Flavor of the Month (119 page)

Villains. There were so many out here, all of them posing as heroes. Sy Ortis, Les Merchant, Hyram Flanders, Bob LeVine, Michael McLain, Marty DiGennaro. And Sam, of course. All selling dream meat. She looked at the picture of her and Sam which still stood on the table beside the bed and shook her head again before she pitched it into the wastepaper basket, frame and all. It had been taken in Santa Cruz. That was only a few months ago. Back when she thought he could love her. Back when she thought he was worth loving.

One more home truth: Ridiculous as the charade had been, she was glad she’d gone through it. She’d longed for him, been rejected, and burned with her humiliation, a sort of culmination of all the humiliations of fat, sad, serious, smart, sensitive, plain girls. But, unlike them, at last, she’d had the chance to transform herself, and then to feel his longing for her. Still, the ending was the same. NOTHING HAD CHANGED. Beauty didn’t protect you from betrayal. Hadn’t Mai told her that? Hadn’t Brewster Moore? Well, fuck it, then! Who needed beauty? It was only another trap for women. The silken trap, the desired trap, the exalted trap, but nothing more than a trap with trappings.

She stalked into the bathroom, ready to pack her toothbrush, deodorant, and that host of products that were lined up there, promising to make her more lovely, younger, softer; to bring out her hidden beauty or to hide her flaws. She looked up to the mirror, at her face: her sculpted, expensive, symmetrical, perfect face. And, once again, she saw her eyes, her old eyes, those eyes of a little girl left alone with her mother’s blood in a hospital corridor. The eyes of a betrayed and abandoned child. They stared out at her, trapped behind the face that she now wore like a mask. Once again, she had hurt that little girl; once again, she had forced her to be hurt.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped, and found herself crying aloud. “I’m so sorry about what I did to you.” The image in the mirror blurred through her tears but, desperate that she would lose touch with the child, her younger self, she rubbed the tears away.

“I’m sorry I hated you,” she choked. “I’m sorry I caused you so much pain.” She thought of those years of rejection she’d forced herself to go through in New York, of rejection by directors who wouldn’t cast her, by men who didn’t want her, of starving herself, of the agony at the hospital. “I’m sorry,” she gasped again. “I believed them, not you.” She looked into her own eyes, warm, brown, unchanged, and still so sad, so frightened. “I’ll never do it again. I promise you. I’ll never believe them again.”

She turned to the jars and bottles arranged along the vanity. She picked up a bottle of Visible Difference Night Repair. It was a pretty bottle, and fit smoothly, seductively, into the palm of her hand, like a pearl tucked in an oyster. But pearls were actually poison that the oyster had ingested, then coated with its own secretions.

“No more!” she said, and threw the little bottle against the marble floor. It smashed, sending tiny, diamond-bright shards across the floor. She picked up the one next to it. Système Anti-Age Crème de Jour. Where did they get these names? She flung it across the room, where it crashed against the marble baseboard and split open, its heavy white contents oozing onto the floor. She picked up the eye creams next, and the special hair conditioners, then the hand creams, the moisturizers, the makeup base, the blushers and their sable brushes, hurling them all across the room. She stamped on blusher, crushing the color into the white marble, pulverizing it. Then she broke open the eye-shadow colors, one after another. Glimmering Violet. Misty Mauve. Opalescent. She threw each one as if it were a grenade, breathing hard as they all smashed against the wall and fell to the floor. That wasn’t enough. They had to be crushed for the lies they represented. “Use me and you’ll be beautiful.” “Paint me on your eyelids and you’ll be loved.” As she pulverized them, a bouquet began to blossom underfoot. “Pretty poison,” she murmured and, lifting a bottle of Youth Dew Eye Make-Up Remover, poured its oily contents onto the floor. Then she smashed the empty bottle. She was out of breath, but she couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop.

All her life, it seemed, she hadn’t been pretty enough. She had lost jobs, men, and her self-esteem because she didn’t look enough like the impossible pictures in the magazines, on the movie screen, on television. And even when she became pretty, even beautiful, even when she
became
one of the women on the screens, in the magazines, she had learned that
they
weren’t perfect enough, that she still wasn’t perfect enough, without special lenses, without careful makeup, without a full-time hairdresser, a stylist, a trainer, starvation diets, facials and manicures, an artful cameraman, a legion of specialists to perfect the illusion. No wonder there wasn’t a single woman in America under forty who was satisfied with her looks. No wonder women were risking cancer to increase their breast size, no wonder they were anorectic, and bulimic, and crazy. Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the media, and men—all of them had conspired to make women hate themselves for not looking like Lila Kyle, a six-foot-tall postadolescent boy with a huge pair of silicone knockers.

Jahne looked into the mirror again. Worst of all was that she had helped spread the lie. She’d had the surgery, she’d starved herself, she’d denied her appetites, her age, her face. I helped them, she thought. I helped Marty and Sy and Seymore and April. I helped them push product, push image. I helped Flanders Cosmetics with those endorsements; I helped to sell the lie. And I was loved for the lie. Which means I was never loved at all.

“No more,” she cried, and picked up a Chanel lipstick, Ultra Violet, and smeared it across the mirror. As she scrawled “
NO MORE
,” the stick broke, and she threw it away from her, picked up another, and continued until it broke, too. Then another, and another, until the huge mirror was covered with “
NO MORE
”
S
in a rainbow of colors and the floor was littered with the broken remains of two dozen lipsticks. Jahne turned to the perfumes.

It wasn’t enough to be ashamed of your looks. You also had to be ashamed of your smell. Don’t smell like a woman. Smell like lilacs, or tuberoses and eucalyptus. Smell like citrus, or musk with a slight hint of lavender, or violet-scented talc. Put on deodorant, then perfume, then douche with the smell of country flowers, then slip in a perfumed panty liner and powder yourself fresh as a daisy, lovely as a lily bouquet.

With a single movement, she wiped the expensive perfume bottles off the counter and onto the floor. The crystal flagons crashed, then crunched noisily underfoot. The scent rose up, thick as a wall, and nearly sickened her. “Yes!” she cried. It smelled like a whorehouse, and it should. It was appropriate. She had sold and been sold. Pimped by Hollywood, pimped by April, pimped by Sam, by Sy Ortis. “But no more!” she cried, the smell clawing at her throat, nauseating her. She picked up the remaining face powder, the brushes, the cover sticks, the tweezer, the eyebrow pencils, the mascaras, the lip liners, the eyeliners. She broke what she could, scattered the rest, tore open the drawers, and found more: eyelash curlers, makeup sponges, rollers, mascara cakes and brushes, pancake lip glosses. She pulled out the entire drawer and emptied it onto the floor, smashing what she could.

By now it was a punishment to stay in the room: her eyes were stinging from the stink, and she was gagging. But she had to finish the job. She grabbed the next drawer, emptied it, and smashed the contents. There were the hot rollers, the hair gel, the mousses. There was the honey-almond facial scrub, the cucumber skin toner, the strawberry facial masque. Enough fruits and nuts and vegetables to feed a Honduran village for a week, enough alcohol to get them drunk for a month, enough cotton balls and pads to keep them clothed for a year.

She was taking her breaths in jagged, sickening gulps. She surveyed the filth of the ruined room. The desecration was complete: her pristine bathroom, that temple to feminine allure, was splashed with the muck that she and every other woman in America had been taught they needed. “No more,” she said, and stepped backward, closing the door.

Jahne lay on the sofa in her huge, empty living room. Living room? This mausoleum? No, giving this up wouldn’t be too hard. But what did she do next?

She thought back to New York, to the time before
Jack and Jill
, to her life with Sam, to the breakup. She thought about Molly and Chuck, about Neil before he lost it. And she thought about those two horrible, lonely years she’d spent getting cut and pasted back together.

Did she wish she’d never done it? Did she wish she’d maintained her identity as Mary Jane?

She couldn’t say yes to that. She was glad she’d gone through it. Not for anyone else, but for
her
. Never having had beauty, she would have always craved it. She would not have known that no amount of it was ever enough. If she hadn’t gone through with the surgery, she’d never have experienced all of this. She thought she’d known the differences in life for a beautiful woman and an ugly one, but she’d had to experience them. She was glad she had.

And now she was sick of the world that perpetuated those differences: that made the shape of an eye and the tip of a nose so much more than a genetic hat trick. She was sick of a culture that worshipped youth and beauty only so that it could humiliate, humble, and control all those without it. But Hollywood’s mania, America’s mania, was spreading all across the globe. America exported its vision of culture the way Japan exported televisions.

So where could she go? Where was safe? And what would she do once she got there?

Jahne could hear the phone ringing at the other end of the long-distance line. Please be home, doctor, she prayed. Please be home. She wondered what Brewster Moore’s apartment was like. Did he sleep in a single bed, or a double, or even a king? Did he sleep alone? Please, God, she prayed, let him sleep alone.

“Hello?”

“Brewster? It’s Mary Jane.” Thank God. It was a good connection. She could hear him take in his breath. “Did I wake you? I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right.” He paused. “I haven’t spoken to Mary Jane in a long time.”

“I know. Neither have I, really.” She stopped. How could she explain? How could anyone, even he, understand what had happened to her: who she had been and who she had tried to be and who she was now? “Something has happened. I mean, I feel like I’ve changed, that…” She sounded ridiculous. She listened to the silence on the line and for a moment became afraid that he wasn’t there. “Brewster?” she asked.

“Yes, Mary Jane?”

“When do you go back to Honduras?”

“Not till next month.”

“Do you need a nurse?”

“Do you need a job?”

“No, but I want one. I want one very, very much.”

Was he going to laugh at her? Was he going to think she was a dilettante, a ditz with a new role to play? All at once, she felt this was the most important call she’d ever made, the most important audition of her life. She closed her eyes. “I know it’s kind of sudden,” she began, “but something has happened to me. I think I’ve been building up to this for a long time.”

“I think you have, too,” Brewster said.

“I think I could still nurse. I mean, I’d have to study. I’ve forgotten a lot. And I don’t know any Spanish, except what Raoul taught me…”

“Wasn’t that mostly curses?”

“Yes. I could call you a monkey’s whore.”

“It may come in handy.”

She took a deep breath. “I could help with the kids. I know I could. Not in surgery, maybe, but postop. And counseling, maybe. I could help the ones with no faces. I could look at them. I could
see
them, Brewster. I know I could. And that makes all the difference. Having just one person who can see who you really are.” Tears filled her eyes. “Can I come, Brewster?” she whispered.

“Welcome aboard,” he said.

Are you kidding? I would trade it all for anonymity again.

—
KEVIN COSTNER

In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.

—
ANDY WARHOL

Fifteen minutes of that was more than enough.

—
JAHNE MOORE

Laura Richie here. Of course, I was there all along, reporting the facts, getting down each detail of the story. And what a story! I can’t take the credit for making it up, but I can get the credit for writing it all down. Who could make something like this up? All of America worshipping at the shrine of the three false sex idols: one involved with her “brother,” one a Frankenstein, and the last one a man! It was a story that used too many exclamation points, and I myself try to be sparing with them. Well, you know what they say: truth is stranger than fiction. You can’t say that you didn’t get good value for your twenty-three dollars. (Or six ninety-nine in paper.)

It has taken me more than three years to do the research and to fit all the pieces together. I don’t suppose I’ll get the Pulitzer, or a MacArthur grant, but it’s a hell of a job of reporting, nonetheless. And if the critics, as they inevitably do, lambaste me as petty, small-minded, and vicious, I may shed a secret tear as I endorse my next royalty check. I already banked a seven-figure advance, and gave Nancy, my secretary, enough of a bonus for her to put down a large deposit on a nice little condo in San Diego. She’s retiring next month. I tell her she won’t be able to take doing nothing all day, but she just laughs and says she’s going to try. She says she only wants to live through the typing of this final revision of this, my final book. I, too, am tired of the dirt, of the secrets, of the scandals that America loves to read about. Maybe, in my heart, I believe what my critics have said. Mine was a small and dirty contribution to literature
.

But you, gentle Reader, you bought the book. Thank you. Perhaps you can explain to the critics and the reporters and sociologists this American fascination for gossip about the rich and famous. I don’t have a clue. But I knew this story would sell like cellulite remover in the spring
.