her shiny pale blue purse, whose hue exactly matched her fingernail polish. After some feral digging, she excavated a lipstick and applied a blossom of color to her lips. She offered the lipstick to Charlotte, who shook her head.

  “Aw, live a little,” Laurel said. And with breathtaking precision, considering that Roselyn was parking the car in which they sat, Laurel seized Charlotte’s shoulder with one hand and used the other to push the soft nub across her mouth.

  “Gimme,” Sheila commanded from the front seat, clutching for the lipstick. “Hey,” seeing Charlotte. “You’ve got lips.”

  Laurel was applying her blusher, a lunar, sepia glitter in the streetlight. “No,” Charlotte groaned, recoiling as her friend came at her with the brush. It grazed her cheeks, soft as mink.

  “Mascara next. Hush hush,” Laurel said. “Or your face’ll be totally de-balanced.” It was hard not to flinch—Charlotte’s eyes felt so exposed without her glasses. But there was a clean divide in her, one part simulating disgust so the other could accept the mascara with impunity.

  “Nuh-uh,” Laurel said, swiping Charlotte’s glasses away when she tried to replace them. “That’ll wreck it.”

  “You realize that I’m totally blind,” Charlotte said.

  “There’s nothing to see in there anyway.”

  They left the car and wandered toward the music among ranch-style houses and waxen golf course pines lit from below, past open garage doors exhaling smells of motor oil and cut grass and rindy walnuts still in boxes from last fall. They paused under a tree to relight Sheila’s half-joint. The pot, in conjunction with Charlotte’s uncorrected eyesight, made her feel like a stand-in for herself. Laurel brushed Charlotte’s hair with a small neon-green plastic brush, and she felt it lift slightly from her head.

  Michael stood alone in the parking lot, an asphalt version of the empty sky. A clear, cool night, a smear of light to the east, where Chicago was. The emptiness of this land and sky had ceased to trouble him; they no longer felt empty in the way they had. The plastic signs were everywhere—Mobil, Holiday Inn, Kentucky Fried Chicken—holding him like the fingers of a hand that would reach as far as he might wish to go. He pulled his car onto State Street, heading west, then took a right, then another right onto Squaw Prairie Road, still amazed at how quickly civilization yielded to countryside: fields, tractors in silhouette, long rows of freshly turned soil, other fields abandoned, still crowded with last year’s dead stalks. Old barns like ghost ships. He crossed over the interstate and soared beyond it, heading for a building site he’d visited once before. It glowed: a cloud of low, flickering light. A condominium village at an early stage of construction that was weirdly akin to devastation—the sort he’d once dreamed of causing himself.

  Michael parked his car and went to look at the development. Nothing had changed since his last visit: four sample condominiums were poised among acres of dirt and curved, sparkling sidewalks. The houses were jaunty ersatz Victorians, each one distinct in size and shape but accented with identical festive trim, mailboxes saluting out front. A vast constellation of Victorian lampposts haunted the empty sidewalks, leaking a faint lunar glow from their flame-shaped bulbs.

  Michael followed one of the sidewalks to its desultory end, then kept walking, trudging through loose, turned earth that worked its way inside his shoes, until eventually he reached three strands of barbed wire demarcating the outer limit of the development. Beyond these lay a planted field, rows of shoots just lifting their heads from the soil. From planted crops to condominiums: three strands of barbed wire abridging a gap of millennia. Wind cackled around him. Cross pollinization. No. Pollination. Cross polliniz—no! Globalization, pollination. This is the new Renaissance.

  All you need to know is how to tell a story.

  Well, that he could certainly do. That he’d been doing all life.

  The door to the party house was open. Inside flourished the sort of event made possible only by a blanket absence of parents, not an out-for-the-evening absence but an out-of-town absence. A primordial murk, a loamy, humid stench of beer and carpeting, a ravaged kitchen where four guys were playing soccer with a beleaguered cantaloupe. A stereo heaved up the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” at disorienting volume. Charlotte was astonished to find it all still here, undiminished by the passage of months or her own lengthy absence. Head down, she avoided people’s eyes at first, then discovered that she couldn’t see th
em even when she looked. The world slurred, buckled, smashed pleasantly, the lashes of her eyes felt heavy, coated like sticky buds, and her lips and cheeks were hot. As she moved among the unrecognizable faces, her hesitation yielded to a marvelous detachment, a sense that she wasn’t herself anymore, so none of it mattered. She carried her face like an object newly made, still wet, in danger of smearing or losing its shape as she followed her friends downstairs to a basement rec room populated by boys in baggy attire who nodded their sparsely bearded chins in accord with the rap music stomping from a boombox. And here was the keg, the party’s faulty, intermittent heart, a guy squeezing out cup after cup of foam, complaining bitterly about the pump.

  “Yo, Tupac!” someone bellowed.

  Stories? You want stories? I got a doozy, said the voice of a Hollywood producer as Michael envisioned him, a voice cribbed from movies and TV, a man who took meetings beside a pool with slices of fruit on his cheeks and chamomile teabags over his eyes. Listen, he said,

  We’ve got a guy from one of those crappy parts of the world where people get shot up every other day—Lebanon, let’s say, but hell it could be anywhere, Sri Lanka, Nigeria. Sudan. Say Lebanon’s southern coast—Tyre—cute little tourist town until everyone started gunning it to pieces. He’s from a middle-class family, Shiites. No, you clown, shee-ite, two syllables. It’s one of those Muslim sects. Now our guy, he’s a prodigy. Math whiz, gobbles up numbers like most kids eat M&Ms. Goes to college in Beirut, honors in every class, brilliant career ahead of him yadda yadda. Gets married, has a kid. Then bam. Chucks the whole thing. It’s the early eighties, the Israelis’re in South Lebanon trying to clear out the PLO, and our guy joins a bunch of Shiites that’s trying to get rid of the Israelis. Hezbollah, you’ve heard of them. Scary folks. Extremists in the extreme. But our guy wants that—see, he’s mad. Pissed. Becomes a fundamentalist, starts baying at the moon or whatever the hell they do. No booze, no girls in bathing suits. Then poof, he disappears. Wife, kid, folks, they all wait terrified. Never hear another word—finally they figure he must be dead.