17.
FOREIGN OBJECTS
-PEARL-
I’d bought a new
dress just for this, and nine kinds of makeup. My hair had been
redone that afternoon, cut and blown and sculpted with goo. I was
dripping borrowed bling and staring at my bathroom mirror, a
contact lens balanced on the tip of my finger.
Color my mother
ecstatic.
“You can do it,
Pearl.” She was hovering behind me, similarly glammed.
“That’s not the
question.” I stared at the contact lens, which shimmered like a
tiny bowl of light. A dreadful, painful glow. “The question is
whether I want to.”
“Don’t be silly,
darling. You said you wanted to look your best
tonight.”
“Mmm.” Foolish words
that had sent Mom into a spending rampage.
Back a million years
ago when she was seventeen, she’d actually had a coming-out party,
like a real old-fashioned debutante. She still had the pictures.
And we’d stayed in New York City no matter how high the garbage
got, no matter how dangerous the streets—because this was where the
parties were. So she probably hoped this was the beginning of a new
era of Pretty Pearl, no more blue jeans or glasses or
bands.
“I could just go
there blind.”
“Nonsense. To be
truly lovely, one must make eye contact. And I don’t want you
stumbling all over the art.”
“She’s a
photographer, Mom. Photos are traditionally hung on the wall; you
can’t stumble on them.” Typical. It was my mother who always got
invited to these things, but she never bothered to Google the
artist. Which was lucky, I guess. A glance would have revealed who
else was on the guest list tonight, giving away the real reason I
wanted to go.
“Quit stalling,
Pearl. I know you can do this.”
“And how do you know
that, Mom?”
“Because I wear
contact lenses and so did your father. You’ve got the genes for
it!”
“Great,” I said.
“Thanks for passing on those sticking-a-finger-in-your-eye genes to
me. Not to mention the crappy-eyesight genes.” I stared at the
little lens gradually drying to razor-sharpness on my fingertip,
imagining all my totally lateral caveman ancestors jamming rocks
and sticks into their eyeballs, none of them realizing the whole
thing would pay off a thousand generations later when I had to look
good at an art gallery opening.
“Okay, guys, this is
for you,” I said, taking a breath and prying my left eye open wide.
As my finger approached, the little transparent disk grew until it
blotted out everything, dissolving into a fit of
blinking.
“Is it in?” my mother
asked.
“How the hell should
I know?” I opened one eye, then the other, squinting at myself in
the mirror.
Blurry Pearl, clear
Pearl, blurry Pearl, clear Pearl . . .
“Hey, I think it’s
in.”
“See?” my mother
said. “That was easy as pie.”
“Pi squared, maybe.
Let’s get going.” I scooped new makeup into my brand-new handbag,
its silver chain glittering softly in my blurry eye.
My mother frowned.
“What about the other one?”
I alternated eyes
again—blurry mother, clear mother—and shrugged. “Sorry, Mom. I
don’t think I’ve got the genes for it.”
As long as I could
recognize faces, the demimonde was good enough for me.
Out on the street,
Elvis made a big deal about my new look, acting like he didn’t
recognize me, trying to get me to blush. The older I got, the more
he thought his job was to make me feel ten years old. Lately, he
was tragically good at it.
The weird thing was,
though, by the time we arrived at the gallery, I felt twenty-five.
There weren’t any cameras popping as Elvis swung the limousine door
open for me, but there was a guy with a clipboard and headset,
other blinged-up art lovers sweeping into the entrance, their
bodyguards piling up out in the street, the clink and chatter
coming from the crowd inside. . . . It was almost like going
onstage.
Even with everything
going on, New York still had gallery
openings. Civilization was still kicking ass, and here I
was, in costume and in character. Ready to charm.
Once inside the
gallery, the first trick was extricating myself from Mom. She kept
showing me off to friends, all of them dutifully not recognizing me
and dropping their jaws, reading from the same script as Elvis.
Soon Mom was striking up conversations with strangers, dropping “my
daughter” comments and clearly craving “Not your sister?” in
response.
And she wonders why I
don’t dress up more.
Finally, though, I
weaseled out of her orbit with the lame excuse of wanting to look
at, you know, the art. Her fingers
trailed on my shoulder as I slipped away, reminding everyone one
more time that I was her daughter.
I made my way
straight to a table full of champagne, rows and columns of it
bubbling furiously, and smiled. The open bar: where else would a
record company rep hang out at an art opening?
I snagged a glass and
hovered near the table, keeping an eagle eye (just one) out for the
face I’d downloaded that morning. My trap was finally set—I was
ready. All my lines were memorized; I was dressed ravishingly and
standing in the perfect spot. There was nothing more I could do but
wait.
So I waited. . .
.
Twenty minutes later,
my enthusiasm had faded.
No record company
talent scout had materialized, the glass was empty, and my feet
were unhappy in their new shoes. The party buzzed around me,
ignoring my little black dress and borrowed bling, like I was some
kind of nonentity. Bubbles rattled unpleasantly in my
head.
All my life I’d
wondered how my mother’s sole life purpose could be going to
parties, even while the world was crumbling around her. Finally
Google had shown me the answer: her reason for existence was to get
me into this party. Astor Michaels, Red Rat Records’ most
fawesome talent scout, was also the biggest collector of this
photographer’s work. He’d discovered the New Sound, signing both
Zombie Phoenix and Morgan’s Army—not huge, commercial bands, but
gutsy bands like us.
It was a perfect
match, like when Moz and I had been brought together. Surely this
was fate playing with my mother’s social calendar.
But as I picked up my
second glass and wandered through the crowd, squinting at two
hundred half-blurry faces and recognizing none of them, I started
to consider an awful possibility: could fate be messing with me?
What if Astor
Michaels was out of town? Or busy scouting bands at some
undiscovered club instead of here? What if Google had lied to me?
All my efforts tonight would be wasted—in fact, my mother’s whole
life would be wasted. . .
.
I stood there, dizzy
on my feet, staring at a half-empty glass and realizing something
equally dismaying: the champagne gene was another one my mom hadn’t
passed on. Maybe it was my half-blurry vision or the buzz of the
uncaring crowd around me, but I felt like reality was in a
blender.
I had to get
control.
I took a deep breath
and pulled myself out of the crowd, wandering to the party’s edge
to look at the pictures. They were gigantic photos of the
sanitation crisis: glimmering mountains of plastic bags, garbage
guys on strike, lots of rats. All were dramatic and weirdly
beautiful, almost life-size, as if you could walk straight into
them. Which begged the question: Why would you want this stuff on
your wall when it was all happening right outside?
The crowd seemed to
agree. People were crowded into the middle of the room, shrinking
from the images of decomposition. Only a few of us hovered at the
fringes of the party, sullen and extraneous, like sophomore guys at
the senior prom.
Poor art lovers, I thought, and then, in a fit of
champagne-stoked genius, I realized where Astor Michaels had been
hiding.
He wasn’t here for
the prom; he was here for the art. He was one of the
sophomores.
I started to circle
the room, ignoring the crowd in the middle this time, the ones who
looked well connected and happy and cool. I looked for the lonely
guys, the losers.
Halfway around, I
spotted him out of the corner of my eye—my good eye, luckily. He
was ogling a vast photo of a shrine built by sanitation workers out
in the Bronx: praying hands and crosses and skulls (again!) all jumbled up to provide protection on
their route.
I took a deep drink
of champagne to steady myself, my lines beginning to tumble through
my head.
“What am I listening to? Oh, just this lateral new
band.”
My fingers fumbled
with the sticky clasp of my new handbag, scrambling around inside
until they found my music player at the very bottom. Its earphones
were non-helpfully tangled with makeup and hair goo and a million
other things I never normally carried. After long seconds of
unwinding, I managed to drag the player out and get the phones into
my ears. But where was my neck strap? I peered down into the
bottomless handbag in horror, realizing I hadn’t brought
it.
I flashed back to my
hours spent at the Apple store looking for just the right strap:
sleek black leather with a shiny steel USB connector. I could see
it in my mind’s eye, still in its packaging, sitting on my bed with
all the other crap.
And of course this
stupid cocktail dress, like all stupid cocktail dresses, had no
pockets. It would look way too obvious just carrying the music
player in my hand, and a pair of earphones snaking out from my
handbag wasn’t going to make me look like the hip young trendsetter
I was supposed to be. The kind who says things like . .
.
“No, they’re not signed. Everyone just knows
about them.”
I squeezed my eyes
shut, trying to think.
There was only one
place to put it.
I took a gulp of
champagne, switched the music player on, and dropped it down my
cleavage. It fit perfectly and was kind of warm down there.
Really warm—I looked down and realized
that while scrabbling in my handbag I’d locked the screen backlight
on.
Framed by the black
velvet of my dress, my breasts glowed softly blue.
In my champagne haze,
it was kind of cool looking. Carrying your music this way might not
be the Taj Mahal of class, but it was definitely going to get the
guy’s attention.
I moved
closer.
“What language is she singing in? I don’t think it is one,
really.”
The player was set to
shuffle our four best songs— long, intense rants of Minerva’s
peppered with Moz’s cleanest, simplest lines, Alana Ray shattering
it all into a thousand glittering shapes, Zahler finally playing a
proper bass underneath. As I drew nearer, the music began to
synchronize with the bubbles in my bloodstream, my footsteps
falling with the beat. I was cool and connected, seventeen and
covered with bling, a record company’s dream demographic in the
flesh.
The world began to
shift around me, just like when we played, my fingers twitching
with the keyboard parts. Huge photographs rolled past my shoulder,
a galaxy of rats’ and cats’ eyes flickering on my blurry
side.
“What’s their name? I don’t think they have a name yet,
actually. . . .”
By the time I walked
up beside Astor Michaels, swirling one last smidgen of champagne in
the bottom of my glass, I was cool and predatory and confident, the
embodiment of our music.
He turned and looked
at me, his eyes following the white cords from my ears down into my
glowing cleavage. His gaze flashed a little, reflecting the soft
blue light.
Then Astor Michaels
smiled at me, and his teeth were pointy, a hundred times sharper
than Minerva’s. . . .
All my lines flew
from my head, and I pulled my earphones out, pushing them toward
him with quivering hands.
“You’ve got to
listen, man,” I said. “This shit is paranormal.”