The Line of Beauty.
Might as well do something with all this space. And that something might include some of my writing exercises that have absolutely zero to do with This Ends Now.
Below is something I wrote in January 2024 for my writing circle—affectionately known as “The Thing,” since the writers who form its membership have no better name for it—inspired by a work of art that had come into the public domain that month. I selected Suzanne Valadon’s “Self-Portrait, 1927” as my jumping off point for “The Line of Beauty,” which I might do something more with, sometime. Stranger things have happened.
Everyone agreed it was a terrible haircut. Jeff, who never met a punch he didn’t pull when his wife was involved, tried to come up with something nice to say about it but couldn’t quite get beyond, “Well, at least it will grow.”
Edie wasn’t so kind. “You paid someone to do that to you?”
Yes, yes. Lisa had paid someone, someone who’d come highly recommended by Pamela. Pamela of the Chanel sunglasses and perfectly-fitted, swishy tan trousers; Pamela of the pertly knotted Hermès scarves and crisp broadcloth blouses. Pamela Pan, who’d been plucked from behind the Channel 57 news desk over twenty-five years ago by some Colombian expat squillionaire who liked how her cleavage bounced on the noontime weather broadcast. At least he had the decency to pop his clogs while she still had a few miles left in the tank. Now Pamela Ramos-Pan had her dead husband’s grotesque, mock-Tudor eight-bedroom house in Shaker Heights, two toy poodles named Muffin and Deedee, and a lot of time for projects on her hands.
Edie was the one who had orchestrated the introduction. She was positively breathless when she called Lisa. “You’ll never believe who showed up at the garden club meeting you missed last night. Very exciting.”
It came as no great surprise to Lisa that the only exciting thing that happened at the Shaker Heights Organic Gardeners Club in the past ten years transpired on the only evening in a similar length of time that Jeff had proposed a date night “just because I love my wife.” Life could be funny that way.
“I’m sure I won’t,” she replied. She had Edie on speakerphone, partially to irritate Jeff, who found Edie’s penchant for bitchery and drama exhausting, but mostly so she could continue trying to figure out how to secure hot rollers in her hair. She’d been trying to figure this out for the past forty years with little success, but Lisa considered herself an optimist.
“Pamela Pan,” Edie whispered, as if this were a great secret to hide from her husband. Lisa had known Eric Newman for at least twenty years and doubted his interest was piqued by much of anything in his wife Edie’s life, least of all her garden club friends. Case in point: Eric had never once called Lisa by her actual given name, referring to her exclusively as “Renee.” This was in spite of having taken a week-long vacation in Cabo San Lucas in a two-bedroom rental where she and Jeff shared a bathroom with the Newmans.
Still: Pamela Pan. Now that was news. While Lisa singed her fingers fiddling with the tricky rollers, Edie recounted an evening spent wrapped in the enigma swaddled in the mystery inside the majesty that was Shaker Heights’ own local celebrity. Sort of celebrity. A person who used to be on TV, at least, which must have some cultural cachet, she thought, accidentally jabbing her scalp with one of the roller pins. Definitely a bump up from the club’s treasurer, Maude Levine, who thought she was practically Meryl Streep because she’d once played a grieving mother on an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit years ago.
Somehow, she’d let Edie talk her into lunch with the divine Ms. Pan.
“She likes you,” Edie had insisted, after Pamela had air-kissed them both a brisk farewell and floated out through the front door of the Northstar Cafe in a choking cloud of perfume. (“Tom Ford Black Orchid,” she’d explained earlier when Lisa gently prodded for the name of the poisonous gas that would surely kill them all before their salads made it to the table.)
Lisa stared at the wilting remains of her beet salad and nudged a glossy curd of goat cheese with her fork. “She acted like it was a personal affront when I told her my purse was from Nordstrom Rack.”
“Pish, don’t be ridiculous. Pamela’s not a snob. She came from absolutely nothing, don’t forget.”
How could Lisa forget? Every gushing puff piece in the local press about the fabulous Pamela Pan made sure to highlight her rags-to-riches, Cinderella creation myth within the first four paragraphs.
Back in her kitchen, Lisa doomscrolled through several of these profiles on her phone, searching for any new morsel of information she hadn’t already digested. There was Pamela in a pink Chanel suit, talking about her new line of cashmere doggiewear. Pamela in a sports bra and leggings, shilling on Instagram for some diet shake that Lisa was pretty sure had been banned in Canada for causing heart palpitations. Pamela as the grand marshal of the Cleveland Pride parade, extending her gloved hand for the adoring kiss of a grizzled leather daddy while she pinched the ass cheek of a bronzed Adonis through his Speedo.
Lisa nearly choked on her coffee. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Jeff in anything less than his cotton pajamas. She couldn’t even remember the last time she wanted to see him in anything less either, let alone a Speedo she wanted to grope his ass through. She shuddered on the breakfast bar stool.
Down and down the Pan-hole she climbed, flicking past slideshows of charity balls at the Ritz Carlton and silent auctions at the Hyatt Regency, until she reached a video thumbnail. In the tiny square, a young man cocked a bushy red eyebrow and cupped his chin. He looked up at a still of a very young, still dark-haired Pamela as if puzzled by her very existence. It occurred to Lisa that anything entitled “THE SHOCKING TRUTH ABOUT PAMELA PAN????” from a content creator known as OMGianni! was likely to be anything but shocking and possibly not wholly true, yet she clicked anyway.
She nearly closed the tab when OMGianni! (“Your Number One Source for Everything Fabulous in Ohio!”) began the video with a plug for the same gruelly diet shake Pamela was flogging, but she persevered.
“First spotted slicing up pimiento loaf behind the deli counter at the local Piggly Wiggly by a Hollywood agent who was in town for his granddaddy’s funeral, Pamela Pan unsnapped her supermarket smock and left Rosedale, Mississippi for good with not even a toodle-oo to the checkout girls. After toiling in the trenches of straight-to-VHS horror for a while as ‘Hot Girl #2’ or ‘Sorority Sister #5,’ Pamela traded in her bikini for a cap and gown, earning a communications degree from UCLA. Her career, it seems, was going nowhere until—”
“Mom!” Bella yelled from the living room, followed by the hard slap of the screen door Jeff still hadn’t fixed. “Henry and I are here!”
Lisa groaned and pushed down on the laptop lid, silencing OMGianni!’s shrieks temporarily. Not that she felt guilty about anything. She wasn’t stalking Pamela, not really. There was nothing in any of the clips she’d watched of her new “friend” that she hadn’t heard before. It was just curiosity, she promised herself.
“Mom?” Bella peeked her head in the doorway and scowled. “Didn’t you hear me?”
“Yes, baby.”
Bella had always been a champion scowler. Lisa could recall looking down at six-week-old Baby Bella, nestled and frowning in the crook of her arm, and trying to remember if smiles came naturally or had to be learned. But when she smiled at her infant daughter, Bella screamed, widening her eyes in terror. Scowling it was, then.
“I was yelling, Mom. I thought you couldn’t hear me. You did get your hearing tested like Henry recommended, right?”
Lisa sighed, and turned to fully face her younger child, the very spit of Jeff: blonde hair, big brown eyes, that funny little pointed chin. When she was five, Bella had announced she was going to be a dog when she grew up, and Paul had laughed and laughed at his younger sister. After she and Jeff sent Paul to his room, they’d explained very patiently to Bella that while it wasn’t possible for a human to be a dog, perhaps she could be a veterinarian and do all sorts of lovely things for dogs. Bella perked up at the thought of healing sick puppies, and the topic of canine metamorphosis never came up for discussion again.
But Lisa got it: sometimes being a dog sounded lovely. Walks and naps and treats and belly rubs. Being called good girl! for finishing her dinner or not getting upset when someone unexpected came into the house. I mean, was she making a fuss even though Bossy Bella was riffling through her parents’ mail and running a finger along the counters, checking for schmutz? No, and no belly rubs for the effort. Such is the plight of the human condition.
“You might have let me know you were coming over,” she said, tugging this week’s issue of the New Yorker from her daughter’s hand. “And Henry, too. A visit with his mother-in-law surely isn’t high on his agenda, unless he’s looking for fodder for his next article about how not to spend it.”
Bella scowled again, but pressed a kiss to her mother’s cheek anyway before turning again to the mostly-opened pile of bills. “Some people think Henry’s articles are very good,” she said, holding the cable bill up to the light. “Do you and Dad really need to have two hundred channels? Seems like a lot to spend for just the two of you.”
Only the week before, Jeff had asked Lisa the same question, giving her husband the same answer she now gave her daughter: “Yes, we need two hundred channels. I am very catholic in my tastes.”
While Jeff had just shrugged in response and moped off to see if anything new had magically appeared in the fridge since the last time he looked, his daughter wasn’t so easily fobbed off.
“Mom.” Bella folded her arms across her chest and gave her mother precisely the same look of frazzled disappointment Lisa’s own mother used to traffic in. “We’re—Henry and me—we’re just concerned.”
This is a problem with children. You could love them and soothe them and change their shitty diapers and go to battle for them for years and years to little fanfare or appreciation, and one day acquiesce to their repeated demands to be set free and live their great, big, separate lives in the world, just like they wanted, and they still came back to hassle you for more. If you were very unlucky, they might even be concerned about you, as Bella claimed to be.
“Your father and I are fine, Bella. Fine with money, and fine with age. We’re not even sixty, not ready for the glue factory just yet.”
Bella snorted. “Fine,” she said, and reached forward to snatch an errant cornflake from the counter that had somehow failed to make it from spoon to Lisa’s mouth earlier that morning. Bella’s upper lip curled in mild disgust. “I just worry.”
Lisa opened her mouth to tell her not to, but that was like ordering the tides to pause. Worrying—about her parents, the state of political discourse, the price of eggs, rumors of the threatened retirement of her favorite Dior lip gloss—was Bella’s favorite hobby, and Lisa did like her children to enjoy their spare time. Instead, she nodded, and shifted discussion to Henry’s latest op-ed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer calling for a “return to decency” at City Hall, which gave Bella an opening to shout for Henry to come in the kitchen, and for Lisa to switch off while Henry pontificated for a solid forty minutes about how few people care about paying attention to what’s going on right under their noses.
Henry might have ranted for another couple of hours if Lisa hadn’t lied and said she had a hair appointment. Now this was strictly a lie, but there was some kernel of truth within its husk: she needed to do something with the listless non-style growing out of her head. When she and Edie had been thirty-five, they’d made a pact that they’d never, ever opt for a “sensible” haircut when they got old (read: forty). It felt like giving up on caring what they looked like, what face they turned to the world. On their beauty, whatever that meant, and whatever value it may have held.
And while Edie had broken the promise ten years ago, slicing away her waist-length mane for a spiky crop (“so easy to maintain!”, as if Edie’s life was taxing), Lisa resisted. Sometimes, if the bathroom mirror was a little foggy, she could see who she had once been, unlined, untested. Before Edie and Bella and Paul and even Jeff. Pretty back then, but a little bland, if she wanted to be truthful with herself, which she sometimes wasn’t. Pretty enough, but not like Pamela had been. After all, even at the height of her beauty nobody had asked Lisa to star in Sorority Slaughterhouse III.
Pamela, she thought later that evening while she brushed her teeth. “Pamela will know who can make sense of this,” she said to her reflection through a mouthful of foaming toothpaste.
“Who?” Jeff called out from the bedroom. “Who will know who about what?”
She smeared the small dribble of Crest across her lips with the back of her hand. “My hair,” she replied. “Pamela will know what to do with it.”
Jeff flicked off the switch on his bedside light. “I didn’t know it needed anything doing to, honey,” he said. “You look like you. Just like always. I like it. It feels… right.”
But Lisa was done feeling right. She wanted to be bigger, wilder, bolder as the candles on her birthday cake grew ever greater in number. If she couldn’t be Pamela Pan—tight skin, tight abs, tight ass—she could still be fascinating. So what if she sagged too much to be hot anymore? The line of beauty was still there, even if she needed a little steam in the mirror to see it.
And maybe Pamela wasn’t the warmest lunch companion, but she’d insisted on trading numbers with Lisa. “Call me, I know everyone in Cleveland,” she’d purred. The slightest twinge of her Mississippi accent clung to the edge of her voice like honey to a spoon. “I feel like it’s time to give a little to people more like me, not just to the disadvantaged. We may not want for money, but we can always do with more connections.”
Lisa had thrilled in the moment to think that she was part of a “we” that also involved Pamela Pan. She ignored the prickles of privilege as she slid into bed next to Jeff, who was already laying the groundwork for what would be an inevitable crescendo of snoring within the next ten minutes. It was too late to call, but surely Pamela could respond to a text in the morning.
Hi Pamela, she tapped out, Lisa Bennett here, we had lunch together with Edie Newman the other day. Sorry to write this so late but if I don’t ask now I know I’ll forget! Who do you recommend for a great hairstyle? I’m looking to try something a little new and I love what you do with your hair. Thanks!
Her index finger hovered over the send button. It’s not like you’re asking her to donate a kidney, she chided herself, and pressed the little white arrow. Done.
Jeff’s snoring surged into an explosive blort and settled into what Lisa knew from thirty-five years of experience to be a short window of relative quiet, her cue to slip into whatever light drama would flood her dreams that night. She let the first ebbs of sleep’s river wash over her, allowing her consciousness to bleed into the other-world of slumber. Tomorrow would be Sunday, tennis with Edie at ten, a trip to the market, maybe Paul would want to have dinner, why was Kate so difficult, something about hair, something about hair…
Her phone chirped, a clear, synthetic bell tone she hated but couldn’t figure out how to change, and sleep let Lisa glide from its grasp. She groaned—Jeff was planting tiny snorts from which mighty snores would surely grow—and fumbled for the phone.
She had to squint to read. Hey doll, the message breezed, of course I can help! I know EXACTLY who can make a woman look on the outside just what she feels on the inside. John Pablo Moran, look him up. I’ll tell him I’m sending you. I promise you, it will be something else!
Five days and three hundred dollars later, Lisa definitely felt like something else. She felt like laying siege to Pamela Pan’s perfect life. Feed Pamela’s designer wardrobe through a leaf mulcher. Bash a sledgehammer on her oversized jars of Charlotte Tilbury night cream. Kidnap her plastic surgeon and hold him hostage in Detroit. She deserved it.
John Pablo said he was under strict instructions to follow Pamela’s vision for a brand new Lisa. This wasn’t a mistake. This was on purpose.
There could be no other excuse for the uneven hack job the stylist inflicted after he’d changed her natural chestnut brown locks to a color she could only describe as “rusty municipal drainpipe.” Most hairdressers usually found a way to work with Lisa’s natural cowlick on the crown of her head, but not John Pablo. Oh no. He’d made it into a centerpiece; her hair now poufed in a natural, cockeyed pompadour sprouting from the back of her head. And the bangs? Sweet Jesus.
The effect was altogether terrifying. A small child on the pavement outside John Pablo’s salon had cried. Though she stepped confidently, maybe with a bit of a swagger—I meant to do this!—as she walked to the parking garage, people were giving her a wide berth. Several conspicuously weaved out of her way as she approached, as if the crazy hair were airborne and highly contagious. The final disgrace came when she arrived home and her devoted basset hound, Chauncey, howled a note of complete, ear-splitting sorrow.
Lisa tried tying the raggy ends in a scrunchie, but there wasn’t enough hair for the fabric to catch. A headband nearly fixed things, until she realized she looked uncannily like Roger Federer. She rejected clips—banana, butterfly—and simple barrettes. There was nothing for it until it came in again, as Jeff had said tenderly, trying (and failing) to push a lock of it behind her ear.
She didn’t feel as sanguine as her husband. Lisa wracked her brain, feeling about for some faux pas or snub she’d accidentally visited upon Pamela at lunch, but came up with nothing. Zip. Nada. They’d spoken mostly of Pamela’s eagerness to get involved with the garden club, their dogs, and their husbands, living and deceased. Projects, big and small. Hardly the stuff to inspire an act of hairdressing violence.
In a haircut like that, she felt capable of anything, even war. You want war? Lisa thought, pulling Jeff’s faded Ohio State baseball cap over the jagged edges of what remained of her hair. She shoved her keyring into the pocket of her puffer jacket and threw open the front door, taking in a deep breath of clean, morning air.
War it is, Pamela Pan. War it is.
This be the blog.
Felt cute, might delete later. Or might post more later. In the interim, may I suggest this video which has lived rent-free in my brain since (apparently) 1982: