UGLINESS

UGLINESS

Bernie was an ugly man.  His ugliness was not the effect of aging, that unattractive aging that afflicts some men.  He suffered from his ugliness from his earliest years.  But he was also, perhaps by way of compensation, a generous and giving man, compassionate and sympathetic to the plights of others.  He seldom expected and never asked for anything in return for his generosity.  However, if he had one condition in life which he would ask God to change if he could ask for anything at all of God, it would not be his ugliness—it would be his loneliness.

     Despairing of ever finding relief from his yearnings and gratification of his desires, he took his mind, when he was young, off these aspects of his life by concentrating his efforts on being successful in one business or another.  And so he was—he owned two houses, a successful appliance store, and a used-auto dealership he cleverly named “Ye Olde Auto Shoppe.”  Bernie was wealthy in his own mind, though in the common ways of wealth in the modern world, he might be considered rather undistinguished.  But what mattered, of course, was what Bernie thought. 

He was generous to a fault.  He lived in neither of his two houses.  Being a simple man, he felt he didn’t need the space and rented, instead, an apartment over the shops on Main Street.  The houses he let to two families, both with numerous children, both working families struggling to keep bread on the table, and both barely able to pay the ludicrously low rent Bernie asked for.  Often, when life was tough for these families, Bernie would let them go months on end without paying the rent.  And as is common in situations like these, the husbands and wives despised Bernie for being so lax and for being so gullible as to believe the lies they told him.  Cheaters and liars seldom admire their victims.  And though they did not conceal their attitudes, Bernie never acknowledged them and never threw them out. 

Now it so happened that the shop over which Bernie lived specialized in matting and framing pictures and selling framed prints and objets d’art, little crystal and porcelain things, designed to fit the season.  Bernie liked to go into the shop and look at the pretty things at the end of his day before going upstairs to his interminable loneliness.  The owner of the shop was a woman young enough to be his daughter who was also extremely attractive, and Bernie got a very special pleasure from talking with her.  For her part, she was always cordial to him, never resenting the sometimes intimate questions he asked her, understanding that he lived alone and that through her he lived a little of the life he never lived. 

There came a time, however, when this woman, whose name was Eve, fell upon hard times.  Her husband died a lingering and tormented death from cancer, and the protracted dying cost the woman every cent of their meager savings, including every penny of the dead husband’s life insurance.  She was in debt and eking out a day-to-day existence, finally having to give up her home and make a place for herself and her three-year-old daughter in the back of the frame shop.  This arrangement worked for her by allowing her to watch the little girl while she worked.

And still Bernie came to the shop every evening before Eve closed it to look at the delicate things and pass some time with her in general conversation that, by unspoken agreement, never touched upon her misery.  Although the older man knew her plight, she never spoke of it, and he was sensitive enough to the nuances and subtleties of human nature not to compel her to discuss it.  She was proud as well as beautiful, independent as well as feminine, strong willed as well as personable and friendly, and Bernie admired all these qualities.  Nevertheless, as time passed, he could not help noticing how Eve grew paler and thinner and how the little girl whitened in the cheeks and became listless in behavior.  He would look long and hard into Eve’s face, make an expression of compassionate concern, and wait, expectantly, for her to acknowledge what was happening.  But she never did.  Her silence about the matter was frustrating, for, more than anything, Bernie wanted to help her. 

He did not believe that her refusal to acknowledge her misery was influenced in any way by his ugliness.  He was sensitive about his ugliness, and often, when he failed at some endeavor, especially with people, he blamed his ugliness and resented it, and cursed himself over it, and mourned for himself in great bouts of self-pity.  His lower lip protruded and glowed, almost, with a dark calf’s-liver redness.  His teeth were crowded and bunched up in the front of his mouth.  His cheeks, round and puffy, had red and white blotches.  He was bald with a patch of black hair jutting up like dunegrass just above his forehead.  His ears were large for the size of his head.  But worse than all these was the fact that he had very bad eyesight and from his earliest years had to wear very thick eyeglasses that made his eyes seem to bulge from his head when seen through the lenses. 

Somehow, Eve got by this ugliness that often made others turn away.  She would look at him when they talked with a certain normalcy that even his own mother never had.  For that alone, he would give all he had to Eve, and keep on giving.  No, he felt, it was not his ugliness that kept her silent about her misery; it was her pride.  He was sure of it.  He needed to find a way to get by that, her woman’s pride, and make her able to accept help from him. 

And so he resolved one day to dare the opening and offer her help—in a form she might be comfortable accepting.  He had noticed that her inventory was growing ever slighter and that there were every day more and more empty spaces on the shelves in her shop.  Why not, he thought, since this was obvious, mention it?  Perhaps she would accept help in the form of a little investment by him in her business.  He would, of course, never ask her to repay it.  If she tried to, he would insist she use the payment to buy more stock—it would be a beginning.

With this plan in mind, he walked around her shop making a big deal of noticing the empty spots.  The little girl was dressed in red pants with a red sweater over a white blouse.  She sat on a little chair in the corner, where her mother had placed a tiny table for her to sit at and use her crayons and coloring book.  Her face was pasty white and her hair, despite the pink ribbon, had lost its luster and hung stringily onto her shoulders.  She colored without attention to the lines of the figures, rubbing the waxy crayons all over the page, like she was bored and resented having nothing else to do.  Eve was standing behind the counter, poring over bills.  No one else was in the shop.

“I see you have a lot of empty spaces on the shelves these days,” Bernie said, approaching her delicately, as though he were also preparing to run out the door if she seemed resentful of his notice.

“I’ve been eating the inventory; what else can I do?  We make so little, I have to choose between food and new stock.”

Taking encouragement from her admission of difficulty, he took the next step.

“And what will you do when the inventory is gone?”

“I’ll have to close.  What else can I do?”

“And what then?” he asked, fearing the answer.

“Then I go and apply for assistance.  There is the subsidized housing.  Little Jo,” the daughter’s name was JoAnn, “will be better off.”

“But why wait?  Why not do it now?”

“Because I have this business.  I keep hoping all the time that things will pick up.  They always have in the past.  Whenever the shop looked like it was going to die, it suddenly picked up and I was able to hold on to it.  I keep hoping, you know, it’ll happen this time, too.”

“But why not get the assistance and keep the shop?  Why not both?”

He, perhaps, should not have pushed her this far, and he felt immediately he had made a mistake.  But it came so naturally.  He said it before he thought it almost.  In reply, she gave him a look that broke his heart and made him doubt if he should make his offer, now.  Nevertheless, he sucked in his big lip and paused, looking compassionately at her.

“I wonder,” he said, working up the nerve, daring as he had never dared, feeling more emotion than he had ever felt, as if his life depended on saying it, “if you would let me invest in your business. . . .”

She had stopped him dead by rounding her eyes in a look of alarm and then making a face like a death mask.  He felt his own cheeks flaming.

“I mean only to buy some stock!  Look, there’s hardly anything to sell.  If you have things on the shelves again, maybe what you hope to happen will happen.”

She walked agitatedly out from behind the counter, leaving the stack of bills, and to the corner where the little girl was listening.  She lifted her off the chair and bustled her into the back room, then came out and, pulling the front of her sweater tight around her, said,

“No, Mr. Remy, thanks but no thanks.  I don’t want help of that kind.  You’ll have to leave now, because it’s time to close the shop.  My little one is hungry and needs tending.”

That was it.  She threw him out.  He heard the door lock behind him and when he turned, she had just reversed the sign, “CLOSED.”  He stared at it as though it spoke aloud: “CLOSED.”  That was the way she felt.  That, he feared, also was the end of whatever relationship he had had with her.  He knew the relationship was all in his mind.  He knew this.  There was none from her point of view.  She was just being nice.  After all, he bought so many things from her.  She rather had no choice, being a good business woman, than to relate to him.  He was too ugly.  She really was put off by his ugliness.  If he was a little younger, a little better looking, wouldn’t she have jumped at the chance of a cash investment to keep her going?  He knew she would.  It was his ugliness.  Her, too.  But when he calmed down and walked up the long, dark flight of stairs, and opened his own apartment, and went in, he knew it wasn’t so.  It wasn’t so.  She was too proud to accept help and his clumsy way of offering put her off.  That was it.  He would let time pass and try again.  Meanwhile, he needed to find another tack.

It was just as it was before.  The little girl was coloring at her table and Eve was behind the counter poring over bills.  The shelves were emptier than before, though.  People were coming in and buying.  She had to be getting desperate, he thought.  He looked closely at her and, yes, she’d gotten thinner and paler.  And the child.  She, too, is thinner, like bones now.  Her face is almost gone.  She is all eyes and mouth.  The mouth itself dominates the face, the flesh of which has been consumed by her body.  His heart was breaking.  Many times during the last month he had left a bag of groceries at the door of the shop.  He watched when she opened in the morning.  But she never took them in.  She knew he had left them.  Who else would?  He looked around the shop, slowly.  When there was so little left that it would appear like it was going out of business, people would stop coming in, and then it would all be over.  What?  Life?  Was this life?  Was it worth the suffering?  She didn’t do enough business matting and framing to make the shop work without the gift items that were her main trade.  Why was she hanging on?  Instead of wasting time pretending like he was looking around, he went directly to her.

“I’m looking for new tenants in one of my houses,” he said. 

She looked up at him, in the way she had of looking into his face that always thrilled him, silent, waiting for him to go on.  Taking encouragement from that, he continued,

“The last ones really beat the place up.  I need good tenants I can trust.  Maybe we can help each other out.”

He thought if he put it in those terms—like she was doing him a favor—he might win her over to his helping her, in regards to the house at first, but then in other ways later.

“I know you and your little one are living in the back.  Why not take the house?  I’ll be glad to have you there to keep the place in good shape, and in time, when your business picks up, you can start paying rent.  What do you say?  Deal?  You can move in right away.  Today.  Give you space here to work like you used to.  That’ll help get things going for you again.”

She rolled up her eyes as though thinking over the offer, and then said,

“Mr. Remy, I just couldn’t accept it.  Things are hard for us now.  Everyone has hard times.  Who doesn’t?  We’ll survive.  Stop worrying about us.”

He was crestfallen.  For many moments he stood looking down at his shoes.  Again, he felt the rejection was aimed at his ugliness, but he managed to repress the feeling.  Repressing also the feeling of stricken disappointment caused by her rejection, he mastered himself to speak again.  

“You’re an independent person.  That’s to be admired.  But, Eve, why turn your back on help when you need it?”

It seemed to him such a foolish thing to reject a helping hand.  It seemed almost blasphemous, like a sin.  He wasn’t a religious man, but he had, nevertheless, an appreciation for prayer.  People always pray for help when they are desperate, even if they don’t believe in God.  Here, she had the best kind of help, heartfelt and without strings, and she turned it down.

“It comes with no strings,” he tried to explain, to get her to appreciate how her pride was interfering in her well being.

“I only want to help.  It’s selfishness, plain and simple.  I like coming in and seeing you before I go up, looking at the things in the shop.  Take my offer as help in that spirit.  I’m offering for my sake, not yours.”

He hoped maybe that would nudge her past her reluctance, her insistence on going it alone.

“Do it for the little one’s sake,” he added, hoping that might be the straw.

But she closed up her face on him.  She turned her face towards her left shoulder and composed herself.

“Mr. Remy, I would appreciate it if you left this shop and stopped coming here in the evenings.  You have nothing to gain by coming in any more, there’s nothing here for you.  We have our own lives, JoAnn and me, and we do just fine.  We don’t need anything we can’t get for ourselves.”

She ushered him to the door and once again locked it behind him and reversed the sign.  He stood in front of the door, alone, his hands in his pockets, feeling like a heap of discarded scrap.  A lump filled the back of his throat.  He turned and shuffled to the door to the apartments and went up, up through the darkness, up into the gathered heat risen from the day’s sunshine, up to the emptiness that greeted him every day.  He unlocked his door and went in, one hand still in his pocket, head bent low.

He looked in the mirror.  “It’s not me,” he said bitterly.  “It’s her.  Simply her.  Such an awful pride.  She’d rather lose everything than accept help.  How awful.  How awful.”

He did not go there anymore.  He didn’t dare.  The last thing he wanted was a memory of her frowning at him in anger.  So he didn’t go.  He passed the shop but didn’t look in.  It took great effort not to look.  But he didn’t.  In time, he was able to pass the shop without the huge pull on his emotions.  In time, he was able to forget.  But not really.  He just succeeded in numbing himself.  It wasn’t forgetting.  Deep in his heart he loved Eve.  Not erotically.  But just as a person.  He loved her because she could look at him and seem normal.  In former days, before her husband died, when she was happy and free and full of hope for the future, she could smile upon him, and answer his questions about her life and feelings, about being a wife, a mother, a shop owner—she took his curiosity as a teacher takes that of a child.  He loved her for that, as that.  He couldn’t understand her refusal. 

Then one day the shop was empty.  He stood looking in through the door.  It was dark and empty.  Everything was gone.  A feeling of sadness came upon him, like a blanket draped over his head.  He felt such a mourning that the tears came.  He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes.  Putting them back on, he turned to the sidewalk again and paced away.  Later, that night, reading the newspaper, he found the story.  Eve was dead, as was the daughter.  They were found in an alley behind the supermarket.  They were emaciated.  The reporter inveighed against the inhumanity of our failure to help the needy. 

Bernie went again to the mirror.  He was ugly.  The tears flowed from under the thick lenses.  It was the ugliness.  All he had to offer meant nothing.  He didn’t feel angry, at Eve, at life, at people, at God.  He felt calm.  It was his fate.  It was what he had to bear.  He wiped his eyes and steeled himself to bear the rest of his life.