In The Valley of Beautiful People- Alex Quyen
You never know truly what you think of your face until you lose it. When I had mine, I hated it. I detested it with a passion, a fiery burning vengeance that morphed over time into a sallow, oozing abhorrence. My nose was too round, I would think as I poked and prodded it in the mirror. My eyes were too big, I’d believe when I pulled down my eyelids and gazed into the reflection at the two sclera. My then-boyfriend always used to disagree with me. “Your eyes are my favorite part of you.” He’d whisper in my ears, which I thought too big and too pointed. I tried to take his compliments to heart, but something deep inside of me kept me from using them a salve. Perhaps I knew they were only made to keep me quiet.
“We are all born with our face.” My mother, a hard and sturdy Swedish woman with far too much sensibility and far much less compassion, said to me when I told her of my worries. She gestured to the wart on her forehead and the great big mole that I swore grew every time I saw her, “Am I happy about these? Of course not. But I live with them. It does no good to complain.” She turned away from me, ending our conversation. I hadn’t even broached the subject of cosmetic surgery yet. Maybe she sensed it coming and decided to end it before I could bring it up.
“What will you do though?” My then-boyfriend asked me in bed as I sat perusing blogs of miracle transformations, the ones that documented the twelve easy steps to a new you. “A nosejob? Chin and cheekbone implants? You have too many issues with yourself, and nearly not enough money or time to fix them all.” He turned away from me, rolling over so he faced the other
way. I sighed, closed the lid of my laptop. I tried to put all thoughts out of my head.
Eventually the then-boyfriend exited my life, breaking up with me over dinner. “Sort yourself out,” He had told me over the salmon I had cooked as a surprise for him, “then give me a call.” I never saw him after that night. I heard he had made his way down to America and ended up the paramour of a closeted Senator. Since him, only one other man took his place, an artist from Kensington that had sketched me as I worked. With broad strokes and tiny lines he had drawn my face; my lips that parted slightly as I entered a deep focus, the freckles spattered across my skin in a mock imitation of a rash. He had hung his studies around our shared apartment, hoping to surprise me. I had taken them down every time I saw them, eventually requesting for him to stop, focus his talents elsewhere. We parted after a month or two, him claiming I had no appreciation his art. I let him go. I had no more energy for dealing with people.
*** I remember the morning clearly, although not the date. I had awoken for
a job interview, setting my alarm clock the night before for a time too early for me to really function straight. As I stumbled in a sleep-crusty haze I managed to pull myself towards the shower, turning the knob towards scalding before stepping in myself. When I exited, my hair still sopping, I began to brush my teeth as I stared into the fog-obstructed mirror. Something was off, I could tell. A feeling stirred in my gut that something was wrong and so I reached up and wiped the condensation off the glass. It was my face I realized, that had brought upon me such a feeling of discontent.
Or rather, not my face. Because what was staring back at me was not mine. The round button nose I had hated so much was gone, replaced with one with a narrowed tip that angled up so very slightly. The cheekbones had been
raised and my jaw had hardened, becoming square and chiseled. It was a Kafkaesque circumstance, I considered as I warped and contorted my new visage, bending and stretching it to see how it looked at every angle. Only thankfully what looked back at me from the mirror wasn’t some Gregor Samsa looking fuck. It was a fine face, I thought as I ran a razor over its new features. It could’ve been a model, or an actor. I wondered whose face it was, if it was anyone’s at all.
*** I had ended up getting the job, and so I fell into a new life. I reinvented
myself; throwing out the little amount of photos I had with my old me, discarding my driver’s license and all my old student yearbooks. I chose a new name, one handsome and befitting of such a face I now owned, as well as a new history; a series of fake circumstances that had brought me to the moment in which I had walked in for the interview. In my old life I was no one special, an ordinary body flickering incorporeally through time. The artist once told me, in neither a fit of anger nor a moment of therapy, that I tied myself to my partners, that their life and friends became mine. When I had no one to sleep next to I became lonely and solitary, preferring my own company rather than any one in particular. A desperate creature, my mother had once called me in a burst of rage. I did nothing to argue her point. I knew deep down inside it was true. With this new face however I was able to change my path. I went out to drinks with coworkers, danced long nights away and flirted with men I previously considered far out of my league. It seems shallow, in retrospect, to think all this came about because of my new appearance. But I hated my old one so much, it only seems fit that a change would occur. Perhaps it was a gift from the man above.
I had sworn long and wide to myself that I’d keep this secret. The mystery of my transformation was one I did not like to dwell on, and I found my life going by so much easier when I didn’t. I’d go to the grave with this, I’d
tell myself, the undertaker would be piling cold hard earth on my strange new features and still no one would know. But now I have to tell someone. I can no longer repress this, keep it bottled up inside me. Because the face staring at me from across the street, the one peering lovesick into my eyes; that face is mine.
*** I had met him at a bar on the north side of town. He had approached
me from the side, my peripheral vision catching only glimpses of him before he tapped me on the shoulder and asked to buy me a drink. It took a second to register. I remember blinking to clear my eyes, but nothing I tried worked. It still stared back at me, a reminder, a haunting vision. He had shaken my hand, given his name. He gave no indication that he recognized me, that the reason he had approached me was because he knew he wore my face, or maybe because I wore his. As far as I could tell he was simply entranced by me. He sickened me. I tried to ignore him all night, ordering more and more drinks to pound back until I was so woozy I could barely remember why I had done so. But he was there every step of the way, eventually carrying me back to his car and driving me home. He asked if he could come over the next day, and, me, the ever-courteous creature, let him.
For a month I had met up with the man who had my face, curious of who he was. He spilled so quickly, so easily. By the end of the first date I knew everything about him except how he got his countenance; how his favorite drink was a dirty martini with the saltiest olives one can find, how he once wanted to be a singer when he was a kid but soon found he couldn’t sing for shit. He was confident, or maybe just horny. He’d lie in my lap and gaze into my eyes, twist my features of his into an approximation of a swoon that caused something in me to gag. It took every effort not to push him off. Perhaps it would’ve been better if I did, if I shoved him off and told him to never speak to me again. Instead I’ve found myself becoming increasingly
tangled in this web. Now, like an Almodóvar horror or an X-Files special, I sleep with my face next to me every night.
And now I’ve reached my limit. No longer can I bear to see that visage again. I’ve gotten up early in the mornings to avoid the eyes and nose and lips next to me. I’ve come home late and eaten out when I can. Maybe he knows, the signs are all there, but I doubt it. He still snuggles up to me, presses my lips onto my cheek or rubs my nose onto mine in an eskimo kiss. He had shown no sign when I called him from work. It was a business trip, I had lied to him; I’d be away for a week or so. I had already found a condo to rent online and had exchanged a series of emails with the landlord. I was all set to leave, be gone forever.
He greeted me at the door, kissed me before I got the chance to turn away. He had packed me a suitcase and gushed as he placed it in my hands, telling me to take pictures and text every night. I thanked him before stepping back and swiveling quickly to avoid dwelling on that face. I could see the taxi he had called, and began to quickly make my way there.
“Your boyfriend?” The driver, an old woman with graying hair stuffed into her cap, said. I nodded as she pulled away from her curb. I thought about my face standing on the sidewalk in front of the apartment that now was just his. I wondered what he would do when he realized I wouldn’t be coming back. My eyes began to water. I was not a cruel person, I told myself. It was me I could not stand. It was my face I hated. It was not the man-who-wore-my- face’s fault, but my own lack of self-confidence and abundance of disgust. Tears began to drip down the creases of my strange unfamiliar features. “Don’t cry,” the cabbie said as she patted my shoulder, “You’re too handsome to cry.”
But that made me only sob more