Covergirls
by Luke Boyd

     I’m writing this mostly for you.
     Just in case something happens to me someday—so you know the truth.
     And I’m writing it a little for me, too.
     Just in case something happens to us—so you know the truth.
     In either case, if you’re reading this, it’s okay. I wanted you to know eventually, and I guess now is that time.
     You’re about to find out that I’m as ugly and monstrous inside as I am outside. I know that sounds like one of those bullshit lines people use when they want positive reinforcement, but with me it’s true.
     And you’re probably smiling to yourself at this point, shaking your head, and maybe feeling a little sorry for me. Shaking your head, smiling, and thinking how much I must be exaggerating.
     But you won’t be smiling for long.

***

     Like anyone, you can trace my problems back to when I was a kid. Even then I knew something wasn’t right about mom and dad. He was an Army officer, a high-ranking somebody with desks in half a dozen offices all over the east coast.
Desks everywhere but home.
     Home—where it would’ve been empty drawers and mothballs anyway. A dusty lamp and empty black rolodex on top. Because he was never there.
A few times a month he would pull up to the house, usually late in the afternoon on a Saturday. He’d come through the front door with dry-cleaned uniforms and duffel bags, leaving them in the hall and picking them up again on his way out the next morning. Arriving in full dress and leaving the same way.
     It always seemed like more of an inspection than a family. He asked pointed questions about how I was doing in kindergarten or how much my mother was drinking. He looked through the cupboards and cabinets in the living room. Kind of humming to himself, pretending to look for something. He listened to Dean Martin records in the bathroom while he flushed my mother’s pills and vodka and rum down the toilet.
     Then he’d shave and shower and take her into the bedroom after dinner. I’d be able to hear him yelling, using his big Army voice. My mother just sobbing and wailing about how sorry she was. How she couldn’t help it. Or how good she had really been this time.
Eventually things would quiet down late at night. And the next morning he would hoist his bags and uniforms up on his shoulders and load up the car as I was eating my cereal. Then after he left my mother would lay on the couch and cry. Or take me to the neighbor’s house and drop me off for the day.
     Then one weekend my father came home early on a Friday night. It was after dinner and I was in my room while she had all of her bottles out across the kitchen counter top. Different sizes and colors. All in different stages of emptiness.
     I guess he had come home to surprise her. Or make an unannounced inspection. Either way, my mother wasn’t ready. Nor was she in any shape to try to cover up what was going on. I remember coming out into the living room in my underwear when I heard all the glass breaking. My mother was in her usual position, sprawled out across the couch, but my father was there, too. Standing in the middle of the room with bottles in each hand and broken glass already covering the wood floor. And I remember him yelling as he threw down more and more bottles.
     “This—this is why you can’t get a part-time job? This is what you do all week long in the house that I pay for?”
     Bash.
     Another broken bottle.
     My mother crying, choking on her own tears and snot. Dead drunk and making pools of inky eyeliner on my father’s tan suede couch.
     When he left that night he didn’t come back. There were only phone calls. They mostly ended with my mother screaming hysterically, or if she was drunk, cursing at him and telling him to stay away from us.
     The bottles stayed out on the kitchen counter and filled the entire coffee table in the living room. More empties colonized around the kitchen trash can like a city of glass buildings. My mother started to get really careless, forgetting to take me to school or pick me up. Getting too blasted to make dinner. Passing out on the floor of our kitchen, curled up with her colony of glass.
     When the divorce went through and was final, she realized that the alimony and child support weren’t going to be enough. Not enough for the way she was used to living.
But she couldn’t work. She didn’t know how to find a job, get a job, or keep a job. The only thing she knew was how to keep someone else happy — at least for awhile. So she started having other men over. She would meet them at my school PTO meetings, at my soccer games, at the grocery store. And each time she had met someone new she would do the same thing — come rushing home to clean up the house. All the things that had gone neglected for weeks — vacuuming, scrubbing floors, hot meals, make-up.
     She was a mom again.
     That would go on for a few weeks until something didn’t work out between them, or he found out about her other problems — debt, booze, pills. Then these guys would stop showing up for dinner, or taking us out for breakfast on Sunday mornings, or coming to my soccer games.
     Little by little the bottles would reappear around the house. The dinners would stop. The rides and appointments were forgotten again. I became the kid at school with “the lousy mother”. The one all the teachers and counselors have meetings about. At recess the guidance lady would come get me with a very grave face and take me to her “talk room”. She’d pull me in there and give me some puppets and Legos to play with, and she’d ask me questions about how my mom was doing and what I had for dinner last night. And she would sit in her chair and write down everything I said.
     My mother’s condition got so bad at one point that the school decided to set up transportation for me. Everyday the second grade teacher, Mrs. Wenger, would pick me up on her way to school. She would even come to the door and make sure I was ready and had a lunch — on the rare occasions that my mother was awake and coherent she would snap at Mrs. Wenger,
     “Of course he’s got lunch!”
     And Mrs. Wenger would either just hustle me out the door to her car or answer under her breath, “Well, he didn’t yesterday or the day before.”
     The winter of third grade she was still picking me up every morning, but we had worked it out that she didn’t have to come to the door anymore. My mother had complained to the school that she was routinely insulted by Mrs. Wenger’s attitude.
     On those cold, dry mornings she would pull up outside and beep the horn. And I would take my lunch, if I had one that day, and go out to meet her. And I liked it. Her car was always warm and she always smelled good. Clean and perfumed. I would climb in and take as many deep breaths of air as I could before we got to school.
     The morning of the snowstorm she didn’t wait outside and beep. She pounded right on the door and my mother answered it and pulled her in out of the blowing snow. Nobody knew why school wasn’t closed, but my mother didn’t want to deal with having me home all day, so she sent me off. I remember her at the front door as I was wrapped up in Mrs. Wenger’s long coat and half-carried-half-dragged out to the car. Heavy winds pummeled us, and every few steps the flaps of Mrs. Wenger’s coat blew open and pushed us both back. She held on to me tight and got me in the car and I could hear my mother yelling from the doorway,
     “Be careful! I don’t like this at all! So be very careful!”
     And it snowed sideways as we crawled our way down the street, Mrs. Wenger’s leather-gloved hands both tight at ten and two on the wheel. It was the first time I didn’t feel safe in her car. The gusts of wind shook and blew us all over the empty road. She had a very pinched expression on her face and didn’t talk at all.
     But we made it. Across town through the driving snow in silence. Finally as we came down the long hill I could see the school ahead on the right and I knew we would be okay. At the light at the bottom of the grade she looked over at me, her softness and perfume back in the air, and scolded me, “Look down at yourself and tell me what you forgot. Go ahead, look!”
     I looked at my lap, my backpack resting there, then down to my snowy boots.
     “Your seatbelt! We drove this whole way and you didn’t even have it on! Now put it on, even though we’re almost there.”
     I laughed, but not too loudly. I didn’t want her to get really mad at me. I pushed my backpack off to the floor and grabbed the shoulder belt as she tapped her foot at the red light, clucking at me.
     Pulling the belt across my heavy jacket I saw something big out my side mirror and saw Mrs. Wenger’s arm flash across me.
     Then black.

***

     Your new life starts when you wake up in a room full of beeps, blips, and wheezing noises. Not being able to feel anything above your neck but still somehow knowing that you must be in tremendous pain. You lay there like that with clouded vision for about fifteen minutes before anyone comes in to check on you. A nurse, and even though you can’t really make out the words she’s saying, you know she’s disgustingly cheerful.
     The kind of nurse who would never tell anyone that they are probably going to die or that their face will never really be the same shape again. The kind who treats cancer like candy.
After some of the swelling goes down from the surgeries, the doctors take some of the gauze wrapping off your head. You start to get your hearing and sight back, though one of your eyes is always going to have that half-closed droopy look to it.
     There was no saving it, even after total reconstruction of the socket.
     And just like that, this is the new you. Nobody will let you look in a mirror—they say the swelling is too bad right now. But you can feel the bumps and ridges all over your face and you know — even at nine years old — you are not really you anymore. Food tastes a little bit blander, lights are a little bit duller, people take second looks at you as they pass you wheeling down the hall in your wheel chair.
     You’re a freak, so get used to it. The sooner the better.
     The doctors all say the same thing—they can try more reconstructive surgery but it’s going to be a long-term process, and there’s no guarantee for success. And your mom, she looks at you in a new light, too. With pity. And shame.
     All of these things happen in the first week of the rest of your life.

***

     Welcome to the world of the kid in the back of the class whose face looks like some half-melted Halloween costume. Kids saying things like, “Hey Windshield, why don’t you take your mask off?” Welcome to seventeen skin graft surgeries over the course of the next three years. Seventeen surgeries and every specialist on the East coast knows you and your story, “The No-Seatbelt Windshield Kid”.
     And of course, welcome to not having a girlfriend all the way up through high school. Being stuck in the special-ed class in ninth grade because everyone just assumes you’re retarded. Until someone nudges the secretary and clues her in, “No, he’s not special-ed or anything, he’s that kid…”
     For the sake of the story let’s just call this little place my life—my mother still trying to sue the school district for what happened, claiming it’s caused her irreparable emotional scarring.
     You’ll drink to that, won’t you mom?
     Of course, once she tries to sue the district, she’s exposed as the neglectful, alcoholic, pill-popping madwoman that people only used to whisper about. More publicity for my movie-star face, pictures in the paper, on the local news, a host of medical journals plastering my x-rays all over their pages. Permission signed over by mother — to further her budget for appeals against the school district. It’s all for my own good.
     Another Bay Breeze and the blame’s an easy shift.
     A couple more Valiums and nothing will ever be your fault.
     The good news for me is I fit right in with the Goths when I get to ninth grade. The freaks, punks, cutters and glue huffers. I don’t even need to try. Having a face like mine is application, admission fee, and hazing. They take me just like I am, plus I look like I’m way ahead in the self-mutilation game. And after I get high with them a few times, go to a few shitty punk shows, and stare down a few cheerleaders I become some sort of hero to these kids. Something to rally around, they look at me and say things like, “Look at him, he’s crazy, he just doesn’t give a fuck!”
     That’s what gets me my first girlfriend. That and the fact that after we all hang out drinking behind the high school on Friday nights we come back to my house where my mom is passed out. We mooch off her stash of liquor, steal whatever cigarettes she has left lying around, and empty the house of aerosols and cleaning products. One of the girls that hangs around us, Tori, she doesn’t really have anywhere to go, so she stays in my room a lot. She sees all the artwork and writing I’ve done hanging up all over the ceiling. She sees how I’ve put a big picture over my entire bureau mirror—a picture of a guy taking a shotgun blast to his face. Tori says I’m a lot prettier than him and one night while we are up there smoking cigarettes she just starts kissing me.
     She thinks I’m some sort of artist. A tortured soul. The ultimate mockery — a middle finger to the world’s idea of beauty. She thinks my art is a beautiful translation of my isolation and anger.
     All I know is I can still feel tiny slivers of glass in my face and every week I go to a special doctor who vibrates a few more to the surface.
     Little by little, my life gets better and my mother’s gets worse. The years of heavy drinking and not taking care of herself—they wear on her face and her body. She is shrunken, her skin painted tight across her bony frame, her eyes and cheeks sunken. She floats from job to job relying on the alimony and child support checks to carry us month to month, cashing in bonds and stocks to supplement it.
     Then, one afternoon, as Tori and I come up the driveway, a military officer leaves the house and passes us on the way to his car. He’s all brass and white gloves, a cardboard-looking hat jammed under his arm. He makes brief eye contact with me, a quick apology with his eyes for whatever happened to my face, and drives off. Inside my mother is sitting on the couch — there are no bottles anywhere to be seen. The place looks vacuumed, the wood floor waxed.
     She has big tears welling at the corners of her clumpy outlined eyes. She’s got a manila envelope open on the couch with papers spread out everywhere.
     And a folded up triangle American flag in front of her on the coffee table.
     Even though they had been divorced, my father never changed his family status or his beneficiaries through the military. My mother could only say, “The lazy bastard!” The man who had methodically searched through our house each time he came home, flushing away booze and pills, collecting hidden away half-empty bottles.
     She leaned back there in the cushions of the suede couch, half-laughing, half-crying. Knowing somewhere inside that it wasn’t laziness that had left her in the will. His life insurance, military pension, bereavement, control of his investment portfolio — everything came to her.
     All of the money plus what was left of my father and the stroke that took him quietly in his sleep. A perfectly folded triangle American flag.

***

     My mother was not a religious woman, but I remember hearing her alone in her bedroom a few nights later, sobbing and thanking God for what had happened. My father had never felt so appreciated when he was alive, I’m sure.
     She took a chunk of the money and stuck it in a trust fund for me. One of those “hands off until you’re twenty-one” deals. Then she took a much larger chunk and invested in personal improvements — namely tits and a facelift. She had to secure her own future was all she told me when she came to me late one night, to tell me she was going to make some changes in her life. Saying she had gotten off track and was going to use this opportunity to clean her life up.
     I had no reason to believe her but somehow I bought it. She had padded barefoot down the hall to my room and it was late, and she was wearing her oversized flannel pajamas. Holding two mugs of hot chocolate. Her tiny feet poking out the piles of fabric at the bottom of her legs. My desk lamp threw a soft beam across her standing in the doorway. Almost like she was my mother again.
     It seemed like a change was due. For the first time I could remember she told me she was sorry. She gave me a hard felt box containing my father’s stars. It was one of those moments. Her tears soaking through my shirt as she hugged me and sobbed into my shoulder. She wanted to make a new start…forget the past…clean her life up.
     At the time, I’m imagining this might mean rehab, counseling programs, psychiatric therapy. It might mean moving out of this town, starting over somewhere new with a clean slate. Dropping the lawsuit against the school district. Learning to eat right, exercise right, find a deeper purpose for living. These are the images in my mind as she’s clawing at my back sobbing for all she’s worth. I’m figuring a real epiphany here.
     She was talking plastic surgery and hair extensions. Just for starters. Then collagen injections in her lips and a tummy tuck. Color enhancing contact lenses.
     All said and done she looked somewhere between an over-the-hill porn starlet and a truck stop hooker.
     Putting on her make-up methodically at her dressing table she dusted her cheeks and applied dark rich lipstick to her new lips. Blotted them on a napkin, smacked them together, looked at her capped teeth in the mirror, and saw me standing behind her watching. She stopped for a minute and made eye contact in the mirror, then went back to work, saying, “Honey, I’m going out with Chuck. I’ll be back sometime later tonight.” Then as she was finishing up she looked at me again in the mirror, still standing across the room observing.
     Watching her.
     As she watched me watch her.
     Putting on that slow and deliberate mask.
     Over the course of that fifteen minutes, she had sat down and analyzed her face, putting on foundation and concealer where she needed it. Adding powders and creams. Accentuating this feature, pushing that flaw to the back. I saw her put on a whole new face to become the woman that Chuck wouldn’t be able to resist. And as she was transformed I stayed the same — there was nothing on that table that could fix me. Accentuate this feature, push that flaw to the back. There was just too much mess to work with and that was the difference. She had the basics hair, eyes, mouth, ears — all in basically the right proportions.
     She had something to work with, and that’s all anyone needs.
     Because it doesn’t matter if you’re good looking or not. If your eyes are brown or green or hazel. If your hair is thin or naturally curly. If you have bags under your eyes. If your nose is crooked.
     It doesn’t matter.
     If your skin starts to lose its elasticity when you hit your mid thirties. If your boobs sag after a few kids. If you sprout hair on your back and across your shoulders. If you can’t lose those extra pounds. If your teeth aren’t as white as you want.
     It doesn’t matter.
     People are parts hung on frames.
     All the identity is buried deep under the cold flesh, heaped on the surgical table. All the meaning is locked away and lonely while we stand naked in front of full-length mirrors, critiquing and cringing. Everything outside that dark pit in your chest is interchangeable. It’s a suit that can be stretched, shrunk, colored, cut, and cooked.
     All that hits as I’m watching her.
     And she’s watching me watch her.
     When she leaves I sit on her bench in front of the mirror and stare. I turn my head to the right and left, seeing if one of my profiles is more bearable. I lean in right against the glass and stare into my drooping eye with my own drooping eye, looking for some sign that there’s another person inside there somewhere. But all I see is what everyone else sees — sagging skin under my sloppy left eye, pouches of loose flesh in some places, stretched unnaturally tight in others, scars like ravines from my ears to my chin where the doctors peeled everything off and tried to reshape what they could.
     It’s hopeless. So I turn to my mother’s massive collection of skin toners and creams, rejuvenating scrubs and cleansers. A coffee cup with Atlantic City in script across it is stuffed with brushes of every shape and size. Blush brushes, rouge brushes — the tools that my mother uses to make her masterpieces each night she goes out. The same type she would give to me to use as paintbrushes when I was a kid, after their bristles had begun to split apart and fall out.
     There on the dressing table are half packages of mints, combs and curlers, a mess of wires leading to the floor where hair dryers and curling irons lay tangled. Bobby pins and my mother’s contact lens solution.
     I poke around through the odds and ends lip glosses and compacts scattered there, grab the contact solution and walk out. In the kitchen I unscrew the cap and empty it into the sink.      I stop with the empty bottle in my hand and look straight up at my reflection in the window over the sink.
     That same leering expression.
     Unchangeable. Unfixable.
     Permanent.
     Opening the cabinet under the sink, I take out the small bottle of bleach my mother uses for disinfecting the kitchen and bathroom. When she’s expecting company. A new guy for dinner or drinks.
     I match up the openings of the two bottles and pour the bleach into the contact solution bottle, screw the cap back on and wipe the cap and sides of the bottle off. Then I put it back on my mother’s dressing table and go to bed.
     The first screams come a little past eight the next morning.

***

     This is exactly what I was warning you about earlier.
     Disfigured monsters don’t really have hearts of gold.
     When my mother’s screams become unbearably loud and I can hear her smashing blindly through the downstairs, I turn on my stereo and start rooting around for my headphones.

***

     What happened to my mother was only the first in long series of unfortunate accidents. Accidents that have happened to all the women in my life. Even though my mother never accused me directly, there was an unspoken understanding between us.
     Permanent damage.
     Being unable to flush her eyes out in time, her retinas were irreparably burned. Damage like that, the emergency room doctor said, is only seen in two situations—with victims of chemical explosions and gasoline-fueled fires.
     Car wrecks.
     Plane crashes.
     Ex-husbands.
     Every person coming in as a flaky black husk.
     The doctors told her that she should consider herself lucky. It could have been worse—she did still retain the ability to see light and dark patches. Which meant she wouldn’t have to look at me anymore. Feel bad for me anymore. It was time for me to leave and once my aunt moved in to help out with mom, I was gone.
     I ended up in community college, doing some graphic design stuff and taking a few art history classes. It was an easier fit than high school — nobody knew me, I wasn’t the Windshield Kid with the alky mother anymore. Instead I was the guy who might have gotten into a motorcycle accident, or been badly burned trying to save old women and cats from a high rise fire. There were a lot of stories I could have told, but I didn’t need to, everyone else did a better job of filling in the blanks themselves.
     Even though I was more confident in myself, I still had the same problem — girls wanted to date me because I was a novelty, it made them feel good. Then they would realize they didn’t want to go long-term with a freak show. This would usually happen the first time we went somewhere nice for dinner, or saw pictures of the two of us at a party. And by that time, poor me, I was already hooked.
     So I relied on what I already knew — how to level the playing field.
     Sophomore year it was Tina. She was a cheerleader, but it’s not like it seems. She was the cheerleader who wasn’t as pretty or bouncy or natural as the rest. She was filler, the one they put in the back row buried in the middle of each dance routine. The one who spots and catches the pretty girls on all the tosses and lifts. She was in one of my art classes playing the well-rounded socialite while I played the internal-storm-is-raging introvert.
     Dating me made her look good, made her feel a little better off. Until she had an accident one morning in the shower. I had stayed overnight at her house, but she was different that night — she curled herself into her own ball, didn’t want to be touched, said she just didn’t feel well.
     I knew better. I knew where this was going.
     Then something went wrong with her conditioner the next morning. A bad chemical reaction or mislabeled ingredients. The hair came out in handfuls, clogging the shower drain and making puddles like dead kittens on the tile floor. She didn’t scream, not right away. She just felt the hair coming out as she rinsed. Saw it wadding together in the bottom of the shower and sticking to her neck and shoulders.
     She came out into her room where I was still in bed. She was naked and shaking, not crying but in shock. Too afraid to look in the mirror. Too afraid to turn around and see the ratty trail behind her. She just stood there looking at me with her bottom lip shaking, her fingers wrapped around those last stringy clumps.
     What could I do? I just held her there, naked and soaking wet, as I surveyed the damage. I told her it wasn’t that bad… it would grow back… she could probably sue… The empty tube of Nair was buried under the socks and drawings in my bag.
     The hair grew back and in the process I tried to tell her it wasn’t even that much of a big deal. But to her it was. To her it was everything. For the few months it took to grow out we became closer than before. She immersed herself in my world — art, music, reading and writing. She was terrible at it all, awkward and unnatural. Maybe that’s what made it so beautiful — such an ardent effort put into such an utter failure.
     I felt akin to her.
     But the hair grew back and I became disinterested. She was reabsorbed by her friends, like a leper coming out of the desert miraculously healed.
     A clean bill of health.
     End game.
     We went our separate ways with the only difference being the way she looked at me when we passed on campus. There was resentment in her eyes, and a little sadness. Not all that much unlike my mother’s expression the first time they unbandaged me.

***

     Beautiful people look at everything ugly around them without realizing just how precarious their beauty is. How they’re just an icy sidewalk away from a broken nose, a stray bullet away from paralysis.
     A chromosome away from being a mistake. A sideshow attraction.
     But hey, who’s bitter? You live, you learn. How to make things a little more fair. A little more the way God intended. With millions kneeling and worshiping the ideals of beauty, someone has to be a voice. Someone has to scatter the multitudes, remove the scales from their eyes.
      The brand new Babel. And since I wasn’t invited I decided to bring it low.
     A stone at a time.
     Carrie Phillips. She almost didn’t deserve it — an off-Broadway actress with all that potential. All that shiny black hair and china skin. The kind of girl who could just sit quietly drinking a double latte in the corner and be the most beautiful thing you ever saw. The kind of girl who doesn’t need to talk or get up and walk past you to make you look.
     I saw her pretty often at the café where I went to read and people-watch. Sometimes she would be with this older guy, the there’s-no-way-she-she’s-with-him type. Because there weren’t many tables at this place I would end up sitting close to them almost every time and I would overhear them talking theatre. A lot of name-dropping from his end — who he knew, which playhouses he had been to, bits about some half-baked script he was working on. She was quiet, looking as much over his shoulder as at him as he spun his wheels and talked himself up. Always leaning over the table toward her and whispering his insights in conspiratorial tones.
     Like she was going to reach across the table and take his hand, with something smoldering in those coal black eyes, and whimper sweetly, “I can’t hold back anymore! I want you so bad — take me out to your car and fuck me right now!”
     A couple of times her gaze would wander around the café as he pled his case earnestly. She would catch me rolling my eyes at them from behind my book and a little smile would play around the edges of her mouth.
     And just like that you’re hooked again — even though you look at her and you look at yourself, and there’s no way to reconcile the difference. The soft skin to the scars. You know it would never last unless you could shock her world, drag her from the base of the tower. Make her look in the mirror and hate it….
     A few weeks go by. In your mind it’s easy to expand an isolated incident, to give that passing look some meaning. So you go more often to the café, but if she’s not there you don’t stay. You get a coffee-to-go, drink it out in your car, keep an eye on the door to see if she shows up. If she does you pound down the rest of it and go inside a few minutes after her. You don’t make eye contact with her when you go in — because remember you’re not here looking for anyone. You try to be real laid back as you get another coffee — something large that you can nurse for awhile. The guy behind the counter looks at you kind of strange, then he sees her sitting alone at a table over your shoulder. He feels bad for you too so he says, “Don’t worry about it — on the house.”
     You put your books, notebook and coffee down on a table not-too-close to hers. Don’t act too interested in anyone here as you walk past her to get some creamers and sugar. Remember — you’re preoccupied with work — whatever work you want to imagine you must get done. For whatever imaginary deadline you’ve set. You portray intensity, independence, mystery.
     Maybe when you get back to your little table you pull out a sketch or two and leave them out where she can see them. The ones of empty theatre houses done in charcoal — all those rows and rows of seats sloping down to the footlights. Somehow you captured the sadness and the intimacy, maybe it’s the janitor with his pushbroom working across the dim stage. Maybe it’s the solitary ghost light in the rafters backstage.
     Don’t look up as you spread your work out. Don’t care who does or doesn’t see it. Remember — you’re too busy to be bothered. Work on a few odds-and-ends poems, deep in concentration. As you write, mess your hair with the other hand. Make it look as if you didn’t sleep last night. You couldn’t — the calling of your work was too strong, too pressing.
Do this all just right and sneak a look at her as you shuffle a few papers in your notebook. She’s watching you, and when you look up and catch her she lowers her eyes and smiles — smiles so you see it.
     The sketches provide the perfect excuse, the perfect reason for her to stop at your table as she walks by on her way out. Wrapped up tight in a knee-length trench, she puts her fingers on the charcoal drawing, making you look up at her before she even says anything. When you do — look up at her — try to keep any recognition out of your eyes. Make her feel like she could be anybody, like you don’t really remember the half-dozen occasions on which you’ve made eye contact.
     Say thanks when she compliments your work. Don’t put your pen down or act like you have time to chit-chat. When she asks if the drawings are of the Ambassador in NY, say yeah — like you’re real familiar with it and it’s no big deal.
     When she says she would love to see some more of your work, especially anything to do with theatre, it’s no big deal. Say sure and make some loose arrangement to meet her back here in a few days.
     Tell her to give you a few days because you’ll have to dig them up. It’s no big deal but they’re mixed into a bunch of different collections. Don’t get nervous because you don’t actually have any other theatre artwork — you’ve got a few days to come up with some. And you work well under pressure.
     It’s no big deal.
     Before she turns to leave, ask her if you’ve seen her in something — one of the off-Broadway numbers, or something from the playhouse downtown. She’ll say yes and run through a laundry list of her work.
     Brush it off. It’s no big deal. Remember — you’re already established — plus you’ve got work to get back to. Imaginary deadlines. And the sooner she leaves, the sooner you can get home and start working on some new charcoal sketches.
     This is how you make a first date out of nothing. How you make the most beautiful woman in the room come to you just by paying attention. As soon as she leaves go straight back to your imaginary work so that anyone else watching will also think…
     It’s no big deal.
     As you clean up a couple of minutes later try not to smile when you see her amorous admirer standing at the edge of the café. This self-espoused theatre buff is scanning the tables and couches for her. Trying to look like he’s not looking for anyone.
     He could take lessons from you.
     But don’t smile, and above all don’t acknowledge him as you brush past, your arms full of projects, drafts, and deadlines.
     Remember — it’s no big deal.

***

     With Carrie I didn’t have any predetermined end result. With most of them I don’t — things just end how they end. I did everything by the book with her, kept my distance and watched for an opening. Acted like any sort of romantic connection was the last thing on my mind. Instead I played the part she desperately wanted in her life.
     The phantom.
     The shadowy and strong. The intense and macabre.
     In our budding relationship I didn’t pursue her, nor did I make her chase me. I stood solid, confident, expecting nothing but companionship. Keeping a portion of my personality partitioned off, like a hideous internal mirror of my face.

***

     Rule number four — make your greatest weakness into your greatest strength. Put it on display; don’t let anyone think it’s a weakness and it won’t be one.
     Rule number nine — after you’ve figured out what a girl is looking for, who she wants you to be, and you become that idea, stay in character. Nothing will sour her faster than finding out you aren’t the character you play.
     That you don’t have deadlines to meet.
     That you don’t stay up through the lonely hours of the night writing.
     That you don’t go walking through the silent snow at night, standing at the top of the cemetery with the wind whipping through your coat and scarf. Your eyes distant and scanning the stretched out sleeping city before you.
     If these things aren’t you, you’re shit out of luck Time to rethink your strategy — put your face through a window or gargle some ammonia. Embrace your character.

***

     I was doing a great job of keeping Carrie far enough away that she always felt I had secrets. I never talked about my face, about my childhood and what had happened to me. It needed to seem worse than I could make it sound, like some unspeakable horror. My scars stayed that way, quiet and waiting between us, until one night we were walking home from dinner. It was cold and quiet in the streets, the few passing cars padding along through the fresh snow. I cleaned off a bench along the lit up storefronts. We sat huddled together and talked and shared brandy from my small flask.
     “Mmmm, it’s sweet,” she said as she licked her coated lips. Then she pulled the lapels of my coat against her and kissed me softly on the mouth. Letting her tongue graze the front of my lips — not a pity kiss. I wanted to gush right there about everything, about seeing her with that guy at the café, about setting up a way to meet her, about knowing she would be able to see past my face.
     But I stayed in character.
     Rule number nine.
     Stayed dark and wounded. Emotionally injured, but stirred as well by the kiss. I held her face close to mine, close enough that the steam from her breath mixed with mine before rushing away into the night. I spoke quietly to her eyes, “Is this what you want?”
     And it was her eyes that answered back, yes.
     And her mouth that opened and wrapped itself around my bottom lip, scraped along my cheek and up to my ear.
     Her tongue that darted inside, “Yes. I’ve known it all along.”

__________________________________________________________________

main