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Engagement

2023

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Josephine saw her reflection in the black lacquer of the bus that was not hers. My chin, she thought, is too far back, my bangs not mussed forward enough. The bus passed before she could figure out the rest, but a lot more was wrong. If there were a good corner and good seat, when the bus that was hers arrived, she would get the chance to open her phone and see, but right now, time was running out: her bus would arrive in less than two minutes, said the GPS, and in that short window she had to pass into and accept her ugliness, to pre-emptively dissociate away the inevitable stares, play them in her mind’s eye, look away, look away from what? Never mind and stay in motion. Now run it again. Okay. Rehearsed. And find time amid that rehearsal to plan what to look for. She knew something was wrong, but what? Guess at the most likely problems and try to repair them, quick, before too much attention was drawn aboard that bus, if she could, in fact, get a good and private-enough seat. Make that plan, and first, rehearse for survival, or the passengers’ stares would obliterate her thoughts, memories by the time she sat down. All of this, in the end, was an astonishing success. Not even so much as a flare of anxious notice or a swivelled head was caught, even in the periphery. It was as if the other passengers simply did not have heads. It always was, when she did it right. And then at her little seat, two forward from the back, the most normal seat onboard, she opened her phone-camera and got to work. But there was nothing to fix.

            The old, favoured angle was good. It always was. But the hair was set, the buoyancy all it could be, skull reduced as well as could be, disappeared in the static, the haze, the frizz, and her skin glistened with a healthy, natural glow, ruddy and bright and dew-damp. Her neckline was not too high, the collarbones’ suggestion in place, her eyebrows sliced at the exact angle she looked for, exact tone, exact width. All was as it could be, yet nothing was as it should be. She tried to smile, and it helped a little, but after a few seconds the grin would corrupt, turn sour and tremulous and worsen everything. But she had been schooled on this, told so many times: there was more to it than her own perception. Besides, besides, she had dysphoria and so she, especially, could not trust herself. But it kept happening. She kept seeing it. She would ask people. She would ask her girlfriend. Variance would convince her, deliberately, craftlike, with a deep sense of care and intelligence, that she was imagining it; that her self-image was profoundly, delusionally skewed. Then Josephine would believe her, and excitedly turn on her phone-camera or make her way to the brightest nearby mirror, and look at herself again. But she kept seeing it. It was still broken. There always was nothing left to fix.

            Variance would help her. She always helped. Josephine did not want to be this ugly, or think she was this ugly, by the time she got into the city, by the time she got to the little office they carved for this temp period, by the time she got under those cold blue-white overheads and shook hands. She did not want to hear herself say, “No, not Joseph. Josephine.” Variance always helped. Out of options, but trusting her, trusting she would understand the importance, Josephine took three live shots of her head, panning ear to ear, one with the lens at nose-height, another with the lens at brow-height, and the last at chin-height. From those shots came thirty-six still images, showing Josephine’s face from every forward angle. Variance had always pointed to her own face and said: “To my own eye, I look worse than you in almost every respect. I know it takes a lot to look past that in yourself. It does for me, too.” Josephine did not understand, as she had never been able to look past the ugliness she saw, at least not to see beauty or even normalcy or anything except still-worse-ugliness. It “taking a lot” to see past the dysphoria was incomprehensible. She drove herself to exhaustion trying to see past it, but did not. Could not. Josephine sent every photo to Variance with the message, “I have an idea for a thing that could maybe help my perception stuff. If you do the same. Live shots across your face the same way, at the same sort of height, and we both go through them and talk about what we see. You tell me what’s wrong in yours and I tell you what’s wrong in mine? Then say what we actually see and see past the problem.” But the message failed to send. Josephine, it said, was trying to attach too many files at once, so she typed, “about to send a bunch of selfies, will explain after I’ve sent them” instead, then dropped them in lots of eight. The last lot was still loading when the bus arrived, and then she had nowhere to be but at work, and the follow-up message went unsent.

            She took her lunch break later than everybody else, as she often did, finding she was most productive only after her co-workers had filtered out of the room. Alone in the break room eating a banana and drinking coffee from a French press whose owner she never identified, she scrolled the images again. A third of her banana was through by the time she got to the second row of face-shots. Two-thirds of the banana by the time she got to the last row. And as she stared into the final shot, a low shot, eyes gazing down her scraped and wounded neck, the tumbling, rocky arch of it, she realised: Variance could not help. The lighting was perfect, the angle of that bus-overhead exactly where she would place it were she at home and on camera, but brighter, more natural than any radiance achievable inside her house. Variance could not change anything, because in that perfect glow, that gorgeous sun-touched amber aura, was the clearest, truest, most beautiful depiction of herself she could hope for. And yet, in that moment, she was still very, very ugly.

            Variance’s reply, sent three hours earlier, read: You look so fucking gorgeous in so many of these, holy shit.

            I think I look alright, messaged Josephine, in three of them. The ones near the angle I tend to use on the top row. I think.

            Those are probably the best yeah. – Variance, instantly.

            But I look really bad in every other picture, really, really bad in some. Before Variance’s rolling dots could manifest as words, Josephine cut in further: It’s not just the light. I’m not making a face. Look at the ones that are okay. I’m making the same face. I have the same expression. Also, my skin’s the best it’s been in ages.

            Baby.

            My hair too. Look at everything. It’s all right. Everything is there.

            You look good in most of them.

            I mean, I don’t. I look goodish in one, okay in about two, and bad or very bad in every other one. I don’t look good. I’m an ugly person I think. I don’t like that. I am aren’t I. I look awful. I’m bad to look at a bit aren’t I. You can’t say I am. Don’t try to. I know. Sorry.

            Sorry. I really disagree. Are you okay?

            No, I’m not okay. I’m ugly. I’m ugly. I don’t want to be ugly but I am. I don’t know. I don’t know how anyone ever gets enough money to fix it.

            What are you doing now?

            I’ve dumped this on you even though I’ve got more work. But look at the photos. Think about it. What could I change. What’s left. Not the three that are okay. The other thirty-three.

            Please take care of yourself as much as you can. I love you.

            I love you too. If you want to see go to the window near the router where the light’s good and your phone has the same setting. It will do the same rows. If you want. I mean. Look at them both though.

            So Variance did. Flicked off her pyjamas and slid into a decent neckline, touched her hair a little, end-oils and frizz-cream, splashed and moisturised her face, and stepped into the soft sun of the spare room, where the router hummed and the dust danced. Josephine’s behaviour was infuriating, but Variance could think of this capitulation, this granting of the obscene request, as an act of revenge as well as therapy. Once the rows were shot, candid and expressionless and forwarded without comment, she returned to bed where, deep in heavy sheets and comfortless over-warmth, she revisited Josephine’s pictures. She looked at them, looked at the crumpled, bad angles. There were a lot of those. Sure, more than – she looked at her own photos – more than she had. Sure. Those angles were an exception. They were the part of her girlfriend that was less seen and so loved in a special, more beautiful way. They were not, though. What else do you say to data? There were more of them than not. That special, more beautiful, yes somewhat ugly, but other and subtler— that side of Josephine was Josephine. There were more of those sides than not, she saw— saw that Josephine was made of these pallors and sheens and receded-hair roughnesses, skin traumatised, glistening like scar tissue, philtrum greyed by the scraping and scraping-over-again of a thousand dulled and dirtied blades, impregnated with rust and chrome, cut-up and torn and torn again, shoddiness, aggression, but there was no longer any saving it, nor the folding wrinkles, the lumps of Cro-Magnon bone in the forehead, the bulge of the upper nose, like a small explosion had gone off in the bridge, nor the thinness of the few hairs that regrew and were done regrowing, too thin, looking on their way out rather than in. Variance saw it all and was angry. It was her right, of course – it was given to others – to come to this revelation at her own pace, to see it after years perhaps, after finding the path to disillusionment on her own. Her girlfriend’s ugliness – fine – should have been there, but at the back, not the forefront of her mind. An insurance. An insurance by which to gain peace when the affection ebbed away, peace in the discovery that it was not really so valuable, what she was giving up, and that, in fact, there was wisdom in giving it up: because, through that new-gained perception, she could recognise and believe her own growth, trust her newfound confidence. She was better at seeing now, proven by the embarrassment of having not seen before: so it would go. And in that embarrassment would be the whole, great comfort. But now, she was being made to see it far too early, long before any feeling dropped away, and would have to live directly, without deniability, through the problem of her perception, her advance-awareness of that being the cause and the origin of her eventual loss of love: her girlfriend’s inarguable, un-unseeable ugliness. So it was that, by making her see it, it was as if Josephine had broken up with her herself, but by some evil fait accompli such that it now had to be her, Variance, who took responsibility: as if she had checkmated her, put her in a situation where, now that she could not deny or stop seeing that she was ugly, she was now going to have to initiate the break, but with no plausible deniability, no means of sparing feelings. It was as if, without Variance having done anything, Josephine had made her into an evil person, and yet done so correctly, using nothing but the truth. She could not torment her by remaining with her either, considering what she now saw, so the only way to not be evil, like a Nazi given his orders, was to kill herself. She debated, then: kill herself, or end a relationship on the understanding that she had been wrong, young, confused by the light, and actually her girlfriend was just a lot uglier than she previously realised, with no realistic hope of pitching it otherwise. Kill herself, or that. Even if she chose the latter, she might just kill herself anyway, afterward. At least, if she killed herself first, she would have manoeuvred out of her girlfriend’s checkmate, denied her the satisfaction, etc., etc.  

            She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat, and stared, and stopped thinking in words.

            Aeons ago, she read a book, a collection of short stories, and in the longest story, a sort of bildungsroman, there was a scene where the main kid – the kid’s dad bought him a “whore” for his 16th – met this person, this educated left-liberal from another, bigger city, who said sex work was rape. To start, the kid thought it was strange someone would use the term “work” while still calling it rape. He decided to tell this stranger about his 16th birthday, and when the stranger said “really?” and “then you’re a fucking rapist, man,” the kid said, well, no. Whether sex work really is or isn’t, he said, well, he didn’t think about it, but it’s not like he could say no. His dad might call him a fag maybe or feel judged, maybe, say he was acting holier-than-thou, which is the same as getting called a fag. He’d get kicked out. Maybe. Eventually. And to that, the liberal said, “Then your dad raped both of you, you and the worker - what kind of situation is it if a man puts his son and a girl in a room together where they’re both going to be homeless if they don’t fuck like he’s told them to?”

            But that wasn’t what Variance was thinking about. She remembered the character’s spirals after that conversation. Rape and rape and what is rape? Spiralling. Starting to poke. A sayable sentence: the sex worker’s situation was more ambiguous than the kid’s. But the kid started poking, trying to dismiss the problem, rewind the spiral. He poked to convince himself the word was not applicable, but when he considered what words were, all preceded by adjectives like “statutory” and “sexual” and followed by “that my dad did to me,” the first word, “rape,” lodged only more firmly, felt only more true. That sequence spilled across Variance’s mind because she, too, was trying to dismiss a word, the word “ugly,” but in the effort was grounding it further, returning to it as the only sincere description: “ugly.” Her girlfriend was ugly. Not only a little, but probably much, uglier than her.

            Josephine caught the tram home instead of the bus, and the tram’s windows were scarcely reflective, showing only her vaguest outlines. For the first time, she was glad she was invisible to herself. There was no need to look at it, knowing its hideousness, the problem of it. That at least was resolved, and however Variance attended the dilemma, that too would soon be resolved. Most of the evening, since she finished looking over the images and accepted their meaning, was devoted to figuring why people had sex with her. She supposed it must be a kind of kink, variously a self-esteem thing or a betrayal for the sakes of betrayal: some people believed in beauty as an absolute principle, so when those people got bored and needed to kick down a crystal palace, etc., they fucked her. In Variance, it must be both. A limited confidence in her own appearance, plus a kind of worship of beauty, constant visits to the throne of it, an austere willingness to go without sex (except sex with Josephine, the repulsion of which, for her girlfriend, must be like jerking off with a rough glove on, a lonely masochism) for months if the options were not models. Every time her girlfriend fucked her, Josephine realised, it was an act of self-flagellation for still not having found somebody actually worth fucking. So she turned to the person least worth it. Kept her close for that purpose. She planned the best way to argue this, to prove to Variance that these were her thoughts, and with a mind to listing the key points in her notes, unlocked her phone. But there was a message from Variance, 2 min ago:

            Did what you said and can talk about it but another question. What was the next step in our relationship for you.

            Does it have stages. Is that how relationships work. There are connections that get stronger and like lap onto each other more. I guess I saw what’s next as the same but maybe more and deeper.

            It’s like cities though. There are towns that start to grow and go on like that and there’s sort of a point.

            Traditionally it’s when they build walls but lots of towns have walls.

            Yeah yeah okay sorry that helps me how long until you think you will be home.

            10 minutes.

            Variance was a talented speed-reader and knew how to gloss a page for key words and drift over it while somehow, semi miraculously, gleaning perfect recall of its contents. She applied this to texts she read for her studies or as a favour to friends, but not to things she found truly interesting. In preparation for Josephine’s return, reading some breakup guides and putting that talent to work, she made the discovery that the mechanism by which she encountered and tolerated Josephine’s face was that same drifting gloss. What’s more: it was something she could turn on or off at will. Thus, she revisited Josephine’s pictures and replanned, rethought, and realigned her perceptions, and when at last her girlfriend came in through the gate, and when they kissed and sat together near the left-open-door to the spare room, in the drab wanness of the skylight above the kitchen table, she let her eyes glaze over.

            “How do you feel about this?” asked Variance, and extracted a little black box from her coat-pocket, set it down on the woodtop.

            “What is it?”

            “Well,” said Variance, and nodded at it.

            On command, so, Josephine reached out, slid it close, turned the clasp to face her, and popped the lid. “There’s nothing in here.”

            “Yes there is.”

            “What?”

            “There’s a ring.”

            “I can’t see it.”

            “What do you mean? Let me look,” and Variance pulled back and turned the box, and gazed inside. “It’s right there. Look again.” She twisted the box about and pushed it over.

            Josephine bent and looked inside. “Oh,” she said. “Oh I see it now.”

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