Amanda Filipacchi - The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I finally manage to murmur.

And the reason it doesn’t matter, the reason I have been silenced, is that the unthinkable, the impossible, has begun.

Beauty is crawling all over Lily like a disease. It is clawing at her face, chewing her features, transforming their shapes, harmonizing their lines. It attacks her flesh, takes hold of her skin like a rapidly-moving cancer, leaving behind pure loveliness. Waves of delicacy wash over her. Ripples of symmetry soften her. Layer upon layer of grace sweeps over her entire countenance.

I shake my head a little, to make sure I’m not hallucinating. I blink.

We need the tape recorder.

The melody is fast and inescapable. It’s an ocean of notes crashing around us in my living room. Gorgeous and delirious.

This has got to get recorded. Before it’s too late. Does Lily even know what’s happening to her — what she’s achieved?

I finally manage to tear my eyes away from Lily, who no longer resembles the Lily who entered my apartment tonight. I look at my friends.

Jack is fetching the small recorder from the bookshelf nearby and comes back with it on tiptoes, turning it on. He holds it out of Lily’s sight, so as not to distract her — not that she would notice anyway; her eyes are closed.

She still hasn’t looked at us since she sat at her piano. We, on the other hand, can’t stop looking at her — with the solemnity of country folks watching a spaceship land. Her beauty continues to increase. She looks like an angel.

I’ve never seen anything like this, beauty of this magnitude. I had no idea it existed.

And suddenly, the angel speaks. “I’m tempted to look into your eyes to see if anything has happened. But I’m afraid of being disappointed again.”

“Open them,” I say.

Slowly, she does. The effect is spectacular. Her eyes are turquoise, large and clear.

There is no model, no actress in any movie I have ever seen who is as exquisite as Lily right now. When I’m not wearing my disguise and men look at me, if they see even a fraction of the beauty I am seeing right now, I forgive their shallowness. There is power in beauty. That’s the tragedy of it.

It’s hard to imagine that Lily can’t decipher from the looks on our faces the extent of her success. If we were cartoons, our mouths would be hanging open wide in awe, our lower jaws on the floor.

But because we are human and because Lily has endured months of failure, her insecurities aren’t permitting her to read our expressions with any degree of accuracy. So she seeks out an answer in a roundabout way. “Does this piece need to get recorded?” she asks.

“Yes,” Jack says, lifting the recorder within her line of vision. “It’s on.”

A smile appears on her lips and her music takes off again, free and wild. She’s done it and — at last — she knows it.

She plays for a while longer and says, “Time to see the rate of the fade.” She stops playing, gets up and goes to the ballet bar. She stands with her hand on the bar, facing the narrow full-length mirror at its side.

She seems startled by her reflection and takes a step closer to see better.

“You’ve succeeded,” Georgia tells her. “Probably beyond what even you imagined, right?”

“Yes,” Lily says.

As the seconds pass, Lily’s loveliness lessens. “The fade is even more rapid than I expected,” she says.

Within a minute, every hint of beauty has left her.

“Now I just have to see if playback works as well as live,” she says, and asks us to hook up to the speakers the recorder containing the musical hallucinogen.

We do, and turn on the music. She studies her face as her beauty returns. The porcelain skin, the delicate features.

“Peter,” she says, looking at him in the mirror, “thanks for helping me. It’s completely thanks to you that I succeeded.”

“How?” he asks, baffled.

“You made such good points. The women you spoke about, who alter themselves drastically — you said they objectify themselves, that they see themselves as merchandise. You made me realize how important that is. I wasn’t doing it very much, and that was the problem. You helped me see that. So I lowered my self-esteem until I saw myself as no more significant than an item sitting on a shelf — a ceramic pot Penelope might break and put back together. I told myself that I’m like any other object in this world that I must beautify, just an ugly pot.”

“Wait,” Peter says, looking at me. “I can’t believe my ears. I was making the absolute opposite point.”

“Which was then reinterpreted by an artist,” Georgia says.

“Before, I wasn’t focusing on the right things,” Lily says. “But as soon as I tried Peter’s idea of looking at myself as an object, bam! I gained a sense of distance from myself, which freed my mind to come up with this new solution: depth. So that’s what I went for. The music enables you to see past my unfortunate physical appearance.”

“Past it? So what are we looking at?” Jack asks.

Lily doesn’t answer. Her silence is puzzling until I understand what she’s reluctant to state because of her modesty.

“Her soul,” I say.

“Her inner beauty,” Georgia adds.

Blushing slightly, Lily says, “Yeah, it wasn’t shining through. Not even slightly. I don’t know why. My physical appearance is very opaque, in addition to being ugly — an unfortunate combination.”

“So you performed… a kind of… musical peel?” Penelope asks.

“Yes, exactly.”

“What now? Do you have a plan?” Georgia asks.

“I have a fantasy. One of you will call Strad and offer to set him up on a blind date. He will agree. He and I will have our date at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square, in the coffee shop on the third floor. I will ask the store to play my beauty music on that day, instead of my book music, which they usually play. That’s how the whole thing would begin.”

“The whole thing? So you’re thinking there will be a ‘whole thing’?” Penelope asks.

“Well, that was the point, wasn’t it?” Lily says.

“How can you have a relationship with someone if the music always has to be on?” Peter asks. “What if he wants to take you out where no music is playing? Is this stuff covered in your fantasy?”

“Yes. I’d wear a mask.”

“A mask?”

“Yes. Or just avoid going out. But if I can’t avoid it, I’d wear a mask.”

“Won’t he find that strange?” Peter asks.

“Perhaps. But in my fantasy, he accepts it. And plus, people are often strange.”

“And you wouldn’t mind living your whole life this way?” I ask.

“Maybe not. And that’s an interesting question coming from you, Barb.”

“What if he finds out the truth?” Peter says. “What if you’re at home with him one day and for some reason the music stops and he sees you’re Lily?”

“Maybe his love could survive the truth.”

“What if it couldn’t?” Penelope asks.

“Maybe it won’t be the truth anymore.”

“What do you mean?” Jack asks.

“Maybe by then I will have improved the music to make its effect permanent. Even through silence.”

Georgia claps her hands once. “Okay, who’s going to make the call? I hope it’s not me because the thought of setting you up with that creep is hard to bear.”

“I’m not quite ready yet,” Lily says. “There are two things I have to take care of first.”

AN HOUR AFTER my friends leave, I’m surprised that Lily comes back to my place to speak to me one on one.

She asks me if I could make a mask for her to wear sometimes, if she’s ever out with Strad. She says she wasn’t able to find a nice one that fits her because her eyes are too close together for any normal mask. She says there’s only one she found that fits her, and she pulls it out of her bag. To my horror, it’s a mask of the Wicked Witch of the West, from The Wizard of Oz . The face is hideous green rubber with a hook nose topped by a big mole. The witch is wearing sunglasses — cheap sunglasses attached to the mask. I turn the mask over and see that each eyehole is huge, the size of the entire lens of the sunglasses, which explains why she bought it. Big eyeholes can accommodate a greater variety of distances between people’s eyes.