by Emily Beyda
* * *
—
I start with footage of Rosanna alone. There is more of it than I thought there would be. Hours. The camera switching on as I come into the empty rooms of my house in the hills, walking through the terra-cotta hallways, the lights coming on when the camera does so it looks like I’m carrying light with me, emitting it from my pores. I sit in the kitchen drinking tea or eating a small bowl of bright red sorbet with a narrow gold spoon. I talk to myself, my voice echoing as I memorize lines, practice for the next day’s interview or press appearance. Humming under my breath. Singing. I wonder if I am happy. Once, my face tense, I cross through the corner of the frame in the darkened living room with a bundle of herbs burning in my hand, my pale feet floating on the dark floor, lights flickering on as I pass, off as I exit the video’s frame. Behind me, the windows form a dark mirror, reflecting my rippling movement through the empty room, another Rosanna appearing and disappearing like a shadow. Does she know she is being watched? Does she know I am the one watching?
My favorite tapes are the conversations between Rosanna and Marie, whom I haven’t talked to since our hike. I want to. Every time Max makes me make plans with another casual stranger, I feel my heart sink. The only person I want to see is Marie. I keep taking my phone out of my pocket, clicking it on and off again, trying to gather the courage to ask Max if I can see her, chickening out. Watching her is almost as good. I feel us slowly growing closer across distance, across time. On the tapes we each mirror the lines of the other’s body, folded, fetal, our bodies closed parentheses, my body in the same pose here on the outside, curled up on the couch. There is a sameness to us. It was hard to see when I had viewed our interactions one at a time, spaced out over weeks. I hadn’t noticed it when I saw Marie in person, either; she was wholly outside me then. But our bodies are the same size, with the same taut, practiced grace of the expensively exercised. We speak in the same tones, make the same fluid gestures, laugh the same laugh—tinkling, artificial, charming—doubling and redoubling, the two of us, the same girl, mirrored, and here I am, watching, the same girl again, the three of us, the two, one. I have seen this before, girls disappearing into each other, slipping into one another’s spaces, packs of girls roaming the hallways and malls of my small town like wild dogs, untouchable, a girl group wall of sound, gorgeous, crushing, floating in a cloud of vanilla-scented body spray. There is a power in this disappearance. It lit them up from the inside. I had never had power like that before. I have it now. I think of all the women who want to look like Rosanna. The women who buy her makeup line, wear clothes that look like her clothes. Little Rosannas all around the country. All over the world. In the grand scheme of things, I am nothing new.
Marie and I have the same conversations over and over, a woman addressing herself in the mirror. There is something dreamlike about it: two identical bodies slowly, gracefully aging, our clothes, our hair, gradually evolving in concert as the world shifts around us. In the early tapes, we sit close, our knees always touching, easy with each other. Over time we move inexorably farther and farther apart. It’s like watching the slow drift of continents, an island disappearing over the horizon until there is nothing left but light and the water, an endless undifferentiated smear of blue where there used to be a world. What we talk about seems almost beside the point. We stick to the same territory, an empty space that can be circled and recircled, some deeper feeling lurking just beneath the surface, too precious to touch. If I watch carefully enough, maybe I will be able to remember what it was.
“How’s your love life?” I ask Marie, Marie asks me. “How are the boys?”
We both speak in the same arch tone, performing for some invisible audience, we are, we think, too smart to worry about these things, even though here we are, worrying.
“Oh my god,” we say. “It’s pathetic,” we say. “It’s something to do, I guess,” and it makes for good press, all of this endless seeing and being seen, but we would rather be here, alone, together. I pour Marie another glass of wine. She lifts it to her lips, my grace in her long pale arms. The mutual creation of a greater whole, a project beyond us both. And also nothing more than this. Two women sitting together on a couch, talking for long hours into the night.
But as the tapes go on, the tone of our conversations begins to change. Even though I know it’s coming, the same thing, the same time every night, it’s hard not to take it personally when the shift comes. Like it’s my own failure I’m watching. Like I have somehow influenced them. It would be better, I think, to stop watching earlier in the night, to end with us sitting close, looking into each other’s eyes, but I can’t, I keep watching over and over, as though by watching I can exert some influence, keep them frozen, somehow, close. And if I can do that, Marie will remember me. And if she remembers me, she will call.
What happens is this. Marie falls in love. I keep talking about the boys, the bars, the clubs with that same disengaged interest. I want her to know she’s still the center of everything for me. But she doesn’t seem to notice. The gossip she shares takes on a bitter edge. She talks about the failures of bodies, who is having trouble getting pregnant or can’t seem to shed the weight after they’ve done it, the poor things, the inadequate things. None of this, she is sure, will happen to her, to her husband, who almost seems as though he is taking up space in the room, sitting between us on that narrow couch. Her pity turns on me, too.
“I can’t imagine what it must be like for you,” she says, “still dating. I don’t know how you do it. There’s someone really special for you out there, I know it.”
The Rosanna on the screen rolls her eyes, but in the living room, I always lean forward.
“Yes,” I say, “I know it, too.”
Maybe I’ve already found her, I think. Maybe my special person is you.
There is a shot, a beat after, when her gaze shifts toward the camera and she seems to see me. Almost, I think. I am so close. If only I could reach toward her, put my hand on her arm, let her know how important she is to me. But I can’t. I just watch as she sits a little farther from Rosanna on the couch, over and over, every night. I think about how time spreads out, looped in on itself in a tangle like the silky lumps of an inexpertly folded fitted sheet. As I talk to Marie, I try to make my voice be an exact replica of Rosanna’s, saying better words, the words she should have said.
“I’m sorry I’m withdrawing from you,” I say. “I’m scared. I’m so afraid of losing you. Please, Marie, don’t let it happen. Don’t let me let you go this time.”
If time slips somehow, becomes unmoored, my voice will drift into that room, seamless, to that other place, and hearing me, Rosanna will echo, the two of us speaking with one voice, my old self and my new, like a parent in the audience of a shy child’s school play, mouthing along with her practiced lines, love flowing out from me so strong she can feel it, tenderness like a tidal pull. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t happen. Marie moves farther away, a baby on her lap, her husband’s ghost filling her body, and she’s speaking in his voice now, moving with his gestures, not mine. Rosanna and I finally sit silent. I can feel something growing inside me. Here I am, and there I am, too, on the other side of their screen. I am curled up in my dark room on my small couch, like a child, her child, in my womb. I wonder why I didn’t tell Marie how much I needed her. Why I never even tried. I search and search my brain, but my memories seem fogged somehow. There are things I cannot remember, no matter how hard I try.
* * *
—
I always watch the same tape last. The tape tucked underneath the mattress. The tape I had hidden from Max. It’s hard the first time. I’m not sure if it’s right, if I should watch it without his permission, Rosanna’s. I hold it in my hands for a long beat, turning it over. I should return it to him, slide it anonymously into the box. But I like that it is mine. Some part of Rosanna that belongs only to me. And when I watch it, I see
I was right—it’s different, somehow, from the others. The camera work is shakier, the quality less glossy, an experimental feeling to it, somehow, of someone working out the kinks. It is the only span of uninterrupted footage longer than twenty minutes, a full hour of Rosanna’s life. It is the best and only thing I own.
The tape starts with Rosanna sleeping. A long shot of her face, brow crinkled a little in the center, reacting to some dream. I can see her breathing, her chest moving up and down, slow, even breaths. It is both peaceful and strange to see her so helpless, watched by whoever was holding the camera. Watched now by me. The camera leaves the bedroom, moving through the dark house, down the whitewashed stairwell, the dark wood creaking under someone’s feet, out into the high-ceilinged spaces of the ground floor. It lingers here and there on a series of objects, a statuette of a greyhound, a closed door, the box that holds the doorbell, maybe, or some kind of alarm. Things Rosanna would see if she was the one holding the camera. It feels anthropological, scientific, investigating the marginal spaces of the life she’s made for herself. Making some kind of inventory. I like to think that it’s the first video, that she is younger, that the smooth openness of her face in the first section is some version of Rosanna that no longer exists. And someone is watching her. Someone is beginning to plan whatever enormous project I am a part of, whatever it is I can sense around me, looming up over the horizon, a mountain hidden by darkness.
Leaving the house, the camera goes into the garden. I can hear someone’s footsteps on the gravel, the sliding crunch as they turn to film the large front door, panning up the exterior of the house, past the archway in front where an enormous yellow lamp hangs, watery bright, a small sun. The camera pans across the side of the house, down again as the door opens, a vague movement in the bottom of the frame, like a glitch, an error, and there is Rosanna, standing in the hallway, body loose against the doorframe, light streaming out around her.
“Come to bed,” she says to the darkness. “I miss you.”
There is such a tenderness in her voice. A softness absent from the other tapes. I like to pretend she’s talking to me. She reaches forward. The yellow light from the lamp throws her face into sharp relief, so her beautiful face becomes a blunt-edged skull. The camera switches off. As my eyes close, I imagine Rosanna’s face, rising toward me out of the night.
* * *
—
I can’t sleep anymore. I hate to sleep. I hate the dreams that come from sleeping, the confused images that push themselves through to the surface of my mind no matter how many glasses of wine I drink, how many sleeping pills I take. My dreams stubbornly remain my own, a monstrous intrusion of my old self, little snatches of image, of the movie theater lobby, Scott, my mother’s face, the faces of women I haven’t spoken to in years appearing as their ghostly child selves, tight pigtails, smiling. I hate them all. I force myself to stay awake as long as I can. In the hour before the sun rises as I begin to succumb to exhaustion, I put a tape on mute and close my eyes. I lay with my hands floating in front of my face, two moths drifting toward the light of the screen, their fingers feelers, her face my moon. When I open my eyes, Rosanna’s hands are always in the same position as mine. I am getting closer. I can tell. She is closer than ever to me. The day will come when there is nothing left for me to remember. And when it does, Rosanna will be ready to slip into the body I leave behind, like water into an empty glass.
* * *
—
The idea of seeing Rosanna begins to obsess me. Even more powerful is the idea of being seen by her. I no longer imagine her coming to me. Now I dream of the day when I will walk through the gold-lit archway of that hidden house, cross through to the bright white kitchen. Of Rosanna, waiting there for me in the sunlight. Smiling. Before, when I thought my work was for Max, I liked to imagine calling him into the room with me. How I would sit down facing him, our bodies close, my back to the television. How I would turn the sound off and speak her words for him, she my mirror, I something better, closer, real. In that moment, she would become my reflection. My shadow. Stuck inside the prison of the screen, when I am close enough to touch. But something stranger than that is happening. Something is starting to shift inside of me, a bulb in frozen soil. It feels impossibly fragile. I have to protect it from the pressure of his gaze. So when Max is watching I make sure to throw in a few errors. Small things, nothing big enough to make him angry. I want him to think that this is hard for me. That this is work. I stumble just a little over a long word, or speak a moment after Rosanna, a moment before. My hands are a little heavier as they move through the air, laden with her. I let myself feel the extra weight.
“I’m in talks with my agent about signing a new deal with the makeup people,” we say together, our voices seamlessly holding the same pace. “The perfume…,” we say, and I pause a fraction of a second longer than she does before the next line: “…was such a hit.”
You can tell that there are two people speaking, but speaking together in sync, their voices similar enough. You can tell I am pretending. One woman pretending to be another. Not two women becoming one. Max smiles and nods, reassured. He’s seeing what he wants to see.
“They want to start selling it in drugstores,” we say. “But isn’t this supposed to be about aspiration? I don’t quite think that sends the right message. There’s nothing aspirational about fluorescent lighting.”
“She can’t tell me what to do, but—” says Rosanna.
“She can’t tell me what to do, and—” I say.
“Of course I value her opinion.”
“You slipped!” says Max. He sounds delighted, a small child catching an adult in a lie. I sigh, and he puts his hand, soothing, on the small of my back.
“I’m so stupid,” I say. “I’m sorry, I promise I’ve been practicing.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “You’re getting better. Let’s try again.”
Max doesn’t know. But I know. The time for practicing is over. I have done all I can. I am ready for a new kind of knowledge now.
* * *
—
The longer I spend in front of the television, the less certain I am about who exactly I am watching. The longer I watch, the more false her gestures seem, overly rehearsed, somehow, not quite right. Whatever it is that is most urgent about her presence, most real, has begun to seep through the screen, into my body. What is left there now is nothing more than a shadow. A ghost image, faded, like an overexposed Polaroid, film run through an X-ray machine at the end of a vacation, all those beautiful memories wiped clean. I don’t pretend to understand the mechanism of it, how she is making it happen, but when I watch the tapes now, I can no longer find Rosanna. There is nothing there to find. She is here with me, on the outside. I have set her free. She is here with me, in the silent corners of our apartment, the shadows sliding up the wall, the drip in the kitchen sink like the drumming of fingers, Rosanna all around me, her presence a menace and a comfort both. I sit in the dark feeling her tingle in my fingertips. Slowly I stop watching the footage on my own. I am happy enough to do it when Max asks, when he comes over with those ridiculous bags full of food he thinks we will like. But we have transcended the vile demands of my body. We smile and thank him, sit close on the couch. We watch me on those tapes, my awkward movements, a stiff falseness that couldn’t be anything but a copy, and who copied Rosanna better than I did, the old me, that strange, ungainly girl. Perhaps Max has found some way to film me practicing. He has inserted me, with all my glib, imperfect falseness, into the sacred spaces of Rosanna’s life. But no. This is magic. Beyond him. Beyond us both. I let my eyes drift, unfocused, over the bright surfaces of the screen. It is better not to watch. It is better to stay here in the dark. It is better to sit with my eyes closed, pretending, running through perfect scenes in my head. We never make a false step. We are always self-possessed and certain. We light everyone up with our shine. The two of us, t
ogether, one.
“Again,” Max says. “You were slow this time.”
“Sorry!” we say. “I know.”
It’s time for me to see Marie. Max won’t like it, but he’ll agree if I make him think it’s his idea. I cover the coffee table, the floors, with spread-out images of Marie from the magazines. Rosanna and Marie at lunch, picking up her kids from day care, the reams and reams of best-friend photo shoots. They grew up together in the public eye, both the only children of famous parents, and people feel attached to their connection. Their friendship is highly marketable. I leave the bottle of sleeping pills and an almost empty glass of water on the floor beside the futon. I lay myself down and close my eyes.
Max rushes to me, knocking over the glass. Water seeps across the photos. I wait to see if he will stop paying attention to me and make sure Rosanna’s image is saved, and he hesitates for a moment, a breath, not even that. I can feel him looking down. But he doesn’t pick the photos. He picks me. He lifts me up, shaking me. “Wake up,” he says, a note of panic in his voice. “Come on!” He’s not calling anyone, I notice, not asking for help. Not letting anyone know what he thinks I have done. A long and breathless moment passes. Slowly I open my eyes.
“What’s going on?” I say.