The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty (31 page)

Georgia knows her article is powerful, but she didn’t expect fashion magazine editors to be so stunned by Lily’s tragic story as to discuss it among themselves and decide to turn Lily’s ugliness into the new beauty.

These editors are smart, realistic women and men. They know that radically redefining modern beauty is not going to happen overnight.

But they’re wrong.

It does.

Virtually.

Here’s what happens. First, Georgia’s article stirs up a vigorous debate in the media about beauty. Two days after her article appears, Ellen DeGeneres announces she is going to devote a show to the topic of the unfortunate importance of physical beauty in our world. She invites the editors-in-chief of the top four monthly fashion magazines, as well as the head of
Women’s Wear Daily
. She wants them to defend themselves on her show after they’ve read the
Times
article—not an easy task, she predicts.

Far from defending themselves, the magazine editors agree with Ellen. This makes for a surprising show. One of them, the editor-in-chief of
Elle
magazine, confesses she’s been made sick by Georgia’s article. She says she wishes she could do something about it.

The show ends with a plea from Ellen for Lily to come back, wherever she is. Everyone is distraught over her disappearance.

The next day,
Women’s Wear Daily
introduces the new ideal face: Lily’s face. They cover the story incessantly, with front-page updates and news about models who are being discovered all over the world and signed before they even create a portfolio.

The monthly beauty magazines redo their cover shots and cover stories; they whip up new feature articles based on the new beauty; and they quickly reshoot, in studio, either twelve, twenty-four or—in
Elle
’s case—forty-eight pages, out of sixty fashion pages, for their next issues, using models who are ugly in ways that resemble Lily as much as possible.

It’s a holistic, industry-wide embrace, a coordinated effort. Even nightly newscasters offer regular updates, particularly Peter Marrick.

We’re sad that Lily is not alive to enjoy her new beauty.

Several top fashion designers in London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo announce that they, too, are supporting this new beauty ideal and replacing all the models in their upcoming runway shows.

Not everyone’s reasons for joining the trend are noble. A few are mercenary.

Three high-ranking plastic surgeons report that there’s been a dramatic decrease in business. They say women are having second thoughts about getting rid of flaws that are now highly prized. When the three surgeons are asked if they are disappointed in this turn in fashion, two of them—possibly insincerely—say no. The third one, however, says yes he is disappointed but expects that women will start booking appointments to get flaws (now considered “improvements”) incorporated into their faces and bodies. He adds, “As long as women are dissatisfied with how they look, I’m satisfied. I don’t care what form their dissatisfaction takes, provided it requires me to fix it.”

This comment fans the flames, causing more articles to come out condemning the fact that the basic underpinning of the fashion, beauty, and cosmetics industries is women’s dissatisfaction with themselves. I think that people getting this glimpse into the dark side of beauty has enabled them to see pulchritude for what it is: something as disgusting as it sounds—putrefaction; rot; another one of life’s necessary lunacies.

Of course, not everyone hears about the new beauty, especially people who don’t keep up with fashion. That’s why I still get catcalls and come-ons from non-metrosexual men who are behind the times. I’m allergic to them, but I have to be patient, take it one day at a time.

No longer ladylike or meticulously groomed, Penelope lives in sweat clothes and her hair is disheveled. She used to be the only one among us to wear makeup on a regular basis, and even though I think she’s much more attractive without it, we all know its absence is a bad sign about her mental state.

She’s been rebuilding Lily for weeks with little progress, yet she’s showing no signs of letting up. Quite the opposite. Her focus is sharpening and her determination is acquiring a certain savagery.

Not once since Lily broke has Penelope met us anywhere other than at her apartment, and her reluctance to let us visit increases each week. And she’s cranky, which I know is understandable given that as soon as she makes any progress, Lily falls apart again.

In her desperate desire to bring Lily back to life, Penelope at first tries to rebuild her in the exact position she died in—standing up—but she quickly realizes it’s impossible. So she tries rebuilding her friend lying down. Penelope believes that horizontally the task will no longer be impossible—merely horrendously difficult.

Even though Penelope does start making some progress, Lily still keeps collapsing. But Penelope continues working on Lily with as much passion and single-mindedness as Lily did when working on her musical pieces. Day after day, with infinite delicacy, Penelope balances Lily’s pieces on top of one another. No matter how careful she is, however, there always comes a time when she is not careful enough, when her hand shakes a little too much, when the mere fact of being human makes it impossible for her to place every single fragment with the exact degree of gentleness necessary at the precise angle required. She’s killing herself trying to attain perfection in all her gestures.

And we don’t stop her.

We don’t have the energy.

Lily’s death has left us weak and despondent.

Plus, we know it would be useless to try to stop her. Penelope would continue. And the truth is, we want her to continue because even though our minds know that her enterprise is hopeless, our hearts can’t stop hoping—stupidly and relentlessly.

Jack is the last one to see Penelope.

That was three days ago. He said she looked bad—haggard and pale—and that she’d lost weight. In the middle of her living room floor was Lily, close to being fully recomposed. But the same problem kept happening. Each time she was almost back together, she’d crumble.

Jack was upset to discover that there was no food in Penelope’s fridge or cabinets. He bought her groceries and made her promise to eat.

His account was so disturbing that each of us made concerted efforts to see her after that. But we failed; she was no longer receiving visitors, saying she needed to work on Lily without distractions.

Thankfully, we don’t have to endure the situation much longer. Everything changes dramatically one evening when Jack’s phone rings while we’re gathered at my place, brooding over Lily’s recomposition and Penelope’s decomposition.

Peter is not with us. As my cuts have been fading, so has his presence from my life. I still see him once or twice a week, but I sense his visits will grow farther apart. He’s been withdrawing because he feels that nothing has changed between us, that I’m still blocked, that we have no future beyond a friendship. And I can’t say I disagree. Lily’s ugliness as a new beauty trend has in no way touched the core of the beauty worship problem. Just because beauty’s been redefined doesn’t mean it has lost its importance. And I’m resigned to being stuck for as long as beauty rules—which I expect to be forever.

This night, Jack almost doesn’t pick up his ringing phone. At the last minute he checks the caller ID. “It’s Penelope,” he says, and eagerly answers it.

He listens for a few seconds and then snaps the phone shut.

“What did she say?” Georgia asks.

“It was her number, but it wasn’t Penelope,” he answers, in shock. “It was Lily. She said ‘Help us.’ And then the line went dead.”

We rush to the elevator, out the building, hop in a cab, and reach Penelope’s apartment in under ten minutes.

It takes us another ten minutes to persuade the doorman and the super to open Penelope’s door with the spare key they have.

We find Penelope and Lily unconscious on the living room floor. We call 911, and while we wait for the ambulance to arrive, we’re able to find a pulse on each of our friends. We can’t believe Lily is alive again, and not only alive but not reflective.

The superintendent, who is hovering over us, seems perplexed as to why Penelope’s unconscious state terrifies us while Lily’s delights us.

The ambulance squad arrives within minutes and Lily regains consciousness on the way to the hospital but Penelope doesn’t. The doctors say she’s dehydrated and malnourished. Her vital signs are weak.

Much of the ecstasy we feel over Lily’s resurrection is dampened by our worry for Penelope.

NOW THAT WE’VE
got Lily back and that Penelope possibly sacrificed her life to reassemble her, I want to place Lily on a shelf with a big sign that reads: “Fragile. If you break her you will pay.”

When word gets out that Lily is back and alive, journalists start calling her incessantly, asking for interviews. She doesn’t give a single one, being in no mood to talk about herself when the friend who brought her back to life is in the hospital in a coma.

In an effort to distract her from her crushing feelings of guilt, we show Lily how much the world of fashion has changed during the past few weeks. We want her to see that, at least for now, she’s beautiful in this world. But Lily doesn’t care. She doesn’t care about the many fashion magazines that use models who resemble her. She doesn’t care that on the streets, many women who, until last month, would have been considered unattractive are now carrying themselves with more confidence and self-appreciation. She doesn’t care that her physical appearance is now desired.

And not only does she not care, she doesn’t believe it. She doesn’t feel beautiful. How can she, after years of being ignored, dismissed, avoided, insulted—insulted like she was by that man at the bar who ended up murdered. The damage to her self-esteem was far too great for her to feel beautiful now. As though all it would take would be for the whole world to find her beautiful.

Lily is swamped by adoring fans and by men who want to date her. But she’s not interested in men who see the beauty in her ugliness only now that everyone else does.

She is contacted by old schoolmates and acquaintances who never showed much interest in her before. Those are the worst. Extricating herself from having to meet up, catch up, or hook up is so awkward that she changes her phone number and becomes a recluse within a week of coming back to life. This, of course, only increases her mystique and feeds the frenzy.

She also hires a bodyguard (at our insistence), after Jack points out that she might be a tempting target for kidnappers, now that Georgia’s article has revealed the extent of Lily’s powers and her ability to beautify—and create a desire for—not only objects but people, and not only a desire for those objects and people who are present, but also for those who are not.

It doesn’t take long for her fans, acquaintances, and old schoolmates to start approaching me and Georgia and Jack to try to get to Lily. We tell them she doesn’t want to talk to anybody. There is one old schoolmate who is not only persistent but evasive—a particularly annoying combination. He says his name is Derek Pearce. He has contacted all three of us multiple times but won’t tell us why he wants to reach Lily beyond saying it’s important.

We give Lily everyone’s messages. She’s not in the mood to call back anyone, including Derek Pearce.

Lily’s only regular daily outing is to visit the hospital where Penelope is languishing on life support, and play for her on her portable synthesizer. She composes music that she hopes will awaken Penelope from her coma. In vain. She keeps lamenting that her skills are nowhere near capable of achieving such a feat. She can tell she’s not even close.

ONE RAINY AFTERNOON,
after eleven days in the hospital, Penelope comes out of her coma. According to Lily, it has nothing to do with her music because nothing she composed had that kind of power.

Penelope simply awakes on her own—as comatose patients sometimes do. We are euphoric and relieved.

Physically, she looks okay except for several purple patches on her arms, legs, and torso where the doctors have been injecting her twice a day with a blood thinner.

She’s released from the hospital the next day with instructions to get physical therapy three to five days a week until her strength returns.

MY MOM CALLS
and says, “You haven’t put your fat suit back on, have you?”

“Not yet,” I reply, to torture her.

“Seriously, Barb, please don’t wear your disguise to protect yourself from ending up like me. I know you think your father loved me for my beauty and had affairs when it faded. But it wasn’t as simple as that. I mean, yes he did become increasingly attracted to younger, more beautiful women as I aged, but that wasn’t our only problem. We also grew apart, we had different interests. In a lot of ways we simply weren’t compatible. I like not having to cater to a man anymore. And who knows, I may still meet another special man someday, but in the meantime I’m content, and often even happy—definitely happier than I was with your father at the end. I like my solitary life. I’m having a good time traveling. I have good friends. Don’t deny yourself happiness while you’re young. Ending up like me is not the worst thing that could happen to you.”

AFTER BEING TAKEN
care of by her mother for two days, Penelope is able to walk a little. Lily picks her up and brings her to my apartment so we can celebrate her recovery and—most importantly—thank her again for her phenomenal feat of bringing Lily back to life.

When Penelope walks through my door, I’m taken aback by how weak and sickly she still looks. We are the opposite. We’re exuberant, bouncing off the walls. We settle her on the couch, prop her up with pillows and blankets, and call her our hero, our miracle worker.

We shower her with attention, hugs, and gifts. Georgia models a long purple angora scarf she bought for her.

Our only sorrow is that Peter isn’t here to share our happiness.

In an effort to amuse us, Jack goes to the bookcase to demonstrate how attractive the bookends he just bought for Penelope will look with books between them. “Oh, God,” he says, laughing at something he sees tucked at the back of a high shelf. He grabs the object and faces us. He’s holding the ugly ceramic box Penelope gave me months ago to thank me for having lunch with her parents.