Imperfections (29 page)

There was a clamour at the door. Paige returned, champagne bottle in one hand and a bouquet of fresh flutes in the other. She smiled when she saw me, which was a relief. I had been expecting the worst but hoping for more. I was happy Paige fulfilled my hopes.

Paige had put on a little weight. No, I thought, that wasn't fair, she had filled out. There was a premature frost of grey in her hair and her face seemed older, warmer and a bit more refined. She was no longer a girl; time had transformed her into a woman.

I admired her aging as she apologized at length to the old man and his wife. I thought of how I hadn't really noticed people around me aging before. In fact, most people around me didn't age. Whether it was from the perennial nips and tucks, as with Donna, or from some other indefinable grander beauty, as with Stella, for some reason my eyes didn't see people age. And here was Paige, five years older, expertly popping a champagne cork, apologizing so profusely she was almost bowing as she filled Prince What's-his-name's flute.

Paige smiled when she caught my gaze, said a few words to the prince and made her way to me.

“Richard.” She embraced me. She was soft, warm and smelled of an oddly comforting blend of champagne, cigarettes and stale perfume.
 

When our embrace broke, she slapped me. The smack sounded the room to silence. As if by the same strike, all faces in the room snapped toward us.
 

“You could've at least called,” she said.

I rubbed my cheek, feeling the phantom burn of a hand strongly applied and shortly passed.

Paige leaned in. I flinched. She kissed my cheek, her lips sensually electric against the heat of my insulted skin. I had to admit, it felt amazing and it excited me. I shifted and crossed my hands in front of my groin, feeling embarrassingly adolescent at its creeping growth.

“I missed you,” she said. “Thank you for coming.”

I had forgotten how arousing our past encounters had been. Paige and I had always connected physically and, on some subconscious plane, mentally since our first meeting. My memories tripped back to the first time we made love, mere children in hindsight, clumsily rolling around in front of the campfire. I remembered the terrible void in my chest as Paige walked back to camp, ahead of me through the dark forest. I remembered the profound loneliness when Leonard and I stood on that abandoned highway under a solitary light, sharing a cigarette. Those feelings I had felt often in Paige's absence. I knew them well.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “You're right, I should've called.” As I said it I knew I meant it. I don't know why I didn't see the connection we had, as clearly as Paige saw it, until that point. Paige had never been bad to me, never been cruel and she had always been an interesting puzzle. She was intriguing to me, a little scary, and totally exhilarating. She always had been. Like that time we fucked on the airplane, I never knew what she was going to do or say but everything she ever said to me had been true and honest and sincere. And, at our last meeting, she said she loved me.

Now, thinking back, I may have always loved her, too. It was just that she was direct with her feelings and thoughts—something I wasn't used to. Paige always displayed a brutal, bare and complete exposure of emotion that I had encountered only in her.
 

I also liked the way she had used my body. There was honesty there, too. She hadn't slept with me because I was a model. She slept with me because it was a way for her to explore a different way to communicate. I liked her sex because it was as true as when she spoke.

When I spoke, I was a show. When I fucked her, well, that word says it all. It was the pursuit of getting off. It was a fashion show. I had never thought of it in another way until that night. Paige's bare feelings, her willing exposure of her emotions, regardless of the potential for rejection and pain, had changed that. I was ashamed that I never returned Paige's honesty that it took me this long to realize.

I needed to be that honest.

I needed to foster the same explorer's quality that endeared Paige to me, the childlike frankness that knew no bounds. I would be honest from then on, I resolved.

“You've put on a little weight,” I said. “And it looks great on you. And…”

My vision rocketed sideways and I swear I heard a popping sound from the cartilage between the vertebrae of my neck.

“And?” Paige asked.

I slowly swivelled my head back to centre. She looked at me expectantly.

“And I love you… I always have,” I said. “Well, maybe not always, but for a long time anyway.”

Then we kissed.

Later that night, after the sales were done and the clients had gone, I stood in the bathroom, unable to sleep because Paige was snoring and sprawled out over most of the king-sized bed. I examined myself in the mirror, the bite marks recently delivered to my chest. I twisted my body to inspect the claw marks that ran diagonally from my shoulder to the line of my spine. I straightened up and smiled at my reflection. I had made it. I felt that thing that people feel when they find someone. Love.

A bruise had risen on my cheek. I leaned closer to find the web of several tiny burst vessels on my cheekbone. I marvelled at perspective, how what I saw changed with it. From far away, a glowing, purple bruise. From up close, a nebula of colour detailed in pores and vessels. It changed everything.

I spent the rest of the night in the bathroom examining my face and my body. I scrutinized my skin, my features, how they worked together to make a person, how they were beautiful as their own pieces. I looked at them from afar and then a mere fraction of an inch from the mirror. I stretched skin. I flexed and pinched.
 

Models are necessarily introspective, self-critical and vain. The career requires detailed examination of the features of the face, the musculature of the arms, chest and stomach, the curve of the buttocks and the shape of the legs. All parts, every blemish, every mole, every angle of bone under skin, every ripple of tendon and muscle need inspection. It is the search to admire, to mend the imperfections.
 

I think it's in all of us, really. It is a necessary meditation. Those elements making up the molecules making up the cells making up our bodies, they are the same elements composing the trees and the air. They all started as particles, floating around, billions of years ago. They all remember each other, long to see each other again.

What had Dr. Sloane said before I punched him? “We carry little pieces of the people we know, inside us. Some people leave bigger pieces behind and those tug to rejoin the universal flow.”

I paused for a moment and smiled as Paige's snoring reached a crescendo punctuated by a snort. She mumbled something and then all was quiet again. I turned my attention back to me.

A highly developed sense of self-criticism, of vanity, is the quest to understand the intersection of oneself and the universe. It leads to the realization that the physical interaction between the two is one and the same. Me, picking at my face in the mirror, that is a meditation of the universe looking at itself, interacting with itself, learning about itself, remembering itself from billions of years ago.

I found my pants on the floor, between the toilet and the tub. I rummaged through the pockets for my cellphone and called Chester. He sounded a sleepy grunt from the other end.

“Chester, are you there?” I said quietly into the receiver. “I've been looking in the mirror for the past few hours and I think I get it.”

“Trench?” He cleared his throat. “That you?”

“I have come to terms with most of my imperfections. There are just a few that need to be fixed and my body will be free. My body and mind are so close to being united. They have been at war for so long. Get ready for the next phase, perfection.”

“There's this thing called ‘blind sight,' Richard. Know what that is?”

“Get ready for the next phase,” I spoke over Chester. “The evolution of beauty.”

Chester didn't stop speaking, so we wound up talking at the same time.

“Your brain sees things that aren't there,” Chester muttered. “Or they might be there but your eyes can't see them.”

“I'm going to give you a true beauty,” I said. “Something so true, you'll be able to see my naked soul.”

“Blind sight is said to be the depth of your conscious mind. You're a wading pool right now, Richard. Are you listening to me?” Chester said.

“Once I correct a few things,” I was saying, “I won't be bound by any perceptions of imperfection, no more doubt or self-pity. My spirit and body will fuse, becoming the ultimate instrument of free expression. I will truly just
exist
.”

“Oh, Richard, do you know what time it is? I'm going back to sleep. We can talk later.”
 

Then Chester called me “quixotic” and hung up.

I had no idea what that meant.

And that's how I wound up at Dr. Bella's office in Burnt Timber Acres Mall, the largest strip mall on the coast, watching the woman who didn't know what Gothic decor looked like, wander over to a mirror and pick at her face. The woman turned and looked at her fanny, lifted the cheeks a bit using both hands, and then let them fall, meaty and thick, with a sigh.

Dr. Bella came highly recommended by Donna.

“I absolutely love her,” Donna gushed. “I was looking for a plastic surgeon who understood my emotional needs, you know, and Dr. Bella was the answer. It's like she can look through your skin and see the real you. And then make your looks match.”

Paige didn't know I was here. I told her I was going to a talent call for the Agency. When I actually got the surgeries, I would tell her I was off to a show in Tokyo for a week. Then I would hole up in some airport hotel and watch movies on-demand and eat room service while I healed.
 

When I had poked Paige gently with the idea of me getting plastic surgery, I had brought it up in a sideways, “a friend of mine” kind of way. Paige's response had been definite and negative. She thought plastic surgery was a solution to nothing.

“I've seen enough of it, Richard,” she'd said. “I can't look at a beautiful woman without wondering, without looking for the work she's had done. Plastic surgeons are making a new species of plastic people when it's really just sticking peacock feathers in a chicken's ass. The genes don't change, it's just a mask.” She paused for a moment to inspect me. I thought she had seen through my clever ruse. “There's no beauty in what's not real. Fuck the plastic people and you still get beautifully ugly babies who'll never grow up to look like their parents. They'll have anomalous hairy patches and bumps on their heads that challenge their mother's love. Plastic surgeons can mess around all they want—nature gets the last word.”

The next morning, having coffee in the white sunlight of our apartment's breakfast nook, she read to me from a “special section” in the paper about beauty and style. It was as if she was explaining to me why she was so opposed.

“You know,” Paige said from behind the newspaper. She used a finger to fold one corner toward herself and looked at me over the edge. There were toast crumbs at the corner of her mouth. “This year, 2003, Defence spending in our fine United States will hit $115 billion.” Paige paused for effect. “That's the same as the projected revenue of the cosmetics industry.”

All I could think was, does she know about my appointment to see Dr. Bella?

“Richard Trench,” the receptionist called. “Dr. Bella is ready for your consultation.”

I glanced once more at the woman inspecting herself in the mirror. She pinched her cheeks and pulled the flesh back toward her ears. She smiled a wind-tunnel smile and opened her eyes wide as if she had just been goosed. The combined efforts gave a deceptively youthful visage of innocent surprise. Deeper, in her eyes, she looked unhappy. She was trapped in an aging prison.

Dr. Bella's office was dimly lit and furnished in dark wood and heavy leather chairs. Chocolate brown, velvety drapes were drawn across the windows.

The receptionist closed the door with a quiet click and it was only then I could hear violins playing from somewhere in the room.

Dr. Bella sat in shadow, backlit by soft glow that diffused around the drapes. Her silhouette was thin and graceful. Her slender limbs worked at something on the desk in front of her, though I couldn't tell what. My eyes were slow to adjust to the light.

I stood, with my hands in my pockets, exactly where the receptionist had deposited me. Unsure what to do, and feeling like I had intruded into someone's private residence, I waited. Dr. Bella gave me no acknowledgement and for a moment my mind tripped and wondered if I really was there—or was I indeed invisible and observing this woman's private reverie without her knowing?

As I stood, my eyes grew accustomed to the light. The violin strings emanated from a small stereo that sat on a bookcase lining one side of the room. The stereo sat next to a bust of some stern-looking patriarch, scowling over the room as if with great concern over the loss of his limbs and half his torso.