My friend C has taken to teasing me with the idea that I look like Nick Nolte. Just hearing his name insinuates a black metallic fear in the bottom of my heart. We have similar facial structures, no cheekbones, pursed lips, brows prone to furrowing. I'd be okay with the analogy if Nick Nolte's index of attractiveness stopped in the late Seventies, maybe somewhere around The Deep. That's not the image of Nick Nolte that I have. That may have been who he once was, but it isn't who he's become. The Nick Nolte I know is the one that looks like a scarecrow and passes out on the floor in airports, clutching his folded glasses like some confused professor after a quart of hot toddies. It's a scary comparison because it reminds me that I have no idea who it is that I'll become as the years continue to deflower me.
Over the summer I started to look at people on the sidewalk, in coffee shops, sitting at bars and I would imagine how they would age. It might have been a delusional skill, but I began seeing eager young twenty-something's age into liver-spotted fifty and sixty year-olds. I started doing this with old people too. Grumpy old women and tired old men in outmoded shades of gray and brown easily morphed into their lithe younger selves, with tight skin and sparkling eyes.
There aren't many people whom I've gotten to see age over a long period of time. With my parents and myself the process has been so gradual that I've barely noticed any change at all. I find it hard to look in the mirror and see how I'm different from my teenage self. I know I am, but I don't know what it is that's different. I have the same experience when I'm with my parents. My sixty-three year-old father is indistinguishable from his thirty-five year-old self. It's jarring to go back and look at old photos and be reminded of just how much he has changed. I forget about the white hair, the new wrinkles, the loosening skin. It's so easy to look past all that in the course of the days and weeks that sneak up on us.
I'm bad at accepting compliments. It makes me uncomfortable, and I've learned to cover up that discomfort with an aloof disinterest. I have no idea how attractive I really am. I don't have any interest in the general criterion of what makes someone attractive or not. It's usually either symmetry or conformity. Clothes can make people more attractive with a subtle suggestion of someone else, emulating the style of some celebrity or some social group, you can subconsciously insinuate yourself into their circle. Or you can just celebrate the fact that your eyes are evenly spaced and your body is proportionate and let the ooh's and ahh's fall where they may.
When I'm on a date with someone I always wonder what they're thinking when they look at me. It's always surprising to see someone drawn to me, charmed by whatever energy or image I'm translating into in their minds. I know that I have a lot of attractive qualities and am comfortable with the idea of people being drawn to them. But it can also be disembodying to get complimented for something you have no control over, like symmetry. It's always nice to feel desirable, but when the root of that desirability is the result of some genetic gamble, the compliment stops to be about who you are. It's like when a stranger sees you from a far and mistakes you for an acquaintance and waves before realizing their mistake.
So when C tells me I look like Nick Nolte, even when she protests and insists that it's the young Nick Nolte that she means, I still panic. Nick Nolte is a paean to the transience of all the things we tend to value in our world. Looks, talent, success, a great mustache. Who would have thought that brawny man with the romantic squint and the wind-swept hair would one day turn into a prune-faced drunk lying on the floor in baggy pajamas? It's even more terrifying to imagine that he must surely feel the same on the inside now as he did when he was young and desirable. I can imagine Nick Nolte staring at himself in the mirror some mornings, just like I do, touching his face and finding it indistinguishable from the one he saw years earlier.
The Celebrity I Most Resemble: Nick Nolte.
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