The Good Life (5 page)

“Pat Weiler,” the host mused. “Wife, mother, activist.” On the screen at the side of the stage, a video clip showed Pat standing with an unhappy smile in a dressing room, her long hair straggling over her shoulders and her hands hidden in her jumper pockets. She kept them there as she turned around, and Frederick noted for the first time how the soft fabric bagged across the seat and how her flat sandals made her ankles look stumpy. She had worn that jumper, or one just like it, for years.

“Meet the new Pat Weiler: Style Queen!” cried the host. Music surged, and from the far side of the stage Pat burst out, nearly running. Later people would ask Frederick whether he had recognized her, and he would be insulted. A haircut and a new dress couldn't conceal the woman with whom he had built his life. Still, she tore at his heart. Her hair trailed in feathers over her ears and down her neck, and her face's sweet softness was lost. She was wearing a sea-green evening gown whose sequins caught the light, and beneath it he glimpsed green sandals with heels so high that her ankles wobbled while the audience wolf-whistled. Frederick's eyes flooded again and he stared at the floor to compose himself. When he looked up, he was the only person in the room still seated.

“What do you think?” the host cried over the commotion. “Are these our biggest makeovers ever?”

Pat had almost made her way to Frederick, her step light. As members of the audience shouted their approval, she twirled. The skirt flared up her calves, and he was jolted by her legs' unnatural color—shaved, he realized. When she reached him, he finally stood and took her hand. Her smile was more than a smile; for the first time he understood what it meant for a person to look radiant. He could hardly keep his eyes on her. “You look like a princess,” he said. His voice was high and strained.

“Style Queen,” she said. “But you!”

Before he could ask her what about him, the host was at their elbows, making both of them turn around again for the cacophonous audience. “Who knew?” he said. “Who could have foreseen these beautiful people?”

He turned to Pat. “What are you going to do with that jumper when you get home?”

“Burn it,” she said.

“And your new hair and face? Do you think you can keep this up on your own?”

“Or die trying.” She gestured at the huge “before” picture on the screen. “I think it's time to retire her.”

“You're talking about the woman I love,” Frederick said, and the host cuffed him on the shoulder. “What about this guy?” the host said to Pat. “Did you ever think you'd see him looking so fine?”

“Never,” she said, setting off another roar from the audience. Frederick tried to exchange a glance with her—a promise, an affirmation—but her bright eyes slid away, she twirled again, and he was left trying to straighten his idiotic French cuffs.

“We have a present for you,” the host was saying to Pat, who said that she needed nothing more. “You already know that we're sending you and Frederick out on the town tonight, to show off your new looks. But we want to send you home with a memento.” Frederick's black-clad handler strode from the wings with a plastic bag for Pat, who pulled out something lank and grayish that looked like a dead cat.

The audience howled, and the host cried, “We were going to give you his beard, too, but we didn't think it would fit in your suitcase,” setting off another roar from the crowd. Pat, too, was shaking with laughter, dabbing at her green-lidded eyes and wagging the ponytail in the air. “Look,” she said to Frederick. “There's twenty years.”

Twenty-two. With a little cry, he bent over against his constricting vest, pressed his manicured hands to his smooth face, and burst into tears.

 

That night at the restaurant, where the network limousine had taken them from their hotel, Frederick's emotions had dried up. Bathed in creamy light, he listened to the muted string quartet and the murmur of the French sommelier moving from table to table—wealthy sounds, paid for by the show. He hoped that the show would also pick up the tab for Pat's long phone call from the hotel to the girls, in which she had detailed every stroke of the cosmetician's brush. He had lain on the bed, cold along the chin, and listened for some reference to his tears, but Pat spent most of the time telling them about her hair stylist, a navy man.

“They're very excited,” Pat told Frederick now. She sucked at a white Russian. Laura and Bett had told her to order it. “They wanted to make sure that we'd gotten directions for all of the makeup and hair drying. They're afraid that we're going to come home tomorrow just the same, as if none of this ever happened.”

“It'll take a while to grow that hair back.”

“They love that I got to keep your ponytail. They all want some of it to braid and wear as bracelets.”

“I was thinking about giving it a proper burial.”

“We could burn it, along with my jumper. A purification ritual.”

“Not bad,” he said. “We could smear the ashes on our faces.”

“And ruin my makeup? No way.” Her laugh was a trill, and she ducked her head girlishly as she sipped her sweet drink. He had made her happy, as he had meant to do. Surely couples owed each other happiness. He looked at his own drink, a double scotch, more liquor than he usually drank at a sitting. So now did their lives stop, resting on the platform of her happiness?

He said, “If we're going to hold a ritual, we'll have to check the calendar for an opening. It's already time to start thinking about the recycling initiative. The new waste-removal contract is coming up before city council.” He saw her drop her eyes, and he softened his voice. “In Rock Hill they missed the deadline, remember? They went three months without curbside pickup. I hate to think of the waste.”

“I don't think that will happen to us,” she said.

“Constant vigilance,” he said, their old battle cry.

“The girls are keeping up the fight in our absence. I have reason to believe that they are spending tonight putting a faux finish on our recycling bins.”

“You want me to be charmed by that, don't you?”

“That would be nice.”

The sight of his own groomed hand and buffed nails unnerved him, although at least he'd changed into a shirt with button cuffs. Pat had insisted on visiting the hotel's boutique, and he had taken the opportunity to buy another shirt. “I don't want to fight,” he said.

“Remember what Jack Carey said? We're supposed to have fun.”

“Who's Jack Carey?”

The smile died on Pat's mouth. “He's the host of
The Jack Carey Show
, Frederick. It's a television program. You were on it.”

“I'm sorry. I never caught his name.”

“It was all over the set. And people said it about a hundred times.”

“You know I'm not good at names.” He nudged his glass, noting the damp impression it left on the thick tablecloth.

“And I shouldn't ask you to change, should I? I shouldn't ask you to be what you're not,” she said. He knew this voice. She had used it when Laura, age eight, came home in tears after throwing a rock at her best friend.

He said, “What do you plan to do now? If we have to picket about waste removal, are you going to walk in high heels?”

“I think so, yes. I like them. If I make the 6:00 news, we can keep the videotape with the one of you talking to city council.”

No, they couldn't. One of the girls had taped a cartoon show over the old tape of Frederick's speech, a fact he had uncovered one afternoon when he was alone in the house. Still, he remembered how he had looked on TV, as if a prophet had come before the clean-shaven council members in their dark suits. He closed his eyes against the sharp tears.

“What do you want me to say?” Pat said.

“‘Honey, are you all right?' ‘Frederick, is there anything I can do?'”

“I'm sorry,” she said. He lifted his stinging eyes to see her, blurry and green. “I truly am.”

“If I knew you were crying, I would have done something.” He absolutely should not have gone on to the next sentence. “I wouldn't have let you cry on TV.”

“What are you talking about?”

In his shock, Frederick had plenty of time to watch the young waiter hastening to their table. His broad, welcoming smile had been installed all the way across the dining room.

“You know that your charges here have all been taken care of by the network,” the waiter said as soon as he was tableside. “If I were you, I'd keep the champagne coming. You look like movie stars. I'll bet you spent the last two hours in front of a mirror.”

Maybe he misinterpreted their silence. He lowered his voice to the level of a confidence. “The show sends most of its makeovers here. Sometimes the people look like they're wearing costumes. You can tell that they just let the crew on the show do things to them. The important thing is to let people's true selves shine out.” His smile blazed. Pat looked stunned. To Frederick he said, “You were the most honest thing I've ever seen on television.”

Frederick said, “There was a close-up, wasn't there?”

“You looked good.”

“That wasn't exactly what I was asking.”

“I said, ‘There is a man who knows his truest self.' No one who saw that show will ever forget you.”

“Thank you,” Frederick said unsteadily.

Pat's voice, speaking to the waiter, was suddenly tart; her white Russian must have already dived into her bloodstream. “Haven't you ever seen this show? Tomorrow somebody will get his hair dyed red and his wife will get a miniskirt, and everybody will clap again, and nobody will remember that Frederick's beard took up most of a trash bag once it was off his face.”

“They'll remember the ponytail,” said the waiter.

Pat shook her head. “Did you see the show when Jack Carey gave a guy's overalls a funeral? Another time he weighed all the makeup a woman wore every day to work.”

“Three ounces, with the eyelashes,” the waiter said.

“A ponytail is nothing,” she said.

“Hang on,” Frederick said, and cleared his throat. The tremble was back. “Everybody's been telling me all day that I was being made into a new man. I thought that was the point. The gal who cut my hair kept saying that you'd never know me.”

“Frederick, no one would ever be able to miss you.” She nodded at the waiter. “Just ask him. You're the most unchanging thing he's ever seen on television.”

“That's not what I said,” the waiter protested.

Frederick said, “Are you saying that I can't be different? No matter what?”

Perhaps because of the lipstick, Pat's smile looked strange—saucy, appraising. “Prove it,” she said.

“I know how to make a good thing last a long time,” he said.

“Same guy.”

“I appreciate what I've got.”

“Same, same, same.”

What was going on today with his shirt cuffs? Now they were twisted around his wrists like shackles. “I'm trying to give you what you want. You're not making it easy.”

“Good.”

The waiter brushed his fingers over the tablecloth and made a sizzling noise. “If you two had talked like this on the show, they would have had to bleep you out.”

Pat raised her slim new eyebrows suggestively. “This is the part of the show that doesn't get advertised, where the couple starts fresh. They decide whether they want to get started with each other.”

“And?” said the waiter.

“Negotiations are under way,” said Pat.

“The worst is over,” said Frederick. He waited, but neither Pat nor the waiter agreed.

 

On the ride back to the hotel Frederick and Pat's silence was rich. The limousine driver turned off his radio, and the doorman at the curb stepped back, swallowing his “Good evening” before it left his mouth. The Weilers ascended the elevator in silence and entered their room in silence. Perhaps Pat was happy. Perhaps even Frederick was. It seemed unlikely, but he was a little drunk and wasn't going to exclude any possibilities.

Though the night was sweltering—pure Chicago August, with the smell and feel of rubber—Frederick sat out on the balcony while Pat took off her evening gown. He liked the cling of the humid night air, which erased the lingering aroma of emollients and hair spray. From nearby a car alarm started up, and somewhere behind it the El clanked past. Frederick hadn't sat outside in a city for years, and the mechanical shrieking and sighing were oddly satisfying. He had an urge to get even closer to it—to go back down to the streets, into a bar. Into a bar fight. He wanted to rub his smooth new face against gritty surfaces.

Three feet in front of him, the edge of the balcony was faced with cheap, rough stone. Frederick had read once that jumpers in cities often suffered massive abrasions on their way down. If the impact didn't kill them, the loss of skin would. No one knew whether they simply hit the building or were trying to reach out and cling. Frederick stood up and ran his hand along the outside of the balcony, brushing the rough surface until his palm stung. Then he slung his jacket over his shoulder and slipped back into the cool room.

Sitting on the bed like a dollop of froth, Pat watched television. She had bought a filmy green peignoir at the boutique, and her pale shoulders bloomed from the green flounces. She still wore her makeup.

Frederick whistled, then made his voice soft. “Come here often?”

“Maybe. Looking for a sharp-dressed man.”

“Be smart. Clothes are just the start.” He opened the honor bar and pulled out a finger-size bottle of VSOP. She made room for him on the bed, but not much. He had to sit close.

Either the show had included perfume in her makeover, or one of the lotions smelled like pine and honeysuckle, traced in a line behind her ear. The smell deepened as he moved his mouth down her throat and licked the tiny cup at its base. He opened the cognac, dabbed it across her breastbone, and started to lick it off.