Aesthetica Read online

  The curtains in my room were thin. The sun cut through them the way it cut the morning marine layer, the smoke and evening smog: like a blade. I rolled onto my back, held my phone high as I replied to Jake. Yes, I would love to meet a star like him. Yes, I used the word love. I used the word star.

  3.

  The pool is shaped like a heart, the hotel like a castle. It’s close to Warner Bros, the Burbank airport and LA’s lesser theme parks. I booked it because I thought I’d feel safe here. And the hotels in Beverly Hills are too expensive. In the lobby of this one: a chandelier made of fake antlers, a display case of three-hundred-dollar crystal crowns, two white and pink thrones, for selfies. “Boutique,” I read online before I booked. But everything feels dated.

  I hurry to the elevator bank, look around, punch the up button too hard. Somewhere between here and the pool I lost the woman and the girl. Without them, all I want is the safety of my own room, solitary and dark. The doors ding open, shut, open again, on a floor that feels deserted, coated in a deep purple light cast by tinted lamps, absorbed by purple carpet. The hallway is intolerably long, lined with door after door of possible disappearances. I imagine my body dragged across the threshold, swallowed. But maybe this is what I want, a violent disappearance. I breathe for a count of three to get my nerve up, then speed walk to my room with my key card out and ready. Inside, I turn every lock, catch my breath, taste mildew. Even the mold is air conditioned, the whole room so cold the carpet’s damp, or feels like it. The furnishings are ornately carved, like a princess’s, the way I remember Fairy Tale Land, everything medieval, but also plastic, worlds like pages out of a child’s bath-time book, whimsical and water-resistant.

  The bathroom fan rattles. I drop my bikini bottoms, unlace my top, let it fall, then glance at the mirror, always startled by what I see. Dimples, ripples, reminders of masks and knives and wrist ties. A certain willful proximity to death itself. I give myself a conspiratorial look, the kind of look you give a friend who asks how you are when obviously you’re shitty. And shut the light.

  In the bedroom, I bend to the mini fridge, remove a bottle of wine. My own, not the twenty-dollar, two hundred milliliter the hotel provides. I came prepared. My wine bottle, my vape pen, nineteen bars of Xanax, thirteen Ambien, fifty Vicodin. And six gel caps, prefilled with magic mushrooms, a drug I’ve never tried. My dealer threw them in with my last order. “Nature’s medicine,” he said. I think he’s worried about me.

  The screw cap snaps. The bottle pours. My glass is paper, made for coffee. I set it on the bedside table, wrap myself in a robe and climb into bed, turn on the TV. The word “breaking” runs on a reel across the bottom of the screen. Twenty-four-hour news, the same story that’s been told for days. A powerful man, his desire, his violence, the world’s permissiveness.

  There’s an orange bottle next to the wine. I open it, shake a circle into my palm, pale pink as a contraceptive. I swallow, pick up the remote, scroll sound and color, pause on a home improvement network. A powder blond couple shops for a starter house in North Carolina. They look like real people, with eye bags and muffin tops. But nothing is what it looks like; the show is staged. Still, I watch for a while, top off my glass, drink. Mineral, dank notes of pear and flower. “Dream house,” the woman says. “Man cave,” says the man.

  From the bedside table, my phone pings and I reach for it, find its glassy face stacked with notifications. Instagram DMs mostly: sex bots, scam bots and a reporter for Vanity Fair who writes to me often, asking for my story about a man from my past. I swipe away, open my texts, touch the one unread blue dot. “Reminder: your facial procedure at The Aesthetica Center is tomorrow, check in at 6 A.M., reply YES to confirm.”

  “YES” I type, and send. The phone makes the sound of zipping and a bot responds, thanking me. I’ve waited months to be here, on the verge of the appointment I just confirmed. That I would cancel now, that I even could, plucks a dreaded cord behind my sternum. Because I have to go through with it. This is my chance. I won’t have another one.

  I close the phone, put it face down on my chest and find the remote, pump the volume to drown out my thoughts. One episode ends, a new one begins. A mother and daughter want to flip a house together. Like magic, I watch them turn a total gut-job into a pristine starter home, open concept, with subway tile bathrooms. Fragments of my mother’s voice filter in: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Be the change you want to see. Revise the negative self-talk.

  I pick up the phone again, open my photos and examine the picture I took of the girl at the hotel pool, the anxious mother in her background. Frizzy hair and foam noodles. Nothing is what it looks like. Their sameness and skin, my mother’s and mine. Seventeen years ago in Fairy Tale Land, her arm around my waist in front of Fairy Godmother’s Magic Wand Shop.

  “Put your tongue behind your teeth when you smile,” I told her. “And one leg in front of the other.” We posed. The camera flashed. The Xanax meets the Vicodin and together they spread out inside me. The woman and girl walk the rooms of their renovated tract house. I dream, as I often do, of meals I didn’t mean to eat, drugs I didn’t mean to swallow, faceless men I didn’t want to fuck. Even in sleep, I open my mouth, and scream.

  4.

  I met Jake Alton for the first time at a club in downtown LA. Password protected, private, the perfect place to discuss my future, he said. I carried my phone, debit card and license in a cheap silver clutch that matched my dress, also metallic, also cheap, loose everywhere but my ass and nipples. They tented the fabric like bones.

  “You sure, hon?” the driver said when he dropped me off. Around us: broken buildings, streetlights either dead or flickering on their way. I wasn’t sure and felt uneasy for a moment. But successful entrepreneurs say yes to any potential opportunity. And sometimes that’s uncomfortable. I pointed to a line of people hunched outside a green metal door. “I think that’s me,” I said.

  Music roared behind the door. I stood near the line, but not in it, and texted Jake, “Here.” Thumb on the screen, I waited, worrying about my age, the date on my license, the fake ID I didn’t have. I had just turned nineteen and my body still looked like a girl’s body. Which Jake said wouldn’t be a problem.

  Minutes passed and no response. I felt watched by the people in line, judged, like they might assume I thought myself better than them, standing apart as I was. I folded one arm over my chest and scrolled my phone, considering how to appear casual, chill, considering what TV show, movie, Instagram feed I could draw from to appear casual, chill. Anything but awkward or worse, anxious; anxiety, to me, was my mother’s purview.

  “You’re pushing me away,” she had started to complain after our trip to Los Angeles, after the Hippy Baby pictures posted, as I prepared to move for good. At first, I reassured her with lengthy descriptions of my business plan (gain followers, get sponsors, make money), and promises to text her every day. But the last time she said it—you’re pushing me away—I didn’t look up from my phone. She snapped her fingers at the space between my face and the screen. “Anna,” she yelled.

  “You simply can’t stand that I’m not like you,” I told her, my voice matter of fact, cold.

  ALONE AND JACKETLESS in the desert night, I shivered. The line was getting longer. Still scrolling, I walked to the end of it and took my place behind a group of girls, two guys in tow. They all turned to look at me, then back to each other, and the silver dress, which at home in the small and streaky bathroom mirror had looked expensive, felt cheap the way I knew it was. I checked my phone for Jake again, saw nothing and thought of catfishers, scammers, stories of stupid girls, too eager to be wanted, too easily punished for it. But then, a buzzing. A blue bubble and in it, Jake’s name. “Don’t get in line,” he wrote and washed me in relief. I saw him appear at the door, saw him from beyond all those waiting bodies. He held a hand up high and waved me to where he was. I unfolded my arms, put my phone in my clutch, left the line, and went to him.

  He wore a suit, the collar of his dress shirt unbuttoned, prayer beads on his wrists and laced loose around his throat. “You look hot,” he said and leaned in to kiss my cheeks. The feeling—his skin against mine—thrilled me, scared me, thrilled me again. I tried to see his face, but all I saw were flashes: fabric and skin. I had seen Jake’s account, though, the pictures of Jake’s face: chiseled cheekbones and his trademark tousled hair, worn most often in a bun atop his head. He was hot in a manufactured way. Soon I would be too. But always, I wanted to see him without a filter; for our entire time together, I would wonder what he looked like completely naked.

  The bouncer waved us in, underhanded, his eyes fixed on the line I’d left. Jake took my hand and his palm was clammy. I moved closer, close enough to eke heat, close enough to smell his Acqua Di Gió, which all the boys in my high school had worn. Jake was twenty-nine but he reeked “fresh aromatic” like an eighteen-year-old, familiar, unthreatening. He led me down a narrow hallway, a dark canal that opened into vampiric light, house music and beautiful bodies arrayed in patterns that seemed ornamental, everyone with wet, parted lips and drinks in their hands. Like something from a movie, something I hadn’t believed existed in real life. But I had wanted it to be real, had surrendered my self-limiting beliefs, and now here it was, real. Girls on Instagram called this manifestation. Entrepreneurial gurus like Tony Robbins and Pat Flynn called it creating one’s own reality. The music swelled. Strobes timed to match it split the dark. So I could still see Jake’s eyes when he turned to face me, pewter blue contact lenses, too bright to be real, obviously fake. And almost bold because of it. But also basic, dated, especially next to the beads, the cologne. Though he didn’t seem to know it. I knew the truth and Jake did not and this gave me power.

  Mine was, “the fickle power of teenage girlhood,” a temporary currency, according to my mother. Objectifying myself could never make me happy, she said, though she was wrong. Her version of feminism was outdated, too rigid to work in the real, digital world where I was in control of my body, my content, and smart to leverage the short blush of my youth for what was permanent and sure: power like Jake’s, his power to sign and promote me, his power not to. His was a power shored up by money and other men’s power. His was the power of choice, the power to leave and not be left. Which was what I wanted. To transcend my mother’s fate, and mine. To make more of our abandonment, my father’s leaving. I wanted to turn the story around and choose how I spent my time, made my money, presented my body. I wanted the power that came with certainty, what was real, what was illusion. I wasn’t sure there was a difference, wasn’t sure there should be.

  Jake led me through the club, walking with a languid gait, his shoulders rolled back so that his heart looked open and imperiled. We sat at a sticky banquette. There was a bucket on the table before us, champagne on ice, clean flutes on a tray. He poured me one, tipping the glass to stanch the foam, graceful in how he held the stem, which felt breakable in my hand, dangerous. I tried to look comfortable. Jake sat back and sipped, so I did also. We checked our phones, turned them face down, checked again, sipped again. A waitress brought tiny strawberries on a platter and Jake plopped one into my champagne. It fizzed at the bottom until I swallowed it whole and poured myself another glass. Jake talked about his latest trip, to Peru, where he had done Ayahuasca and “seen the point of it all.”

  “I’m telling you,” he said, “something clicked in my brain, like a new neural pathway. Like, before I would have looked at you and seen your hair, you skin, your smile, your eyes, your whole ascetic.”

  “Aesthetic,” I said.

  “Anyway, now I see your soul, and the fucking crazy thing is, it’s my soul too.”

  We were, Jake said, as all humans and animals and plants and life forms were, part of the same consciousness, divided at birth into independent bodies. He touched his collarbones, his pecs. He tapped his phone and was silent for a beat, checking. He turned back to me, touched my leg.

  “It’s all an illusion,” he said, and I knew he was making a commitment, telling me this mindset informed his managerial skills, which he called “conscious” and “nurturing.”

  I was humoring him when I nodded, smiled, told him he was right. I was playing a part to get to his power, measuring every move I made against moves I’d seen other desirable women—girls—make: the way Daul Kim leaned forward for the camera, swan-necked and skinny-armed; the way Kendall Jenner touched her fingers to the tip of her shoulders, turned a cheek, and glowered. My body was the result of those other women’s bodies, and now the club itself, which had closed around me and altered what power meant to me, what it looked like, and who I was willing to become, to make power my own. This was experience, adulting, trying on roles, creating my own reality. A reality in which Jake, who had at first seemed corny and canned, was starting to glow, a twilit vampire, his skin like a little girl’s fantasy of paternal love, always beaming.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said and stood, pulled me up with him. I followed him back through the crowd, back down the dark canal and into a night that was brighter now, a sort of daylight.

  ON THE CURB, Jake called an Uber with one hand and brushed my ass with the other, casual. I checked my Instagram and leaned toward the cup of his palm. My last post, the picture of my nearly naked body, the bougainvillea from my walk, had earned 627 likes, twenty comments. I’d received seven DMs since Jake’s, monosyllabic messages from gamer guys and faceless bots and old men whose grids were stacked with expensive cars. “Hey,” they wrote and “question . . .” and “pretty” and “love your page.” I tapped each one and hearts rose up.

  A bright blue BMW arrived. Jake held the door. I tucked my phone into my clutch and we lowered in.

  “You’re going to the Rainbow Room, yeah?” The driver wore sunglasses despite the night.

  Jake said, “Yeah, bro,” and put a hand on my thigh. I looked to the front seat, the driver’s invisible eyes. Jake’s hand inched higher. Blood beat from my knees to my crotch and I turned to face him. The car pulled to a stop. He took his hand away.

  Inside the Rainbow Room, there was a fireplace, a bar. “A lot of famous rockers hang out here,” Jake said. In booths aging men with long gray hair huddled, the air above them ringed in smoke. Like the people in wolf costumes who roamed Fairy Tale Land and waited tables at Red Riding Hood’s Roadhouse, where my mother had ordered cheap wine for us both. It arrived in shapely plastic flagons, an adult beverage we both knew I was too young to drink. But I drank it anyway, and she let me, a sly smile on her face as the room warmed and we both began to giggle.

  “I love it here,” I said to Jake. It was the right thing to say.

  “You love it,” he said and asked if he could kiss me. I told him yes. His mouth was like Dentyne Ice, mezcal. Like putting myself in front of the camera, like thousands of likes piling up, hundreds of comments—

  @inesbnld:

  @delphinegendron: Beautiful

  @Love_Certified: Amazing!

  @Under_the_influence_reality: Iconic!!

  @sebahormazabal:

  @mr.nearlynice: Nice

  @maeda346: So nice

  @cameron_paul: Sweet and pretty :)

  @wells_spring_viiana: eu não pego ninguém mesmo, não vai fazer falta kkkkkk

  @Dr_6689: You’re so beautiful

  @kellykimmyjames:

  @storevast: Astonishing

  —All of them confirming that I was right, had played the game right. I was the best, most beautiful, sweet and pretty, astonishing and iconic. A victory, that I could be all these things when my mother could not. And a sign of how clueless she was about where power truly lived. Social media was causing depression, she always said, suicide. Thousands of girls. Yet I was in Jake’s mouth, alive.

  “You’re perfect,” he said and held up his phone. I sprawled on a burgundy booth for the photo, crossed my legs, angled my body to look curvier.

  “Yeah, like that,” Jake said. “Okay, now look up at the wall.” I looked at cobwebs and cigarette stains, framed photographs of shirtless men in big hair, bell-bottoms.

  Jake said, “Perfect.” I put a finger in my mouth.

  “Baby,” he said, and I felt certain that this was who I could be, perfect, baby. Backed by one hundred thousand hearts.

  JAKE LOWERED HIS phone, passed it to me, showed me myself on his screen. I looked better from his perspective; every raw image already filtered. I scrolled while he signed the credit card receipt, left an extra twenty-dollar bill. Then he took his phone back and went to the bathroom with it. I stayed at the booth with mine, taking selfies next to photographs of Slash, Alice Cooper, Axl Rose. My kiss-kiss faces beside their guitars, voices, songs. I turned my phone to see myself. Here where my eyes were half shut, here where they were wide, here where I had tipped my chin and found the angle I knew was mine. I felt Jake arrive then, felt his hand on my shoulder and put my phone away, stood up, faced him. He turned me back around, gave my body a soft push in the direction of the door. He kept hold of my arm and steered me.

  “I got it,” I said, and pulled away. I wasn’t a pushover. I was special, self-assured; it was important Jake know that. But resisting him was the wrong thing to do. His body stiffened. So in the car, I left my phone in my clutch, put a hand on his inner thigh, and looked him in the eyes and this made up for it. Because he opened his gated complex in Beverly Hills, his apartment, his bedroom for me like he couldn’t believe his luck.