Look at me: by Jennifer Egan

in the fashion world, where beauty, the best disguise of all, was so commonplace.
    “Well well well,” Oscar said, glancing at me. “Well well.”
    “Well?”
    “Better than I expected.”
    “Thanks,” I said dryly. “Different, though.”
    “Oh, yes.”
    “Did you recognize me?”
    Oscar snorted. His business, after all, was the business of sight, of recognizing what he’d never seen before. “Through the window,” he said haughtily.
    At this news, I relaxed. “Different how?”
    His eyes moved over me in the appraising survey peculiar to my line of work, when someone takes in your face, your bones, your eyes, and calculates their worth. You hold very still for that look. “Uneven,” he said, “for one thing.”
    “Oscar, you have to tell me. I need to know.”
    “Oh, Oscar will, darling,” he said. “Just give him time.”
    Oscar had been my booker since I first came to New York at twenty-one, claiming to be nineteen, with a few Marshall Field’s ads in my book. He’d masterminded my rise to almost-almost-stardom, then partnered me through my slow minuet down a gauntlet of catalogue jobs whose end, mercifully, I still had not reached. I’d known him fourteen years in all, during which I’d allowed myself to age at approximately two-year intervals, so that now, at thirty-five, I was allegedly twenty-eight. And as my career trajectory had flattened and begun to sink, Oscar’s had risen steadily, and I’d followed him from agency to agency until now, at Femme, he booked mostly stars. But he’d never been a shit to me. We’d known each other too long.
    I ordered escargot, and Oscar filled me in on rumors of drug addiction, plastic surgery and egregious behavior among “huge girls,” as top models are admiringly known by their colleagues. Girl-girl affairs were the new fad, he told me; models shacking up together over the violent objections of their rich, powerful and occasionally gun-toting boyfriends.
    “Have you ever done that?” Oscar asked. “Been with a girl?”
    “Never,” I said.
    “Nor I,” he said, and laughed.
    My escargot arrived, and I let one slide down my throat, luxuriating in the taste of garlic. After the accident, my sense of taste had been dulled; then, in the past few weeks, flavors had begun rocketing across my palette.
    “Business is good?” I asked.
    “Strange,” he said. “This mania for real people is becoming a full-fledged pain in the ass.”
    “You mean powerful women in pantyhose, that kind of thing?”
    “That was unpleasant enough,” Oscar said. “Now it’s people in the news. You haven’t heard?”
    “Oscar,” I said. “I’ve been in the Midwest.”
    A few months ago, he told me, a booker at Elite had spotted a beautiful, starving Hutu refugee in Time. Somehow, through Doctors Without Borders, this booker managed to track the refugee down and fly her and her eight children to New York, where “Hutu,” as she was known (her name having been deemed unpronounceable) promptly shot covers for Marie Claire and Italian Vogue and garnered an avalanche of publicity for Elite. Not to be outdone, Laura, the CEO of Femme , noticed a beautiful North Korean girl in a story about famine.
    “She says to me, ‘Oscar, get me that girl,’” Oscar said, in a perfect imitation of Laura’s heavy Czech accent. “So I embark on this mad goose chase, coming home from work and ordering dinner for my Korean translator, Victor, so the two of us can start calling North Korea, where it’s already the next day, looking for the girl in the picture. After a week of this we track down her father, and Victor tries to explain that we want to fly the girl in the New York Times picture to New York, her father thinks we’re threatening to kidnap her, he’s begging us, No, please, I have no money … Lord give me strength to go on! Anyhow, she’s living in my guest room as we speak. Five-foot-one.”
    “How weird,” I said.
    “Oscar is in complete accord.”
    “Is she