Beautiful You: A Novel

  Her first weeks back in New York were a blur.

  The money Maxwell bestowed on her came in the form of an annuity. She couldn’t withdraw the entire lump sum, but she could live very well off the accruing dividends for the rest of her life. Prudently, she invested in a small town house on the Upper East Side. When the realtor had shown her the sunny tiled kitchen, the elaborate scrolled-ironwork elevator, and the carved marble fireplaces, Penny had written a check for the full asking price. It had plenty of closet space, which Penny’s burgeoning wardrobe almost filled to capacity.

  On her first day back at BB&B, she found someone to share the house.

  Despite her self-professed identity as a crunchy bohemian, Monique was thrilled to give up the squalid studio she shared with two ethnic roommates under the Kosciuszko Bridge. Before Penny could entertain any second thoughts, Monique was dragging cardboard boxes from a taxi into the town house’s elegant foyer. The smell of sandalwood was inescapable, but Monique’s weird sitar music helped to fill the emptiness. To celebrate their first night together the transplanted neohippie cooked a curried tofu feast. Afterward, the two young women flopped on the sofa in the media room. Each with a bowl of popcorn in her lap, they watched the Academy Awards ceremony being broadcast live.

  As the camera in the Kodak Theatre panned the crowded audience, Penny couldn’t help herself. She searched for Maxwell’s pale boyish face and limp blond hair. There, seated on an aisle, was Pierre Le Courgette, Alouette’s boyfriend. Of course he would attend; she was a shoo-in to win best actress. Other faces Penny recognized, powerful people who had snubbed her or leered at her. It was hard to believe she’d rubbed elbows with them. That part of her life was fading like a sexually charged dream. She’d allowed Maxwell to isolate her in a fantasy of addictive pleasure and no emotional attachment, but now she was free.

  Between being constantly examined by Maxwell and judged by the thoroughbred jet-setters they met in public, Penny had shed any sensitivity she’d had about getting ogled. She might occasionally hear it, the clicking of paparazzi camera shutters, but she no longer reacted. She’d come to assume that every eye was always on her, and she carried herself with a new relaxed poise.

  Whether it was this new self-confidence or the new clothes, she often caught men staring. Whenever she walked down Lexington Avenue, she almost didn’t recognize her own reflection in the windows of Bloomingdale’s. Striding along was a leggy Amazon. Gone was the layer of baby fat. Her hair swung in a shining wave.

  In retrospect, Penny was glad the City of Light had never heard of butter brickle ice cream.

  In the media room, she and Monique fought good-naturedly over the remote control. Both shouted jibes at the screen, where lesser-known cinematographers and producers expressed their verbose gratitude. The winner of best documentary was ushered offstage, and the network cut to a commercial.

  The television showed a group of delighted, smiling young women gathered around a table. In the center of the shot the prettiest of them blew out the candles on a birthday cake as her friends pressed gifts upon her. To comic effect, every gift turned out to be a bright pink box emblazoned with a very curlicued white logo. Beautiful You. The girls rolled their shoulders and giggled. As if sharing some glorious secret, they pursed their lips and leaned to whisper in one another’s ears. The birthday girl squealed as if the pink boxes contained nirvana.

  To Penny, it was unlikely that girls like these—thin, doe-eyed, clear-skinned—would have any problem finding men who’d romance them. They were the last women who’d need to buy Maxwell’s throbbing whatchamacallits.

  Suddenly Penny envisioned a billion lonely wives or single women abusing themselves in isolated resignation. In ghetto tenements or tumbledown farmhouses. Not bothering to meet potential partners. Living and dying with no intimate companions beyond their Beautiful You gadgetry. Instead of being either whores or Madonnas, they’d become celibates who diddled a lot. To Penny that didn’t seem like social progress.

  The television commercial ended with the familiar tagline; a dulcet female voice intoned, “A billion husbands are about to be replaced …”

  “They have a store on Fifth,” Monique said through a mouthful of popcorn. “I can’t wait until it opens tomorrow.”

  Penny thought of the flagship outlet. Already a line of women was forming and it snaked for two blocks, down almost all the way to Fifty-fifth Street. The building’s facade was skinned in pink mirror, so anyone trying to peek inside saw only a flattering rose-colored reflection of herself.

  Penny hoped the eventual products were better made than the one Maxwell had left for her aboard the Gulfstream. She’d fallen asleep to its soothing pulsations, but as they’d been descending into LaGuardia she’d blinked awake to find it broken. The two wings of the plastic dragonfly had fallen off, and the pink-silicone body had split down the middle. It was almost as if the thing had hatched. Metamorphosed, she’d thought. But it was caterpillars that turned into butterflies. Butterflies just died. They laid their eggs on cabbage leaves and died. As the pilot had prepared for landing, Penny had discreetly picked the shattered scraps of silicone out of herself and stuffed them into her coat pocket.

  Resolutely, she decided to find a real, live, flesh-and-blood lover before she’d resort to standing in line on Fifth Avenue.

  Monique called, “Pay attention, Omaha girl!” and began to pelt Penny with salty, buttery kernels of popcorn.

  On television, Alouette sauntered across the stage to accept her award as best actress. Her floor-length gown swirled around her toned legs. Her shoulders bare and thrown back, her breasts held high in her strapless bodice, she was the perfect image of self-assurance and accomplishment. It was thrilling to watch.

  “God, I love her,” Monique sighed. “Is that bling for real?”

  Glowing in the center of the actress’s cleavage was the huge sapphire.

  The camera zoomed in on Maxwell seated ten rows back, on the aisle. The lovable dork, he appeared to be playing a handheld electronic game. As his thumbs danced over the keys on a little black box, he seemed to be ignoring Alouette’s triumph onstage.

  In vivid contrast, the audience of big names applauded with genuine admiration. Standing behind the clear Plexiglas podium, the French beauty beamed, graciously accepting their accolades. A few people stood. Then everyone was standing. A tidal wave of adoration. As the applause subsided, leaving room for her to speak, a shadow of pain seemed to drift across Alouette’s delicate features. Her lips and brow tightened almost imperceptibly. It passed, and her smile returned. Even under her makeup her face looked flushed, and rivulets of sweat flattened strands of hair to her cheeks.

  She looked a little dazed, Penny thought, but who wouldn’t be?

  The actress began to say, “Merci,” but winced again. “Alors,” she cried out. She gasped for breath. Hugging the golden award to her chest, she took a step toward the wings, but looked uncharacteristically wobbly in her stiletto heels.

  Taking a second step, she stumbled and fell. The golden Oscar landed with a clunk and rolled a few feet. A murmur of concern rippled through the auditorium.

  “Somebody help the lady!” Monique shouted at the television screen.

  As she lay on the stage, trying to raise herself onto her elbows, Alouette’s legs began to tremble. A palsy began at her feet, but quickly traveled upward to her knees until both legs were shaking from the waist down. Her ankles moved slowly apart. Positioned toward the audience, her legs gradually spread, stretching her skirt taut between them. Even as Alouette reached down, gripping the hem and trying to keep it at a modest level, the tension on the fabric was too great. It sprang up, collecting above her crotch. She wasn’t wearing underthings, Penny realized. You never did with a gown that clingy and formfitting.

  “Are you seeing this?” asked Monique in a whisper. One hand hung frozen in the air, midway between the bowl of popcorn and her gaping mouth.

  To Penny, the five-time Oscar winner clearly
looked deranged. She twisted her head violently from side to side, lashing the stage with her long hair. Her eyes rolled up until only the whites showed. Her chest heaved, and her back arched, thrusting her hips into the air as if to meet a phantom lover.

  In heavily accented English, she was screaming, “No!” Shrieking, “Please, no! Not here!” It seemed as if the suffering movie star was staring directly at C. Linus Maxwell.

  None too soon, the network cut to a commercial.

  Instantly, the panting woman lying on her back, shoving her bare pubis at an audience of millions, was replaced by a new bevy of giggling twenty-somethings brandishing bright pink shopping bags.

  Everyone at BB&B was talking about it. Alouette D’Ambrosia was dead. According to the front page of the Post, she’d suffered a brain aneurysm onstage and died before an ambulance had arrived.

  The rumor was that after the broadcast had cut away to an emergency break, the cameras had kept rolling. In front of that vast audience of industry swells, Alouette had acted like an animal in heat, going so far as to violently abuse herself with the gold-plated statuette. Penny couldn’t believe that. Or she didn’t want to. The extra footage was reportedly on the Web, but she couldn’t bring herself to view it. If anything, the shocking episode only reinforced her impression that Alouette had been seriously mentally ill. It was a sad idea, but she’d likely relapsed into abusing drugs and alcohol.

  Whatever the case, it was tragic. In more ways than one. Brillstein had hoped to make Penny an associate. He’d planned to appoint her as lead counsel to represent the plaintiff in the palimony lawsuit filed on behalf of their client, Alouette. It would’ve looked great: the defendant’s most recent lover championing his jilted lover on the witness stand. Such a strategy would’ve made Alouette look injured and deserving. BB&B would’ve won the case, but not before the firm had oodles of billable hours to their credit. With the actress dead, her lawsuit was dead. BB&B would have to find a new rainmaker, and Brillstein would need to find a new shop window in which to showcase Penny’s lawyering talents.

  Brillstein wasn’t the only person watching out for her at BB&B. Tad was back in the picture. Tad Smith, who’d always called her “Hillbilly.” He was the young fresh-faced patent law specialist whose private man-parts Monique referred to as “the tadpole.” After Penny’s Beautiful You transformation in Paris, Tad hardly seemed to recognize her. Now a boldly beautiful eyeful, utterly unashamed to be seen by all, she was no longer anyone’s fat, stinky dog. If he still had a hankering for Monique, he never asked about her. Instead, he invited Penny to lunch.

  He escorted her to La Grenouille and regaled her with anecdotes about his days editing the Yale Law Review. After lunch they’d hired a carriage and ridden through the park. He bought her a handful of helium balloons from a street vendor, a simple romantic gesture that Maxwell—despite all his brainpower—would never think to do.

  Tad didn’t even tease her about being “the Nerd’s Cinderella.” The New York Post had long since moved on to other stories. Alouette’s death, for instance. A forest fire in Florida. The queen of England had collapsed in convulsions during a meeting to negotiate duties on consumer goods manufactured in China. As their carriage clip-clopped down Fifth Avenue, Penny tried to ignore the pink-mirrored building that loomed ahead at Fifty-seventh Street. A line of shoppers waited to enter. The line trailed into the distance as far as she could see.

  “Look,” Tad said. “Is that Monique?”

  Penny followed his gaze to a girl cooling her heels on the sidewalk, her arms folded across her chest. All of the people waiting in line were women. In the carriage seat she slumped her shoulders and slid down. She cringed with disappointment and resignation, pulling the balloons low to hide herself.

  Tad shouted, “Mo!” He waved until the girl’s eyes found them.

  “Can you believe this?” Monique yelled. “This is worse than when I bought my BlackBerry!” The midday sun sparkled on her rhinestone-studded fingernails and the bright tribal beads braided into her hair.

  Tad asked the driver to halt at the curb.

  As before, Penny felt ignored, relegated to being her glitzy friend’s stinky mutt. She looked up, pretending to only now notice her housemate. She knew Monique had a list of Beautiful You products that she was anxious to cart home and try. The online buzz posted by early adopters was positive. Beyond positive—it was raves. Despite the fact that a huge inventory had been stockpiled before the launch, the offshore factories were having trouble keeping up with orders. The praise spread like wildfire. Media wags speculated that so many women were calling in “sick” and staying home to indulge themselves that the gross national output would take a short-term dip.

  Penny resented how male newscasters treated the story like a dirty joke, reporting it with winks and an implied “hubba hubba” in every pause.

  “Save yourself the money,” Tad shouted to Monique. “Jerald in copyright law has a crush on you.” The horse shifted, restless. A taxi behind them honked.

  “Haven’t you heard?” Monique shouted in response. “Men are obsolete!”

  The declaration drew a small cheer from the assembled women.

  Monique played to the crowd. “Anything a man can do to me, I can do better!” She snapped her fingers dismissively, making the crystals glued to each nail flash in the sunlight.

  This evoked a louder cheer. Jeers and whistles sounded in her support.

  The taxi honked again. The line of shoppers began to move.

  “Can a sex toy buy you dinner?” challenged Tad, clearly flirting.

  “I can buy my own dinner!” With another step, Monique and the women nearest her were swallowed up by the big pink store.

  As if she needed proof that she was back in wild-and-woolly New York City, Penny was attacked her first month there. Standing on an otherwise deserted subway platform, she was headed uptown after a late night at work. She was idly musing whether to order Thai food or pizza when two arms grabbed her from behind. They crushed the breath from her, squeezing at her chest and throat, and her vision pinholed to a narrow awareness of the fluorescent lights overhead.

  She was on her back, her Donna Karan slacks stomped down around her Jimmy Choos. Later, what she’d remember most about her attacker was his stench of stale urine and peach wine coolers. What she’d never understand was how quickly it had happened. One moment she’d been deciding on lemongrass chicken, and in the next she’d felt the stranger’s erection ramming to enter her.

  Maxwell flashed into her mind. Not that the attacker was either curious or clinical, but how the assault was so impersonal.

  Even as Penny felt herself yielding, felt the angry hardness rip into her, she also heard the man scream.

  Faster than he had fallen on her, he jumped to his feet, his hands cradling the filthy penis that hung from the open front of his ragged trousers. He kept on yelping, tears streaming from his eyes as he looked down and examined himself.

  Her first impression was that the man’s fly zipper had snagged some tender fold of skin. Before she could rally her strength to scream or run away, she saw a large bead of blood swell from a puncture wound in the glans of his penis.

  The stranger’s attention shifted from his bleeding self, his eyes rising to glare at her. His voice timorous, he whined, “What have you got in your snatch, lady? A Bengal tiger?”

  Penny watched as the drop of blood grew to a steady stream. She edged backward, sliding herself away from where the blood dribbled to form a growing pool on the subway platform. She saw that he’d been wearing a condom, and the latex of it had also been torn.

  In another beat, a train arrived, and the man was gone. That was all she could tell the policeman who responded to her 911 call.

  The doctor she’d gone to for the necessary STD tests said she showed no signs of infection but insisted she come back for further tests in six weeks. The doctor, a sympathetic older woman with frizzy, graying red hair, insisted on giving her a pelvic exam and s
wabbing for DNA evidence. While she told Penny to place her feet in the stirrups of the examining room table, the woman donned a pair of latex gloves. She said to exhale while she inserted a speculum.

  While the doctor clicked a penlight and began her careful inspection, Penny asked for a pelvic X-ray.

  “That’s usually not necessary,” the doctor assured her.

  “Please,” Penny insisted. A wave of dread was fueling her request.

  “What are you worried about?” asked the doctor, still squinting through the speculum, rotating the beam of the penlight.

  Penny explained about the man’s lanced penis. The hole torn in his condom.

  “Well, there’s nothing here that might account for a puncture wound,” said the doctor. “Your first impression was probably correct: He got it caught in his trouser fly.” She began to slowly withdraw the speculum. “Serves the bastard right.”

  They ordered the X-ray.

  The X-ray came back showing nothing.

  Penny told herself it was nothing. Probably just the sharp metal teeth of the man’s own zipper. It was only after that fact that Penny realized the worst part. Her guardian angels, in their tailored suits and mirrored sunglasses … for the first time in her life, they hadn’t come to her rescue.

  At work, Penny was cramming like crazy to pass the bar. Brillstein was still searching for the perfect class-action case for her to helm, but that wouldn’t happen unless she was an attorney. Until then, she still had to juggle the occasional coffee run and wrangle extra chairs for big meetings.

  It didn’t help that Monique kept calling in sick. Since the day she’d lugged home two bright pink shopping bags, the girl had been barricaded behind her locked bedroom door. From what Penny could tell, she didn’t even emerge to eat. Day and night, a faint buzzing came from behind the door. When Penny knocked the buzzing stopped.

  “Mo?” Penny waited. The buzzing was all too familiar. She knocked again.