Chapter 69

No, it was not that easy.

"Jeff, we need to talk."

He started to laugh and continued for some time.

"I'm gratified you seem to be over the fear those words strike in most men's hearts."

"It was a reaction to the fear they strike in most men's hearts. When you say them it's usually a way to make us better. It's usually something I could have thought about but didn't."

"Jeff, I think I'm too beautiful."

He started to laugh again.

"I didn't see that coming. I'm not sure it's possible to be too beautiful. But assuming it is, what problems does being too beautiful cause? What are the consequences when you step over the line from being breathtakingly beautiful to destructively beautiful?"

"Mock me if you will. Let me give you just the short list because there are so many ways extreme beauty can be insidious.

"It made me complacent. Raw beauty allowed me to achieve so much I began to feel I didn't need anything else. I didn't need to develop any skills or talent to get what I want.

"It made me contemptuous. Of what value were the talents of people around me when I could get just as much or more without those talents? And since nobody else seemed to be able to achieve my level of beauty it gave me too high an opinion of myself and too low an opinion of everybody else.

"It blocked my development of empathy. I couldn't understand others' feelings or pain because I had never been in their situations. I was never rejected. I didn't suffer from underperforming. Allowances were always made for me because I was so beautiful.

"It prevented me from learning to develop relationships with other people. I could make connections with people, but they were always based on my superiority in the connections. People connected with me for what it gave them and I connected for what it gave me. I had control. I had dominance. They had status by virtue of the connection.

"It made me pathologically selfish. I saw everything and everyone in terms of what was in it for me. I barely recognized there was another side to the equation. And, to take a page from your ubiquitous math analogies, the equation was always an inequality - Ashley is greater than whomever.

"It denied me the ability to appreciate almost everything. I had almost everything I wanted. I could do whatever I wanted. I could get almost anything I wanted and I never had to make much of an effort for any of it. How could I value anything when it came so effortlessly?

"Look at all the work you did for me in high school and it cost me nothing. My grades cost me little effort. And all the help I got from others toward grades or whatever else I rarely even had to ask for. It was offered up on the altar of my beauty.

"It prevented me from gaining any understanding of responsibility. If I didn't do something, if I omitted something, if I didn't properly appreciate the things being done for me or given me, well, you know Ashley is so beautiful you really can't expect, fill in the blank.

"And could I ever ease up on the beauty? What could I do, put on less makeup?"

"You don't wear makeup."

"Exactly! What a useless, pathetic parasite I would have turned out to be if you hadn't slapped me in the face repeatedly to bring me out of my trance?"

Jeff wasn't laughing anymore.

"And look at how it made me treat people. I -"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa up there. You didn't do anything to get that beauty. It was given to you randomly. And I will concede you've made a compelling case that it put a enough impediments in your way to make you likely to turn into a wasted, useless husk of a human being."

"Thank you," I said.

"You know what I mean. And all those impediments you listed and all the others I'm sure you were going to elaborate have made your achievements in overcoming them all the more remarkable. They have made you not a wasted, useless husk, but a truly remarkable human being."

"Thank you." This time I said it sincerely. "You're not just saying that because I put out for you, are you?"

"Have I mentioned that amazing sense of humor?"

"So, if I understand you correctly, even though I did nothing to become this breathtakingly beautiful, even though I did nothing to deserve it, I've been served well in learning to overcome it. And there is much more to me than my beauty. And, given that I well know how to use it, I'm developing the capacity to use it for good, not merely for my benefit?"