Look at me: (12 page)

I stared at the set. I wondered seriously if I might be hallucinating, a relapse into double vision induced by too much brandy in one day.

I muted the TV and called Grace, hoping she could elucidate the meaning of the program. Frank answered and informed me that she was in bed.

“At nine o clock?” I was skeptical.

“She’s still recovering from her visit to New York.”

“Or avoiding you—and who could blame her?” I bellowed, then rushed to slam the phone down before he did. It was sort of a contest between us: who could hang up first.

I was feeling very antsy. Before the accident, such a mood would have propelled me outside to a club, then more clubs. But I no longer had the energy. The city looked dark and corrupt and I was glad to be in my silk kimono and fuzzy blue slippers with the heat on full blast. Central heating was a must, I thought, as I padded around the apartment turning on lights. And plenty of good strong electrical outlets!

I lay on my bed with the lights on, Jacques Brel serenading me from the CD player. The TV was still on;
Unsolved Mysteries
, one of those shows you could watch without watching it, as if it were one story looping around and around. “Penny was fifteen when she rode into these woods and disappeared …” A shot of a blond girl riding a bicycle, pinktasseled handlebars. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, a psychic was leading the police to young Penny’s remains, a raccoon-eyed woman in a head scarf, humming as she stepped through crackling underbrush.

That night I dreamed about Hansen. I felt his arms and smelled him, and we were together in some familiar, beautiful place, possibly one of the towns on the Jersey shore where we used to go on weekends. Was the Jersey shore actually beautiful? I didn’t know. I had made a point of never going back.

On the few occasions when I recalled myself with Hansen, I saw a girl whose energies and affections were trained entirely on one human being, but I credited my devotion less to Hansen himself than to the fact that we’d fallen in love before I discovered who I was—or was not. He represented the last time I had believed in something that I no longer believed in.

There was no denying that Hansen was terrific. Smart, great in bed, a landscape architect and fanatical gardener who knew everything a person could know about soil and plants. Even now, resting my eyes on a dusty vase at the dry cleaners or walking past the public library in the flush of spring, names of plants and flowers would startle me like someone whispering into my ear: coleus, baby tears, dahlias, jasmine. We met a few weeks after I came to New York, at the Metropolitan Museum. I would wander through the rooms of European paintings and stare at the canvases until my head ached, waiting for them to reveal themselves to me. Hansen introduced himself by murmuring, as I gaped at some frigid Poussin, “Are you trying to make it combust?” He took me to lunch in the cafeteria. He was twenty-five, a year out of graduate school. I was twenty-two, posing as twenty, but I told him twenty. Even after we were engaged, I never corrected myself.

There was no denying that Hansen and I were happy. We were perilously happy. We lived in a ground-floor apartment on Bank Street, two blocks from the Hudson. Our street had cobblestones. Hansen grew roses in the backyard, blah blah blah. The picture was coercive in its perfection. Pasta in the evenings, weekends tooling around in Hansen’s baby-blue vintage Oldsmobile. Endless discussions of our love; its quality, its texture, its indestructibility. Fights, tears, jealousy over feeling ignored by the other at a party, followed by reconciliatory lovemaking. Presentation to one another’s parents, who nodded sagely as they noted our clutched hands under the tablecloth. It was someone else. When I thought of it now, I was filled with a sense that it couldn’t have been me.

At that time, a sojourn to Paris, usually for a year, was a critical part of every model’s development. I put it off for many months so as not to be parted from Hansen. Finally Oscar set a date and announced that I was leaving.

On my last weekend in New York, Hansen and I drove to the Jersey shore. It was a rainy spring, and we holed up in our bed and breakfast room for two days, crying, screwing, staring morosely out our small round window at the sea. Hansen proposed to me in the dining room of a nineteenth-century beachside hotel, striped awnings on the windows. By the world’s account, I was twenty-one. That night, while Hansen slept, I lay awake and listened to the sea’s fitful breath. My life felt absolutely pure. Can it really be this easy? I wondered—you met someone, you fell in love … like an old story? It seemed too lucky, and for that reason, or some other reason, it provoked in me a tiny beat of disappointment. I had always believed my life would unfold in some more angular fashion. Instead, I’d virtually stepped from my childhood into this happiness.

In Paris, I shared a minuscule apartment with a model named Ruby, who had a cocaine problem and almost never slept. I put a sock over each of my ears, trying to repel her nocturnal phone chatter, her giggles and rages and tears as she shifted west with the hours, seeking out time zones where men she knew were still awake: New York, Aspen, Los Angeles, Honolulu, finally Tokyo, which she reached at dawn. But Ruby played only a bit part in the pageant of my lovesickness. I went to castings, I landed little jobs with
Elle
and
Marie Claire
, I walked beside the Seine, and invariably I was miserable. The unfamiliar sights hurt my eyes, the words I couldn’t understand—I felt exiled, with no way to connect. In occasional lucid flashes, I was dumbfounded to find myself in such a state. Here I was in Paris, after all! Paris, where French people lived! And yet the fulcrum of my existence was the hour, usually around seven, when Hansen would call at lunchtime from his architectural firm. Hanging up was like being lopped from him physically. “I can’t stand this,” I told myself repeatedly throughout each day. I felt like I was dying, like the blood was being drained from me slowly. Clients complained about my listlessness, and there was talk of sending me home. Oscar begged me to stick it out. He offered to advance Hansen a plane ticket, but Hansen was designing his first project, a small park in Queens, and couldn’t get away until July.

One Saturday, while I was walking by the Seine in my usual morose haze, I saw a man standing at an easel. When I stopped to watch him paint, he barely acknowledged me. I’d been hounded by men since the moment of my arrival, the usual rich compulsives whose particular drug (or one of them) was the presence of teenage girls in large quantities. But the lone painter’s oblivion made it feel safe to stand beside him. Even I could see he had no talent. “You like?” he asked, turning to me suddenly.

I shrugged, which made him laugh. He was attractive in a muscular, straightforward way, and spoke no English. He pulled a ham sandwich from his shoulder bag and offered me half. We ate side by side on the river’s edge, our feet dangling over the water. He opened a bottle of red wine, which we drank in swigs. He seemed perfectly indifferent to me, as if his day were unfolding exactly as it would have without me. Eventually he took out a book and began to read. I looked at the river, feeling a tentative contentment. It was June, sunlight lapping at my face and arms. The ratio of red wine to ham sandwich had left me not drunk, exactly, but dreamy. I leaned back, tipped my face to the sky, and shut my eyes. Then he kissed me. I yelped, my eyes popped open, and except for a lingering essence of red wine and tobacco on my lips, it seemed possible that nothing had happened. The Frenchman watched me, testing my reaction, then seized my face in his hands and kissed me again. Something awful stirred in me. He pushed me gently backward against the concrete and leaned over me, kissing my mouth and neck, whispering into my ears until my mind emptied of everything but a drugged sense that we must get to a place where we could undress. Clearly the Frenchman’s thoughts were following this same itinerary; he pulled me to my feet, packed up his paints with alacrity and led me up to the street, where his miniature orange Citroen was parked. We got in, and as he twisted and wove among the Paris streets I tried to think of Hansen, but it was as if one version of me were still by the Seine in a zombie state of missing him, and now a second version had broken off and hijacked me into this stranger’s car, where I was counting the moments until we could have sex.

Eventually we reached a run-down apartment house. The Frenchman led me inside by the hand, and we climbed what seemed an infinite number of steps, flight after flight, the stairwell echoing with cries of dogs and infants until, when we reached the seventh floor, I was only nominally clothed. I hardly saw the man’s apartment, except to note that it was small and clean. We stayed there until evening, and then he drove me back to the apartment I shared with Ruby. His name was Henri. The next day I returned to the Seine to look for him, but it wasn’t until the following Saturday, one week later, that he was back at his easel. When he saw me, he began packing up his paints, and the day proceeded similarly. After that, I learned how to get to his apartment by Metro and met him there. I had no idea what the rest of his life consisted of, nor he mine. We couldn’t speak.

But the happiness! The cheesiest metaphors could not exaggerate the immensity of my relief; a spell had broken, a weight had been lifted from my shoulders, a large black cloud dispelled from the atmosphere. I’d wakened from the dead to find myself in Paris. I was free! Not from Hansen—I never thought of it that way—but from my misery. I wanted to skip and yell and sing. “You sound so much happier!” Hansen marveled when we spoke, and only then did I realize what a burden my desolation had been for him. I made a better impression at castings, and work began picking up. Of course I was aware that something was wrong with all this, but I tried not to think about it. It was a stopgap measure, I told myself, a drastic coping device until Hansen and I would be reunited. I felt like a part of myself was still with him in New York, holding my place among the hosta and clematis, while another entirely separate part was meeting Henri each Saturday for hours and hours of anonymous sex. I never took off my engagement ring.

As July and Hansen’s visit approached, I was hobbled by dread. What would happen? Would he guess? Would I feel differently? But when he arrived, the love I felt for Hansen seemed, if anything, more intense. I didn’t show up at Henri’s that Saturday, and he must have known better than to come looking for me. I never saw him again. Hansen and I spent whole days at the Louvre and watched sunset from the Eiffel Tower. We chose a wedding date for one year later, in Paris. As we made love, I would sometimes be stricken by the knowledge that I had done these same things (and other things, too—things I hadn’t done with Hansen) with a literal stranger, and so recently, and I would feel a kind of shock—not on my own behalf, but on Hansen’s. He doesn’t know who he’s making love to, I would think, and panic would slash through me until I reminded myself that it was over now, a freakish aberration not to be repeated.

It was Hansen who first made me aware of shadow selves. He would lie in bed watching me for whole minutes, and I would look back into his eyes and wonder, What does he see? How can he not see the truth? Where is it hidden? It made me ask, when I looked at other people, what possible selves they were hiding behind the strange rubber masks of their faces. I could nearly always find one, if I watched for long enough. It became the only one I was interested in seeing.

Hansen stayed three weeks, and after he left, I experienced a modified version of my prior despair. I missed him bitterly, but with each day the bitterness abated and another set of possibilities began to assert itself, like shifting my weight from one foot to the other. A week after he left, I had dinner with a young playboy, dark-haired and light-skinned like the Carravagian boys Hansen and I had observed so recently. Again, as with Henri, the desire that I felt for this man was like a blanket tossed over my head. We went back to his house, a house in the middle of Paris with tall shuttered windows, and I spent the night without making love all the way, but the next morning I relented, and we began an affair. I felt exactly two opposite ways: gripped by the feverish eroticism of my new circumstances, and devoted to Hansen in a way that made the other feeling outrageous, inconceivable. In moments, I clutched at the notion of some larger “me” that could contain and justify my contradictory behavior, but more often I simply felt like the scene of two irreconcilable visions, two different people, one unerringly loyal and faithful, the other treacherous and greedy. My affair with Henri had pushed something open in me, and now I felt ravenous, in constant danger of going hungry. Hansen alone would never be enough.

As the weeks progressed, I developed a morbid fascination with the enormity of all he didn’t know. I reminded myself incessantly that the happiness I heard in his voice when we spoke each night was predicated upon a trust and faith and mutual understanding that I had already betrayed countless times in countless different ways, ways that would make him scream, were he to glimpse them. The thought tortured me. I felt like a poisoner sprinkling arsenic on Hansen’s food while he wasn’t looking, watching him eat it bite by bite. I wished he would guess, but I did everything in my power to keep him from guessing, and it was easy. I sounded the same! He had no reason to doubt me! He believed that I loved him, and he was right! I was made for this treachery! Each night, as I reported to him the jobs I was on hold for, the church I’d wandered into, the croque monsieur I’d had for lunch, I would imagine rescuing him from his ignorance and my duplicity by telling him everything. This fantasy of absolution so enthralled me that at times I completely lost track of our conversation. To say it and have him know, to close the gap between us. I couldn’t do it. And yet I knew that it couldn’t go on this way, either, that sooner or later I would have to choose between Hansen and everyone else. A lifetime of deceiving a good man was more than even I could stomach.