Imperfections (2 page)

“That's me, all right. That was a while ago though.”

“Yeah, I remember that. Musta been early nineties.”

The Jungo shoot was in the mid-nineties, actually. 1994. Grunge was in full swing. Pearl Jam validated plaid jackets and workboots as a statement of individualism that everyone was wearing.
Pulp Fiction
reacquainted us with the genius of John Travolta and, at the time, we were all still blind to the fact that genius is actually all about being in the right place at the right moment. It was the year of the Lorena Bobbitt trial. That year the world learned an important thing: a severed penis could be reattached and still function. That year, Dow Corning was served a class action lawsuit that would eventually be backed by half a million women unhappy with their breast implants. Actually, they weren't just unhappy: their tits were poisoning them.

There was a pause in the conversation.

“You see that mannequin?” I pointed across the menswear floor to a wool trench coat supported perfectly by the slender shoulders of the plastic torso. “That one over there?”

“Yeah.”

“That's me.”
 

Wait for it.

“Really?” Comparing eyes flit from plastic to flesh. “The face ain't yours.”

“It's my face.”

“I don't know. It don't really look like you.”

“It is my face,” I say. “It's just… stylized. You know? They made the nose sharper.”
 

That mannequin had been cast twelve years ago—I was eighteen. If you have ever shopped that big department store, the one that has Seniors' Day the first Tuesday of every month, you have seen me, too. Sure I have put on a few pounds, fleshed out since they cast that, and my smooth, alabaster belly wouldn't work as well as a washboard now.

It is amazing how easily the body can be compartmentalized. Without even thinking, the eye will deconstruct a face or a body, notice little imperfections in an isolated feature and ignore the whole. It takes the subconscious mind mere seconds to do it. Some believe it is inherent, in our genes. Some say we are looking for physical perfection, good breeding stock.

There is always something wrong.

I think he's hot, but his lips are too thin. I think she's hot but her eyes are too close together, too far apart, different colours, and on and on. I do it myself. Like a mechanic, I can tear down a face or a body and rebuild it, noting everything that needs tweaking or tuning. I am probably more astute than most with such things—being in the business, I look for works of art.

Down the aisle, a clerk is undressing mannequin-me. She has taken off the wool coat. The mannequin-me stands on a display so, to remove the more personal articles, she is forced to mount a chair. She looks me in the eyes. Her hands glide deftly over my smooth, plastic skin as she removes a smart sweater vest. She runs an open palm down my chest and across my abdomen and she shifts her position slightly, rubbing her knees together once, one past the other.

The clerk climbs down from her perch. Her eyes level with the mannequin-me's beltline, she reaches out and pauses. Her cherry red fingernails grasp the fabric on either side of the button. Her tongue breaches her bubble gum lips, a fleshy petal tilting toward the sun. It slides to the corner of her mouth leaving those lips glistening, slick and seductively puckered. She smiles before drawing her hands together, the button slipping out of the buttonhole. The clerk looks up the length of mannequin-me's body. She pinches the zipper and pulls the tab slowly and the pants loosen from mannequin-me's hips.

“Yer nipples that pointy?”

“No. That's stylized too. My nipples are normal.”

“Oh.”

You have seen me naked. If you have been around when they were changing the mannequins then you have seen me naked. They took a few liberties with the nose, the nipples and the face. Still, that moulded plastic body has caused many a blush on Seniors' Tuesday.

“So, what you been doing lately?”

That hurts. It prompts the words “nothing” and “looking for work.”
 

Lately, I have this feeling of panic.

“Things are still moving along nicely. I've decided to do less modelling and take more of a management role. You can't stay beautiful forever, right?”

Lately, I have this tightness in my chest. Makes it hard to breathe.
 

It's like I'm trapped in a car that has driven off a bridge and into a lake and the water is slowly leaking in through the cracked windshield. This is okay because there is still lots of air for the moment but the problem is that there is someone else in the car, some big fucker with strong hands around my neck choking the living shit out of me so I can't even enjoy the last, sweet bit of air before the car fills up. I can just feel the water pressing against my skin. I have been trying to get back the five years that saw my career shrivel.

Modelling is a cruel thing. You have passed your prime before you hit thirty. At a time when other people's careers are just blossoming, yours wilts. Your friends, the ones who went the doctor/lawyer/accountant route, have just been promoted. They are married. They have a kid or two. They have just bought a house and a new car. They have retirement savings. They have a dental plan and an expense account. They get paid vacations and flex days.
 

There are many things that older models wind up doing. We see them every day. Me, however, I would rather be homeless than get a paycheque pointing at green screens for a weather channel or telling people that I lost twenty pounds of unwanted fat on some diet. I would rather die than peddle an orthopaedic shoe or do a commercial spot for all those starving kids in Third World countries. Who has the time to save the whales and polar bears? I have been planning a comeback. I have been working hard toward it. I have a plan and I was about to get it underway.
 

It worked for John Travolta.
 

The essence of genius is being in the right place at the right moment.

My agent called me “quixotic.”
 

I have no clue what that means.

“So, what you been doing lately?”

“Things are still moving along nicely. I have decided to do less modelling and take more of a management role. You can't stay beautiful forever, right?”

“No… you can't stay beautiful forever. It ain't like there's a fountain of youth or nothing to make you immortal.” A chuckle. “Right?”

There was something sick in the laugh, something desperate. The words were spoken too quickly, as if trying to convince me of something that wasn't true. This should have been a clue.

“True.” I smiled uncertainly.

“The body of work you left behind's admirable, though. In itself it kinda preserves an immortal youth, right? Kinda like a time capsule.”

This should have been a clue.

“Oh, you know my work.”

Vanity blinds.

CHAPTER 2

Every Tree is Known by Its Fruits

Memories are an unreliable fiction. Different people remember the same things in different ways. Even so, memories construct a core truth for a person no matter how unreliable they are. I remember my birth. Well, I am not sure I really remember it or I have just imagined it so vividly and repeatedly that it became a memory for me.

I remember my mother being beautiful.
 

Psychologists also say that our response to beauty is something crawling around our subconscious mind, a little goblin working behind the scenes. They say that in the first ten minutes of life, babies can follow the outline of a face and after a few days they can recognize their mother. They say that babies react more favourably, form a stronger bond with people who portray health, people who have symmetrical faces, and all of the other things that form beauty.
 

My mother was definitely beautiful.

Things I don't remember about my birth are the ejection from a warm, wet world into a cool, dry one. I don't remember the suffocation of muscles contracting around my body. I don't remember the dark giving way to harsh banks of white lights. I also don't remember how to breathe fluids and I don't remember my umbilical cord being cut.

What I do remember is the comparative absence of smell. Absence is the wrong word. There was a smell there; the smell was clean, sterilized to the point of being a simulacrum for the absence of smell. It was that sterilized smell coupled with my mother's face that led to an association between the two that I carry with me to this day.

 
“Congratulations,” said the nurse, her features covered by a surgical mask. She was talking to my parents but looking at me. “You are the proud parents of a perfect, beautiful baby boy.”

Ten toes, ten fingers, two arms, two legs, everything was there.

My mother smiled. Beaming at my big, round head and my tiny body. She did not marvel at the wondrously freaky mis-proportions of it all, the head a quarter the length of the entire body, the nearly adult-sized eyes and the comparative lack of a chin or nose. All these things, if carried into adulthood would result in an alien-looking being with a beach ball-sized head, baseball-sized eyes and severe neck problems. Instead, she saw something beautiful. She sported that glazed look of motherly admiration, that instinctual love that has been blindly bred into mothers for millions of years. That look of being exhausted from ten hours of labour, strung out on hormones and painkillers and, for my mother, about two minutes away from becoming her old self again.

“He's gorgeous,” she said.

“He's small,” my father said, watching his wife hold his son from across the room where he leaned against the wall. His idea of perfect was quite different from the nurse's. Father didn't have the same millions of years of inbred instinct that Mother had.

“No he's not,” my mother replied. She looked to the nurse. “Is he small?”

The nurse's forehead wrinkled, a frown. “He is a little below the average length, a little thinner than average but he is perfectly healthy. Those are just averages, some babies are longer, some are fatter, others are shorter and skinnier. All babies are different but all of them are beautiful.”

“See,” my father grunted, pushing himself from the wall and walking to the bed to get a closer look. “He's small.”

Mother gingerly touched some of the gick that covered me and recoiled. Her eyes cleared, her beautiful eyebrows dropped and her face seemed to fall.

“What is that?” she asked. My mother pointed, her finger wiggled an arc at the top of my vision.

The nurse inspected me. “That's called a haemangioma. It's a mass of constricted blood vessels. It's kind of like a birthmark. Nothing to worry about, really.”

“It is rather hideous though,” Mother said and poked the top of my head. “Will it go away?

“They mostly disappear over time,” the nurse replied. “It may grow a bit more but it should go away in a few years.”

My father sighed.

My mother's eyes were unconvinced. She scowled for a moment.

“Can it be… taken off?”

“It can if it's posing some kind of health risk. Sometimes they form on or around organs and impair their function. It's usually not good to operate on newborns though. That one will go away in time. Even if it doesn't, it won't matter because the little fellow will have a full head of hair.”

Mother scowled at the blemish for a while longer and then, resigned, examined the rest of my body.

“And what's that?” she asked. Her finger dropped below my vision.

“What?” The nurse's mask flexed and contracted when she spoke. “That's an anomalous patch of terminal hair.” She muttered. “Again, nothing to worry about.”

“Terminal hair?” My mother's eyes widened in horror and the corners of her mouth dropped, exposing her lower canines.

Mother had beautifully white teeth.

“Yes,” the nurse replied. “The body is covered with hair, called vellus hair. Hair follicles respond to androgens, hormones like testosterone, and thicken into what is called terminal hair. Usually this happens at puberty but occasionally babies have a patch of fuzz like that. It's a cute fuzzy patch, I think.” The nurse's eyes smiled at me over her mask.

“He's not going to turn into one of those Mexican wolf-men is he?” Mother grimaced.

“Testosterone,” Father mumbled to himself and smiled.

Mother sighed.

Father coughed.

“I'm going out for a cigarette, dear,” Father said and sauntered out the door, not waiting for a response.

“He's a very handsome boy.” The nurse cast a stern gaze at Mother. “You have a beautiful baby boy, not a Mexican wolf-man.”

With that, she stormed out of the delivery room and I was left to continue bonding with my mother. This consisted of her holding me awkwardly and making strained kissy faces in between glances at the door and out the window.