Lying In Bed

by Rose, M. J.

  Once again, I read the end of the letter.

  He had asked me to forgive him. He had asked me to write him back.

  But I no longer would be able to do either.

  3.

  Eighteen months later

  Feb 1st, 2005

  “I don’t want to be in the picture,” I said as I got up from behind my desk, hoping to prevent the photographer from a clear shot of me.

  Vivienne Chancey continued to search me out with her sleek silver box. “You’d give the article a more interesting slant. The face of the woman who writes the letters.”

  Click.Click.Click.

  I was talking to a camera but it wasn’t even slightly disconcerting. My mother is a photographer. So are my stepfather and my stepbrother. I am the only one in the our family who doesn’t look through a lens to see the world.

  Click. Click. Click.

  “The letters and stories don’t need my face. They speak for themselves,” I laughed. Hoping she would too. That my levity would deter her.

  It didn’t. She was still aiming her machine in my direction.

  It was a blessing, I thought, for the sake of the shoot, that I had my father’s last name and that my mother had kept her maiden name. And that my stepfather and stepbrother had different names altogether. If Vivienne knew who my family was, she’d barrage me with questions that would make this session even more uncomfortable. Isabel Swifter was too well known. Cole and Tyler Ballinger were too.

  Vivienne is lovely: small and slight with pale blonde hair, cut short and smartly to show off her perfectly oval face. Her hands are the most expressive part of her. Long, strong fingers, unadorned by either jewelry or nail polish. Her fingers danced - they didn’t just move. I knew those hands. My mother’s have the same economy of motion. So do Cole’s, my stepbrother, and his father’s.

  “Why don’t you want the people who read the article to see you?”

  “Because,” I told Vivienne. “I write letters and stories for other people. Me, my personality, my likes and dislikes have nothing to did with what’s in them.”

  She was snapping shots, one after another without a break and the sound punctuated what I was saying. Each click was like a period at the end of my thoughts.

  I hadn’t let my anyone take my picture in eight years.

  In that last photo I was lying in bed. Naked. 19 years old. I didn’t mind when the picture was taken. I didn’t know how exposed I was going to appear. How naked I was going to look. You think there is only one kind of undressed? There are layers. Innocent nudity. Then suggestive nudity. Then bare and brazen sexual nakedness. And since that day, I have never been that undressed again.

  And since then, I have not had my photograph taken by anyone except the NYC driver’s license bureau and the man in the small store in the bottom of Rockefeller Center when I needed a passport shot. And in both cases I was wearing my glasses. Big, round glasses with thin black frames. They are the barrier between me and everyone who looks at me. I could wear contacts but I like the curtain of glass - slightly, ever so slightly tinted blue - that I wear to separate me a little bit from everyone’s eyes.

  I didn’t want a stranger to take my photograph even if it would have been good for business. That hadn’t been the plan. The magazine’s art director hadn’t told me she wanted me in the shots when she’d set up the shoot. She’d said the photographer would photograph some of the collage letters/short stories for a pre Valentine’s day issue of New York’s weekly glossy magazine. My work was to be part of a section on perfect gifts for the man or woman who has everything.

  “How do you do that? Get out of your own way and keep yourself out of the letters that you write?” Vivienne asked.

  “It’s my job,” I told her.

  The job we were talking about was writing love letters and erotic stories for other people. Sexy sweet letters. Suggestive stories from one lover to another using their names as the characters. Poignant ones. Seductive ones. Dirty ones. I also decorate them, turning them into exotic collages.

  For the few months before the shot, men had been hiring me to write Valentine tales for their girlfriends and mistresses. Women had been hiring me to create fictions out of their fantasies to give to their boyfriends. I worked with people who couldn’t express themselves but wanted to offer words as promises or to immortalize their most passionate wishes and dreams. Sometimes I simply personalized and altered one of the three dozen letters or the two dozen short stories that came with the job - written by my predecessor’s predecessor.

  But I also wrote originals for a slightly higher price.

  And while I don’t know if I did it better than anyone else – even if there was someone else out there doing it – I do know that I did it well enough to have a steady clientele who had found me via word of mouth. And that gave me the time to work on my own collages that I hoped would someday hang in an art gallery.

  Vivienne moved to a corner of my office, looked through the viewfinder, shook her head and then moved to the opposite corner. That angle must have been better because she stayed put and the clicking sound started again.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “I really don’t want to be in the shots,” I moved out of her line of sight.

  I was annoyed but also amused because I knew first hand how incredibly obstinate photographers can be.

  My mother would respect our wishes when my sister, Samantha, and I stamped our little feet and told her we were done, that we wanted to play or watch television or get away from that single, never tiring glass eye, but not until she got off one more shot. And I never minded when I got a little older and Cole, my stepbrother, began to photograph me.

  Until I minded too much.

  Once Vivienne couldn’t find me in the frame, the sound stopped. She lowered her Canon and looked for me with her eyes. Spotting me standing almost behind her in front of a large flat file case where I keep supplies and samples, she grinned at my game of hide and seek.

  “Do you care that my editor is going to be unhappy?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry about that. And I’d be happy to make it up to you. If you ever want me to write a letter for you, you have an IOU for one at no cost.”

  Her eyebrows raised. “Really?”

  I nodded.

  “You really don’t want your picture in the article.”

  “You guessed!”

  We both laughed. I liked her and wouldn’t mind writing a letter for her for free if she ever claimed it.

  “Okay. Let’s look through some of the letters,” she said. “You will let me shoot the letters, right?”

  I smiled and pulled out one of the drawers.

  Vivienne came over but she didn’t glance down. “Here, look at this shot. Are you sure you won’t change your mind?” I thought she’d given up.

  She shoved the digital camera in front of my face so that I had little choice but to see the photo she was showing me.

  The woman had straight hair, parted in the middle, skimming her shoulders. Brown streaked with gold. She was tall – almost slim but not quite, wearing a plain white tailored shirt with a starched stand-up collar. Her shirttails were untucked and hung lose over khaki pants. A black sweater was tied around her waist.

  Through my oversized, round glasses, I looked at myself in my oversized, round glasses.

  “I look like a tall, colorless owl.”

  “No. A smart owl. Beautiful too in a non-traditional way” she said. It wasn’t a compliment but rather a statement made by a professional assessing what she saw in the camera.

  “Thanks,” I said quickly. “Now, can I tempt you with some love letters?”

  Finally she looked down at my profferings.

  There were more than a dozen letters and stories in the file. Each was a collage combining words, pictures, fabrics, papers, and various other ephemera. They glittered and shined, bits of metallic paper or gold picking up the overhead lights. The inks were greens, purples, turquoise; ribbons and bits of lace,
velvet, satin or silk decorated the sheets of prose.

  Vivienne picked one up: deep fuchsia colored ink covered a rich vellum paper that had petals of roses imbedded in its weave. She read it silently to herself and over her shoulders; silently to myself, I did too.

  Your skin is what I think of when I close my eyes. How it warms me when I slip into bed beside you, cold from the outside. You take away the freezing air. Heat me up. With what?

  How do you manage to start the process as soon as I walk into the room?

  In the darkness I feel your eyes on me. Can just make them out, orbs of luminescence, stroking me from eight feet away. My hands reach out before I have reached you - my hands have a memory of you that they trick me with when I am out in the world.

  I touch a silk tie and feel your skin. Pick up a glass and think it is your wrist. Run my fingers down a line of figures on a sheet of paper and they are running down your thigh as you lay on the sheets under me. And the sensation, for one second, takes my breath away.

  When she put down the letter there was a faint blush on her cheeks. The same color as the rose petals.

  4.

  Three months later

  May 16th, 2005

  “Are you hurt?”

  I looked up at the man who belonged to the voice. A quick impression of dark hair, strong features and a beard. Then he reached down to help me up.

  I’d fallen. Cut myself. My reactions were slower than usual. Instead of getting up I stared at his hands for a moment. They were heavily scarred. The older cuts showed as pale lines, almost impressions of wounds, whereas the recent ones were deep red and raised.

  The pain throbbed in my own hand and I grimaced. A few seconds, before I hadn’t even known I’d cut myself. I bent my head and sucked on the heel of my palm, the fount of the nuisance. It tasted sweet.

  Then I inspected the source of the stinging injury.

  Carved into my flesh was a clean, curved gash which, as I watched, refilled and then overflowed with blood.

  “You’ve cut yourself. C’mon let me help you up,” he said in a voice that sounded like wind through a canyon. Strong, evocative, determined. And concerned. His hands were opened to me. Still slightly dazed, all I could do was stare at them, not realizing that was what I was doing.

  On the heel of his left palm was a crescent moon of thickened flesh. Almost the exact same shape as the cut I’d given myself.

  How could that be? It suggested something portentous but I didn’t believe in fate. We were not in a fantasy but in New York City, in Soho, on Broadway between Prince and Spring streets, inside the store where I work, called Ephemera, which sells papers and ribbons, stickers, pens, boxes, journals, glitter, glues, scrapbooks and stationery pre-designed or to order.

  Grace - the owner, my employer and my friend - and I debated the issue of fate when business was slow. Over cups of take-out cappuccino from Dean & Deluca, the gourmet emporium across the street, she always tried to convince me to pay attention to the signs that the universe presented. An eternally optimistic woman, she loves with an exuberance that I find enviable and am thankful to be the recipient of. Grace believes in magic, several religions as well as parapsychology, the healing power of chocolate and good red wine.

  Her belief in predestination was as strong as my opposition to it. And we argued about it, both of us enjoying the fight. She used to be distraught that I didn’t want the comfort her belief system offer but I remained unwilling to accept that I could be locked into a fate that was not of my own making.

  But, here was a stranger who was marked in an almost identical way to me. Both alike in how we were damaged – at least on the surface, in the flesh.

  He would have once felt the very same pain that was flashing through my hand.

  I had been spending too much time listening to Grace, I thought. Our having the same shape cut in the same place on our palms didn’t mean anything. Even if the gash was similar, it was impossible that his psyche was ripped in the same places as mine or that the glue that mended me would be the same as had mended him.

  Still, I was mesmerized by his injury. Hypnotized and angered by its familiarity. I wanted to rub it off him and erase the coincidence of it, annulling what I couldn’t understand.

  No.

  I didn’t want to erase it.

  In what seemed like an obscenely short amount of time - mere seconds - I knew that I didn’t want his scar to disappear. I was fascinated by it and I wanted to touch it.

  Maybe I had been momentarily stunned from getting hurt. Or I was simply curious because of the odd parallelism of the way we were both marked. The why didn’t matter - I was fixated on the scar.

  Or maybe Grace, with all her talk about predestination and symbolism and how there were no coincidences had primed me for that moment.

  Grace made prophecies. She brought in amulets and crystals and left them on my desk the way someone else would leave flowers. I adored her. She was the older sister I never had. And so I took her offerings and respected her. But I had never believed any of what she told me when she went all “new age” on me.

  Or so I thought.

  Because the truth was, in that moment, looking down at the scar on his hand, a mirror image of my own fresh one, all I could think about was what Grace would say it meant and how she would interpret my reaction to it.

  Maybe the pain in my hand had made me hypersensitive to other feelings, or perhaps it was the sound of the man’s voice or the way he looked so familiar in the instant when I’d seen his face, I didn’t know. But my reaction was both completely unexpected and foreign to me. I disliked it. And so I mistrusted the man who had aroused it to me.

  I wanted to dissect his scar. Explore it with my fingertip and read it like Braille. Examine its contours and ridges just as I had done to my own cut. I needed to prove how distinct it was from mine, how dry, how healed compared to my open, sharp-edged and wet wound.

  “There’s blood everywhere,” he said. The wind now a worry. “How bad is that cut? You might need stitches.” He gripped me by my elbow and lifted me up.

  As I stood, shards of broken glass fell from my skirt and hit the tile floor with a high pitched sound that rung out like glass bells.

  In one swift motion he pulled my hand toward him, bending over it so quickly that I didn’t get a chance to see any more of his face and instead found myself studying his hair which was burnt umber – a deep brown color I used when I painted - and fell forward in thick curls.

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “No. But I know about cuts.”

  I was quiet while he studied my hand. A customer in the store who had come to my aid. A stranger who I had no reason to notice. He was much taller than me, wore blue jeans and a black turtleneck. He was lean and gangly and almost disheveled but not quite.

  I was aware of his strong fingers on my skin. Where we made contact, my nerve endings pulsed. Similar to the throb of pain, sensation spiked and retreated and then repeated itself.

  It made me uncomfortable and uneasy. I was too aware of his touch. The accident had made me nervous.

  “This cut isn’t deep enough for all this blood. You must be hurt somewhere else.” He picked up his head and looked at me. “Are you?”

  Once he wasn’t bending over my hand anymore, I examined his face while I explained that what he thought was blood on my clothes and the floor was only ink and how I’d been kneeling, searching on a low shelf for a box of gold leaf paper, heard the phone ring, rushed to get it, pulled myself up using a shelf above me, but somehow yanked out and spilled a box of six bottles of vermilion ink in the process. How all of them had broken around me, sending glass and splashes of red liquid everywhere.

  “Something else is wrong though. What is it?” he asked when I’d finished.

  “What?”

  “Something other than the pain is bothering you.”

  “How did you know that?”

  He shrugged. “I can see it in your eyes.”


  “But you don’t know me.”

  “That’s true. But I do know what concern looks like. And you’re concerned?”

  I couldn’t tell him about all of the reactions I was having to him. So I chose the most innocent. “It’s only that you look like someone and it was driving me crazy who it was.” I’ve studied art and painted for years and still look at people as if I was going to draw them. I forget that it’s rude, intrusive and confusing. I forget people on the other end of it find it disconcerting.

  “So who is it? Have you figured it out?”

  I nodded. “You look like a man in a painting. A fresco in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Roman. 3rd century BC.”

  And he did. The same dark wavy hair, wide, almond, intelligent eyes: deep set and harboring a haunted expression. The same arrogant high cheekbones, aquiline nose and long neck.

  I pictured the portrait that I’d stopped in front of a dozen times on my way in or out of the Egyptian wing because the man’s gaze – even though it was only pigment on stone – demanded it.

  “Only your toga and crown are missing.”

  He tilted his head and looked at me as if he was figuring something out. Then he smiled. “I’ll have to go see him, then. I’d like to see how I look in a toga. And the idea of a crown is very appealing. I haven’t been to the Met in too long anyway.”

  “It’s a wreath really.”

  “Build up my ego and then dash it to bits in mere seconds. You’re heartless,” he joked.

  I don’t know what it was that gave me the feeling he was so secure, but listening to him, I didn’t think anyone could dash his ego. Except it wasn’t egotistical or obnoxious. It was a good thing that this man was sure of himself. It was as if he wore an invisible cloak that kept him slightly removed from the dangers and weaknesses that could attack the rest of us mere mortals.

  Or was I projecting what I felt about the man in the painting on to his 21st-century double?