1

We’re both ugly. And not a common ugly either. She has a sunken cheekbone. From the operation she had when she was eight. My disgusting scar comes from when I was just a teenager and got a horrible burn next to my mouth.

It can’t be said that we have sensitive eyes, either. Those self-justifying beacons truly ugly people can sometimes claim as approximating a kind of beauty. Certainly not. Her eyes, like mine, full of resentment, reveal only the barest acceptance of our misfortune. Perhaps that’s what brought us together. Well, maybe together isn’t the best word. I refer to the relentless hatred each of us feels for his own face.

We met by chance outside a movie theatre, waiting in line to see two run-of-the-mill beautiful people on the screen. It was there that, for the first time, we looked each other over with a kind of unsentimental but murky solidarity. It was right there, at first glance, that we took note of our respective solitudes. Everyone in that line was standing two by two, but the others were real couples: man and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend, lovers, young, old, who knows what else. Everybody stood arm in arm, or hand in hand—with someone. She and I were the only ones whose hands hung tense and unattached.

We each looked at the other’s ugly mark slowly, insolently, matter-of-factly. I examined the gouge in her cheekbone with the assurance that my shrunken cheek afforded me. She didn’t blush. It pleased me that she was tough, and that she returned my gaze to peruse that shiny, slick, beardless patch of my old burn.

We finally got inside and sat in separate but nearby rows. She couldn’t see me, but even in the dark, I could make out the back of her blond head, and her pert, shapely ear. It was the ear on her normal side.

For an hour and forty minutes we admired the respective good looks of the brash hero and the sophisticated heroine. Personally, I have always been able to admire pretty things. Loathing I reserve for my own face, and sometimes for God. Also for other ugly faces, for other frightening people. Maybe I should feel pity, but I can’t. The truth is, they seem a little like mirrors. Sometimes I wonder what the myth would be like if Narcissus had a sunken check, or an acid burn, or only half a nose, or stitches across his forehead.

I waited at the exit for her and walked beside her for a few yards before I spoke. She stopped to look at me, and I had the impression she was wavering. I invited her to come chat a while in some cafe or coffee shop. She immediately agreed.

The place was full, but just then a table opened up. As we walked past the other tables, we left looks and gestures of astonishment in our wake. My antennae are particularly adept at capturing the morbid curiosity, the unconscious sadism of people who have nondescript, miraculously symmetrical faces. But this time my well-developed intuition wasn’t even necessary, since I could hear all the muttering, throat-clearings, and fake coughs. A single horrible face evidently arouses some interest, but two together constitute a great spectacle, only somewhat less synchronized. Something you should watch in the company of one of those good-looking men or women with whom one ought to share the world.

We sat down and ordered two ice creams. She had the guts (which I also liked) to take a little mirror out of her purse and fuss with her hair. Her beautiful hair.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked.

She put the mirror away and smiled. The deep pit in her cheek changed shape.

“Nothing very profound,” she said. “To each his own.”

We talked for a long time. After an hour and a half, we had to order two coffees to justify sitting there so long. I suddenly realized that both of us had been talking with such penetrating openness that we were in danger of crossing a line between sincerity and something like hypocrisy. I decided to go for broke.

“You feel excluded from life, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, still looking me in the eye.

“You admire all the beautiful ones, the normal ones. You’d like to have a face as smooth as that young girl’s on your right, even though you’re intelligent and she, judging by her laugh, is a hopeless idiot.”

“Yes.”

For the first time she lowered her eyes.

“I’d like that, too. But you know, there’s a chance that you and I could amount to something.”

“Like what?”

“Like loving each other, damn it. Or just be friends. Call it what you like, but there’s a chance.”

She frowned. She didn’t want to think about hope.

“Promise you won’t think I’m a nut.”

“I promise.”

“Our chance is to climb into the night. The deep of night. Total darkness. Do you follow me?”

“No.”

“You’ve got to understand! Total darkness. Where you can’t see me, and I can’t see you. You have a nice body, didn’t you know that?”

She blushed, and her sunken cheek turned scarlet.

“I live alone, in an apartment, and it’s close by.”

She looked up again, and this time her eyes were full of questions, questions about me, as she tried desperately to arrive at a diagnosis.

“Let’s go,” she said.

2

Not only did I turn out the light, I also drew the double curtains. She was breathing at my side, but it wasn’t a heavy breathing. She wouldn’t let me help her undress. I couldn’t see a thing, not a thing. But all the same, I could tell she was waiting, motionless. I stretched out a hand, cautiously, and found her breast. My touch sent me a powerful, stimulating sense of her. And in this way I saw her belly, her sex. And her hands saw me.

Then suddenly, I realized that I had to yank myself (and yank her) out of that falsehood I had fabricated. Or tried to fabricate. It hit me like a bolt of lightning. This wasn’t what we were about. We weren’t about this.

It took all my courage, but I did it. My hand slowly ascended toward her face, it found that ditch of horror, and it slowly began a convincing and convinced caress. The truth is, my fingers (shaky at first, then gradually calmer) passed over her tears again and again.

Then, when I least expected it, her hand reached up to my face and went over the rib of the scar and the slick patch of skin, that beardless island of my sinister mark. We cried until dawn. Wretches, happy. Then I got up and opened the double curtains.