Not wanting her vacation shortened on my account, I talk her out of jumping on the next plane to care for me. I tell her my friends have been helping me plenty.
AND THEY HAVE been, especially Peter, who is devoted to me. During the next few days, he stays with me, nurses me. He leaves me only to go to the station to anchor the news and comes right back to take care of me. He is endlessly attentive and affectionate. I tell all my clients that I need extra time to complete the various projects I’m working on. Everyone is, of course, very accommodating.
I can tell by the way Peter looks at me that he’s affected by my real appearance. I’ve noticed this every day since he ripped off my disguise. Yet, he makes no pass at me, which is just as well because if he did, I know I would rebuff him. Despite my attraction to him, I would reject him because I refuse to let beauty win. Especially now that Lily has been destroyed by it.
When I go out, people’s stares get on my nerves.
I screen my calls. I ignore the many messages I get every day from journalists asking me to grant them interviews and to explain why for years I squashed my beauty under a load of hideousness and why I did my bar ritual.
Why should I grant interviews? Only to become even more recognized, even more stared at? I wouldn’t have minded explaining myself, or expressing my harsh opinion of beauty, but the cost is too great.
Plus, Georgia does something much more powerful to further my cause against beauty worship. She turns Lily into a legend. She doesn’t mean to. She means only to honor Lily’s memory by writing an in-depth article for the New York Times about her life.
Surprisingly, at the bottom of the article, in a separate section entitled “What Happened to Lily?” Georgia doesn’t shy away from describing Lily’s end—the true version. Given its supernatural nature, everyone takes this finale to be an imaginative and metaphorical account of Lily’s breakdown and alarming disappearance. They believe Lily got depressed and “fell to pieces” after her breakup with Strad. They believe the split “shattered” her and that then she decided to vanish, leave town. For a while or maybe forever.
Correcting this misconception would be unwise of us, we feel, particularly as her parents have already recruited the police’s help in trying to locate her, and any insistence on our parts that Lily broke to pieces literally, not metaphorically, will only make us seem like lunatics, deserving of being more thoroughly investigated in connection with her disappearance—an investigation we would not welcome for fear it might uncover the fact that there does happen to be, coincidentally, a killer among us.
But that’s not the only reason we don’t want people to know Lily is in real pieces. We’re afraid Penelope will go insane if those pieces are taken from her. She’s already demented, spending her entire days trying to put Lily back together.
Georgia knows her article is powerful, but she didn’t expect fashion magazine editors to be so stunned by Lily’s tragic story as to discuss it among themselves and decide to turn Lily’s ugliness into the new beauty.
These editors are smart, realistic women and men. They know that radically redefining modern beauty is not going to happen overnight.
But they’re wrong.
It does.
Virtually.
Here’s what happens. First, Georgia’s article stirs up a vigorous debate in the media about beauty. Two days after her article appears, Ellen DeGeneres announces she is going to devote a show to the topic of the unfortunate importance of physical beauty in our world. She invites the editors-in-chief of the top four monthly fashion magazines, as well as the head of Women’s Wear Daily. She wants them to defend themselves on her show after they’ve read the Times article—not an easy task, she predicts.
Far from defending themselves, the magazine editors agree with Ellen. This makes for a surprising show. One of them, the editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, confesses she’s been made sick by Georgia’s article. She says she wishes she could do something about it.
The show ends with a plea from Ellen for Lily to come back, wherever she is. Everyone is distraught over her disappearance.
The next day, Women’s Wear Daily introduces the new ideal face: Lily’s face. They cover the story incessantly, with front-page updates and news about models who are being discovered all over the world and signed before they even create a portfolio.
The monthly beauty magazines redo their cover shots and cover stories; they whip up new feature articles based on the new beauty; and they quickly reshoot, in studio, either twelve, twenty-four or—in Elle’s case—forty-eight pages, out of sixty fashion pages, for their next issues, using models who are ugly in ways that resemble Lily as much as possible.
It’s a holistic, industry-wide embrace, a coordinated effort. Even nightly newscasters offer regular updates, particularly Peter Marrick.
We’re sad that Lily is not alive to enjoy her new beauty.
Several top fashion designers in London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo announce that they, too, are supporting this new beauty ideal and replacing all the models in their upcoming runway shows.
Not everyone’s reasons for joining the trend are noble. A few are mercenary.
Three high-ranking plastic surgeons report that there’s been a dramatic decrease in business. They say women are having second thoughts about getting rid of flaws that are now highly prized. When the three surgeons are asked if they are disappointed in this turn in fashion, two of them—possibly insincerely—say no. The third one, however, says yes he is disappointed but expects that women will start booking appointments to get flaws (now considered “improvements”) incorporated into their faces and bodies. He adds, “As long as women are dissatisfied with how they look, I’m satisfied. I don’t care what form their dissatisfaction takes, provided it requires me to fix it.”
This comment fans the flames, causing more articles to come out condemning the fact that the basic underpinning of the fashion, beauty, and cosmetics industries is women’s dissatisfaction with themselves. I think that people getting this glimpse into the dark side of beauty has enabled them to see pulchritude for what it is: something as disgusting as it sounds—putrefaction; rot; another one of life’s necessary lunacies.
Of course, not everyone hears about the new beauty, especially people who don’t keep up with fashion. That’s why I still get catcalls and come-ons from non-metrosexual men who are behind the times. I’m allergic to them, but I have to be patient, take it one day at a time.
No longer ladylike or meticulously groomed, Penelope lives in sweat clothes and her hair is disheveled. She used to be the only one among us to wear makeup on a regular basis, and even though I think she’s much more attractive without it, we all know its absence is a bad sign about her mental state.
She’s been rebuilding Lily for weeks with little progress, yet she’s showing no signs of letting up. Quite the opposite. Her focus is sharpening and her determination is acquiring a certain savagery.
Not once since Lily broke has Penelope met us anywhere other than at her apartment, and her reluctance to let us visit increases each week. And she’s cranky, which I know is understandable given that as soon as she makes any progress, Lily falls apart again.
In her desperate desire to bring Lily back to life, Penelope at first tries to rebuild her in the exact position she died in—standing up—but she quickly realizes it’s impossible. So she tries rebuilding her friend lying down. Penelope believes that horizontally the task will no longer be impossible—merely horrendously difficult.
Even though Penelope does start making some progress, Lily still keeps collapsing. But Penelope continues working on Lily with as much passion and single-mindedness as Lily did when working on her musical pieces. Day after day, with infinite delicacy, Penelope balances Lily’s pieces on top of one another. No matter how careful she is, however, there always comes a time when she is not careful enough, when her hand shakes a little too much, when the mere fact of being human makes it impossible for her to place every single fragment with the exact degree of gentleness necessary at the precise angle required. She’s killing herself trying to attain perfection in all her gestures.