Tell-All

Juliet Capulet. Blanche DuBois. Scarlett O’Hara . With ministrations of lipstick and eyeliner I give birth to Ophelia . To Marie Antoinette . Over the next trip of the larger hand around the face of the bedside clock, I give form to Lucrezia Borgia . Taking shape at my fingertips, my touches of foundation and blush, here is Jocasta . Lying here, Lady Windermere . Opening her eyes, Cleopatra . Given flesh, a smile, swinging her sculpted legs off one side of the bed, this is Helen of Troy . Yawning and stretching, here is every beautiful woman across history.
    My position is not that of a painter, a surgeon or a sculptor, but I perform all those duties. My job title: Pygmalion .
    As the clock strikes seven, I’m hooking my creation into her girdle, lacing the waist cincher. Her shoulders shrug the gown over her head, and her hands smooth the skirts down each hip.
    With the handle of a long rattail comb, I’m hooking andtucking her gray hair into the edges of her auburn wig when Miss Kathie says, “Hush.”
    Her violet eyes jumping to the clock, she says, “Did you hear the doorbell just now?”
    Still tucking away stray hairs, I shake my head, No.
    When the clock strikes eight, the shoes are slipped onto her feet. The white sable draped across her shoulders. Her orchids, still chilled from the icebox, she cups them in her lap, sitting at the top of the stairs, looking down into the foyer, watching the street door. One diamond earring pushes forward, her head cocked to hear footsteps on the stoop. Maybe the muffled knock of a man’s glove on the door, or the sound of the bell.
    A whiskey later, Miss Kathie goes to the boudoir mantel and her violet eyes study the letter I forged. She takes the paper and holds it, sitting again on the stairs. Another whiskey later, she returns to her boudoir to fold the letter and tear it in half. She folds the page and tears it again, tears it again, and drops the fluttering pieces into the fireplace. The flames. One of my creations destroying another. My counterfeit Medea or Lady Macbeth , burning my false declaration of love.
    True love is NOT out of your reach
. Saturday replaced with Friday. Tomorrow, when Webster Carlton Westward III arrives for his actual dinner date, it will be too late to repair tonight’s broken heart.
    By a third whiskey, the orchids are worried and bruised to a pulp between Miss Kathie’s fretting hands. When I offer to bring another drink, her face shines, sliced with the wet ribbons of her tears.
    Miss Kathie looks down the stairs at me, blinking to dry her eyelashes, saying, “Realistically, what would a lovelyyoung man like Webb want with an old woman?” Smiling at the crushed orchids in her lap, she says, “How could I be such a fool?”
    She is no one’s fool, I assure her. She’s Anne Boleyn and Marie Curie .
    Her eyes, in that scene, as dull and glassy as pearls or diamonds soiled with hair spray. In one hand, Miss Kathie balls the smashed flowers tight within her fist, to make a wad she drops into one empty old-fashioned glass. She hands the glass to me, the dregs of whiskey and orchids, and I hand her another filled with ice and gin. The sable coat slips from her shoulders to lie, heaped, on the stairway carpet. She’s the infant born this afternoon in her bed, the young girl who dressed, the woman who sat down to wait for her new love.… Now she’s become a hag, aged a lifetime in one evening. Miss Kathie lifts a hand, looking at her wrinkled knuckles, her marquise-cut diamond ring. Twisting the diamond to make it sparkle, she says, “What say we make a record of this moment?” Drive to the crypt beneath the cathedral, she means, and cut these new wrinkles into the mirror where her sins and mistakes collect. That etched diary of her secret face.
    She draws her legs in close to her body, her knees pressed to her chest. All of her wadded as tight as the ruined fistful of flowers.
    Throwing back a swallow of gin, she says, “I’m such an old ninny.” She swirls the ice in the bottom of the glass, saying, “Why do I always feel so degraded?”
    Her heart, devastated. My plan, working to perfection.
    The rim of the glass, smeared red with her lipstick, the curved rim has printed her face with red, spreading the corners of her mouth upward to make a lurid clown’s smile.Her eyeliner dribbles in a black line down from the center of each eye. Miss Kathie lifts her hand, twisting the wrist to see her watch, the awful truth circled in