Beautiful You (4 page)

Moments before, when she’d first climbed into the cab, she’d called Omaha to spill the big news. When her mother’s voice had answered, Penny had asked, “Are you sitting down, Mom?”

“Arthur!” her mother had shouted away from the receiver. “Your daughter’s on the line.”

“I’ve got some pretty exciting news,” Penny had said, barely able to contain herself. She looked to see whether the driver was watching her. She wanted him to eavesdrop.

“So do I!” her mother had exclaimed.

There was a click, and her father’s voice had joined the conversation. “Your mother grew a tomato that’s the spitting image of Danny Thomas.”

“I’ll send you a picture,” her mother had promised. “It’s uncanny.”

Her father said, “What’s your big news, cupcake?”

Penny had hesitated for effect. When she’d spoken, she’d made sure her voice was loud enough for the cabbie to overhear. “I have a date with C. Linus Maxwell.”

Her parents hadn’t responded, not right away.

To save time, Penny’s dad drank his morning coffee while sitting on the toilet. Her mom dreamed of owning a waterbed. Every birthday they sent her a Bible with a twenty-dollar bill tucked inside. That was her parents in a nutshell.

Penny had prompted them, asking, “Do you know who Mr. Maxwell is?”

“Of course we do, sweetheart,” her mother had replied flatly. “Your father and I don’t live in Shippee anymore!”

Penny had waited for their shouts of joy. For their gasps of disbelief. For anything.

Finally, her father had said, “We love you no matter what, Pen-Pen. You don’t have to invent wild stories to impress us.” He was calling her a liar.

It was at that point the cab had gone under the river. The connection was broken. Her roommates hadn’t believed her either, but they’d fussed over her, helping with her eye shadow and lip liner as if they’d been bridesmaids. Tomorrow they’d all believe her. Normally she’d never take such pains with her appearance. She hadn’t primped just because Maxwell would see her. Tonight the whole world was watching. Penny would walk into that restaurant a complete nobody, but by the time dessert was served she’d be a household name. Even her hero, President Hind, would know Penny’s name.

Stalled in the traffic beside her, Penny noticed two men seated in a black sedan. Like the bodyguards who had escorted Alouette D’Ambrosia, both wore tailored, navy-blue suits and mirrored sunglasses. Their stern, chiseled features betrayed no emotion. Neither turned his head in Penny’s direction, but she knew from long experience that the pair of them were covertly watching her.

From her earliest memories, she’d been aware of similar strange men following her. Sometimes they’d trailed behind her in slowly moving cars or sat parked at the curb outside her grade school. Other times, they’d strolled purposefully in her wake, always at a discreet distance. There were always two, sometimes three men, each dressed in a plain dark suit and wearing mirrored sunglasses.
Their hair was clipped short and neatly combed. Their wingtip shoes were highly polished, even as they’d trailed her like two-legged bloodhounds across rain-wet Cornhusker football fields and the sandy beaches of Lake Manawa.

Many a winter afternoon as the twilight faded, these chaperones would shadow her steps over lonely farm fields, weaving between the dead, wind-blasted stalks of corn as she trudged home from school. One man might lift his lapel and whisper into a microphone pinned there. Another sentinel would raise his arm and appear to signal to a helicopter that was also tracking Penny’s every step. Sometimes a great slow-moving blimp would hover above her, day after day.

Ever since Penny could recall, these chaperones had haunted the edges of her life. Always in her peripheral vision. They were always in the background. Chances were excellent that tonight, they’d be among the diners at Chez Romaine, albeit seated at inferior tables, ever watchful.

She’d never felt in the least bit threatened. If anything, she felt coddled and safe. From her first inkling that she was being followed, Penny assumed the men were agents of Homeland Security. All Americans, she told herself, enjoyed this same brand of diligent supervision. So enamored was she of her bodyguards that she’d come to accept them as guardian angels. A role they’d fulfilled more than once.

One grim winter’s eve she’d been picking her way homeward through acres of rotting silage. The eventide sky was dark as a bruise. The chill air smelled heavy and ominous with decay. In a twinkling, a killer funnel cloud descended, churning the landscape into a dirty froth of fertile topsoil and airborne dairy cattle. Razor-sharp farm implements clattered around her on all sides. Fist-size chunks of hail pelted her young scalp.

Just as Penny thought she’d be killed, some force had knocked her facedown in the furrows and a gentle, insistent
weight pressed itself upon her body. The tornado spent its fury in a moment. The weight lifted, and she could recognize it as one of the anonymous watchers. His pin-striped suit soiled with mud, he removed himself from her backside and walked away without accepting a word of thanks. More than just a passive guardian, he had been a hero. This stranger had saved her life.

Years later, when Penny was in college, a beer-saturated Zeta Delt had dragged her down some stairs into a dirt-floored cellar. It was during a high-spirited Pledge Week mixer. In retrospect, she recognized that she might’ve promised the young man more than she was willing to deliver. Frustrated, he had thrown her to the ground and straddled her, a knee planted on either side of her struggling torso. His muscular hands began the savage task of shredding her brightly flowered afternoon frock. He fumbled with the zipper of his chinos, producing an angry red erection. Dire as this situation seemed, Penny remained a lucky girl.

Thank goodness for the agents of Homeland Security, Penny thought, as a gray flannel–suited stranger stepped from the shadows near the cellar walls. He delivered her attacker a violent karate chop to the windpipe. With the would-be rapist gasping, Penny had raced away to safety.

Even after she’d said good-bye to her home state, the guardian angels had kept tabs on her. In the Big Apple, she saw them, the neon lights glinting off their sunglasses as they watched over her from a discreet distance. At Bonwit Teller. Even at BB&B they wore their sunglasses indoors, and still they guarded her. As the agents of Homeland Security, she assumed, they guarded all Americans. All of the time.

While she’d been lost in thought, traffic had begun to thaw. Even now her cab was pulling to the curb in front of the Chez Romaine canopy. A valet stepped forward to open her door. Penny paid the cabbie and took a deep breath. She checked the time on her phone. Fifteen minutes late.

She did a last-second check of her dress and arms. No flies.

In the pages of the
National Enquirer
, Jennifer Lopez or Salma Hayek never walked a red carpet without an escort. Penny Harrigan had no choice. There was no sign of Climax-Well. A cadre of photographers was corralled behind a velvet rope, but they didn’t give her a second glance. None of them snapped her picture. No one with a microphone stepped up to say how nice she looked and ask about her dress. Another car arrived at the curb, the valet opened another door, and she had no choice except to proceed through the restaurant’s gilded entrance, alone.

In the foyer, she waited for the maître d’ to notice her. He did not. No one noticed her. Elegantly dressed men and women lingered, waiting for their cars to arrive or to be seated. The din of laughter and conversation made her feel even more invisible, if that was possible. Here, her dress was barely good enough. Her jewelry drew bemused stares. The same way she’d wanted to run from the haughty saleslady at Bonwit Teller, Penny again longed to turn and flee. She’d wrap the gorgeous red gown in its original tissue paper and take it back tomorrow. Men like Maxwell didn’t date girls like her.

Still, something nagged at her. She wished she’d never bragged about this date. Her roommates … her parents … even the taxi driver had thought she was a liar. She had to prove she wasn’t. Even if one gossip columnist saw her with Corny Maxwell or a shutterbug snapped their picture together, she’d be vindicated. This thought pushed her the length of the foyer, toward the door to the main dining room. There, a flight of carpeted
steps led downward. Whoever entered would draw every eye in the vast, crowded space.

Standing on the top step Penny felt as if she were on the edge of a high cliff. Ahead of her beckoned the future. Behind her, the rich and powerful were already bottlenecked, backing up like gridlocked traffic in the streets. Someone cleared his throat loudly. Below her, the room was packed. Every table was occupied. A mezzanine held even more watchful diners. Where Penny found herself, on the stairs, was like a stage, visible from every seat.

In the center of the room, one man sat alone. His blond hair caught the light from the chandelier. Open on his table was a small notebook, and he was studiously jotting notes in it with a silver pen.

A stranger’s breath touched Penny’s ear. An officious voice behind her whispered, “Pardon me. Young lady?” The speaker sniffed loudly.

Everyone in the restaurant was watching the lone man scribbling, but watching in that discreet New Yorker way: ogling him over the tops of their menus. Spying on his reflection in the silver blades of their butter knives.

More insistently, the officious voice at Penny’s shoulder whispered, “We must keep this space open.” He said, “I must ask you to step aside.”

Frozen, Penny willed the solitary diner to look up and see her. To see how pretty she looked. The crowd forming behind her grumbled, restless. She couldn’t move. The doorman, the parking valet, someone would have to lift her and carry her out like a sack of potatoes.

At last, the man writing in his notebook looked up. His eyes met Penny’s. Every head in the cavernous room turned to follow his gaze. The man stood, and the noise of so many people dwindled. As if a curtain were rising at the opera, every voice fell silent.

Without breaking eye contact, the man crossed to the bottom of the stairs and began to climb toward her. Still two steps down, he stopped and offered his hand. As she had once been below him on the office carpet, reaching up, now he was beneath her.

She reached out. His fingers felt as cold as she remembered.

Just as she’d seen in the
National Enquirer
, C. Linus Maxwell escorted her. Just as he’d escorted so many exquisite women. Down the remaining steps. Across the hushed room. He pulled out her chair and seated her. He took his own seat and closed his notebook. Only then did the voices that surrounded them begin to rise.

“Thank you for joining me,” he said. “You look lovely.”

And for once Penny actually believed she might.

In the next instant, his hand lashed out. As if to slap her face, he leaned forward, swinging his arm so fast it blurred. She winced.

When she opened her eyes, his fist filled her vision, huge, hanging there, his knuckles so close they almost touched the tip of her nose.

“I’m sorry if I scared you,” he said, “but I think I caught him.” Opening his fingers, Corny Maxwell showed her the crushed little corpse of a black housefly.

The next morning, Penny was standing outside the locked doors of Bonwit Teller for a half hour before they opened. She couldn’t afford even a day’s credit card interest on what the evening gown had cost. Even if this made her late for work, she had to return the dress right away.

The fairy tales never showed Cinderella getting up at dawn to return her gown and her shoes, terrified that some wary sales-clerk
would notice a flaw and refuse to credit her account with a full refund.

Despite the extraordinary food and wine, dinner had been less than magical. The stares had never let up. It was impossible to relax and have fun in a fishbowl. Maxwell wasn’t the problem. He’d been attentive, almost too attentive, hanging on her every word. Several times, he’d even opened his notebook and written a few words in a quick, spidery shorthand, as if he were taking dictation. It felt less like a romantic tryst than a pleasant job interview. He’d volunteered almost no information about himself, nothing she didn’t already know from gossip columns. In her nervousness, Penny had chattered without taking a breath. Desperate to fill any possible silence, she’d told him about her parents, Myrtle and Arthur, and their suburban life. She’d reminisced about the long hours in law school. She’d rambled on about the love of her life, her Scotch terrier, Dimples, and how he’d died the year previous.

Throughout her monologue, Maxwell had smiled calmly. Thank goodness the waiters had occasionally arrived, giving her a moment to shut up and catch her breath.

“If madam will allow…,” a waiter said with a white-gloved flourish of his hand, “the kobashira sushi is a house specialty.”

Penny smiled winningly. “That sounds delish.”

Max shot her a questioning look. “You do know that’s raw aoyagi scallops, don’t you?”

She didn’t. In fact, Maxwell might well have just saved her life. Unknown to him she had a severe shellfish allergy. One succulent bite and she would’ve slumped to the floor, swollen and lifeless. Penny’s alarm must’ve shown on her face, because he’d immediately revised her order, saying, “The lady will have the Chicken Divan.”

Thank God that someone was paying attention. Her runaway mouth resumed its nervous monologue.

She knew she sounded pathetic. Still, Penny couldn’t stop herself. No one here had ever expressed any interest in her, not in New York City. She’d gone from being her parents’ little miracle to being miserable and invisible. Most nights she’d force herself to walk around the streets until the neighborhood fell quiet and she felt exhausted enough to go to bed. She’d wander around the Upper East Side, alone except for the doormen who stood behind glass in the elegant lobby of each building and watched her pass. These stately town houses and sumptuous co-op apartments, these were what everyone aspired to. In some way she was trying to train herself to want them also. The truth was: She didn’t. Penny only pretended to want the jewelry in the windows at Cartier and the furs at Bloomingdale’s.