by Emily Beyda
“It’s okay,” says Edward, “I got it.”
He fills her glass. His other arm is wrapped around her shoulders. He smiles at me across the table when I try to catch her eye. But she doesn’t even notice. She’s looking up at him.
“Thanks, babe,” she says.
* * *
—
That night the apartment feels smaller than ever. I keep thinking of Marie and Edward’s house, the expensively decorated empty rooms folding in around them like a nautilus shell, each room with its own decorator, its own color scheme: the dark greens and masculine grays of the pool room; the wide white space of the entranceway; the rainbow craft room, perfectly orderly, shelves full of immaculately dusted spools of yarn; Marie’s closets, vast and white and pink. Here the colors are muted by dust. I can measure the space with countable steps. I feel pent up, a chick pressing against the hard sphere of its shell. I try to sit still and remember. Normally this is fine. I can spend hours curled up, staring into the darkness on the other side of my eyelids. If I look long enough, flashes of bruised color bloom like strange nocturnal flowers. Not tonight. Tonight I grope around in my dark spaces for some hint of Rosanna’s presence. But she is gone. At last I am horribly, finally alone.
I think of Marie in bed with her husband, wrapped up in those confining arms. They will have spent the rest of the evening sitting in the garden they grew together, or at least together hired someone to grow. It’s a beautiful night, the air dense with the smell of jasmine, hot asphalt, exhaust. The moon is high and silver, looming huge over the horizon, so close it looks like its belly will scrape the mountains’ jagged edge. I can feel it pull me, stirring the hidden tides of my blood. I want to get out so badly for just a little while, to feel the air on my face. I need space. I need openness. I can’t stand being locked up like this. I roam the apartment like a distracted animal, turning the taps on and off again, opening and closing the closet doors, every window, every cabinet, every drawer.
And then I remember. The front door is unlocked. Max had dropped me off at the curb. I was thinking about asking him up, seeing if he wanted to watch videos with me, but he sped off up into the hills, saying he needed to go see Rosanna. Typical, I had thought, the one night I want to spend time with him, he’s too busy for me. I had pouted on my way through the dark hallways, preoccupied with thinking about how selfish he was, how inconsistent. How could Rosanna have chosen someone like him as an employee? I had opened the door myself. I had closed the door behind me. The door was and is unlocked.
Maybe Max knows the door is open. Maybe he wants me to be tempted to wander, so he can catch me in the act. Why else would he have left me alone? I feel him watching me. He must be. I am not alone now. I am never alone. But the walls of the room seem to be closing in. If I could just open the door, maybe go out into the hallway, breathe a little, would that be so bad? Rosanna owns the whole building. She has fixed it all up just for me. Don’t I owe it to her to explore a little? This is what I will tell Max if he’s waiting outside.
I put my hand back on the doorknob. My sweaty fingers slip and the knob starts to turn. I clutch the door shut. My head warps with swimming waves of light, and I sink back onto the floor, hands and knees on the wood, knots swelling up to meet my skin. I push an acid rush of vomit back down my throat. I close my eyes and think of the space around me, the empty building, the sleeping houses, the dark weight of the night air outside. Hands flat, still crouching on the floor, I push. The door swings silent into the silence. I heave my body through the doorframe, a movement like slinging a heavy sack of groceries into the trunk of a car. And then I am out. I stand up slowly. I take one breath. Another. A cautious first step forward. I leave the door open, just in case.
The hallway looks different in the moonlight. Dreamy. Vague. It looks perfect, like Rosanna’s house. My hands are shaking; my whole body is shaking. To steady myself I run the tips of my fingers along both narrow walls, letting my eyes close, feeling my way across the sand-rough stucco, the smooth wood of my neighbors’ doors, not allowing myself to pause for breath or think until I am through the cold vault of the entryway and out that second unlocked door and the heavy night air swallows me up.
My feet are cold. I have forgotten to wear shoes; they’re somewhere in my apartment, empty as an abandoned cicada shell. The gravel walkway stretches out in front of me, impossibly long, to the dark lapping asphalt of the street. I am afraid of the sharp bite of rocks on my skin, afraid that a car will swoop around the corner and surprise me here, pinning me to the road like a butterfly splayed in a frame. But I can’t go back. I hold my breath like a swimmer standing on a high dive, looking down into the cold water glinting below.
There was this thing I used to do when I was very small and needed to calm myself down. Noticing. I guess I thought if I could pay attention to every sound around me, name them all, they couldn’t hurt me. I try it now. It is late, and mostly silent. The only sound is the distant rush of the freeway, constant, vague, like running water. I think of it as the breath of the city, flowing, smooth, an automatic process. A sign of life. It quiets the terror that has been building inside me. I close my eyes and step off the stairs. Airborne. Eyes still closed, I begin to walk up through the darkness toward the sky, as far as my legs will take me.
* * *
—
When I get back, I stand in front of the closed door of the building for a long time, looking up at the dark window of my room. Max is in there, waiting for me in the quiet dark. I know it. But when I come into the hallway, the door is still open. There is nothing, no one, waiting for me inside. I sit on the bed, watching the movement of dark palm fronds against the purple sky. My body hangs limp on my bones, aching with the strain of unaccustomed motion. The bottoms of my feet are sore and raw. I wait for what feels like a long time before I realize that he is not coming. He does not know I have been gone. I am unnoticed. I am alone. I lay myself down on the bed and weep. I sob until I am breathless. Until my body begins to shake. Soon I fall into a dreamless sleep.
* * *
—
In the morning I stretch my sore calves, crafting pads from gauze and Vaseline to protect my skin from the rub of my stiff leather shoes. I greet Max normally. I have an ordinary day. That night the door is unlocked. That night I walk again. Again the next night. And the next. I begin to feel safe passing through the darkness of the hills; I have never seen anyone else out walking, not once. Sometimes a car will pass, but I duck down a side road or crouch in someone’s driveway until it’s gone. I try not to let myself think about all those windows, my body reflected in them as I walk past, rippling, a darkened mirror. But even if there is someone watching, what will they see? A small figure moving quickly until she disappears from view. An anonymous woman. An insomniac who could be anyone, who is no one at all. Every night when I return to the apartment, I hope and fear that Max will have noticed. But I always come back to an empty room. The hollow shell I’ve left behind.
I develop a new ritual. Before, when I watched the tapes, I let my internal sense of Rosanna guide my movements, feeling the energetic whisper in my hovering palms. Now I move my body in the same way, tracing vaguely familiar paths through the hills, following a pull inside me that seems to grow stronger every night. I go up and down the same hills over and over, making my way through narrow staircases, winding streets. Sometimes I cross through an unlocked gate and sit hidden in a stranger’s garden, staring up at the low belly of the sky. I stop and stand for long minutes in the shadows of overgrown bougainvillea vines, hidden, waiting to feel where I need to go next. I don’t know where I am walking. But I know it is because of Rosanna. Someday soon she will let herself be found. Someday soon I will find a house with large arched windows, wood floors shining through them like pools of dark water, all lit up with bright golden light. And when I find her, when I come to her, she will be waiting for me to arrive. I am growing closer, I kn
ow, one step at a time.
The weeks slide by, a sunny blur. I increase the space I take up in the world by buying things, a pair of tight-fitting black pants, a little blue fish in a crystal bowl, an indigo-dyed table runner, three bouquets of flowers, a lamp. I eat six different salads in six different restaurants. Because of me, quantifiable amounts of carbon are displaced from the engines of trucks and cars, waiters are tipped, busboys earn their minimum wage. Capital flows through the world as loose and easy as water in a river. Max takes me to the park and I run along the paths wearing the worst-selling pieces from my new athletic line, leaf-print leggings and a sea-green top, the car idling beside me, driving slow, the engine drowning out the shouts of the photographers. I wave and smile. I smile and wave. The leggings sell out that afternoon.
For months I have been making tiny adjustments to the instructions Max gives me. At first I thought they were errors, but now I realize that what seemed like imprecision was really my way of moving closer to Rosanna. The real Rosanna. The living Rosanna. Max wants me to be like the statue of her in the Hollywood Wax Museum, perfect, frozen, wearing the same outfit for ten years straight. He wants to pump all resistant traces of life from me, leave me wide-eyed and pliant and dead. But Rosanna isn’t pliant. Rosanna isn’t dead. The only way I can survive this is to become intentional about my corrections. I will become more like her than he can imagine.
When Max sends me out on my next see-and-be-seen solo shopping trip, I buy a leather jacket, close cut with a diagonal zipper. When I touch it, I feel a tingling in my fingertips. Rosanna wants it. So I buy it. It costs three thousand dollars. I put it on my card. I do not clear my purchase with Max. “Rosanna’s New Look,” the tabloids say. I can feel my offshore account filling up quietly while I sleep, the interest compounding, money piling on money, cozying itself up into vast new stores of wealth. And I love to spend Rosanna’s money. My purse is full of loose bills. I start to tip better than she did, twenty instead of fifteen percent. I slip a fifty into the jar when Max and I stop off to pick up juice. The woman behind the counter smiles. I make sure Max doesn’t see. I pet dogs now. Dogs are totally nonjudgmental. Rosanna would like them, even though they are probably the only ones who can smell my old smell. A tabloid takes a picture of me bent over a Pomeranian tied up outside a bar. “Rosanna’s Puppy Love.” It’s relatable. It’s cute. My wall is covered with new pictures. When people think of Rosanna now, remember her grocery shopping for sponsored products, sitting at a lunch meeting, walking the red carpet, it is my image, mine, that reverberates inside them. I trace Rosanna’s face with my fingertips. Nothing hurts anymore. I am the woman they want to become.
* * *
—
Each night I go farther, guided by my internal hum. I start on the same path, left at the door, up the hill, past the chrome-faced mansions gleaming like pulled teeth, the glossy fence of the always locked garden with OZ spelled in tile shards on the gate, the narrow tower of the fake Victorian, the high stone walls of the Spanish Revival, the sign, half overgrown by bushes, depicting three golden pyramids, HOLLYWOOD OASIS written across the bottom in pixelated tile. On my early walks, I stayed close, afraid that I would get lost or that Max would come back and find me missing. But I have been walking for a long time. I am no longer afraid. I move with the slickness of a figure skater crossing a hard frozen pond, black asphalt like black ice, the spool of the hill’s maze unraveling inside me, pulling me forward and then back again, home. Every night I walk a little farther. Every night I find new things. Up I go, and up.
Tonight the city is silent around me, except, of course, for the distant sound of the freeway. The air is thick with the smell of jasmine, gasoline, bruised jacaranda flowers, something heavy and sticky and bubblegum sweet. I am tense and electric, coiled up so tight I can hardly stand to close my eyes. I want to exhaust myself enough to feel at home in my body, to push myself forward until I am too tired to think. I want to be all body, no mind, with nothing to distract me. So I walk. My legs are starting to ache by the time I see the first unfamiliar thing, a white gate surrounded by high barbed-wire-topped fences, a sign saying HOLLYWOOD RESERVOIR. I look and there are no cameras, so I slide myself through a gap in the fence and keep walking.
It is quiet here. A narrow trail passing under scrubby pines, the shine of dark water below me and houses above, perched on the top of the hillside, all wide black windows, open to the night. I see a sugar-cube-white box of a house, shimmering patterns of blue drifting over its front. A pool. I desperately want to submerge myself, to soak up that pale blue light. That house and the houses surrounding it have darkened windows, quiet and still. It must be after three. The sky is low and brooding purple, empty. There is nothing—no passing cars, no helicopters—to disturb the perfect silence. If I am quick and quiet, no one will see me. No one will know I was here at all.
I clamber up the slippery hillside, dust sloughing soft over my white shoes, staining my hands, and there is the house in front of me, a kidney-shaped pool glowing at my feet, pulsing as though it is filtering blood, a working part of some larger living thing. I stand still for a long moment, look into the mirror of the windows. Nothing looks back. Slowly I unbutton my pajama top, take off my coat, my pants, kick off my dust-stained shoes, and slide, naked, into the water. It closes around me as I float. In the stillness, I can feel my heart slow. I look up at the bruised sky and something overwhelms me, an urge so strong that I have to sink down to the bottom of the pool before it escapes me, the sound waves exiting my body as bubbles, my body convulsing, and I push myself onto the rough stucco and I scream and scream and scream. I come to the surface slowly, airless, and float for just one more moment, listening to the stillness until it is broken finally by the distant whir of a helicopter, its searchlight sweeping the mountainside’s scrub of manzanitas and wild sage. Searching for someone in the dark folds of the hills. I wonder if anyone is looking for me.
I climb out of the pool. I pull on my clothes, denim sticking to the damp surface of my legs. As quietly as I can, I pass through the narrow passageway beside the house and find myself on an unfamiliar street. I can’t be far from the apartment. I know this logically. But the street is indistinguishable from a thousand other streets, white wooden gates with vines climbing over the top, desert plots of blooming cacti and creeping jellied leaves, the raked gravel of a Zen garden. A tunnel of pink bougainvillea closes me off from the sky. Something isn’t working. My chest begins to grow tight. The interior pull seems confused, simultaneously urging me in two different directions, both uphill and down, a clamor that makes my skull ache. The houses seem huddled, their backs to the street, as if they are conspiring against me. I look hard at every little thing I pass—the window boxes, the parked cars, the single concrete lamppost—searching for something I can interpret as a sign. And then I round the corner and the two hums click into place, growing louder and louder until I have to suppress the urge to cover my ears, and there it is in front of me, the place I didn’t even know I was looking for, that I have been looking for all along. I am standing in front of Rosanna’s house.
The house is hidden from the street by a high iron gate swirled pliant into loops and counter loops, a meringue-topped cake, a frozen ocean. Every tape I have seen has been oriented from the inside, making it seem expansive, full of light. Out here, it looks like it’s cowering in the darkness. Closed off. I press my face against the gate, peering through a gap in the scrolls down the driveway to the door, that distinctive hanging lamp. It’s dark now, but I can picture it lit up so clearly—Rosanna, slumped in that doorway, washed in that yellow light. I notice the spill of leaves sprouting from the low trees planted on either side of the doorway, the bars on all the narrow windows, how the gutters have been molded into the shapes of grotesque faces, mouths open in a silent scream. I stand there for a long time, letting my memories click into place. There, on the side of the house, is the bird-of-paradise whose wide leaves I have
glimpsed from the window of the kitchen as Rosanna makes salads, chopping carrots with that impossibly shiny knife. There is the window of her bedroom, the iron balcony she leans over, smoking a cigarette, her back to the camera, not saying a word. It is Rosanna’s house, exactly the same as I hoped I’d find it. She has called me, and here I am. Just as I’d imagined, I have arrived.
It’s late, I realize that. But Rosanna is a late-night person. I know her habits. Even now she may be roaming the dark halls of her dark house, thinking of me, wondering where I am. I press my body up against the gate, the iron scrolls cutting into my soft belly, and wait for a light to go on. I’m here, I think. Notice me. But there is nothing. I have climbed so many fences in my life. And this is a simple one, lots of empty spaces for foot- and handholds, nothing sharp at the top or waiting for me on the other side. I imagine lifting myself up, over, down onto the gravel of the driveway, the loud crunch my feet would make on the stones, how Rosanna would hear the sound and be afraid of the stranger at her gate. No, I think. I can’t do that to her. The house remains still, silent as a mausoleum. The hum that has been inside of me for weeks, has propelled me through these hills toward her, is quiet now. I long for some small sign that she is looking back out at me, that she is pleased. I have come so far, am so close. Any moment now a light will come on. The door will crack and Rosanna will be standing there, her face hidden by darkness, her arms open to welcome me in. I will cross the threshold into her garden. She will take me into her arms. I picture us sitting close together on the couch, how she will run the tips of her fingers lightly over the ridges of our face. Neither of us speaking. A perfect understanding between us. Why would we have to say a thing?
