The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty (22 page)

Peter says he’d better call it a night because he has to get up early the next morning. He offers to escort me home. I tell him that won’t be necessary. He kisses me on the cheek and I leave.

I decide to walk home to clear my head. My apartment is 45 minutes away, but the air isn’t cold for December and I’m wearing a big coat over my bloat wear.

“You look a bit hot and sweaty,” Adam notes, opening the lobby door for me. “When you get upstairs, why don’t you cool off by opening your window and sticking your head out, feet first?”

Of course, he doesn’t know that my best friend killed himself by jumping out a window. I doubt he would have made that comment if he’d known—despite his disorder.

THE FOLLOWING EVENING,
Strad and Lily are walking to his friend’s birthday party when he suddenly takes hold of the edge of Lily’s mask and tentatively begins to lift it off her face.

She grabs his wrist. “Never,” she says.

“Oh, come on, won’t you let me?” Strad pleads.

Lily shakes her head. “No one ever takes off my mask. Only I do that, when and if I choose to.”

“I think I’m going to go home. I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m feeling a bit sad.”

“Why? Because I won’t take off my mask?”

“That’s just a symptom. The spot I take up in your heart seems . . . so small. It’s hard for me to get used to that.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Your unwillingness to be truthful,” he says, leaning against a lamppost. “You allow me to believe things that are completely inconsistent with ways that you act, and you don’t bother explaining the inconsistencies, as though I’m not even worth the trouble.”

“What inconsistencies?”

“You let me believe that you absolutely
have
to wear a mask in public so that you won’t be harassed by strangers, but then why do you put it on when I go to the bathroom in your apartment? It insults my intelligence. Also, you refuse to take off your mask to go to this private party, and yet you took your mask off at the bookstore on our first date. So why can’t you take it off now as a special favor to me? My friends aren’t going to pester you the way those jerks did at the bookstore.”

Head hanging, shoulders drooping, Lily says nothing. She can’t explain to him that she puts on her mask when he goes to the bathroom because there’s no music in the bathroom and when he emerges from it, he’ll see her in all her ugliness; he’ll instantly recognize her as Lily until the music’s power takes hold of his brain again.

He continues. “I want to help you find another way to deal with the problems you’re struggling with that make you wear the mask.”

“That’s not likely to happen. I’ve been wearing a mask for fifteen years.”

“You have?” He pulls her to him and tenderly whispers in her ear, “I knew there was more to it. Things didn’t quite add up. Please open up to me. I want to know you.” He kisses the edge of her ear. “Will you tell me? Let’s forget about the party and go home.”

She nods. They walk back to her place. In her mind, she’s rehearsing Georgia’s concoction. She dreads using it. When she first heard it, she cringed and was tempted to ask Georgia to make it more literary, but Georgia had already made it clear she wouldn’t, that it wouldn’t be effective on Strad.

Strad and Lily go straight to her bedroom. She turns on the music. A minute later, she takes off her mask. She lies next to Strad on the bed.

He strokes her hand. “Tell me everything.”

She gazes at him for a long moment and then takes the plunge into Georgia’s fabrication. She describes at length a torrid history of sexual abuse that supposedly happened up to and including the age of eight, and that involved many pedophiles: her swimming instructor, her neighbor on vacation one summer, an art teacher, etc. The offenses were never genital penetration—because, as Strad knows, she was still a virgin their first night together—but it was everything else. Lily tells him she had an uncle she adored, who’d never laid a finger on her, until one day when he became one of the others. He couldn’t bear the guilt of what he did to her, and what he did to her again twice, and what he knew he would continue doing to her, so he killed himself.

Strad looks too shocked to respond.

“And that,” says Lily, “was when I started wearing the mask.”

Strad puts his arms around her and seems very distraught.

She, too, is upset, though over the fact that this crazy story was what she had to resort to. And it’s not even over.

She pulls away from Strad. “He left a suicide note confessing to my mother that he’d been molesting me and that he was killing himself mostly for this reason. I couldn’t believe he would do that to me—that on top of traumatizing me with his abuse and traumatizing me with his death, he was exposing our disgusting secret. He himself was conveniently escaping the shame of it through death, leaving me to bear it. I wanted to die, too.”

Strad is staring at her, looking quite upset.

Lily continues. “I refused to take off the mask. I wasn’t only wearing it to stop attracting sexual abuse, I was also wearing it out of shame. When my parents tried taking it off by force, I had a fit. I told them that if they didn’t let me wear it, I’d find another mask and glue it to my face with Superglue, or I’d cut up my face. They were horrified. They sent me to therapy, which was useless. Finally, there was one shrink who did help, though only a little. Now I’m going to explain to you those inconsistencies that offended you.”

“Okay. Thank you,” Strad says.

“After three months, the psychiatrist found an alternate way to make me feel safe. I was only eight years old, keep that in mind. He made me listen to a piece of music and said that whenever that piece was playing, I’d be protected. He claimed the music had properties that would make people around me inoffensive and relatively normal-acting in the face of my looks.”

Strad strokes Lily’s hair.

She continues. “My parents were thrilled, at first, that the therapist was able to add the musical piece to my derangement. They thought I was on the road to recovery. What they didn’t realize was that my progress toward mental health would stop right there. They had to learn to live with their daughter either masked or accompanied by music, and they got so tired of both that sometimes it was hard for them to decide which they could bear. To this day, things haven’t changed. I can live either behind the mask or behind the music. I can choose between my two prisons.”

“But now, as an adult, I assume you know the music doesn’t protect you.”

“On some level I know that. But on an emotional level I still believe in it. I need it.”

“What a sad story.” He pauses. “I don’t mean to sound nitpicky, but I still don’t understand the bookstore. You took off your mask, yet I assume your special music wasn’t playing.”

“Yes, it was, actually.”

“How did you manage that?”

“Connections.”

Strad nods.

“Now you know. I’m very screwed up,” she says. “It’s hard for me to have a normal life. That’s why Barb thought we might be a good match. Most men wouldn’t stand for my lunacies, but she thought that you—because you value physical beauty so much—might be willing to . . . or be able to . . . overlook these huge psychological aberrances.”

He hugs her. “Thank you for being open with me about your past. It all makes so much sense now.”

Georgia never fails,
Lily marvels to herself.

OVER THE HOLIDAYS,
I spend a few days with my mom in her house in Connecticut, just the two of us. We have a nice time. She hasn’t mentioned my fake fat since I went to the Excess Weight Disorders Support Group, that one time. I can tell it takes some effort on her part, but I appreciate it. Instead, we talk a lot about her upcoming trip to Australia in March, which is a topic I much prefer.

I devote a large portion of each day to working on some designs for the dream sequence of a new movie. And I dedicate the rest of the time to fantasizing about Peter. I’m feeling optimistic. He said he would not neglect his sense of touch at our next meeting. Who would say that if they weren’t interested? Only a sadist. I think he’s interested.

In the end, my mom can’t help herself. Right before I’m about to go back to the city, as we’re standing at the living room window staring out in silence at the countryside, she says, “Barb, you’ll never find a worthwhile guy if you keep wearing that disguise.”

I’m sure my mom would find Peter Marrick worthwhile. In the window, my own reflection is staring back at me with a tiny, hopeful smile.

Chapter Fifteen

S
trad tells Lily it’s been three years since he’s been with a woman who made him want to take a vacation with her. He suggests they go on a trip for two weeks to the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. Then he says, “Why not leave tomorrow?”

Excited by his spontaneity and enthusiasm for her, Lily agrees to go on vacation with him the next day. Worried that the airline might not let her wear a mask, she insists they take separate flights. She says she always travels alone.

MY FRIENDS
SANS
Lily come over for a Night of Creation. I’ve been daydreaming about Peter a lot since he gave me that frustratingly incomplete demonstration a few days ago, so it stirs me even more than usual when he walks through the door and kisses me on the cheek.

While we work, the room is quiet without Lily here playing her piano. Half an hour into our session, I go to the kitchen to get some juice. Peter joins me.

Softly, so the others can’t hear, he says, “Can I see you tomorrow evening?”

I don’t answer right away, wondering how I’ll survive twenty-four hours until then.

“Please say you can see me tomorrow,” he whispers, leaning against the island, his back to our friends. His smile is so seductive I nearly drop the knife I picked up to cut a lemon. He adds, “We need to finish that demonstration I started. One of the five senses was missing, remember?”

“Yes, I remember.” I clear my throat. “Okay, tomorrow.”

“Thank God,” he says. “Otherwise we’d have to wait a week because I’m leaving after tomorrow to visit my dad in California for five days.”

“Oh.”

“And that would be too long to wait, don’t you think?”

That he’s showing this much interest in me moves me deeply. My gray curls shield my face as I lean over my lemon and answer “Yes,” casually.

“We can hear you!” Georgia hollers, and then mutters to herself, “Where is Lily when we need her to mask the noises of love?”

She resumes her typing, but louder.

I LOOK FORWARD
to Peter’s visit with utmost anticipation. But he calls me in the morning to let me know that sadly he will not be able to come over tonight because of unforeseen work obligations. He says he’s very disappointed and can’t wait to see me when he returns from his trip, in six days.

After we hang up, I wander from room to room, stunned, like a human being dying of thirst having just been told the water will not arrive today as promised, but possibly after I’m already dead.

I get back to my work in a daze. It takes me a while to regain my focus.

AS LILY REPORTS
to me later, the first few days in Vieques are heavenly for her and Strad. She wears her mask by the hotel pool and on the beach. She even swims with it a few times, trying not to wet it too much.

People stare, of course. But Strad and Lily don’t care. In their rooms, she doesn’t wear the mask, only the music.

Strad feels protective of her. He’s attentive to her psychological and emotional needs. The more she gets to know him, the more she loves him.

BACK IN NEW
York, I’ve been having an intense e-mail correspondence with Peter while he’s away visiting his dad. Our exchanges are flirtatious and titillating. I can hardly sleep. I spend most of my days smiling or snickering to myself while working, reminiscing about the last message sent or received.

I can’t wait for him to get back, can’t wait for him to indulge his sense of touch. I wonder what first move he has planned, how he will touch me, how he will kiss me, how he will undress me, how surprised he’ll be to encounter my fake fat under my clothes, how astonished—though not overly ecstatic, otherwise that would make him shallow—he’ll be to discover I’m attractive by every conventional standard, not only by his open-minded, evolved, and big-hearted one. For the first time, I will take off my disguise out of love, not out of hate, like I do in bars. And then I can keep it off, because I will no longer be searching for my soul mate. I will have found him.

My friends have remarked that since I’ve met Peter, I’ve stopped going to bars and doing my stripping ritual. It’s true, I’ve lost the urge to rub shallow men’s faces in their own superficiality.

PETER RETURNS FROM
his trip, and our long-awaited reunion is that same evening, during which he will complete his demonstration by delighting his sense of touch. I’m very excited, imagining his caresses.

When he walks through my door, right on time, he gives me a big hug and smiles at me, saying, “I missed you.” He’s lightly stroking my gray curls with the tips of his fingers. I’m glad my wig is made of real hair.

We position ourselves just like we did at his apartment, with me on the couch and him on a chair facing me, close.

He opens his bag and pulls out a piece of fabric. He begins stroking the fabric—red velvet—while staring at me.

Needless to say, this is not the kind of touching I expected.

After what feels like ten minutes (but maybe it was just one), I say, “Is it still good?”

“Remarkably.”

“You’d think the pleasure of touching that thing would wear off after a few minutes.”

“Hasn’t yet. It’s really very soft.”

I nod. Maybe if I act ever so slightly bored, that will nudge him in the right direction. So I lean my head back and gaze past him, as though momentarily lost in thought.

After another minute, he says, “Well, that was great.” He puts his piece of velvet back in his bag.

I smile and nod again. And wait. He does nothing.