Jump to page whatever.
Then, jump back.
This will be ten thousand fashion separates that mix and match to create maybe five tasteful outfits. A million trendy accessories, scarves and belts, shoes and hats and gloves, and no real clothes to wear them with.
And you really, really need to get used to that feeling, here, on the freeway, at work, in your marriage. This is the world we live in. Just go with the prompts.
Jump back twenty years to the white house where I grew up with my father shooting Super 8 movies of my brother and me running around the yard.
Jump to present time with my folks sitting on lawn chairs at night, and watching these same Super 8 movies projected on the white side of the same white house, twenty years later. The house the same, the yard the same, the windows projected in the movies lined up just perfect with the real windows, the movie grass aligned with the real grass, and my movie-projected brother and me being toddlers and running around wild for the camera.
Jump to my big brother being all miserable and dead from the big plague of AIDS.
Jump to me being grown up and fallen in love with a police detective and moved away to become a famous supermodel.
Just remember, the same as a spectacular
Continued on page whatever.
No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen-heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That’s how your whole life will feel someday.
This is all practice. None of this matters. We’re just warming up.
Jump to here and now, Brandy Alexander bleeding to death on the floor with me kneeling beside her, telling this story before here come the paramedics.
Jump backward just a few days to the living room of a rich house in Vancouver, British Columbia. The room is lined with the rococo hard candy of carved mahogany paneling with marble baseboards and marble flooring and a very sort-of curlicue carved marble fireplace. In rich houses where old rich people live, everything is just what you’d think.
The rubrum lilies in the enameled vases are real, not silk. The cream-colored drapes are silk, not polished cotton. Mahogany is not pine stained to look like mahogany. No pressed-glass chandeliers posing as cut crystal. The leather is not vinyl.
All around us are these cliques of Louis-the-Fourteenth chair-sofa-chair.
In front of us is yet another innocent real estate agent, and Brandy’s hand goes out: her wrist thick with bones and veins, the mountain range of her knuckles, her wilted fingers, her rings in their haze of marquise-cut green and red, her porcelain nails painted sparkle-pink, she says, “Charmed, I’m sure.”
If you have to start with any one detail, it has to be Brandy’s hands. Beaded with rings to make them look even bigger, Brandy’s hands are enormous. Beaded with rings, as if they could be more obvious, hands are the one part about Brandy Alexander the surgeons couldn’t change.
So Brandy doesn’t even try and hide her hands.
We’ve been in too many of this kind of house for me to count, and the realtor we meet is always smiling. This one is wearing the standard uniform, the navy blue suit with the red, white, and blue scarf around the neck. The blue heels are on her feet and the blue bag is hanging at the crook of her elbow.
The realty woman looks from Brandy Alexander’s big hand to Signore Alfa Romeo standing at Brandy’s side, and the power-blue eyes of Alfa attach themselves; those blue eyes you never see close or look away, inside those eyes is the baby or the bouquet of flowers, beautiful or vulnerable, that make a beautiful man someone safe to love.
Alfa’s just the latest in a year-long road trip of men obsessed with Brandy, and any smart woman knows a beautiful man is her best fashion accessory. The same way you’d product-model a new car or a toaster, Brandy’s hand draws a sight line through the air from her smile and big boobs to Alfa. “May I introduce,” Brandy says, “Signore Alfa Romeo, professional male consort to the Princess Brandy Alexander.”
The same way, Brandy’s hand swings from her batting eyelashes and rich hair in an invisible sight line to me.
All the realty woman is going to see are my veils, muslin and cut-work velvet, brown and red, tulle threaded with silver, layers of so much you’d think there’s nobody inside. There’s nothing about me to look at so most people don’t. It’s a look that says:
“May I introduce,” Brandy says, “Miss Kay MacIsaac, personal secretary to the Princess Brandy Alexander.”
The realty woman in her blue suit with its brass Chanel buttons and the scarf tied around her neck to hide all her loose skin, she smiles at Alfa.
When nobody will look at you, you can stare a hole in them. Picking out all the little details you’d never stare long enough to get if she’d ever just return your gaze, this, this is your revenge. Through my veils, the realtor’s glowing red and gold, blurred at her edges.
“Miss MacIsaac,” Brandy says, her big hand still open toward me, “Miss MacIsaac is mute and cannot speak.”
The realty woman with her lipstick on her teeth and her powder and concealer layered in the crepe under her eyes, her pret-a-porter teeth and machine-washable wig, she smiles at Brandy Alexander.
“And this …” Brandy’s big ring-beaded hand curls up to touch Brandy’s torpedo breasts.
“This …” Brandy’s hand curls up to touch pearls at her throat.
“This …” The enormous hand lifts to touch the billowing piles of auburn hair.
“And this …” The hand touches thick moist lips.
“This,” Brandy says, “is the Princess Brandy Alexander.”
The realty woman drops to one knee in something between a curtsy and what you’d do before an altar. Genuflecting. “This is such an honor,” she says. “I’m so sure this is the house for you. You just have to love this house.”
Icicle bitch she can be, Brandy just nods and turns back toward the front hall where we came in.
“Her Highness and Miss MacIsaac,” Alfa says, “they would like to tour the house by themselves, while you and I discuss the details.” Alfa’s little hands flutter up to explain, “…the transfer of funds …the exchange of lira for Canadian dollars.”
“Loonies,” the realty woman says.
Brandy and me and Alfa are all flash-frozen. Maybe this woman has seen through us. Maybe after the months we’ve been on the road and the dozens of big houses we’ve hit, maybe somebody has finally figured out our scam.
“Loonies,” the woman says. Again, she genuflects. “We call our dollars ‘Loonies,’” she says and jabs a hand in her blue purse. “I’ll show you. There’s a picture of a bird on them,” she says. “It’s a loon.”
Brandy and me, we turn icicle again and start walking away, back to the front hall. Back through the cliques of chair-sofa-chair, past the carved marble. Our reflections smear, dim, and squirm behind a lifetime of cigar smoke on the mahogany paneling. Back to the front hallway, I follow the Princess Brandy Alexander while Alfa’s voice fills the realtor’s blue-suited attention with questions about the angle of the morning sun into the dining room and whether the provincial government will allow a personal heliport behind the swimming pool.
Going toward the stairs is the exquisite back of Princess Brandy, a silver fox jacket draped over Brandy’s shoulders and yards of a silk brocade scarf tied around her billowing pile of Brandy Alexander auburn hair. The queen supreme’s voice and the shadow of L’Air du Temps are the invisible train behind everything that is the world of Brandy Alexander.
The billowing auburn hair piled up inside her brocade silk scarf reminds me of a bran muffin. A big cherry cupcake. This is some strawberry auburn mushroom cloud rising over a Pacific atoll.
Those princess feet are caught in two sort-of-gold lame leg-hold traps with little gold straps and gold chains. These are the trapped-on, stilted, spike-heeled feet of gold that mount the first of about three hundred steps from
