Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  “Whatever, Vanessa.” He sighed. “It’s not just my mom. What if I decide to go into politics, too? It’s been bothering me for a while. Your work, your life, it just feels…shallow. Empty.”

  “I’ve built a community,” I said hotly. “Community is a vital part of the human experience.”

  “So is reality, Vanessa. You don’t actually know any of those people. All they do is tell you how great you are. There’s nothing authentic about any of it, it’s just the same predictable posturing day in and day out—parties and outfits and oooh doesn’t she look cute sitting on the steps of that four-star hotel. Rinse, repeat.”

  This cut uncomfortably close to the bone. “So, what now?” I snapped. “You work in finance, Victor. Don’t tell me about shallow. So somehow when I’m out of the picture you’re going to become an enlightened human being? You’re going to quit your job and start building latrines in Mozambique?”

  “Actually.” He cleared his throat. “I did just sign up for a meditation course.”

  “Oh fuck you!” I screamed, and threw the phone across the room. And then I tugged the engagement ring off my finger, and flung it after the phone. The ring rolled into a corner and when I went to look for it a few days later, it had vanished entirely. I was pretty sure the cleaning crew took it.

  Good, I thought. They can have it.

  * * *

  —

  The next week, my father’s will was read. Of course Daddy didn’t leave Stonehaven to my brother. Why would he leave the estate to someone who vowed to burn it to the ground? No, the house was to be my burden now: Five generations of our family’s stuff, the Liebling legacy, and I was now its caretaker.

  But Stonehaven was also a gift, I soon learned. Because when I finally went back to New York, I couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm for V-Life anymore. Rather than organizing trips and shoots and looks, I holed up in my apartment, eating salted caramel gelato and bingeing on Netflix. My posts grew few and far between. The golden rule of influencing is Don’t bum out your audience, but I didn’t have it in me to smile. Saskia and Trini and Maya sent me concerned texts—You aren’t posting much, are you doing OK? What’s going on? Worried about U XX—but of course I knew from their feeds that they were continuing their lives without me. A new girl—a twenty-one-year-old Swiss pop star named Marcelle—had taken my spot in their jet to Cannes.

  Mr. Buggles was run over by a taxi on the way to Bryant Park.

  My followers started to get crabby about the lack of posts; and then, they started to unfollow me. Increasingly, instead of basking in the adulatory comments on my posts, I found myself focusing on the nasty ones: Get over yourself bitch. Where’s UR ring, did U get dumped? Haha. You think you’re cool because you’re rich, why don’t you sell that ugly dress and donate the money to refugee children? On social media it’s all or nothing: lavish praise or appalled outrage; sycophants or trolls. Caption-and-comment culture in all its brevity leaves out the middle ground, where most of life is found. So I knew I shouldn’t pay attention to this empty noise, shouted by those who knew nothing real about me, but I still couldn’t help myself. Why did they loathe me so much, a total stranger? Did they think I was breathing such thin air up here that I couldn’t feel pain?

  With every new insult, Victor’s words came echoing back to me: It just feels…shallow. I thought of my father’s face, his words when I told him what I was doing: That’s not a career, cupcake, that’s just a shiny toy that’s going to get old real soon.

  Maybe they were right.

  I couldn’t help but wonder: Were people just following me in order to hate me? I never meant to be the personification of privilege; I was only ever doing this because it made me feel good about myself. And it didn’t anymore. I looked at the heaps of clothing in my closet, unworn dresses with five-figure price tags still hanging off them, and felt ill: How did I become this person? Because I didn’t think I wanted to be her anymore.

  I was done with V-Life. I needed to get out of New York and do something new. But what?

  And then it hit me one sleepless night: Stonehaven. I’d move there, really set myself the goal of becoming someone at peace with the world, someone balanced and self-assured. (The embodiment of those inspirational quotes I threw up sometimes, to fill the gaps in my feed: Some daily inspo, guys! #motherteresa #serenity #kindness.) I would breathe life into Stonehaven, make it a place that was habitable and appealing again, a home that my children (someday) would actually want to visit. I could remodel (or at least redecorate!), erase the taint of tragedy, start the Liebling story anew! Bonus: It would lend itself to a whole new social media narrative: Vanessa Liebling moves to her family’s classic Tahoe estate in order to find herself.

  I called Benny to tell him what I was going to do. He was silent. “You know I’m not going to visit you there, Vanessa. I can’t be in that place.”

  “I’ll come visit you instead,” I said. “Besides, it’s just for the short term. Until I figure out the next thing.”

  “You’re being awfully impulsive,” he said. “Think about it for a second: It’s a terrible idea.”

  I knew I was clutching at straws; but straws were all I had. Within the week, I’d packed my entire life into boxes, including the wedding dress that I never had a chance to wear; fired my staff; and terminated the lease on my Tribeca flat.

  Saskia and Evangeline threw me a going-away party on a Chinatown rooftop, with a DJ and half of Manhattan in attendance. I wore a silver minidress that Christian Siriano had designed just for me and I dispensed kisses and invitations to visit the family estate. I made it sound like the Hamptons, only better. “We’ll come out this summer!” Maya trilled. “I’ll bring the girls and we get sponsors and we make it a whole week get-a-way, like, spa retreat, yes?” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that there were no spas near Stonehaven, no SoulCycle studios, no restaurants serving avocado toast. But Saskia seemed to have figured that out on her own: At the end of the party she hugged me as if she was saying goodbye to me forever.

  I couldn’t get away fast enough.

  A moving truck arrived the next day and hauled my life away. I snapped a last photo as the truck lumbered off, rattling uneasily along the cobblestones, and uploaded this to Instagram: And so I begin a new journey! “Every great dream begins with a dreamer”—Helen Keller. #sotrue.

  Later, I would discover that Victor had liked this image, and I would wonder what he liked about it: the positivity, or the departure.

  * * *

  —

  Stonehaven was like a time capsule when I arrived. Nothing had changed since the day we left, years earlier: The furniture was still covered in white cloths, the grandfather clock in the foyer was stopped at 11:25, the tins of foie gras in the pantry had expired in 2010. There was no dust and the property had been well maintained, thanks to the caretaker and his wife who, until my father died and the bills began going unpaid, had been living in a cottage on the far edge of the property. Still, as I walked through the dark, lifeless rooms, I realized I’d moved into a crypt. Everything cold to the touch. Everything inert.

  Sometimes, as I moved through the house—throwing off dustcloths, examining bookshelves—I thought I felt the ghost of my mother. There was a soft dent in the sofa in the library, on the cushion where she liked to sit, and when I settled myself into the groove she left behind, there was a prickle at the back of my neck, as if someone had blown gently on the hairs there. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what it felt like to have Maman’s arms around me, but what I felt instead was a cold knot in my belly, the grip of skeleton fingers rising from the grave to grab at me.

  At one point I found myself in the guest bedroom where the Meissen birds still sat frozen in their cabinet, waiting to be set free. I picked one out—a yellow canary—and turned it in my hands, remembering how my mother tipped her hands and let that parrot shatter. I wondered
if my mother identified with these trapped birds. I wondered if her suicide was a kind of escape, not just from the pain of her failed marriage and troubled child, but from a cage she’d felt locked inside.

  I won’t let this house kill me, too, I thought, and then gave myself a little shake, to toss off this morbid thought.

  It didn’t help that I was so alone. Tahoe City was not so far on the map, but it felt like a world away; I wasn’t sure how to go about making friends on this quiet stretch of the West Shore. People come and go in Tahoe; the lights in the vacation homes along the shoreline flick on one week and off the next. At the general store up the road, the locals buying their coffee and the Reno Gazette-Journal looked right past me, assuming from my New York clothes and the Mercedes SUV parked out front that I was just passing through.

  And so I spent my days alone, milling through the rooms of Stonehaven, feeling increasingly like a bird in a cage myself. I’d pace the property, shoreline to road and back again, walking in circles until my calves ached, never seeing a soul. On warm days, I’d walk down to the end of the dock, where the water-skiers turned the glassy water into chop, and dutifully upload smiling bikini selfies: Loving my #lakelife! On bad days, I’d stay in bed, blinds closed against the light, scrolling through my own Instagram archive: thousands upon thousands of photos of a strange woman who shared my name. Social media feeds the narcissistic monster that lives within us all, I would think to myself. It feeds it and grows it until the beast takes over and you are left outside the frame, just looking at images of this creature, like everyone else in your feed, wondering what it is that you birthed and why it’s living the life you wish you had.

  Sometimes, even I could be terribly self-aware.

  * * *

  —

  One morning, while out on a walk around the property, I pried open the wooden doors of the old stone boathouse and found myself staring up at the Judybird. My father had never bothered to sell it after all, so there the yacht still hovered on its hydraulic lift, a few feet over the surface of the lake. The caretaker had kept the boat fueled, the battery fresh; but it still looked forgotten there, a forlorn beached whale. The cover was filthy with spiderwebs and bird droppings from the swallows that rustled in the eaves overhead.

  I stood on the wooden ramp beside the boat, the cold water lapping at my sneakers, and put my hand up to touch its side, as if I might be able to feel the ghost of my mother in the fiberglass. The boards of the dock groaned and gave under my feet, weak with rot. And for a moment, just a brief one, I wondered what it would feel like, really, to drive the Judybird out to the middle of the lake and just jump in the water, my pockets full of stones. Would it be a kind of relief? As if in a dream, my hand reached for the switch that would lower the yacht back down to the water.

  And then I jerked it away. I am not my mother; I don’t want to be. I turned and left the boathouse, locked it behind me, and vowed never to go inside again.

  * * *

  —

  Summer arrived, the lake filling with boats; tourists clogging the roads. At Stonehaven, nothing changed. And then, one day, as I walked from the dock back toward the house, I noticed the empty caretaker’s cottage. I stopped to peer in the window: I’d never been inside. I was surprised to see that it was still fully furnished, clean and neat as a pin. Something ignited inside me, an idea suddenly coming to life: Here it is, the answer to my problems. I could rent out the cottage! Why not? It would bring life to the property, since God knows I might lose my mind if I didn’t find someone to speak to besides my housekeeper. It would give me a focal point, inside the unspooling nothing of my current life.

  Two weeks later, my first JetSet.com guests arrived, a young French couple who liked to sit at the edge of the water and drink wine all day. The wife had a guitar and as the last light passed over the lake she sang old pop songs in her dreamy, lisping lilt. I sat with them, and as we talked about the places we loved in Paris, I felt a strange nostalgia for the life I was living just six months ago. Vanessa Liebling, globetrotter, fashionista, brand ambassador, Instagram influencer. Did I miss being that person? Maybe a little. But my mood lifted with their presence, and as we sang When I’m Sixty-four together I felt that I was getting a glimpse of a new, more centered person I might actually be able to become.

  The French couple were followed by married retirees from Phoenix, a group of German men biking their way across the Sierras, three moms from San Francisco up for a girls’ weekend, and a taciturn Canadian woman with a suitcase full of romance novels. Normal people, living normal lives. Some of my guests were antisocial, but others were eager for a local tour guide, and so I took them hiking in Emerald Bay, to outdoor concerts beside the lake, to the Fire Sign Café for eggs Benedict and hot cocoa. This filled my days with some sort of purpose and took the edge off my solitude. Plenty of material for my photo stream. The days flew by.

  But when summer came to a close so did the rental bookings. And as the empty days returned, so did the dark whisper in the back of my head: What now? What are you doing here? How long can you keep this up? Who are you really and what are you doing with your life?

  * * *

  —

  One day in early November, I woke up to a query in my inbox from “Michael and Ashley.” Greetings! the message said. We’re a creative couple from Portland, looking for a peaceful place to spend a few weeks, maybe longer? Michael is taking some time off from teaching to write a book, and I’m a yoga instructor. We’re on a little sabbatical from life and your cottage looks perfect for us! Is it available? We’re new to JetSet so we don’t have any reviews yet, but we’re happy to tell you more about ourselves if you’d like!

  I studied their photo for a long time. In it Ashley was standing right in front of Michael and he had one arm wrapped around her shoulders, leaning his chin on her head as they both laughed at some private joke. They looked intelligent and attractive and grounded, like models in a Patagonia ad. I was immediately drawn to them, the easy confidence in their smiles, their happiness together. He was, I noticed, quite handsome. As for her: I plugged her name into a search engine and, after sifting through a thousand other Ashley Smiths, eventually came across her website: Ashley Smith Yoga Oregon. There she was, sitting on a beach in the lotus position, her eyes peacefully lowered and hands extended to the sky. “We need to learn to want what we have, not to have what we want,” teaches the Dalai Lama. I believe that my role as a teacher—and a human being!—is helping people come to this awareness, and in doing so find their peace within. Only internally can we locate the validation that we spend so much of our lives seeking elsewhere.

  It was almost like it was written just for me. I zoomed in on the photo to study her closer, admiring the serenely knowing expression on her pretty face. She looked like the kind of person I was trying to become; the one I pretended to be in my social media feed. I wondered what I might learn from her.

  I felt something lift inside me: my heartbeat, winging back to life. And so I clicked Accept, without thinking twice about it.

  The cottage is available, and you can stay as long as you like, I wrote back. Looking forward to getting to know you better in person!

  14.

  THERE SHE IS.

  Ashley is practicing yoga out on the lawn, softly backlit by the early morning sun. Steam rising off her skin; her yoga mat spread out like a tongue lapping at the lake. Yoga’s never been my thing—I always preferred the obliterating burn of boot camp or spin class—but as I watch Ashley out there, working through her Sun Salutations, I realize that this is another thing that I should change about myself. It looks so centering. From where I stand in the kitchen window, Ashley appears to be swimming through the air, just one leg kick away from taking flight.

  And— Oh! The light is perfect for a photo, and it’s been at least twelve hours since my last post. (How far into obsolescence have I fallen in that time?) I pull out
my phone and frame a shot of Ashley, her serene face silhouetted by the lake, her body bent into a triangle with fingers thrust to the sky. I upload this to my feed: My very own backyard warrior. #yoga #sunsalutation #goodmorning. Maybe I should have asked her permission, but how identifiable is she really? And why would she mind, anyway? This is what she does for a living, it’s good brand awareness. I hit refresh until the first likes materialize, wait for the dopamine kick that will thrust me back into the land of the living. There.

  Then I stand watch in the window, hypnotized, for nearly half an hour, as she rolls through her asanas and finally finishes up with a Shavasana. She lies flat on the dewy grass so long that I start to wonder if she’s fallen asleep. But then she stands, abruptly turns around, and once again, she’s caught me watching her. She must think I’m some sort of stalker. (I am some sort of stalker, I suppose.)

  I wave at her. She waves back. I make a “come here” gesture. She gathers up her mat and walks to the back door, where I meet her with my cup of coffee in hand.

  She dabs sweat from her forehead with what I recognize as a bath towel from the caretaker’s cottage. Then she smiles at me, revealing a charmingly wonky left incisor. “Sorry about that, I should have asked if you’d mind if I did yoga on your lawn. But the sunrise was so glorious, I couldn’t resist. The day was calling to me.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “In fact, I was just thinking that I should join you tomorrow.” Too late, I realize that this sounds pushy, presumptive.

  But she smiles. “Absolutely.” She points to the mug in my hand. “Can I beg a cup of coffee off you? We don’t have any in the cottage.”