by Emily Beyda
The interviews were the first part of Rosanna I knew, dimly back home, and then here, with the magazines, the tapes. I have practiced her lines on waiters and strangers and paparazzi and even Max, until my body moves the right way without my telling it what to do, my mouth forms the right words. I raise my eyebrows the way she does in moments of coyness, tipping her head. Everyone will see me. I will sit in front of them—Rosanna’s fans, her public—and let them call me by her name. Inside everything is quiet and still and blank, white noise in a white room. Inside I am fine I am fine I am fine.
“Is that what Rosanna wants me to do?” I ask.
“Yes,” Max says.
“And you’re not convinced.”
He shrugs.
“Well, you’re out in the world now. Someone has to do it. We don’t really have a choice.”
“I’ll do whatever you think is best for her,” I say.
I notice that I’ve been clutching at my chest, where the necklace is hidden under my clothes. I let it go quickly, dropping my hand like I’ve burned the skin. Max doesn’t seem to notice. I lean my head into his shoulder, smell the warm smell of him, soft, against my face. I think about Rosanna’s father lifting her up. I think about biting him hard, puncturing the thin skin of his neck.
“Don’t worry, I’m ready,” I say.
* * *
—
Max books me on a daytime talk show to promote Rosanna’s new handbag line. I’ll be sitting down with a woman who has interviewed Rosanna a handful of times. Max says this is so we will have tapes to watch, specific conversations to refer back to, so I can see the way Rosanna conducts herself, how their conversational patterns play off each other, the tactics she will use to try to trap me into saying things I don’t want to say. This seems like a dangerous game to me. She has met me before, she knows me. She may recognize that something isn’t right. Max says this is silly, that I will do fine.
“She’s like anyone else that you’ve met so far,” he says. “The photographers, the women who work in the stores. She doesn’t care about Rosanna. She doesn’t even know her. She is familiar with Rosanna the brand, that’s all, the same way everyone else is. She’ll see what she’s expecting to see.”
* * *
—
Max starts coming over every night, bringing tapes, pictures of the handbags for me to study, sample swatches of leather dyed a muted rainbow of shades. I still go out during the day, but not as much, just a few small errands here and there, enough to be seen, enough that people remember me. Otherwise I stay inside, watching interview footage until the sun sets and Max comes by with takeout, suspiciously cheerful. I don’t ask him what he’s been doing all day, and he doesn’t ask me. We sit on the couch, slowly working our way through a list of practice questions, strategizing together. Or, rather, he strategizes and I nod along, trying to pay attention to the videos of Rosanna playing on the screen, forming my own ideas of how she would behave.
“We’re building a redemption narrative,” says Max.
“Redemption?” I ask. “Does Rosanna need redeeming?”
“No,” says Max, “and we want to make it clear that you’re not asking for forgiveness. You haven’t done anything that needs forgiving. You’re asking for understanding, trying to reconnect to your fans, helping them sympathize with all you’ve gone through. Ideally we would have a cry break somewhere in the first third of the show so you can build an emotional arc: hope, the sadness of returning to a difficult past, then optimism, cut with a little charming anxiety about the future.”
The emotional space I’ve occupied as Rosanna so far has mostly been confined to surface-level aspiration. Looking pretty and buying things, I can do. The rest is uncertain. More and more, I can feel her heaviness inside me, hear the quiet buzz of her truth, but I am not sure if that will be good enough. I don’t think Rosanna’s truth is anything close to what Max thinks it should be.
“That’s a lot,” I say.
“Don’t worry,” says Max. “Everyone will be rooting for you to succeed. We’ll make sure you get the questions beforehand and that you have practice answering them. It will be easy.”
“So what am I supposed to tell her about why it’s been so long? I know, rehab, exhaustion, whatever, but I’ve seen the tapes—she’s going to want more information.”
Max gives me a brittle little smile. “We’ll go over it,” he says. “But nothing specific. It’s important to protect Rosanna’s privacy. Just hit the buzzwords. Addictive personality, enabling, needing a break. Push through until she gets bored asking. You’ll be great. Everyone will love you. Everyone loves Rosanna.”
“Max,” I say, “what happens if this doesn’t go well? What will happen if I fail?”
He looks at me for a long time. “Don’t,” he finally says.
* * *
—
Our main problem is that it isn’t enough for me to mirror the old Rosanna, to be perfect in every remembered detail. That had been what the paparazzi wanted, what we needed for marketable photographs, for brief appearances in the lives of people invested in the consistency of Rosanna’s brand the same way Max is, clinging to a version of Rosanna that exists only in photographs. But the entire premise of the interview is that I have changed. I have been through a difficult time and come out a survivor, born again. Max doesn’t seem to understand this. He doesn’t want realism, he wants reproduction. Something he can control. When we run through the footage of the interviews, he wants my answers, my intonations, to be exactly the same as Rosanna’s had been, suffused with the same false weight. He wants me to return as if I had never been gone. Like nothing has changed, and I can slip back into my old life uninterrupted, unpausing a film. He coaches me with an insistence on precision, having me mirror Rosanna’s smallest movements, making me copy them over and over and over until my body starts to ache. Again, he keeps saying, again, putting his hands on my shoulders, turning me, pushing my head to one side. The weight of him is immense.
“And how is your relationship with your father?” the interviewer and Max say, leaning forward on the couch, a look of tender concern on their faces.
* * *
—
I have never met Rosanna’s father. I haven’t seen my own father in years. Rosanna herself didn’t see her father much. He was married to a woman closer to her age than her mother’s and had two young children to worry about. Rosanna was grown up. She didn’t need him. His appearances on the tapes are sporadic and brief, pockmarked with awkward silences, father and daughter staring past each other out of frame. He never comes to her house, and she doesn’t go to his. Most often they have breakfast, sitting across from each other, not saying much. I think of one of these tapes, Rosanna’s father uncomfortable, twisting his coffee cup in his hands. She has just called off her engagement, although why she felt necessary to tell him this, I cannot say. She can’t be deluded enough to expect he’ll be a source of comfort. Surely not. He sighs when she tells him, not looking at her face.
“That’s too bad, kiddo,” he says.”Another one bites the dust, eh?”
“Wow, Dad,” says Rosanna. “Gee, a series of loveless relationships with emotionally withholding men whose approval I crave. I wonder where that pattern could have come from?”
Her dad raises his hands in a gesture of mock defeat. “Hey hey, maybe you could be a little less picky, that’s all I’m saying. You’re thirty, right?”
“Twenty-eight,” she snaps.
Rosanna’s father scans the room, seeming to hope he’ll see someone he knows, someone who will rescue him from this person, his daughter, this strange woman he is failing to understand.
* * *
—
“I don’t see my dad often,” I say. “We’re both busy people, but I will always love him and be there for him. And he for me. At the end of the day, I’m a daddy’s girl.”
As I speak, I picture the tension in their shoulders, sitting hunched together in that booth, their mirrored body language giving them away.
But Max frowns. “No,” he says, “that’s not the right tone. Not at all. Rosanna’s father is someone people know. They’re picturing his face as you talk about him. He has this great public presence, totally gregarious, warm. You need to confirm what they believe about him, about you.”
I try again. “I don’t see my dad often.”
I pause, loading my voice with heavy, toffee-sticky regret.
“We’re both busy people.”
Nostalgia.
“But I will always love him and be there for him, and he for me.”
Fondness. Solicitude.
“At the end of the day, I’m a daddy’s girl!”
I land on a tight high note, a gymnast sticking the dismount with triumphantly raised arms.
“Better,” says Max. “Try again.”
Again. This time my voice hews exactly to the recorded Rosanna, the same inflections, pauses, breaths. I am the Rosanna that has always existed, the Rosanna who was interviewed before she and her father grew more and more distant, gradually becoming estranged. The Rosanna Max wants so badly to know. I wonder what she will think about my interpretation, hidden away in that vast and silent house, watching that old false vision of herself repeated back to her, always perfect, always the same, a flock of jabbering parrots, an infinitely repeating hallway lined with mirrors. Wasn’t that Rosanna the version of herself that destroyed her? She had hated being zipped inside that too-tight skin.
It seems wrong to make her watch me repeat her mistakes. A small betrayal. So when Max leaves for the night, I rewatch the tapes he has left with me. I make edits, answering questions the way I know Rosanna wants them answered now. It feels better. It feels true. I can sense her somewhere close, moving inside me with purpose, filling me with a strange propulsive energy that keeps me up until the sun begins to rise. Max wants me to be the Rosanna he understands. But I know the truth. I am not that dead and troubled girl. I am Rosanna’s only true ally, the real Rosanna, the living Rosanna, the Rosanna who waits for me in that silent house, longing to be set free. I will say the words she wants me to say. I will let her truths fall heavy from my lips. I will be newer and I will be better. I will do whatever it is I discover she wants me to do.
I feel fine, excited even, until the moment we pull up to the sound-stage door. The car idles in the wide space between two buildings, their high arched roofs hunched against the low gray sky, the red recording light shining bloody on the stucco wall. At the gate, they had waved us through with no hesitation. “It’s good to see you back, Ms. Feld,” the guard said. We drove through a fake New York and a fake Old West, past a big fake pond that Max told me stood in for the Red Sea when they still made Bible movies, two plexiglass walls under the surface neatly slicing the water in half, a manufactured miracle. A woman taps on the window and the driver rolls it down. She’s close to my old age, younger than Rosanna, thin, blond, her hair gathered into a messy ponytail. She looks tired.
“Hi, all!” she says. “I can take Rosanna from here. Ms. Feld, if you’ll follow me?”
I look to Max. He wasn’t expecting this, I can tell by the way he isn’t looking at me, his back hunched tense over the light of his phone. He wants me to say something, insist he come with me, I can tell. But Rosanna is a professional. Being alone wouldn’t bother her at all. I can’t let it bother me, either. It’s better for me to be alone with my intuition, feeling my way toward whatever it is Rosanna wants me to do here.
“See you later, Max,” I say.
Max just nods, his lips set in a tight line.
* * *
—
The blond woman takes me to a room with my name on the door. It’s cramped inside, smaller than my room, but not by much, with no windows, a large mirror to create the illusion of space. There’s a plate strewn with slices of fruit, glinting like flesh in the reflected light. I walk past the woman and arrange myself on the couch. To my surprise, she sits down beside me with her clipboard on her lap, so close our knees almost touch. There’s a strong smell of deodorant and drugstore perfume, synthetic and vanilla sweet, rising off her skin. It’s nauseating. I feel the front of my head begin to pound. Rosanna is sensitive to artificial fragrances.
“I’m here to prep you for the show,” the woman says. “I understand that your assistant handled our pre-interview phone call, which isn’t super usual for us, so I hope you’ll bear with me. I wanted to make sure you were up to speed with the topics we’ll be discussing later.”
“Max and I have gone over it,” I say. “We’ll be focusing on the handbag line, right? And I’d love for us to talk about how well they fit in with the rest of my leather goods brand.”
The woman’s perfume seems to be growing more and more intense, filling the room, a sweet miasma like the steam rising off a pot of caramel. She nods, makes a note on her clipboard. “Perfect,” she says. “Our audience is all about female entrepreneurship and empowerment, so they’ll be all over that. Next, she wants to ask what you’ve been up to since our last interview with you. I understand you have a few topics that are off-limits, but—”
“Whatever Max told you on the phone,” I say.
I don’t mean to be rude, but the smell is becoming overwhelming. I’m used to being around strangers by now, but the closeness of her is too intense. I’m losing focus, losing track of the quiet electrical hum Rosanna makes inside me, and if that happens, if I lose her, this interview will be a disaster. I try to sound calm, but even I can hear the tremor in my voice, every feeling in me pressing close to the surface, a bruise. The woman looks confused, setting her clipboard down. I can tell she’s wondering if the rumors are true. If I’m damaged beyond repair.
“People often change their minds about what they feel comfortable discussing,” she says, careful. “I just wanted to check with you in case you had any new thoughts.”
“Thank you,” I say.
Rosanna would be calm, so I am calm, forcing my fluttering heartbeat to slow, like I’ve heard monks can, meditating, controlling even the most intimate and automatic of their bodily functions with the strength of their faith. It’s not my heartbeat. It’s not my heart.
“I appreciate your checking in,” I say. “But I think we’re all set.”
I stand up, offering her my hand. Although I’m calmer now, I need, very badly, to be alone. There’s something about this woman that makes me nervous, with her smug efficiency, her lists. She has a plan, too. And it might not intersect with ours. I tell myself I will be fine. We will stick to the script Max has written for us. I will make Rosanna’s corrections as I go.
“Of course,” she says. But her manner has changed. She grips her clipboard with tight hands. At the door, she pauses, turns, with a guilty look, speaking softly. I have to lean closer to hear her, inhaling that awful perfume.
“I know I shouldn’t say this, but it’s not too late. If you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to. People back out more than you’d expect.”
It’s nice that she’d put her job on the line to tell me I can quit if I want to. But nobody is nice just to be nice here. If she’s nice, it means she wants something from me. If she wants something from me, it means I have power. I feel the confidence returning, Rosanna growing stronger. I sit up straight on the soft cushions.
“You’re sweet,” I say. “But I’ll be fine. Just pre-show nerves. I’ll see you out there!”
She smiles again, looking almost disappointed.
“Sure thing,” she says.
The door closes behind her.
I check my makeup in the mirror, look at my phone to make sure I haven’t gotten any texts from Max. There’s nothing. He must be confident that I’ll do fine without his help. That or he’s angry, he wants me to f
eel abandoned, on my own. Either way, I don’t care. I’m not alone. I’ll be fine. In the mirror, I watch myself take a slice of pineapple from the plate, the slight, strange delay between when I put it into my mouth, the bright yellow disappearing between my perfect lips, and when I taste it, acid, sharp, eating away at the flesh of my tongue. A lag like a skipping record. In the mirror my reflection looks back. It is like watching an image of Rosanna. I eat another piece, painful, sweet. I look into my eyes. I am beautiful, I tell myself. We are beautiful. We are beautiful, and I will be fine. Another knock on the door, another woman younger than I look, older than I am. She tells me it’s time to get ready for the show.
* * *
—
It’s weirdly bright outside my dressing room, a phalanx of spotlights shining down like an artificial sun. And beyond the lights, nothing, the ceiling so far away it disappears into black. The set is supposed to resemble the hostess’s apartment, wide windows overlooking green screen, an orange rug, a golden statuette of a dog. Beside the dog, a small blue porcelain lamp, switched on, its yellow light shining uselessly into the larger white light, which comes from high beyond the reach of the imagined ceiling. Outside the ring of lights, there are chairs for an audience, rising over me like the slow slope of a mountain, but no audience in them. I look for Max, but the lights are too bright to see beyond. I can’t see him, but I tell myself he’s there, picture his face in the back row, watching, ready to intervene if anything goes wrong, not close enough to tell me what to do.
My interviewer is here already. I won’t say she’s waiting for me—her back is turned as she speaks to a crowd of staffers, among whom I recognize the messy blond hair of the woman from my dressing room—but I see the way she stiffens when I approach, her shoulders moving back just slightly. She knows I’m here. I have learned to read the signs. She is making me wait for just a moment, just long enough for me to notice I’m waiting, before she turns, smiling, taking my hands in hers, pulling me close, kissing me on both cheeks. I can feel her every movement before it happens, so I am ready to react with graceful precision to her gestures, easy in her hands. Still, the smell of her is overwhelming. I’m still getting used to dealing with the realities of strangers’ bodies, their deodorant, their body wash, that persistent undercurrent of sweat. The interviewer smells like her assistant did, a more expensive version of that sweet scent—heavier, more significant, a scent that clings to your clothes, claims space. I can feel it latching onto me, burrowing close against my skin, obscuring Rosanna’s own smell. I smile, breathing through my mouth, trying to ignore my aching head.