by Emily Beyda
* * *
—
Max comes up with a set of exercises he wants me to do every morning. My bearing is better now, the attitudes of my body more precise, but there is still that softness, that imperfect sag. I’m glad he is doing something to help. He sits on the futon with his hands folded in his lap, watching me. The coffee table has been pushed to one side of the room, under the window, where I brush against its hard edge with my fingertips as I bend and stretch. I haven’t moved this much in a long time. I am eating less than I used to eat. I am sleeping more. My muscles feel atrophied and soft, squirming like eels beneath my pale skin. A sharp cramp stabs my left side. I collapse on the mat, my hand on my stomach.
“Keep going,” says Max. His voice is soft, encouraging.
“I can’t.”
I feel like my skin will rip open if I move, my insides wriggling onto the floor. Max pushes me with his foot.
“Come on,” he says. “Keep going.” His voice is still gentle, but it is a forced gentleness, a tightness he is trying to use to tamp down his frustration.
It’s not fair, his frustration, but I want him to tell Rosanna that I’m doing a good job, that I’m ready to leave the apartment. So I push through the pain. I make my body move, pulling itself forward into another plank, every part of me screaming. I close my eyes and breathe hard. I have nothing to do with my body, I think. It can’t bother me. It isn’t my problem. It isn’t even my body anymore. I finish the set. I collapse into a heap on the floor.
“Very good!” Max says. “You’re doing so well.”
* * *
—
I am supposed to do one set of exercises on my own, another when Max visits in the afternoon. One morning, tired and sore, I skip my set. When Max comes over, he doesn’t say a word to me, just sits down on the couch and nods for me to start. I complete one set. My form is perfect. I congratulate myself; not tired out from my morning exercises, I do a better job. I’ll have to skip my set more often. I pull myself out of the last plank and smile at him, perfect, pristine.
“Again,” he says. His voice is clipped and hard.
I stand for the first movement, pulling myself into warrior pose, my arms above my head, palms pressed together, sweaty, starting to slip, and it’s a little harder this time, a little less precise, but I do it.
“Again.”
The third time is harder. My body feels heavy. My muscles are starting to burn.
“Again.”
I am filled with a deep and profound loathing for the dead weight of my body, the useless flab of it, the space it takes up. Even the smallest movement is torture. I keep moving, I push myself through, each pose turning into a feint, a symbolic gesture toward that pose more than the pose itself. I ache. I hate him. I hate everything that’s happening to me.
“Again,” says Max.
I can’t. My body feels like a deflated balloon.
“Please,” I say, “can we stop now?”
“You skipped your set this morning,” Max says, his voice implacably calm. “We have to make up for lost time.”
I am moving slower now, trying hard to breathe. My muscles ache and shake and strain. Halfway through, I start to cry, the tears running silently down my face. Max just sits there, calmly watching. I hope he will mistake them for sweat. He reaches forward and softly brushes away the hair plastered to my forehead.
“Keep going,” he says tenderly. “Just once more. For me.”
At the end, I collapse on the mat, dry heaving. Max leans down from the futon to scratch the small of my back.
“I knew you could do it,” he says. “I’m proud of you.”
He pulls me up, letting me lean my whole body weight against him, and takes me to the bathroom, where he draws me a warm bath with Epsom salts and lavender oil. The running water covers up the sound of my vomiting, but the smell lingers, sour, in the small, humid room.
* * *
—
When Max leaves, I check the apartment for cameras. I pull up the rug. I leaf through the books. I take down every picture of Rosanna and inspect the wall behind it for pinholes. I remove the pillows from their cases, squeeze through the stuffing inch by inch feeling for microphone lumps. I examine the hinges of the cabinets, the folds of the curtains, carefully scoop the dirt from the potted plant languishing on the windowsill. I find nothing. I tell myself this is because there is nothing to find.
Still, he keeps noticing things. He notices when I don’t make my bed first thing in the morning, and so when I wake up, I pull the sheets tight into hospital corners, tuck the lumpy mattress of the futon back in on itself. Rosanna, he says, likes to keep things neat, so now, so do I. Every morning I am supposed to eat one of three meals selected from my food diary, green juice, a handful of goji berries and almonds soaked in water, or a small bowl of brown rice with sweet potato and miso paste. I must write down exactly what I’ve consumed, when, and how much. Max notices discrepancies down to the ounce and will bring less food at dinner. He’s never cruel about these small corrections, but there is an insistence on perfection, on precision, that gradually seeps into my performance. I am more and more careful, more and more aware of my new role. The better I get at acting like Rosanna, the sweeter Max is to me. He brings me little gifts, things he knows Rosanna likes: a blue-cloth-covered book of poems, bouquets of lilacs, matcha-glazed éclairs from her favorite bakery in Koreatown, expensive-smelling bundles of incense, little gold bracelets studded with her birthstone. He tells me I’m as pretty as the things he buys. He touches me more now, I have noticed. He comes closer to me, the closer I am to getting it right.
I try hard to leave my old life behind. If I dream of myself, when I wake up I lie with my eyes closed, running through my memorized Rosanna lists or trying to conjure a perfect replica of one of her pictures, until I can no longer remember what I dreamed of. It seems important not to waste mental space on anything that doesn’t belong to her. Every thought is one thought closer to perfection. To being good enough to leave this room.
* * *
—
It’s morning, and I am practicing my makeup. It is early, still far too early for me to expect a visit from Max. But suddenly through the thin wall of the bathroom, I hear a click as a key turns in the lock. The front door squeaks as it opens, and then there is a long silence as whoever opened it looks around and doesn’t find me. Rosanna? It must be her. She must have heard I’m ready. She’s here now. It’s time. I look at the imperfect replica of her face I have created, overcome with guilt. I do not want her to see me like this, this sad imitation, and I move to wipe it away. But then I stop myself. I look at my beautiful face in the mirror. It is my face, with Rosanna’s written over it. Rosanna’s and my own. Her spit on my lips, flakes of her dead skin over my living flesh. Even now she is burrowing into me, taking me over, her host. The thought fills me with a strange paralyzing joy. I want to laugh, to scream. Instead, I wait for her to find me, sitting on the edge of the bathtub with my hands neatly folded in my lap.
Max walks in without knocking, my privacy a lie we tell each other. And then, seeing me, he stops. For a moment, he thinks it’s her. I can tell by the way he looks at me, that mixture of terror and awe. Perhaps he has just come from Rosanna’s house, telling her about my progress, and now here she is again, in two places at once. A miracle. The look on his face wipes clean the anger I feel at seeing him, not Rosanna, standing in the doorway. I press down the amusement that bubbles up inside me. If he didn’t look so panicked, I would laugh. He stands still for a long time, looking and looking at my strange new face, although what he expects to find, I cannot say. Finally he speaks. “Rosanna,” he says, softer than anything, in a voice that is almost a whisper. In the quiet of the small room, I can feel his breath against my ear. He says her name like it has power. An incantation. He says it again, just once, even softer: “Rosanna.” I sit
perfectly still and look up at him, my eyes finally meeting his. We are locked together, the two of us alone in the world.
And then a loud noise outside as a truck passes up the narrow street, and the birds in the courtyard scatter in a panicked cloud, calling to one another with shrill cries, flapping. Had any of them learned to talk in their domesticated lives? Or were they too far gone, their human voices lost to wildness? Would one of them call out my name?
Max moves close to me. For a breath, he just stands there, looking. And then he sticks his thumb into his mouth and runs it down my fake cheekbone, smearing the new lines of my new face, running it, warm, wet, past the soft plane of my cheeks and down onto my chin, then up to my lips, where he rests for a long beat, as though he is quieting me, his thumb pressing hard against my teeth. In the mirror behind his shoulder, I can see my ruined face. I can feel the sticky traces of spit and filth and smeared foundation cooling hard against my skin. I look beautiful. I look like her.
“Almost,” says Max.
* * *
—
I wake to the light switching on. Max is standing at the foot of my bed with his back to the dark window, as sharp and unexpected as a night terror.
“Less sleep!” he says. “Sleep is good for the skin.”
“Good morning!” I say, trying to keep my voice even, as though his presence is the most natural thing in the world. “What’s all this?”
“We have to damage your skin,” says Max. “Rosanna, of course, is older than you. Her skin doesn’t look like your skin. I’ve noticed that there was something missing from our regimen, something that’s not quite right. Maybe it’s your skin. Maybe this will help.”
His voice is incongruously cheerful, the inspirational chirp of a camp counselor, a motivational speaker trying to convince me to live his truth. It is a shock to see him in the morning. I wonder if this is what daytime Max is like, if he, too, has a hidden version of himself. Maybe this is the Max Rosanna knows. Groggy, I get out of bed, and he folds the sheets, stows the comforter, pushes the futon back into a couch, sits beside me in the dark. Together we watch the sunrise, the white walls turning gray, then pink, in the growing light. He makes me coffee the way Rosanna likes it, the way I like it now, too—strong, with agave, a little steamed almond milk. We sit so close beside each other that I can hear the tiny motions of his body, his breath. We don’t speak. When the room has grown light and it is too late for me to get back to sleep, he leaves. I know I won’t see him for the rest of the day.
* * *
—
I am on a low protein diet, then low carb, then macrobiotic, miso soup for breakfast and a fridge full of celery, flavorless prepared meals in little plastic trays. Max makes me smoke cigarettes and drink diet soda instead of water. Then for days on end I consume only water with lemon and cayenne and maple syrup, and become so weak I can barely stand. In the mornings in the mirror I can see that it’s working. There are new circles under my eyes, and my face looks almost gray, the skin thinner, clinging closer to the bone. Little wrinkles like parentheses appear on the sides of my lips from smiling. I listen to the departure of the parrots. I stand in front of the door and rest my hand on the slick wood, listening. I am close, closer to perfection than ever before. Soon the door will open and I’ll walk through the hills in the sunshine, in my new skin, the city spread supplicant at my feet.
* * *
—
One morning when I wake up, there is a tanning bed in the living room, turned diagonally to fit in the small space, as sleekly compact as a coffin. Max stands beside it, looking down. I wonder how he managed to maneuver this enormous object up the stairs and into my room. Did he do it on his own? Has someone else been here? The air feels different somehow, disturbed, my head thick and cottony with too much sleep or something else. I can’t remember falling asleep the night before, can’t remember any of my dreams. Did Max put something in my dandelion root tea? The taste is so bitter it would be easy to disguise another, deeper bitterness within it. I sit up, smiling brightly at him, pushing the hair from my eyes. I say nothing, waiting.
“Good morning, sleepy!” he says.
He crosses toward the kitchen, where there is a cup of coffee waiting for me on the counter. He turns the handle toward me when he hands it over, protecting me from the heat of the cup. A small tenderness, and a new one. I wonder what it means. He takes a pair of bright blue tanning goggles, domed, with little pinhole eyes, out of his jacket pocket. I put them on. The world looks submerged.
“Take off your clothes,” he says. “There’s a bottle of lotion on the table. Put as much of it on as you can.”
I get out of bed, walk behind him so I’m not in his line of sight. I want him to know that I’m still in control of my body. That I’m agreeing with his instructions, not letting him tell me what to do. I take off my top first, then my pants, folding them and placing them on the pillow beside me. For a moment I hesitate, and then take off my underpants, too, rolling them into a neat little ball and hiding them under my pajamas, shy for no reason; after all, he’s seen them, he bought them for me. I slick my body with the thick white lotion, which has a cloying chemical smell, heavy with artificial flowers, like the air freshener they use in malls. For a moment I wait, standing there naked, expecting him to turn around and see the results of our hours of work, what the artifact of my body has become beneath the protection of Rosanna’s clothes. But Max stays still. I lower myself into the bed, the chill of it making me flinch, and pull the lid shut. The tight space makes me nervous. Tight spaces always have. But Rosanna isn’t claustrophobic.
“Okay,” I say, “I’m ready.”
I clamp shut my eyes and pretend.
I can hear Max moving outside, the switch flip on with a hum. The narrow space I’m in turns blue, as if I’m floating in water I can breathe. One breath. Another. I am feeling less anxious now. More like Rosanna. I lie there in the light for what feels like a long time, listening to the quiet noises of the machine, the sound of Max moving around outside. It’s strange to be so close to him without being able to see his face. To feel unwatched, for once.
“Max?” I say. “Tell me about her.”
We haven’t talked about Rosanna much since that first day, not the real Rosanna, the person who exists outside all those photographs, magazines. Rosanna, her private self. I almost don’t want to know what he thinks about her. Some strange feeling of propriety, like there should be some part of Rosanna I allow her to keep for herself, just as she doesn’t want to know about me. Maybe we’re better for each other in the abstract. But now, in this small light-filled space, I want her to feel real. To remind me why all this work is worth it. In here, I don’t have to look at Max’s face as he speaks. I don’t have to watch him trying not to notice the imperfections in mine. In here, he can tell me the truth. Outside, there is a light sound that I think might be his hand resting on the lid. A long pause before he speaks.
“You know,” he says. “You know so many things about her.”
“I don’t,” I say, “not really. I don’t know her the way you know her. I don’t know anything beyond the facts. Not the way you do. You know what she’s really like.”
Another silence. I can sense the weight of his palm.
“It’s a pointless question,” he finally says. “What is anyone like? What are you like?”
The light of the bed pulses soft against my closed eyes. I think for a moment about how he wants me to answer. I understand that there is no part of him that actually wants to know.
“I don’t know anymore,” I say finally. “Maybe I used to. But I’ve forgotten.”
“No,” he says, “you never knew.”
He drums his fingers on the lid of the bed, a quiet tapping like rain on a roof. It hasn’t rained once since I got to Los Angeles. I wonder if it ever does. The sound calms me. I never liked small spaces. I do no
t like them now. Rosanna is not claustrophobic, I tell myself once more. And so for now neither am I.
“No one ever knows,” says Max. “You think you know yourself, but you don’t. We tell ourselves stories about what we’re like. We assemble a set of anecdotes to show the people around us that we’re thoughtful, say, or clumsy, or have a good sense of humor. But it’s all fiction. The only true thing is just beyond your reach, the version of you held inside the people who decide to know you. That’s the best any of us can hope for. That someone decides we’re worth knowing. That they will tell our story. That they will help us decide who we are.”
“Like you did for Rosanna,” I say.
And heavy in my mouth is the thing I can’t say, can’t even whisper into the hard top of the bed. Like you will never do for me.
“Yes,” says Max.
The tapping stops.
* * *
—
My skin begins to blister from days and days in the fake sun. When I’m in the bed, Max reads to me, books that were Rosanna’s favorites from childhood, about little women and little princes and little houses on prairies and grasslands and in woods, everyone cozy, everyone safe. I grow to like the small space of the bed, the tenderness that comes when I am tucked away inside. Rosanna isn’t afraid of small spaces. And now neither am I. Afterward, Max cuts a hunk from the aloe plant he leaves on the windowsill. He spreads the thick cold gel onto the parts of my back that I can’t reach, as gentle and impersonal as a nurse. I always thank him, wanting him to think me nice. He never says anything back. But sometimes he rests his hand between my shoulder blades a moment longer than he needs to, the skin aching like it’s on fire where he touches but still, still. I hate when he lets go.