Deadly Beloved(17)

“I never had a camera in my hands in my life until I was twenty-four years old,” Karla said. “Except for, you know, Brownies and that kind of thing.”

“I thought a Brownie was a kind of Girl Scout.”

The bellhop had opened the double doors at the end of the corridor. Karla walked through them and found herself in a living room larger than any she had ever been in. Evan shook through his trouser pockets and found a tip.

“Merci,” the bellhop said. He was not smiling. In France, Karla had noticed, only the managerial class smiled.

Evan threw himself into a mock Louis XVI chair and stared at the ceiling. Karla saw fat cherubs and even fatter grapes, molded in plaster, frozen in time.

“Jesus,” Evan said. “The way this thing is going, I’m never going to get you into bed.”





7.


AS FAR BACK AS she could remember, even in junior high school, Julianne Corbett had used rouge and foundation and mascara to distract people from what she knew to be the truth about herself: that she was coarse-looking and plain; that she was as common and inessential as any of the other girls who had grown up with her on the outskirts of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, greaser girls, bimbos, Catholic virgins, and working-class sluts. It was funny the way life worked out, sometimes, for some people. It was possible to go on fooling the world for decades if you worked at it hard enough.

The thing about using makeup to disguise yourself, though, was that nobody recognized you when you went without it. Julianne let herself through the back door of her office and looked around for some signs of life but saw none. It was one-thirty in the afternoon, past the lunch hour but still in the dullest part of the day. Tiffany Shattuck, Julianne’s secretary, was probably getting some backup typing done. Julianne went to the door of her office and locked it slowly, quietly, so that if Tiffany was standing right outside, she wouldn’t hear it. Then Julianne went to the back of her office again and into her own private powder room. The powder room had been the dealbreaker in her decision to rent these offices. If the management of the building hadn’t been willing to install it, Julianne would have found another building somewhere else.

In the long mirror over the sink, a middle-aged woman with bags under her eyes and a wilted white blouse looked ready to collapse. Her skin was gray with dust and dirt. Her hair was matted and flat. Julianne washed her face with Dove and threw too much cold water on it in the process. She hated going out looking like this, but there were times it couldn’t be helped. Ever since she had been elected to represent the 28th Congressional District, she had become a public figure. When she had been asked by the Governor to run in the special election after old Congressman Herold had died, she had imagined that the public scrutiny would begin and end with the campaign. It had been inconceivable to her that the Philadelphia newspapers would still be interested in her private life when all the speeches were over.

Maybe it will be better when I get to Washington, Julianne thought now, painting over her eyebrows with thick black liner. It was maddening to have to sneak around like this every time she wanted to go and see a friend. She had a lot of friends of that kind too. She always had had. It was all part of growing up so plain, she might as well have been ugly. Julianne couldn’t count the number of years she had gone without any boys or men being interested in her at all. All of high school. Most of college. Most of the five or so years after that, when she and Patsy were traveling in India and the Far East and when she was at graduate school. Of course, boys and men were always interested in Patsy. That was part of the relationship Julianne and Patsy had built ever since they had been assigned to be roommates their freshman year at Vassar. Patsy was the kind of girl—thin, rich, tennis-athletic, pretty—who always got what she wanted when she wanted it, especially if she wanted it from men.

Julianne leaned closer to the mirror. She had to be very careful with the eyeliner. She wore so much of it, put on such thick black lines on both her upper and lower eyelids, even a small slip was a disaster. It didn’t take much to make her look as if someone had given her a shiner. She put the eyeliner brush down and got out her blusher. She put streaks of red on each of her flat, undistinguished cheekbones until they began to look high and stuck out. She should be over all this by now, she knew she should. She was forty-eight years old and a highly visible and successful woman. She had a law degree from Penn. She had a doctorate from Penn too, in political science and government. She had just been elected to Congress, and as soon as the short congressional recess was over, in just about a month, she would be in Washington, where she had always wanted to be. The problem was that you never got over it all, not really. You carried what you had started out to be with you forever. It was what you really were instead of what you fooled other people into thinking you were. In the long run it was your destiny. Or maybe it wasn’t. Julianne thought about all those “friends” of hers, the afternoon hotel rooms, the need to be with somebody else for the trip over and the trip back, and the long lunch hours where nothing mattered but the fact that she had managed to find American flag condoms in a novelty store in Wilmington, Delaware. I’m too old for this, Julianne told herself—but she didn’t feel too old for it. She couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like in Washington, who she would find to be with. She wanted to go back out right that minute and start all over again. Maybe when I finally get caught, I can go on Oprah and claim to be a sex addict, Julianne told herself. She drew a line around her lips that made them just a little bit thicker than they really were. She filled that in with bright scarlet lipstick on a brush.