Waking Beauty (32 page)

“Oh. Okay. No problem.”

Nathan stood up.

I didn’t want to, but I stood up, too. “Well, I guess that’s it, then.” I picked up my purse and swung it over my shoulder.

“Not quite,” said Nathan, going into the bathroom and returning with a towel. “You’re covered in sauce,” he said, smiling. “You should probably clean yourself up a bit if you’re going to meet my folks.”

“Smoke on the Water.” That’s what Nathan’s dad played on the Majestic Monster Tuba ten minutes after we arrived for dinner. It was horrendously off-key and Nathan looked mortified, especially after his mom came in, brandishing a bottle of Danzy Jones Whiskey Liqueur, and demanding that he stop, lest he “scare Nathan’s new friend away.” But I thought it sounded good.

I liked it very much indeed.

17    

We slept at my place that night, due to the broken elevator
and twenty-two floors. It was lovely. Humid and sticky and great. In the morning Nathan went bleary-eyed to work, and I didn’t. I lounged for hours on the futon, perusing the want ads, drinking coffee, and waiting for Nathan to call me and let me know if he could zip out for a late lunch. He had to work that night at 505 Richmond, and the thought of not seeing him until eleven P.M. was too terrible. Of course, I was on the john when the phone finally rang. I clamped my bladder shut and lurched out of the bathroom.

“Hello.”

“Allison?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Fiona. Are you okay? You sound out of breath.”

“No, I’m—” Leaking urine down my thigh. “I’m fine.”

“Listen,” she said. “Can you do me a favor?”

“Um, sure.”

“You know that job I submitted you for?”

“Oh—”

“Don’t panic,” she interrupted. “You didn’t get it.”

“Okay.”

“But they’re holding go-sees in town tomorrow afternoon, and they’d like to have a look at you.”

“Okay.”

“Now, it’s highly unlikely they’d consider you for the job; it’s a huge campaign. But they liked your look and probably want to check out a new face for future reference. Anyway, it’ll be less complicated for me if you could just go and let them see you. I don’t want to piss them off.”

“No problem. So, what’s it for, anyway?”

“Calet,” she said. “They’re looking for the new face of Calet #7. And it’s too bloody bad you don’t want to do this, Allison, because you’re the only girl from the agency they’d even deign to look at.”

Well, of course, I thought as I crawled across the floor, mopping up the trickle of piss that led from toilet to telephone: Who could be more Feminine, Timeless, or Sophisticated than I?

So I went. And they looked. They looked at a lot of girls. I had never seen so many genetically blessed individuals in one location. I felt very alien when I took my place in the waiting room, a holding pen populated by a bevy of pouty-lipped beauties with a combined body-mass index of about eleven. An edgy energy permeated the room as the girls came and went or waited their turn to be ogled (short intervals
behind a not entirely soundproof door that lasted anywhere from thirty seconds to three minutes). There was a surface camaraderie, pretty smiles, giggly chitchat—a lot of the girls seemed to know one another—floating atop a heavy bottom-note of competitiveness as the females ferociously sized one another up, feature by feature, and strained to hear what was going on in the next room, then checked their watches to see precisely how long each one had been granted with the powerful Calet people.

I thought: I’m really glad I decided not to be a part of this racket; I’d rather empty trash cans for the rest of my life than have anything to do with this. But three days later, when Fiona called to breathlessly and frenetically inform me that I had somehow blown them away with my “personality,” and the gig was mine if I wanted it, I told her yes, absolutely, I would do it.

It was Maureen who changed my mind.

Here’s what happened. On Friday morning, when I went to the Healing Art Center to visit Jeannie, I found her at the card table at the back, with her left arm in a cast almost to the elbow. Olga pulled me aside and told me that she had broken her wrist.

“How?” I asked.

“According to her sister, she fell.” Then she showed me the painting that Jeannie had done on the previous afternoon. It was a face mangled by rage. A woman’s face. Maureen’s face. “I’ve seen bruises on her arms before,” whispered Olga. “I don’t believe she fell.”

18    

Shortly thereafter Allison Penny became the new face
of Calet #7. I was flown to Los Angeles and put up in a pleasant hotel for just over a month while the TV commercials were filmed and I was launched, so to speak. During this time, I spoke daily to Nathan, who checked in weekly with Jeannie and Olga.

On the whole, I found the Calet/L.A. experience to be bizarre and unappealing. The directors were fascinating creatures, but the work itself was frequently boring and often mortifying. In one commercial, I had to swing back and forth on a perch in a giant golden birdcage. In another, I had to be chased and carried off by a “Statue of David” that had come alive. In the third, I had to waltz endlessly around in a velvet-and-taffeta number that weighed about three hundred pounds. The days started early and went late, and there were always dozens of people buzzing around: producers, publicists, directors, photographers, hairdressers, makeup artists, set designers, stylists, managers, assistants, actors, models, journalists, aestheticians, cinematographers, agents, writers, moguls, groupies, gaffers, and grips. Of course, everybody was pleased to meet me. Allison Penny suddenly had a million friends. And Nathan was right: I was hit on repeatedly by studs with glam jobs and sports cars and full heads of hair. “Model whores” is what they’re called, apparently—a sorry subgroup of males whose raison d’être is to date propitious genetic anomalies. It was an ordeal. Exhausting. Nevertheless, I was well compensated for my four weeks of pretty service. Fiona negotiated a contract that covered worldwide rights for television, print, POP, magazine and newspaper. For this I received a shocking $2.3 million (I like to think of it as $230,000 commission I took out of Peter Igel’s pocket).

Here’s the first thing I did when I got home: I arranged to pay off Maureen and take over guardianship of Jeannie. Then
I sent three thousand dollars to George. I made a generous donation to the Healing Art Center and bought a house in which Jeannie, Nathan, and I could live. A good thing for all involved. Another good thing I did was slip copies of Nathan’s screenplay to the celebrity directors who filmed the Calet ads. One of them, Jason Soderman, read it and liked it. Not enough to want to shoot the thing, but enough to want to read the next screenplay Nathan comes up with. He also promised to pass the script on to an agent pal at William Morris, and Nathan and I are on tenterhooks, waiting to hear back. In the meantime, I’ve convinced him to quit his job at 505 Richmond and try writing in the evenings.

So now it’s the three of us in my slightly wonky, one hundred-year-old Victorian house. It’s not completely furnished yet, but it has a fireplace, and a claw-footed tub, and a cool blue swimming pool in the yard, which backs onto the Beltline Trail. I had an art room constructed for Jeannie in the third-floor loft, and a desktop recording studio for me to fool around with in the basement. Nathan’s office is in the spare bedroom that looks out onto the garden. He likes admiring the plants while he types, knowing he no longer has to tend them. The three of us do our own thing and we get along well. We paint and write and sing. We eat deathbed lasagna and watch good movies and swim under the sun. Jeannie, like me, loves to swim. Ever since she had her cast removed, we’ve spent hours a day bobbing around in the pool. Jeannie still hasn’t spoken, but I’ve noticed just recently that she’s started to hum—there’s a stereo in the art room; she’s been listening a lot to my Chet Baker box set.

Of course, Fiona telephones regularly with “lucrative opportunities.” As soon as the Calet campaign hit airwaves and magazines, she started to receive inquiries from everyone and their grandma. Fortunately, my Calet contract is exclusive and precludes me from modeling for anybody else for two years. I am, however, permitted to do movies, television, and rock videos, and the offers have poured in. If I wanted
to, I could have played a spy in the new James Bond film; I could have minced around semi-clad in an upcoming Aero-smith video, or portrayed the coach’s love interest in a movie about a soccer-playing kangaroo. But I didn’t want to. All I’ve ever wanted to do is sing. So a couple weeks ago, I went to the Gladwell Hotel and got my old job back as KJ. Now that I’m no longer allergic to smoke, it’s perfect. Eight bucks an hour, plus half-price draught. I was delighted to see that all the regulars were still hanging in, making microphone magic. I was especially gratified to find eighty-plus Edgar Whittle still crooning “Stand by Your Man” every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights.

Poor Fiona was apoplectic when she heard about my employment. “The Gladwell Hotel?! I know you’re an odd duck, Allison, but why on earth would you want to be a maid in that dive?”

“I’m not a maid. I’m a karaoke host. I like it there. I like to sing.”

“Sing? You can sing?”

“Sort of.”

Three days later Fiona brought me an offer from EMI. So even though my voice is completely uninteresting now, it seems I can have that singing career after all if I want it.

Sheesh.

19    

“I have an idea,” I said. Nathan and I were dangling
our feet in the pool on a warm Sunday night. “Why don’t you write a movie about an ugly woman who wakes up beautiful one day?”

Nathan was feeling pressure to come up with an idea for his new script. He had already started two and abandoned them. “What do you mean, ‘wakes up beautiful’?”

“Well, she goes to bed ugly and wakes up transformed for some reason.”

“Like Gregor Samsa?”

“Right. But it’s not symbolic; it’s not a physical expression of what she’s feeling. It’s real. She’s inexplicably beautiful. And you show how everything in her life changes because of it. Suddenly, everyone treats her differently. She can get sex and love and good jobs, access to all kinds of exclusive worlds—”

“And revenge on people who were dicks to her when she was ugly.”

“I guess…if she’s that kind of person. But, you know, you could just show how her life improves immeasurably in every area and in every way.”

Nathan mulled it over. “So for a while she thinks it’s just great being beautiful, but then the reversals start.”

“Reversals?”

“Yeah. Bad stuff. Drawbacks.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know…like people assume she’s an airhead, and don’t take her seriously anymore.”

“But if she wasn’t an airhead, all she would have to do is open her mouth to disprove them.”

“That’s true.”

“It’s not really a big drawback.”

“Okay, well, maybe a jealous rival tries to sabotage her. Throws acid in her face or something.”

“Too extreme,” I said. “Too movieish.”

“Or maybe she’s really shy and introverted to begin with, right?”