Beautiful You (13 page)

None too soon, the network cut to a commercial.

Instantly, the panting woman lying on her back, shoving her bare pubis at an audience of millions, was replaced by a new bevy of giggling twenty-somethings brandishing bright pink shopping bags.

Everyone at BB&B was talking about it. Alouette D’Ambrosia was dead. According to the front page of the
Post
, she’d suffered a brain aneurysm onstage and died before an ambulance had arrived.

The rumor was that after the broadcast had cut away to an emergency break, the cameras had kept rolling. In front of that vast audience of industry swells, Alouette had acted like an animal in heat, going so far as to violently abuse herself with the gold-plated statuette. Penny couldn’t believe that. Or she didn’t want to. The extra footage was reportedly on the Web, but she couldn’t bring herself to view it. If anything, the shocking episode only reinforced her impression that Alouette had been seriously mentally ill. It was a sad idea, but she’d likely relapsed into abusing drugs and alcohol.

Whatever the case, it was tragic. In more ways than one. Brillstein had hoped to make Penny an associate. He’d planned to appoint her as lead counsel to represent the plaintiff in the palimony lawsuit filed on behalf of their client, Alouette. It would’ve looked great: the defendant’s most recent lover championing his jilted lover on the witness stand. Such a strategy would’ve made Alouette look injured and deserving. BB&B would’ve won the case, but not before the firm had oodles of billable hours to their credit. With the actress dead, her lawsuit was dead. BB&B would have to find a new rainmaker, and Brillstein would need to find a new shop window in which to showcase Penny’s lawyering talents.

Brillstein wasn’t the only person watching out for her at BB&B. Tad was back in the picture. Tad Smith, who’d always called her “Hillbilly.” He was the young fresh-faced patent law specialist whose private man-parts Monique referred to as “the tadpole.” After Penny’s Beautiful You transformation in Paris, Tad hardly seemed to recognize her. Now a boldly beautiful eyeful, utterly unashamed to be seen by all, she was no longer anyone’s fat, stinky dog. If he still had a hankering for Monique, he never asked about her. Instead, he invited Penny to lunch.

He escorted her to La Grenouille and regaled her with anecdotes about his days editing the
Yale Law Review
. After lunch
they’d hired a carriage and ridden through the park. He bought her a handful of helium balloons from a street vendor, a simple romantic gesture that Maxwell—despite all his brainpower—would never think to do.

Tad didn’t even tease her about being “the Nerd’s Cinderella.” The
New York Post
had long since moved on to other stories. Alouette’s death, for instance. A forest fire in Florida. The queen of England had collapsed in convulsions during a meeting to negotiate duties on consumer goods manufactured in China. As their carriage clip-clopped down Fifth Avenue, Penny tried to ignore the pink-mirrored building that loomed ahead at Fifty-seventh Street. A line of shoppers waited to enter. The line trailed into the distance as far as she could see.

“Look,” Tad said. “Is that Monique?”

Penny followed his gaze to a girl cooling her heels on the sidewalk, her arms folded across her chest. All of the people waiting in line were women. In the carriage seat she slumped her shoulders and slid down. She cringed with disappointment and resignation, pulling the balloons low to hide herself.

Tad shouted, “Mo!” He waved until the girl’s eyes found them.

“Can you believe this?” Monique yelled. “This is worse than when I bought my BlackBerry!” The midday sun sparkled on her rhinestone-studded fingernails and the bright tribal beads braided into her hair.

Tad asked the driver to halt at the curb.

As before, Penny felt ignored, relegated to being her glitzy friend’s stinky mutt. She looked up, pretending to only now notice her housemate. She knew Monique had a list of Beautiful You products that she was anxious to cart home and try. The online buzz posted by early adopters was positive. Beyond positive—it was raves. Despite the fact that a huge inventory had been stockpiled before the launch, the offshore factories
were having trouble keeping up with orders. The praise spread like wildfire. Media wags speculated that so many women were calling in “sick” and staying home to indulge themselves that the gross national output would take a short-term dip.

Penny resented how male newscasters treated the story like a dirty joke, reporting it with winks and an implied “hubba hubba” in every pause.

“Save yourself the money,” Tad shouted to Monique. “Jerald in copyright law has a crush on you.” The horse shifted, restless. A taxi behind them honked.

“Haven’t you heard?” Monique shouted in response. “Men are obsolete!”

The declaration drew a small cheer from the assembled women.

Monique played to the crowd. “Anything a man can do to me, I can do better!” She snapped her fingers dismissively, making the crystals glued to each nail flash in the sunlight.

This evoked a louder cheer. Jeers and whistles sounded in her support.

The taxi honked again. The line of shoppers began to move.

“Can a sex toy buy you dinner?” challenged Tad, clearly flirting.

“I can buy my own dinner!” With another step, Monique and the women nearest her were swallowed up by the big pink store.

As if she needed proof that she was back in wild-and-woolly New York City, Penny was attacked her first month there. Standing on an otherwise deserted subway platform, she was headed uptown after a late night at work. She was idly musing whether to order Thai food or pizza when two arms grabbed her from behind. They crushed the breath from her, squeezing at
her chest and throat, and her vision pinholed to a narrow awareness of the fluorescent lights overhead.

She was on her back, her Donna Karan slacks stomped down around her Jimmy Choos. Later, what she’d remember most about her attacker was his stench of stale urine and peach wine coolers. What she’d never understand was how quickly it had happened. One moment she’d been deciding on lemongrass chicken, and in the next she’d felt the stranger’s erection ramming to enter her.

Maxwell flashed into her mind. Not that the attacker was either curious or clinical, but how the assault was so impersonal.

Even as Penny felt herself yielding, felt the angry hardness rip into her, she also heard the man scream.

Faster than he had fallen on her, he jumped to his feet, his hands cradling the filthy penis that hung from the open front of his ragged trousers. He kept on yelping, tears streaming from his eyes as he looked down and examined himself.

Her first impression was that the man’s fly zipper had snagged some tender fold of skin. Before she could rally her strength to scream or run away, she saw a large bead of blood swell from a puncture wound in the glans of his penis.

The stranger’s attention shifted from his bleeding self, his eyes rising to glare at her. His voice timorous, he whined, “What have you got in your snatch, lady? A Bengal tiger?”

Penny watched as the drop of blood grew to a steady stream. She edged backward, sliding herself away from where the blood dribbled to form a growing pool on the subway platform. She saw that he’d been wearing a condom, and the latex of it had also been torn.

In another beat, a train arrived, and the man was gone. That was all she could tell the policeman who responded to her 911 call.

The doctor she’d gone to for the necessary STD tests said
she showed no signs of infection but insisted she come back for further tests in six weeks. The doctor, a sympathetic older woman with frizzy, graying red hair, insisted on giving her a pelvic exam and swabbing for DNA evidence. While she told Penny to place her feet in the stirrups of the examining room table, the woman donned a pair of latex gloves. She said to exhale while she inserted a speculum.

While the doctor clicked a penlight and began her careful inspection, Penny asked for a pelvic X-ray.

“That’s usually not necessary,” the doctor assured her.

“Please,” Penny insisted. A wave of dread was fueling her request.

“What are you worried about?” asked the doctor, still squinting through the speculum, rotating the beam of the penlight.

Penny explained about the man’s lanced penis. The hole torn in his condom.

“Well, there’s nothing here that might account for a puncture wound,” said the doctor. “Your first impression was probably correct: He got it caught in his trouser fly.” She began to slowly withdraw the speculum. “Serves the bastard right.”

They ordered the X-ray.

The X-ray came back showing nothing.

Penny told herself it was nothing. Probably just the sharp metal teeth of the man’s own zipper. It was only after that fact that Penny realized the worst part. Her guardian angels, in their tailored suits and mirrored sunglasses … for the first time in her life, they hadn’t come to her rescue.

At work, Penny was cramming like crazy to pass the bar. Brillstein was still searching for the perfect class-action case for her to helm, but that wouldn’t happen unless she was an attorney.
Until then, she still had to juggle the occasional coffee run and wrangle extra chairs for big meetings.

It didn’t help that Monique kept calling in sick. Since the day she’d lugged home two bright pink shopping bags, the girl had been barricaded behind her locked bedroom door. From what Penny could tell, she didn’t even emerge to eat. Day and night, a faint buzzing came from behind the door. When Penny knocked the buzzing stopped.

“Mo?” Penny waited. The buzzing was all too familiar. She knocked again.

“Go away, Omaha girl.”

“Brillstein asked about you today.”

“Go away.” The buzzing restarted.

Penny went away.

Around Wednesday, Monique stumbled into the kitchen, squinting against the sunlight as if she’d been trapped for months in a collapsed coal mine. Fumbling in the fridge for a carton of milk, she grumbled. “Damn cheap piece of junk.” She drank from the carton. Gasping before another swig, she added, “I can’t wait to buy a replacement.”

Penny looked up from the textbook she was highlighting. “It broke?”

“I guess,” Monique said. “At least, the wings came off.”

Penny stiffened. She was sitting, the breakfast table in front of her covered with books and legal pads. “Was it the dragonfly?”

Guzzling milk, Monique grunted in the affirmative. All the bright Austrian crystals had been chipped off of her fingernails. Her braids were kinked and tangled in disarray.

Warily, Penny asked, “Did it split down the middle?”

Monique nodded. “I was asleep.”

Penny made a note to talk to Brillstein. This might be just the high-profile case she needed. With the land-office way Beautiful You was selling, if even a small percentage of the products
were defective it might warrant a recall. If she could prove real damages and assemble a pool of plaintiffs, women from around the world who’d been hurt in any way by the shattered dragonflies, she might have an enormous class-action lawsuit. The idea wasn’t without precedent; it seemed that every time a new tampon or form of birth control came to market women died. Toxic shock. Ruptures of the vaginal wall. Men engineered these innovations, but it was always women who paid the price.

Alouette, for example. She’d been among Maxwell’s stable of lab rats. What was to say her embolism wasn’t the long-term result of some stimulant-infused silicone coating? It wasn’t impossible that the queen of England and the president of the United States might be compelled to testify. Penny could see herself as another bold Erin Brockovich. This was a case that would make her career.

Sure, Maxwell would be furious. He might cut off the payouts from her trust fund, but the income and prestige from winning a huge settlement might yield more than that loss.

Highlighting passages in a text about patent law, Penny said, “I was afraid you’d died in your bed.”

“Only about three thousand times,” Monique quipped.

“Have you used the douche?” asked Penny.

Monique was peeling the top off a cup of yogurt and stirring it with a spoon.

“When you do,” Penny continued, “read the directions. Make sure you use imported champagne, not domestic sparkling wine. Definitely do not use brut. And the temperature must be between forty and fifty degrees Fahrenheit.” She wondered whether this was how Max had felt when he was coaching her.

Jotting a citation in the margin of a page, she felt like Maxwell. Without meeting Monique’s curious gaze she said, “When you use product number thirty-nine, start with the oscillations
at fifteen bpm and slowly dial them up to forty-five bpm. After that, you’ll maintain the best effects by alternating between twenty-seven-point-five and thirty-five-point-five.”

Monique was impressed. She’d yet to eat a spoonful. She kicked a chair back from the table and lowered herself into the seat. “What’s product number …?”

Penny completed the sentence. “The Happy Honey Ball.” She asked, “Do you know where your urethral sponge is?”

“In the bathroom?” Monique ventured. “On the shelf next to the tub?”

Penny gave her a wilting glance. “Did you buy a pair of those awful Peruvian married stones?”

“Of what?”

“Good,” Penny confirmed, remembering the miserable scene where Alouette had come to her rescue in the restaurant. “Don’t.”

Monique set her yogurt on the table, careful not to cover any of Penny’s study materials. “You sound as if you designed this stuff.”

Penny thought, but didn’t say,
I sort of did invent them
. Her resentment toward her housemate dwindled. Life was too short. A few days of physical indulgence wouldn’t kill Monique. It was pleasure without affection; she’d recognize that and outgrow it. “Listen up,” Penny said. “When you use the Daisy Love Wand, keep in mind the coefficient of friction and only use it with the Glassy Glide Cream.”

The expression on Monique’s face was one of complete bewilderment. “This shit,” she marveled, “is going to change the fabric of society.”

Tearing a blank page from her legal pad, Penny went to work with a pen. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m writing this all down.”