The Body Double

by Emily Beyda

  I will do better. I say it out loud to myself in the mirror. “You can do better,” I say. “You will.”

  The girl in the mirror smiles back.

  Max has left me with a case full of expensive cosmetics, the kind of stuff I used to wish I looked classy enough to be able to steal, all of it beautifully packaged and deeply pigmented and sweet smelling, baby powder, floral. Only rich women can afford to surround themselves with these powerful emblems of innocence. But when I start opening the packaging, I realize that every item bears the marks of Rosanna’s use. I wonder why they haven’t bought me all-new versions of the products she uses. Doesn’t she have her own beauty line? Couldn’t she afford to get me my own new kit, instead of sending me these castoffs? This decision smacks of Max’s ignorance, I decide. Probably she gave him all her makeup, things she used to wear every day but is now too depressed to take out of the drawer, so he could go out and buy all-new versions. Clearly he misunderstood, thought she was giving them to me, like a mother giving her daughter the worn-down nubs of her old lipsticks to play dress up with. I tell myself this is an opportunity to learn even more about her. Little things, things Max wouldn’t understand are worth knowing. Like how Rosanna is one of those women who press into the pigment from the top down, pushing hard into their pursed lips so that each stick ends up flat, a gesture that speaks to both nervousness and a kind of compensatory overconfidence. I picture her pulling a tube out of her purse, swiping it on with practiced insouciance. She is the kind of woman who puts on lipstick without a mirror. You can tell by looking at her, by the sharp, precise angles of her mouth in the photographs, by the way she laughs toward the camera, showing her lipstick-free teeth. I turn away and swipe the lipstick on, letting my wrist settle into the unfamiliar motion. It feels okay. But when I turn to look it’s all wrong, crooked, and so I turn my back and try again, again, until I can do it in a moment and look over my shoulder at my perfect mouth, smiling Rosanna’s smile, her mouth floating strange in the middle of my face.

  I close my eyes and picture Rosanna, how it would look if she were looking back at me from that small dark mirror. I see the sharp tilt of her cheekbones, the tweezed neat perfection of her brows, her large eyes, fringed with dense, feathery eyelashes. I see the clean sheen of her skin, as milky and opaque as the flawless belly of a fish. I open my eyes and see my own face, red around the nose and at the corners of the eyes, pockmarked with acne scars. I look nervous, flawed, pinched. I look nothing like Rosanna. I will fix it. I can fix it. It’s okay.

  I close my eyes again and picture her moving toward me out of the darkness, close, close enough that I can see every detail of her, intimate, immense. Working quickly, remembering slicking quick layers of paint onto the porous surface of my sketchbook back home, the thirsty paper sucking up the color’s shine, I smooth a layer of foundation on, the pockmarks on my cheeks and chin disappearing under a supple slick of liquid flesh. I watch myself disappear, becoming flat and smooth and bland. In the mirror my face floats, as pale and round as the moon. I draw on cheekbones, add a slight cleft to my chin, deepen my Cupid’s bow. The lines make my face look like a skull, and I can feel the fragility of my own skeleton, the closeness of bones beneath my skin. I blend the sharp lines in with my fingers, softening them to shadow, faking real structure beneath real skin.

  Night has fallen long ago. Outside the narrow bathroom window, I can see a sliver of purple sky. I step back from the mirror and turn off the light. I disappear. Rosanna’s face swims into focus, like a deep-sea fish emerging from dark water. I can finally see what Max saw at the beginning. What Rosanna understands. Our correspondence. The way her face is hidden beneath my own, like an ancient fresco waiting to be dug up from the ash. I put my hands up to my face, her face, close enough that I can feel the warmth of my skin, the hair tickling my fingertips. I do not touch the surface, afraid it will smear. It is the strangest feeling. Part of me is terrified. I want to wipe my new face off, to leave the room, the apartment, all this, to take my old self back. I can be gone before Max returns, disappearing into this vast city, making a life of my own. I can still leave. I don’t have to let myself disappear. Looking at Rosanna’s face in the mirror, I know all this, and yet…and yet it is wonderful, too.

  Every day is the same day. Every day I go deeper.

  * * *

  —

  In childhood, my body had been a shelter, protecting the small sliver of my selfhood as the world around it shifted and shifted again, my mother and then my grandmother gone, my father disappeared. My little bit of self stayed safe, buried down deep where no one could touch it, as tender and thin-shelled as a quail egg. And then I was a teenager, and my body stopped protecting me. And now I am here, and it no longer belongs to me at all.

  Things start disappearing. The name of my first grade teacher, the face of my best friend when I was small, what the lobby of the movie theater smelled like. The kind of messy little fragments of memory you don’t even know you possess until you reach for one and find it missing. One morning I wake up and find that for a brief and panicked instant, I can’t remember my own name. When it returns, it’s with a flinch, a small violence, so separate and painful from my life in this room that I almost feel as though I do not want it back. Outside, the parrots shift in the branches of the trees, murmuring their morning song to one another, preparing to venture out into the world. Listening to them leaving has become painful, a reminder of the freedom I no longer have.

  Still, the idea of encountering the outside world makes me more and more anxious. All those strangers, all that jostling and disruption and noise. I could stay here for a little longer, tucked inside my tiny room. Safe between these four walls, safe in the endless stretch of days and nights and days again, each day the same day as the day before it, time passing quick like a string of pearls sliding through limp fingers. It must be a month since I got here, more. I try to imagine how much money I’ve made so far, how much closer I am, even now, to my new self. My old life seems to recede further and further from me, a small island disappearing over the horizon.

  I sit on the futon the way Rosanna sits, mouthing the words she says along with her. I wear her sweaters, her underwear. I draw her lipstick on in the mornings, all on my own, without a mirror. I mark the passage of time by the shifting patterns of light across the purple hills. Some days I read for hours, and it hardly seems to change. Some days, when I look up, it is dark. Inside, slowly, that small glint of self begins to dim. I’m disappearing completely, perfecting a skill I learned a long time ago. The only difference now is that I have someone else to disappear into. I will slip into the role of Rosanna like warm bathwater. I will find a new self, a better self to take the place of whatever it is I’ve lost.

  * * *

  —

  Here are the things Rosanna says she likes: cashew milk, white-rimmed Miltonia orchids, the films of Terrence Malick, dry martinis at Musso & Frank. Here are the things she says she does not like: traffic, processed food, pears. Here is another thing she doesn’t like: me. Days pass, days keep passing, and still Rosanna doesn’t come. I know she isn’t coming for me, won’t, until I am so perfect that seeing me will be as natural as glimpsing herself in a darkened hallway mirror. Still, I sit by the window and wait. For what, I cannot tell.

  * * *

  —

  Max sits across from me on the futon, his body angled toward mine. I can feel him watching me, the warmth of it, the way he looks now, really looks, no longer afraid, his eyes resting comfortably on my fancy clothes, my clean, clear skin. I’m careful to wipe off my makeup around him, not ready yet for him to know how hard I’m trying. I want to seem effortless for him, like I’m just existing, my body naturally falling into aesthetically pleasing lines. I want him to see that Rosanna was right to pick me. I want him to go to her, after he leaves, and tell her how right she was.

  “I like it when you wear your hair like that,” h
e says, and I laugh.

  “It’s easier to have nice hair now that I finally have a hairbrush!”

  Max laughs, too. “I’m sorry!” he says. “I already said I’m sorry. Rosanna doesn’t always think of practical things like that. But it looks nice brushed out. You look nice.”

  He pushes one lock behind my ear. The light touch, his fingers lingering for a moment longer than they need to, gives me chills. “You have pretty ears,” he says.

  I roll my head away from him, clap my hands over them, pretending annoyance. In the interviews, Rosanna is a little possessive of her body, self-critical, self-effacing. She jokes to show she’s comfortable.

  “What a strange compliment,” I say, turning the page, pretending to read. It works. He laughs.

  “I think you mean thank you,” he says.

  Over the glossy frame of the magazine I can see he’s smiling, looking tenderly at my face. I laugh back, mirroring him.

  “Okay, sure, thank you!” I say. “You’re still a weirdo for noticing, though.”

  He shakes his head. “I’m a noticer!” he says. “I’m good at seeing things other people don’t. Like your ears. Which are, as I mentioned, very nice, as ears go.”

  He reaches back across the couch and keeps playing with my hair. I tilt my head toward him like a domesticated cat.

  “Like with Rosanna? Do you notice things for her? Like you noticed me?”

  His hand tightens around the hair he’s stroking, and then falls still. “Yes,” he says quietly. “Like that.”

  * * *

  —

  When I am alone, I leaf through the interviews and try to assemble a timeline: what was going on when, what was she thinking, how did she feel? I try to sense her in my body, the tingle of her nerves raising the hair on the back of my neck, her excitement slicking my palms with sweat, like a Method actor preparing for a role. I sit on the couch with my eyes closed, answering the questions interviewers pose. At first I use her words. But after a while I feel my way toward new answers, other things she might say, if she was asked again, given a second chance. I try to let my tongue hang loose, to feel in the empty air for the words she would speak.

  “What brings you the greatest joy?”

  “My family. And lemon meringue pie!”

  “What brings you the greatest joy?”

  “My family, my fans, and a nice dry martini!”

  “What brings you the greatest joy?”

  “Solitude. What can I say, I love my alone time!”

  “What brings you the greatest joy?”

  “I haven’t been happy in years!”

  “What brings you the greatest joy?”

  “Max.”

  * * *

  —

  He has begun bringing me boxes of loose photographs, Polaroids, printouts of paparazzi shots, strips of film and test shots for magazine covers, advertisements—every scrap of her he can find. I stick them on the wall, one image at first, and then a small cluster, and then the wall is covered with Rosanna and Rosanna and Rosanna. I stand close and let the shape of her burn into the folds of my brain, memorizing every image, the tilt of her head, the position of her hands, her glance passing just beyond the frame of the photograph to meet me, smiling, her gaze direct and unashamed. I force myself to stand so close to the wall that she’s all I can see. When I step away, she is still there, watching. There is nowhere in the room I can stand without looking up to meet her eyes. Without her seeing me back.

  In the mornings I do my makeup, spending hours in front of that tiny mirror. And in the afternoons, I put on her clothes, my clothes, ours. I take my time dressing. There are so many versions of her I can become. Lifestyle blog Rosanna, standing in her kitchen pretending to make a smoothie in a navy-striped marinière, slim-fit jeans, and boots, a gold bangle hanging light on her wrist. “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” Rosanna, coming out of a coffee shop with a chai latte and a soft leather bucket bag, white twill culottes, a chambray shirt the same light gray as the long gray mornings of the Los Angeles sky. Date night Rosanna, in those sultry silk shifts, crimson lipstick, lips tight, eyes cast upward at the man beside her. There are other iterations. Too many to count. Piles and piles of very fine things to dress the versions of Rosanna who would wear, for example, a peplum skirt, an A-line dress, a slinky black silk kimono with nothing underneath, a cream-colored jacket, a lace dress, gloves, a fisherman’s sweater too fine to fish in. I have never seen the sea. I always look unconvincing, like an understudy, a child trying on her mother’s clothes.

  I spend a long time standing in front of the rack, imagining how she feels when she gets dressed. I touch one sleeve, straighten a hem. I bury my face in the fabric and breathe, searching for some small trace of her, some memory I can cling to and bring to life. I try hard not to remember doing the same thing with my mother’s clothes—the heavy scent of her perfume, of her cigarettes; the nights when I would curl up into her fur coats and pretend that this was a place my father could not find me. But there is no warmth of life left in Rosanna’s clothes, no sense of the woman who used to wear them. Even the heavy musk of her perfume is fading. Soon the clothes will smell like nothing. Worse, they will smell like me. The thought is disgusting, transforming the clothes into empty skins, horrible, dead things. I breathe once, twice, the air dense in my chest. I gently touch the sleeve of a white cotton dress with my fingertips. It is fabric. Just fabric. I close my hand and hold on tight.

  * * *

  —

  When Max arrives every day toward evening, I have carefully hung all the clothes back on the rack. I don’t want him to know how difficult her carelessness is for me to replicate. I am sitting on the couch with the stack of magazines, pretending to read, although really by now I have gone over each of the articles so many times that the words have lost their meaning, wearing the same soft white button-down and black leggings I revert to every evening. I sit still and listen for the car, a series of sounds I have come to recognize and love, yes, like a pet dog, that’s how bored I am, my heart jumping a little at the sound of the idling engine, the clunk of the door closing in the empty street, a wait, and then, bliss, the door unlocking, Max, here to save me from boredom, from the noisy fragments of my old self. In the kitchen, he unpacks my dinner, which is always the same, a series of small boxes of vegetables prepared in various ways—raw, steamed, roasted, dehydrated. Today it is food in dull neutral shades—mushrooms, brown rice, burdock root, lotus. I know the names of all these things now.

  As he unpacks, he asks me questions. “What’s your favorite food?” he’ll say, or “Who do you love most in the world? Tell me about your dreams.” He’ll ask me to remember conversations I’ve read. “And how did you answer,” maybe, “when she asked you what you were doing with your life?” or small details about my everyday activities: “What vitamins are you taking? What color lipstick do you prefer for everyday wear?”

  “Dark chocolate,” I say. “My father, probably. I had a strange dream about a glass mountain. Growing up, mostly, I think. It’s a process. Vitamins E, A, K, collagen supplements, selenium. Some antioxidant pills. Coral blush, of course.”

  At the end of the recitation he smiles. “What have you been doing all day?” he always asks.

  “Oh, you know,” I say, my tone casual. “Reading. Dress up. Practicing. I missed you.”

  I don’t look at him when I say this, afraid of the expression he will make. Max is a bad liar. But it’s true, I missed him, miss him every day. I long to be close to him, even though I know that he’s as responsible as Rosanna is for keeping me locked up in here, for the deadening monotony of my days.

  “I would be flattered,” he says. “But you don’t have anyone else to miss.”

  I pretend to laugh. “True,” I say.

  But it isn’t. I miss Rosanna.

  * * *

&n
bsp; —

  In the first days I expected her every minute. I thought she would check in on me regularly, wanting to keep track of my progress, and I waited, expectant, for that first inspection, sure that I would please her. Of course she never came. I tell myself I am no longer waiting. That Max’s approval is enough. Even so, l hold myself tense, in expectation. I am never quite myself, even when no one is watching. Because she could be coming, any minute. And I want her to be happy with what she sees. The exhaustion of this, of having to maintain two separate fictions at the same time—the Rosanna I cultivate for Max, and the Rosanna that exists only for Rosanna herself—makes me bleary. I am never not tired. But one day, I know, it will be worth it. Max will tell Rosanna that I am ready. And she will come to me. I will recognize her cautious footsteps on the stairs, her hesitation at the door. She’ll be stunned when she sees me. She will stand in the doorway for a long time, looking. I will make the first move. I will reach for her, taking her hand very gently, so she won’t be scared. “Hello,” I will say, “I’m—” But no, I won’t say my name, I’ll greet her with her own. Ours. “Rosanna,” I will say. “Hello.” She will look at me with infinite humor, infinite kindness. She won’t say my name back. She’ll touch my face. We’ll laugh. Our laughs will sound the same, like it is one person laughing. She will come into the room. She will sit on the couch, close beside me. She will ask me what it feels like to be in her body, and I will tell her. I will tell her everything I know.