The Liz quiz: Angela or Martha

by David Benjamin

 

“As if you were on fire from within/ The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”

—Pablo Neruda

 

PARIS—For most of us, there are few greater shocks in life than to be seen as attractive. It’s against human nature to look in the mirror and perceive beauty unalloyed and flawless. Too many pimples, pits, wrinkles, blotches and wild hairs besmirch the image and deflate the ego.

Okay, yes, there are child stars—Shirley Temple, Lindsay Lohan—who were probably gorgeous, and knew it, five minutes after the doctor slapped ’em on their already lovely ass. I mean, Lena Horne must have been a beautiful baby! I recently watched Elizabeth Taylor, in the flower of her youth as the dewy and delectable Angela, opposite Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun. She was lissom, stunning, sultry and clever at once, breathtaking. Her eyes could melt steel. Her skin was alabaster. She illuminated her every scene and swathed every other actor in shadow.

But I can’t do that. Never could. Neither can you. Some of us, however, maybe even a slim majority, have our moments, perhaps because—fleetingly—we’ve hit an ephemeral “prime,” or maybe we’ve just stumbled across a receptive audience. 

I had my first instance of seeming attractive while counseling at a summer camp in East Troy, Wisconsin. So extraordinary—and out of character—was this experience that I saved it up and fictionalized it in one of my novels, Summer of ’68. Yeah, it’s been that long since I’ve been worth looking at. That brief encounter started when one of my eleven-year-old campers delivered a note that turned out to be a love poem, written for me. By a girl.

Me? Are you kidding? Who is this bimbo?

All right, I had been in love, in high school. I had written poems, partly on honor of my beloved, partly because how else on God’s earth could I ever possibly get a girl to notice me. I was advertising (ineffectually). So, the idea of receiving a love poem? From a girl? Unthinkable!

But there it was. A counterattack in free verse. 

I won’t chronicle the subsequent course of my brief summer of briefer love. The enhanced version reads better in my book. But after camp broke up, I had a few magnetic moments with the opposite sex, although I’m reluctant to suggest that Emily, or Becky, or that Swedish girl in Boston, regarded me as handsome. I’d always fallen back on being funny, joking my way into female favor and ending up, usually, as “friends.” But, I have to admit, there was a physical element in that period of experimental romance. For a while, I was, according to at least one witness, “cute.” More significantly, this was the Sixties, when scarecrows like Bob Dylan and Woody Allen were considered sexy. Haircuts were optional and a certain level of scruffiness was regarded as cool. I let my hair grow, limited by wardrobe to jeans, a few sweatshirts, huaraches and a fatigue jacket from the Army surplus store in Rockford. In that guise, I drew Emily (see above) like a moth to a streetlamp. Then she broke my heart. 

(And the summer-camp poet? She did, too.)

The Sixties passed, thank God, Emily scurried off to BU and I swiftly aged out of my transient hippie allure. Two decades hence, when I met my eventual wife, Hotlips, I had no more sex appeal than Walter Brennan. I had reverted to my high-school cloak of invisibility. When I got my morning coffee, the fresh, young baristas at Starbucks tended to look right through me and serve the next customer in the queue. 

They still do.

I was head-over-heels for Hotlips the first time I saw her. She was bright, articulate, vivacious and cosmopolitan—luminous, but not like Angela in the movies. This woman came in three excellent dimensions. She was real. I wondered if she, too, could see right through me to the next customer. Of course, I knew she could, would and probably did. So—if only to achieve visibility—I had to feign charm, muster up a pretense of wit and erudition, deploy my last full measure of chutzpah and dredge deep into my depleted reserves of “personality.”

Every day since then, I wonder what—if not beauty—she sees on me. 

Prudently, I don’t ask her.  An answer is available elsewhere. 

A few weeks ago, for instance, I led a discussion with a group of readers in a small Wisconsin town. Among them was an older woman who’d been ill-used and through the mill. She had long since shed any allure she might have once radiated. She was heavy, rumpled and indifferent to her appearance. She needed a walker to get around and she grunted gratefully as she settled into a chair. Had she ever been attractive? It was impossible to tell.

But, as soon as we started talking about books and I started asking questions, she sprang to life. Her eyes sparked. She effervesced. 

I was reminded of a jazz concert one night in New York. It featured the brilliant percussionist Chico Hamilton (see Jazz on a Summer’s Day). He was in his eighties by then and needed help shuffling from the green room to the stage. But the moment he sat down and wrapped his fingers around the drumsticks, the years dissolved. He took command, turned his drums and cymbals into living things and pumped energy into his fellow musicians. He spun yarns in words and music, and he tutored the audience. He was beautiful.

As was that remarkable lady at my book event, sharing her memories, telling her story, challenging my premises, bonding and laughing with her fellow readers, thanking me for coming to town and bestowing her glow. She was beautiful.

She reminded me that skin-deep beauty—if it was there at all—recedes terribly soon and forever into its human depths, all the way to bone and deeper, to the soul. Fed there by intelligence and learning, experience and memory, tempered by heartbreak and soothed by sympathy, beauty thrives and springs its surprises, pouncing on anyone wise enough, keen and caring enough to feel its fire. 

It has occurred to me how welcome would have been the chance—if she were accessible—for a jug of wine and a loaf of bread beneath the bough with Elizabeth Taylor. But which Liz?

Pleasant—and fraught with sexual tension—would be picnicking with Angela, the ingenue of A Place in the Sun. Better, though, would be hanging out and trading barbs with the later Liz, profane, sarcastic and heartbroken, who was Albee’s Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. 

Beautiful.