Sheer, p.26
Sheer, page 26
“Will do.”
Ms. Cartoon Villainess brushes past me with a stack of dirty plates. “If you’re not eating, you leave,” she snaps, and slams a check down on my table. “Pay at the register.”
“Who was that?” asks Sandrine. “You’re not at home?”
“I went out to get some air and some coffee.”
“Got it. Well, send me everything when you’re home. Max, we always knew termination was a possibility. We’re going to fight as hard as we can, I promise.”
“Thanks, Sandrine.”
I end the call. Sandrine is right, I always knew this outcome was possible. Possibility and reality are not the same, however. Nothing has prepared me for the sensation of losing my company, even temporarily. Reveal is no longer mine. I wait for the sharp slices of pain and the agony of defeat to overwhelm my body. There is nothing. I feel nothing.
My dismissal has been written in the sky since before the Board existed, as far back as Reveal’s very birth. There is no pleasure in watching a woman succeed unless she is eventually punished. Stories of female achievement are never truly inspirational; they are, at their heart, cautionary. In that respect, my professional narrative has managed something that my personal life never will: it has adhered to convention.
The check is for twenty-five dollars. I guess that’s how this diner survived into 2015; it charges a fortune for limp fruit and coffee that could double as euthanasia. I pick at my fruit plate for another forty minutes, to piss off my server, before I stand to leave. I’ve already been kicked out of my office. No one is kicking me out of a diner. As I turn in the direction of the cashier to pay my king’s ransom, a flash of navy ribbon catches my eye. It is wrapped around a dark glossy ponytail that belongs to a young woman who sits on one of the swivel stools, her back to the diner. She wears a long-sleeved polka-dot dress. Black patent-leather ballet flats are on her feet, daintily crossed over each other like she is at afternoon tea. There is no uncertainty about it: Amanda sits at the bar.
* * *
—
My first instinct is to flee. Sneak out the door before you turn and see me. The register is directly next to your seat, though, and I can’t have an accusation of theft on top of the other charges I already face. Besides, that emptiness from seconds ago has been replaced by an inferno of rage. Before common sense can stop me, I stride over to the register, check in hand.
“You should be the one to pay this, not me. Since you’re the reason I’m here.”
Your shoulders jolt at the sound of my voice and you hop off your seat in alarm. On the bar before you is an omelet with hash browns smothered in Tabasco sauce. I guess you’re no longer dieting for me.
“What are you doing here?” you snarl. “Are you following me?”
“Get over yourself,” I say. “I didn’t think anyone I knew would come to a place like this. What are you doing here?”
“It’s my comfort spot,” you say. “Not that I owe you any answers. I shouldn’t even be talking to you without a lawyer.” You turn to the server behind the bar. “Could I have my check please?”
“I’m sure you heard,” I continue. Your perfect face stares at me and that inferno in my chest morphs into something unidentifiable, some emotion I can’t place. “The Board fired me.”
“Yeah, my lawyer called me. That’s why I’m here. Like I said, this is my comfort spot.”
The server slaps a check on the counter and you pick it up.
“Comfort? What comfort could you possibly need? You got what you wanted. I’m done. Though make no mistake, I’m going to fight it.”
Your dark eyes moisten.
“You think I wanted this? I didn’t want any of this. You were my boss, Max. How do you not understand that? You had power over me this whole time.”
“Oh, please. You initiated things. We’re here because of you. All I did was go along with what you started. Look at yourself: Can you blame me?”
The moisture is gone from your eyes. I wonder if I should be afraid. If you want to hurt me more than you already have.
“That first time in London, I felt sorry for you. You were so upset. When you reached for me, I didn’t want to deny you what you desired. I thought it would be a one-off incident, but it wasn’t.” You are steely now in a way I have never seen before. “I was powerless and not just because you were my boss. It was also about race. For my whole life I’ve been stalked and harassed and demeaned because I’m ‘so exotic’ and ‘so sexy.’ It was clear that I was nothing but a sexual object to you after London. You only paid attention to me because I was sleeping with you.”
That unidentifiable emotion spreads across my chest and I try to ignore it. “You millennials make everything about race. You’re an adult, Amanda. If you felt uncomfortable, you should have come to me. We could have ended things.”
“I don’t take pleasure in being the victim here. It makes me feel weak and pathetic. That’s partly why I didn’t say anything until now.” You pull a wallet out of your bag and fumble with some bills. “I am an adult, yes, capable of giving consent. But you had a power over me that you never acknowledged. You still won’t. I was your assistant for five years, five years before you promoted me. I felt like I would never be able to leave. I thought, I have to keep sleeping with her because it’s the only way she’ll promote me. But she also may never promote me because I’m sleeping with her. Then you promoted me and still expected me to sleep with you. Did you notice how much I drank before we had sex? How I stopped eating? Then the stuff with Sly. The whole thing makes me sick. I never really desired you. I used to respect you as a visionary, but now I wish I had never met you.”
Your eyes are cold and unmoving. The fiery mischief that I saw in them so many times, a sparkle that set my insides aflame, is gone. Maybe it was never there. You never wanted me. None of your advances were genuine. My body turns to stone.
“What was your goal, then? To punish me?”
“To stop you from doing it to someone else. Women deserve to feel safe in their workplace.”
A laugh breaks through the numbness.
“Safe? When is a woman ever safe in this world? What a crazy thing to expect.”
“You need to dream bigger, Max, nothing will ever change until you do.” Your gaze hardens. “Maybe you should spend more time looking at yourself in the mirror and less time telling other women how they should be.” You crumple a twenty and toss it on the counter. Then you shove your wallet in your bag and storm out.
I give the cashier both checks and the twenty dollars, with an extra forty to cover my meal and a large tip. Outside, I stand on the sidewalk and stare across the street at Reveal’s building. Around me, the bustle of SoHo is unrelenting. Tourists practically seep out of the asphalt, clogging the pedestrian arteries. The crispness in the air signals the coming of fall. I clutch my coat more tightly around me.
I turn right and head north on Broadway. Luxury retailers, their storefronts shiny and tidy, taunt me with their two-thousand-dollar handbags and three-hundred-dollar jeans. There will be none of that in the future to which I am headed. Challenging this termination will cost a fortune.
What about the rest of me? I have barely survived these nine days without the daily grind of Reveal. In the end, writing down my story has failed to achieve its intended goal: to convince me of my innocence. I was never innocent. I don’t need a boardroom full of white men—and Ellen—to tell me that.
My attraction to women was the foundation of Reveal. I desired them in a way that other beauty entrepreneurs never could. Other female founders sought to make women in their own image, while male founders tried to control them through their patriarchal gaze. I imagined something different, giving them the greatest pleasure you can extend to a woman—the freedom to be herself. How has my desire, the superpower that set me apart and gifted me my vision, failed me so completely? I believed my sexual appetite was a form of resistance against a world that saw me as unnatural. And yet all I did was reduce myself and other women to a sexual definition that same world imposed. In the process, I became the very monster this ugly society insisted I already was.
I realize that my relationship with you was imperfect at best and inarguably wrong. You were beautiful. I lusted for you and I thought you lusted for me, too, though I was terribly mistaken. You never wanted me, only my approval. How did I misread the signs so completely? I held you in thrall not through magnetism, but through dominance.
I will never forget the expression in your eyes when you stared at me in that crummy diner. You hated me in that moment, it was plain. I was accustomed to inspiring hatred in other women, jealous hatred for being beautiful and successful, disgusted hatred for being different. Never have I experienced such venom from a former lover.
Elizabeth thinks that I love you. Maybe I do, though not in the sense that she means. I love your ambition, your ferocity, your refusal to settle. I love your beauty. Perhaps most of all, I love your admiration of me. More than anyone, you have seen me at my worst. You have seen my weakness and you have protected it—until now. I love the version of myself that was reflected in your eyes.
I look at you, Amanda, and I see a different reality. A world that is soft. It is a place in which women make aesthetic choices based on personal whims not expert dictates. I see a time when clear boundaries around sexuality, race, and gender are dissolving. This world confounds me. It resents me. What does power look like in a land of pink clouds and hugs and warm sincerity? What does womanhood look like in a world that demands vulnerability instead of strength? Maybe those two things are not as unalike as they seem. Ellen’s proxy power through men repulsed me. Yet I have become Ellen to you. When the pink clouds of your world eventually turn gray, will you play Ellen to a future someone?
SoHo is hard beneath my heels as I stride up Broadway, my hunger for your forgiveness burning a hole in my lungs.
And Reveal. Jesus, Reveal. My baby has been ripped from my arms. I birthed Reveal into being. I suckled it into childhood. I sent it to private school and paid for its college tuition. After all that, I have been deemed an unfit mother. Put out to pasture with all the other middle-aged matrons. What a joke it is to be a woman.
I reach the intersection of Broadway and Prince. On a whim, I swerve right onto Prince. Broadway feels too wide; I yearn for a narrower street to squeeze me into submission. Prince is less crowded than Broadway. Quaint cafés, a hip Italian eatery, a teeming magazine newsstand—they still exist, who knew—lull me into a sense of control. This is what I need: small spaces, kitsch, the rustle of nearly extinct media. The cold air nibbles at my cheeks as I walk east, in the opposite direction from home.
Later, I will call Sandrine and tell her that I am done. I don’t want to fight this. She should negotiate the best settlement she can.
At the corner of Mulberry, a colorful blur catches my eye. I turn left and walk a few steps north until the blur comes into focus. It is a mural that runs across a brick wall of what appears to be a pizza joint that has gone out of business. The bricks, visible only in the faint indentations of their grout, have been coated in a dull, slate gray. Atop this dour background, someone has spray-painted a profusion of multicolored hearts. Their shapes are inconsistent. Some of the hearts are perfectly symmetrical, like the red drugstore doilies that proliferate ahead of Valentine’s Day. Others are shorter and wider, akin to misshapen loaves of bread. A few are so elongated and slender, they look more like teardrops than arterial cavities. The colors are exuberant, fuchsia and aquamarine and canary yellow and pumpkin and spearmint and cherry red. I didn’t know hearts could come in such an array. Their shapes are layered atop each other in overlapping waves, like a mob of butterflies or a cascade of dead leaves blowing in the breeze.
Unlike that Alexander’s mural of my early childhood, this artwork is unapologetic in its obviousness. In case the message somehow eludes you, the artist has inscribed #LOVEONLY on their masterpiece.
As I stand here and stare at this creative schmaltz, my face dampens with tears. They stream down my cheeks, silently, determined in their mission. My brain winds back from you to Ellen to Caroline and farther back to my mother. These tears suggest that I am not quite an impenetrable fortress. There is life in me yet. Maxine Thomas has a heart.
Don’t you understand, Amanda, I didn’t write my story for myself. I wrote it for you. So you can forgive me. Please, please forgive me. As soon as I am home, I will write down these final thoughts. I will confess my sins. I will attach my story to an email and send it your way. It is to you I owe my most unfiltered truth.
I continue to stare at the mural. The skin of my face is soaked. My body trembles in release. There are so many hearts on this wall. They are set to fly off the bricks, land on my skin, and devour me down to the bone. All that sincere, open-faced love threatens to destroy me. Let it. What are you waiting for? I ask those hearts. Take me. I am here. At last, I am ready. I am ready to reveal all.
Acknowledgments
I am so grateful to and thankful for the many people who have supported Sheer and me over the course of this book’s life.
To Pilar Garcia-Brown, who truly saw and embraced this book from the first read and who has made it better ever since with such deep intelligence and empathy. Working with you is a gift and Sheer and I are both stronger for your collaboration and care.
To Julia Phillips for your incredible generosity and longtime advocacy of and belief in this story—and in me. How lucky I am to learn from and know you.
To Julia Kardon for your passion and wisdom. And thank you to everyone else at HG.
To the wonderful team at Dutton who worked on Sheer, including Lauren Morrow, Nicole Jarvis, Leah Marsh, Laura Corless, Chandra Wohleber, Alicia Lea, and Ariana Tyler. Special thanks to Ella Kurki for your notes, Emi Ikkanda for your early backing of Sheer, and Dominique Jones for Sheer’s stunning cover.
To Nelly Reifler, Sarah Conde, Lauren R., and Aimee Cho for your thoughtful and sharp readings of Sheer as a work in progress.
To Tia Ikemoto and CAA for initial steerage.
To Stephanie Tran, Adam Milch, and Kemper Donovan for your advice, and to Frances F. Denny for your gracious expertise.
To the readers for spending your valuable time in these pages.
To Cricky for your sweetness.
To Jennifer Barton for a long and beautiful friendship.
To my parents and the rest of my family for your faith and support.
To Dana for your constant kindness, humor, and encouragement. I love you.
About the Author
Vanessa Lawrence is a writer, editor, and native New Yorker. Her debut novel, Ellipses, was named a best book of 2024 by Vogue and a most anticipated book of the year by ELLE, Electric Literature, and Autostraddle. For nearly two decades she covered the arts, fashion, beauty, design, and New York society as a staff writer for publications including Women’s Wear Daily and W Magazine. She has a BA in history from Yale University and an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College.
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Vanessa Lawrence, Sheer
