We Are Gathered Page 2

  I graduated Phi Beta Kappa and wanted to go as far from the University of Pennsylvania and Atlanta as I could, but what could you do with an English degree? I considered graduate school, a dissertation on the deformed in literature from Medusa to Mary Wollstonecraft. I couldn’t get past the title. The ugly did not do well in literature. In the movie version of my life, our heroine gets a degree in anthropology and finds a tribe in Papua New Guinea where port-wine stains are considered the highest form of beauty. She and her colleagues are trekking in the jungle, looking for a lost tribe rumored to have floated on the shards of Noah’s Ark over the oceans to the Coral Sea, washing up at last on a tiny island along the archipelago that collectively forms New Guinea. As they trek, Matthew Willingham, an esteemed British cartographer, burns with fever and finally succumbs along the swampy shores at the mouth of an underground river. The next to fall is Vanessa Lopez, an Argentinian primatologist who has mistakenly eaten a poisonous mushroom. As she writhes in pain and vomits, she hallucinates a vision of the tribe. They are purple, she cries, her engorged face and bloodshot eyes straining to see her vision. She reaches her hands out; “Hermosa, hermosa” are her last words. Alone now, our heroine, drinking water from cupped leaves and sleeping under the stars, unable to close her eyes, haunted by the last words of her friends and the indecipherable sounds of the jungle, presses on in search of the tribe. She is riddled with mosquito bites, almost starving; her hiking boots are in tatters. Perhaps she has gone mad herself. She parts the dense growth of the forest, barely flinches at the snake hissing at her from the vines. There it is: a waterfall, pink and orange flowers the size of dinner plates, drumbeats. She sees the back of a small child running from her. “Wait!” she calls out. The child turns to her. Big black eyes rimmed with lashes, long dark hair, and a purple face. The child smiles at her beatifically, says something in a foreign language; now other children appear, then adults. They fall to their knees and bow. They have been waiting for her, the half-white, half-purple woman who can bridge both the magical and the mundane worlds. She becomes their queen. In real life, she winds up with an entry-level job in publishing in New York.

  I vowed never to return to Atlanta, Georgia, where Scarlett O’Hara’s descendants are alive and well, and still making life miserable for the flawed and the outcast and the downtrodden. But I had to go back. A lot. Because my father, Marty, who I loved, got sicker and sicker. I sat with him while he wasted away in the hospital bed, hooked to oxygen. We watched lots of TV; the Braves lost in postseason again. My dad stopped liking the Dodgers when they moved to Los Angeles and the Yankees after Joe DiMaggio retired. I remembered Joe DiMaggio from the Mr. Coffee commercials; when I was little, I once asked my dad who he was, and he said, Only one of the greatest ballplayers of all time. Oh, and Mr. Marilyn Monroe. Despite all that time at my father’s bedside, I was in New York when he died.

  I came back for the funeral and to help my mom pack up his suits and shoes and books. My father liked to dress well, and he had a collection of ties, from the thin black ties of the sixties to the fat wide stripes of the seventies to the present. I chose one skinny baby-blue tie for myself. I used to think I would give it one day to a man I love who loves me back if there ever is a man I love who loves me back. I have packed and moved that baby-blue tie from a series of shitty apartments in New York to my current shitty apartment in Los Angeles. It’s all I have of my dad, the only man who ever really loved me. Four years have passed with almost no visits to Atlanta, and now I am back because Elizabeth is getting married. This might be the last time I ever come to this city. My mother has retired to Hilton Head, South Carolina, to turn leathery there while watching the Atlantic from her balcony. There is nothing but bad memories left in Atlanta.

  I can cover this birthmark. I could go to my friend Elizabeth’s wedding and present an entirely different face to the people who were so brutal to me in high school. Ta-da—I am the Harlequin no more. I am just a regular person who survived Mansfield High and went on to greater glory. I was working on a film set when Kelsey Porter, makeup artist extraordinaire, noticed me. She said I could easily cover my stain if I wanted to. These days, according to Kelsey, there is no reason for anyone to have less than perfect skin. With the wonders of a good dermatologist, and failing that, makeup, we can all look as dewy and flawless as a silent-film star. She said no one in Hollywood would be beautiful without help. Hollywood, she said, is a mess of pockmarks, scars, and disfigurement. If a tsunami washed over LA, she insisted, we’d be standing in a freak show. Kelsey assumed that I already knew this, so she asked if there was a political reason I left my birthmark visible—was I taking a stand? Was it important to me in perfect Hollywood to be so demonstrably imperfect? I assured her I was apolitical and that I had tried every form of makeup in the department store, even paint, to cover the stain, and nothing had ever worked. The paint chipped and cracked; the makeup caked and peeled. It was an unfixable flaw. Kelsey sat me in her chair, and with a few dabs of a foam triangle, the mark that followed me, shaped me, and cast me in the movie biopic of my life in the roles of Kid Kicked Out of Sandbox, Morose Middle Schooler #2, Outcast of Eleventh Grade, and Girl with No Date for Prom—the stain that I first noticed at the age of three and tried to wash away and cried and cried when it wouldn’t come off until I noticed my mother crying with me—had vanished. I pressed my face closer to the mirror. I could see the makeup, but it was not obvious, and when I touched my face, it felt like skin. I stared and stared and refused to cry. It was so easy. It took only seconds.

  “You look beautiful,” Kelsey said.

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “You do,” she insisted.

  “I look almost normal,” I said. “And that’s good enough.”

  Kelsey gave me the makeup. It could be ordered only by a professional, so she also gave me a card and told me to call her whenever I needed more. I never used it again, and Kelsey called me three months later and asked if I had lost her phone number, since by now I would surely need more makeup. She got my number from my boss, Carter Graham, yes, that Carter Graham, the movie star and Academy Award nominee; two-time Golden Globe winner; Hollywood bad boy, twice engaged but never married. I told her I wasn’t using the makeup, and she said, “I thought so. I pegged you as a political one. Good for you.”

  “It isn’t political,” I said.

  “Then why aren’t you using it?”

  I didn’t have a good reason. “I don’t know,” I said. I thought about it later, and I guess the reason was that if you aren’t going to be beautiful you might as well be ugly. What am I without my birthmark? Everyone in the village knew Frankenstein’s name. And Dracula. And wasn’t the portrait so much more interesting than preening, foppish Dorian Gray himself ? From the day in first grade when Todd Coleman called me a freak and mimicked barfing at the sight of my face, that stain has gotten me noticed.

  My parents used to tell me that you could barely see my port-wine stain. They were more concerned about the fact that my right leg was longer than my left, and though I had already had one surgery, the pediatric orthopedist said future surgeries might be needed throughout my life. I arrived at First Montessori with a purple face, a brace on my leg, and heavy black orthopedic shoes I have seen only on old men with tremendous amounts of dandruff. In a screenplay, this is when you start to fall in love with our heroine, watching her suffer as an innocent child, but in real life, you recoil at her difference, avert your eyes, or pretend not to notice at best and laugh, mock her, or call her names at worst. I get it. My mother needed to believe that the port-wine stain didn’t matter. Since they call it a birthmark and she’s the one who gave birth, she has always felt responsible for my disfigurement, as if it were some punishment for her visited on her daughter because the gods could think of nothing crueler. I am not sure what sin she could have committed to merit the punishment, but as we age, I see the list of reasons to incur deity-driven wrath growing longer and that we are constantly making dea
ls with the devil. Many people—who knows, even I—might agree to mar their children in a disfiguring but fundamentally harmless way in order to sell a screenplay or marry the man of their dreams. Satan would never show up in a red jumpsuit and horns, holding a trident and breathing fire out of his nostrils. He would show up in the form of a diet pill, a glass of white wine, and a false-negative pregnancy test. He would show up as a movie star, devastatingly handsome albeit unwashed and unshaven, who says, Work for me for a few years and I’ll introduce you to agents and producers, guide you through the war zone that is Hollywood, get your career started.

  By elementary school, I knew my father was a liar and that the red mark on my face was not beautiful. In art class in fifth grade, I painted my cheek white, and Mrs. McMillan, my teacher, scolded me and sent me to the principal’s office. The school nurse cleaned the paint off with paper towels, rubbing so hard it turned the port-wine stain a livid purple, and then she sent me back to class, but I didn’t go. I hid in the AV room until the end of the day and walked home long after the bell had rung so I would be alone. Eventually, I accepted defeat. I became the Harlequin. I even introduced myself that way to those too polite to ask what happened, to let them know that I know my face is two different colors. In case you were wondering, I have a mirror. It’s not news to me. I was born this way. Self-inflicted pain is so much easier to bear than the slings and arrows that others deliver. I suspect this truth was known to the monks in hair shirts. Hyperbole, I know, but what are movies if not hyperbole, and what are movie stars if not hyperbole incarnate? And I, for some reason not even clear to me, have chosen to make my home among the movie stars. I am even in love with one.

  As ridiculous and unrequited as my four-year-long high school longing for Evan Elkins was, my current one-sided love affair is even more absurd. I yearn, I ache, I pine for my boss, Carter Graham—yes, that Carter Graham, who, despite what Kelsey and other makeup artists might imagine, is physically flawless, dazzling, even when unwashed, reeking of body odor. Movie stars really are different from you and me, even from Elizabeth, so healthy and happy. Everyone stops and stares at Carter; the assemblage of his features as show-stoppingly abnormal as a Cyclops only they stir desire rather than revulsion. I know because I have seen him naked. I have not seen him naked in any kind of romantic tryst. It wouldn’t occur to Carter that his personal assistant who always knows when to refill his herpes medicine and keeps track of the constantly changing cell phone numbers necessitated by the broken hearts he leaves behind is someone he could have sex with. Carter undresses in front of me the way someone undresses in front of a dog. He doesn’t care what I think of him, and though, like a dog, I may gaze adoringly at him, I do not linger on any one part more than any other, from eyes, to hands, to knees, to the tangle of hair between his legs, while he changes pants in his trailer or gets ready for a date with some knockout. I am embarrassed by this ardor, and in the screenplay that I write of my life, I root against this romance. The whip-smart homely assistant must fall in love with the kindhearted and secretly ultrawealthy chauffeur or the “just returned from a Haitian mission trip” doctor or the public defender getting the innocent man off death row; and when she takes off her glasses or finds the right laser treatment, she will turn out to be stunning, and the coldhearted, shallow, oversexed movie star will grow old alone, bloated with alcohol and regret. That’s how it works in the movies, but not in real life, where the coldhearted, narcissistic, oversexed movie star reaps all the rewards that this world has to offer and keeps trading in brilliant, talented, beautiful lovers for younger, more brilliant, more talented, and more beautiful lovers and spends not one minute alone and experiences not one moment of doubt or regret.

  Carter pretends that it is stupid to be beautiful. Only beautiful people say things like that, just like only rich people say money can’t buy happiness. The ugly and the poor know the truth. Make me beautiful and rich, and I promise I will rejoice. Of all his attributes, Carter will tell you, his looks are the most useless, and what matters is really what you think about William Faulkner and whether the French Revolution was about money or citizenship and if you are lucky enough to have a green thumb and are able to grow heirloom tomatoes. Any of these talents, Carter Graham will tell you, far outweighs beauty, but I know a shitload about William Faulkner, have memorized approximately a hundred poems from Shakespeare to Auden, can grow a mean tomato, wrote a critique in French of Citizens that my professor mailed to the author of the book, Simon Schama himself, and I would trade it all to go through life with the ease that has been granted to Carter Graham and, to a lesser degree, my friend Elizabeth Gottlieb.

  I briefly considered asking Carter to come to this wedding with me although it would be a disaster even if Elizabeth hadn’t slept with him, the guest of the lowly bridesmaid upstaging the bride. Carter definitely sucks the air out of the room, and in far, far from Hollywood Atlanta, all eyes would be on him even if he showed up, as is entirely possible, unwashed in jeans and a sweatshirt, especially if he showed up unwashed in jeans and a sweatshirt. For a week, he let me think that he might do it. We are close, Carter and I. I am his personal assistant. I read all his scripts. I read and summarize books he might want to option for his production company, and then Carter talks about them as if he has read them, and he thinks he actually has. When Carter voices an opinion, even though it is mine, he does so with complete conviction, as if years of thought have led him to this conclusion: Alyosha is not the hero of The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan is. To talk to him is to feel completely understood, known, and cherished; though after years of observation, I am now aware that he has forgotten about you the moment the basketball game comes on and that you are not his soulmate; you momentarily fill the emptiness that every actor has. Only empty people can assume so many identities. You have to be naked, after all, between each costume change. Most of us are too implacably ourselves to ever convincingly be someone else. We’re cooked, hardened; we can only change by breaking. Actors have a hollow core and can become whatever you fill them with, wine, milk, water, sewage, starlight.

  When Carter asked me whose wedding it was, I said, “Elizabeth. My best friend from kindergarten.” He looked at me blankly.

  “You met her,” I said. Still no glimmer of recognition. “She was in law school in Virginia. Really pretty, tall, curly black hair. Freckles.” Still nothing. “Carter,” I said. “You slept with her.”

  “Oh,” he said finally. “The one from Virginia.” He acted like he remembered. “She was really sweet.”

  I hadn’t been in touch with Elizabeth for at least a year or two when I moved to LA, but six weeks after I arrived there, I got a call out of the blue from her—she was going to be in Los Angeles and couldn’t wait to catch up with me. I’m sure it never occurred to Elizabeth that she wasn’t the first acquaintance who suddenly developed a burning desire to reaffirm our deep friendship now that I was working for a movie star. When she arrived, I suggested we visit the La Brea Tar Pits. I took a bit of perverse pleasure in taking people who came to visit me to a science museum since I knew they wouldn’t actually come out and say that the reason they had come to see me was to (a) meet the gorgeous movie star I worked for and (b) see other movie stars. As it happened, Carter came to the museum too.

  Carter only ever asked me about my social life when he was between women, which meant he was on the hunt. There is one thing I can say about every actor I have ever met: they can’t stand to be alone. What would Freud say about my inability to lie when Carter asked me what I was doing on Saturday, my rightful day off ? On almost every other Saturday, I could have said that I was sleeping late, catching up on reading, maybe hitting the gym, going to a movie with one of my friends who Carter had met and didn’t care for, and he would have waved me off and gone to the Bel-Air where he would undoubtedly find someone to go home with him. I could have lied. I knew what to say to be dismissed, but instead I said, “My friend Elizabeth is in town.”

  “Oh yeah?” Carte
r raised an eyebrow.

  “We were thinking of going to the La Brea Tar Pits.”

  “What’s that? Is that the new soccer team?”

  “No, it’s a science museum. Thousands of years ago there were these tar pits and all these ancient animals like giant sloths and mastodons fell in and their bones were preserved there. It’s really cool, and it’s right on Wilshire. They have all these models of what prehistoric Los Angeles looked like. People think it’s brutal now. Before there were agents, there were saber-toothed tigers.”

  “It’s cool, really?”

  “Yeah, you’d like it.”

  “You sure you wouldn’t mind?” he asked, accepting.

  “No, I’m sure my friend would love to meet you.”

  “What’s she doing in LA?”

  “Visiting. She just finished her first year from law school and she needed a vacation.”

  “Law school? Cool. What time are you going?”

  It never occurred to me that Carter would actually come to the museum. Elizabeth and I were standing in the dim light of the pits, looking down at a diorama of a giant ground sloth caught in the black tar that would both kill it and immortalize it. The artist who made the model had captured its agony and fear; its eyes rolled back in its head, paws reached uselessly up to us, but 20,000 years ago, we weren’t here, and the mastodon standing in the safety of the tall grass couldn’t have helped if it had wanted to. Elizabeth was fidgeting, but I painstakingly read every plaque in the museum. She was dressed for Rodeo Drive, in a romper and sandals. I was wearing a U Penn T-shirt and leggings.