“Makeup” turned out to be a closet-sized room with two beauty-salon chairs, a mirror that covered one wall, and a table stocked with a department store’s worth of pots and tubs and containers of eye shadow and foundation and fake eyelashes arrayed like amputated spiders’ legs. One chair was empty. In the other sat a middle-aged white guy with short, sandy hair, bland features, a wedding ring on his left hand, and a class ring with a gaudy red stone on his right. The makeup artist introduced herself as Cindy, handed me a smock, and went back to patting foundation on the man’s face.
I sat down in the empty chair. “Hey, that’s my brand!” I said to the man, who did not smile. “Hi, I’m Allison Weiss. Are you on the panel, too?”
Without meeting my eyes, he gave a stiff nod. “I am.” His small brown eyes were sunk back into the flesh of his oddly rectangular head, like raisins in dough that had risen around them. “You must be the sex worker.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Sex worker? Who do you think would hire me?” When the man didn’t answer, I realized that he wasn’t kidding. “I’m not a sex worker. I’m a blogger.” Realizing that might not sound any different to the uninitiated, I said, “I write about marriage and motherhood on a website called Ladiesroom.com.” Which, I thought with a sinking heart, also sounded vaguely p**n ographic. I mustered a smile. “Trust me, I’m about as far from a p**n star as you could be.”
“We’re all set,” said the makeup lady, giving the man’s nose a final dusting. He stood up and unsnapped his smock, revealing the plain black shirt and white clerical collar underneath. Oops.
“Good God,” I said. The makeup lady giggled. The pills did not make me slurry or sloppy, but they did lower my inhibitions. On them, I’d say whatever was on my mind, and think it over later. Usually it wasn’t a problem. This might turn out to be an exception. I bit my lip and wondered if it had been a good idea to take anything before leaving for the studio. This, of course, led me to wonder if the shipment I was expecting that day would show up, and whether I had enough to get through the weekend if it didn’t. I wondered, as I walked down the hall, who Penny Lane’s vendors were, the druggy Oz behind the Internet’s green curtain. Were they cancer patients willing to sell their meds and suffer in order to pay off their bills and leave their kids cash? Scummy thieves who robbed cancer patients, then sold their pills for cash? Kids who worked in drugstores, sneaking out five or ten pills at a time, or people getting them from doctors without ethics, or maybe even actual doctors?
Never mind. “Did you do your own makeup?” Cindy asked, cupping my chin in her hand and turning my face first left, then right.
“My friend helped.” Janet and Maya had come over that morning, lugging a light-up mirror and bags of makeup. Maya had actually been excited enough to speak directly to her mother while they debated brown versus black eyeliner and whether my brows required additional plucking.
“Not bad,” Cindy said.
“Just please don’t make me look too slutty,” I said, as she began filling in my lashes with a brush dipped in brown powder. “Slutty would not do.” With that in mind, I’d worn a pencil skirt and pumps with a not-too-high heel, a fuchsia cardigan with a pale-pink T-shirt underneath, and a single strand of pearls. I was going for “mildly sexy librarian,” and I’d already solemnly vowed to refrain from looking at any and all online commentary on my outfit, my figure, or what I had to say.
“Good luck,” Dave had told me as I’d gathered my car keys and my purse. He sounded friendlier than he had in weeks, and, almost without thinking, I’d turned my face up toward his for a good-luck kiss. Maybe he’d just intended to brush my lips with his, but I’d stumbled, as a result either of the heels or of the Penny Lane pills, and we’d ended up with his arms around me, the length of my body pressed against his, close enough to feel the heat of him through the cotton and denim, to smell his scent of shampoo and warm, clean skin. I’d opened my mouth and he’d settled one hand at the small of my back, tilting me against him, the better to feel his thickening erection, the other at the base of my neck so he could keep my head in place while he kissed me, lingeringly, thoroughly . . .
“EWWW!”
We sprang apart. I stumbled again—this time, it was definitely the heels—and staggered backward, praying that my skirt wouldn’t rip. “Ellie, what’s wrong?” I’d asked. Ellie, predictably, had started to cry.
“I don’t like KISSING. It is DISGUSTING.”