One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, "I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you are more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.
from The Lover by Marguerite Duras

Makeup

Applying makeup at sixty can be a transforming experience or, to be more exact, translucent. Not the translucent we associate with the white light of truth or the prism held high in the morning at the kitchen window, a light reflected as pure bands of color, angled and yet hopelessly distorted, but rather translucence as in flawless skin.

When applying makeup at sixty, you use more of everything. It's grounded in our womanly anticipation of something potentially transformative, a mysterious process meant to illuminate even if it's just the face. A jar of the promise-filled and creamy Buff is suddenly half finished. We glow, despite the puffy eyes. And the eyes, well, the eyes at sixty have grown cloudy and are slow to focus. They seem not to notice those rugged red lines on the nose, the skin cracked and creased along the cheekbones; or even the deeply rutted outline around the lips. Every morning I finish the ritual, repetitive, tedious, but on the surface, successful. I leave satisfied, fully convinced that all wrinkles are erased, all pores topped off, and all age spots neutralized, the landscape of a face more like a ski slope, smooth and pearly, a face ready for the world, a face unafraid of the10x mirror.

And so at sixty, the eyes might be cloudy but not what's behind them, those other little eyes, that other little voice, growing clearer and louder as we grow older, a voice that whispers that what's truly translucent here is that translucent makeup doesn't work. It covers nothing. We only think it covers. The way we might think ourselves through, say, 30 years of a bad marriage, misery lurking just beneath the thin varnish of respectability, 30 years of gliding on the surface of life like a veritable CoverGirl. It's been a secret, even to my mind, that indeed my eyes have always seen straight through those filmy and invisible topcoats, eyes that in defying the weathered complexion and scars have instead chosen to pan quickly across the face with glances that turn upwards and out, pushing beyond the mirror, glances that forget to tell the brain about the pocked skin and yellowed blotches, the furrows that cut deep across the forehead, the collapsed jowls. Instead, lies are rushed to the brain, reaffirming once again that skin can, in fact, be flawless and translucent with the just the right type of cream. A lie we come to understand when applying makeup at sixty.

And if we can think ourselves into perfect skin, then surely we can think ourselves into any delusion.