Sheer, page 8
“What are you?” I asked.
Caroline lay on her stomach, her small head resting on a pillow facing me. At my question, she propped herself up on her forearms. Her lower back muscles clenched beneath my fingers and I withdrew my hand.
“What am I?” she parroted back at me.
“Yeah, where are you from?”
“I told you at drinks. I grew up in the Bay Area.”
“That’s not what I mean. Like, your parents. Where are they from?”
“They’re also from California. Why do you want to know?”
“I’ve never seen anyone like you before. I was curious. I’m sorry.”
The hard pinpricks of Caroline’s eyes began to soften.
“Curiosity is fine. Asking someone what they are isn’t.”
“I get it.”
“No, you don’t. But you’re young. There’s still hope.”
“How did you know to ask me out?”
“What do you mean?”
“How did you know I would be receptive?”
Caroline smiled. “Ah,” she said. “It was instinct honed by many years of experience. You learn to see the signs.”
“What signs?”
“They’re in the ether. The way someone looks at you. The charge in the air when you speak to each other. You’ll get a feel for it. It’s something you figure out on your own,” she said as she patted my arm. “What’s your deal anyway? Besides working at Macy’s.”
The bar’s server never checked my ID. Classy places were the easiest cons for underage drinkers because their staff were so drilled in hospitality, they wouldn’t bother guests with unseemly questions. Caroline had no inkling that I was a student.
“I quit yesterday, after you left.”
“Not the right fit?”
“Exactly.”
Caroline sank back down into the pillow and turned onto her side. Her nipples were about three shades darker than mine.
“What’s next?”
I shifted closer to her and flipped onto my side, too, so that our bodies faced each other, though mine was a few inches longer.
“I worked as a freelance makeup artist before I started at Macy’s.” I’d overheard a customer at Macy’s refer to themselves as “freelance” in conversation. It seemed an appropriately vague and uncontestable term.
Caroline reached across the inches of sheets that separated us and began to stroke the side of my waist.
“Were you any good?”
I leaned my face into hers like I was going in for a kiss, then stopped an inch from her lips.
“I’m the best there is.”
She glanced at my lips expectantly. When I failed to close the gap between us, she looked me straight in the eyes, like she had a day earlier across the blinding counters of the Macy’s beauty department.
“Show me what you’ve got.”
Caroline Part Two
Some of my career’s biggest moments originated in bed. Take the morning after that first night with Caroline, when I did her makeup before work. Caroline hardly needed anything, she was that naturally stunning, more so after a night of hot sex. I seated her on an ottoman in her bathroom. A ring of bulbs surrounded the mirror above the sink; the heat radiating from them brought me back to the Macy’s cosmetics floor.
I had already examined Caroline’s face in detail when I woke beside her. Caroline’s skin was unlined. Her undertones were practically solar. I had never made up anyone with skin like hers, in color or texture. For the first time, I was at a momentary loss to improve upon nature.
Caroline smirked at my hesitation.
“What’s the matter—nerves?” She ran an elegant finger down the front of my torso. “If you’re not planning to do anything, I can think of a better way to use this time…”
I gripped her hand and removed it from my torso. Though my insides twisted in response to her overture, I would not be deterred.
“You’re stunning, you know that,” I said. Caroline smiled. “But things can always be better.”
Caroline’s personal makeup stash was laid out on her bathroom counter. A collection of well-used brushes filled a plastic cup. I pushed the cup away. I hated the sharp lines and heavy application that brushes imparted. A face wasn’t a literal canvas; I had evolved my thinking since middle school. Faces were attached to people. The makeup needed to sink into the skin, to blend into seamless oblivion, not unlike the melding of two bodies in a bed. Tools got in the way.
“You’re not going to use those?” Caroline asked.
“I prefer my fingers,” I replied.
“I bet you do,” she said. “But we’re talking about makeup. I don’t want to look like a clown when you’re done.”
“Trust me,” I told her. “I know what I’m doing.”
I prepped her face with a light moisturizer. Then I swiped an extra dollop from the jar to mix with her concealer. There were no creases on her perfect face, but faint crescents of darkness hung beneath her eyes. I patted the concealer across them and underneath her nose and on the center of her forehead and chin. Blended with the moisturizer, it had the plush texture of a toasted marshmallow. I plucked two lipsticks, one a rose berry, the other a rich carnelian, and mixed them on the back of Caroline’s hand to see their effect. Then I swiped their blunted ends across the apples of her cheeks and rubbed until they appeared feverish.
Highlighters hadn’t become mainstream. Caroline had a pale iridescent eye shadow powder in her arsenal. I tapped it lightly across her brow bone and the tops of her cheeks. Her face was flushed and gleaming, like she had emerged from a lava hot spring.
Caroline was impressed.
“How did you get the concealer to disappear like that?” she said.
She gave me a long kiss and off to her real estate job she went. I lingered at Caroline’s vanity, luxuriating in the success of the past twelve hours: I had lost my virginity to a beautiful woman, then I had enhanced her beauty. Days earlier, this happiness would have been unimaginable. It was a rare moment when reality transcended my most penetrating fantasies. I was as close to divinity as I ever managed. If only I had known how fleeting it would be.
Thanks to that morning-after maquillage, Caroline shared my name with a few of her fancy friends, who attended galas and other events for which they needed their makeup done. It was like my Paramus business all over again, except now I trekked to Park Avenue penthouses and Gramercy Park brownstones to caress the faces of millionaires’ wives. There was Alexis, a thirty-something married to an M&A titan. She had an addiction to dark smoky eyes and Russian vodka. I met her halfway, tightlining her eyes with a gray pencil and finishing them with a matching powder that cloaked her gaze in a sexy smog. She paid me in cash and shots of Stoli straight from the freezer. Lauren was in her early fifties but appeared younger thanks to her dermatologist and off-label skin injections. She lived on lower Fifth Avenue, near my Washington Square dorm. Until she met me, her go-to evening move was a red lipstick that left her mouth like an open wound. I pulled her back from that ledge with a blackberry gloss that gave her face the ripeness of a late-summer day. I made Misty’s and Dahlia’s skin shine like polished silver, and I basted Tina’s pout like it was a porterhouse steak.
I informed my parents that I would not replace the Macy’s gig with another service-sector position. My dad took this with a mix of resignation and general sadness.
“Maxine,” he sighed into the phone a few weeks after my fateful first date with Caroline. “How do you expect anyone to take you seriously when you’re running around town doing makeup in people’s apartments like it’s a middle school slumber party?”
If only there were sleepovers involved.
“I’m making more money than I did at Macy’s.”
“It’s not just about money.”
“Says the accountant.”
“There is no trajectory in what you’re doing. It’s a dead end. At Macy’s, you get promoted to manager, then you move up to corporate…there’s somewhere for you to go.”
I was sitting on my twin bed, playing with the ragged corner of my woven comforter.
“Maybe I don’t want to go anywhere. This is where I’m supposed to be.”
My dad sighed deeply again.
“I want you to be secure in the long term. I can’t afford to help you as an adult.”
A piece of wool thread broke loose from the comforter’s corner. I tugged at it repeatedly.
“I know, Dad. I want to be happy. Besides, some of these women are really wealthy. They could help me with a next step down the line.”
Caroline’s acquaintances were loaded. I’d walk into their five-bedroom apartments for families of three, and I wouldn’t know where to look. They had living rooms, dining rooms, family rooms, and libraries, each chamber leading into the next to the point where you wondered if their homes had secret passageways to other countries. Their furniture was either very modern, all boxy angles and chilly materials, or comprised of antiques, scuffed but shiny, passed down through decades of family wealth. The art on their walls was by names that also filled the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. There was one woman who had a famous Cubist work hanging casually in her entryway the way most people have coatracks in their foyers. A souvenir from a trip to Paris, she offered when she noticed me staring at the painting. They ran out of mini Eiffel Towers? I replied. That was the last time I made a joke about a client’s wealth.
I learned other things, too, from these women. Alexis attended most of her events without her M&A husband. He was always at the office or traveling or doing god knows what. She had a retinue of strapping young men, most of whom I assumed were gay based on their availability and fashion sense. Alexis rotated between these men as dates. Straight women seemed much more comfortable with gay men than they did with gay women, I noted.
After the makeup was done, I often assisted my clients as they got dressed. Zipped them into their strapless gowns. Carried the trains of their dresses. Helped them into the cars waiting downstairs. Unlike Alexis’s spouse, Lauren’s husband acted as her date. I say “acted” because the role didn’t seem to come naturally to him. He always slammed the door when he returned home, usually while I was mid-process. Lauren was charming, an easy conversationalist. She’d regale me with anecdotes from her latest charity board meetings or ladies’ lunches. Whenever Lauren’s husband slammed the door, her neck would stiffen and her posture would hunch over. Sometimes he’d stomp into the room, interrupt her, and demand to see what she was wearing.
“Not that one,” he’d snap nearly every time. “Are you crazy? Important people will be there.”
Lauren would flinch and offer other options until her husband gave his approval. He’d leave. I’d return to my work. Neither Lauren nor I would acknowledge what had transpired. All those big, beautiful rooms in her apartment were empty of affection or even mutual respect. I began to believe that the immense privilege of these women came at a heavy cost. It was a price I promised myself I would never pay.
Caroline didn’t tell me how she explained our relationship to my new clients and I didn’t ask. I assumed she told these women that she had met me through her job or while out one night. Obviously, I knew enough not to hint at anything more intimate than a superficial friendship between us. These women wouldn’t have suspected a thing. Their minds weren’t sophisticated enough to consider that a woman could look one way and swing in the other direction. Caroline was as feminine as they came; even in the pantsuits she occasionally wore, she exuded a doll-like prettiness. While my long, shapeless lines and angular features were far more androgynous, my blondness had always softened my tougher edges, like steamed milk atop a bitter, dark espresso.
I don’t say this to boast. It’s a fact. Appearances matter and mine, specifically, gave me a cover that many others don’t have. I’m not proud of this, but I’m not going to shrink in shame over it either. A straight woman can enjoy her feminine beauty. I had to wear mine like hammered armor.
* * *
—
I continued to see Caroline multiple times a week for the rest of freshman year. During the summer break, I returned to Paramus and acquiesced to a part-time Macy’s makeup job to appease my dad. Unfortunately, Linda was no longer there. She had moved to Pennsylvania with a new boyfriend, according to another woman. Caroline and I didn’t speak much that summer. I told her that I was taking time off to be with my family; most of my clients traveled to Europe or to their country houses for the summer. I had a grandmother who wasn’t doing well or something like that. Occasionally, I’d call her at the office from a GSP pay phone on a lunch break. We’d exchange some perfunctory words and she’d ask about my grandmother, but after the fourth stilted conversation, she told me to just call her when I was back in New York. Sophomore year started and we resumed our rendezvous.
I’m not sure if what we had could be termed a relationship. I only saw her after hours, at times and places she chose. Then we would head to her loft, where I would spend the night. She never asked about my apartment; I didn’t offer up details of my own. It was like she knew, implicitly, that I was hiding something, beyond the same thing we were both hiding to the outside world, and she either didn’t care or didn’t want to know. I always left her apartment first thing in the morning, sometimes before she woke, to avoid any awkward run-ins with neighbors. We never went out with her friends and I didn’t introduce her to anyone from NYU.
The second semester of my sophomore year, Caroline and I were at a dark, divey bar in the East Village on one of our nights out. When it came to the locales for our meetups, Caroline’s taste ran the full gamut from posh elegance to gritty realism and she hardly ever repeated a place. She never told me why, but I figured it was out of discretion. We were careful never to act affectionately in public beyond the bare-minimum hugs and single-cheek kisses permitted to platonic women.
She and I sat in a back booth of this establishment. The benches and tables were all wood that had seen better days, and that past patrons had tattooed with their initials and witty observations: Alex sucks! for example. Caroline sipped a whiskey neat. I had a vodka and soda with lime. Caroline was in a weird mood. She kept making snippy comments about things I said. It was almost like we were an actual couple. She was in the middle of telling me about a ridiculous Tribeca loft she was trying to sell for millions of dollars—“The apartment is major, but who the hell wants to live in Tribeca?”—when Carl, this tall, scrawny dude from my Macro class wobbled up to our booth.
“Max? That you?”
It had been over a year since I’d started seeing Caroline. Initially, I had worried that any time we ventured within a twenty-block radius of NYU, we would run into people I knew. We never had and as a result, I had lowered my guard.
“Carl, hey.”
Carl could barely stand still. He swayed gracelessly. His eyes were watery. College boys and their nonexistent tolerance levels. This worked to my advantage. I could discount anything incriminating he said based on his obvious inebriation.
“What are you doing here?” he groaned.
“Having a drink with a friend.” I glanced at Caroline, whose face bore an expression of utter disdain. “Maybe you want to go home? I could help you get a cab.” I needed to get him away from Caroline, stat.
“I’m fiiine,” he sang. “Just wanted to see if it was you.”
Carl turned and made like he was going to stumble back to the bar. Just when I thought I had skidded through this train wreck unscathed, he offered his parting words.
“Seeee you in class.”
My spine went cold. No amount of intoxication could explain away that comment. My mind raced to concoct a justification for Carl. Perhaps I was taking a night class somewhere. Oh wait, that wouldn’t work. Between Caroline and my makeup clients, my evenings were entirely booked, something Caroline knew. Besides, Carl, with his wiry limbs and juvenile face, practically screamed I’m underage! Card me!
Caroline stared hard at me, then looked off toward some future horizon only she could see as she took a long, deep sip of her whiskey. This only made things worse. Cold fear radiated from my spine to my arms, neck, and face. Finally, she turned her gaze back to me.
“How old are you?” she asked calmly.
Beneath the table, I gripped my thigh with my hand so tightly the crescent-shaped marks from my nails were still visible after I left the bar.
“Twenty.”
“Fuck. You’re in college?”
“NYU.”
“So you’re not a ‘freelance makeup artist’?”
“I am now.”
“And before—you lied?”
“I omitted some details.”
Caroline glared at me pointedly.
“I was a makeup artist. Back in Paramus. I ran a business in high school.”
“Doing what, children’s parties?”
I sat up straighter at that.
“It was for girls who were going on dates. I had a full operation until I was forced to end it.”
Elbows resting on the table, Caroline cupped her forehead in her hands.
“If those women find out you’re only twenty, they’ll kill me. You can’t tell anyone.”
“It’s safe to say I know how to keep a secret,” I noted.
Caroline took her head from her hands.
“This can’t happen anymore,” she said, lowering her voice. “It’s bad enough sneaking around; now I have to worry people will think I’m a pedophile, too? No way.”
Emptiness replaced that cold fear. Caroline was dumping me. I didn’t raise my voice or cry. We were in public. I couldn’t allow myself to feel the pain of this break, not now. I would grieve later when the time was right. When Caroline and her beautiful face weren’t sitting across from me, lacquered in my betrayal.
