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The Beauty Expert
Cue had natural features, clean-cut, mellowed straight off of a Midwestern farm,
who just got hired as cosmetic columnist for a New York City based women’s magazine,
High Gloss. Future: Benton’s new girlfriend, of course.
I had known her a bit, meeting her at a hot nightclub, never hitting on her, just
drinking smooth Drambuies. I fell in love with her face, how the glow from the ceiling’s
light eased down upon her cheeks, nose, neck and beneath her eyes. No pores visible, no
makeup, no lipstick, no rouge. Her conversation, interspersed with curse words, was
sexual: she had been out with many guys, yet her complexion revealed no signs of
carousing, something unusual for a thirty-one-year old female who drank a lot. That
doomed her, I guess. Being so immaculately possessed, it reminded me of the Pre-
Raphaelite painting “Girl with Lilac,” by Sophie Anderson I had seen on a postcard.
I was stupid not to have invited her to my Upper West Side apartment. I stood in
opposition to her surface, its flawlessness. It was not her facial expression but the
supremacy of her face. I had always placed all things facial on the highest pedestal.
I had acne vulgaris, its papules, pustules and cysts deforming me. Cue’s face drove
attraction and repulsion simultaneously, I sitting near her at the club, envious and
humiliated that I could not get beneath the skin of that poreless face.
Here are examples of how I looked, though I was not the subject of these photos:
Acne, cystic on the face
When Benton met Cue at my apartment, I saw him leer at her, rub his crotch, saying
things like, “What a sweet face you have, Cue” or “How come a honey pot has to hang
around Hart? Isn’t that demeaning?” I drank beer listening to him, Cue responding
warmly, moving from the couch we sat on over to Benton, who then rubbed his palms
over her cheeks bringing a healthy flush to her face, from her forehead to her chin, down
her long neck to its nape, then massaging her colored throat and exposed upper chest.
“Take a look, Cue, see your boy over there, beerfaced and looking like a carny geek.”
“I like him. Why pick on a friend? You’re acting as if he’s toxic but I think you’re sick
and polluted,” she said, buttoning the top two buttons of her shirt. I raised my bottle high,
saying automatically,
“The greatest treasures are those invisible to the eye but found in the heart.” He had
missed the pun but Cue had by the look in her eyes. Even in the club her eyes gave
her away, how instinctively she grasped what lay inside me, her eyes inches from
my face, anticipating William Blake’s line, “The eye sees more than the heart knows,”
from America: A Prophecy. The eye knows more in observing than the heart itself knows
beating in our chests. She had worked at High Gloss for a month, her skin unmarred
and impeccable.
I took photographs, selling them after they appeared in gallery shows. My work
featured faces of people, close-up and grainy, so near the man or woman that it
approached abstraction, boring in on their eyebrows, eyes, noses, cheeks, upper lips and
chin, throats, backs of necks, behind the ears, the jugular veins, sternum, backs, skin
to the nipples. The intricate details of persons showed enlarged images of terrible acne
and disfigurement.
Critics commented that I revealed proud flesh, not the swollen flesh causing too much
granulation, accentuating the clinical definition. No. Critics indicated my theme was how
endearing and enduring, how proud we were of ourselves even with our imperfections,
scars and defects. Any photographed person having their name as the title of the work
stamped them as brave, proud souls who gave up their privacy and put their faith in me,
the artist, the ugliest person they had even seen.
This photo is one, stepping back from my usual tightly frames, showing half a face. I
took this to compare another’s face with my own. I found myself worse than this:
I was proud when it garnered top honors among other photographers work.
I had not seen Cue since that time with Benton. He would dominate her by now, as he
had with others. Walking through the West Village, stalking out new subjects, tracking
them to isolated crevices of wretchedness, hoping to scour even upscale bistros, not at
the tables but behind kitchen doors, the closeted help from foreign lands ( grotesques and
repulsive homo sapiens are universal, archetypal forms shaped in our vestigial brains ).
Instead, I saw someone who recognized me. I thought her a complete stranger.
“It’s me, Hart.”
“What happened?”
“I’m allergic to all the cosmetics they told to use, applying it sometimes three times
a day,” Cue said. “They had to fire me, the beauty expert.”
“I can pay you for modeling. If you’re up to that.”
“No. I can’t do that. I’ve thrown away all my mirrors.”
“How will you get by? I can loan you money. Don’t pay it back if you can’t.”
“I have money. Benton turned me out. I’m in the life. He takes 60%.”
“No photos, then. You’re a courtesan.”
“His whore, you mean. Since when have you glossed things over?” she said, anger and
rue accenting each word.
What could I do? Going tete-a-tete with Benton, shooting him? Violence proved
nothing. One less pimp in the world would not alter history. I invited Cue to live with me.
We shared everything. We stood naked in front of a seven-foot floor mirror for hours
daily, caressing hideousness.
George Sparling has been published in many literary magazines including Tears in the Fence, Lynx Eye, Hunger,
Rattle, Red Rock Review, Rattle,
Paumanok Review, Lost and Found Times, and Potomac Review. He has had many jobs, such as a welfare caseworker in East Harlem, a counselor/reading instructor in
the Baltimore City Jail, and a scuba diver for placer gold in the Trinity Alps of Northern California for two years.
He tries through fiction and poetry to give all dark things the light they require to exist unconditionally.
The tension between persons living in pain and the struggle not to fail as human beings also concerns him.
Email: George Sparling
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