The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty (18 page)

His words express how I feel so perfectly, they make me want to cry.

I have to admit I’m intrigued by him. And I’m starting to like him very much: for this speech, for his effort, for recognizing Lily has a problem, and for caring enough to do something about it. I like that he took the initiative on this, that despite knowing her less well than we do, he took a more forceful step than we have ever taken with her. He’s the first person outside of our group that I’ve been drawn to in a long time, since before Gabriel died.

Lily is listening to him very attentively. She appears genuinely interested. I think Peter is making progress, which is not surprising considering how persuasive his argument is.

“And it requires a lack of self-esteem, too,” Jack adds, “even though these women often try to claim the opposite. You know, they like to profess that it’s
because
they value themselves that they do all these cosmetic procedures. But that’s just spin.”

Peter continues: “What I’m getting at, Lily, is that you are such a beautiful person, intrinsically. You shouldn’t try to alter yourself to accommodate the tastes of a shallow prick who’s unworthy of you. You’re a great artist. Do you know how much I’d give to have even a fraction of your talent? This may sound corny to you, but my advice is love yourself and love the people who love you, not the others.”

I’m nodding in agreement. The others are, too.

The most thrilling part is that Lily is nodding, too. Peter’s words seem to be getting through. And I don’t think she’s just being polite.

Lily raises her index finger to interrupt Peter, and says, “Wow, you’re saying some very interesting stuff. You’re really helping me put things into focus. You’re so right on every front.”

“You see my point?” Peter says.

“Oh, God, totally!” she replies, getting up. “Can we continue this a bit later?”

“We haven’t finished!” I cry.

“I got the gist of it, though,” she says. “But please, keep talking. I can still listen.” She walks over to her piano, sits, and goes right back to playing—completely undeterred.

We stand around her piano. Through the filter of my frustration, her music is hell to my ears. “Why are you doing this?” I bark.

“Don’t mind me.”

In a whisper, I ask Peter if this is common, the alcoholic getting up in the middle of an intervention and going straight to the liquor cabinet.

“I’m sure it happens a lot,” Peter says.

I turn to Lily. “Have you even heard a word Peter said?”

“Yes, every word,” she replies, clearly reabsorbed in her playing. “And I will give it some serious thought.”

Jack says, “Lily, do you see that getting up in the middle of Peter’s talk is a symptom of your disease?”

She nods. “I’m sorry. But you know how it is . . . when the impulse takes you.”

“The impulse to what? Destroy your life?” Penelope pitches in.

“I can play and listen at the same time. I’m a good multitasker. You guys can keep talking to me, if you want.” But her eyes are downcast, and she doesn’t really seem to be listening to us.

We ask her to please stop and pay attention.

“I am!” she claims. She has an intense expression on her face—a look of deep concentration. But her gaze seems to be turned inward. As I speak to her, she nods mechanically while playing.

And then I stop talking. An unsettling sensation has quieted me.

Still nodding, she says, “Go on, I’m listening.”

But I don’t go on.

“You were saying?” she says.

I just gaze at her. Words are meaningless now.

Then she asks, “Has the cat got your tongue? I’m all ears, keep talking.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I finally manage to murmur.

And the reason it doesn’t matter, the reason I have been silenced, is that the unthinkable, the impossible, has begun.

Beauty is crawling all over Lily like a disease. It is clawing at her face, chewing her features, transforming their shapes, harmonizing their lines. It attacks her flesh, takes hold of her skin like a rapidly-moving cancer, leaving behind pure loveliness. Waves of delicacy wash over her. Ripples of symmetry soften her. Layer upon layer of grace sweeps over her entire countenance.

I shake my head a little, to make sure I’m not hallucinating. I blink.

We need the tape recorder.

The melody is fast and inescapable. It’s an ocean of notes crashing around us in my living room. Gorgeous and delirious.

This has got to get recorded. Before it’s too late. Does Lily even know what’s happening to her—what she’s achieved?

I finally manage to tear my eyes away from Lily, who no longer resembles the Lily who entered my apartment tonight. I look at my friends.

Jack is fetching the small recorder from the bookshelf nearby and comes back with it on tiptoes, turning it on. He holds it out of Lily’s sight, so as not to distract her—not that she would notice anyway; her eyes are closed.

She still hasn’t looked at us since she sat at her piano. We, on the other hand, can’t stop looking at her—with the solemnity of country folks watching a spaceship land. Her beauty continues to increase. She looks like an angel.

I’ve never seen anything like this, beauty of this magnitude. I had no idea it existed.

And suddenly, the angel speaks. “I’m tempted to look into your eyes to see if anything has happened. But I’m afraid of being disappointed again.”

“Open them,” I say.

Slowly, she does. The effect is spectacular. Her eyes are turquoise, large and clear.

There is no model, no actress in any movie I have ever seen who is as exquisite as Lily right now. When I’m not wearing my disguise and men look at me, if they see even a fraction of the beauty I am seeing right now, I forgive their shallowness. There is power in beauty. That’s the tragedy of it.

It’s hard to imagine that Lily can’t decipher from the looks on our faces the extent of her success. If we were cartoons, our mouths would be hanging open wide in awe, our lower jaws on the floor.

But because we are human and because Lily has endured months of failure, her insecurities aren’t permitting her to read our expressions with any degree of accuracy. So she seeks out an answer in a roundabout way. “Does this piece need to get recorded?” she asks.

“Yes,” Jack says, lifting the recorder within her line of vision. “It’s on.”

A smile appears on her lips and her music takes off again, free and wild. She’s done it and—at last—she knows it.

She plays for a while longer and says, “Time to see the rate of the fade.” She stops playing, gets up and goes to the ballet bar. She stands with her hand on the bar, facing the narrow full-length mirror at its side.

She seems startled by her reflection and takes a step closer to see better.

“You’ve succeeded,” Georgia tells her. “Probably beyond what even you imagined, right?”

“Yes,” Lily says.

As the seconds pass, Lily’s loveliness lessens. “The fade is even more rapid than I expected,” she says.

Within a minute, every hint of beauty has left her.

“Now I just have to see if playback works as well as live,” she says, and asks us to hook up to the speakers the recorder containing the musical hallucinogen.

We do, and turn on the music. She studies her face as her beauty returns. The porcelain skin, the delicate features.

“Peter,” she says, looking at him in the mirror, “thanks for helping me. It’s completely thanks to you that I succeeded.”

“How?” he asks, baffled.

“You made such good points. The women you spoke about, who alter themselves drastically—you said they objectify themselves, that they see themselves as merchandise. You made me realize how important that is. I wasn’t doing it very much, and that was the problem. You helped me see that. So I lowered my self-esteem until I saw myself as no more significant than an item sitting on a shelf—a ceramic pot Penelope might break and put back together. I told myself that I’m like any other object in this world that I must beautify, just an ugly pot.”

“Wait,” Peter says, looking at me. “I can’t believe my ears. I was making the absolute opposite point.”

“Which was then reinterpreted by an artist,” Georgia says.

“Before, I wasn’t focusing on the right things,” Lily says. “But as soon as I tried Peter’s idea of looking at myself as an object, bam! I gained a sense of distance from myself, which freed my mind to come up with this new solution: depth. So that’s what I went for. The music enables you to see past my unfortunate physical appearance.”

“Past it? So what are we looking at?” Jack asks.

Lily doesn’t answer. Her silence is puzzling until I understand what she’s reluctant to state because of her modesty.

“Her soul,” I say.

“Her inner beauty,” Georgia adds.

Blushing slightly, Lily says, “Yeah, it wasn’t shining through. Not even slightly. I don’t know why. My physical appearance is very opaque, in addition to being ugly—an unfortunate combination.”

“So you performed . . . a kind of . . . musical peel?” Penelope asks.

“Yes, exactly.”

“What now? Do you have a plan?” Georgia asks.

“I have a fantasy. One of you will call Strad and offer to set him up on a blind date. He will agree. He and I will have our date at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square, in the coffee shop on the third floor. I will ask the store to play my beauty music on that day, instead of my book music, which they usually play. That’s how the whole thing would begin.”

“The whole thing? So you’re thinking there will be a ‘whole thing’?” Penelope asks.

“Well, that was the point, wasn’t it?” Lily says.

“How can you have a relationship with someone if the music always has to be on?” Peter asks. “What if he wants to take you out where no music is playing? Is this stuff covered in your fantasy?”

“Yes. I’d wear a mask.”

“A mask?”

“Yes. Or just avoid going out. But if I can’t avoid it, I’d wear a mask.”

“Won’t he find that strange?” Peter asks.

“Perhaps. But in my fantasy, he accepts it. And plus, people are often strange.”

“And you wouldn’t mind living your whole life this way?” I ask.

“Maybe not. And that’s an interesting question coming from you, Barb.”

“What if he finds out the truth?” Peter says. “What if you’re at home with him one day and for some reason the music stops and he sees you’re Lily?”

“Maybe his love could survive the truth.”

“What if it couldn’t?” Penelope asks.

“Maybe it won’t be the truth anymore.”

“What do you mean?” Jack asks.

“Maybe by then I will have improved the music to make its effect permanent. Even through silence.”

Georgia claps her hands once. “Okay, who’s going to make the call? I hope it’s not me because the thought of setting you up with that creep is hard to bear.”

“I’m not quite ready yet,” Lily says. “There are two things I have to take care of first.”

AN HOUR AFTER
my friends leave, I’m surprised that Lily comes back to my place to speak to me one on one.

She asks me if I could make a mask for her to wear sometimes, if she’s ever out with Strad. She says she wasn’t able to find a nice one that fits her because her eyes are too close together for any normal mask. She says there’s only one she found that fits her, and she pulls it out of her bag. To my horror, it’s a mask of the Wicked Witch of the West, from
The Wizard of Oz
. The face is hideous green rubber with a hook nose topped by a big mole. The witch is wearing sunglasses—cheap sunglasses attached to the mask. I turn the mask over and see that each eyehole is huge, the size of the entire lens of the sunglasses, which explains why she bought it. Big eyeholes can accommodate a greater variety of distances between people’s eyes.

“You’re right, this is not exactly the kind of mask you want to be wearing when you’re hanging out with Strad,” I say.

“I’m going to wear it at the start of my first date with him.”

“Why?” I ask, stupefied.

“I want to experience what you experience when you take off your disguise at bars.”

I PUT EVERY
other project on hold to make the mask. I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it. I’m so excited by what has happened. And it’s all thanks to Peter. Lily will have a chance to taste one of life’s greatest joys: romantic love; unrequited love suddenly requited—something she might never have been able to experience if it hadn’t been for Peter helping her access her greatest powers. He was her source of inspiration. And he wasn’t even trying. He
was
trying to do the exact opposite—convince her to give up her insane project and unhealthy obsession with Strad. If he’d succeeded at that, it would have been good. But this new outcome is even better. It may not be as healthy, but it’s much more delicious.

I could make a perfectly decent mask in an hour, but I want this mask to be inspired. I want it to be jaw-droppingly beautiful, ethereal, majestic. And most of all, I want it to be white. I have a vision of Lily in a white mask, which doesn’t make it easy for me because white is my weakest color. White masks always come out bland at my hands. Especially the feather ones, which is the kind I want Lily’s to be. I try to talk myself out of that color, but fail.

I work on it all night. Can’t stop. It always makes me feel good to do things for Lily, and she never asks for anything, so the opportunities are rare.

In the morning, I sleep for a few hours and then get back to work on the mask. One reason it’s taking so long is that I keep pausing to daydream about Lily wearing it and taking it off for Strad while the music is playing.

I continue working all day, and by the evening, I’m practically done. This white mask rivals—possibly even surpasses—my most beautiful colored masks. I had to make the eyeholes close to each other, though doing so would reveal Lily’s biggest facial defect. So I made the eyeholes huge, touching in the middle and extending far to the sides, in a sort of infinity symbol, which turns out to be the mask’s most stunning feature. I covered the eyeholes with a mirrored surface (the type of glass used for mirrored sunglasses). It’s essentially the same concept as the mask she already has—but attractive. Lily will be able to look out, but anyone trying to look in will only see themselves.