She was beautiful. That was what everyone told her. At the murmured apex of parties, she found herself sitting alone, draped in the luxuriant coats that had just finished their runway spotlight, garments given to her with no expense, their designers humbled and honored at her presence. Sitting there, her body hidden in roils of purple satin, ruffles of fuchsia fluff, or the speckled grey of mink, she made heads turn. “She is so beautiful!” the others would say, glancing quickly, discretely, in her direction, then turning back to their jostled conversations, their red ice wines: “It’s such a shame!” And still, no one approached her; no one bought her a drink, an introduction. She didn’t blame them; she had rationalized the situation in countless ways, putting herself in their shoes within the silence that cocooned her: what could they possibly say?
“This young, rising star as incredible potential… She has the face of a Lepidoptera with saffron wings.” That was what a writer in Vogue said of her first photo shoot. Her photographer had given her the magazine on a Monday morning, barging into her apartment while the sun etched yellow shapes on the hardwood floor. He had stood by her wheelchair as she finished the article, his hand resting lightly on her shoulders, the tips of his fingers tracing intricate, invisible lines on her skin. She could see that he had been crying.
“What do you think?” he asked.
She looked up into his face and smiled. She didn’t feel anything.
“It’s wonderful”, she said. “Thank you.”
He had started to weep again, and when he kissed her, she could taste the salty tint of his tears. It had been so hard, he said, but they had made it. She deserved everything she got. When he had left her room, leaving on her neck the smell of his cologne, fading sandalwood, she looked at the article again. The words. “The face of a Lepidoptera with saffron wings.” She cut out the quote with a pair of small, black scissors and taped it to the center of her dressing room mirror. When she looked at herself, centering her body just right, her mirrored self would have no eyes. Instead, they would have these words.
“…with saffron wings.”
She was not vain. She knew her success was both lucky and fleeting. The fashion world, save for a few exceptions, was constantly in a process of cyclic regeneration. Sometimes, on mornings when the sun hid behind a veil of grey cloud, or the wind made furtive gestures in unlocking her street-facing window, she glided about her empty loft, trying in vain to tip over her wheelchair. When that proved fruitless, she would leaf through dated fashion magazines, their glossy covers stained with traces of careless food. When she had asked for these stacks of old magazines, her photographer had been perplexed at first, then conceding; “If it makes you happy to see these dead models, then what of it?” he had said. And what of these dead models, she thought, slowly running the tip of her index finger along their curved contours; their hair, their eyes, their breasts, their legs.
Did these women, staring out at her with their painted, porcelain eyes, their glossy, pursed lips, did they even exist? They seemed to belong to that hallowed category of being, the self-sustaining fashion creature, an organism born out of examination. She had seen them, how they would preen and feather themselves, re-applying their blush or lip-liner, waiting for the next white flash from the camera. She didn’t quite believe that such creatures, also called nymphs or glammer-children, existed outside of the printed page; they were urban myths, ethereal and insubstantial. They weren’t corporeal beings; they would dissipate on touch. They only existed in that still moment, in that flash of light, that millisecond of drowning glare from a high-wattage camera bulb. Afterwards, they would simply fade away.
And then, her wheelchair lodged in the space between the dresser and her bed, unfolded magazines spilling from her lap, she would pick up her black plastic scissors. She would meticulously cut out the model’s silhouettes, place them side by side on her bed. When she had cut out thirty models, usually the work of two, maybe three magazines, she would stop. Now she would pick up the wafer thin women, flimsy and fragile, and would carefully cut them into letters. When this was done, she would arrange them on her bed, kaleidoscopic renderings of vowels and consonants, a phrase conjured from Prada handbags, Versace shoes, Givenchy scarves, and low cut Valentino negligee:
“I exist between the flashes of light”.
The first postcard came when her first photo-shoot had been plastered in the thick pages of Cosmo. The postcard depicted the Paris Louvre in the mid-afternoon sun, a shot carefully composed to accentuate its regal authority. She turned it over. The words were fractured but carefully scribed. The ink was dark and expensive, the letters meticulously rounded and spaced, as if the writer was a student of calligraphy.
“Dear Friend”, it said, “I broke up with my boyfriend today. I called him long-distance from our hotel and told him that I had found someone else. And I have. When I picked up this month’s issue of Cosmo, the one with your headshot in it, I thought, ‘She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.’ Then I read the article on you and about your accident. I cried. If there is a God, why does he do so many horrible things? But it made me love you even more. I love your hair and your eyes and your lips. As you can guess, I am in Paris and I am loving it. I have run through the Louvre twice now and I think I have pissed some people off. But all I could do was laugh. The French are so pompous. I will write to you next month.” It was signed, ‘An Admirer’.
Her photographer had insisted that the photo-shoot take place in her apartment, “to establish a sense of familiarity”. He had only wanted to do headshots at that time, so it was imperative that the light falling on her face was just right, “to capture the essence of her beauty.” So she had wheeled her chair to her window, the sounds of the street muffled and distant outside. She sat in profile, the gauzy white curtains brushing against her face when the wind wheezed through. There was silence, then two quick flashes from the photographer’s camera, positioned on the streaked hardwood floor just beyond her dresser. She would later learn that he only took two photographs, no more, no less; a perfectionist, an artiste, an admirer.
Within weeks of the magazine’s publishing, the fan-mail poured in. She wanted to read and reply to every one, but her photographer said it would be a waste of time.
“In time”, he said, “When you have gained some standing, you must give this replying duty to someone else. Perhaps an agent?”
She nodded feebly and showed him out. This was when she had discovered the postcard, and after reading it several times, carefully slipped it beneath her mattress.
The months passed by like the wind outside her window; rattling and wheezing and drawing attention to itself, then flitting by, insubstantial, unnoticed. Every month, her photographer would expand the edges of his shot, revealing more of her in increments of plastic. He would shoot her hands, her fingers adorned in silver rings, her wrists in gold brooches. He would shift his gaze to her neck, an ancient bronze necklace resting in the soft hollow of her chest.
And every month, like oiled clockwork, she got a postcard. Each one was from a different country, a different landmark. The New Mexico desert, the Taj-Mahal, Easter Island, An emperor’s palace in Japan, Stonehenge, Mt. Fuji, windmills in Holland, The Empire state building, the CN Tower, the Thames, Vatican Square: these were the landmarks by which she judged the passage of time. Calendars became superfluous and unwieldy, extraneous mechanisms used by an extraneous society. Time, for her, was etched by pieces of rectangular cardboard, snapshots of places that seemed too distant to be real. When she read these cards over and over again, then slipped them beneath her bed, she liked to think she was marooned on a deserted island in the Pacific, forced to keep time not by etching the days into corroded bark, but by glancing briefly into these other worlds, into that other life.
The messages scrawled on the back of the postcards were never as comprehensive as the first. Her admirer, a woman she guessed, probably in her early twenties, would sometimes write only a single line, telling her how she loved the country she was in, or sometimes, how she loved the latest photo-shoot. Occasionally, she would write a brief description of some inane stunt she had pulled while visiting that particular landmark: wading into the shallow pool in front of the Taj-Mahal naked, or trying, in vain, to get lost in the New Mexico desert. She had even walked through the Vatican square in a gauzy white dress, without underwear, on a particularly windy day.
Sometimes, sitting in her wheelchair by the dawn lit window, reading these incidents to an empty apartment, she would smile.
Then, four seasons later, her photographer decided to expand the frame, sliding his camera further back, the long black metal stilts brushing the edges of her door. This final shot of her was from the waist up, leaning into her dressing room mirror, her face fresh and red, untouched by the glare of cosmetics, her hair undone and uncombed, willows of thin strands resting on her shoulders like woven sugar. She looked like she was standing up, dreaming into the mirror after a fitful autumn sleep. To achieve this effect, she had brought her wheelchair as close as possible to the dressing-room mirror. She had then pushed herself up, balancing on the stumps of her legs, holding grimly to the edges of the dresser to keep from falling over. Two flashes and it was done. She slumped back into her chair.
“You did good”, her photographer said, and wrapped his arms around her shoulders, kissed her lightly on the neck. She could smell him, the sharpness of citrus, the dry smell of sweat. These days, she categorized her photographer, and, by extension, the photo-shoots, by his smell; always shifting and changing, flitting from oakmoss to Lychee, Abrette seeds to cedar.
“Thank you”, she said, and kissed his hand.
The month’s postcard didn’t come. She sifted through the growing pile of weekly words, looking for that scent from two worlds away. There were glowing reviews of her photographs, fashion critics waving their multifarious flags atop her head, proclaiming the next big thing, the next woman who would shape a generation and a half. Bravo, they cried, capitalizing their superfluous adjectives, hyperbole splashed around her lighted head; bravo, bravo. She didn’t care about them; their opinions were worthless and hypocritical, cresting the wax and wane of the trend tide. She cared only for the opinion of her admirer, that woman who seemed to belong to no country but Earth, a white stain on a silk scarf, borne across the oceans by a festooning wind. And still, no postcard came.
Time had ground to a winter halt, the falling flurries outside her window the only indication that the Earth had not stopped spinning, that gravity continued its coercive reign. Her postcard totem was lost; her empty apartment had become a wooden sepulcher, the rising, but steady thud of her heart the only axiom for life. When she opened her eyes to a grey dawn, she would blink and lie still as a specter, watching dirty snow accumulate on the beige plaster window sill, waiting for the world to come alive. Time stretched out like pink taffy, and she felt trapped inside its pores, drowning in syrupy hours.
A month later, the critics’ glowing praises receding to a mitigated hum, she got her postcard. Except this wasn’t a picture of some grand forgotten monument, wasn’t a depiction of humanity’s brick and stone gods, but a picture of a girl. She looked to be no more than fifteen, her cheeks pimpled and red, her hair a clumpy auburn, wisps brushing against a pale, stretched forehead. The girl seemed to be in a hospital bed, her eyes revealing the expression of one who has just awoken from a barely remembered dream, something about horses, green fields, and exotic retreats. There was an IV tube attached to her arm, and a bandage covering a portion of her left shoulder. A glimpse of a doctor’s white tailcoat could be seen escaping to the right. And she was smiling.
When she turned the picture over, there was the familiar meticulous scrawl, although this time it seemed forced and leaden, the curves wavering and skittish.
“Dear Friend”, it said, “Now you can finally see my face. I hope it is what you expected. I am sorry I didn’t write to you last month, but as you can see, they kinda have me in chains over here. You see, I was in an accident. Remember the boyfriend I told you about? Well, my mother didn’t really approve of him and after we broke up, he got kind of stuffy and angry. Last month, he came by my house on his motorcycle – he told me he had stolen it from his dad. Anyway, he said he wanted me to ride with him. Now before you go judging me, I’ll just say that at the time, I was confused and didn’t want to hurt anyone’s, including his, feelings. I guess we were having an argument and I was telling him not to go so fast, but that’s the last I remember. Bummer, huh? Anyways, when I woke up in the hospital all I felt was this terrible, terrible pain. It was like needles everywhere in me body. I wanted to scream but my mother was there and I didn’t want to upset her. The doctors told me that I had just about severed both of my legs – the bike had apparently skidded off and landed right on top of me. Talk about bum luck! And before you ask, my boyfriend (should I be calling him my ‘ex’?) is OK. A little dazed, but nothing else. Anyway, the doctors said that they could try to recover my legs but it would be touch and go. Also, I would have to endure countless months, maybe years of therapy to even walk with crutches! So you know what I told em? I told them to just take em off. Now I can be beautiful just like you.”
It was signed, as always, “An Admirer.”
She didn’t scream, she didn’t cry, she didn’t laugh. She merely slipped the picture beneath her bed; time had started moving again.
A few days later, her photographer came to her apartment. He said that he had come to a revelation. He said that the fashion world would be talking about this for years. His long, lanky hair was in colorful disarray about his head; he smelled of bourbon and cigarettes. He was carrying his camera beneath his arm.
“Come”, he said, and beckoned.
She wheeled her chair in front of the bed, rays of dying sunlight etching parabolas on her skin. The photographer set up his camera in the hallway, trying to get as much distance as possible.
“Take off your clothes” he said.
And she did. She unbuttoned her patterned silk blouse, shrugged it to the floor. She unhooked her bra, let it fall to the bed; somewhere below it, postcards from two worlds away. She was wearing a long, knee length purple skirt, and this too, she discarded. She stood on the stumps of her legs, nudging the satin cloth to the floor, her movements practiced and precise. Outside, it was snowing again, the thick white flakes brushing against the glass, their sounds audible to none but her. The sun inched its way to the horizon, yellow light diffusing on the walls. She knew that if she looked outside the window, she would be able to see all the way to the Taj-Mahal. The photographer lowered himself to the camera. She tilted her head back, letting her hair fall away from her face. She laughed. She thinks, I exist between the flashes of light. She thinks, I am beautiful.