The Makeup Man

A new fad was "in": Everyone was mutilating himself. There were famous actors who had actually removed their ears or eyes. Executives had cut deep scars into their faces. Plastic surgeons on Wilshire or Sunset---for their usual high prices---were turning teenaged girls into monsters: both eyes on one side of the nose, say, or lips severed from the mouth, or the skin drawn like awful cellophane down the cheek and neck. Those who could afford such alterations were envied most.

An old makeup man lived in Beverly Hills as this new hysteria began to ride the air. The palm trees in his front yard had withered, but he kept trying to revive them; earthquakes had left raw openings in parts of his city; food supplies were sufficient and everyone still had a car, but the new fad dominated every conversation and newscast.

In the old days of glamor and good looks, the makeup man had had shops everywhere, private offices in two of the major studios and a fine laboratory in his home. He had serviced the stars on their yachts and sound stages, and it was agreed he was without equal in the industry, a magician. He was known in the business as Mr. Byron or the Fabulous Byron. Naturally, he had many lovers. He could invent faces so beautiful that his clients wanted never to be without him.

Now he stayed home---a less expensive place---trying to revive his withered palm trees, taking his pills and listening to the distressing news of The Rovers or The Fad on television.

One morning, just before his early lunch of oatmeal and juice, a girl came to his front porch.

"I'm Sylvia," she said through the screen door. "I don't have enough money for anything permanent. But---you're the Fabulous Byron, right?"

He nodded yes. Nobody had called him that in years.

"Make me ugly," she pleaded with him.

Byron held the door open as she stepped inside. He reached out his gray hand and turned her head slightly so he could see the curve of her cheekbone. Sylvia was gorgeous, easily the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

He felt his lips pronounce her name.

•

Sylvia remained with Byron in that small hillside house above a darkened neon valley while he tried to decide what to do about her. She was broke and lost, another waif of the city, yet had that natural indifference only the truly beautiful or gifted possess.

"Why do people do this thing?" he asked her about The Fad.

She shrugged the question away.

Nakedness suited her. She shucked her clothes and curled up in his den during those soft warm mornings, combing out her long hair, munching fruit and watching TV. Every afternoon, she stretched out on his patio cushions like a lioness, casual and dazzling, sunlight glowing on the tiny blonde hairs of her torso and turning her arms the color of caramel. At night, she slept in his bed. They lay apart. He ruminated on times past and she suggested ways they might go about ruining her face. He was ancient and undemanding, so she allowed him nearness as they talked.

One morning, he observed her watching a TV program about The Rovers: those gangs of marauders roaming loose in various parts of the country. In obscure parts of Wyoming or the Carolinas or Arkansas, they had attacked farm communities, cleaned out supermarkets or held public executions. Sylvia held her breasts and padded around his den in a frenzy as she watched. Her excitement filled the room with a strange electric pulse that caused his gray hands to tremble.

After this, he gave her his first makeup job. He opened up the holes of her face: made her eyes bulge, her nostrils flare, her mouth open in a drooling fall. He pulled back the skin and pinned it so she seemed caught in a hideous and terrified scream.

"Ghastly!" she cried. "I love it."

•

While Sylvia went out into the city to make her fortune, the makeup man drove out beyond Malibu to an abandoned beach house he owned. He hadn't stayed there in years, not since the mistresses and parties of his heyday. In his early retirement, the house had been rented, but soon tenants had written on the walls, ripped out fixtures and chopped up the deck for firewood.

Slowly---working mostly in the mornings---he made repairs. When he grew tired, he strolled the beach. Cries of gulls. Odors of an air blended with salt and oily rot. Distant hulls of empty marinas.

The inland is a waste, he decided, and the last life is at the shore again, all the creatures crawling back toward the sea in a last primeval moment. He thought of the fierce crustaceans. Only guarded things survived: wrapped in their sorrowful armor, turned in on themselves.

In the evenings, he went home to fix supper for Sylvia.

Soon she had two bit parts and her newly styled face adorned a local commercial. With this small success she became petulant and difficult, and little that Byron did pleased her.

"More oatmeal?" she shouted at him.

He jerked out his false teeth and exposed his wrinkled gums. With his finger hooked into the corner of his mouth, he yelled back at her.

"Look, all slimy!" he said, spraying her with his words. "You've got those perfect white teeth, but I've got these---ancient and soft and slimy!"

"Sorry," she said, relenting.

He learned to be occasionally repulsive. It was clearly the way to deal with her.

•

The Fad seemed to energize people.

It was as if in all nature beauty sat still, languishing, content with itself, while ugliness became dynamic. Those thorny, pincer-fingered, nightmarish crustaceans endured, evolved, fed on the lovely soft flesh of the landscape and multiplied.

Sylvia, too: Her new faces made her bold. She no longer draped herself over the furniture of his den or patio. Instead, she paced his rooms. More often she didn't come back in the evenings. Her career included strangers, dinners, weekends down in Baja, parties in the hills, and in the end Byron was forced to create new distortions for her, each more sickening than the last, just to ensure her frequent visits. Anything to keep her near.

He loved to talk with her when the makeup was off and postponed doing new faces for her as long as possible.

"There were great beauties," he told her as he worked. "Garbo, Bergman, Taylor, Christie! Sensuous, luscious! And the size of their faces up there on the screens! Bigger than anything living, large as the Sphinx, as huge as the Colossus of Rhodes!"

"I do like to sit down close at movies so things look big," Sylvia admitted.

"A beautiful human face in gigantic proportion," Byron went on. "That's the mystery and power of the medium!"

"Can you extend my ears now?" she asked.

"Sure, anything, Sylvia."

"I want my ears wrapped around my face---like tentacles. As though---these---tentacles---are choking me."

•

Sylvia won a part in a monster movie. It was set during the period of the Spanish Inquisition. The picture was shot in Barbados and Texas with a British camera crew, an Arab producer, a Danish director, Latin hairdressers---everything normal---except that it managed to catch the spirit of The Fad at the height of the craze and became a box-office sensation. As a consequence, Sylvia was offered dozens of films and Byron, given his due credit, was brought forth successful out of retirement. In only a few short weeks, he opened Byron's Fabulous Emporium in Palm Springs.

All was well, except he was losing her.

An academy awarded him a medallion on which was inscribed:

Beauty is only skin-deep ugly is to the bone.

Beauty always fades away but ugly holds its own.

•

With his new wealth, Byron ordered a first-class renovation of the beach house and went into seclusion behind a high fence, three Dobermans and a brace of guards with brutally scarred faces.

He ate his oatmeal, watched TV and thought of normal times. Sylvia, he reminded himself, was from Ohio. Byron's father was once employed by the Department of Sanitation of Phoenix, Arizona, (continued on page 158) Makeup Man (continued from page 76) in days when there were families, hourly wages, ball games, anthems and carburetors.

Feeling not at all fabulous, Byron stared into the depths of his television set one whole afternoon and evening, witnessing more than he could assess.

One team had won, another lost.

The number-one hit song of the season was the one about the exciting adventures of The Rovers.

A strange disturbance at a remote edge of the galaxy had been recorded on instruments but not fully identified.

Tattoos were the coming fashion.

Light scattered earthquakes were predicted from the West Coast to the Rockies.

Sylvia's horrid face was part of an award-winning advertisement for handguns.

Food supplies, analysts insisted, had dwindled only slightly.

In some parts of the South Pacific and in the middle jungles of the African continent, palm trees still thrived.

•

At the Palm Springs Emporium, a shiny laboratory awaited the master's touch. When Sylvia became one of the all-time great movie monsters, ranking with Dracula, the Creeper and the Beast with Five Fingers, she became too busy for Byron, so he began to play around in his lab.

He went back to an old experiment: devising a youth cream.

The base compound of Byron's Fabulous Youth Cream over the years had always been sulphonmethane---which produced a hypnotic effect. But Byron, by his own admission, wasn't a scientist, just an artist, so his test tubes and flasks were always filled with fluids that looked good but did little.

His new effort was less a cream than a handsome milk.

In despair, he poured it over his oatmeal and ate it.

Not much taste, but his eyes fastened on the bright spoon in his bowl and he sat there in a trance for 60 hours.

•

Byron went to a party hoping to see Sylvia.

For the floorshow, the hosts presented a philosopher who was reluctant to speak. After a brief and futile interrogation, the master of ceremonies put the philosopher's feet into a vise. The philosopher, an old bearded man who looked wise, writhed in pain as the m.c. tightened the vise but confessed no secrets.

After a buffet supper, some men beat on a 1976 Chevrolet with old pole lamps. They banged out an effective rhythm and everyone except Byron danced.

Later, the m.c. announced in a panic that Rovers had surrounded the estate, so the guests fled in every direction. They dived through windows, hid in pantries and sprinted off into the night toward the beaches, but it all turned out to be a hilarious practical joke.

•

When Sylvia finally came to visit again, she still wore her famous tentacled face.

The air sang with nervousness that night. The restless ocean pulsed into the shore below the beach house, far off in the darkness the Dobermans were beginning to bark and Sylvia's laughter was false, a performance. She was happy about The Fad's passing, she told Byron, tossing her head and laughing, ha-ha, because the required makeup, ha-ha, was beginning to irritate her skin. She seemed desperate and unnatural.

Soon she began to shed her clothes in the old way. Her fingers---silvered, Byron noticed---trailed over his new couches, the brass telescope aimed out at the ocean and his warm television set as she moved through his rooms.

"What do you want?" he asked, following her.

Byron felt both annoyed with her and sorry for her because she had lost that magnificent indifference.

She wore a tattooed wildflower below her navel.

She danced through his place, dropping her gossamer blouse here, a shoe there, touching things; she draped her clothes over his furniture and knocked over jeweled bottles of cosmetics on his mirrored worktable, trying with all her might to bewitch his rooms and his life again, the crude charm of her brown body against all his powers.

Her wretched face distracted him. He couldn't help it, but she just wasn't the same as that first time she came to him.

"You'll make me beautiful and splendid now!" she sang to him, dancing away.

"I can't do it!" he called, his breath growing short as he clumped upstairs after her.

"Oh, yes you can! You can do anything!" she reassured him, whirling. She moved out onto the deck under the stars, back into his bedroom, across the hall-way, her arms beating like wings.

Byron also wanted to say that she didn't love him or appreciate his achievement but knew that would sound childlike. She was still doing her pathetic dance.

"Only our art and the industry matter!" she called to him, spinning out of reach. "You'll find me another fad, then another!"

"No, you don't understand," he wheezed.

"Trick after trick, Byron, you're a genius!"

"The fads kill us!" he yelled at her.

"They're real! You just don't know!"

"You're going to make me lovely now! "You're going to!" she insisted, and she let him catch her. He grabbed her and they wrestled each other down on the thick, creamy rug before his hearth. The flames crackled beside their faces as she began her desperate seduction, pulling his scrawny weight on top of her, laughing in his ear, opening herself to him.

"You don't know what you've done!" he said breathlessly, but she laughed and nuzzled, entwining him. Her hands caressed him as he reached for her face and began to tear her latex mask away.

He was the master, the supreme artist, destroyer and creator, but his talent sickened him now, for it made all passing fashion real, as always, and every fad part of the true texture of the soul.

The sea and the dogs were howling as he pushed his fingers into her makeup. He felt her body relax as she let him work. But then she suspected what she saw in his eyes.

"What is it?" she asked, and she tried to crawl out from under him. They struggled, rolling and falling, until she saw herself in the broken mirror of his work-table, which lay tipped on its side at the far end of the room.

Her faces were coming off one after another, caked artifice and flesh, each more wrinkled and horrid than the one before. He dug into the sockets of her eyes and peeled back another fistful.

Her screams and cries grew louder and darker than the night surrounding them.

Beneath it all, deep down, like the makeup man himself, the famous Sylvia was only a skull.