La beauté sans vertu Read online

  She walks past them all without turning her head. She walks past the building and into the street and toward the empty cul-de-sac at the edge of the parking lot, where the field starts. With every step the threads shake loose—that walk is a killer, that walk gets the job done—and the first hoop’s rattled to the asphalt before the Mothers Against have quite caught their breath.

  It’s not a mathematical process, of course—a labor of love never is—and a few of the hoops clack together as they slip down, only to be caught up in the dam of silk threads until she can jar them loose. She sheds everywhere, strands of silk in single filaments that shine along the ground like something from a fever dream, every color so expertly dyed it casts a halo against the asphalt as it falls. Once or twice threads catch and sink in a cluster all at once, and a hoop will clatter to the ground, so as she steps out of it she leaves behind a circled map to a place no one will ever reach.

  She’s naked long before everything finally goes, of course—a few hoops and some string do not a garment make, and the white knobs of her spine and of her borrowed wrists and blackened fingertips and the purple hollows at the backs of her knees are shaded by the deep blues and the strings of gold that are still left. She keeps walking without looking left or right. Once she hits the tall, muddy grass of the field and the gold-tipped heels of her shoes sink with the first step into the soft earth, she abandons them and continues barefoot, but she never breaks stride; she’s a professional.

  When she disappears into the woods beyond the field, there are three hoops hanging around her knees at strange angles, and a few vertical streaks of blue still holding them up.

  After a long time, one of the Mothers Against says, “I suppose we should tell them.”

  One of the others—the oldest, the one wiping away tears—says, “I’ll go.”

  * * *

  The threads were mapped over the course of eight months. Rhea had a vision. She wanted a legacy.

  She dyed each one by hand in a room in her apartment that got light like a Vermeer. She medicated to avoid sleep for a week so she could determine where every thread should start and end. She consulted a physicist the next week, to make sure she was right about the rate of tensile decay on a body in motion, just in case she had hallucinated during the original sketches. It wouldn’t be perfect—Maria had a way of walking that no application of metrics could fully predict—but it would do what it had been made to do.

  The team of dressers that wove Maria into the silk-thread gown spent the two weeks before the show locked in a hotel room with no outside connection and a half-wage stipend, with a PR vice president stationed outside to make sure no one from room service could ask them anything. Each dresser was given a garment map and practice threads from Rhea’s dry runs. (She’d done sixty.) By the end of two weeks, they could do the whole dress in three hours. The day of, with the real thing, they wept once or twice as they worked; a miracle affects people in strange ways.

  * * *

  If it panics Rhea that her centerpiece and her prize model have vanished, no one ever gets wind of it. You don’t become the head of a house by being easy to read. As soon as she hears what’s happened, she cancels the finale and just orders the models to walk straight through the crowds in the aisles and hold rank outside. The attendees file out in pairs after that, past the gauntlet of thirty-four girls, and see what’s left of Maria. There’s a constellation of silk snakes, filaments disappearing into the tall grass, hoops leaving ghost marks where they fell, pale blue threads suspended in a little puddle of antifreeze.

  No one claps. Some cry. The reporters shoulder-check each other and take hundreds of pictures at speeds that sound like someone wheezing.

  “Did you see it?” the audience asks the picketers, and when the Mothers Against nod, the guests don’t ask what it must have been like. They just shake the Mothers’ hands, and shake their heads at Rhea as they would a brutal saint, and file silently past towards the city proper.

  * * *

  They never find Maria.

  It could be foul play—she’d run from a house to which she owed at least six figures. There were consequences when a girl bolted on a contract, and Rhea would have taken the loss rather than let such an artist move under someone else’s roof. Centifolia signed girls for life; casualties were a cost of doing business.

  The cops don’t make a particularly thorough search for Maria. If she’s moved couture houses without approval it’s a legal matter above their pay grade, and if she’s vanished in the process it’s a business matter, and they’ll never find the body.

  There are routine checks on the morgue from time to time, but they figure in that case the call will come in to them. She was healthy unless her arms malfunctioned, so it could be a while, and they’ll know if something happened: Maria’s is a face not even death could hide.

  The girl who opened the show becomes a media darling. Someone at Bespoke decides she must have known what was wrong and had bravely decided to begin the show anyway, and it catches on. Rhea’s team tells her to let them believe it. It’s a good angle, and somebody’s got to close out the spring show. They’re working on a new image for her, maybe something with mermaids, something with ghosts; the sunken eyes, they’ve decided, will become her trademark. Rhea starts dying fabrics for her.

  When the press goes wild for the story, and the MAOYM find themselves at the center of more attention than their clauses had ever planned for, a lot of things happen. Some just amplify their slogans regarding the right kind of woman, with the unblinking intensity television can lend someone, and get picked up for church work. Some split from all that and argue for transparency and freedom of industry, and precipitate updates to regulations in some of the major Houses.

  The oldest Mother Against—the one who broke the news about Maria to an assistant who thanked her, threw up, and sprinted for Rhea—left the organization before she ever got in her car to go home.

  Sometimes she drives all the way out to the edge of town and stands in the doorway of the Old Baroque, where the runway was never torn down, and looks from the runway to the trees on the far side of the field. The dye from one of the silk threads has held fast to the asphalt all this time, a dusting of gold pointing to the place between two trees where Maria disappeared.

  Maybe she lives in the woods, the old woman thinks. She doesn’t know why that comforts her.

  The runway’s going to seed. Reeds have sprouted from the oily pool, and there are beginning to be frogs, and the moss has started to grow over the sharp edges, a pool of pale blue algae skimming every imprint of a shoe.

  * * *

  The nail polish for spring is from Centifolia, in collaboration with Count Eleven. Out of the Vagary beauty line they design that year, the most popular by a factor of ten is the shade called The Woman Vanishes; it’s a hundred dollars a bottle, and was sold out before it ever saw the inside of a store.

  It’s nearly black, tending a little purple. You dip your whole fingertip in it, so it looks like the blood has pooled.

  About the Author

  Gevevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula. Her short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards, and has appeared in several Best of the Year anthologies. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2016 by Genevieve Valentine

  A
rt copyright © 2016 by Tran Nguyen