Chapter 3 Lily #2
I followed Emily behind the glass partition, into a boutique, where I caught a look at my face in a vanity mirror.
The circles under my eyes were inky and jarring.
My pores were gaping and dark. I immediately felt revealed, embarrassed.
Emily, perhaps sensing this, stepped over to a row of lipstick testers and plucked one between her fingers.
“Here. Deidre has this thing about wanting staff to wear at least three types of makeup on their shift. You should go in there looking the part, right? Try this one.” Emily held a tube out to me, the silver case as sleek as a bullet.
I turned the tube until the lipstick swiveled out, a pinkish red.
Philip Louis, my old boss, always said he preferred a clean look for his gallery girls, and so I never bothered with more than a swipe of taupe eye shadow and a bit of mascara.
“Go ahead,” Emily prompted. As I leaned in and traced my mouth in a shaky scrawl, her eyes gleamed with amusement. Or maybe it was annoyance. Up to a few weeks ago I would have said I was good at reading people. I wasn’t so sure anymore.
Emily tore a tissue from the vanity and held that out to me, too.
The color bled onto my skin and I looked like a child who had just eaten a Popsicle.
The red made my exhaustion more pronounced, brought out my tired-looking skin, my puffy eyes.
Her expression was still inscrutable. I couldn’t tell if she was mocking me or being kind.
She had stepped close enough that I saw there was a spatter of freckles, softened by foundation and powder, across the bridge of her nose.
“Good girl,” Emily said, taking the tissue from me after I blotted what I could of the mess.
“Now let’s get this show on the road, huh?
” She had a slight accent that emerged then, a Midwestern pull on her vowels.
I wanted to ask her what she was doing here—at the spa, at the casino—but she had already turned and started to walk away.
Emily led me down a hallway that was as bright and sterile as a hospital.
We passed through a small room that she called the color dispensary, which was filled with shelves of boxed hair dye.
Rings of fake hair hung from hooks on the walls, swatches in every color from bleach blonde to blue-black.
The ammoniac smell in the air and rows of small brushes laid out to dry next to the sink reminded me of Ramona.
I wondered if she would still use the small room in Matthew’s studio.
Maybe now that she had made a name for herself she would rent a studio of her own.
An old factory building with huge windows that flooded with light every morning.
Exposed brick, wide plank wood floors. Fuck her, I thought.
But I still couldn’t make myself believe I really meant it.
Emily stopped so abruptly that I bumped into her back. My hands went out in front of me automatically and I felt the knobs of her spine through her jacket. Blood bloomed in my face, and I pulled my hands back as though I’d touched something hot.
“I’m … God. Sorry,” I stammered.
“Relax, okay? I just wanted to warn you, she’s a bitch to everyone, so don’t take it personally.
I’m cutting my hours this fall so I can take more classes, so you’ll be picking up the slack a few days a week—she needs you.
But this location has been underperforming since we opened, and it’s her head on the chopping block, so she’s wound especially tight right now. Heads up.”
I must have looked pathetic, terrified. I wanted to ask her what, exactly, was so bad. What was I getting into? But she jerked her head in the direction of another door, paused in front of it, and rapped on the frame. A weary voice permitted us to come in.
Deidre stood to greet me. She was a tall, breastless, wiry woman with a dark, razor-cut bob who wore, like Emily, all black. She reminded me of the women who used to come into the SoHo art gallery where I worked: Ferragamo pumps, chunky gold jewelry, Barneys bags swinging at their sides.
“You must be Lily,” she said, eyeing my dress, then my purse, then my shoes, as I stood to shake her hand. Her skin was so soft in mine it felt nearly liquid.
“Deidre Bergman, the Mid-Atlantic regional manager for the company. Please, have a seat. Thank you, Emily.” Emily responded with a beatific smile. Deidre turned for a moment to draw a pen from a silver cup on her desk, and Emily took the opportunity to mouth good luck to me.
Deidre’s office smelled like lemon verbena and was furnished in the same style as the front lobby: sleek, low-profile chairs made from chrome and covered with white leatherette, a glass-topped desk, another orchid.
Deidre turned to my résumé and ran a long, bony finger down the page.
She scanned it with a disconcerting quickness, looked up at me, and was silent for long enough that I felt anxious.
A general air of disapproval, of rejection, had filled the room, and I’d barely spoken more than my name.
“Do you have any questions about my résumé?”
“You have an impressive work and educational history. Tell me, why here? Why now?”
I expected this question and had rehearsed the answer to it again and again in my head the night before, but hadn’t landed on anything that spun things right. I needed an answer that seemed plausible but that wasn’t the truth: I didn’t have much of a choice.
“I want to start over,” I blurted. So much for staying calm.
But I was surprised to realize that I meant it.
Deidre seemed amused by how earnest I was.
I wasn’t like Ramona and Matthew. Or even like Emily, who turned on such a generous, obliging smile for Deidre, even though, just seconds before, she had called her a bitch.
I wasn’t like any of them: able to dissemble, able to pretend.
“Why’s that? An art history major at Vassar, lands a job with a prestigious gallery in New York, and leaves it all for a part-time job in Atlantic City. Just seems like an unusual path.”
“It … it didn’t feel like my world anymore.
” She stared at me, eyes flashing with what—mockery?
knowledge? For all I knew she’d googled me the way I googled this spa; maybe she had read all the write-ups of the show, could trace my path from that life to this desk with as much precision as I could.
But to my relief Deidre only held my gaze for a second or two before nodding, apparently satisfied.
“You should know that we are facing an unprecedented number of challenges at this location.”
“What kind of challenges?”
“Well, the demographic here is quite different compared to our other locations. And you are surely aware of the economic conditions in Atlantic City overall. We are fighting an uphill battle in terms of launching a luxury enterprise.”
“So why did you choose this location?” I was genuinely curious about that.
Everyone else seemed to know that Atlantic City was a bad investment.
Two more casinos had closed in the past year.
Violent crime was on the rise. The billionaire who put his name on two of the largest beachfront properties thirty years ago had gone bankrupt twice.
His insignia was scraped from or painted over on the doors and the sides of buildings where it had first been affixed in giant gold letters, now traced in grime.
Two days ago I had walked through the luxury mall that had been built five years ago and seen that it had lost most of its original tenants: Gucci and Louis Vuitton—they were replaced with the kinds of junk shops that cluttered the boardwalk, the ones that sold T-shirts and key chains and little lopsided mobiles made of spray-painted seashells and fishing line.
The spa was part of the expansion project everyone had called insane: a last-ditch effort to bring Vegas-grade entertainment to the city while customers were being drained off to slot parlors in Queens and the Poconos.
“We believe that the potential for luxury to elevate daily experience is important. People may not be investing in, say, luxury vehicles the way they used to, but will they still treat themselves to a new lipstick? A facial, on a special occasion? We think so. Our hope is that we will also draw a new sort of client, beyond the career gambler, by offering an alternative to the usual Atlantic City entertainment options. That said, this puts more pressure on how we conduct ourselves here, and more pressure on the value we provide for our guests. If clients with diminished disposable income decide to allot a portion of that income for an experience here and are let down in any way, they will feel not only disappointed. They will feel betrayed. What we offer is a chance to transcend ordinary life through the promise of beauty and clarity of mind.”
“Well, it would be a great pleasure to be a part of that for the clients of the spa,” I said, though inside I bristled at the facile logic behind her speech.
It seemed so condescending, to say that women would forget their problems if they had the right haircut or fewer lines around their eyes.
Men were never offered this same ridiculous promise: if you look good enough, everything else will be fine.
“Guests.” She smiled. “We always refer to our clients as guests.” At that she slid my résumé off her desk and slipped it into a drawer, and I understood that I had been dismissed.
I made my way back out through the hair salon, where a client—guest—sat in front of a timer like a piece of meat cooking.
The fumes from the dye were thick in the air, a forceful chemical tang that hit me in the back of the throat.
What was she promised? I wondered. What pain or desire was she trying to soothe with a half-head of highlights, a few new layers around her face?
As I approached the desk, Emily looked up and quickly jerked her mouse to click out of an internet browser window. Her face changed when she realized it was me.
“Oh, just you. How’d it go?”
“Fine, I think. Thanks for the lipstick and everything.”
“Sure, it was nothing.”
“Have a good day,” I said, waving like an idiot, and right away I wanted to cringe. My voice echoed in the hush of the lobby, too eager. Too loud.
Emily sighed. “You’ve already got half the job down.” But by the way she said it, I knew it wasn’t a compliment.
When Deidre called me a day later to make me an offer, I thought of Emily’s face as I left that afternoon, of the dread I had felt sipping my drink at the bar. A knot formed in my stomach, yet I heard myself saying Thank you, yes, I’d like to accept. Yes, thank you. Monday is fine.