Pretty Is (7 page)

“Sounds original.” By the time Brad turns around, Sean is right in front of him, sticking his hand out.

“Dr. Drake,” says Sean, practically bowing over Brad’s hand. “Nice to meet you. I haven’t had a chance to take a class with you yet, but everybody says I should. I hope to. I’m extremely interested in the American modernist poets.”

Brad nods a bit goofily, clearly caught off guard, trying to shift gears to professor mode. I tap my pool cue on the floor.

“I saw you make some sweet shots, Dr. Drake,” Sean says, eyeing the table. “Not bad for a teacher. You want to shoot a game? My buddy over there, he can play, too. Students against teachers. What do you say?” Sean has a “buddy”? I’m surprised. I have pictured him skulking through the world alone; when I try to imagine him holding an ordinary college-guy conversation, maybe chugging a beer, I fail. And the Sean kissing up to Brad is not the menacing young man who frequents my office. Sean is complicated, apparently.

There are plenty of graceful ways to decline his proposal; I wait for Brad to think of one. Pointedly, I stand my cue against the paneled wall. “Sorry, but that’s about it for me.”

“Just one quick game of nine-ball with us, then,” Sean says quickly to Brad, and I know my hopelessly amenable friend won’t be able to refuse. I turn my back on them and retreat. From the safety of my crooked-legged wooden table, on which decades of sticky beer and ashes clog the jagged contours of sad old carved declarations of love and hate, I take stock of the crowd. I am strongly tempted to walk out.

Just then I see Delia, the director of the rape crisis center, at the far end of the room with a group of women—a rare sight at Ivan’s. She’s wearing jeans and a black leather jacket, and looks effortlessly bad-assed. She folds over the table and breaks; with a satisfying smack, the balls scatter around the table. Two rattle into pockets. I have never mastered the break.

I had said I would call Delia, and then I didn’t. I completely forgot about it. Seeing her again, though, I feel the same urge to connect, or try to. It’s as if I’m once again a lonely little girl on the playground, friendless. I check on Brad, who is neatly arranging nine balls in a tight diamond; Sean hovers nearby. That settles it. I start toward Delia, leaving my beer behind.

She demolishes her opponent in no time and then, spotting me among the spectators, separates herself from her cluster of companions. “Not exactly a faculty hangout,” she greets me.

“That’s what I like about it. I come here with a colleague sometimes.” I nod in Brad’s direction. “At the moment, though, I need to get away from the kid he’s playing with.”

“I can see how you might,” she says, after a mere glance at Sean. I’m grateful that she’s so quick to pick up on the fact that there’s something
off
about him, something palpably wrong. I allow myself to feel vindicated. And then her eyes dart back in his direction and linger for a second, narrowing. She’s just remembered him from somewhere, and the association is not a pleasant one. Considering her line of work, this seems like cause for concern.

“Do you know him?” I demand. “Where do you know him from? Because I have a bad feeling—”

She cuts me off. “It’s nothing,” she says. “Never mind. I shouldn’t have said anything.” I’m not reassured, not in the least. It seems less likely that she isn’t sure of her memory than that some scruple prevents her from telling me what she knows. A confidentiality agreement? My mind begins to construct scenarios in which Delia could have encountered Sean, producing an impromptu series of brief horror movies. “If you know something, I really wish you’d tell me,” I press, my voice low.

Delia raises a hand to her friends, waves her index finger to indicate that she just needs a minute. It isn’t rude, exactly, but I feel dismissed. “No,” she says. “Really. It’s nothing.”

Her friends are eyeing me askance. They look to me like women from the center—volunteers or victims, it’s hard to tell. Definitely not sorority girls. What do I look like in their eyes? Hapless, dowdy movie professors flicker across my mind. Pop culture isn’t kind to academics.

I take the hint. “Anyway, I just came over to say hi. Listen, do you still want to have coffee sometime?” I hear the note of urgency that has crept into my voice. She knows something about Sean. She is someone in whom I might confide, at least in a limited and strictly unofficial way—someone who might even have useful advice.

“You have my number, right? Call me, if you’re serious.” She turns away, and I cross the room to rejoin Brad. As a child I used to imagine that there was some sort of force field around me, deflecting people; that feeling returns as I make my way through the crowded room with peculiar ease.

I reach Brad and slip my elbow through his. “Let’s go,” I say.

What was Delia thinking when she looked at Sean?

“But I’m winning.” Brad waves his cue in the direction of the table.

“Of course you are.” I retrieve my abandoned beer and down the last swallow. “I’ll take you out for pizza.” I let him go make his excuses to Sean and catch the dark look my student sends my way. Brad is still pulling his gloves on and trying to zip his coat as I drag him out the door, steering him to the left, down the snowy street to Nicolletti’s. Outside he stops me, his puffy sleeve bracing itself momentarily against my own. “Lois,” he says. “What is it?”

I feel as if I am being blamed for something that is not my fault. This is perhaps irrational, since the only reason Brad doesn’t know the whole story is that I have withheld it. Still, I have tried to offer meaningful fragments of the truth, and no one has taken me seriously: not Kate, not Delia, not even Brad, who obviously thinks I’m overreacting. “It’s nothing,” I say. I push his arm away and start walking, leaving him no choice but to follow.

Nicolletti’s is one of this town’s chief charms. It’s a little mom-and-pop Italian joint, the kind that’s practically extinct: good pizza, good spaghetti, cheap wine, dark and candlelit. It almost always improves my mood.

So it might be the influence of Nicolletti’s, of the familiar candle glowing through dimpled red glass. But as Brad and I settle into our booth, my anger is replaced by a strange and sudden warmth when I read in Brad’s face that he is genuinely concerned. Ordinarily, genuine concern disconcerts me, but I find myself tempted to tell him—not just about Sean, and about Chloe, but about everything; all the parts I have left out. Beneath my resistance to telling—a habit of years—I have an intimation of the dizzying wave of relief that might follow. I have only to release the words, organize the unwieldy fragments. Or not. One more bottle of Chianti, and out they would tumble.

And then? What would be left of me? How would I anchor myself to the past?

No. Mine is not a story to be given away or traded for fleeting emotional gratification. What are your plans for the summer? I ask Brad, and that is what we talk about. He doesn’t reach for my hand, as he might have; I don’t have to slide it gently away. My secrets will not be tested today. I won’t thrust them into the light and see what happens to them. Would they take a healthy gulp of sun and air? Or shrivel up like ancient tomb-dwelling vampires?

I’m sure it’s better that I do not know.

Chloe

I think my parents had a good marriage. I think they loved each other. My early memories support this belief, and this was the sense I got when Daddy talked about my mother. I could also see their happiness in the old photographs I found in a shoebox in the back of his closet. But it was
her
relationship with my father that I grew up with. No wonder I don’t have much faith in romance. I could never figure out exactly what they got from each other, Daddy and Gail, but it sure as hell wasn’t healthy. Maybe Daddy wanted to be punished for my mother’s death, not that it was his fault. Maybe Gail wanted to rule the fucking world, or at least Arrow, starting with my father.

Maybe that’s why I don’t go out hoping to fall in love or find happily-ever-after or even happily-for-a-while. It never even crosses my mind. What I hope for is to have a reasonably enjoyable time, with good food and good drinks and a moderately interesting conversation. As a bonus, at least if I’m in LA or New York, I hope that someone will recognize me and that I will impress them with my dazzling looks or sparkling wit, which could always lead to something, you never know. At
best
I hope for a spark of attraction that will lead to a little fling. Really, I don’t even waste much time looking for the spark; I’m just glad when it happens.

So I’m not expecting a hell of a lot from my writer date, William. I like that he’s not a goddamned actor, and I like that I met him at the grocery store in front of the asparagus.

If my life were a romantic comedy, which it most definitely isn’t, you would now be expecting that William will, in fact, turn out to be my soul mate, after the obligatory rocky start. But my life sure as hell isn’t a rom-com, so it would be a mistake to get your hopes up.

As for meeting William in the produce section, there’s an explanation, and it has nothing to do with an impromptu, heartwarming debate between strangers over the merits of, I don’t know, ugli fruit or something. What happened was that I was sort of half-consciously exercising my powers—like flexing a muscle, only what I was doing was sweeping my eyelashes upward, casting my eyes sideways at the stranger inspecting the white asparagus while I checked out the green. You can like me less for this if you want. But power is power; we all use what we’ve got. Or if we don’t, we should. I don’t know what beauty is—I mean I don’t know how to define it—but I know that it’s power. I’ve known for as long as I can remember that something about my face can not only get attention but hold it. It can arouse curiosity, desire, half-dead dreams. I actually think my knowledge of this has nothing to do with vanity. It’s just the truth: the thing we call beauty is power. Sometimes it flashes out without warning, but you can also learn to control it. It’s like having a special ability, like telekinesis or something; when you first develop it, you accidentally fling shit all over the place, breaking things and hurting people whenever you’re the slightest bit riled up—and then gradually you learn to manage it, direct it at specific objects. You know what I mean. You see this process in movies from
Carrie
to
Firestarter
(thank you, Stephen King) to, I don’t know,
X-Men.
Or
Star Wars
, I guess: beauty is like the force. Which also means that, like any halfway decent special power, you can use it for good or for evil. (And when you’re young, of course, it’s hard to know the difference. Hence: collateral damage.)

I recently read an interview with a model in a magazine. I won’t say who, but you would know her. She said that she had never done anything she wasn’t proud of.
Ever
. Nothing even remotely morally sketchy or ambiguous. She had her standards, and she stuck to them. This would be a pretty huge claim for anyone to make, but for one of the most beautiful women in the world, it was shocking. Could it possibly be true? She was “discovered,” as they always say, when she was fourteen. Fourteen, then, would be the age when she learned that she could stop people dead in their tracks, drive men mad with the slightest flicker of her almond eyes.

What fourteen-year-old girl wouldn’t try these tricks once or twice, just to see?

A saint, that’s who.
Please
.

Anyway … although I’ve always thought telekinesis would be nice, what I got instead was my face. Not a supermodel face, but a good-enough face, attached to a good-enough body. Last week I flexed it in the grocery store and ended up with a date. Worse things have happened.

Lois

By the time we hit spring break, Sean has scraped through his British Novel midterm with a respectable C
+
, while continuing to torment me with old headlines: “Spelling Bee Champ Disappears.” “No New Clues in Search for Local Honors Student.” “Disappearance Remains Mystery; Parents Cling to Hope.” If spring break delivers nothing more than a vacation from Sean, I’ll be happy. Aside from the clippings, he’s left me alone recently, but his very quietness is worrisome. What is he waiting for? Why haunt me with my own past? I can’t imagine what he wants. I’ve considered calling his bluff, going public with my history—and why not? I have nothing to be ashamed of—but increasingly I feel as if disclosure is the least of his concerns.

I add the clippings to a folder that I keep in the same drawer as my growing
Carly/Chloe
file, though I’m not sure what I am saving them for.

Meanwhile, Brad and I have watched every movie in which Chloe Savage has ever appeared, however fleetingly; I finally told him she was a girl I had met at summer camp, to account for my apparent obsession. He has developed—or perhaps cultivated—a mild crush on her, which is actually convenient. I have an uneasy sense that he would like me to be jealous. I am not.

My sequel, meanwhile, has ground to a halt. It’s not writer’s block. My character—the kidnapper’s son—has gone silent. I can’t hear his thoughts, if he has any; I can’t hear his conversations, spare as I imagine they are. I can’t get him to do anything more interesting than drive his pickup down to the tavern for a beer or go out back to chop wood. As a result, he does these things too frequently. I craft lovely descriptions of the bleak snowy landscape in which he is stranded, and begin to wonder what kind of novel I am actually writing. But the kidnapper’s son remains obscure to me. Gary, I am calling him. Gary will not act; he refuses to be diabolical.

Well, surprise, surprise, I hear someone mocking. It’s called
fiction
, Lucy Ledger. Unlike thinly disguised autobiography, you actually have to
make it up
. Blame Gary if you like, but keep in mind—
Gary isn’t real
.

*   *   *

The snow is melting. Streams of muddy brown runoff rush along streets, sidewalks, any groove they can carve, sparkling in the still-chilly sun. The students have gone home for the week, or they’ve flown off to Cancun or other sites of tropical debauchery; they’ll return with peeling tans and faux-ethnic braids in their hair and monumental hangovers, tired of school and ready for summer. Brad and I stroll around town in the mud; it’s nice to be outside after the long winter. We play pool (without running into Sean or even Delia); we have cheap dinners at Nicolletti’s; we watch movies. The rest of the department thinks we are—well, a couple, obviously. They don’t come out and say it; they are too polite. But I see them thinking it. Combating this mistaken impression seems like more trouble than it’s worth.