The Patron Saint of Ugly (38 page)

Yvette was plopped on her bed in her underwear, and though she wasn’t wearing Kabuki makeup, she was again binding her feet. Afterward she slid beneath the covers and before clicking off her light she looked directly at me.

Here it comes
.

She stared into my eyes and without a hint of revulsion, even with my face melting, said, “Are you going to stand there all night?”

Again she was gone when I woke the next morning. I loitered around campus until midnight, but this time when I opened our door, I was confronted by a four-panel Chinese screen positioned around Yvette’s bed to offer privacy for her and whomever she was passionately embroiled with, she screaming, “Rebel! Oh, Rebel!” He grunting, both making so many sloshing/bumping/skin-slapping noises that I couldn’t move. Finally the climax, which rippled through me too. The mattress springs stopped creaking, the breathing settled, and Yvette called out, “Jesus Christ! Are you going to stand there all night?”

A hand reached out and folded back one of the Chinese panels so that I could fully see Yvette, Kabuki makeup smeared, her mate yanking the sheet up to his waist. Rebel fumbled for a cigarette on the nightstand. Finally he looked at me. “The chick from the balcony! Far out.”

I was stunned to see one of my art-house hippies in my room.

“You know each other?” Yvette stood, impeccably nude, and slipped into a silk robe.

“Yes, master,” we both said, which cracked us up.

Yvette settled a pan of water on her contraband hot plate.

Rebel pointed to my face. “You staging a paint-in too?”

Yvette whipped around. “No! No, she’s . . .” She didn’t know how to finish, and from the look on her face, I could tell she’d heard the rumors surrounding me. I felt suddenly mythic, in the best possible way.

“What’s a paint-in?” I wondered if this was a club I had already joined.

“Well,” Yvette began. As she fixed us tea she revealed that her diplomat father had accompanied Nixon to China. Appalled by the treatment of Chinese women, Yvette began binding her feet and wearing Kabuki makeup in protest. Her father was so humiliated that he yanked her out of American University and flung her into our gulag, where he would continue to pay tuition if she stopped her antics. She gave up the makeup—except during Halloween and sex—and trussed her feet only in our room.

Every night I was treated to Yvette’s rituals: bowls of oolong tea, x-ing another square on the calendar that counted down to her December graduation, and binding her feet before walking clumsily around our room on her heels to perfect the lotus gait, the hobbled step of foot-bound women that was supposedly an aphrodisiac. Neither Yvette nor I found anything sexy about taking away a woman’s ability to walk without pain. We understood the real aphrodisiac was utter dependence.

Though I hate admitting this, given my burgeoning feminism, I began waking an hour earlier so that I could slather on makeup before Yvette emerged from behind her screen. I also bought seven pillowcases, not to wear as nun headgear, but to swiftly swap out so that Yvette wouldn’t see the remnants of my previous day’s face.

Throughout the following weeks I stood at the back of Yvette’s rallies, where she whipped her followers into a radical frenzy. At night she made good use of her Chinese screen, whipping various partners into another kind of frenzy. Sometimes it was Rebel. Or that dude from the record store, or the anarchist from DC who had tracked her down, or Rosie the Brazilian exchange student. Though they seemed uninhibited by my presence on the other side of those papered panels, all that copulating only reminded me of my own longing, so I would grab my stargazing kit and head up to the roof.

If Yvette wasn’t inciting a riot or engaged in sex, she would sink into a pool of despair. I often found her on her bed rifling through two decades’ worth of postcards from her divorced, jet-setting mother:
Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here
. Or
here
. Or
here
. Yvette wishing she were there-there-there too.

Worse still were the letters from her father, which held special powers. “Why would he say that to me? Why?” she muttered to herself over and over in tears. Given how much I longed for an accumulation of my father’s words to tuck into a certain box, I couldn’t imagine what Yvette’s father had written that could so crush his fearless daughter. I also couldn’t understand why she continued to pore over those pages that obviously caused her such pain. Countless times I considered wrapping my arms around her to offer solace, but I was too afraid it would make Yvette reel in the life preserver of friendship she had so recently cast.

I was also too anxious to play my saw in her presence—
Stop that racket!—
so I performed that penance while she was in class. One afternoon, however, when I was perfecting “Is That All There Is?” I heard sniffing at the door. I swiveled around, ready to whip the saw behind my back and impulsively shout,
Go away
.
This is private. Private!
, but Yvette begged, “Please don’t stop.”

I couldn’t refuse, and from then on, every night I serenaded Yvette, particularly when she was holding her father’s words to her chest. Though hall mates pounded walls and hammered fists against the door, Yvette would yell, “Shut up! This is beautiful!,” a word I never thought would genuinely be connected to me.

On December eleventh, I prepared for Apollo 17, the last moon landing for who knew how long. Yvette was draping a silk scarf over her lamp and setting out massage oil for whoever would be arriving to offer a sensual diversion. I didn’t think she even noticed me gathering my gear, but as I opened the door to leave she said, “Plant a flag for me.”

On the roof, I sat on a campstool and gazed through my telescope at the Taurus-Littrow region, where the astronauts had landed. Though the view was as stunning as always, my eyelids began to droop. I spread my unzipped sleeping bag beside the heat-emitting ductwork and folded myself inside, where I fell into a sound sleep bathed in moonbeams.

Hours later I heard the door to the roof creak open. My heart thudded since I thought it might be campus police busting my ass yet again. A spectral figure bobbled toward me, closer and closer; my heart shuddered and then, sweet relief, I recognized the lotus gait.

Yvette approached with no coat or proper shoes, just her bandaged feet without even socks to keep them warm, a bundle of her father’s letters clutched to her stomach. Yvette’s paramour must have been a no-show.

She hobbled toward me, hands out in anguish. “Why would he say that to me? Why?”

“I don’t know.” I considered running downstairs for my saw, but the sight of our leader with no one to distract her made my heart ache.

In one sweeping gesture, I flapped open my sleeping bag and invited Yvette into the warmth emanating from the ductwork, and from me, as I began my descent back to earth.

Yvette did not hesitate; she knelt and slid deftly beneath the covers. I folded the sleeping bag over us both and she faced me. Our eyes locked as she put her hand in my hair to pull my mouth toward hers and then

TAPE NINETEEN

Three on a Match

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned:

First of all, I am not a lesbian.

Second, I know you’re feeling cheated by the abrupt ending of my last installment, but if Nixon can erase eighteen and a half minutes from his Watergate tapes, I can erase a segment of mine. I’m not even going to pretend it was Nonna performing an arthritic Rose Mary Stretch.

Third, did I mention that I am not a lesbian?

Okay, maybe I was, for thirteen days, but I chalk it up to those experimental college years, to six weeks of being a torqued-up, peeping Garnet to the calisthenics going on behind Yvette’s screen, but mostly I pin it on loneliness. On enduring a decade without a warm embrace or a kiss good night. That evening on the roof while I was swaddled in my sleeping bag, under Yvette’s well-practiced hands, nuts and bolts sprang free as my outer hull exploded. By morning I was a flesh-and-bone girl again, filled with carnal bliss and absolute terror, since I didn’t want Yvette to see my makeup-less face.

Though it pained me to do it, as the morning sun crested, I unwrapped my arm from Yvette’s waist. She groaned as I stood, but I tiptoed across the roof and down to our room so I could apply fresh camouflage and return before Yvette knew I was gone.

In the bathroom, I lined up the foundation and concealer as I had done for so many years. I held a steaming washcloth to my face to scrub off the previous day’s remnants, and when I looked in the mirror to check if I’d missed any spots, I saw Yvette standing behind me. I felt as exposed as I had in the Hall of Mirrors, my face gripped in Mom’s hands as she brutally put me on display.

My eyes swiveled to Yvette’s reflection. “You weren’t supposed to see me!”

I grabbed the foundation, the cotton balls, daubed like a maniac. Maybe if I applied it quickly enough, she would think it was all a dream.

Yvette stepped forward and stilled my hand, the tinted cotton ball falling into the sink.

We looked at each other in the mirror until I slumped over. “I didn’t want you to see me.”

Instead of turning on her bound heels and retreating, Yvette cupped my face in her hand and lifted it up so that we again looked at each other’s reflections, my mulberry stains open for scrutiny. Rather than pronouncing,
You’re beautiful just the way you are
, which I would never have believed, Yvette uttered the honest truth: “You don’t have to hide anymore.”

I broke under the weight of that statement, but instead of tumbling to my knees, I fell into Yvette’s arms and bawled like a twelve-year-old who had just lost her father and brother. I wailed for the fam-i-ly I had avoided grieving over by blasting into space. Even that Icelandic volcano erupted, and I cried for Nonna and Betty. For my regret at never telling my father I loved him. For those same words I would never hear from him again. Mostly, however, I wept for myself, and for my once staunchest ally—my mother, my mother, my mother.

When I was wrung dry I glared at all those vials of makeup. Maybe they weren’t Dr. Trogdon’s pills, but suddenly they were poison to me.

I swept the bottles and tubes into a hand towel. Yvette followed as I burst from our room and stalked down the hall, girls flattening themselves against the walls as we passed since they had never seen me without the clown paint. Instead of cowering, however, I lifted my chin and stared them straight in the eye.

Outside, Yvette and I marched to the biggest trash receptacle on campus, next to the dining-hall picnic tables meant to catch our wrappers and soda bottles. I didn’t hesitate one second before tossing into this Freedom Trash Can, not a bra or girdle, but the goop that had been concealing me for years.

The cherry on the sundae was that at that moment, Sister Joanie dashed out of the dining hall and galloped toward me, cheering, “It’s about time!”

Yvette looked at me, a prideful spark in her eye, which bolstered my courage to bolster her nerve. “Go get your father’s letters.” Her eyes rounded, but she nodded, fetched them, and I applauded as she tossed his hurtful words into the trash one page at a time.

From then on it was me behind Yvette’s Chinese screen. Since my face was just the tip of my secret, I slowly revealed my personal geography to her, my anxiety dissipating when she did not run away screaming as I exposed one shoulder, then the other. My chest, then stomach. Feet, ankles, knees, thighs. “You’re a work of art,” she said, surveying the full breadth of me at last, and for the first time in my life, I believed it.

Yvette traced coastlines and minor continents with her fingertip. Landmasses that had not been altered since I’d left Sweetwater except for the occasional Vietnamese rash. Apparently La Strega or whoever had been tinkering with my mapped body had short-range powers. It became a game. “My mother has been there, and there, and there,” Yvette would say. “I’ve always wanted to visit the Balkans!”

“Why don’t you ever go with her?” I finally asked.