We all get old, Bad, Bad Lovers, it happens to us all. But for women, it’s different. There, I said it. Funnily, I thought I would come back to this passage with twenty years of distance and find it no longer relevant, or less so. You know, girl power and STEM-girls and you can be anything you want to be. Yep, all that, but you’d damn well better be pretty too, or this culture has no use for you. And you’d damn well better stay that way. So, that’s what Installment XXVI is all about. Don’t believe me? Spend ten minutes watching TV.
And if you’re wondering how in the world we got to this sad impasse, you can take yourself all the way back to the Beginning Of It All by clicking right here.
NB: What follows is in no way intended to be judgy about anything any woman has done, or had done, or will do, or intends to, in the privacy of a cosmetic surgeon’s office. We all do what we have to, ladies, and no one knows better what that is than you.
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Shelf-Life
On the occasion of Livia’s last visit to her sister five years earlier (guilt-twinged as she made the calculations), she’d stepped into Danae’s dressing room to borrow a brush; she had forgotten to bring hers. Danae’s dressing table was disorderly and dusty (she’d shuddered; she could never live with such chaos), and it had taken some time to locate her sister’s brush. She’d pushed the jumble of makeup, necklaces, powder puffs, and earrings to one side; perhaps the brush was hiding beneath all the clutter. Only then had Livia noticed that her sister’s dressing table was glass-topped and that Danae had slipped several photographs between the sheet of glass and the costly wood of the table.
One photograph had been taken, Livia had judged, just after her sister’s wedding; possibly even on her honeymoon. A very young Danae, standing next to a much younger Bretton. Danae’s face was turned upward, toward Bretton, but Bretton’s was turned self-consciously toward the camera, fists shoved hard into the pockets of his navy blue trousers. Danae’s hand wrapped around her husband’s arm, squeezed painfully into the tiny space between Bretton’s left tricep and his big body, as though he might float away if she didn’t tether him firmly.
She’d found the brush; she’d picked it up. Just beneath the brush, a photograph which had, at first, puzzled Livia. A woman, dark-haired, olive-skinned. A pillow. Danae asleep? Danae in one of her roles? She’d bent forward to examine the image more closely. No, it was Marta. The lush lashes, the still mouth, the blue dress. She’d been visited by unwelcome images of that afternoon in the funeral home. She’d hurriedly buried it once more, beneath the clutter.
~
Danae’s house (Danae’s and Bretton’s, but Livia preferred, for obvious reasons, to think of it as Danae’s) was a two-storied mansion, with tall, graceful columns along the length of the deep front porch. It stood amid an abundant tangle of cypresses, weeping willows, and evergreens. There were gardenia bushes on either end of the porch. The scent met Livia insistently as she climbed the shallow steps. They were tall, those bushes, their stems thick like they’d been there for decades. Livia pondered for a moment, certain they hadn’t been there the last time she’d visited Danae.
Danae opened the door before she could knock (Danae’s doorbell didn’t work; it hadn’t, for as long as Livia could remember), and Livia, uncharacteristically remiss, forgot to ask about the gardenia bushes. The hallway was dark. Danae must have been sitting in the front parlor, watching out the window, quiet and still, waiting for the sound of her sister’s rented car in the driveway. Danae, Livia knew, wouldn’t have been reading while she waited. Danae didn’t read anymore. When she had read, the material she chose had been limited to drama, and only those plays in which she herself might hope to have a part. But the simple activity of waiting now sufficed for Danae.
Waiting was something at which her sister had become a consummate expert during the past fifteen years of her life. Waiting for parts, waiting for Bretton, waiting to age.
Danae’s smile only engaged her mouth. Livia, however, was not offended by the resulting distance. She knew that her sister had spent long hours in front of her dressing table mirror, beside the print of Ophelia and the tiny bottle without a label, practicing smiling with her mouth, without wrinkling the newly tightened skin at the corners of her large, dark eyes. The intention was not to offend, it was protective. Of herself.
~
One year and two months before her sister’s fortieth birthday, Livia had received a telegram from Danae asking permission to pay her a visit in New York. Danae had, she said, some business to attend to.
Livia had shuddered at the prospect of what would happen to her sister’s face in the plastic surgeon’s office. She had only recently begun to study her own pale skin for the tell-tale signs of aging; she had found none, however, and, returning to a perfunctory application of hand-lotion to her face at night (when she happened to remember), had given the matter no further thought. And now Danae was talking, quite seriously, about having tiny cuts made into the delicate flesh around her eyes so that minute portions of excess skin could be snipped off, like taking in the waistband of a pair of pants after you had lost weight.
Danae had made the appointment from New Orleans; everything was taken care of. Before Danae’s appointment, Livia had sat for an hour with her sister in a cafe on the Upper East Side, around the corner from the plastic surgeon’s office.
On Aging
A woman had been seated at the table closest to the window, visible only in profile. Danae and Livia had seen her at precisely the same moment. The woman appeared to be around fifty; there were lines at the eyes and mouth, incipient folds beneath the chin, made apparent in almost grotesque fashion by the tenuous light of late winter, that seemed ready to turn to dusk at any second, though it was early afternoon. The light entered the window obliquely, hitting the face at an odd angle, decomposing it in a way that would surely have horrified the woman had she been aware of it, opined the pitiless Danae.
Livia had decided ten years earlier that she didn’t give a shit about what she would look like when she was old; old men, she reasoned, were no treat to look at either. She imagined that, when old men got randy, they often had recourse to old women. Livia wasn’t worried about it. Livia, therefore, had been unaffected by the woman’s face, by the strange light. She’d contemplated both with purely clinical interest.
But Danae had stared at the woman, at the light, with an intensity that had embarrassed her sister almost to the point of a reprimand. An intensity not un-tempered by disgust. After several minutes of Danae’s intense staring, the woman had changed the position of her head and the fold and wrinkles had disappeared. You wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow if she’d told you she was thirty. But Danae had seen what she had seen. And she had seen her own face like that.
Danae was obsessive about not letting herself become complacent in her beauty. That was why she had come to New York to do what she had come to do. There were certain lights under which she (and anyone else) would swear she was twenty, rehearsing La Dame aux Camélias, flirting with Bretton, not even using moisturizer yet. That was under certain, favorable lights.
To flatter a face, Danae had informed her sister, stirring low-fat Half-and-Half into a third cup of coffee, a light must hit it directly, without beating around the bush; Danae had deduced that the same was true for a spectator–in order to view you at your best, anyone who might be looking at you should look you directly in the face. After the obsessive afternoon on which she had made that discovery, Danae had endeavored never to allow Bretton to see her at a three-quarters’ angle. It had been challenging, but Danae was confident that she’d managed it, with the exception of one or two slip-ups, and even then, Bretton had probably not been paying attention.
The light in Danae’s bathroom was fluorescent. Danae had chosen it herself. Whenever any friend asked to use the restroom to repair her makeup, Danae always directed her to the guest bathroom downstairs; she was tired of having to defend her choice of lighting.
On Lighting
The effect given by the fluorescent light was an unfortunate one, even cruel. Fluorescent lighting, Danae had explained to her sister, is definitely the worst, especially when placed above its subject, as was the case in Danae’s bathroom–the light was in the ceiling. Danae, because of the bathroom light’s refusal to pardon even the vague tiredness occasioned by a late night, could be scrupulously vigilant, could spot the beginnings of any fold or crease, however incipient. Danae, thanks to her bathroom light, would catch any suspicious sagging beneath her lovely eyes, or along the perfectly sculpted line of her jaw, and could thus do something about the problem before anyone else had even noticed its existence.
Besides, Danae had announced to her sister, that woman, the one seated at the window table, had never been beautiful. It was obvious. Attractive, yes; beautiful, no. Oh, it was probable that she still occasioned desire in the members of men of her age, or perhaps a bit older…she still had a ways to go before her possibilities would be all used up.
Danae had dwelt on the stranger’s possibilities while the woman stood and gathered her belongings, preparing to leave. Possibilities for getting a man, of course, or for keeping him if she already had one–what other kind were there for a woman, really? Once masculine approval, desire, stopped coming your way, you stopped existing, for other women as well as for the men who didn’t desire you anymore.
Danae didn’t know which was worse; she’d sighed as she extracted a cigarette from the nearly-full packet in front of her on the table (she, as did her sister, parsimoniously rationed cigarettes to herself–no more than three a day). Then she’d put the cigarette back–she wouldn’t waste one of her precious three on such a worn-out topic as aging; they were much more delicious after a meal.
That was the worst part of the whole thing, the betrayal of other women, Danae had said, through her sigh, their exclusion of the ones who are no longer desirable. “Maybe”, Danae had mused, “it’s because they make the rest of us uncomfortable. Maybe it even scares us. No one wants to meet an old woman’s eyes.”
Livia had had to concede that her sister was right. No woman wanted to be forced to divine her future in the folds of tired skin pleated about those eyes, making them small, however large they may once have been, closing them. They all want to deny the sadnesses which have occasioned the cruelly etched rictus of the mouth, a mouth which, like theirs, had been, in its moment, full, moist, like fruit sprinkled with dew.
But Danae–she’d stood, abruptly, banging her thigh against the table–was doing something about all that. Her appointment was at three.
~
More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.
Right here, IN TWO WEEKS’ TIME, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…
Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.
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