I think. Showing off our lives, showing her everything I have accomplished. Showing her who is ahead.
But there is another part of me that feels deep unease. Something about the way Frank always sees more than she should. She likes to think she knows me better than anyone – maybe even myself. She considers this a triumph. So she pokes at my life like a child with a stick, prodding at a dead seal washed up on the shore. Waiting to see what crawls out. Peekaboo, I see you!
She is always digging, digging, trying to go beyond the surface. The real you, she says, I know the real Merry. Whatever that means.
At the table across from me, I watched a young woman. She must have been in her early twenties, blond and slim and well dressed. She was eating a cinnamon bun, forking small bites of pastry into her mouth. She kept brushing a finger gently to her lips. She talked with an older man, perhaps in his forties, dressed in a gray cashmere sweater and dark jeans. Like me, he watched her movements closely, followed her fork with his eyes into her mouth; followed her fingers as they danced on those red lips. At one point she touched his arm, casual and friendly and innocent of all desire, but for him I could see it was electrifying.
She was showing him something on a laptop screen, pointing with her long fingers. She wore no wedding band, just a thin gold ring on her index finger, set with a small topaz stone in the center. He nodded intently as she spoke; she wrote something down in a notebook that lay open next to her cup. He watched her take a sip, the way she licked her lips to make sure that no foam lingered. Love or infatuation, who could ever tell.
An older woman walked in alone, ordered a coffee and a sandwich from the barista, and sat down at a table near the window. She was flawless. White trousers, neat leather pumps, pearl earrings. She must have been sixty or more, glowing and beautiful, without anything surgically pulled or plumped. It is a mystery here, how their women are permitted to age with such grace.
I thought of my own mother, her freakish final face and all the ones in between. So many years she spent obsessively trying to ward off the inevitabilities of aging. Every few months, something new. Eyes ironed out at the corners, extra skin pulled back and sewn high into the temples. Fatty deposits sucked out and reassigned, either to cheeks or lips. Breasts lifted, stomach fat suctioned through a pump.
As a child, I loved to watch her getting herself ready to go out. My father was always coming home with invitations to galas and balls; charity dinners or openings of new wings at the hospital. It was an elaborate performance, painting on a face, torturing her hair into some elegant updo, squeezing into a dress two sizes too small and two decades too young.
You’re so pretty, I’d say.
I’m not pretty enough, she always replied.
Or sometimes: I used to be, before you came along.
There were many things for which I was accused and held accountable. The loss of her figure. The thinning of her hair. The sagging of her skin. The absence of my father’s attention.
He never told her to stop the surgeries. Perhaps this was how he punished her.
Sam likes me natural, he says. This means slim. Groomed. Depilated. Scrubbed and lotioned, smooth like a piece of ripe fruit.
He shaved me once, early on in our relationship; made me stand over him in the bath while he took a razor between my legs and slowly carved away. There, he said, that’s how I want you.
I had looked down at my new self with delight. Beloved, I thought, this is what it feels like to be beloved.
Six years in and still, in the early hours of the morning, while Sam lies and dreams, I clean my teeth and shine my face and comb my hair. I shape my eyebrows and tint my lashes and pluck away the stray hairs that plant themselves on my upper lip; I trim my cuticles and buff the dead skin from my heels, I paint my nails to match the seasons. I shave and moisturize and soften my skin, I spray perfume and roll deodorant and use special intimate wipes to make me smell like flowers instead of a woman. All this I do so that when he wakes, I am transformed, when he wants me, I am ready. All yours, I say. I am all yours.
It is a lie; a small part I keep for myself.
It must have been around noon when I realized I was hungry. I left the café and strolled around the cobbled back streets in the glare of the sun. It’s a pleasant city, I suppose. Charming, contained in a way that New York is not, and never can be. Here there is none of that current in the air, the pulse of lust and need and ruthlessness. Of longing and secrets.
Around Götgatan I spied a café with a neat little row of quiches sitting in the window. I went inside and ordered at the counter, sat down at a small table in the corner. The waitress brought over my food and laid down cutlery and a napkin. Tack, I said, and she smiled sweetly. The quiche was delicate, not too heavy. It felt strange and delicious to eat alone; a forbidden delight from another life.
I ordered a coffee after I finished, not wanting it to end just yet. The café was filling up with people; I saw the waitress glance over at me. She came up to the table.
Would you mind? she said. This man would like to eat something.
It was the same man from earlier.
May I? He indicated the free chair opposite me.
I smiled. Of course.
You are American, he said, as he sat.
Yes, I said. Sorry about that.
He laughed. I tried to recall the movements of the woman from earlier, the way she touched her lips, delicate and deliberate. I brushed my fingers against my mouth. I watched him watch me.
What are you doing here, he said, business or pleasure?
Oh. I smiled. Always pleasure.
Again my fingers went to my lips.
You remind me of someone, he said.
Yes, I said, I hear that all the time.
You’re on vacation? he asked.
I hesitated. There was something I had to take care of here, I said.
I wanted to sound enigmatic and mysterious. The kind of woman a man like him aches for. I took a sip of coffee, I touched my lips. I smiled sadly and looked suddenly toward the street, into the middle distance, as though recalling some dark secret or heartache within.
Yes, I had it. I watched him watch me and shift in his seat.
In New York, there were countless days like this. It’s easy in a city that size. You never see the same person twice. Never have to be the same person. Sitting in the park, strolling through the Met, whiling away a few hours in the public library. I was the woman in the red dress, or the blue coat, or the scarf with red lips printed all across it. I was a lawyer, a grad student, a midwife, an anthropologist, a gallerist; I was Dominique or Anna or Lena or Francesca. I was all of these women. Everyone but Merry. It was always a rush, a moment belonging only to me; a spectacle for my own entertainment. My own secret pleasure. Only occasionally did it go too far.
Even as a child, I loved nothing better than to perform in front of the bathroom mirror. Sometimes I’d steal one of my mother’s lipsticks or some of her jewelry. I’d pretend to be a model or an actress, sometimes a lovesick girlfriend or a wife betrayed. I liked to watch myself, the transformation into someone else. I’d try out different voices and accents, different expressions on my face. I could play out scenes for hours on end. It never grew dull. It still doesn’t. Perhaps this is my gift. The ability to slip in and out of selves, as though they were dresses hanging in a wardrobe, waiting to be tried on and twirled about.
I’m Lars, by the way, the man said.
He extended his hand and I let it linger in mine. While he ate his lunch, I entertained him with stories from my recent trip to the Maldives.
Can you imagine, I laughed, two weeks on a tropical island with only the winter wardrobe of Mr. Oleg Karpalov in my possession!
Which island? he asked.
I