Beauty: A Novel (16 page)

Heels

C
arol didn’t feel queasy anymore, and she was not so weak she couldn’t walk. She looked back once to be sure the name of his boat was what she’d seen, but she couldn’t tell because he was running up with his
sorry
s as if she still needed help. Hardly touching her, which was more than she wanted, he guided her to his truck and opened her door, and as soon as she got in, she was glad not to be walking. She would have been glad even if she weren’t covered in vomit. She was also glad they didn’t speak. Before she threw up, he had as much as said he loved her. She wished she felt more excited. Today, her company was almost open for business, and they’d wandered into a couple million dollars of free fish, and Easy Parsons had said he loved her. But right now, she couldn’t wait to get out of his truck and away from him.

She looked out the window and didn’t understand why he was going the long way around, down Main Street. She felt like she was emptied of everything, including anger, and she wondered if he would be able to say he loved her again.

He double-parked on Main Street, put down her window, leaned across her, and called to a group of women going in Elizabeth’s expensive restaurant for lunch. He called, “What’re the best women’s shoes?” The women curled their shoulders and pushed at the restaurant door. Carol sank down in her seat like an embarrassed teenager, and Easy shouted at the women in the voice of someone picking a fight. “What are the best women’s shoes in the damn world?”

“Manolos,” one of them said over her shoulder, and Easy turned around to stare at whoever had honked behind the truck.

Carol told him, “You aren’t going to find Manolos anywhere near Elizabeth.”

“So they are good?”

“I know that much.”

“I’m getting you Manolos. My boat makes you sick, I replace the shoes.”

“I’m changing my clothes and going back to the plant.”

“What, are you too embarrassed to go into Boston, into a flashy store, with one of your company’s fishermen?” At which point he left the truck where it was and ran into Elizabeth’s one expensive restaurant and came out with the name of a store in Boston called Harry’s.

He let her change her clothes, and she was tempted to run out the back of her place and through the graveyard, past Emily Ingersol, to get away. Only now she wasn’t sure she wanted to get away. She put on a skirt instead of pants.

Harry’s was four
stories of Boston brick at the fancy end of Newbury Street, and if it had only been expensive, she would have been fine—Manolos she guessed would run seven or eight hundred dollars, which she hoped would be enough to make Easy regret his project. But after he pushed open the door and Carol walked in, it was clear that Harry’s was more than just expensive. It was the height of chic. And Carol was too tall and too plain, a plague on chic.

Easy tugged her toward a young and beautiful saleswoman and shouted, “We need a pair of heels.”

Carol wanted to apologize for him. She also wanted to hide her feet, but the saleswoman would not look at them anyway.

Easy said, “Manolos.”

The saleswoman heard that and gazed at Carol’s feet. It was the kind of change Carol had seen when people didn’t realize at first who Baxter was. She was amazed to find herself thinking of Baxter, though of course he shopped in places like this.

The saleswoman said, “Yes,” slowly and thoughtfully appreciating Easy’s decision.

The saleswoman said to Easy, “Come this way,” and smiled. She said, “I’m Amanda.” She was very pretty, and Carol, who was not pretty, didn’t believe she was entitled to follow along. She was ready to give up and tell Easy to go on with Amanda by himself.

Easy, in his khaki pants that were clean but not pressed and his denim shirt that had its pocket beginning to tear loose, said with quiet authority, “Glad to meet you, Amanda.” It was the delivery of somebody who could buy the building, and it surprised Carol and perked her up a little bit and got another look from Amanda.

Carol was a little over six-one and would be taller than that in heels. She held her shoulders back and followed Amanda and Easy into a room that looked nothing like any shoe department she had ever seen. She sat and let Amanda remove her flats so that anybody including Easy could look at her naked feet. Carol looked at the ceiling, which was high and elegant.

She continued to look at the ceiling when she stood to have her feet measured. She sat back down and ignored the styles of shoes Amanda showed her; she pretended to be someone who had other people choose such things, and then she hated herself for playing along with the store’s snobbery.

Amanda took hold of her foot, and the touch was so intimate Carol got clammy, and then the first pair, when she stood up, hurt Carol’s feet, and she said so and was glad she didn’t have to look. She sat back down without looking at Easy either. She wouldn’t have looked at anybody if the room had been packed.

The heels on the second pair were so high that if Carol didn’t have good balance and strong legs and strong feet she wouldn’t have been able to walk. She could walk, though, and the shoes didn’t hurt. They felt all right. She walked to the grand, old Boston window and looked above opulent cars to Newbury Street. The window and the elegant ceiling made the contemporary chic of the store more chic.

She looked down.

They were red shoes, and she was already proud of herself for being able to walk in them. She was proud of the courage it would take to wear them out of the store. She hoped they did cost a gazillion.

She turned to Easy now and said, “Okay? Are we done?”

Easy sat in a plush armchair as solidly as if he belonged in the Harry’s shoe room. Or at least he looked as if he knew who he was regardless of where he was. She guessed he had known that in more difficult places than Harry’s. He looked at her and didn’t say a thing about the Manolos he was so determined to inflict on her, so she turned back toward the window and pulled up the skirt she had worn in anticipation of his god-damned shoes. She pulled it up far above her knees, and turned around in a circle twice and faced him again.

Easy leaned forward in his chair and grinned and said, “We’ll take them.”

She liked his grin. She knew that shoes were not going to make her any prettier than she already was. But these shoes made her stiff posture feel more graceful.

Also, Easy’s grin was sexy and made her feel sexy.

She walked to the mirror and looked at Easy in the reflection and said, “Thank you.” He looked back at her in the mirror and down to the shoes and back up at her, and he didn’t lose his grin. You would have thought he was the one who was able to stand up and walk in the shoes. “I love my shoes, Easy,” she said. And then, not exactly out of the blue, “I want a dress to go with them.”

He said, “Good.”

She faced him and said, “I’ll buy the dress.”

He said, “Better,” and stood up out of his chair as if he hadn’t forgotten he could buy the building, and Carol laughed.

Amanda, whom both of them had nearly forgotten, said, “Yes,” slowly and discerningly, speaking to Carol now.

Up the grand staircase, shamelessly playing along with Harry, Carol said, “Something to have a martini in.” Carol figured if she were going to make a fool of herself, she should do the full nine yards. Maybe she’d actually have a martini. Amanda got them near what might have been dresses and looked at Easy, and Easy was shy. Shoes had been his limit.

Amanda was ready. She said, “Von Furstenberg.”

It wasn’t as if Carol had never read a women’s magazine. It just had never occurred to her to wear the clothes. Now she missed Easy’s authority. Carol nodded, and Amanda gathered three or four dresses. One of them was navy with a bit of red piping, and Carol worried that navy was the color of the suits she had already, but this dress was short, and the fabric was nice and would hang well. She thought the red piping would work with her shoes. She took it to the dressing room.

She looked at herself in the mirror in her own suit, and she was who she was. She took off the suit, and in her underwear, she was who she was, not awful, but hard to imagine as a prize. She was all bone and elbows and knees, without even a chest to speak of.

She put on the new dress, and she was still who she was, and for a moment she was disappointed. She had not expected to be different, but she had hoped.

Amanda called, “Carol. Come look in a mirror out here. The light is so much better.”

As soon as she heard that, she realized her knees. They were below the hem of the dress, and they glowed like blue knobs in the dressing room light, uglier than God ever imagined. She pulled open the door and ran from the dressing room before she chickened out.

When she’d gone in the dressing room, Easy had been standing by a chair. He had not moved since. He stood there and looked at her, and she was paralyzed. She could not make herself walk around. She could not make a model’s pose, whatever that would have been. She smiled at him. She could do that. She loved him. She believed he loved her. He was smart and strong and capable and did real work and was kind and believed in his life, and no matter what she thought about herself, he thought she was pretty.

She looked over at Amanda for a clue, but Amanda was watching Easy, and now Amanda was preening like she’d won something Carol had no idea about. Carol looked at Easy again, and he was trying to sit into the chair and had missed and gotten the arm of the chair and now slipped off that into the seat.

Amanda said, “I think that’s a yes.”

Easy righted himself in the chair and grinned again like with the shoes, only more. Carol could feel his hands everywhere the dress touched her.

He said, “Jesus, Carol.”

Amanda wrapped Carol’s
old clothes in tissue and hid them in a chic bag and said where to go for a cocktail.

After Carol and Easy had sat for an hour with their one martini apiece, laughing about Harry and Amanda, the bartender said where to go for dinner—Italian, crusty bread, white tablecloths, candles and waiters in long aprons.

When they reached their table, Carol asked the waiter to go away and stood beside Easy and said, “I heard you on the boat, about being married, about losing her and your baby, about how much you loved her. I’m sorry. I’m glad you had love like that, so much that it could last and last, and I’m sorry she died and your baby.”

Then she sat down in her beautiful dress and her electric shoes, and Easy sat down across from her, and she might as well have been naked. She loved Easy Parsons, and if he had had joys and if he had hurt, she loved those things, and she loved that he had offered them to her. She said, “Forgive me for saying it now, when we’re supposed to be having fun.” Even if she hadn’t answered his offer just right or at the right time, still she wanted to have met it.

“Thank you for saying so.”

Carol, naked, went ahead. She said, “The boy I loved got killed in Vietnam. We weren’t married, but we would have, and we loved each other, and even then, I knew I’d had the love I was going to have. After he died, all that was left was work. So I worked harder.”

The waiter opened her napkin in her lap, and Easy just looked at her.

“His name was Dominic. We did cars in the alley behind our houses. It was a neighborhood outside Detroit where in the spring men with stomachs hosed the soot off their houses that were pastel colors like the sunsets over the plants.”

Easy shrugged and nodded and shook his head and leaned down at his place on the table. Like he was shy to say whatever it was. The waiter laid Easy’s napkin beside his elbow.

He looked up at her and said, “I could always catch fish.”

This was what he was shy to say? Carol didn’t know if she could laugh.

He said, “Seriously, from when I was little. I could catch so much it was unfair. Not to the fish. I mean for other kids then, and for other fishermen now. It’s embarrassing unless it’s what you do. Also, it lets me see sunsets and all kinds of other light on the ocean.”

Carol said, keeping a serious voice, “Would you take me out and show me? I have shoes that have been on boats.”