The Book of You: A Novel (4 page)

Henry haunts me too, but not as much as you. You’re fast overtaking him.

Despite the freezing night and slippery pavements, Rowena is wearing a plunging sleeveless dress of deep-purple velvet and high heels. I think it’s a little odd because it’s not like Rowena to make so much effort just for me. I tell her that her dress is beautiful.

“So many women get stuck in their look,” she says, and I’m pretty sure she means me.

Is this the Rowena who used to sneak her favorite clothes to me whenever I wanted to wear something my mother hadn’t sewn?

I glimpse my reflection in the window. My hair is piled on top of my head and held with silvery geometric clasps, though a few blond wisps have escaped around my face and neck. The bodice and sleeves of my charcoal dress are tightly fitted, the skirt like the upside-down bowl of a wineglass, the hemline just above my knees.

Rowena looks down at her chest. “It’s not just to attract men.” The emotion behind the last sentence is too strong; her mouth trembles as she struggles not to frown. “It’s for me. I owe it to myself. And these new boobs don’t move at all. They’re so pert and perky I don’t even need a bra.”

I think of the defendants jeering at Miss Lockyer.
Look at her tits wobble.

Pert and perky are not Rowena words. When did they become so?

Rowena goes on, seeming to need to convince herself more than me. “The women at my gym are always asking, ‘Who did your face? Who did your boobs?’ ” She speaks as if her body parts can be purchased by anyone, like a new gown or bag.

The defendants say “tits.” Rowena says “boobs.” I say “breasts.” I don’t know what you say. I don’t want to know. What I do know is that these differences matter.

“It’s a huge compliment. You should try Botox, Clarissa. At the very least. If you don’t do something soon, you’ll wake up one morning looking like a deflated balloon.”

She’s not even nice to you,
Henry said.

She’s comfortable being honest with me,
I said.

You have nothing in common,
he said.

I blink hard several times, as if this will clear my vision so that the Rowena I thought I knew will come back to me. This version of her would probably advise Henry to get a hair transplant. I can picture his response if she dared: the scornful, incredulous eyebrow he’d raise, wordlessly. I think Henry is beautiful as he is, even if he’s no longer mine to think this about.

“I’ll give it some thought. Are you well, though? Recovered from the operations?”

“The only downside is that I can’t feel my nipples anymore.” Rowena says this mockingly, like a dieter who has given up chocolate but never liked it much anyway. I work hard to disguise my sadness for her, and my horror that she has mutilated herself and her own pleasure in this way. “The scarring’s rather shocking. But the surgeon’s hopeful it will improve.”

Is this the Rowena who used to float in the sea with her eyes closed, humming to herself and pretending to be a mermaid as she let the currents rock her?

I picture Rowena’s areolas sewn on like buttons, a dark ring circling each one. For a few seconds my own nipples seem to burn and tingle. “I’m sure it will. I’d imagine it just takes time.”

She studies my face. “You’ve got circles under your eyes. You should cover them up. You should consider an eyelid lift. It’s very rejuvenating. You’d feel so much better about yourself. If the people you work with see you looking tired, they’ll believe you are tired. They’ll believe you’re not effective at your job, that you’re unprofessional.”

Many women are disinclined to tell others about what is happening to them.

I bite my lip. “I’m not sleeping very well lately, Rowena. It’s this man.”

She misunderstands. “I want to hear all about him. But can it wait?”

Is this the Rowena who rushed from Edinburgh to London so I could sob in her arms when my boyfriend broke up with me in my second year at university?

“Of course,” I say.

She only ever talks about herself. She’s not interested in you,
Henry said.

But I’ve withheld the most important things,
I said,
to try to hold on to her. How can she be interested in me when I’ve kept the essential parts of my life hidden?

Both of Rowena’s husbands said they didn’t want children, then left her to have them with other women. She’d never have forgiven my taking Henry from his wife. Sometimes I even wondered if it was my guilt about what I’d done that somehow stopped me from getting pregnant. The attempted baby-making would certainly have infuriated Rowena further. Henry knew this and helped me with the cover-up, though he mumbled about how one-sided a friendship it was.

She checks herself severely in the compact mirror again, and I realize that her failed marriages are probably what made her so susceptible to this cult of plastic. “Did I do the right thing with my face?” She brushes powder above her eyebrows, which seem higher than I remember.

“You did absolutely the right thing. You look like an American soap opera star.” This brings a near smile to her lips, which I have just noticed are plumper. “If it makes you happy, more confident, then that’s what matters. That’s what shows.”

She nods in enthusiastic agreement. “It’s a firmer, more youthful and sculpted look.” Henry would pull a face at this, but I do not.

The waiter leads us to a table in the corner. Hanging on the restaurant’s walls are pseudo Art Deco paintings of nude women, easily overlooked in the dimly lit room. I get sidetracked by one of them, of a dancer. It makes me think again of the men in the dock and how they forced Miss Lockyer to strip and perform for them. “What made you choose this place?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then who did?”

She ignores my question. “Do you think it looks natural?” There’s a tremor in her voice that makes my heart hurt for her.

The flickering candlelight gives Rowena’s frozen face an illusion of expressiveness, though I’m alarmed by how pronounced her cheeks have become and scared that whatever the beauty technicians shot into them might harm her. “I do. Like you’ve been to a really great spa.”

Is this the Rowena who used to play with my hair and tickle my arms when we had sleepovers, then swap places so I could do the same to her?

“I believe that each of us has a responsibility to look our best at every age.”

Who are you, and what have you done with Rowena? I silently ask her.

I take her jeweled hand to get her attention. “I need to talk to you. It’s something very bad.”

She looks toward the restaurant’s entrance, and it’s as if somebody’s flipped a switch: her dazzling white, cameras-are-on-me smile appears in a flash. She makes no attempt to restrain it.

I follow her gaze and nearly choke on the sip of water I’ve just taken. The warbling French jazz seems to grow louder, and the room plunges from dim to almost dark. Have they done something to make the lighting even worse? Because I cannot process what I’m seeing.

What I’m seeing is you. Striding toward me like it is the most normal thing in the world.

There was no sign of you when I left my flat. No sign of you when the taxi dropped me off. No sign of you at all until now. How did you work out I was here? Only Rowena knew.

You are beaming. You look radiantly happy, so happy that I’m astonished by a small stab of sadness that I am the one who must wreck this crazy joy of yours. Something you make me do over and over. Don’t you know how exhausting it is? Doesn’t it make you tired, too?

You are moving your mouth, saying words I don’t understand. You are standing beside Rowena. You are bending to kiss her on each cheek.

“D-d-don’t touch her.” I’ve never had a stutter, but for a few seconds I do. “G-go away.”

Rowena pulls out the chair beside her in welcome. “Rafe’s joining us.”

How can she know your name? None of this is making sense. “He can’t.”

“I invited him.” Rowena puts her hand on yours. You are first to break the contact, but she seems not to notice. “Sit down, Rafe.”

My flight response nearly hauls me out of my chair, but I don’t want to leave Rowena alone with you and she doesn’t look like she’s going to follow me out anytime soon.

“If you’re sure.” You drape your coat over the back of the chair, declining the waitress’s offer to hang it up for you. I’m certain there’s something in the pockets that you don’t want to risk having discovered. I’m certain also that you want to keep your things near so you can grab them quickly to chase after me when I run away.

I look only at Rowena, as if she is a lifeline I must grab. “I don’t understand.”

“We wanted to surprise you.” Rowena adjusts her carefully highlighted brown hair.

I force myself to use my brain and use it quickly. I puzzle out how you linked Rowena to me. It must have been that awards ceremony for businesswomen eight years ago. Rowena was between husbands then, so I went with her. When they called her name, I clapped so hard my palms smarted; I smiled so much my jaw hurt. There’d been a photo of me and Rowena, with both of us named in the caption. It’s the only thing that comes up on me in an Internet search.

“We thought you’d be excited that we know each other.” Rowena sounds hurt, but my horror of you is even stronger than my usual inclination to comfort and reassure her.

“How?” My vision is blurring in this stupidly dark room. “How do you?”

“We met face-to-face for the first time at lunch today. But we’ve been emailing the last two months. It’s amazing how close you can get to a person when you write to each other.” She waves away the approaching waitress. “Rafe follows my business blog. He gets his students to read it to enhance their employability. But he noticed a reference to my creative ambitions in my profile, so he got in touch. He’s advising me on that memoir I’ve always wanted to write.”

The blood is pulsing behind my eyes. “He cyberstalked you.”

“That’s melodramatic. And paranoid.” She apologizes to you. “Clarissa didn’t mean it.”

“Yes I did.” Everything is in shadows. I shake my head several times to try to clear it, and then I make myself focus on you, the very thing I hate to do. “You don’t know anything about writing a memoir. You’re just a literary critic.” I say the last two words like they’re the worst insult I can think of.

“I have a number of talents and interests you haven’t yet discovered, Clarissa.”

There you go again. Punctuating every sentence with my name in your freakish way. Why doesn’t Rowena see how weird it is? A sob comes out of my throat before I can stop it. “You don’t need him, Rowena. You can join a writing group. He’s using you to get at me.”

“Not everything is about you. That’s so unbelievably arrogant. Not to mention ridiculous. Rafe and I only just discovered a few weeks ago that we have you in common.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, then open them again, not caring how peculiar I must look. “What a coincidence.”

“Isn’t it, Clarissa,” you say.

“We both care about you,” Rowena says.

“Very much,” you say.

“Did he tell you about this morning? When he was waiting outside my house? When the taxi driver had to threaten him with the police? When he knew I didn’t want him to be there?”

You are shaking your head in a pantomime of how wounded and misunderstood you are. Your performance is clear even through the murky vapor of this awful room. “Clarissa,” you say. “Oh, Clarissa. How could you think this way?”

I can barely stop myself from dashing your face with iced water from the nearby jug.

Rowena touches your arm. “Rafe’s concerned about you. That’s why I came down.”

The irony isn’t lost on me that it’s only because of you that she got in touch after two years of silence.

She is regarding me with disappointment. “He told me you haven’t been yourself lately. That you’ve been acting strange at work. I asked him to keep an eye on you until I could get here. I never dreamed you’d be so unkind to him.”

A vein throbs in my forehead as I fully grasp how much trouble you took to set this up, how much time you spent plotting and manipulating, how much advance planning you did, how much patience and discipline you exerted over yourself in waiting for tonight. Rowena was the ideal target for you. She is visibly injured, her vulnerability and desperation carved into her new breasts and face. You groomed her. You totally maneuvered her. You actually charmed her.

If you have friends in common, he may turn them against you by dismissing your worries or claiming you behaved unreasonably to him.

It’s as if you’ve read the anti-stalker leaflets, too, and you’re using all of their advice against me. We have no friends in common, so you went and made Rowena into one.

My throat is tight, but my vision is clearing. “That’s not how it was.”

You’re smirking now, enjoying yourself: two women fighting about you. You’ve put me in a position where I have to talk to you and look at you and pay attention to you. Already you’ve forced me to break the resolution of silence that I made only this morning.

“You can’t not believe me, Rowena.” If my own friend trusts your story over mine, if she actually thinks you’re plausible, then there’s no hope that the police will ever take me seriously. There’s no hope for Miss Lockyer, either.

You are sucking on an olive, watching me. You take the stone out of your mouth slowly, sensuously. There’s a sheen of oil on your lips. It makes me shudder, and I tear my eyes away, wishing my vision hadn’t snapped into this new hyperacuteness.

Rowena pats my hand lightly. “Let’s change the subject, Clarissa, and put the evening back on track. You’ve always encouraged me to be creative, and Rafe’s got me started on writing about my childhood. I thought you’d be pleased. I told him the things we used to get up to when we were teenagers. I’ve been writing about when that girl beat you up on the seafront. Remember how horrible that policewoman was to you afterward?”

There’s a hot radiator on the wall behind me, but I’m shivering in my wool dress. Goose bumps are springing up on my arms. The person I least want to be exposed to now knows every detail of the story I least want to tell. I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out.