Ursula came here as a teenager, one of the thousands comprising the nightly spectacle that was and still is Harvey Street, a heady blend of tourists and suburbanites who make the pilgrimage by the busload for the pleasure of dressing up in system-buckingly cheap thrift-store outfits, or the harrowingly expensive designer knockoffs thereof, and promenading up and down this quasi-world-famous strip in order to gawk and scoff at the other dressed-up or dressed-down tourists and suburbanites who, in turn, are gawking and scoffing at them.
All of this is just as she remembers it, but there have been some changes, too. The customary “Mid City Sucks” T-shirt has evolved into several hardier, more virulent strains, such as the “I Paid a Malaysian Textile Worker’s Monthly Wage for a Middle City T-shirt” T-shirt, and the still more eye-straining “I Got Insulted, Robbed, Raped, Jailed, Hooked on Crack, and Gang Raped in the Mid” T-shirt. The Narcotics Anonymous meeting hall and the Scientology recruiting office have been supplanted by two theme restaurants: Medea, where you can have a meal vaguely resembling your murdered offspring, and GrossOut!, where you can dine surrounded by blown-up photographs of rare skin diseases, Siamese twins, radiation victims, flamethrower victims, cannibals gnawing on roasted hands, women eating feces from men’s anuses or menstrual blood from other women’s vaginas, jars of pickled mutant fetuses, cross-sectioned heads, and maggots feasting on cats’ carcasses. And the old wino mime with the sign saying he was trying to raise $1,000,000.25 for wine research has been forced out by an invasion of slicker operators: the mime who screams at passersby, the mime who mimics different people using exactly the same mannerisms, the mime who feels for a way out of an actual glass box.
It was never exactly a cultural mecca, but still, Ursula can’t help feeling there’s something insidious about the changes here. In high school the one thing she learned in her blow-off Earth Science class was that Earth and Venus started off almost exactly the same, the only difference between them being a temperature variation of about four degrees, which tiny difference caused a tiny bit more water to evaporate from the oceans, trapping a little more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which trapped a little more heat and caused the temperature to rise a couple more degrees, which caused more water to evaporate, and so on, until the planet was a seven-hundred-degree hellhole of corrosive gas. The lesson concerned a brand-new theory known as chaos, and she never forgot it: in chaotic systems, slight differences in initial conditions can over time produce massively divergent outcomes.
Ursula has the eerie feeling that she’s now witnessing the early stages of a similar kind of experiment. There’s something off balance here, and that certain something—she’s almost prepared to admit it—may very well be irony. Excessive amounts of it have been released into the atmosphere. The city is already too cool for its own good, and the temperature is dropping. Soon it will be supercool, too cool for living tissue. The only survivors will be a race of disaffected, lounge-posing, ad copy–writing, indie film–watching androids.
The epicenter of the impending catastrophe may in fact be this very stoop, overlooking a cappuccino and tattoo parlor on one side and a combination religious-icon and sex-toy shop on the other, to perch on which her tireless trainer, Javier Delreal, has unerringly brought them for the purpose of people watching. Apparently this is a ritual of his, and it involves not only sitting on this stoop but also drinking beer. They have the stoop but not the beer, which is making him anxious.
“You know,” he says, “it isn’t just a matter of beer. It’s a matter of tallboys. In paper bags, the little paper bags designed specifically for tallboys.”
She pretends not to listen, having by now determined she can do this without risking her job. He doesn’t seem to take offense. She leans over the book on her lap, sketching the various new hairstyles bobbing past and giving them fanciful names: The Whirl. The Deep-fry. The Porcupine. The Pan-o’-Jell-O. It’s been a long day. Her legs are aching and her feet are sore from two days of rollerblading, and Javier gave her only an hour off to shower and change and eat before making her meet him again for this nocturnal outing. In her sketchbook, her pencil marks come out deep and jagged, the emergent faces vulgar and discomposed, the trunks like shards of flint, no arms or legs. The figures are so mean- and disturbed-looking that she almost laughs at herself. Eventually she’ll have to turn them into airbrushed marketing fodder, and it’s not so much an aesthetic revolt as a perverse moral impulse that makes her want to render that job as difficult as possible for herself.
“The can of beer has to be in the paper bag. Right up to the rim,” he goes on. “So when you take a swig your bottom lip touches the paper, not the can. And that little bit of paper gets soaked with the beer. And you taste the brown paper bag as well as the beer.”
It’s not because she doesn’t want a beer that she’s resisting. She likes beer, and the way he describes it actually makes her gulp with anticipation. But for some reason she suspects that Javier doesn’t like beer, that he would never even think of wanting one if he didn’t happen to be sitting on a Harvey Street stoop on a Saturday night, the same way he’d probably opt for a piña colada on a tropical vacation or a Pernod in the bar at Charles de Gaulle Airport.
“It’s not a good precedent, to forgo the tallboys,” he explains. “Things like that have consequences. People who sit on stoops without tallboys come to bad ends.”
“Like what?” she says.
“They end up donating kidneys. Filling out place-mat puzzles. Rooting in cockfights.”
“So go get a beer. I’m not stopping you.”
“No. You’ve got to have one too. It wouldn’t be right with just me drinking. We’ve got to sit here and be like two synchronized pistons. Slow-motion-like. Me drinking, you pausing. You drinking, me pausing. That’s just the way these things are done.”
She closes her sketchbook. “Hey, Javier, what do you say we go get some beer?”
“Check.”
They get up and walk to the corner store, which Javier refers to, with due reverence, as a bodega. Apparently this bodega is part of Javier’s ritual as well. He talks about what a good bodega it is, how it’s one of the last of its kind, well lit but not overlit, how the narrow aisles are stocked almost all the way to the low ceiling, allowing you to shop with a feeling of privacy and even intimacy.
“They put the little cookie bags up there on the top shelf,” he says, pointing. “If you see them, it’s only by accident. They’re almost out of reach, even. That’s great, really great.”
“Why?”
“It’s so innocent. Everyone knows you put the impulse items right by the counter. They teach you things like that in grade school nowadays. But it works here, don’t you think? It makes you feel secure. It’s exactly where your parents put the cookies, way up in a jar on the top shelf behind the bag of flour and the box of oatmeal.” Javier gazes moonily at the bright packages.
“Is that where your parents put the cookies?” she asks.
“My parents? No. We didn’t have cookies.”
For a moment his face goes slack, losing its hyperintensity, becoming, she thinks, what it must really look like. It’s a strange face, sad and a little beautiful, even, every feature—eyes, nose, cheekbones, lips, chin—a little too big or too long, like an Eastern Orthodox saint’s. But then he smirks, and his eyes dart at her puckishly.
“I was raised by Gypsies.”
He picks a can of cat food off the shelf. “Filet mignon–flavored. Take a look.”
The cat on the label is wearing a miniature robe, tall gray wig, and crown, in the style of Catherine the Great.
“There’s actual filet mignon in it,” he says.
“That’s kind of sick.”
“Cats are there to be indulged. That’s their function: to receive the love and devotion we never fully gave our parents. Not like dogs. Dogs are there to give us the love and devotion our children will never fully give us. You’ve never seen a dog wearing a tiara on a dog-food can, right?”
“Not that I can remember,” she admits.
“Well, now you know why. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Did you have cookies in cupboards?”
“I guess so.”
“Loving parents? Happy childhood?”
“That’s kind of a sore subject,” she says.
He looks at her expectantly. She gives in.
“They divorced when I was thirteen,” she begins. “Standard story. My dad left my mom for a slightly younger woman, moved away with her, and started a slightly younger family. Not very inventive, but then, he’s not the interesting one. That’s my mother Gwennan’s job. Pretty much her full-time one since she lost her real job.”
“What was her job?”
“She was a plastic surgeon, until she did a few operations on a woman who wanted to look like Betty Boop.”
“Betty Boop,” Javier repeats. “Sure, she’s pretty hot, for a cartoon.”
“I guess I’m not making myself entirely clear. The woman didn’t just want to kind of resemble her; she wanted to have the exact same proportions as the cartoon character—her face, her body, everything. She was a performance artist, or wanted to be one. The operations were going to be a publicity stunt for the Postfeminist Movement. Her life-character would be known as the Boopleganger, and her mission would be to disrupt media events.”
Javier nods somberly, bulging his cheek with his tongue. “And . . . your mother did the operations.”
“My mother is a supporter of the arts. That’s more or less what she told the jury when the woman sued.”
“She didn’t do a good job?”
“No, she did a very good job. She obsessed over the job. She did eleven operations on the woman over four years. She planned out each one for months. She stopped taking other clients. She’d sit in her study poring over medical books, making notes and sketches, screening Betty Boop cartoons against the window shade using an old movie projector. The result of it all—the Boopleganger, I mean—was, well, something less than human, more than cartoon.”
“ ‘Less than human’?”
“It’s not easy to describe. Her nose was just a kind of fleshy tab. Her lips were sort of sectioned off, and collagen was pressure-pumped into the centers. Her cheekbones were like the bony faceplates of a rhinoceros. Her breasts, I’m pretty sure, were unrivaled by anything in history except for maybe a couple Indian fertility goddesses.”
“Wow,” Javier mumbles. “So did she do her performance art? I never heard anything about it.”
“No. She stayed indoors, mostly. At first she wanted everything complete before she made her appearance. And then . . . she just didn’t want to go out. The final operation was going to be on her eye sockets, which my mom was planning to expand so they could contain plastic replicas of Betty’s giant moonpie eyes. These would be removable, for the Boopleganger to use primarily during performances. In court the Boopleganger’s lawyer argued that no ethical and responsible plastic surgeon would ever have collaborated in the plans of a woman so clearly deranged—which, according to the Boopleganger herself, she’d been all along.”
“And then she . . . um . . . stopped being deranged?”
“She testified she got her sanity back suddenly one day and found herself hideously deformed; a couple psychiatrists explained her condition. But none of the testimony was really necessary anyway. The sight of her alone probably would have convinced any jury. The clincher was when Gwennan admitted under cross-examination that she’d encouraged the Boopleganger to go on with the operations even after she started expressing doubts. Gwennan basically confessed she’d become emotionally invested in the project.”
“I can see how that wouldn’t look too good.”
“My mother was a postmodern Dr. Frankenstein, and the Boopleganger was her creation, her true daughter, a monster that returned to destroy her. The newspaper editorials called it a lesson to any and all who would presume to overstep the natural limits of taste.”
Javier looks at her—a little fearfully, she thinks.
“What happened to your mother after that?” he asks.
“She became a Buddhist, joined a bridge club, and in her one or two hours of spare time a week devoted herself to raising her children.”
He smiles weakly. “Good thing for the bridge and Buddhism, eh?”
She laughs, and a look of something, understanding or solidarity, passes between them. Ursula is happy for this—she hasn’t had anyone she’s felt she could talk to in a while—but their quiet moment is interrupted by two women in party dresses and teased hair who saunter between them and over to the beer coolers. After a little comparison shopping, they pick out two six-packs of Corona.
Javier leans over and whispers in her ear.
“How about I show you an old trick Chas taught me?” He winks at her, then strides over to the cooler.
“Hey. You guys headed for the party?” he asks, reaching in for a six of Dos Equis. One of the women hesitates, but the other says yes.
“So are we. I’m Javier, and this is Ursula.”
They respond with their names. The one in the skunk-print slip is Bettina. The one with the pointillist landscape dress is Tammy.
“So who do you guys know?” Bettina asks Ursula on their way to the counter.
“We’re part of John’s contingent,” Javier explains.
“John?” Bettina says. “Which John?”
“John Hayden.”
“Oh. I don’t know that John.”
“He’s in sales.”
“We’re in sales,” Tammy says.
“Really? Are we talking the same company?”
“General Foods?” she asks.
“Right. Well, he’s mostly regional nowadays.” He tosses a Payday bar down next to his six-pack on the counter. “You probably wouldn’t see him much. Hey, Santos.”
He shakes hands with the weary Latino man behind the counter and asks him to break a hundred, talking about Middle Eastern counterfeiting rings as Santos holds the bill under an ultraviolet lamp. By the time the group gets out onto the street Javier has already changed the subject a few times over, with a little help from the headlines on the row of newspapers next to the door. Tearing into his candy bar, he brings up a recent murder mystery in Richard W. Held Park, about which the two women profess fear and exhibit excitement. He tries out yesterday’s capture of a guerrilla leader in central Africa, but they aren’t too keen on politics, so he shifts back to the familiar: the British royal family, the latest fun-loving-hitmen buddy movie.
They turn uphill on Singlaub and are met by the full moon, nestled beside a low cloud of crater ash above the volcano’s mouth, its cushiony underside illuminated by the jeweled city lights.
Tammy and Bettina gaze at the tableau.
“Full moon,” Tammy says softly. “Anything could happen tonight.” Bettina nods, her eyes misted, her face newly serene and hopeful. It’s as though the two of them had been sprinkled with pixie dust. Javier gives Ursula a look that says, This Is Significant.
“What’s it mean to you?” Javier asks the two women. “That bright big moon up there?”
Tammy and Bettina give each other an amused, questioning look, silently conferring, probably, on the issue of whether Javier is weirder than he is cute or cuter than weird. They seem, at least provisionally, to settle on the latter, and begin trying to answer his question. Javier keeps eyeing Ursula as the women talk about travel, adventure, romance. He begins to prompt them. Does it mean newness or oldness? They talk about childhood camp-outs under the stars and about ancient mysteries and decide it means both. Does it mean belonging or separation? Again they decide it means both. Wholeness or emptiness? Wholeness, definitely. He asks them if they’re superstitious, and at first they don’t think so, but then Tammy admits that her horoscopes are often quite accurate, and then Bettina talks about her frequent déjà vu experiences and the dream she had about flying, which was a lot like the skydiving scene in the TV movie she saw the next night, and then Tammy relates her recent dream of going to a shoe store and being fitted with a pair so soft she couldn’t even feel the ground. She thinks it might mean something, but she isn’t sure.
To Javier, of course, it means something.
“Superstition is on the rise,” he whispers to Ursula.
They turn up the driveway of a luxury high-rise and take the elevator to the seventy-seventh floor. She wonders how Javier can be so sure they won’t be stepping into something they can’t possibly fake their way through—a dinner party, a bridal shower, a living room in which four people are playing Scrabble—but as it turns out, he’s judged the women well: the party is large and well under way, the apartment a duplex in which seventy or so people are milling around in the main rooms of the lower floor and a dozen more are out on the back terrace. The crowd is midtwenties to thirties, professional, the men wearing regulation dress-down Friday khakis and audaciously baggy sport coats, the women dressed on the whole more casually than Bettina and Tammy. The front room is decorated with cartoon stills, and the back with vintage liquor and cigarette ads.
A stocky man in a black satin shirt and black jeans strides over to bellow hello to Bettina and Tammy and stick a hand in Javier’s direction.
“Ed Cabaj,” he announces.
“Javier Delreal. And this is—”
“Ursula,” Ursula cuts in.
Cabaj appraises her, his bushy eyebrows furrowing toward the center of his broad, red, balding head. “You look familiar,” he says. “Have we met before?”
“We probably met at some other party,” she says, looking off through the terrace window. “Octoberfest? Mardi Gras? Day of the Dead?”
“They’re friends of John . . .” Bettina pauses. “What did you say his name was?”
“Hammond,” Javier says, at the same time Tammy says “Hayden.” “Hammond,” he corrects her.
“And he invited you here?” Cabaj says.
Javier looks back at him innocently, opening his hands. “Well, he lives here, doesn’t he?”
“No,” Cabaj says. “I live here.”
“You’re kidding!”
Ursula begins scanning for exits. Javier turns to her and says, “You know what, Ursula? I think we’ve come to the wrong party! Isn’t this Four eighty-four West McCone?”
“No. It’s Four eighty-four West Wisner,” Cabaj says.
“Aha! This is fantastic! They’ll crack up at John’s place when I tell them about this. I’ll tell them all what a great party you’re throwing over here. Tell me, Ed, what is it you do?”
After a bit of formalized modesty, Cabaj reveals that he’s the head of marketing for General Foods’ New Beverage division. As it turns out, this is a very challenging job. It is a very exciting time for new beverages. You have to be very creative nowadays in marketing. Javier keeps feeding him questions, he and Ursula going into Very Interested mode, eyes widened 14 percent, nodding every 3.7 seconds. Cabaj hammers the ball back into Javier’s court.
“So now tell me what you do.”
Javier gives the one-word answer, which of course doesn’t satisfy. Sensing no end to the conversation in sight, Ursula excuses herself to get a drink. She finds the wet bar in the kitchen and makes herself a vodka tonic in a tall glass, happy at long last to finally have a minute alone—ridiculously happy, downright giddy, in fact. She can’t believe Javier scammed their way in here like that, can’t believe he got away with it. The drink, she sees, looks just as it should—the tall glass, the rough-cut ice cubes, the slight rainbow brightening the faint tonic fizz. She moves over to the garnish bowls and finds Bettina and Tammy behind her. She holds up her drink for their inspection.
“Have you ever seen a vodka tonic that looked so much like a vodka tonic?” she asks.
Bettina and Tammy exchange an ambiguous look. Ursula goes on.
“It could be in an ad for vodka, or for tonic, or for glassware, or for investment services. This vodka tonic has star potential.” She addresses the drink: “Stick with me, kid. We’ll go places!”
They smile. And cut her, turning to talk to a man who’s just walked up, an effete-looking guy with octagonal-lensed glasses and a trimmed hedge of curly hair. Mission accomplished. She returns her attention to her preferred companion, the drink. Lemon wedge or lemon peel? The wedge would taste better, but the peel would look better. The choice might have seemed obvious to her before, but no longer. Appearances mean something, after all. They offer a pleasure all their own. Ultimately she hits upon the solution of squeezing the wedge over the drink, disposing of it, and then dropping in the peel. Who says you can’t have it all?
But the operation takes too long. Cabaj and Javier have appeared. Cabaj is pressing close to Javier, asking him to explain what he means about something. Javier hesitates, then steps up to the bar.
“OK, this is kind of what I mean,” he says. “This is the world.” His hands pass over the glittering rows of bottles and then flutter over a silver serving tray, clearing it off. He picks up the tray and balances it on top of the bottles. He then begins to place things on the tray—the bowl of pretzels, the martini shaker, the plate of limes.
Cabaj laughs nervously. “That’s several hundred dollars worth of booze you’re playing with,” he says.
“Exactly,” Javier concurs. “And this,” he says, gesturing quickly at the upper level, “is the world above the world.”
Around the pretzel bowl he places four more bottles, then balances the cheese tray on top of those bottles. He does all of this quickly, recklessly, but the balance is perfect. Cabaj watches, hypnotized by the movement of his hands.
“You see? The world above the world,” Javier says. “Our world exists only to hold up this other world, this ideal world. It’s the world of our dreams, our desires. It’s elaborate, it’s heavy, and we carry it around with us everywhere. But we don’t mind. The more that’s up here, the better. Because up here is where we keep all that’s best in us. The more that’s up here, the richer our imagination becomes.”
Behind Ursula a small crowd of people has gathered. They all watch expectantly, murmuring and laughing, waiting for catastrophe to strike.
“Now the limes,” Javier says, leaning in and pointing, “and the pretzels, and the bowl and the plate, these are products. Products are the materials we use to build our world above the world.”
Cabaj nods, and Javier runs a hand through his tangled black hair, the two of them gazing teary-eyed at the ramparts and pinnacles of the wet-bar metropolis.
“It’s nice to hear someone talk about marketing positively for a change,” Cabaj says, reaching for a bottle safely off to the side and pouring out a couple of neat tumblers of scotch. “It’s refreshing. In this business it’s so easy to forget the bigger picture.”
Javier accepts a glass from Cabaj. “Market researchers are public advocates,” he says. “We bring consumers’ desires to the attention of private companies. We’re like congressmen: we represent the public.”
Cabaj nods, thoughtful, then looks to Ursula. “You think of yourself this way, too?” he asks.
“Not so much like a congressman,” she says. “More like . . . a missionary. Or maybe a saint. Like Mother Teresa, kind of, but with an expense account.”
Cabaj begins to smile, but she keeps a straight face, and the gears of his own face slip, leaving his mouth half open and his eyebrows half cocked.
Javier holds up his glass.
“So. Here’s to marketing,” he says cheerily. The glass trembles slightly in his hand, and he quickly brings it to his mouth. She remembers the bag of pills and the handkerchief in his pocket, and she wonders what’s wrong with him. The idea that he has some kind of terminal illness takes a sudden, frightening hold of her. As she watches him swallow the drink and wipe his forehead with his sleeve, the idea gains strength in her mind: his frenzied pace, his almost spiritual need to find meaning everywhere, his complete lack of cynicism—these could very well be the qualities of a man who knows he has only a short time to live, a man who’s determined to soak up all the love he can in the time remaining to him.
Javier and Cabaj look at her. She realizes she hasn’t joined in the toast to marketing. She raises her glass and drinks, inwardly laughing at herself. The fact that she can understand optimism only as a desperate response to terminal illness no doubt says more about her own cynicism than it does about Javier.
“So, Ed,” Javier says. “What’s this revolutionary new product of yours you mentioned?”
Cabaj hesitates, looking back and forth between them. He scans the kitchen to make sure no one else is listening.
“All right, kids. I guess I can let you in.”
He rechecks the room and then leans in closer.
“Diet water,” he whispers.
“Diet water,” Javier repeats sagely, and the two of them nod.
Ursula studies Cabaj’s face feature by feature. She finds evidence of booze in his flushed cheeks and the faint skein of capillaries on the tip of his nose. She finds evidence of poor grooming in the form of a couple of recently clipped nose hairs beached on the reef of his upper lip. She finds no trace of irony. She feels the vodka beginning to burn a hole in her stomach.
Javier keeps nodding sagely for a moment longer, then shakes his head. “I don’t understand,” he admits.
Cabaj smiles. “No problem. Think about it: water is fattening. Not literally, of course. I mean, it doesn’t contain or produce fat. But still, you know, it does keep those dieters from losing as much weight as they could, right? Because the water is retained. I mean, how often have you heard women complain about water retention? How much heavier it makes them, how bloated it makes them feel?”
“Diet water,” Javier repeats, his forehead showing the struggle beneath to join these two words into a single idea. He turns to Ursula, a small, troubled knot on his brow. “Is it true, Ursula? Does water make you feel bloated?”
“Sure. Every time I drink from a fire hose.” As punctuation, she downs her vodka.
Cabaj acknowledges her wit with a laugh and a hot hand on her back.
“We’ve perfected an artificial form of water,” he says, a keen blaze in his eyes. “It passes through the body completely unabsorbed. It’s completely inert, completely harmless. It’s extremely simple to manufacture, and we’ve got all the compounds used to make it on the fast track for FDA approval. But of course, with a product this . . . as I said, revolutionary, there might be some entirely . . . foreseeable degree of reservation on the part of the consumer. So I’ve got to figure out just the right pitch. I mean, the thing’s gonna take some finesse, you dig?”
Cabaj is now leaning in so close that his aftershave vapors sting Ursula’s face.
“But . . . ,” Javier says, “but won’t people be thirsty?”
Cabaj guffaws, his bulk rippling beneath the satin shirt. “No problem. They’ll buy more. They can drink all they want, guilt-free.”
Cabaj is in high spirits. Javier’s smile is weaker.
“Well. . . .” Javier laughs, scratching his head. “. . . Well, Ursula, diet water. What do you think of that?”
Ursula looks at him, at his strained half smile, his liquid, frightened-looking eyes. It occurs to her that he may be feeling the same hole in his stomach that she is.
“It had to happen eventually, I suppose.”
Her response seems to cheer him.
“That’s true,” he says, smiling a little more genuinely now. “I’m amazed I never thought of it myself.”
“If you had, you’d be a pretty rich son of a bitch,” Cabaj says. “Or whoever you worked for would be, anyway.”
Javier nods. “Our agency can help you with this,” he says.
Cabaj smiles slyly. “You think so?”
“We’ll tell you exactly the kind of pitch people are in the mood for. As I told you, we’ve got contacts in every major city in the world, and a research department that can tell you everything there is to know about your target market.” He hands Cabaj his card. “Give us a call. We’ll make your beverage go down so smooth people won’t know how they lived without it.”
Javier’s crooked-toothed smile loiters on his face like a vagrant who doesn’t really want to be there but has nowhere better to go. He glances at Ursula and quickly away, again his eyes retreating to the comforts of the liquor-bottle landscape. Cabaj, she now sees, is staring at her.
“Excuse me—Ursula, did you say your name was?”
She nods.
“You’re a model, aren’t you?”
“No, sorry, never done that.”
“Oh. I was almost sure. But I’ve been looking at head shots for two weeks straight. I look around and see nothing but head shots. Still, I could’ve sworn. . . .” He pauses, his jaw slightly unhinged. Without looking away from her, he holds up a finger and calls out to the hedge-haired guy, who’s still standing nearby with Tammy and Bettina: “Hey, Lucien.”
The man looks up and then floats over, carrying the women in his wake. He has a sinuous way of walking, as though propelled by small snakes fastened to the bottom of his shoes.
“Couldn’t we get someone like her?” Cabaj asks him.
Lucien presses his octagonal glasses up his nose, and he and Cabaj set about examining Ursula, tilting their heads this way and that. Bettina and Tammy follow suit, regarding her with renewed interest, and Javier begins dumbly staring as well.
Meanwhile, Ursula smiles like she doesn’t have a thought in her head, like she doesn’t know exactly what’s coming next.
“She looks like Ivy Van Urden,” Lucien concludes.
Cabaj furrows his brows, trying to place the name.
“She does, doesn’t she?” Bettina says.
“The name sounds familiar,” Cabaj says.
“You know, Ed,” Bettina says. “That wannabe model who went nuts last month?” She smiles at the memory.
Cabaj laughs. “Oh, yeah. She was some kind of streaker or something, right?”
Javier glances worriedly at Ursula.
“She ran stark naked through . . .” Bettina pauses. “Which park was it?”
“Ray E. Davis Park,” Tammy says.
“Richard W. Held Park,” Lucien says.
“Banister Park,” Ursula corrects them.
“Right!” Bettina enthuses.
“Of course!” Cabaj says gratefully. “And she cut herself, too, or something, right?”
“Carved herself like a pumpkin,” Ursula says. The others laugh, except for Javier, who runs his hand through his hair nervously.
“And . . . ,” Cabaj says, “didn’t she have on . . . warpaint?”
Ursula freezes. The memory of Chas’s reference to warpaint comes back to her. And the way he stared at her when he said it. She didn’t make the connection then. She’d never thought of it as warpaint.
“She painted her body,” Tammy confirms.
I hired you for a reason, Chas said. What reason? The fact that she’s Ivy’s sister? Why would that give him any confidence in her abilities?
Lucien picks up the conversational slack left by Ursula, a serene smile oozing across his face. “She marked the places on her body she was going to cut with red paint, and then she cut them with a straight razor. Except for the marks on her cheeks.”
“Her cheeks?” Cabaj smirks. “Which cheeks?”
Tammy laughs. “Her face cheeks.”
“Why didn’t she cut her face cheeks?”
Tammy widens her eyes. “Nobody knows.”
“She probably forgot,” Ursula says. “She seemed like kind of an airhead.”
They all laugh and fall silent, the attention then gravitating back to Ursula, who stands stiffening, shoulders tense, feet taking root in the floor.
“Do a lot of people tell you you look like her?” Cabaj asks.
She takes a breath and looks at him—calmly, she hopes. “Yes. I’ve been hearing that lately.”
“Too bad she lost her marbles,” Cabaj says. “She would have been perfect for this one.”
“Why not use Ursula, then?” Javier says.
Asshole. She shoots him a look that obviously scares him.
“Oh,” Lucien says. “No, she’s a bit too smart-looking. Too, um, wise.”
“Too old, you mean,” she says.
Lucien titters, caught out.
“But I’m sure people must tell you that you should be a model all the time,” Cabaj insists.
Ursula nods. “It’s not my style. Not that Ivy Van Urden doesn’t make the whole profession seem quite glamorous.”
They all laugh.
“Excuse me,” she says. “I’ve got to go find the bathroom.”
“The one right upstairs is probably less crowded,” Cabaj offers.
She thanks him for the tip and heads for the stairs. There’s no line for the bathroom, and two men with smallish eyes are just leaving. She goes in and locks the door and commences her ritual of self-inspection, searching her reflection for the latest punishments, meted out in the form of tiny lines, freckles that increasingly resemble age spots, slight droopings of jowl and sallowing of skin. There remain the rallying points—the dark-blond hair, the broad cheekbones—those features Nature got right the first time, before going back to the drawing board and perfecting the mold, eight and a half years later, in the form of Ivy. Ursula’s pale-blue eyes are sharp and focused, a little too shrewd-looking, her brow and jawline a little too bony. Ivy’s face, by contrast, is round and delicate, her forehead high and smooth, her eyes more widely spaced, which makes them look larger, glassier, and gives them that sought-after cast of vulnerability. The differences don’t stop at the neck. Ursula is broader in the shoulders, thicker in the arms, curvier around the hips, buttocks, and breasts. Seeing herself in pictures next to Ivy has always made Ursula feel physically excessive. Ivy is so straight and slight, with nothing wasted; there’s simply less of her, making what substance remains all the more precious.
Standing before the mirror now, she tries to duplicate the smile she gave Cabaj and his entourage downstairs as she said those things about Ivy. The smile looks as false as it is, making her entire face seem arbitrary, haphazard, slapped together. She thinks of Ivy’s face, her new, insane face, a palette with all the colors mixed, bleeding into one another. Pieces of smile, of frown, of pout, of glower, emerging briefly in an eyebrow or a bent lip or a delicately thinned nostril before sinking back into the undifferentiated confusion, like a tumor growing bits of tooth and brain and hair and liver and skin all jumbled together. What are those bits of brain thinking? What are those bits of skin feeling? Whenever she visits Ivy in the hospital, she has to resist the urge to put her fingers on Ivy’s face and physically resculpt her lips into their usual gentle pout, her cheeks into those adorable balls they used to form when she smiled.
Which cheeks?
She pulls open the cabinet mirror. Cabaj’s shelves support a variety of colognes, antacids, antidiarrhea pills, an electric nose-hair trimmer, an electric razor, an electric toothbrush, a box of multicolored condoms. She takes the toothbrush and rubs it under the rim of the toilet. Then she unscrews a bottle of Drakkar Noir, douses the bristles with it, and puts everything back in place.
Still not ready to go back downstairs, she walks down the hall and cracks open a door at random. Cabaj’s study. Bookshelves lined with bound reports and neatly labeled videocassettes. A small, chartreuse vinyl loveseat kitty-corner to a mammoth TV and stereo console. A silvery fiberglass desk against the window. She closes the door behind her and walks to the desk. His computer whiles away the time with a screen saver showing a cartoonish Middle City getting trampled by Godzilla and King Kong. She slides the monitor to one side, then clambers onto the desk, stands, and presses her forehead to the windowpane.
For some reason these few extra feet make all the difference. The altitude becomes something palpable. The city ceases to be an innocuous array of baubles and takes on depth: a spiky, glittering chasm. It has to do with how the window now spans from head to toe, how the wall disappears. If the pane dislodged or broke along some invisible fault line, she thinks, she’d be taking a swan dive, eight hundred feet, into a sidewalk puddle.
Of course, there are people who fall farther—fall from airplanes, even—and live.
Then again, there are people who fall five feet, having slipped on a stair, a spent condom, a patch of ice, and split their skulls open like watermelons.
All that glass, all those windows. Behind each one she imagines some loser like her, staring out the window with muted outrage, thinking about all the talents she possesses, all the capacity for loving, for shining, for doing things both uncommonly great and commonly good, thinking about all the ways those personal talents and capacities are squandered in this world, never put to use. Ursula sees it vividly, sees all of them, the millions, the isolate, seething hordes of one, in offices, standing on desks, foreheads pressed to a windowpane, putting their whole frustrated, useless weight against it, waiting for it to dislodge, waiting to plunge into the chasm, and statistically, some will, they will fall, and they will think to themselves, This is my last moment, I should be enjoying it, living it up, feeling the wind in my hair, but they won’t feel the wind because even as they fall, the pane will still be in front of them, falling below them, their hands and feet and foreheads still pressed against it, and they will console themselves that the pane will break before they themselves will break, and maybe in that gap, in that moment, they will be freed into some larger context, some larger meaning, though of course the gap will be almost unmeasurably slight, and perhaps the best thing to hope for is the momentary satisfaction of seeing it shatter.
Losers.
She turns, hearing a noise. Javier stands in the doorway.
“Hi, Ursula.”
On the computer screen at her feet, Middle City is rebuilt and then leveled under a mushroom cloud.
“I thought you were long gone,” he says. “Good thing I’m a snoop, too.”
She turns back to the window, hears him walking up to the desk, peripherally sees him sit on its edge, lean back against the window, and gaze up at her face. He reaches up and takes her hand.
“Sorry about that, Ursula. Sorry if I said the wrong thing.”
His hand feels surprisingly delicate and soft. The way it grips hers gently communicates something unexpected to her, an essential care that belies his frenetic behavior. She feels suddenly warm toward him, and embarrassed about the appearance of her own hand, with its ragged nails bitten almost down to the cuticles—not a proper businesswoman’s hand, she supposes. She remembers the military precision of Chas’s squarely manicured fingers, steepled between his eyes like a warship’s prow. She imagines them on Ivy’s face, pressing it from either side like vise grips, and feels a chill.
“Did you ever see my sister with Chas?” she asks.
“Just twice. Neither time for long.”
On the screen, Middle City is rebuilt and again destroyed, this time simultaneously by a volcanic eruption, an earthquake, a tsunami, and a tornado.
“He was crazy about her,” Javier adds. “Deeply in love. Still is.”
“What?” She scans his eyes for duplicity, deviousness, or mere idiocy, but all she sees is wide-open earnestness. “Did he tell you that?”
“No. It was obvious.”
He stares up at her moonily, the way he looked at the cookies in the store. She believes him.
“Why hasn’t he visited her?” she asks.
“He tried once. Her first day there. Before you got here. She screamed her head off.”
On the computer screen, Middle City is rebuilt and then flattened by the sandaled foot of God. Ursula crosses her arms and presses her forehead into the cool pane, wondering what Chas and Ivy were like together, wondering whether he could have done something to stop her from cutting herself and running through the park. But it doesn’t really matter. She knows Ivy’s schizophrenia isn’t something any boyfriend could be blamed for. It’s all in the genes. Ursula is probably prone to it herself. She, too, may wake up one day and believe that the entire world is an elaborate lie meant to mask an even more elaborate conspiracy.
She turns back to the city.
“It looks pretty from a height,” she says. “Like it’s nothing but light. Like it couldn’t hurt you if it tried.”
Javier reaches up and places his hand on her arm, firmly, then makes her lean back a few inches from the pane.
“Ursula,” he asks, “what do you see?”
“I see the world below the world.” She laughs, on the verge of crying. “I see a nightmare made of solid steel. I see a hundred square miles of compulsion, delusion, and death. Where does that fit into your philosophy of marketing?”
“No,” he says, “change your focal length. What do you see?”
She sees herself, in the ersatz space of the pane’s reflection.
“Oh.” She sighs. “Just some loser, looking out a window.”
“I see a beautiful woman who can be anything she wants,” he says. “Who never needs to touch the ground. Who can take off and fly. And the city will be as beautiful as you want it to be, as beautiful as you. I promise you.”
She looks at him, suspicious as always of compliments about her appearance, but his face is flushed with embarrassment, and his eyes are luminous with awe, and his overall demeanor is so earnest she could kick him, and she feels a silly, weak, reprehensible smile spreading over her face—he thinks she’s beautiful, this weird, not entirely unbeautiful man—and he smiles as well. He holds out his hand and she lets him help her down from the desk, while on the screen gravity fails a freshly rebuilt Middle City, which detaches from Earth and floats forlornly into space.