Elle's glamor derived, first, from her complete, almost pathological, self-possession. Although we were young enough then, still in college, that any act of self-invention could have been framed instead as self-discovery, she never presented her life as anything other than a canvas and herself as anyone other than its painter. This was a distinctly unromantic notion, that there was no authentic self to excavate, but she never apologized for it.
You could refer to Gatsby for the details: mid-west to northeast; winter camping to camp cinema; staid plaits to streaked bob; a bridge of freckles to an inky trail of stars injected into the skin covering her collarbone, right up to the hairline. Of course her appearance was only the most obvious site of change, and in some ways nothing more than a distraction. She threw it up like a screen and went to work in its shadow.
Elle's glamor derived, as well, from the distance she maintained between herself and her image. She was never quite where you expected her to be, but always just off to the side. She never liked the part of the movie or the afternoon that you found most persuasive, or she did but for a different reason entirely. It could throw a person, this relentless hide and seek. Last week you connected at Stella's, drinking espresso with a twist of lemon, but this week it's all about Gimme and next week coffee will be out entirely, only martinis and only before noon. You're still hung up on the lemon, though, wondering at its curve. How do they unspool such long, delicate threads from such a tough, waxy skin?
The lemon was never the point.
Elle didn't change once or even several times in discrete steps from hippie to punk to hipster. She filled up with change, gradually, like a note swelling with breath, or a word, meaning. She was pulled into change like light into a pupil.
I generally find it becomes more rewarding to talk to someone the longer you have known them and the more often you see them, because you are forced to say the same things over and over again in the course of getting to know someone or catching up with them. "What did you study?" "How have you been?" "Don't you miss the seasons, living in San Francisco?" "The hills really are a killer." "New York is so busy, so loud. I just couldn't bear it anymore." "Can you believe how expensive things have gotten?" "And the internet, knowledge at the push of a button, constant communication, imagine when people wrote honest-to-god pen-and-ink letters!" These lines must be exchanged, like a secret code, to establish trust. Only then can you risk saying something new, something neither one of you has heard before.
But Elle didn't need trust and she had her own code, so she always spent the most time with the person in the room she knew the least. She might suggest that we throw a party in the house we all shared, help plan it, agree on a guest list from our pool of friends, help clear out the living room and haul booze back in the trunk of her Hyundai, and then the day of the party disappear for hours, showing up at midnight with a scraggly couple who she met at a bar downtown and leaving with them not long after for some underspecified destination where everyone would at least be comfortably unfamiliar.
The longer I knew her, the less I interested her until all we shared were late-night drives through the hills around Ithaca, up and down backroads lit only by the intermittent glare of her hazards, smoke drifting out of the front windows like curls of lemon peel.
Glamor is sometimes confused or associated with romance because of their common truck with beauty but in fact they are unrelated, structurally. Romantic actions are linked in an unbroken chain of cause and effect: she smiled and so he called; he brought flowers and so she granted him a kiss. Romance occurs between specific particpants: secret admirers may be anonymous but they are still singular.
Glamor is an open letter and its only logic is proximity. Who bought you that last shot of bourbon? Who caught the smile you tossed out of your purse? Who sits next to you in Introduction to Literary Theory, close enough to feel you lift your pen or roll your neck? Any of their charm or grace may be transferred to you, or vice versa, like glitter passed from someone's eyelashes to someone else's cheek as they brush by in a crowded bar.
Joan Didion, who I have been quoting almost obsessively these days, understands romance and understands glamor, disdaining the former while exuding the latter.
Romance requires a happy ending or at least an ending, a final event that brings a series of previous events into a traceable line. In The White Album, Didion writes: "...I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative's intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical." Didion is an inherently unromantic or a-romantic writer because she offers us no healing, no union, no coming together of event and meaning. Her resistance reveals that romance does not require love so much as resolution.
But for Didion, as for Elle, there is only impression, figures caught in the burst of a flashbulb, light reflecting off the bent elbow of someone turning away. And so a few pages later Didion presents this scene: "It was six, seven o'clock of an early spring evening in 1968 and I was sitting on the cold vinyl floor of a sound studio on Sunset Boulevard, watching a band called The Doors record a rhythm track...On this evening in 1968 they were gathered together in uneasy symbiosis to make their third album, and the studio was too cold and the lights were too bright and there were masses of wires and banks of the ominous blinking electronic circuitry with which musicians live so easily."
That is the glare of pure glamor, radiating indefinitely, undirected, for no reason and to no end, all night long, hazards blinking on a lonely road.
