The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty (28 page)

Before I can react, Peter rips open my extra-large man’s shirt. The buttons fly off. He yanks apart my fake-fat jacket underneath. The snap fasteners pop like machine-gun fire. My long blond hair is swarming around my shoulders.

This passionate act of Peter’s takes me by surprise. And so does my response to it. I am overcome by a strange sense of relief. My principles—instead of bucking at his disobedience—are paralyzed in the face of such irreverence. I can’t muster the will nor the desire to fight him. I remain completely passive.

Jack knocks Peter away from me violently enough that he almost falls. “What the hell are you doing?” he roars at Peter.

Peter hisses an urgent whisper to Jack: “
He’s here!
The doorman! In the living room, looking for her. He wants to kill her. The only way to hide her is to change her into what she really is, which is what she never is. If you stop me she’ll die!”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. We were watching Adam on the video just a minute ago. I look at the screen. The lobby is now empty. And that’s when I remember there’s a slight tape delay on the doorman channel.

As for how the doorman ended up inside my apartment, that’s harder to fathom. Probably a guest let him in, hoping he was some literary agent or editor.

Georgia scream-whispers at Jack, “Help him, Jack!” And she dives into my closet and grabs some items, crying desperately, “Conceal by revealing!”

My friends are upon me now, like a pack of wolves tearing at me, destroying my painstakingly artificial self—all in an effort to save my real one.

Jack strips me of my fake-fat jacket. Penelope seizes my glasses and chucks them in a corner. Peter unbuttons my pants and begins wrenching them down, both pairs at once—not the most effective method.

Behind me, Jack hooks his arms under my armpits to hold me up while Peter, changing tactics, peels off my huge jeans and then my gel pants. Penelope hides them in two filing cabinets along with my shirt and fat jacket.

I’m in my panties now and Georgia loses no time threading my legs through a black miniskirt—the one I always wear under my disguise when I go to bars for my ritual. She slips my feet into high-heeled pumps I’ve worn only once, on Halloween.

Georgia sticks her fingers in my mouth, and says, “Spit them out!” She extricates my ugly fake teeth and slams them in my desk drawer.

At Jack, she barks, “Help me with her eyes!”

Jack holds my left eye open while Georgia plucks out my brown contact and flicks it over her shoulder. They do the same with my other eye.

Georgia then grabs my face and rubs her lips against mine, spreading her lipstick onto me and wiping off what smeared around my mouth.

I’m now in my white undershirt, which can pass as a sexy top, so my friends leave it alone.

They are done with me.

Teetering in my pumps, I feel like a decorticated fruit, ready for consumption.

Peter is gazing at me, looking mesmerized, lost in some incapacitating fog of useless admiration. Georgia’s publicist, her editor, and the guy with the manuscript no longer in his bag still have not moved, transfixed.

The door flies open. The doorman looms at the threshold, staring at all of us. “What a bunch of
assholes
in there!” he says, pointing to the living room. “I mean, is my gun invisible? They are so
blasé
. Don’t they care about life?”

“Not as much as they care about their careers,” Georgia says.

He sneers. “Why does it not surprise me that these are Barb’s friends? See, that’s why I’m here—to kill the Queen of Jade, presiding over her jaded subjects. Where is she?”

He stays in the doorway keeping an eye on the guests in the living room.

“They’re not her friends. They’re mine,” Georgia says. “They’re not even my friends. They’re my enemies.”

“Why would you have them over if they’re your enemies?”

“Grim fascination. Unwholesome addiction.”

He scoffs. “Typical.”

“With the present state of the book publishing world, you can’t blame them for being desperate.”

“Where’s Barb? I was told she’s in here.”

He studies us, and his gaze stops on me. “You. Come here.”

I don’t move.

“You!” he yells, pointing his gun at me and waving me over with his free hand. “Come! Here!”

I am terrified. I walk toward Adam.

There’s a slight smile on his face as he ogles me. “Wow. You’re spectacular. I would have remembered a knockout like you coming into the building.”

I stare back at him, as expressionless as I can manage. My heart is racing.

“That would be naughty, if you snuck past me.” He smiles broadly and winks. “Should I spank you?”

I wouldn’t want him to recognize my voice, so I say nothing.

“Are you always this stupid or are you just having a blonde moment?” he asks. Then, slowly and loudly, he says, “Do you speak English?”

I shake my head.

“Dumb bimbo,” he mutters, looks at the living room, and then at us. “Okay, people, where’s Barb?”

No one says anything.

Sticking to his post in the doorway, he scans the room for places where I could be hiding.

“You,” he says to me, “open the closet. I’m sure Barb is hiding in there.”

I do nothing, at the risk of annoying him—which is still better than infuriating him by revealing I lied about not understanding English.

He repeats his order in mime.

Obeying, I walk to the closet and open it. The inside is visible from where he stands. Thank God my friends didn’t throw my fake fat in there.

“Push the clothes out of the way,” he says, miming again.

I do as he says. He can see there is no one hiding in the closet.

Then he says to everyone, “I’m going to ask you guys one more time, and if I get no answer I’ll shoot one of you randomly. Where is Barb?”

“She went to get some apples,” Peter says. Not bad for someone with no imagination.

“I don’t like liars,” the doorman tells him. “I didn’t see her leave the building. And though I did miss this spectacular bimbo when she entered the building, I would never miss Barb. I don’t miss her when she comes, I don’t miss her when she goes, I won’t miss her when I’ll shoot her, and I won’t miss her when she’s dead.”

“She’s getting the apples from a neighbor in the building,” Peter says.

“What neighbor?”

“She just said a neighbor upstairs.”

The doorman flashes another look at the living room. “Come here,” he says to Peter.

Peter approaches him.

The doorman tells him, “I only wanted to kill one person: Barb. But if you are lying to me I will kill you, too. Come closer.”

Peter obeys.

The doorman presses the barrel of his gun against Peter’s heart. “I’m giving you one last chance to tell me the truth. Where is Barb?”

A second passes, and Peter says, “I have told you the truth.”

The doorman looks at the rest of us. We nod, except for me, careful not to contradict the impression he has of me as a foreign bimbo.

“Fine, I’ll wait for her, then. Hands up, everyone. I want you all in the living room. No touching of cell phones.”

We raise our hands and file past him into the living room. The guests are chatting quietly among themselves. They watch us as we join them.

The doorman addresses the whole crowd: “I want everyone’s hands up, even the jaded people’s.”

Everyone’s hands go up. At least somewhat up. Some hands don’t go up past waist level. A few people are finishing their conversations. I happen to hear the tail end of an exchange between two men standing close to me.

“His last novel sold very well. I’ll send you his manuscript.”

“No need. I only acquire literary fiction now.”

“Ah. Well, I’ve got some literary authors, too. Here’s my card. Could we have lunch some time?”

The doorman stares incredulously at the few people who are still talking. “I have a gun, folks!” he wails. “Are you blind?”

Finally, everyone falls silent with hands at least up to chest level.

While the doorman waits for me to return from getting the imaginary apples, he cuts himself a piece of goat cheese. “Mmm,” he says.

To my astonishment, Penelope takes a few steps toward him and says gently, “Excuse me.”

“What?” he growls.

“Why do you want to kill Barb?”

“Ah,” he says, sounding pleasantly surprised as he puts down the cheese knife. “Thanks for caring. Come a little closer.”

Penelope takes another step toward the doorman. They’re no more than two feet apart.

Looking deep into Penelope’s eyes, he says, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear him clearly: “Barb is a cold inhuman bitch, the most arrogant person I’ve ever met. The most convinced of her own superiority.”

“What makes you think that?”

“You’d never understand,” he says, losing interest and turning back to the cheese.

“Yes I would!”

He chuckles, seeming surprised and even charmed by her earnestness. “I insult her all the time. And she never gets offended. It’s rude and offensive.”

“Sounds like you get easily offended.”

He shakes his head. “Not especially. She’s just odious. She gets the medal for being least annoyable. And her medal is in this gun. And I can’t wait to give it to her.”

“But why do you insult her?”

The doorman sits on one of my counter stools. He looks tired. “Because she wasn’t offended by my subtle signs of disrespect.”

“Why did you give her signs of disrespect?”

“Because she wasn’t bothered when I was in a bad mood or slightly rude.”

“Wow. So it began small and really escalated.”

“Exactly,” he says, nodding. “Her ego was incapable of getting miffed by me because she considers people like me so unimportant. That’s why I pushed it. She infuriated me.”

Penelope is nodding.

Encouraged, he goes on: “Thinking about it makes me very angry. That’s why I’m here. To put an end to her. For me, it’s a win-win situation. If she’s miffed before dying, I’ll finally have gotten what I want. If she’s still not miffed, that will prove that she’s a psychopath and that I shouldn’t have taken her behavior personally, which will make me feel better about the whole thing. I’ll kill her either way, of course, but right before doing it, I will hold the barrel of my gun against her forehead and I will ask her one simple question: ‘Does this bum you out?’”

Penelope says, “I understand. You want to feel that you exist, that you matter, like we all do, but—”

“Exactly!
I
always have the courtesy of being offended when people are not nice to me. I mean,
look at me now!”
he roars, standing up.

Penelope nods. “Of course. But there’s something you should know. The reason Barb wasn’t miffed is not because she has a huge ego, but rather, no ego. It’s not
you
she considered unimportant but herself.”

“Oh,
spare
me the
bullshit!”

“It’s true. You were right, you shouldn’t have taken it personally, not because she’s a psychopath, but because she was traumatized by a terrible event two and a half years ago that left her numb.”

The doorman looks like he’s about to explode with sarcastic comments, so without a pause, Penelope quickly explains. “Her best friend killed himself out of love for her, and since then she’s obliterated herself. Her main concern is to avoid hurting anyone ever again, even indirectly, even accidentally, which is why when you mistreated her, she was concerned about
you
, not about herself. Didn’t she express concern for you, for your well-being?”

“Yeah, it was so condescending.”

“She never complained to the management about you, did she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, she didn’t, otherwise you’d be fired and you know it. Most people would have reported you. And do you know why she didn’t?”

“Because she knew I’d retaliate. That’s obvious.”

Penelope shakes her head. “No. It’s because she didn’t want you to lose your job. Understand that I’m not objecting to your desire to kill, per se. What troubles me is that your murderous impulse is based on a misinterpretation of everything she’s done. The person you’re hunting down doesn’t exist. She’s an illusion, your delusion. You took the few pieces of her that were visible to you and you put them together into this little grotesque being that you assume is Barb. But I’ve now handed you the missing pieces, so you can rebuild her into what she really is: a person who has been altered by grief. If you knew the real Barb, you would love her and want to protect her, not kill her.”

To my surprise, he looks momentarily moved. But, recovering quickly, he says, “Clever twist, and a very poetic story you’ve made up, but I know you’re lying because you’d be stupid not to, and you don’t look stupid.”

“I couldn’t have made that up to save my life. I’m not very creative. I just like to fix things. Like your misconception of Barb.”

“It doesn’t matter. I have my heart set on killing her, and plus I think you’re lying.”

“No, she’s telling the truth,” Georgia jumps in. “Ever since her best friend killed himself out of love for her, Barb has developed a shell. She’s still very caring about the welfare of others, such as yourself or her friends, but not her own. She no longer cares what people think of her. In fact, she now prefers being disliked to being loved too much. This can come off as cold indifference. And someone could, as you have, misinterpret her as being a hard bitch.”

I know Georgia means what she says because she’s actually said this to me before.

“I don’t care what lies you all make up. I’m not going to change my mind,” the doorman says.

My stress level is skyrocketing. By now, lots of cell phones are ringing, and so is my landline. No one is allowed to answer their phones, so the room is filled with clashing ring tones accompanied by a gentle tinkling sound as Lily starts unobtrusively playing the piano.

“What’s taking her so long?” The doorman turns to Peter. “And why is she getting apples in the first place?”

“They go well with cheese,” Peter says.

The doorman cuts himself another piece of goat cheese and says to Lily, “That’s very pretty, what you’re playing.”