The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty (25 page)

In the silence, I hear her breathing. And in her breathing, I hear her anxiety.

“What’s his secret?” she asks.

I tell her what it is.

“Maybe you just need a little bit of time to think about it, and you’ll come round to accepting it,” she says, full of hope, almost as though she’s arguing her own case.

“You know I can’t, Lily.” I wish I could add something to comfort her. But I can’t, because I feel dead.

After Lily hangs up with me, Strad joins her for their first night of sleeping in the same room.

They make love, snuggle, and Strad drifts off to sleep. But Lily lies awake, weeping silently inside her mask.

Strad wakes up to the sound of her crying. He’s kind and gentle. He says, “Are you sure you don’t want to get it over with now, and just tell me what this big skeleton in your closet is? I hate to see you like this.” He’s hugging her, stroking her hair.

“No, no,” she says. “Not yet.”

She feels suffocated by her mask, so she turns on the music and takes off the mask. Strad has no trouble going back to sleep, but she only briefly dips into slumber. The hours pass and the music is becoming unbearable to her. Unlike the mask, which asphyxiates only her lungs, the music is suffocating every pore of her being. And yet, the thought of its elimination tomorrow—and of the mask’s—is even worse.

She rushes to the bathroom, overcome by a surge of nausea.

When she emerges, pale but no less ravishing, Strad is awake, propped up on one elbow, watching her with concern. He taps the mattress. She sits. He pulls her to him, holds her in his arms. Using much patience and reassurance, he tries to convince her
not
to tell him the truth about her mask, since it’s clearly making her so miserable; not to worry about anything, and to just accept his marriage proposal.

She finally agrees.

LATER THAT MORNING,
they drive around the island with the top down, her hair and her music blowing in the wind. Reclined in the passenger seat, her head relaxed against the headrest, she’s holding the mask firmly on her lap, just in case. It caresses her hands with its soft feathers made alive by the breeze. And she caresses it back, no longer hating it—at least not today, not right now. She’s engaged to Strad and she’s rarely been happier. He was right; not telling him her secret was the correct decision. All she had to do was embrace this state of things.

They stop for a picnic on a deserted beach, settling down in the shade of a cluster of palm trees. Lily positions her travel speakers next to them and puts a heavy rock on her mask to prevent it from flying away.

Strad looks blissful, feasting his eyes on her exquisite face framed by the turquoise ocean behind her.

THEY SPEND ALL
afternoon in her hotel room with the music playing. They make love, they laugh, they talk about their future. He then settles himself in the easy chair and takes a couple of old magazines out of his beach bag to browse while he waits for her to get ready to accompany him to the pool.

“I love you. I adore you,” he says to her.

“I love and adore you, too,” she says, smiling at him.

As she rubs sunscreen into her arms and legs, she notices that something in one of the magazines grabs his attention. He places it down on the ottoman and pores over it. Lily sees him scratching the page with his thumbnail, as though he’s trying to get something unstuck. He’s frowning.

“What in the world is this,” he mutters. He picks up the magazine again to look at it more closely, and that’s when she sees its cover.

She freezes. She knows what he’s looking at.

As vividly as the previous moment represented a life of romantic bliss for Lily, this moment embodies its end.

Strad is looking at a picture of his transcendentally beautiful girlfriend, Sondra, in the magazine, and clearly wonders why the picture is in an article about Lily Stanton, his supremely unattractive musician friend, and why even the caption under the photograph so confusingly reads: Lily Stanton at her piano.

It’s not as though she hasn’t known the risk of photos—hasn’t known that photographs of herself get beautified by the music just as effectively as her physical self does, and that when the music stops, her beauty on paper fades just as quickly as it does in the flesh. She knew she could never let Strad have a photo of herself because as soon as he took it home with him, away from the music, it would no longer look like the woman he loves but like his ugly ex-colleague. She has guarded against this risk by hiding all photos of herself and forbidding Strad to snap any new ones, ever. But it hasn’t occurred to her that one day, on his own, he might stumble upon a photo of her in an old magazine, and that this might happen while the music was playing. That day is today. That time is now.

Strad tries one more time to remove what he thinks must surely be a photo of his girlfriend Sondra stuck on top of Lily’s photo, because he
saw
the original photo on this very page before packing the magazine in his suitcase and it was unmistakably a photo of Lily. “I don’t get it. Am I dreaming?” he asks.

“In a sense, you are,” she answers.

They stare at each other wordlessly for a long while. Finally, he says, “I don’t want this to be a dream.”

“It was the only way possible.”

He slowly turns his gaze to the music player, and she can see in his face that he finally understands. He reaches for it. He’s about to stop the music, but she says, “No, please don’t. Not like this.”

And so he doesn’t. Instead, he gets up and says, “I need to be alone for now.”

“I understand.”

He goes to the door.

“Strad,” she says.

He turns to her.

“Don’t take the magazine.” She knows that if he does, he will gawk at the hideous photo as it emerges in the silence outside her door.

Guessing her fears, he says, “I’ve seen Lily before, you know.”

“I know. But never through the eyes of her lover.”

He places the magazine on the bed and leaves.

AN HOUR LATER,
she knocks on Strad’s door. No answer. She calls the front desk, asks if he’s checked out. He hasn’t. She goes looking for him. She finally sees him, alone, in the business center, gazing at a photo of her—as Lily, not Sondra—on the Internet. And while he’s staring at the screen, he’s humming her music. She’s tempted to tell him it’s nearly impossible to activate the illusion by merely humming the melody. But she steps away from the door without saying anything and without having been seen.

She goes back to her room, buys a plane ticket so she can depart the next day for New York, packs, checks out, and takes a taxi to spend the night at a different hotel.

That night, she goes on the pontoon boat to the biobay. She swims in the luminescent water, looking down at the shine of her movements. She floats on her back, sinking her ears under the surface so that people’s shrieks of joy are silenced. Tears run down her temples and disperse in the liquid light as she stares at the black sky. She lifts one arm out of the water and admires the glitter sliding down her skin.

Even after she leaves the bay, she will try to continue bathing in the beauty of existence. She will let the universe embrace her, since no man will.

ON THE PLANE
back to New York, Lily tells herself that if Strad e-mails her or leaves her messages, perhaps she won’t return them. Perhaps it’s for the best. Their relationship might have worked out for a while, but now that he knows, how can it?

THERE ARE NO
e-mails or messages when she lands. Nor are there any later that evening.

She calls me and we talk about her trip.

Worried about her, I suggest we get together. Lily says she’s tired and will visit me tomorrow evening instead.

WHEN LILY ENTERS
my apartment the following evening, I scrutinize her. In addition to her customary ugliness, there are lines of stress on her face, and an expression of resignation that amplifies the overall sorry effect.

The first thing she says to me is, “Strad doesn’t care.”

“What do you mean?”

“He hasn’t called.”

“It’s only been two days. And plus, you left suddenly. Maybe he’s afraid you might not want to talk to him after the way he reacted. Maybe he thinks he has a better chance of explaining himself in person.”

“He’s made no attempt to see me in person either.”

“Maybe he needs time to think about things, figure out what he’ll say, especially if he happens to want to continue the relationship. It’s possible,” I tell her.

“Why are you trying to get my hopes up? You usually do the opposite.”

“It’s for your own good when I do the opposite. To manage your expectations.”

“And you no longer care about my expectations?”

“Yes I do.”

“So why are you doing this?”

I answer by looking past her, into my living room. She follows my gaze, which brings her to the large swivel easy chair with its back to us.

Slowly, it turns.

And Strad is revealed.

In Lily’s ear, I whisper apologetically, “He persuaded me to let him do this.”

I tell them I’m going out for an extended errand. And I leave.

What happens then, I’m told later:

Strad gets up and walks over to Lily. She has an urge to hide her face, but she remains motionless.

Without saying a word, he gently kisses her lips. And then he kisses her more passionately. He envelops her and buries his face in her hair.

“Isn’t this great?” he whispers. “We can go to my place and listen to some of
my
music, for a change.”

She laughs, crying a little.

He gives her another long kiss and takes her hand and pulls her out of the apartment. They fly out of the building.

AT LEAST THAT’S
how Lily describes the scene when she calls me the next morning. She says last night was the happiest of her life. “And to think that just the night before, I was so depressed I almost died.”

I grunt sympathetically until I realize she’s not just using an expression. “You almost died?” I ask.

“Yeah. I was playing at my piano, feeling devastated, and my hands started turning reflective again. Clearly it’s the depression that triggers it. It hadn’t happened in a long time, many weeks. The reflectiveness spread up my arms. I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t have the will. And when it got past my shoulders and started spreading onto my chest, I could feel I was dying. And part of me just wanted to let go, let it take me, and be released from the burden of living. I can’t tell you how difficult it was to muster the will to stop the process. I managed it this time, but barely. If it ever happens again, I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop it. Hopefully, I’ll never be that unhappy again.”

THE NEXT DAY,
I’m finally ready to return Peter’s calls. I’m still just as disillusioned by his secret and by the fact that he’s not a valid exception, or if he is, there’s no way to be certain of it now.

But in early afternoon I gather my courage and dial his number.

He picks up. I ask him if we can see each other, to talk.

He comes over an hour later.

We sit at my dining table, nothing to drink before us. Neither of us wants anything.

I begin with, “I can never bypass my rule.”

“I know. You told me,” he says.

“But I miss you. And I was wondering if we could be friends. Just friends. But good friends.”

“It won’t be easy for me.”

“I’m not sure I believe you. And actually, there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

“What?”

“Why did you torture me?”

“When, specifically?”

“All the time. Like when you came over with your piece of red velvet.”

“Yeah.”

“And when you kept canceling or postponing our appointments.”

He nods. After a pause, he says, “It was all very calculated. And very difficult.”

I stare at him.

He says, “You’re sort of right that I was trying to torture you. It was an elaborate ploy to get you to . . .” He seems unable to finish.

“Get me to what?”

He looks embarrassed. “I thought that if I could increase your desire and your frustration you’d be more likely to forgive me for knowing what you really look like, once you found out I knew. It didn’t work, of course.”

We talk for hours. When we get tired, we lie on the couch, one of us at each end of the sectional. We keep talking for most of the night, covering countless topics.

The last thing he says to me before we finally fall asleep on the couch is, “Okay, I guess we can be friends. I’ve missed you. Having you in my life in whatever capacity is better than not having you at all.”

Even though I can’t be his lover, I love him more than ever.

PETER AND I
get together frequently. It’s usually my initiative, sometimes his.

It comforts me to be with him. So I keep asking him to come over.

When he points out, pleasantly, the abundance of my invitations, I simply say, “I like to be with you.”

He never turns me down. The few times he can’t make it, he makes a counterinvitation, usually for earlier or later the same day.

I CATCH MYSELF
staring at him when I think he’s not looking. But sometimes he catches me. Like the time we were sitting on my couch, watching a movie, and I thought the angle would make it impossible for him to know I was gazing at him, and he said, “Why are you staring at me like that?”

Blushing, all I could say was, “You have good peripheral vision.”

“Yeah. So why are you?”

“Just looking at what a good friend you are.”

His eye twitched.

WE MAKE A
point of not getting together on Valentine’s Day to avoid the romance aspect. But we make up for it by seeing each other five evenings in a row after that.

I don’t know what Peter did on Valentine’s Day. I don’t ask. As for me, I stayed home working.

FINALLY, ONE DAY,
when I call Peter—as I often do to ask him if he wants to come over and hang out—he tells me, “You don’t understand. It’s very difficult. I am practically delirious. I could get killed crossing the street because I have fantasies and I don’t see the cars.”