Katie Catulle

I polish my face every morning. Sometimes I don’t even turn on the light in the bathroom, I don’t even draw the blinds. I can polish my face entirely in the dark now. I scrub, vigorously, starting at the top and circling right, down, and around, hands ticking around the face. Then I roll and buff, buff and roll in similar cycles. I repeat this three times; I can’t risk leaving even a blemish, even an imperceptible smudge. The end is my favorite: patting my face with a warm towel and misting with soft, delicate facial spray. Ocean breeze, I think.

As I’m ticking away at my face, circling and scrubbing and polishing, it’s almost as if I can feel time slipping between the slits of my fingers. I remind myself that I enjoy this. I enjoy tangibly touching time, almost. Someone—I can’t remember who—once mentioned the accumulation of time we spend on appearance, but that it’s fine, since we enjoy it. I was shocked. Wasn’t it enough that I made myself beautiful? I didn’t know we were supposed to enjoy it too!

I used to ask Pascal, every day, if I looked okay. He would always say I looked fine, pull four shots of espresso, and return to his prints. Sometimes I miss that ritual.

This morning, I draw the blinds and polish my face in the sunlight. I love to feel the natural light shine and reflect, love when the cold, pure, piercing rays reach my cold, pure, piercing face. This morning, I do miss our ritual, but probably only because I’m feeling a bit more reflective now.

I find my way out of my apartment: turn left from the door and walk twelve steps to the end of the hallway, turn right, walk twenty-two steps to the elevator, fumble to press the button, wait for the ding, ride the elevator down and walk through the lobby, wait for the swirling cold air to hit twice, enter the revolving door, and leave onto the auditory-intense street. This is either my favorite or least favorite part of my day.

Always, I’m hit with the endless horns hoping to announce their urgency over the hundreds of other urgent horns. Usually, I’m hit with incessant drilling, banging, sawing, for some perpetual renovation. That’s helpful, actually, so I’ll know to dodge the scaffolding. Sometimes, I’m hit with snippets of conversation spilling across the street.

Today, it sounds like someone is getting fired from a modeling shoot over the phone. I hear tears and pleas and she could have sworn that the time was an hour later, she was on her way now, please.

I would stay to listen, but it’s Thursday, and I’m already wearing my bright pink A-Line dress. I flutter between the contemporary art museum and random galleries and smaller exhibits, but on Thursday, I’m always at the city’s main art museum.

I’ve memorized the path to the Impressionist wing by now. When I used to give tours here, I would breeze through the other galleries to spend an hour doing close visual analysis of my favorite Monet paintings. Sometimes I wouldn’t even go to the other galleries; I would just head straight into the Impressionist wing. Which is actually challenging because you have to pass through so many other exhibits on the way, and everyone wanted to stop and go into each and every exhibit, and it was so exhausting to keep shepherding everyone along as they tried to root themselves in front of every inconsequential vase, dish, landscape.

But then I got to the 19th and Early 20th Century European Paintings and Sculptures section, and I could breathe. Rest. There, I was in complete control. Once, I spent forty-five minutes discussing 

 and that didn’t even include time for questions, which are consistently disappointing. There was—is— just so much to discuss: the pastel sky behind the deeper purple shadowed trees, the duality through the reflection, the history of Monet bribing the lumber merchant so he wouldn’t cut down the trees until Monet was satisfied with his painting, and yes, I did talk about the brush strokes. It 

 Monet. I mean, he is simply genius, the beauty he portrays from afar and the chaos up close.

At some point I may have received some mildly degrading form of a verbal warning, but it turns out Monet is quite popular, so when more and more patrons started requesting the “Monet Tour,” the museum finally just let me do my own thing. Which was fine. I had written my undergraduate thesis on three Monet paintings, and the museum had one of them, so I had a lot to say. I think they were really upset when I stopped showing up to work.

To be fair, I did keep showing up; it was just that no one recognized me. And I couldn’t exactly lead tours anymore. It’s a bit funny now, everyone’s different impressions. It induces some internal chuckles, now and then. Most think I am part of the museum, like some sort of interactive art piece. A few people think I am some sort of commentary on how art is a mirror held up to society. Or to themselves.

A lot of people simply come up close, so close they’re breathing on my face, and adjust their hair or lipstick, which I learn through comments made by other people, giggling and tittering that they didn't think that was “the point.”

And what is the point? Why do I keep coming back? It’s annoying to have to stand and listen to insipid commentary on the paintings I can no longer see. Sometimes I simply can’t stand listening to one more spoiled teenager or snotty sixty-something or even some polished twenty-four year old talk about the brush strokes and debate the time of day and discuss how Impressionism is really just Expressionism, except for, like, these flower paintings. I mean, I feel like my face might actually explode.

But the Impressionist wing is and always will be primarily a place of serenity. Of comfort. Before, I could just stand planted in front of those golden frames for hours, allowing my mind to empty except for the image before me. I plunged into the pastel scene of four trees bursting out of the water, submerged myself in Monet’s 

 and walked along his wavy, slightly blurry scene of the early light gently illuminating the muted trees.

Someone talked about the healing power of art and pretty things once, and how beautiful aesthetic experiences can produce happiness simply by looking. Maybe a part of me still wants to reflect that ideal.

Or perhaps the point of coming back here every Thursday is the weekly silly little hope that someone will remember me, will recognize me. That 

 recognize me. I dream that he’ll walk into the Impressionism wing one Thursday and remember the girl in the bright pink A-line dress who knew more about Monet than he did. But not more about painting. Never more about painting.

Time in the morning always falls forward like a shot of espresso, one minute browning in the cup, the next jarring your taste buds, your nervous system, and then, swish, it’s gone. By noon, some middle-aged man is giving a watered-down analysis of 

, barely brushing beyond the strokes. I mean, just admit that you haven’t had a critical thought since the turn of the century, please. I take that as my cue and float to the photography wing, the most transient collection, hoping to overhear something about any new pieces they’ve curated.

causes me to pause, to become still. Every word falling into my ears creates a flash, and my mind is left with the afterimage. I see pictures upon pictures, still images swirling in the insides of my eyelids from my favorite photographer: Pascal.

Then I open my eyes, and I’m walking around a gallery filled with images of myself. I see myself frozen dancing on the rooftop in the rain, where the sunlight caught in the falling water drop right before it fell on my face. I see a candid of myself hiding my nose and mouth in a flower—a lilac—at the botanical gardens, looking up through my eyelashes. That one’s posed, though I thought it wouldn’t be so obvious. I see my face fixed mid-laugh at a joke told off camera in front of the fading sunlight. I think I hated that picture once. I wander through these images and realize there is no one else in the gallery. I turn and turn, looking for a window, a door, but all I can find are more and more images of myself—toasting at the hotel in his hometown, posing with a paintbrush at the little studio we dabbled in, on the steps of the museum where I gave the Monet tours.

But he always did have such an unremarkable voice. It really could be anyone, I realize, and this pulls me out of the imagined gallery, as if my memory is a film strip being rolled back and my vision is pushed forward into the darkness, becoming still.

I turn to go, to return to the comfort of the Impressionist wing. I will complete the afternoon there. Though the afternoon always lingers more languidly, each moment sticking up close to the next. Afternoon time is trying to squeeze crystalized honey out of the bottle, is the gelled sweetener resisting. But I will return, oscillating between hope for new, insightful commentary and annoyance at the derivative dialogue, an unchanging pendulum of anticipation and stoicism.


“Photographs are simply a desire to suspend time.”

The voice, Pascal’s voice, says, and images swirl from the first moment I knew he loved me, when he captured the most beautiful image of me and I knew he truly saw me, perhaps saw me even more clearly than I saw myself, and I said the same words that that voice says now because that’s what I wanted to do—I wanted to suspend myself in that beautiful, perfect moment in time. And in one beautiful, perfect moment, I believed someone understood.

He taps me on the shoulder. He says I seem familiar, he thinks he’s seen that dress before, once, from a girl who almost knew more about Monet than he did. He mutters that it’s probably a pretty standard dress. It isn’t. My friend got it for me at Paris Fashion Week.

He asks me about my face, and I shrug, and he takes my hand and leads me around the familiar museum. I’ve heard it all before from countless professors, patrons, dates, peers, children, grandparents. I’ve heard it all before from him.

I’m attentive, I’m reflective. On the borrowed Fabergé egg on display, the pearlescent pink enamel adorned in gold panels. On the pursuit of beauty: the perfect eye shadow palette, perfect shade of nail polish, perfect diet pill, perfect angle for the camera. On the costume gallery, the waves and ripples of fashion and beauty. On wanting to reflect the images in the magazines, on social media.

On Frederick William MacMonnies’ “Self-portrait,”: how he included a copy of another painting in the background, in reverse because he was copying it from the image in the mirror. On portraiture: how Pascal, convinced he was an artist, asked if he could paint me. He wanted to suspend time with a brush instead of a lens, and he said because I have such a deep appreciation for beauty and such a developed understanding of art, I would be perfect. So I agreed. I trusted him. I believed in his artistic eye, especially after he captured my silhouette so beautifully through his camera lens.

He posed me in such unpleasant stances: crouched down to pick a flower, or arms outstretched and on my tiptoes as if mid twirl, or suspended on a beam continually falling. Inevitably, the paintings looked horrible. I shouted, dropped tears, I couldn’t believe he had made me look so unattractive, was this how he really saw me, I thought he loved me.

“You just don’t understand my artistic lens. I have a vision. I’m trying to capture time,” he had said.

 don’t understand artistic vision. Art is supposed to reflect beauty, not distort it.”

“If you’re such a genius, maybe you should try. Do your own portrait,”

“Maybe I will,” and I returned the next day with a freshly purchased designer ensemble beneath a fraying artist smock, my most precise makeup and curled hair, and lugged a big, beautiful golden mirror into his studio.

And now we’ve finished the tour and I must return to attention so Pascal can lead me out of the building. He asks if I want to see his studio. He tells me he’s an artist, which I know. An artist and an appreciator, a creator and a connoisseur. I nod.

We enter his studio, and I imagine it looks exactly the same—tall, white walls (no windows, it’s underground, or in the middle of the building, I can’t remember which), once almost blindingly white, abrasive, but covered with unfinished canvas and paint splotches. The walls were arranged by color scheme—the north wall his black and white scales, west wall variations of reds and sometimes pinks, south wall always greens with occasional yellows, the east wall a conglomeration of uncommissioned and unfinished works.

He tells me to watch my step, so I imagine the floor is the same—countless pads with color swatches, blending and mixing to obtain the perfect shade, opened tubes of paint strewn around, bundles of paint brushes in every size, in every level of disarray scattered by each wall.

I want to tell him that I don’t even know. I don’t even remember at what point it happened. It was probably gradual. I mean I would have noticed. I’m quite observant, especially about, well, my own face. Anyway, one morning I looked in the brightly lit mirror, perfecting my face, and my nose had been completely rubbed off! Just like that! I was more careful for a few weeks, patting and polishing more like caresses, less like scrubs. But I found a blemish near my mouth, and I simply had to scrub at it, and as I dabbed at my mouth, it rubbed into the shiny surface too. The eyes went next, both of them blending, becoming reflective. And now all I’m left with is hair falling behind a circular golden frame reflecting the world around me.

It was an adjustment, to be sure. Especially when I lost my nose. I actually wore a Band-Aid over it, like I had gotten it done. Not that I ever would have. Everyone knew my nose was my favorite feature. Losing my mouth was pretty tragic too, but I made do. I never talked much before, beyond the Monet tours, having a silvery voice that seemed to get lost in crowds, even the silent ones. And then I lost my eyes and I became a walking reflection, and no one could recognize me anyway, and so I stopped caring.

Life was a little more fun for a while. A whole day I think. Sure, I ran around, bumping into everything, but the anonymity, the utter detachment from my appearance, was incredible. Everything was clear.

But no one could recognize me. No one even seemed to notice I was gone. And so I stopped answering phone calls, texts, stopped paying for a phone plan all together actually. I simply disappeared.

But I can’t tell him that. I shrug. I suppose it could happen to any of us if we aren’t careful.

We walked toward the east wall, and he stopped. “This is one of my favorites. Do you want to know the story behind this piece?”

“Once I knew a beautiful woman, and we fell in love, and she disappeared.” 

You loved someone else? Loved someone beautiful?

 But before she disappeared, she had started painting a self-portrait. 

 She would stand in front of the mirror for hours, begging her appearance not to change until she was finished, until she was satisfied.

 Okay, that is absolutely false. I wouldn’t talk to my appearance. And besides, how could I possibly be satisfied? I wasn’t an artist. You are the one who—

 She was obsessed, dancing against time, wanting to perfectly reflect her image. And then one day she just never came back. 

“And because I had taken so many pictures of her, after she disappeared, I decided to finish her self-portrait, from photos, from memory, blending her original vision with my artistic lens. Look, here it is.”

He holds up a piece of artwork to my face, the shadow reflecting an image once mine, now flipped and mirrored, distorted through different perception, through memory. Am I supposed to smile, widen my eyes in excitement and surprise, exclaim that it’s perfect, complete, that I’m finally satisfied?

I sign thank you, it’s beautiful. I must imagine it is, because I was.


I’m back in my apartment now, standing in the bathroom, about to polish my face and go to sleep.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll take the transit somewhere new, somewhere entirely random, and I won’t even worry about getting lost or constantly bumping into things and looking silly, and maybe I’ll find my way to the ocean, and I’ll feel the shining, shimmering rays glint and glimmer as they ricochet from my face, and I’ll feel the sea mist brush around me, and I’ll walk to the edge of the sand and let the waves meet my toes and leave, tickle the edges of my body and retreat.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll stand somewhere and reflect, so everyone can see themselves shining back at them, and make it clear that that 

 “the point” because it’s whatever I decide the point is, and maybe tomorrow that’s what I’ll want it to be.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll stand in the bathroom at the end of the day, raise something sharp and hard, like a makeup brush or something, and crack the shiny reflective surface, just to see what would happen. I probably won’t bleed, probably won’t even feel a thing.

Tonight, I fall into bed and pull the silk sheets all the way up, up as far as they will go.


Summer 2023

Fiction

Reflections

Serena Jampel

Lily King is an award winning American novelist. Members of the Fiction Board Katie Catulle and Serena Jampel interviewed her over Zoom on February 26th, 2024 to talk about writing: membranes, rules, and how badly we want it to be fun. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 and loved it. You write so evocatively about the writing process. Was that inspired by your own writing practices?

Lily King: Yeah, I mean, I had to write about my own process in a lot of ways. I couldn’t have made up a completely different writing process. Although, you know, maybe I could have, because I could have just copied any of the hundreds of writers. But no, it was definitely from a lot of my own experiences of how to think about writing a novel. The way scenes kind of come to me in layers. I definitely wanted to capture all of that. There's that moment where [Casey] has to leave writing, how hard it is passing through that membrane. I was really glad to have a place to write about that, because I could never really write an essay about that. That wouldn’t make any sense. But I felt like it could make sense in fiction. Although, when I was writing it, I thought that nobody was going to understand what the hell I was talking about. So you know, it was a relief to kind of talk to other writers after I wrote that and have them be like, “Oh my God, so much of that was how it felt for me.” That really surprised me because it feels so personal.

SJ: Following up on that: do you think there is a universal experience of writing?

LK: No, no, I mean, sometimes you don't really want to write, but you have to get it out. It's an experience for artists across the world that you can't really find expression for. There's something kind of amorphous and very, very powerful. You have to get it out or you're just not gonna feel good. It’s funny, like a number of writers will say “writing saved my life.” But I've met other writers who were just like, “I just like to write,” you know? So I think everybody has different processes, but I do think people need it in different ways and come to it for different reasons. I can't help thinking there's this sort of churning inside of everybody, but I could be wrong about that.

Katie Catulle: That makes a lot of sense. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about how inspiration comes to you and how that kind of personal process works?

LK: You never know where ideas are going to come from. Certain mental states make it easier to get ideas, definitely. For some reason, I get ideas in the shower, and I get ideas while driving. It's almost like when you're not focusing. Like, I cannot sit down and say, “okay, I need some ideas” and just start writing them down. It just does not happen. I would just freeze. They come a lot during activities where your brain has kind of gone into a different place, a little bit of a daydream place. But you're not thinking oh, I'm in my daydream, the place I'm gonna get some ideas from now, you know? It's very unconscious. I also get ideas while reading, and they're so not related to what I'm reading. But there's some feeling. They don't happen when I'm reading a bad book or a book that I'm not responding to. It has to be just a certain heightened state that I get into when I read something that is really, to me, just kind of working on all levels. And then somehow, something triggers something and I'm turning to the back of the book and I'm writing all these ideas for the novel I'm working on or a story idea or something that I’d like to work on years from now. You just never know. Those are, kind of, ways in which inspiration seems to strike.

, and I had handed it in to my editor and my agent. I think maybe I had even sold it by then. It was in many drafts. And I was meeting a friend for lunch. I was late and I was taking this exit off the highway, and I just saw the ending of that book. I didn't even know I needed an ending, because I thought I already had the ending. But I saw it all. And I had to get out a notebook and steer off the exit and just write it down. I wrote it that night. And that was such a relief, but I would never have gotten that if I hadn't been doing that thing.

, and I was interested in how you kind of started from this place of nonfiction inspired by Margaret Mead, and then decided to write a fictional book with amended characters and peoples inspired by real indigenous populations. I was wondering about how that transfer happened for you and where that line was.

LK: I really had a slow process. I kind of had to go say that I would tell it in this Margaret Mead character's voice and I thought that it would be her story. And I couldn't do it. It just didn't work. I only wrote maybe three chapters or something before I realized I had to do something else. I just couldn't access her and I think it had something to do with her being such a famous figure, a well known figure, a person that many people in the country had met, especially back in 2010 or whatever when I was writing that book. I don't know. I felt really trapped by fact, and I had to give myself permission to write my own story. Take, you know, I had these three people and I had this moment that I was trying to get to through the whole novel. I was just trying to get to that, to that part where they have that breakthrough. And that was from real life, but I had to make up so much to get there. I had to get Bankson's voice. That was the thing that saved me.

At first I tried telling it from all of their different voices. When I'm stuck, I write a character's autobiography on a different file. And I just start with each main character from the beginning of their life to the moment where we see them in the book. And that's very helpful for me to kind of start to understand a character that's confusing to me. So I had done that for all three of them. And I was trying to kind of weave in their voices. But Bankson's was just so much stronger. And I really identify with him personally. For some reason I just really felt for him. I read his biography of Gregory Bateson and I was just so enamored with him, I think because the biographer was so enamored with him. He just really captivated me and I was just lucky to feel like I could find a voice through which I could tell the story. And people have gotten mad at me. You know, here and there. Because I did play with major facts. And I didn't give my Margaret Mead character the life and the power that Margaret Mead ended up having. But that's not the way my story unfolded. I just had to stay true to that.

SJ: Well, you saying that actually brings up an interesting question for me. What do you think the fiction writer owes to historical controversy or, in terms of anthropology becoming an increasingly contested field or contested practice? What do you see as the role of the novelist in addressing that controversial or potentially damaging content?

LK: Yeah, it's a really, really good question. I mean, I was gonna say I probably wouldn't have written that had it been 2020 or something. I was already pretty uncomfortable with it as it was. I just don't know if you can kind of make a set of rules for these things. Some people can write with so much heart. Some people can write with a lot of cruelty. And I think when you make rules about what people can write about, you can't write without it just feeling like those rules. They don't allow for the possibility of real human exploration by generating heart and feeling and understanding.

And I mean, I think the question of that intersection of fact and fiction is always problematic. You know, it just always is, in one way or another, and I think it's the writer’s job to really examine what they're doing, why they're doing it, and what kind of harm it could cause. So  I’d really like to hear what you're thinking about those things.

SJ: Yeah, thank you so much. It's super hard. I'm not sure how I would answer it differently than you just did. Other than that, it's about speaking to some truth. In whatever medium you have to use.

KC: Yeah, I think that captures it perfectly.

SJ: You mentioned that perhaps writing isn't fun for you. Could you say more to that?

LK: I want to have fun so badly. Like that's my question when I interview other writers now, I’m like “Do you have fun?” Usually they look at me like I'm absolutely crazy. Every now and then there's a writer who had fun. Like Ann Patchett in her last novel, 

she had fun, apparently. With a novel that I've just finished a draft of, I feel like I had fun for the first 70 pages, and then I really stopped having fun.

KC: At what point did that shift for you?

LK: Well, it's a combination. I mean, I'd like to say it's because it took this big leap and it ended up like kind of in a hospital deathbed scene, which was a bummer. And that made me sad, but it kind of was before. I have yet another love triangle. And so one of the characters of the love triangle leaves town. The whole thing just falls flat, you know, like you can't get rid of one of the points on the triangle. So that's my problem with that book right now. You can just see it was so fun. There's so much tension, and then nothing.

KC: I had a question about the love triangle in 

, actually. When I was reading it, I thought the book was kind of questioning normative conceptions of sexuality and monogamy. I was wondering how you saw the description as a love triangle, like is that how you would describe it, or would you challenge that term at all?

LK: Yeah, that's interesting. Really, technically, it's not a love triangle just because there was Helen, who was offstage but very, very much a part of Nell Stone's romantic inclinations or love. Her feelings of love and desire. I feel like in that book, I really was, at first anyway, following their lead. I mean, these real life characters, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, I wished I could have done so much more with them and had more years with them to explore what they were interested in. They had such strong notions of this idea, of constructs from your environment of what is male, what is female, who's attracted to whom. All that kind of stuff. And both of them in real life, you know, very much explored sexually. And then, Fen was so rigid, conservative and not open to any of that. And you can see that in his whole personality in so many different ways. I mean, honestly I'm always surprised after I write something and then it gets defined back at me. And both these last two novels got this defined as kind of love triangles, and it's really not the way I was thinking about it. But I understand that things need to be simplified. But I do feel like it was more complicated than a triangle for sure.

SJ: So we always finish our interviews with a bunch of rapid fire questions.

LK: Great. When I interview people I also do rapid fire questions. I might steal some of yours.

KC: Who is the first person who reads your work?

LK: Actually today, my friend Caitlin's manuscript because my writers’ group meeting tonight is discussing it.

SJ: If you could interview anyone dead or alive, who would it be?

KC: What was the last movie you saw in theaters?

SJ: Do you have a go-to snack while you're writing?

LK: Apples or bananas with peanut butter.

KC: And then maybe this will be our last one. What's something you've always been bad at no matter how hard you try?

LK: Playing an F chord on my guitar. I mean, you've got to play F if you want to play the guitar and I just can't do it without it being like blah, you know.

Katie Catulle

Katie Catulle

Fiction

Summer 2023

Reflections

Spring 2024

Interview with Lily King