The Beautiful Room

How I live with myself

Belladonna of Tears (1973)

I TURNED 25 three months ago, and since then, something disappointing has happened. I’ve rapidly, severely, and single-mindedly become obsessed with my beauty. More specifically, I am disturbed by it. I don’t know what to do with it. Has a stray animal ever followed you home and, whether perched at a polite distance from your front door or rubbing coquettishly at your ankles, exerted a sort of prophetic ownership over you? Hello. We belong to each other now.

That’s how I feel about what’s happened to me these last few years. Somehow, without my really noticing, a second version of me followed me home one night and now lives full-time in my apartment. She’s sexy, self-assured, and a grown-up woman. She works out five times a week and otherwise spends her time lounging on my couch, thumbing religiously through new copies of Interview and Dazed and PAPER that I pick up for her on Saturday mornings.

“You know, you’ve not touched up my nails in a while,” she says to me in a measured tone, hovering over my face at a strenuous 6 a.m. “The situation is pretty dire. And last night you forgot to moisturize me again after showering. Do you want me to be shriveled and totally disgusting by 30?”

My prettiness—which is truthfully just a confluence of youth and resources—has so far existed outside of myself and firmly remains a foreign intrusion in my life. People point out the difference in self-possession between people who’ve grown up with good looks and people who’ve only recently acquired them, borrowing the model of old versus new money to enact yet another method of social stratification, and it works because it’s true.

Am I beautiful? In this world, there’s a room full of women who are confident they are, and another full of ones who have been assured they aren’t. Spending all your desirable years standing in the hallway, wondering which room you belong in—is that what being a woman is all about? Jostling for right of entry into the beautiful room at all costs, else consign to living one class below forever and find yourself deafened to a frequency only the beautiful can hear.

I realized for the first time that I’d possibly crossed a new threshold of attractiveness two Halloweens ago, when, after agreeing to apply a tube of fake blood to a friend-of-a-friend’s upper lip, I realized much later that he’d asked as a form of flirtation. A month before that, I had to part ways with my personal trainer when, after hanging out with him one afternoon while he dogsat for his sister, I was informed later by my guy friend—wearing an incredulous, what the hell were you thinking? look on his face—that I’d absolutely just gone on a date.

I felt like a huge idiot, and then I felt upset. Did the fact that I was in a relationship at the time not matter? What happened to just being friends, as it had been so earnestly sold to me? Finally, I felt ashamed. The fact that these guys were continually pursuing me—did it mean I was sending available signals back? Prior to that season of my life, I’d always felt completely in control of myself. Nothing I didn’t will or work for presented itself before me, especially romantic attention. And yet, something in me had lurched forward this time and negotiated terms of play and pursuance on my behalf.

That was the first time I felt her shadow over my shoulder. The second me.

One of my favorite things I’ve read on here is an essay by Ava (bookbear express), in which she writes of the experience of womanhood: “I always felt since I was a little girl that being female was about tracking down the correct, elusive objects.”

There was a time in my life when my most prized possessions all existed in my head. They were lines in cherished books, well-worn from private recitations while I washed my face in the morning or looked out the school bus window. It brought me intense pleasure to say good sentences over and over in my head, turning them this way and that like fine jewels held up to the light. When I lost her, I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier. Donna Tartt, on grief. His fatherliness dissolves apace with your daughterliness. Anne Carson, on dementia. A particular species of domestic violence. Susie Boyt, on raising a teenage girl.

If you were to ask after my treasures now, I’d say my Diesel jeans, Jil Sander sweaters, a bottle of Byredo on my magazine stand, and the vintage Celine raincoat my best friend gave to me in the worst month of my life. My luxury workout sets. My Harlequin diamond-print Vivienne Westwood bag. The glossy bottles of gel nail polish lining my bathroom shelves. I would even go so far as to consider my body a possession, too. I’m a slave to this body. I’ve spent endless hours in the mirror studying the arms and legs, measuring the waistline—watching the muscles ripple and feeling a deep-roiling pleasure comparable to that of an opium pipe brought to the lips. Relief that is almost tidal in scope washes over me in an awesome wave. Bret Easton Ellis, on the thrill of keeping up appearances.

“Like what you see?” I see her in the mirror, standing over my shoulder in bra-and-underwear, one hand holding my measuring tape and the other grabbing her ass. “Not bad, right?”

“Don’t do that,” I plead, feeling sick.

“Then don’t leer.”

The problem with showing some aptitude for attractiveness is, I’ve found, the near impossibility of forfeiting your place in the long, arduous line winding out from the beautiful room. I am profoundly afraid of losing the ability to be in communion with all that is fair and fine. I’ve not always been pretty, but I’ve always worshipped aesthetics. And I didn’t ask to be dropped into the race, but here I am, running like my life depends on it. The Olympic ordeal of nights out, tight tops, freshly washed hair falling in a cascade over my face when I bend down to brush the snow off my Vagabond boots. Did I look good just then? Did I say the right thing just now? Work, parties, pain. Earning the right to sit at the right tables. Self-soothing via Pinterest board in the restroom. The long walk home. The shit on my floor that I trip over in the dark. Crawling to the foot of my bed and crouching there silently for a few terrible moments because the room is spinning, and I hate what’s happening to me, and I’m sick of living with myself.

“Oh, grow up,” Second Me says from the couch, flipping a page in her magazine. “You’re no Bella Hadid.”

“Get out of my house,” I demand.

She doesn’t bother to reply to that, but the walls of my studio bow out menacingly. Your house? She arches an impossibly thin eyebrow. I built this room for you brick by brick, you ungrateful ugly bitch.

People talk plenty about the gifts that beauty brings, less of the disturbances. It’s every late-blooming girl’s dream to wake up one morning and discover, at last, she’s come into her promised fortune of beauty. A subtle thing happens when you consider yourself part of the artwork for the first time. Would you believe me if I told you colors indeed seem more vivid, music more sonorous, and lovers more devoted? You are alone far less often. You are given things without question. All sorts of wonderful attributes are freely assigned to you—and also insulting ones. Saint and siren, martyr and mistress; you become a remote figure enshrouded in a blue mist behind a glass pane, difficult to see clearly and so destined to weather the fevered imaginations of strangers.

Sometimes I feel I’ve started down a sad, dark path. Life is more exuberant at times, but I also feel emptied out each time I realize I’ve chased after glimpses of myself in storefront windows for ten straight blocks, anxiously checking and double-checking that my face hasn’t flown off or abandoned me.

There was a time, before, when any love and affection I received felt far purer. In my dreams, I can still sometimes grasp onto remnants of those days. Seventeen or eighteen years old, still bushy-browed, acne-ridden, a little out of shape—yet there were quiet car rides through sun-spangled Southern woods, long phone calls and dizzy sessions of lovemaking, nothing noncommittal in the way I was held before, during, and after. No beautiful thing was truly denied to me back then, I realize now. Before I was anything other or more than exactly myself, I was never expected to be.

Losing that, I think, has destroyed me a little.

“But what—isn’t—destroyed—in time?” She’s yanking me up from the floor and practically carrying me over to the couch. “In just a few decades, I’ll be destroyed, too.”

“So you know, then, that it’s all pointless,” I say.

Shifting closer to me on the couch, Second Me waves a wet wipe in front of my face and gestures to me to close my eyes. “You think it’s easy to be in this apartment. You think I sit up here and make pouty faces in the mirror all day.”

“Well, basically, yeah. Don’t you?”

“Why ask me when you can just assume?”

“Look,” I say. “You’re completely different from me. I mean, Christ, you should’ve seen me at senior prom. Or—well—you don’t know what it’s like to stand in a room and feel unwanted.”

“Ohhh. Don’t I?” She scrubs my face a little harder.

”No, you don’t.”

“You know, you act like I wasn’t there, too.”

I open one eye. “What?”

“At your corny-ass prom. Or all those other places. Bedrooms. Backseats of cars. I followed you everywhere you went. I answered all your prayers. But now I’m here and you’re, like, mad at me. You won’t even accept me as you.”

Through the window, I see that it’s begun to silently snow outside again.

“And you never look at me,” she says.

“I always look at you. I can’t take my eyes off you.”

“No, you just slice me into chunks of meat with your eyes, like everybody else. You don’t look at me.”

So I look at her. We give each other a long, hard look.

Tomorrow morning, we’ll find the branches of the tree outside covered anew in fresh heavenly things—and also the cars below, the sooty unswept streets. If I wake up early enough, I know I’ll see little girls in tiny coats wading through the whiteness on their way to school. The lively, pioneering ones will plunge their boots into the snow and shout with glee; the more sensitive ones might stand still and, holding a mittened hand up to the sky, commune with the universe in that secret language which has long been lost to me.

“What are you thinking about?” Second Me asks.

“A really good sentence,” I say.

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