As she craned her long neck, revealing well-conditioned yet delicate, skinny, and strangely underdeveloped muscles, almost like a child's, as she thrust her head seductively forward, hunching up her narrow, bony shoulders, arching her body like a cat poised to jump, looking long and steadily into everyone's eyes as if challenging them to be part of a play whose stage would be the face itself, its fluid features and the eyes, and whose director, of course, would be she herself, as she did all this, she displayed plenty of studied coyness, no doubt, but not the usual kind; in this game she did not want to be beautiful and attractive, as other people might, in fact she wanted to look uglier than they were and it was as if she had deliberately made herself look unattractive, or rather, as if her body had a different view of beauty, refuting as false and craven the generally accepted notion that a human body or face can be beautiful and not simply a functionally arranged system of bones, flesh, skin, and various gelatinous substances that have nothing to do with the concept of beauty; and for this reason, although she was preoccupied more with herself than with anyone else, she made no attempt to look beautiful, and her purpose seemed to be to laugh at, to ridicule her own longing for beauty and perfection; with a slight exaggeration we might say she loved making a fool of herself; with her ugliness she annoyed, provoked, and challenged her surroundings, like a mischievous child calling attention to itself by being mean and difficult, though all it wants is to be petted and cuddled; Thea's hair stuck sloppily to her well-formed, almost perfectly round head; she herself cropped it very short, "so it shouldn't sweat under the wigs," she said, and without a single remark from me, she would plunge into endless monologues justifying her peculiar hairstyle: in her opinion there are two kinds of perspiration — plain physical sweating, of course, when the body for some reason can't adjust to the surrounding temperature because it is tired, worn-out, overfed, or run-down, and then the far more common, psychic perspiration, the sweating of the soul that occurs when we don't listen to what our body is telling us, when we pretend not to understand its language, when we lie and dissemble, when we are weak, clumsy, greedy, hesitant, and stupid, when, defying our body, we insist on doing something only because it's the proper thing to do — it's the clash of wills that produces the heat, and that's when we say we are soaked in sweat; as for her, if there was anything she wanted, it was to stay free, and therefore she wanted to know whether it was her soul that was sweating, she didn't want to blame it on wigs and heavy costumes, even if what she was secreting was the filth and grime of her soul; of course, all this didn't explain why she dyed her hair, now red, now black, using a do-it-yourself kit, and why at other times she neglected it completely, letting it grow and revealing that if she hadn't been touching it up it would be almost completely gray, but then again, what she had wasn't like real hair but instead a thin, frazzled fuzz with no body, probably no particular color to begin with, neither blond nor brown, a slight fluff on a fledgling's head; about the only thing that lent character to her face was her prominent cheekbones, otherwise her features were rather nondescript, her face was dulclass="underline" a not very high or broad forehead, a somewhat misshapen pug nose whose tip stuck up too much, staring into the world with two disproportionately fleshy nostrils; the lips were wide and sensuous, but they did not blend smoothly into her face and seemed almost as if lifted from another face and placed in hers by accident; oh, but the voice that issued from those lips, from behind the nicotine-stained teeth! a deep, raspy, fully resonant voice or, if she wished, soft and caressing, or hysterically, piercingly thin, as if its tenderness resided in its roughness, the possibility of a howl lurking in every whisper, while her real howls were full of hateful hisses and whispers, each sound implying its opposite, an impression that her face as a whole also gave: on the one hand, her plain features made her look like a worn-out, emotionally unfulfilled working woman whose many frustrations rendered her dreary and uninteresting, and in this respect it was not very different from the faces one saw during morning and evening rush hours on subways and commuter trains, faces sunk in the quiet stupor of fatigue and uselessness; on the other hand, her skin, with its naturally brown coloring, was like a false front, a mask, with a pair of huge, very warm, intelligent, and darkly glittering brown eyes accentuated by very thin lashes; one had the feeling that these eyes belonged not to this mask but to the real face under the mask, and they did glitter, this is no exaggeration; looking for an acceptable explanation, I thought that perhaps her eyeballs were much larger than one would expect in such a relatively small face, or that they were more rounded, more convex than the average eyeball, and that was quite probable, since one did not cease to be aware of their largeness even when she closed her eyes; smooth, heavy, arched lids slid over her eyes, and the mask, full of wrinkles, turned into a kind of antique map of a lively face growing old; on her forehead the furrows ran in dense horizontal lines, but if she suddenly raised her eyebrows, two vertical lines shot up, beginning at the inner tip of the brows, and cut across the horizontal ones, making it appear as though two diaphanous butterfly wings were fluttering on her forehead; only in the hollows of her temples and on her chin did the skin remain smooth, and even on her nose there was not so much a wrinkle as a soft-rimmed indentation that followed the line of her nasal bone; when she pursed her lips, these dips and grooves prefigured the old woman in her; when she laughed, crow's-feet radiated outward from the corners of her eyes; and if in her youth her skin had been overstretched by her protruding cheekbones, the virginal tightness now seemed to be taking revenge on cheeks that were a veritable parade ground of wrinkles, and to know these wrinkles required close and patient scrutiny, because this was not a confusion of lines but a profusion of details so rich it could not be absorbed with a single look.
"We'll wait for you to change, okay," I said quietly, "and then we can still talk about tonight, but hurry up."
She was still looking at me: the wrinkles of her smile, the furrows around her eyes, the closely meshed curved lines that seemed to relieve the darker, deeper grooves of bitterness and suffering around her mouth were still meant for me, but as she withdrew her arm from mine, slowly, making sure the transition was appropriately considerate, therefore beautiful, a flicker in her eyes already indicated that she wouldn't have time to reward my graciousness; as soon as she got what she wanted she no longer felt she needed to pay attention to it, she was already gone; and though she did want to hurry, it wasn't because I had asked her to, or because she had to change, but because there was something else she had to do.