Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

  “Pretend you’re choking on it,” he whispered, moving the camera so that it hovered above the back of my head. He hadn’t actually removed his dick, but I could feel it, hot beneath his sweatpants, somewhere against my neck. He stuck his hand into my hair and pressed my head into his groin, my lips bristling against his pubes, which he had obviously shaved not too long ago. I made a gagging sound and wasn’t sure if it was involuntary. When he eventually took his hand from my head, he yanked out a tangle of hair which had gotten stuck in his watch and tears sprung to my eyes, even though I wasn’t really upset, and he just kept shooting. Then, after some indeterminate amount of time, he stopped and playfully patted me on the butt, motioning for me to get up.

  “Fantastic, Mickey,” he gushed. “Absolutely fantastic.” He sat up, and his face was flushed and his eyes shining. “I cannot tell you how fucking awesome that was,” he said. “I think we made something really beautiful here. Really real and authentic.”

  All of the discomfort and tension that had been building inside of me immediately dissolved into a bubble of elation. I giggled. “Hey, that’s all you,” I said. “I just stand there and look good.”

  “Oh, come now, you do much more than that.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You’ve got something. Different than what I thought.”

  I didn’t know what that meant but I thought it sounded good. I opened my mouth to say something glib, but thought better of it and simply said thank you.

  Benoit got off the bed and stretched his arms overhead, revealing a soft, white belly stitched with black hair.

  “Come here,” he said, bringing his arms together in a circle. “I always close with a hug.”

  I hopped off the bed and we hugged. His body was warm, and he smelled like sweat.

  “You did well today, kid,” he said in a faux American accent.

  “Well, thank you, kind sir,” I said, trying my best Lauren Bacall. We both laughed. I wondered if he might tell Gemma about it later. I imagined her looking through the photos, impressed. The idea lit a warm glow within me.

  “Balthazar’s downstairs,” said Benoit, beginning to pack away his flashes into cushioned black bags. When I looked at him blankly, he said, “Dinner. It’s a bit of a tradition.”

  * * *

  —

  Afterwards, we ate dinner like a family. Jack read our horoscopes on his iPhone. Sylvie showed us pictures of her daughter: an elfin child with Sylvie’s smooth black hair and big brown eyes. Kiki told us about the guy she’d met at Muay Thai. Andy had gone, and I soon learned that he was not one of Benoit’s usual collaborators, that he’d been sent by some other controlling force that nobody mentioned. Benoit sat at the head of the table, resplendent and fatherly. He insisted on creating for each of us what he called a “perfectly calibrated” bite of pâté: he layered it on top of a cracker specially ordered from a gourmet shop—not from the restaurant—and topped it with dried cranberries. I let it melt in my mouth, feeling anointed.

  Benoit had ordered us all the same thing for dinner: salmon with green beans and mashed potatoes, cooked without onion or garlic. I inhaled mine—even began, at her suggestion, helping myself to some of Sylvie’s. A bottle of white wine was passed around the table. Then another. I drank a lot. My seat faced a mirror and every time I caught my reflection, I startled a little, as if I didn’t know myself. I was still wearing all the hair and makeup from the shoot. I laughed and talked without knowing what I was saying.

  I didn’t feel drunk. The sophisticated setting had lulled me into a false sense of sobriety. It was the nicest apartment I’d been to in a long time. Massive, with sleek polished-cement floors that were patchworked with Persian rugs. The palette was beige, white, black, and soft gray, accented by the colorful rugs and large abstract artworks on the walls. The couch looked like something out of Studio 54: low-slung and U-shaped. I pressed my index finger into its ridged fabric en route to the bathroom. It was cut from white corduroy. The lighting was so elegantly orchestrated, I had trouble discerning where it was coming from. It seemed to just exist as an ambient glow, a warmly lit bubble of luxury. Dinner had been served on a large rectangular table at the center of the room. The table was metal, painted matte black, and centered over a large ponyskin rug. Though it was takeout, Benoit had had it plated, so that when we came down to his apartment it was already waiting for us on large slate serving platters. It’s difficult to feel out of control when you are surrounded by so much good taste. It’s like you’re on an island somewhere, insulated from consequences, from the careening madness of the city. I kept downing glasses of wine and thinking to myself wonderingly, I don’t feel drunk at all! Not one bit! How funny!

  The rest of the night passed the way things do in a speeding car; everything comes rushing at you in an indistinct blur and then, through some happenstance of the angle of your gaze, one building will appear in crystal-clear definition. Though I had not fallen asleep, I had the sensation of waking up, several hours later, on Benoit’s U-shaped couch. Benoit was speaking, and I realized with a jolt that he and I were having a conversation. I looked around the room. It was empty, the food cleared away, glasses half-emptied and abandoned on nearly every surface. Someone had opened a window and the room smelled like tobacco. I blinked and the underneath of my eyelids was purple and velvet.

  “Oh dear, did I just lose you?”

  “Sorry, no, I’m listening,” I said, jamming my eyes open.

  “So then Sartre, he gets really clever, and he says—okay, we know the waiter is following the script, but it isn’t just the waiter.”

  I got up and helped myself to more wine. I drank it without sitting back down.

  “It’s all of us,” he went on, waving his arm expansively. “We say ‘I am that,’ or ‘I am this,’ and then we act accordingly. But it’s all bad faith, you see? So, to answer your question, that’s why I became a photographer.”

  He looked so small, and almost pathetic, that I was momentarily dumbstruck by the thought: Gemma is in love with this person.

  I said: “What about Gemma?” And to cover the digression, I added, “I mean, what does Gemma think about it?”

  Benoit looked at me seriously. “You’re really obsessed with her, aren’t you?”

  It occurred to me that I might have asked a lot of questions about her already, and my face grew hot. “I’m not. I’m just making conversation. She’s your girlfriend, isn’t she?”

  “Girl-friend.” Benoit snorted. “I have never understood the American love of that term. It is a woman we’re talking about, isn’t it? In Bulgaria we say priyatel. Pleasant friend.”

  “But she is, right?”

  Benoit finished the rest of his drink in one gulp.

  “You want to see the pictures?” he asked.

  “From today?”

  He nodded.

  We went out into the hallway, and up the dirty rubber stairs to his studio. Outside the well-ordered walls of his quietly luxurious apartment, I felt a lot more drunk. Benoit led me back down the narrow, blank hallway and into the room that served as his office. He didn’t bother turning on the lights. He sat at the desk and jabbed at the keyboard of his Apple desktop until it lit up. There was no other chair, so I stood behind him.

  He began near the end. A shot, from below, of my parted legs, the mounds of my breasts visible above. The curve of my chin was the only thing recognizable about my face, which was framed by a halo of blond curls. A complicated mix of emotions swirled inside of me. If you looked at the photo quickly, it could be Gemma. But if you looked only a second longer, it was clearly someone else, just a little off, like a dissonant chord. Still, it was a beautiful photo, suffused with warmth and intimacy. It was shot by the Benoit and it was of me. There was plenty for me to be happy about. Benoit pressed down on the right-arrow key, and the picture shifted and changed shape as butterflies swar
med inside my stomach. Benoit stopped on a close-up of my face.

  “See what I mean?” said Benoit. “Different.”

  I was horrified. I thought I looked like a psychopath. My smile was far too wide, and there was an evil glint in my eyes. I had too many teeth in my mouth. I ran my tongue over them, feeling ashamed. I looked nothing like Gemma here.

  “I think I know what it is,” he went on. “Something in the eyes.”

  Benoit jabbed at the keyboard and zoomed in on one of the photos. He traced the edge of my iris with his pinky.

  “You know what I see when I look into them?” he asked. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Pure nihilism. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  I looked at the screen. All I saw were pixels.

  Benoit prompted me. “You like it?”

  I nodded yes.

  Satisfied, Benoit pressed down on the right-arrow key, and the photos slid by until we were back at the beginning, with me lying on the bed. I liked myself better here, farther away so I was less recognizable. More like her. Benoit jabbed at the right-arrow button over and over again, and I watched in mounting apprehension as Gemma, pure and beautiful, opened her eyes and glinted at the camera, grew tainted and lascivious and empty-eyed, morphed into me.

  “Gemma—” I started to say.

  Benoit scoffed loudly and deliberately.

  “What?” I asked.

  “That name again.”

  “Am I not allowed to mention your pleasant friend?” I answered archly, trying to regain my composure.

  “One’s pleasant friend doesn’t exactly go about letting one make the sort of art that you and I made today.” He looked almost forlornly back at the computer. “That kind of girl would never let me shoot her like this.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh come now, a fine, respectable lady like her?” he said in an ironic, highfalutin voice. “She’d never sully herself with such smut.”

  I laughed, though I didn’t think it was funny. A series of images flitted through my mind: Gemma and Benoit together, Gemma and Benoit saying how trashy I looked, Gemma and Benoit laughing at me. Even though I thought Gemma was better than me, it enraged me to think that everyone thought so, too. Was she really so fucking perfect? So fucking untouchable?

  Benoit turned to look at me. “That’s why I love working with girls like you. Hungry, unformed.” He smiled and his teeth glowed a sickly blue in the artificial computer light. “Shameless.”

  I wanted to hit him. I thought about how easy it would be to jab my thumbs into his eyes, and press into them until they bled. I imagined cradling his head in a tender embrace while I did it, his hands pinned under my knees.

  Instead I just giggled and said something like, “Guess so.”

  “I mean that as a compliment.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Truly.”

  I didn’t know what he wanted from me, but I knew what I was going to do. Really, there was only ever one thing I could do, one way for me to quench my rage, to avenge myself. I arranged my face to look vulnerable and pensive, so that he would ask what I was thinking about. And when he did, I told him that I was thinking about what he’d said about Sartre. That I’d read him in college (not true) but that no one had ever explained it as beautifully as he had. Carefully, like I was testing the weight of a branch to see how far I could go, I met his eyes as I lied to him.

  He leaned back in his chair, and the chair accommodated his weight. His knees were pointed outwards. I knew if I crawled into his lap now, he would not refuse me. But it is important, in these situations, to make the man feel it is his idea.

  “I think it’s really brave, what you do,” I said. “Your art.”

  He scoffed, as if he didn’t believe me. But I knew it was a bluff. He believed me.

  “A lot of people would probably disagree with you,” he said.

  “A lot of people are stupid.” This, too, I knew he believed.

  We held each other’s gaze for three seconds longer than normal, which was as good as an admission. My heart thudded in my chest, like I was a hunter closing in on its prey. One small movement, I thought, and I have him—or I lose him. Almost imperceptibly, I let my body sway in his direction. He grabbed my hand and pulled me onto him, his mouth folding disgustingly under mine, like it was caving in, too soft, like a marshmallow.

  We fucked right there on his office chair. I took off my jeans and my panties and sat on him, his dick jamming inside me, scratching at me because I wasn’t wet. I made a lot of moaning noises, hoping he wouldn’t notice. He didn’t. As I thrashed against him, I felt a portal open up, a pathway to Gemma, and the deeper he reached inside me, the closer I got to her. When he came, biting my ear and whimpering like a small child, I finally grasped her fingers and pulled her towards me, and she appeared before me, ghostly pale and artificial, and I just threw my head back and laughed directly in her face.

  * * *

  —

  I woke up gasping, as if coming up for air after a long submersion, swimming through black waters. I could not remember what I had been dreaming of, but I woke with fear and I knew I’d been holding my breath. It was a habit I’d had since I was a child, when, without realizing it, I’d keep all the air inside until my lips turned blue and I almost fainted.

  It was still dark out. I checked my phone: 4:30 a.m. I had fallen asleep accidentally. Benoit was in bed beside me. I looked at the hump of his back with such violent distaste that I shuddered. I found a pen and paper in the bedside table and scribbled down a note. Didn’t want to wake you, thank you for everything, etc., etc. When I was putting the pen back in the bedside table, I noticed a Polaroid. In the dark, I could hardly see the image, but written in big block letters on the white space beneath it, I could make out My Muse. My Everything. I knew it must be of Gemma.

  I crumpled the note I had written and stuffed it into my purse.

  I left his apartment before I even called an Uber, so that I had to stand on the street shivering, even though it wasn’t that cold, waiting eight minutes for Yevgen to arrive in his shitty red Hyundai.

  My apartment was dark when I got home, and smelled vaguely of rotten food. I glanced at the fruit I’d optimistically placed in a bowl at the end of my island, as if, after being shot by Benoit, I’d be the kind of person that had a bowl full of fruit at her apartment. The banana had already turned black, and I thought I could see fruit flies. I picked up the bowl and tossed everything in it into the garbage.

  Then I climbed into bed in all my clothes and fell asleep.

  * * *

  —

  In Montauk, Gemma steps out onto the private deck of her Deluxe Superior King Room. There is a full moon tonight, but it isn’t visible. The sky is covered in clouds. The clouds are lilac, lit from behind by the moon you cannot see. Gemma leans against the wooden railing. Beyond it, floodlights illuminate the hotel’s winding gravel path and boardwalk in evenly spaced pools, only to be subsumed by the beach’s preternatural darkness. You can’t see the ocean either, but you can hear it: a soft, cascading hushing sound that belies its hidden power. Gemma could drown out there. If she wanted to, she could walk down the steps, now, and out into its dark waters. She could disappear and drown and nobody would even know.

  Gemma tightens the robe around her. She feels the ocean air against her face, a salty moistness that is almost carnal in the heat. She closes her eyes and inhales it. The ocean continues to churn.

  She was not even supposed to have a deck. She had booked a Queen with a garden view. When she checked in, the receptionist informed her they’d upgraded her. A manager came out and shook her hand and showed her personally to the room, pointing out every amenity. A bottle of champagne waited on ice, framed by the ocean view. There was a small bowl of raspberries. The manager winked at her. “See?” he said. “We pay attention. We really think it’s the s
mall things that make our guests feel at home.” Raspberries are her favorite fruit. Everybody knows that.

  After he leaves, Gemma stares at the bowl. Beside it is a card printed with the hotel’s Instagram account. Gemma picks up one of the berries and holds it between thumb and index finger. Then she pops it into her mouth and slowly crushes it against her tongue. No one could know that that is how she eats it, but that is how she eats it. The thought gives her a fleeting sense of freedom and possibility. She pops another one into her mouth. She looks at the California king bed, gleaming in freshly pressed white like a photogenic bride. Gemma stretches herself across it, pushing into its softness, her hands sliding easily against the high thread count. She laughs, feeling self-conscious. Because despite the empty room, Gemma is not alone. The raspberries were not a gift, but a bribe. In exchange, Gemma will parcel out the moments of her life to her hundreds of thousands of Followers, to whoever is watching. She will give everything, until she is unsure any longer what is content and what is her life. She is never alone anymore. Not even tonight, on the deck, is she really alone. She knows that through the clouds the moon is watching.