by Emily Beyda
I let him watch me survey the chaos, allow the awareness of what has happened while I was sleeping to break sharp across my face.
“Oh my god,” I say, “I’m so sorry, this looks totally crazy. I thought I would be able to clean up before you got back. I was just looking through some old magazines and fell asleep before I could take my pill. I’m so sorry, Maxie, you know I try to keep things clean, the way Rosanna likes.”
He is holding me in his arms, still afraid to let go. He is shaking, just a bit, the afterburn of adrenaline coursing through his veins.
“It’s okay,” he says, “I thought…”
He stops speaking, just shakes his head, dispelling a bad dream. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
“Yeah,” I say, “I’m cool.” I pull myself slowly off the couch and start picking up magazines.
“Why are you looking at these?” asks Max.
“I know,” I say. “It’s stupid, right? But I’ve been worrying.”
Max looks at me cautiously. “What are you worrying about?”
“It’s nothing,” I say. “It’s probably nothing, but—”
I gesture at the magazines. “I’ve been wondering what we can do about the Marie problem.”
“Problem?” Max says.
“She still hasn’t called. And I’m starting to think it might look strange—normally we spend so much time together.”
Max is quiet for a minute. “Well, you’ll have to see her eventually,” he says.
“Yes,” I say, “I know.”
I wait. I let the silence build between us.
“But more than occasionally, right?” I say. “I know how much she meant to Rosanna’s public. All this.” I gesture. “It’ll look odd, won’t it? If I don’t reconcile with her. Or should we find someone else? A new friend? A new Marie?”
He looks at me strangely. I had imagined us together choosing some likely candidate from among Rosanna’s acquaintances for her to get publicly closer to, holding auditions, coffee dates, seeing whose image got us the most pages in the tabloids. But now I see what he has heard me imagine, a replacement for Marie as I have replaced Rosanna. Another me. The look Max gives me is full of horror.
“I mean, she can’t be her only friend, right?” I say quickly. “There must be someone else I can spend time with.”
His face settles. “Of course there is,” he says. “But still, people love Rosanna and Marie.”
He scans the gleaming sprawl of images. There we are, laughing, arms around each other, gazing into the camera like it’s the face of a third friend, welcoming the public in.
“It wouldn’t be the same,” Max finally says. “Rosanna wouldn’t like it.”
“I’m just nervous, I guess,” I say. “It feels so awkward, reaching out.”
“Here’s what we’ll do,” says Max.
He takes my phone. As he scrolls through old texts, I try to figure out how long it’s been since the hike. A little under a month—long, but not too long. I am getting used to socializing again. I am gaining my sea legs. Marie is kind to me, she’ll understand that I had to make her wait. Max sifts through the pile to find a magazine that isn’t water-damaged. He takes my phone and snaps a picture, the two of us looking impossibly young. In the picture, I sit next to Marie, side by side on a red leather banquette. It is late at night, and I lean my head against her shoulder. We both look exhausted. Happy. Totally natural together.
“Coffee?” he types. “The usual spot? Miss you, lady!”
She responds in less than a minute. “Of course!” she says. “I miss you, too.”
* * *
—
Marie and I meet at the small café at the foot of the canyon in which my apartment and, presumably, Rosanna’s house are hidden, an old building with amber-tinted windows obscured by waxy-leaved ivy, roots burrowing deep into the soft brick of the exterior. The menu is full of weird seventies relics like salads composed of ham and black olives and cottage cheese. It is not a particularly cool place. But it’s quiet and nearly always empty, and the waitresses don’t care who we are. In the old days we would meet there to nurse hangovers and talk about our problems unobserved. It’s the perfect place to rekindle a lapsing friendship, recall fond memories. Twenty minutes, Max says. He waits in the car outside. From now on, I understand, Max will always wait in the car whenever I meet with Marie. Neither of us will acknowledge this. We will act as though it is mere coincidence that he happens to have the time to sit close to wherever we are and wait. I will pretend this is normal, something Rosanna wants. I will not allow myself to resent him.
Marie sits with her back toward me, reading the menu with what seems like unusual concentration. She smiles when she sees me but doesn’t stand to give me a hug. I sit close to her on the same side of the booth, and after hesitating for a moment, Marie pours creamer into my coffee for me.
“I remember,” she says. “Two of these nasty little powdered vegetable oil things, right, and lots of sugar.”
“Hey,” I say, “at least it’s vegetables! And sugarcane is also a plant.”
She takes the packet from me.
“Here,” she says, “let me. You have to be careful of your nails. I’m sure you haven’t been taking care of them. They’re already brittle and you wear way too much nail polish. Have you been rubbing jojoba oil on your cuticles, like we talked about?”
I hold my hand up speculatively in front of the window. Against the glass, the vines creep, feeling their way toward us. My nails look fine to me. “I don’t even know what a jojoba is,” I say.
“Ha-ha,” says Marie. “Sure you do. I can tell you’ve been using it, they look much better.”
“See,” I say, “I told you Max was reading your blog. I bet he picked some up for me and I didn’t even notice.”
Marie looks away when I say his name. I feel an odd dip of disappointment; it’s important to me, I realize, that they like each other, or at least get along well enough so as not to get in my way.
“Anyway,” Marie says, “how are the renovations going?”
“Oh god,” I say, “don’t ask. My contractor is refusing to put in the ridiculously expensive hand-painted Portuguese bathroom tile I ordered last month, which was, by the way, a nightmare to get through customs, and now he can’t work with it, the backing’s warped. It’s always something with that man.”
Marie laughs. “See,” she says, “you should’ve let me come over and consult before you got started. I have a great eye, everybody says so. And I know all the best contractors. Remember how helpful I was with the renovations of that disastrously ugly apartment building you bought down the hill? We totally restored it to its former glory.”
So Rosanna owns my apartment. The thought is reassuring—is it possible that she restored an entire building just for me?
“I remember,” I say, and it’s like I do. I can see Marie’s hand in everything now that I consider it: the original wood flooring; the period-appropriate wavery glass, with the pockets of imperfect bubbles near the center of the top pane in the kitchen. “It’s beautiful. You’ll have to come over and see it some time. The place could use a little sprucing up.”
The waitress comes over to refill our coffees, and it’s not very good, thin and brown and vaguely burned-tasting, but we both nod yes and sit silent as she pours, out of habit, the old habit of feeling watched. When she leaves, Marie squeezes my knee under the table.
“I totally get it, though,” she says. “How stressful renovations can be. I remember when we redid our kitchen, I swear I thought we were going to get a divorce. Edward has such a particular sense of how everything needs to look. He’s all about minimalism, you know, to the point where nothing is functional, and he wanted this sleek ‘James Bond villain bachelor pad’ look and I swear I thought, Well, that’s it, he doesn’t want to have children! But we compromised, we made
it through. You will, too.”
I notice that she lifts her hand off my knee when she says her husband’s name. He stops us from talking frankly when we are all together, and intercedes even when it is the two of us alone. His body fills the space that has grown between us.
“I know I will,” I say. “I have to.”
Marie takes a sip of coffee, makes a face, and smiles at me. It really is pretty bad.
“Still,” she says, “why now? You’ve already got a lot on your plate. Wouldn’t it be better to wait until things are more settled?”
I think of the dark house from the videos. Of the closed windows, the shut front door like a stopped mouth, like the castle in Sleeping Beauty, a place where plants never die and fruit never rots and dust never settles on the gleaming marble surfaces of the kitchen. A dollhouse, a snow globe. A dead place. As dead as the still white surface of a salt sea, paved with the bones of long-dead creatures, glowing white under the bright light of the moon.
“I don’t really think I had a choice,” I say. “It’s too much like the old days, somehow, living there. I found myself falling into bad patterns even when I didn’t want to. I didn’t feel like I was living in it. I felt like I was haunting it. The only way for me to stay there and survive is to change everything about it. So it’s a reflection of the person I am now, not whoever I used to be. I don’t think either of us liked that person very much.”
Marie takes my hand. “Don’t say that,” she says. “Of course I did.”
“Really?” I say. “You did? And that’s the reason we’re finally hanging out regularly for the first time in a year, because I was such a delight?”
She laughs. “Okay, you got me there. We’ve had our rough patches. But I always cared about you.”
Someday I will live in Rosanna’s house. I will eat off her dishes. I will sleep in her bed. I will throw open the windows, let the outside in. The house will live again. Everything will be the same as it used to be.
“And now?” I say. “Do you like me now?”
Marie looks at me for a long time before she responds. And then she smiles again, and I can feel sensation rushing back into my numb fingertips. “I didn’t think it was possible,” she says. “But I like you even more.”
“I like you, too,” I say. “More than before. Because now I feel like I really know you.”
Marie looks at me strangely. “What do you mean by that?” she asks.
I take a sip of my coffee, casual. I choose my words carefully.
“I don’t know,” I finally say. “I guess just that I’m trying really hard to know you. You. Not my old idea of who you were, what you could do for me. And I want you to know me, too. The real me. Not some old idea of who I was or should be.”
I think of the dead house, Rosanna hidden away inside. The words press against my lips, heavy as a stone on my tongue. I have a strange and powerful urge to confirm what she must already suspect, to tell her my true name. I can hear traffic passing outside. It is slow here, except for tourists who stop and walk into the middle of the street to take pictures of themselves standing underneath the Hollywood Sign, open palms splayed empty toward the sky. People post warnings in the street higher up—STREET CLOSED, LOCALS ONLY, NO ACCESS—all lies. Down here no one honks. We understand what it feels like to have come so far. Close, so close, but not quite close enough. A place where everyone tells you you’ve arrived, but nothing is quite like you imagined it would be. We smile at them in their badly parked rental cars, and most of us, I think, wish them well.
“I do know you,” says Marie.
“Of course you do,” I say. “Better than anyone.”
We stop for a beat outside the car and pose for the photographers, Marie wraps her arms around my shoulders, the two of us smiling into the camera’s eye. “Stepping Out: BFFs Rosanna and Marie Spotted on a Catch-Up Coffee Date,” they say. Max will be pleased, I know it. I can’t quite guess how Rosanna will feel.
* * *
—
Soon we are together all the time. And more and more, I am with Max as well. I still have my time in public, of course, when I’m alone apart from the strangers watching me, putting my face out into the world. But Max seems to shadow me, his blurry image hovering in the background of every picture, the unspeaking third in the triad of Marie and me, my haunting, my unholy ghost. I tell myself it makes me feel safe, knowing he is watching, always close.
It is when I am with Marie that I feel the most aware of Rosanna’s presence inside me. She isn’t with me much when Max is around. When I am in the apartment alone, I can feel her close, observing, her presence somewhere in the dark spot of my eyes, wherever it is I cannot see, but not part of me. With Marie, she is right there, warming up my empty spaces with her light, her heat, telling me what to say and how to say it, the two of us one. I can never explain this to Max, but I need Marie now. When I’m with her, I relax into the version of myself she knows. Marie loves us. I know this by the way she listens so closely, her hand on mine, the attentive softness of her. We get coffee and go on walks. We are photographed together in Rosanna’s favorite stores. I buy her a little gold bracelet with dark resin beads strung along it like tiny eyes. It’s very expensive.
“It’s nothing,” I say.
Everyone wants something from Rosanna. Not Marie. Marie just wants Rosanna for herself, the same way Max and I do. Shouldn’t Max be pleased by this? I watch him go tense when the phone lights up, see the hesitating tightness in his hands. He wants to keep me for himself. He wants me in the meetings he sets up, making money for him; he wants me to launch products, do interviews, keep the complex machinery of Rosanna’s empire humming smoothly while she rests. He does not want me to be a person like Rosanna was. He does not want me to be a person at all. I pretend that I have not realized this. To Max, it must appear that I think myself free, that I cannot see the bars of my gilded cage. He cannot know that secretly I am negotiating the space, each day giving myself just a little more room, just a little more freedom to breathe.
* * *
—
I go to dinner at Marie’s, sitting at the kitchen table in a warm circle of light. Shadows creep close to the soles of our bare feet. Marie keeps a shoe-free house. The two of us talk back and forth, rapid-fire, reminiscing. Carried along by the familiar rhythms of our speech, I feel myself start to relax. I loosen my hold on rationality, let Rosanna take over.
“Oh my god,” I say, “that apartment was such a shithole.”
“Shithole is relative,” says Marie, “when Daddy’s paying the rent.”
“Come on,” says her husband, “no swearing in front of the kids.”
“That’s right,” says Marie. “Stop swearing, Rosanna.”
“Oh, I’ll stop swearing,” I say. “But remember who was paying your rent back then, Mommy.”
Marie laughs. She must be remembering the days when she was nineteen years old and had a mother who wanted to show her fan base she believed in tough love. I let her live in my guesthouse until her career took off and she got a guesthouse of her own.
“That’s not the same thing,” she says. “And you know it.”
Her husband interrupts. “Wait,” he says, “who was paying your rent?”
“Well, not paying paying,” says Marie. “But my mom was so withholding, you know that. Rosanna helped me out sometimes.”
“That’s a relief,” says her husband. “I thought you had a secret sugar daddy.”
“I do now,” says Marie.
She winks at him. I pretend I am being sarcastic when I roll my eyes.
The nanny is waiting in the other room, and midway through dinner, after the children have finished all the beige things on their plates and abandoned their heirloom carrots with one polite bite, they are excused to go play with her, leaving the three of us alone.
“At last,” say
s Marie, “Rosanna is allowed to swear.”
“Not you, though,” says her husband. “Keep it clean.”
“Naturally,” says Marie. “I’m a mother—I wouldn’t dream of it. My darling children are always with me, in my heart.”
She scoots closer to her husband, leans her body against his. I try to ignore the little ping of jealousy that goes off at the back of my skull. I have Max, I tell myself, who’s just as finicky and controlling as Edward is. I can lean my head against his shoulder, too. It’s the same thing.
“So how’s the business, Edward?” I ask. “Any projects in the works?”
I know the answer already. Marie’s husband is nominally some kind of carpenter. He has a sleekly designed website full of hand-carved benches, a studio in Boyle Heights staffed with recent graduates of lesser liberal arts colleges. All of this costs more money than it makes—a sensitive subject, I know, for them both. Normally I would be more discreet, but I have had a few glasses of the biodynamic orange wine I brought them (Marie avoids sulfites) and am feeling mean. Maybe Rosanna really does have a drinking problem.
Marie answers for him. “Business is business,” she says. “Edward is working on a wonderful new line of benches for next season. And you know how busy things are in Ojai. We’ve starting growing okra this year, did I tell you?”
Edward just nods. “Always something,” he says. “I don’t suppose I could interest you in a bench?”
“One bench?” I say. “Please, I’ll take three. I’m trying to return to my sugar daddy roots.”
I see a little cloud of tension cross his eyes, but he smiles gamely. “In that case,” he says, “I have a hell of a dining room table to sell you.”
He’s funny. Somehow I didn’t remember that.
“Of course,” I say. “I’ll take all the tables you’ve got.”
Marie leans forward and pours me another glass of wine. I can see Edward watching her, the small motions of her perfect body; there she is, the beautiful woman who belongs to him, his wife. It makes my heart ache, watching them. I feel like half a person, a shell. Her glass is empty, too, and I reach for the bottle, wanting to give her something, even something so small, to show them both that I know how to meet her needs.