Invisible Monsters Remix

is we came here. Why today? What are the chances?

The realty Cottrell steers us past the tweedy social secretary and all the wedding gifts. “This is my daughter’s house. But she spends almost all her days in the furniture department at Brumbach’s, downtown. So far we’ve gone along with her little obsessions, but enough’s enough, so now we’re gonna marry her off to some jackass.”

She leans in close. “It was more difficult than you’d ever imagine, trying to settle her down. You know, she burned down the last house we bought her.”

Beside the social secretary, there’s a stack of gold-engraved wedding invitations. These are the regrets. Sorry, but we can’t make it.

There seem to be a lot of regrets. Nice invitations, though, gold engraved, hand-torn edges, a three-fold card with a dried violet inside. I steal one of the regrets, and I catch up with the realty Cottrell woman and Brandy and Ellis.

“No,” Brandy’s saying. “There are too many people around. We couldn’t view the house under these conditions.”

“Between you and me,” says the realty Cottrell, “the biggest wedding in the world is worth the cost if we can shove Evie off onto some poor man.”

Brandy says, “We don’t want to keep you.”

“But, then,” the Cottrell woman says, “there’s this subgroup of ‘men’ who like their ‘women’ the way Evie is now.”

Brandy says, “We really must be going.”

And Ellis says, “Men who like insane women?”

“Why, it plumb broke our hearts the day Evan came to us. Sixteen years old, and he says, ‘Mommy, Daddy, I want to be a girl,’” says Mrs. Cottrell.

“But we paid for it,” she says. “A tax deduction is a tax deduction. Evan wanted to be a world-famous fashion model, he told us. He started calling himself Evie, and I canceled my subscription to Vogue the next day. I felt it had done enough damage to my family.”

Brandy says, “Well, congratulations,” and starts tugging me toward the front door.

And Ellis says, “Evie was a man?”

Evie was a man. And I just have to sit down. Evie was a man. And I saw her implant scars. Evie was a man. And I saw her naked in fitting rooms.

Give me a complete late-stage revision of my adult life.

Flash.

Give me anything in this whole fucking world that is exactly what it looks like!

Flash!

Evie’s mother looks hard at Brandy. “Have you ever done any modeling?” she says. “You look so much like a friend of my son’s.”

“Your daughter,” Brandy growls.

And I finger the invitation I stole. The wedding, the union of Miss Evelyn Cottrell and Mr. Allen Skinner, is tomorrow. At eleven ante meridiem, according to the gold engraving. To be followed by a reception at the bride’s home.

To be followed by a house fire.

To be followed by a murder.

Dress formal.

Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Nineteen

Chapter 25

here you’re supposed to be is the weekly Dangerous Writing workshop in Tom Spanbauer’s tiny living room in 1991 with writing students and half-written novels all over the house. It costs twenty dollars to attend each Thursday night even if you bring a bottle of wine, which a lot of people do, even if you come on weekends to help Tom clear the rusty junk and thorny blackberries from his property. Which I do. Monica Drake is also here, and because she can’t afford to pay the tuition in cash, each week she brings Tom a table lamp, a clock, some piece of furniture in trade. Tom’s house is filling up while Monica’s is almost empty.

For twenty dollars, Tom Spanbauer tells us, “Establish your authority on the page, and you can make anything happen.”

For another twenty, he tells us, “No Latinates!”

Tom tells us, “Unpack your objects.” And we love Tom so much that we print his advice on buttons, like big campaign buttons, we can wear pinned to our shirts. We’re not teenagers; we’re thirty, thirty-two, thirty-five years old. What’s even more amazing is …we do wear these buttons. In exchange for our cash and our lamps and clearing blackberries, Tom gives us copies of a short story called “The Harvest” by a writer named Amy Hempel. It demonstrates every excellent thing he hopes we’ll learn. Monica is the star of our Thursday nights. Suzy Vitello is a star. Erin Leonard and Joanna Rose and Rick Thompson are stars. Candace Mulligan is a star, but we all want to play the role of Amy Hempel.

I’ve given up all hope of ever being published so I’m writing a loopy tale about a fashion model without a face. My inspiration is the loopy descriptions that narrators read off note cards during fashion shows: a hundred adjectives in search of a noun. “A sumptuous crimson melding of shimmering perfumed extravagance demanding unequaled glamour, demanding liquid romance, ensuring lucid transcendent …” Oh, you get the picture. I pronounce hyperbole as “hiper-bowl.” I pronounce Hermes, the Italian fashion house, as “her-mees”; I’m so obviously stupid that Tom is delighted. I bring in the first draft of a chapter about cosmetic reconstructive surgery, and Erin Leonard brings me a magazine article by a young woman who, as a child, lost much of her face to cancer. Her name is Lucy Grealy, and she’s written the most extraordinary memoir called Autobiography of a Face, which I don’t read, not for years and years, then only after I’ve invented my goofus road trip novel which no one wants to publish. In the interim, I write Fight Club. I write Survivor. Jump to ten years gone by, and I fly to New York to read my work at the KGB literary bar in the East Village. A decade after those twenty-dollar lessons, two pretty women walk into the bar. Like the lead-in to a joke, two pretty women walk into the KGB Bar, and one of them is Amy Hempel and the friend accompanying her is—the only person she could possibly be in this strange, magical, dreamy, miraculous, impossible world—Lucy Grealy.

Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter 26

ump to one time, nowhere special, just Brandy and me shopping along a main street of stores in some Idaho town with a Sears outlet, a diner, a day-old bakery store, and a realtor’s office with our own Mr. White Westinghouse gone inside to hustle some realtor. We go into a secondhand dress shop. This is next door to the day-old bargain bakery, and Brandy says how her father used to pull this stunt with pigs just before he took them to market. She says how he used to feed them expired desserts he bought by the truckload from this kind of bakery outlet. Sunlight comes down on us through clean air. Bears and mountains are within walking distance.

Brandy looks at me over a rack of secondhand dresses. “You know about that kind of scam? The one with the pigs, sweetness?” she says.

He used to stovepipe potatoes, her father. You hold the burlap bag open and stand a length of stovepipe inside.