by Emily Beyda
“You’d better not text Bruce just yet,” Max finally says.
“What are you talking about?” I say. “Of course I need to text him. I always do.”
He lowers his voice even further. “Just wait,” he says, practically whispering. “Until we’re back at the house, okay?”
The car idles, the driver’s eyes shifty in the rearview mirror. Max’s face has gone totally white. He’s looking at me with something almost like terror.
“Okay,” he says, his voice returning to a normal volume, a high false cheer directed at the driver’s back, “let’s go back to Ms. Feld’s building. We’re done here.”
The driver nods, steering us back toward the gate through the empty streets of fake New York. Max places his hand over the screen, something urgent in his gaze.
“Rosanna,” he says, “just wait, okay? I’ll explain when we get back to the apartment.”
“The apartment building?” I say. “Is now really the time to visit that old thing? Can’t we just go back to the house? I’m tired.”
“I know you’re tired,” says Max, “I’m tired, too. But just wait. I’ll explain when we get there, okay?”
He reaches forward to take the phone from my hand, and as I shift away from him, I feel the cold brush of something alien against my skin, under my dress, the brush of metal on skin—the snake, I remember, nothing I would buy. It doesn’t belong to me. To who I think I am. Its ruby eyes flash bloody bright inside my head with a violence that feels like something breaking. I hear a noise, a click inside, a heavy door blown shut by wind, a rushing in my ears, a wrenching feeling, something deep inside me being torn out by the roots. I feel as though I have woken from sleep to find myself buried miles underground, the walls of my coffin close around me. And all at once I know that this is not my phone, this is not my necklace, this is not my neck, this is not my life. I am not who I think I am.
“Oh,” I say.
Max is looking at me, wide-eyed. He looks as though he’s seen a ghost.
“Of course,” I say. “I’m sorry. I must be tired, the lights—I, I got confused for a minute.”
I stop. There is a wetness on my face. Am I crying? I lift my hands to touch it and realize that my nose is bleeding, the enormous pressure in my head building until it broke and now there is blood, blood everywhere, and Max takes the phone from my lap, tilts my head back for me, pinches the bridge of my nose as the blood drips salty down my tongue. I do not move. I cannot breathe. Beside me, Max keeps staring. He looks at me like I’m someone he knows. They all do. But I’m not her. I’m not anyone at all.
* * *
—
Max stays with me that night, not saying much, sleeping close beside me, curled up on the floor. He stays until the interview airs, watching tapes of Rosanna, eating takeout, my normally strict diet lifted, a treat. I still feel shaky, unmoored from my body. Eating feels wrong, a grotesque imitation of life. Rosanna claims to love Chinese food, so Max orders it every night and we sit close, passing containers of dumplings, lo mein, orange chicken, white rice back and forth between us, our fingers shining with oil. I eat as much as I can, more than he does, so that he can see how effortless all this is, that I am a woman of endless ability, endless appetite. Whenever he steps out for a moment, I do burpees until I throw up.
* * *
—
When the show airs Max watches it with me. He has taped it live or had someone else record it, and the process of sliding the disk into the player, the whirring pause, makes it feel like any other tape, amplifying the doubled strangeness of watching myself, Rosanna, me as Rosanna, a collapsing hall of mirrors.
I’m up there saying things I don’t remember saying. (“We’ve sourced the leather from the most darling little tannery outside Marrakesh. I spent some time traveling in the region, climbing the Atlas Mountains to get a better sense of how my designs could reflect the landscape. It was an incredible experience.”) And saying things I do. (“I needed so much.”)
My memory stops about the time that the host starts crying. I watch myself lean toward her, gently put my hand on her knee. I watch myself murmur something reassuring. I watch myself go on with the interview as she collects herself. I watch myself do fine. I look natural, like Rosanna, like someone who belongs. I feel the glow of the world I briefly slipped into. I want to do it again. I want more.
* * *
—
When Max is around, I am more myself than ever, the version of myself that he has built, solicitous, careful, full of small tendernesses just for him. I make him tea, sit close beside him on the couch. I ask questions about Rosanna as if she is something outside of me, as if there is anything I could ask him about her that I don’t already know. I am having a harder and harder time remembering what I was before he came, but for the purpose of this little playacting re-creation of my old self, it doesn’t matter. That girl is dead. I create a new old self, someone mild and blank, the girl Max thought he was getting. The one he likes. I wonder whether Max remembers my old name. I won’t remind him if he doesn’t.
Each day I can feel myself getting sucked further and further into Rosanna’s life, like being gently pulled by a riptide out into the water of a warm sea. Swimming against the current is impossible. I am far too far from shore. It’s easier just to relax and wait for whatever is coming next, watching my old self recede into the hazy distance. Letting my new image rise from that water, as placid as Venus, floating foam on the waves.
Max watches me from the corner of his eye when he thinks I’m not looking, won’t notice. Pretending to think myself unobserved, I do small imperfect things, things Rosanna would never do, wiping my nose on my sweater sleeve, biting my nails, clearing my throat. Reminding him of the grotesque spaces of my body. I can see him gradually begin to relax. He stops watching me so closely. Now it is my turn to watch him. I stare straight ahead toward the screen, recording everything he does from the edges of my unblinking vision.
Outside my new body, life goes on. Max sends me out again on my small errands, and the paparazzi ask about the interview.
“Welcome back, Rosanna,” they say. “How does it feel?”
I smile into the halo flare of flashbulbs. I wave. A little girl asks me to sign her autograph book, so I do, my hand slipping easily into the swooping dashes of Rosanna’s signature, making a joke with her, giving her a smile. Each moment in the outside world disappears impossibly fast, like sugar melting on the tongue. Time flows around me. Water over a stone.
“It feels good,” I say.
* * *
—
Everything is different when I am alone. Something is growing inside me, white roots groping through dark earth. I close the room’s curtains and sit in the half dark, breathing, just breathing, until I feel myself flowing out of my body’s confines and making my way up toward the ceiling. Gone. That old filth, the old impurity of me, is lost now. Everything is eroding, slowly being washed away. I picture my old self like a black cloud, leaving my body with every exhalation. Opening a blank space for Rosanna to fill. I can feel her slipping into me, a hand into a glove. I sit there in the dark and I am sitting in the dark in my own room, the vastness of my house around me like an empty shell. Somewhere, in a small apartment down the hill, I can sense the presence of my body. She is breathing in and out. She is imagining me here, imagining her. She is waiting for me to arrive.
The phone has been sitting silent on the table since Max gave it to me. I put it in my purse when I leave the house, because that is what Rosanna would do, but it doesn’t feel real. It’s more of a totemic object, a symbol of something to come. I carry Rosanna’s phone the way my grandmother hung the medals of saints from the mirror of her beat-up Mazda to help her find parking spots, even though she never went to church. It’s a gesture, a reaching toward, some vague belief in a better life. I feel immediately guilty for thinking of this. R
osanna doesn’t remember her grandmother.
Max and I sit silent across the table at yet another lunch. There has been a certain awkwardness between us since that strange exchange in the back of the car, each of us watching the other for clues about what is coming next. The ease that we earned over those long slow weeks and months seems to have evaporated. We are like strangers now, careful with each other, watching what we say. I am beginning to resent Max, whose stifling presence feels more and more like a barrier between Rosanna and me. We don’t need him. He’s scared of that, I think. How secondary he’s becoming to all of this.
I’m eating another Caesar salad, using the crisp stems of the romaine to wipe up the oily dressing that pools at the edges of my plate. I’m so sick of Caesar salads. Max orders different meals every time. Surely there must be other foods, other things Rosanna enjoyed eating, or would enjoy now if she had the chance. I can feel the quiet murmur of what she really wants inside of me every time we look at a menu. Millet bowl, she says, seared ahi. But Max is comforted by the familiar, by routine, so I’m stuck having lunch in a series of identical expensively casual restaurants, eating the same meal over and over, like some kind of bizarrely bougie version of Groundhog Day. What a problem to have, I think. What a stupidly inconsequential problem. I smile across the table at Max, trying not to let any of this show on my face, struggling to look like I’m having a good time. In case anyone’s watching. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that someone’s always watching.
And then, in the bottom of my bag, I feel a buzz. My first thought, irrationally, is that some kind of animal has climbed into my purse and begun its attack, but I see Max’s smile as he looks down at his phone, placed faceup on the table, and gives me a significant look. I take out the phone. I look at the name on the screen. Marie. She’s seen the interview. She reminds me of our plans.
“Hike tomorrow?” she says.
Relief flashes through me. Finally. I want to learn about the Rosanna that this woman, her oldest, maybe only, friend knows. But isn’t this taking it a little too far? They’ve known each other so long—won’t Marie notice the small discrepancies between us? Or maybe she does know. Maybe this is Rosanna’s version of quality control. She can’t come see me herself, so she’s sending someone she trusts. I can picture Marie so clearly, typing out that text. There she is, in her big house in the hills somewhere close to mine, sitting at her kitchen island, children huddled around her feet. Maybe she looks tired. She looks tired, I decide. I am prettier than she is, now.
“Sure thing!” I write. “Can’t wait to see you, babe!”
Marie is imagining me here, too. And here I am, just like she pictures me. I try to confine my perceptions to the immediate perfection of my Rosanna body: my pink polished nails; the soft sleeves of my long white shirt; that amethyst banded ring glinting from the crook of my finger, her grandmother’s, whom she doesn’t remember, but at least she got this ring. My message lights up Max’s phone, and he gives me a slight, hesitant nod.
“Wait,” I say. “Did you want me to say no? Should I cancel on her?”
“Not at all,” he says, smiling, pretending to smile. “I mean, I think if you’ll have fun of course you should go, and it’s great that she’s the one to reach out. Puts us, you, in a position of power. So that’s good.”
Still, his voice is flat. I lower my own, lean closer to him, limp salad forgotten. “Max,” I say, “if you think I’m not ready for this, you have to tell me. That’s your job. I need you to let me know what you think I should do.”
“That’s not it,” he says. “We both know you’re ready if you want to be. You’ve worked hard. This had to happen sooner or later.”
“It’ll be fine,” I say. “I’ll do the same thing with her that I did at the interview.”
He gives me a sharp look.
“Okay, not the same thing, I know I wasn’t perfect, but the ratings were great, people are responding really positively! And I’ve watched—I’ve spent so much time with Marie. I’m comfortable with her. I know how this goes. Keep it superficial, right? I can do that. I have lots of practice with superficiality, let me tell you.”
“It’s just…,” says Max. He keeps his voice low. His eyes skate guiltily around the room. “I know that she can be…distracting for you. And I don’t want you to get distracted. We’ve been working so hard, rebuilding your image with the public. You need to focus, and if you start spending too much time with Marie, that might be difficult. She has taken a lot of your energy in the past. So yes, go on your hike, have a lovely time, but remember this is work. Don’t get carried away.”
He falls silent as the waiter comes by with the bill. We put it on my credit card, her credit card, a business expense. Rosanna’s signature flows easily from the pen, which is identical to every pen they give you in places like this, gold at both tips, embossed with the restaurant’s name. I still notice these things. I can’t help noticing, although I have long since ceased to be impressed.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I couldn’t forget I was working if I tried.”
* * *
—
The night before the hike, when I sleep, I picture Marie on the other side of the canyon in her big white bed beside her husband, my image a hologram, a memory, floating right in front of her face, too far away to touch. Instead of projecting myself into Rosanna like I usually do, I work on bringing myself closer and closer to Marie. So she can see my new face. Acclimate. I want her to recognize me, to know me as a person she can trust.
Max wakes me up in the blue dark, pacing back and forth at the foot of my bed, his footsteps anxiously uneven. These days I sleep more and more, but usually, even when I wake up late in the afternoon, I am alone. Max no longer stays over. He is busy with other things. Now, listening, I lie still for a moment, tracking the quiet sounds he makes, allowing myself to feel reassured. To pretend that nothing between us has changed. The light through my eyelids grows purple, bruised. Slowly I open my eyes. Max stands there, looking down onto the street. His back is hunched, his suit rumpled. I wonder if he’s slept. I make a small animal noise low in my throat to let him know I’m awake, I’m watching him, and he turns around, startled. He’s holding a bottle of unappealingly bright green liquid, and he passes it to me, pretending to smile.
“Here,” he says, “I got you a present.”
I sit up.
“I don’t want this,” I say. “Where’s my coffee?”
Rosanna is grumpy in the mornings, so I am grumpy, too. In my old life I practiced a kind of chipper unobtrusiveness learned from so many years of living in other people’s houses. It has prepared me well for my new role, a new kind of exhaustion where niceness is not the only thing I have to pretend. This morning I feel fine. If anything, I’m happy, thinking about Marie waking up from dreams of me, imagining my face. I want to share my excitement with Max. But I can’t, so I tell myself it’s luxurious to be in a bad mood, to express some petty need and know it will be instantly, unquestioningly met. And as always with my meaningless requests, Max complies. There is a possibility of a whole new kind of tenderness hidden within my badness, if it is the right kind of badness, deployed at the right time. But tenderness is no longer the only thing I need from him. And I am so, so tired.
“Drink up,” Max says, handing me a lukewarm to-go cup. Where does he even find a cappuccino at five in the morning? He is the master, I think, of insignificant miracles. “And then I need you to at least pretend to be interested in this juice. Marie loves the stuff. She says it’s good for inflammation. That’s her big thing right now, inflammation. Hopefully if she sees you drinking this, it’ll start her talking. That’s the main thing. Keep her talking. Don’t let her ask too many questions.”
As he talks, he looks just past me, his gaze drifting beside my ear. I wonder if I look more convincingly like her in his peripheral vision. If that’s as much
of me as he can stand.
“She’ll ask me, though,” I say. “She has to ask. I’m her best friend, and it’s been such a long time. She’s going to ask me a lot of questions, about where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing.”
There is a meanness in this, sneaking around his justifications, not letting him mollify himself. This is hard. This is going to be hard, and I want to make him admit that. I want him to give me some credit. He twists his hands in his lap, and I slide the blunt rim of the bottle between my lips and drink. Everything feels exaggerated, the smooth bite of glass, the liquid it brings up into my mouth, bitter and sandy-textured with the ground-up grit of kale stems. I wonder if I am more nervous than I am allowing myself to believe.
Max stands and walks away from me to face the window again. He gazes down into the quiet street. I wonder what he sees outside. How does the view look to him, someone with so many other things to look at? Who can go out into that wide world any time he wants, who needs no permission but his own. Does he notice all the small details I cling to, the changing shapes of the clouds, the cracks in the street where the weeds poke through? Does he see what I see? I don’t believe he does.
“Stay focused on your talking points,” he says. “Keep the conversation light. Marie’s not really the curious type, so it should be easy to misdirect her. And Rosanna never really opened up to Marie. She couldn’t. Rosanna didn’t trust Marie, and you shouldn’t, either. There were very few people she trusted.”
Here his voice goes softer, fond. He thinks that he was one of those people. I wonder if he’s right. I think of Rosanna, lonely then, alone now. Poor darling, I think. Poor thing. Rosanna wanted Max to think she trusted him. So that’s what I want him to think, too. I trust you, I think. At least I want to believe I can.