Beautiful You: A Novel

  The president ended her conversation and pocketed her phone. Her attention drifted to the crowds of women waiting to buy shoes. “My relationship with Maxwell started like any other addiction,” she reflected. “It was fun. I was your age. At the time I thought Max was everything I’d ever need in the world.”

  There was something tragic in her face as she talked about her younger, naive self. Her voice was heavy with self-disgust. “I trusted him.”

  Penny shifted uncomfortably in her seat. As the president talked, the younger woman’s body was responding to some sexual cue. Whatever the stimulus, her nipples were almost painfully hard, so erect that even her silk lace bra felt like sandpaper against them. Perhaps it was the motion of the car, or the smell of the leather seats, but she felt a warm wetness collecting in her crotch.

  President Hind asked, “Have you tried to have intercourse with anyone since him?”

  Penny thought of the rapist, but shook her head: No.

  “He thinks he’s protecting us, but he’s controlling us. To Maxwell it’s the same thing.”

  By Lexington Avenue, Penny’s breathing had grown so slow and labored that she had to open her mouth and gulp for air.

  President Hind looked at her with sad eyes. “I asked him not to.” For an evil conspirator she did something odd. From where she sat facing Penny, she leaned closer and took the trembling woman’s feverish hand. “Just breathe. Just keep breathing,” she said.

  Clarissa Hind’s voice was hypnotic. “Pretend it’s like the weather, like a sudden storm. You can do nothing about it, so just be with it. Let it pass.” She placed two warm fingers against the side of Penny’s neck and counted silently. “There,” she said. “You’re returning to normal.”

  Cupping Penny’s hands in her own, Hind entreated, “Listen!” She said, “Only one person can save the women of the world. That person lives in a cave, high on the slopes of Mount Everest. Her name is Baba Gray-Beard, and she’s the greatest living sex mystic.” The president tugged Penny close and wrapped the younger woman in a warm hug. Cheek-to-cheek, Hind whispered in Penny’s ear, “Go to her! Learn from her! Then you can fight Maxwell on a level playing field!”

  Hind broke the embrace and sat back.

  Whatever had come over Penny, the arousal was receding. She was confused, but had fully recovered by the time the car arrived at its destination. Accompanied by President Hind, she breezed through security. To Penny, the secret servicemen at the United Nations were interchangeable with the bodyguards who’d escorted Alouette on the day she’d given her deposition. They took the two women backstage. There, a makeup artist sat Hind at a mirrored dressing table and began styling her.

  Reflected in the mirror, she addressed Penny. “I’ve told you everything I dare. If I told you more, he’d kill us both.” Her eyes steely, she lifted her Dooney & Bourke purse to the counter and took out a bottle of pills. After she’d swallowed two, she replaced the bottle in the bag and zipped it shut. “Someday you’ll understand.” Her eyes shifting to see only her reflection, the president said, “You’ll understand that what I’m about to do is my best and only option.”

  Madam President didn’t say another word until it was time to take her place in front of delegates from every nation in the world. The chatter of the press corps fell to silence as she was introduced, and she strode confidently out from the wings to take center stage.

  Growing up, especially through the arduous years of law school, Penny had all but worshipped this woman. As reported in the tabloids, Clarissa Hind had been the plucky community organizer who’d battled to improve funding for impoverished public schools in Buffalo. She’d spearheaded a drive for corporate sponsorship and gone straight to C. Linus Maxwell for a big-money donation. They’d been an immediate item in gossip columns. He’d recognized some innate quality in her and groomed her for greatness.

  As Penny watched, here was the fearless international leader she’d always idolized.

  “Citizens of the world … citizens of the United States,” the president began. “I humbly stand before you. Three years ago I took the oath of office and promised to serve and protect.”

  Her amplified voice echoed around the vast council chamber. “I have failed.”

  The reaction to her words was a shocked murmur that grew as dozens of simultaneous translators delivered the equivalent message to the earphones of everyone present.

  “My failure and cowardice are mine alone.” As if facing a firing squad, the leader of the free world held her head high. “I only pray that the disaster I fear will never take place.”

  She unbuttoned her suit jacket and slid a hand inside, next to her heart. “In closing, I ask God to forgive me.” She glanced at Penny standing in the wings, then cast her gaze out over the audience as if looking into eternity.

  “The mistakes we make in our youth,” she said solemnly, “we pay for with the rest of our lives.”

  There was no debating what occurred next. With the television cameras delivering the sight to viewers around the globe, Clarissa Hind, the forty-seventh president of the United States, withdrew a .35-caliber pistol from the inside pocket of her jacket. She placed the barrel of the gun to her head. And she pulled the trigger.

  In the product liability department of BB&B, a disquieting pattern had begun to take shape. Over late-night cartons of Chinese takeout, Tad described how 70 percent of women who’d originally joined the proposed class-action lawsuit had withdrawn their participation. Of the remaining 30 percent, not a single potential plaintiff had filed a statement. This left them with a pool of zero women seeking damages for pain and suffering. From millions to zero.

  In fact, as Tad told it, the situation was just the opposite.

  Chopsticking a cold eggroll, Tad said, “It gets even weirder. All of our original respondents have purchased replacement Dragonflies from Beautiful You.”

  Penny dipped a sliver of barbecued pork in some spicy mustard and nibbled it, listening.

  “Their brand loyalty,” Tad continued, “crosses all consumer categories. These same ladies now flock to buy the same cologne for their husbands and boyfriends. They all buy the same novels from the same publisher.” Microwave ovens, dog food, soap, it didn’t matter. As he explained, all the products were manufactured by DataMicroCom.

  Penny almost choked. “Maxwell’s company!”

  Tad nodded. “This tectonic shift in buying habits has made each subsidiary of DataMicroCom the sales leader in its niche.”

  Now Penny was confused. How did selling personal care products to 150 million women affect whole industries?

  “These women in particular,” Tad said, “control ninety percent of the consumer spending in the industrialized world.” He sipped at his carton of egg drop soup. “The hand that rocks the cradle decides how almost all household income is spent.”

  Playfully Penny shook a deep-fried prawn in his face. “Oh, whatever work they do, believe me, those gals earn that money.”

  Tad’s teeth snapped, biting the tasty crustacean and plucking it from her fingers. That was just as well, seeing how Penny had a severe shellfish allergy. Chewing, he said, “Wait until you hear this: According to our family law department, divorces are up by four hundred percent since Beautiful You launched. Gals are choosing gizmos over men!”

  Aghast, Penny laughed, “I’m not!”

  “Prove it!” Tad shot back.

  Tad wanted to take their relationship to the next level, but Penny couldn’t risk it. She’d been rejecting Tad for weeks. After what had happened with the attacker in the subway, she still worried that something inside her pelvis might be amiss. Tad was such a nice guy that he didn’t press the issue. He was open and genuinely honest with his feelings for her. The polar opposite of Max. The last thing she wanted to do was to slash the genitals of the only serious boyfriend she’d had since college.

  To change the topic of conversation, she asked, “So we have no class-action lawsuit?”

  Tad shrugged.
“No plaintiffs, no lawsuit.”

  Penny licked almond gravy off her chopsticks, thinking. “But we could still file my patent-rights brief?”

  Tad sighed. He looked at her, his eyebrows arched with concern. “The deposition process might be humiliating for you. Brillstein won’t pull any punches. He’ll want to know the kinky details of every experiment you submitted to.”

  Brillstein. Penny hated him. But she knew that he’d argue her case. The firm stood to make a fortune if she won even a fraction of the profits from Maxwell’s sex-tool empire.

  Tad’s eyes drifted to the huge ruby pendant on her chest. That souvenir. To spare his feelings, she could leave it at home. Beautiful or not, Penny resolved to stash the gem in the safety deposit box where her diaphragm resided.

  She leaned over the desk and began to gather the statement forms for the product-liability case. “Let’s not give up on the class-action case.” She wrapped the forms with a rubber band and headed for the door. “If you’ll give me the day off tomorrow, I promise I can get us the plaintiffs we need!”

  The next day Penny set off from her town house on foot. Gucci-booted, she cheerfully strutted down Fifth Avenue juggling a clumsy armload of clipboards. The pockets of her short-short Donatella Versace trench coat were stuffed to bursting with ballpoint pens. Beneath the coat she wore a fun, rainbow-colored Betsey Johnson microminiskirt.

  The birds chirped. The morning sun felt delectable on her smooth, bare legs, as did the appreciative, pop-eyed stares of handsome male strollers. Being at the center of such ego-boosting attention, it was hard to not get sidetracked from her legal fact-finding mission. Inevitably the warm weather lured her to take a detour through Central Park, where changes in the city’s social fabric were impossible to overlook.

  The usual legions of efficient British nannies and trim Swiss au pairs, those willowy young helpmates who shepherded the privileged children of wealthy Manhattanites, those girls were painfully absent. In their stead, packs of grimy, sticky-faced urchins roamed Sheep Meadow like feral coyotes. Also missing from the pastoral scene were the steadfast ranks of female third-world economic refugees who normally served as dutiful nurses and caregivers. A few elderly wheelchair-bound patients seemed to have been abandoned on the spot. Clearly these hopeless cases had been left to fend for themselves along the fringes of the park’s paved pathways. As Penny sauntered past their slumped, blanket-clad forms, the odor of full diapers and colostomy bags goosed the already brisk pace of her cheerful steps.

  It sounded crazy, but the few females around were either unattended prepubescent girls or drooling geriatrics. Aside from the very young and very infirm, the only women seemed to be pictures smiling from countless sheets of paper that, overnight, had been pasted up everywhere Penny looked. Lampposts … bus stop shelters … plywood construction barricades, every vertical surface in the Big Apple was covered with photocopied posters, each dominated by a photograph of a different woman. Captioning each photo were the words Missing: Beloved Wife or Cherished Daughter or Adored Mother. Treasured Sister. “Have you seen this woman?” the posters asked. “Missing since …” followed by a date within the past two weeks. To Penny they suggested tombstones, fields of headstones, as if the city were becoming a vast cemetery of women. It was really depressing. Scary, even.

  Dark rumors already circulated that the new Beautiful You devices were somehow responsible. According to whispers, the early adopters had retreated to live like reclusive hermits under bridges or in unused subway tunnels. They’d left behind families and careers. Homeless now, their only allegiance was to their new personal care products.

  Penny considered this frightening possibility as two overly groomed fellows jogged past her elbow. The joggers’ immediate presence, so close, almost made her drop her load of clipboards. To her Midwestern eye their running shorts fit far too snugly, crassly displaying their hypertrophied buttocks and their constantly shifting, poorly supported man-parts. In the fey up-speak of a ten-year-old girl, one man commented to the other, “Let the gals have their fun!” His hale running partner replied, “I don’t care if they never come back!” And the pair trotted away in a cloud of expensive cologne.

  Watching them recede into the distance, suddenly Penny found her path blocked. Dead ahead stood a stranger. His short, neatly cut hair was disheveled, and the two ends of an untied necktie flapped down the front of his wrinkled suit coat. His coat, his trousers, and his shirt, they all looked as if he’d worn them to bed. “Can you help me?” he begged. His face was dark with stubble. In one hand he offered a sheet of pale-green paper. In the crook of his other arm he held a ream of the same. “Her name is Brenda,” he whined, “and she’s my fiancée!”

  Balancing her armload of clipboards, Penny accepted the paper. It showed yet another smiling woman, a grainy headshot enlarged and enlarged on a copy machine until the finer details were lost. She wore a Jil Sander blouse and gave the camera a dazzling grin. Below her picture were the words CFO Allied Chemical Corp. There was a phone number and the words To Report a Sighting, Call Anytime, Day or Night. Below that, the word Reward. Penny quickly stashed the flyer in her coat pocket, deep among her cargo of pens.

  This unshaven stranger grabbed her around one wrist. His grip was painfully tight. His fingers sweaty. “You’re a female,” he marveled. “You’ve got to help me!” He was almost shouting. “As a woman, you’ve got to take care of me!” He barked a quick, hysterical laugh. His gaze swept hungrily up and down her remarkable body. “Oh, I haven’t seen a real woman in so long!”

  To escape required a swift, well-aimed kick of her Gucci boot. Her pointed toe connected with the man’s groin, and Penny was able to pull away. Even before she’d landed her crippling blow, she’d noticed one final detail about the stranger. His face, his cheeks in particular … His skin was shining, wet with tears. He was crying.

  Terrified, Penny didn’t risk a second look. She took off in a mad dash toward the tapering pink tower on Fifth Avenue.

  Lately, Beautiful You customers had started to call the mirrored pink building the “Mother Ship.” Every dawn, the faithful patrons were out in full force. Although the doors were still locked, a line of antsy women stretched away for two city blocks. Impatiently shifting their weight from foot to foot, they all wore the same ugly, clunky shoes. Just as Penny had once waited outside the locked doors of Bonwit Teller, they waited. To a woman, they carried the same vampire romance novel. Many carried their lunches in bright pink bags to signal that they were repeat customers. Some among them looked exhausted, with lank hair and sallow faces. They made her think how Monique’s pretty face had shrunken in recent weeks to a skull-like mask. Oh, and the unwashed smell that wafted from the poor girl’s room … These days Monique didn’t even call in sick, and Penny felt compelled to save her housemate’s career by making excuses.

  Midway down the line a middle-aged man wearing a Promise Keepers T-shirt was accosting a woman. Penny recognized the T-shirt because her dad had one exactly like it. Like an uncouth caveman the man held the woman by a fistful of hair, trying to drag her toward a taxicab that sat idling at the curb. The woman had lowered herself to a crouch, using her body weight to retain her place in the queue of early morning shoppers.

  As Penny neared the struggling couple, she could hear the man saying, “Please just come home!” His words were broken by his sobs. “Johnny and Debbie miss their mommy!”

  The woman, Penny guessed, was his spouse. For her part in the marital spat, the wife repeatedly clubbed her husband with something bright pink. Her weapon was floppy, flexible, and very long. On closer inspection Penny realized it was product number 6435, the Honeymoon Romance Prod. Normally it held six D batteries, and Penny could hear the weight of them slamming into the man’s ribs like a bludgeon while his wife yelled, “This hunk of plastic is more of a man than you’ll ever be!”

  Gingerly, Penny sidestepped their quarrel and hurried to the head of the line. In her arms she carried her stack of clipbo
ards, each already loaded with a registration form and a pen. She started her pitching with the most drained-looking women. These dead-eyed wretches stood at the locked doors as if they’d been waiting here all night. To judge from their body odor and sleepy, slouched postures, Penny thought that perhaps they had.

  “Excuse me,” she chirped, offering a clipboard form to the first woman. “Have you experienced a catastrophic failure of any Beautiful You product during use?”

  She felt like a sex-toy ambulance chaser, but her ends would justify her means.

  Shivering despite the morning warmth, the woman’s emaciated hand accepted the pen. No intelligence shone in the stranger’s expression as she turned her glazed eyes to the legal paperwork. Penny could see that she was young, but something had sucked the vitality from her. The bones showed beneath the papery skin of her face.

  Penny recognized the look. After grueling rounds of ecstasy she herself would see this ghostly wretch in the mirror. Reduced to this level of exhaustion she’d been massaged and plied with hand-squeezed fruit juices. Max would order acupuncture and aromatherapy to aid in her recovery. These girls had nothing. They were dying from pleasure.

  Their eyes glittered, glassy and sunken in deep hollows beneath their brows. Their clothes hung limp and heavy with dried perspiration. Their lips were slack. These had been the confident, relaxed gals who’d been striding around Union Square only a week before. It was obvious to Penny that their new toys had become a dangerous compulsion.

  Jumping the gun, she told the woman, “We’re organizing a class-action lawsuit to charge Beautiful You with malfeasance.”

  The woman croaked a response. Here, too, was a condition Penny recognized. Often, after long bouts of testing, loud moans of ecstasy had left her own throat parched and useless.