Dan Lawrence

The Secret Room
(an Obituary)

1979 – Mary Hamilton was the most beautiful woman in the world. The proof was everywhere: in the headlines (Most Beautiful Woman Mounts Tallest Building); the movies (her close-up as Helen of Troy nearly won an Oscar, until it was revealed that her single line of dialogue had been dubbed); endorsements (Hamilton’s Emollient: When Silky Is Not Soft Enough); society (where her appearance at parties commanded fees in the six figures). Wherever she went, she was mobbed by paparazzi. Famous painters begged her to sit for them. Novelist vied to affix her beauty to the page in the guise of thinly veiled, often inert characters. Powerful men behaved recklessly for the opportunity to see her, and anyone who did see her marveled at how woefully short the various depictions of her fell.  

Mary assumed the same was true of mirrors. Every time she looked in one, she expected to be bowled over. Though she never admitted it to anyone, she invariably was not. She was fully prepared to agree that her nose was delicate and exquisitely formed; that her eyes – which despite being green and almond-shaped were often compared to moons – were captivating; that her mouth, neither thin nor full, expressed every emotion without effort or constraint and never disfigured with tension. She could sense her microscopic pores faultlessly breathing and cleansing her smooth, pliant, oil-less skin. And her hair, which she liked to wear loose and full and draped around her neck like a scarf, truly was the colored of spun gold. Yet reflected back at her, the whole never quite seemed to coalesce into anything more than a collection of incomparable parts. This may have been the key to her beauty, since beauty, to be complete, must lack vanity, which is why a wildflower is so much more beautiful than a work of art.  

Though Mary hated to be likened to either, as she so often was, she was herself a great lover of beauty. She surrounded herself with beautiful artwork, music, pets, houses, gardens. She sought out the most beautiful and pleasing companions as others sought her. She was humbled by the beauty of nature. Since she was universally acclaimed to be the most beautiful woman in the world, it pained her not to be able to see herself as others saw her. Her only hope came from her observation that although her features in the mirror always looked more or less the same, their overall effect was always somewhat different. Perhaps someday she would surprise a mirror into revealing herself as others saw her. In the meantime she was, like many beautiful people, obsessed with mirrors.  

In fact her villa on the Amalfi Coast, given to her by an early admirer, contained a secret room. The ceiling, floor and all four walls were mirrors. Even the door, which shut seamlessly, was a mirror. After bathing and combing out her hair, she would lie for hours naked on the sheet of glass suspended in the middle of the room by transparent cables, waiting to see how beautiful she was. For years, the irony of being unable to do so made her smile the wry, though never bitter, smile that had changed the course of so many lives and perhaps even of world events, if the claims of a certain prime minister are to be believed.  

One night in her late-20s, though, while lying alone on her glass bed, she suddenly and without warning felt an angry, choking bile rise in her throat that, had she not swallowed it down, might have disfigured her expression. She realized with a start that she felt cheated. It didn’t matter that she had pretty much everything a person could possibly want: fame, money, a full and interesting life, friends, and, yes, even a steadfast and forgiving lover. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that she was on the downward slope of her youthful prime; unless she saw herself soon as others did, she never would. Whatever the reason, after that night, advancing slowly in receding waves like the tide, came the society doctors, the addictions, the contemptible scenes, the alienations of affection. 

Her inability to see herself became an angry self-loathing, which, as it grew, engendered contempt for others. Her friends’ self-deceptions, always affectionately obvious to Mary, began to seem detestable to her, and she began to view them as hypocrites. At first she avoid their parties, but as her anger simmered and her inhibitions crumbled, she began to seek them out and take advantage of every opportunity to, as she saw it, prod them out of their complacency. They began to avoid her and, when they could not, treated her with a condescending detachment that made her even more angry. A few stalwarts stuck by her, including her faithful lover, who hoped that his love could help tide her over this rough spot. It didn’t help that, for fear of seeming shallow, Mary gave them no insight into the possible cause of the change that had come over her. She lashed out when they got too close, and after the drunken, public scene, reported in all the tabloids, in which she impugned his manhood, the great love of her life finally turned his back on her, too. Given fewer opportunities for disrupting the lives of those who cared about her, she turned with a vengeance to wrecking her own.  

The outward dissipation was painful in its utter predictability. At first she remained beautiful, desirable, and in demand; the public loves the spectacle of a star going down in flames. What for anyone else would be a humiliating debacle can, for a valuable commodity, become a public relations coup – but only so long they remain valuable. As her looks and behavior became increasing less marketable, she was taken up and then dropped by a series of progressively lesser agents and publicists until she was represented only by those for whom no recognizable name could be an embarrassment. She spent her last years largely in seclusion, propped up in her erratic public appearances by a shifting cast of libertines, parasites, and sycophants. During that time, she repeatedly sealed, and then unsealed, the secret room.  

As everyone with a passing familiarity with popular culture knows, Mary Hamilton died alone in the fire that destroyed her Amalfi Coast home just days before her 35th birthday. The young Italian firefighter photographed recovering her body from the flaming ruins enjoyed a small fame of his own, including a spread in Playgirl, after the photo appeared on the cover of People magazine, but Mary was already dead from smoke inhalation by the time he got to her. The autopsy revealed a cornucopia of drugs in her bloodstream, cocaine and heroin most prominent among them. Her erstwhile friends publically shook their heads and regretted that they had been unable to do more for her, and most of them were genuinely puzzled and distressed by her precipitous decline and shocked by her death. Safely dead, though, it became easier to admire and honor her beauty anew. In fact many who knew her came to believe that even in the depths of her self-loathing, she never entirely lost that exquisite pairing of modesty and radiance, of élan and reserve that prompted Sir Cyril Meadmore, on hearing of her tragic death, to comment: “Even when Mary was ugly, she was beautiful.”  

Dan Lawrence received his MFA from Columbia University, where he was a Graduate Fellow and Fiction Editor of Columbia Journal. After a career as a magazine editor with Time Inc. and Reed Elsevier, he recently returned to writing fiction. In the past 18 months, nine of his stories have been published in literary magazines and anthologies. He was a finalist for the 2022 Tennessee Williams Fiction Prize, the 2022 Watertower Press Novel Writing Contest, the Summer 2021 Novel Slices Contest, and the 2020 James River Writers Best Unpublished Novel Contest. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife and three sons.