Marta felt reassured as she journeyed by the hardscrabble outposts, recognizing gas stations, restaurants, motels, and log homes—entire main streets, in fact—possessing a trapped-in-amber quality that was cousin to the revived historic gold rush settlement deeper in the province’s interior. Surviving off visitor dollars, that destination promised to bring one version of history alive by hiring hordes of students each summer and paying them to stroll the dusty streets in character, the select calico- and wool-clad population educational viewing for the whole family, G-rated of course: no rape, racism, smallpox, domestic violence, or situational homosexuality, and perhaps just one town drunk rendered as red-faced and obnoxious yet benignly comical, a pioneer Falstaff.
Although the gradual climb from sea level contained her within one time zone, Marta had been conscious of how barreling so easily beyond the embrace of routine registered as such a heartfelt charge. Passing from sopping dense forests of hemlock, salmonberry bush, and clinging boreal mists to arid, needle-strewn stands of skinny pine, she noticed roadside Great Mullein (“desert tapers,” her mother’s fanciful coinage, sprang to mind first), and, at last, caught sight of the gateway marker, a loaf-form mountain, velvety camel and puckered by dark undulating furrows. Marta’s shoulders began to relax despite the tension caused by traffic: nearby called out the landscape of childhood vacations.
The silence from the production office about tomorrow’s schedule gnawed at Marta’s nerves. To her chagrin, the immediate future was not a mapped road but an opaque wall, and that made her peevish; as always, the lack of a specific plan proved irksome. Marta’s core punctuality—6 o’clock does not mean 6:10—routinely stood at odds with a world of delayed services and detained, inexact people. There’s nothing to do now except stare at the phone, she thought. Of course.
At the motel’s front desk office, Mrs. Simms, the Star-Lite’s affable and confiding owner/operator, had endeared herself to Marta with a sisterly offer of counsel—“You got any questions, Marta, anything at all”—she’d said with a sly conspiratorial tone, as though Marta might be seeking a back-alley abortion, or dry county moonshine—“you come right to me. My family’s been operating this place for two generations, so believe you me, I’ve heard ’em all.” Cross-legged on a stool, Mrs. Simms hadn’t mentioned any calls. Fretful, Marta wondered if she’d missed an important email. One might have been sent after she left home.
The red light on the room’s telephone wasn’t flashing; she lifted the receiver to check for a dial tone.
To her knowledge no one—and by now she’d learned the office’s unwavering chain of command: Jakob near the apex, Lora next, and one of the pawn-like PAs at the base—had sent information about a “session” or “pow wow” (Jakob’s and Lora’s preferred terms for meeting, respectively) following check-in, so Marta guessed she was at liberty to plan out the evening.
The prudent choice to wait could serve her best, she decided. Perhaps Lora’s short term plans included a call to explain next day’s schedule. Marta needed to sort out the per diem, too, excited by the novel concept of daily cash allotments handed out in discreet white envelopes, she imagined, like bribes in movies. She thought of dropping by to check with Mrs. Simms one last time, just in case. Advice about nearby restaurants could supply a reasonable pretext.
In the meantime, she’d try to relax inside the cinder block cube, vintage print spun nylon curtains drawn for solitude. The room was warm and smelled of the staleness of age as well as of lingering bathroom chemicals. She’d prop open the door after sunset.
Marta slid off canvas sneakers. Unpacking luggage could wait, ditto the drive and inaugural wander along Main Street to investigate three blocks of retail offerings. Poised on the edge of the bed—covered with a slithery polyester satin quilt that made her squeamish and would soon be folded away in the closet along with the untenable poly-cotton sheets—Marta grabbed the remote and found the channel guide.
She clicked on a station that specialized in drive-in classics and arrived in the midst of a favourite moment. Tracking the prostitute-fixated serial killer with the light of righteousness to guide them, Angel and Mae skirted around the murky brick alleys of Sunset Boulevard during a breezy California night that nevertheless caused no movement in the stiff curls of Mae’s voluminous wig or Angel’s beribboned hair.
The improbable scene—the 15–year old Angel/whore character being played as innocent by a 24–year old performer in thick layers of purportedly age-defying makeup that rendered her hardened and mannequin-like rather than sweetly, dewily adolescent—always prompted Marta to recall a sibilant-heavy review, one that for a time she’d delighted in quoting to fellow graduate students, whose faces reflected no empathy for her fascination with déclassé subject matter. The writer called the B-movie a “screwy, sickening, and semi-satisfying stew of shtick, sleazeball, and sentimentality.”
Sleazy or not, Angel was also a fortunate discovery—and heartily satisfying too, Marta would argue—that became the subject of her debut conference paper, an analysis of notions of prostitution and feminine duplicity that compared the wily centuries-old archetype Moll Flanders to a contemporary descendent, the soon-to-be avenging Angel. Plus ça change, the essay had implied with a tentative finger of accusation.
2.
For an accidental find, Angel had proven invaluable. Touching on Psycho or Marnie here, Dressed to Kill there, Marta revisited and elaborated on the topic at subsequent conferences. Variation-on-a-theme papers were a venerable if unmentioned tradition at such gatherings: forever eyeing the publish-or-perish quota—the cliché updated as publish-and-perish by rung-eyeing fresh PhDs—the congregated scholars welcomed the efficiency. Utility aside, Marta enjoyed rooting through non-literary source material as much as the political dimensions of the subject; the male-penned account of feminine duplicity opened up as richly complex and imbued with an agreeable taint of controversy.
By the fourth time Marta stood at a lectern for the mandatory twenty minutes to uncover the intricacies of Angel’s narrative—complete with audience-pleasing film stills placed atop a overhead projector—both the character and the speaker had ceased to be students. Over the course of Avenging Angel, Angel III: The Final Chapter, and Angel 4: Undercover, Angel could no longer be labeled a “high school honor student by day,” having graduated and become a respected police photographer. Nor was she a mini-skirted “Hollywood hooker by night,” though she agreed to pose as one—for one last time—in order to trap yet another prostitute-fixated murderer. Exempt from B-movie plot mechanics, Marta’s better paying new role at the classroom’s helm didn’t demand so much as a change of blouse.
Hollywood’s retread economy arrived as a welcome ideology to Marta since she exploited its reliance on low-budget reiterations. She viewed the timely latest installment as grist for the conference paper mill—her constant work generated with one primary aim: the mecca of tenure. Marta barely needed notes to explain Angel’s tidal flux of feminine agency; a single sitting through the latest sequel had replaced the earnest and painstaking shot-by-shot explication of former days. As for the conference talk, she easily stitched together the required minutes worth of material during the flight. She felt proud if absurd when cluing into a fact: her rank as the leading scholar on Angel. Dr. Spëk, the globe’s preeminent Angelographer. Checking later, she’d confirmed the unique monopoly. Careers had been founded on lesser accomplishments.
Marta spoke about Angel 4: Undercover and listened to the panel’s three other speakers—occasionally feigning the ritual expression of rapt interest evident throughout the audience. After responding to a request to clarify a point and throwing in a comment during the roundtable, she left the windowless room and walked at a brisk pace to the exterior doors of the brick campus building that housed the entire event. Bracing Idahoan air and a winding pathway soothed her nerves as she retreated from the unofficial goal of the conference—stiff and polite and nuanced
after-session mingling that eventually stripped down to serial pissing contests. The crowing over publications and grant funding, 3.5 Richter scandals, and fathomless complaint always suffused Marta with dread and a rip-tide undercurrent of nausea.
Naturally no one needed to explain to Marta that any group—from kindergarten on—invented unique means of instituting hierarchies and channeling animosities. And she didn’t need to be told that without tactical participation a career could atrophy. Landed in a group of any variety, though, she ordinarily and habitually conceived of reasonable exit strategies and then gravitated toward lone corners and peripheral tables of finger food and coffee urns. Or, if fortune was smiling, there’d be print of some kind to scan, publisher book displays at which she could devote long minutes. She likened the movement to a plant leaning toward sunlight; more than comprehendible, the perfectly organic and sustaining motion followed earthly laws.
For this one occasion, she forgave herself for not dividing the room into will nots, haves, has beens, and have nots, and then arranging contact with the haves, artfully dropping mention of CV-worthy accomplishments and exceptional busyness into measured conversations—chapters to write! funding applications! student thesis supervision! journal articles! far-flung conferences to attend! book reviews! classes to organize!—and illustrating how bold new grant-nourished research would ensure the ongoing skyrocketing of an esteemed reputation. Even a courtier’s tongue required rest.
The conference was held in Boise, “The City of Trees”—so she’d read about the place, whose completely recognizable name had floated up unaccompanied by facts, images, or trivia. Say “Jupiter” and Marta conjured a solar system illustration, enormity, dozens of moons in whizzing orbits, pinky-orange swirls of volatile gas clouds, and the Great Red Spot; but Boise only summoned Idaho and with it the seemingly contradictory occurrence of vast flat potato fields and angular swathes of coniferous trees. Boise’s cloak of anonymity fluttered attractively.
Early into the many-paneled conference proceedings—a hive humming with intellectual enterprise of varying merit—Marta had succumbed. She decided the ideal moment to “scratch an itch” (the phrase, along with “shit or get off the pot,” jumped directly from her father’s stock of tart phrases, marvelous and vulgar but never repeated aloud) stood before her. Aged two years, give or take, the condition was entrenched, she admitted, resembling one of those inconsequential yet apparently chronic maladies of television commercials, like dandruff, winter dryness, and the terrible shame apparently caused by dingy carpets and coffee-stained teeth. Or feminine itch, Marta had thought. It appeared to be a syndrome only the right medicine could heal.
3.
As she would for an oddly coloured mole, Marta had kept track of the rogue itch-sensation, and could identify the very second it had arisen, shark-like—cancerous?—and unbidden from a murky depth. On a Monday morning early in the autumn semester during a course about narratives of sexual danger in late-Victorian London, she’d been lecturing about Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The mid-sentence epiphany—a cartoon incandescent light bulb illumination that caused her to stall, arms frozen in mid-gesture, and then react with a spontaneous, titter-spurring Cockney-accented proclamation: “Guvnor, I seems ta ’ave lost me train o’ thought”—was unadulterated excitement. At the thought of a double life’s prospects—pretense, danger, creative challenge—her pulse had quickened, the theatrical secrecy a kick too.
Long minutes later and in the refuge of her closed-door office, Marta could tell that the odd fleeting tingle in class hadn’t entirely dispelled. Analyzed, the heightened sensation—racing blood flow and excited neurons, she presumed—looked analogous to creative fireworks, the febrile state identical to the promise of a budding writing project, when the sheer potential of the blank page appeared as an enigmatically wrapped and as yet unopened gift. Less diagnosable was the accompanying bodily symptom—vague: a shiver that transformed into a deep-seated and steady ember burn. A remotely sexual element lurked too. Then again, she’d smiled, it might as easily be gastric distress—a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese. Or: unrelated, a simple coincidence. When she resumed thinking about Mr. Hyde and alter egos, the peculiar shiver failed to recur.
At home that day Marta had changed into a robe, reclined on her thinking chair—she’d been told “slipper chair” was the proper name; and her request for custom upholstery in mossy velvet had delayed delivery from Quebec for an unaccountable eight weeks—and closed her eyes. She tinkered with a working definition of alter ego as growth, a creative act, a vehicle of self-expression, and not a panicked disorder.
Sliding her hand along the furry plush, she thought, It’s similar to this chair, a reflection of the range of my taste and interests. Contrary to puritanical Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson and others, an alter ego didn’t have to be a dire symptom, one indicative of injured consciousness or pathological dédoublement. Well, not necessarily anyway. Yes, nobody could deny Sybil and the genre’s shattered mirror motif—such incoherent fragmentation, so hopeless a case. Fear and propaganda. A perfectly seamless and unified selfhood is a consolatory fiction, she concluded, irked to be quoting from a source she couldn’t grasp. Salient-shaped words competed for her attention: inhabitation, augmentation, polymorphism, masquerade, guise. With so many perspectives to consider, the possibilities tilted into the carnivalesque.
Worries about severe psychological abnormality tamped down, Marta had moved on to a less fraught topic: logistics.
Obviously, the location—a destination promising the least chance of the situation going awry—must also be the edenic place with the remotest likelihood of running into a colleague.
The standard moues of qualification aside, Marta respected guile and accomplished impromptu liars; though she could deceive when necessary, she required forethought and, if possible, cue cards. Without that preparation, she bungled lies, the stammering textbook examples limply ridiculous. Her sputtered improvised answer to “Marta, what on earth are you doing here dressed like that?” would sound glaringly awkward and false, peppered with inept prevarication that even a child could detect. Disastrous. From a secure distance the situation drew a smile; she’d rather eat glass than count the miserable real-time seconds of the concrete experience.
So: a different city, perhaps. Better yet, a neighbouring country. Curled on the chair, she’d pictured herself as vivacious and disembarking at an Alpine train stop, having shed off demure Marta Spëk en route. This new person, _______, would possess an icy Hitchcockian countenance, the exquisite angles of shoulder and cheek signaling arrivisme or perhaps hauteur. Marta had frowned. The woman—persistently French, a favoured affectation dating from junior high school—was untenable and risible, an elaborate surgical remake that owed as much to Kim Novak as to Cruella DeVil. A hopeless travesty. Even if she aimed for such an extravagant imposture, she’d never attain it.
When Marta had attempted a second version of the fantastical step off the train—a feasible charade, one based on her quantifiably modest capabilities—no new figure emerged. She only saw herself wearing the tan Burberry trench coat she’d splurged on last year. Evidently a merely superficial transformation would be a stretch. Nonchalance held greater promise than hauteur. Where there’s a will there’s a way, a voice chimed.
The perspective appeared off kilter, Marta came to realize. Assuming a role was not the same as a play or film she planned to watch or address in an essay. No, the role created a unique kind of theatre in which she’d inhabit actor and spectator simultaneously. Even so, to step into that character and actually scratch the itch could hardly unfold as simply as that inadequate figure of speech implied. For the proper payoff the sensation had to register deeply, and not feel like the ironic donning of a costume, or a jokey thrift store wig on Halloween. True, changes could be cosmetic to a degree, a purchasable ensemble, but there needed to be substantial dimension, fathoms. Sweating thespian as well as skept
ical audience, every outcome she foresaw corroded an already tarnished, 14–carat resolve. Happily, the deflated state did give her insight into the practical challenges of split personalities and bigamy.
During solitary meals and quiet intervals sitting on transit, Marta had grown studious about the practical facets of the alter ego (the term itself sank into obsolescence, replaced by the lyrical, Bergmanesque persona). As for unconscious motivations or root causality, that persisted as a thread she’d resist pulling. “Trifling, I’ll return to that later,” a mewling retort to the intermittent voicing of conscience, kept the overall transformative impulse alive.
There were pressing factors to make allowances for, Marta came to see. Sensitive to narrative triteness she’d fretted in particular about the ne plus ultra of the venue. And to complicate matters, clarity about what she’d like to have unfold remained tightly wrapped. To appear in public as someone else presented a moderate challenge; but to commit to interactive, unpredictable socializing—and colluding in the outcome of whatever contact instigated—only summoned the spectre of woeful consequences from foolish actions with inexplicable motivations. Farcical messes. Or worse: bad dates, as Angel’s Mae would call them. Danger seemed a minor probability, but embarrassment loomed as certain as sunset.
Start small, she’d thought, a grimace shaping seconds after. Typical Spëk. No, comfortable or not, a leap it would be, “of faith” the preferable, courageous figure of accompaniment. “From an office building window on Black Tuesday” bubbled up contrarily within minutes.
The challenge of the live performance caused vexation too. Even in high school Marta had shied away from publicity although she’d pined—acutely, in fact, a pale teenage Pushmi-pullyu—for the notoriety it might bring, agonizing about a two-line role in Our Town before finally perceiving the stymieing thinness of her skin. Speaking in full view on the gymnasium stage before a cold-eyed jury of peers for three consecutive nights, she’d predicted, would induce torrents of perspiration, if not cardiac arrest. Shame-faced while dying: nothing could feel worse. For the nights of the play’s run, she begged for extra shifts at the part-time job at the cedar-shingled public library and tried with patchy success to stay attentive to a pet project, developing a better technique for efficiently shelving books.
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