Close-up on my muse-baby. My actress’ face is threatening to turn red, it is twisting. It is not very pretty and reflective as an ingénue is supposed to be. An ingénue is supposed to be ingenuous.
Don’t cry. Don’t cry my Ruth. Don’t cry. You look so homely when you cry.
He snatches the pink bottle away from her, tassel waving. Well, let’s try it out, hmmm? He focuses on a gaggle of American tourists, pudgy middle-aged women in pantsuits, shrieking at the vaulted ceilings. Tennessee? Ruth guesses. Texas? Tallahassee? They are like the American women arriving in Paris in Jacques Tati’s
Playtime
, riding up the escalator to their hotel with drooped flowers in their hats, descending the escalator with freshly restored flowers.
Good morning ladies, his stern expression relaxes into an almost amiable mask. Good morning, they twang in unison, flattered at the Englishman’s attention. I don’t know if you ladies have heard, but there’s a new product out on the market we’re quite excited about, a new fragrance by one of your own. I’m sure you’re familiar with? He says the name. Oh yes, my daughter loves her, one of them pipes up, amidst a general buzzing by the group. He smiles without teeth, nodding his head. Well, perhaps you’d like to sample her new fragrance, Desire. It’s a pretty, pastel scent, perfect for a teenager or teenagers at heart like you lovely ladies. Well, sure! Why not? Surely! they cry. He passes out sticks as Ruth helplessly squirts a wet dot of rose on each, to squeals and clucks of approval. Well that’s very nice. Perhaps I’ll get Mary for Christmas?
Let me know if you need anything else, and enjoy your stay, he concludes grandly. The little hen ladies threaten to erupt into applause, as he motions them to push off like children on their first wobbly bicycles. He turns to Ruth and raises his eyebrows, as if to say, See? Look how easy it is. Her lips stay sealed, and curve into her quick smile. When someone antagonizes Ruth, her face only registers a moment of surprise, as if slapped, but then quickly smoothes over.
Be. Better. He waves a fat forefinger at her, and sails off to terrorize Fine Jewelry.
What did that bastard do to you? The German girl, Natalie, clomps up to her. Natalie is constantly getting in trouble for abandoning her post. Ruth shakes her head, forbidding the tears.
Oh cry cry we want to see you cry. I want to squeeze my Ruth-doll so water comes out. Is that a tear? A tear the moment of truth. A tear in the fabric of the perfected surface.
She feels the gaze of the terrible girls. The tribe of slender mannequins circling in an orbit of feigned disinterestedness. Their leader is Elspeth from the Chanel counter. She is so pale as to be in constant threat of disappearing altogether, her face framed with inky black hair. White and black and cruel. The terrible girls pretend Ruth is not there, although they are always watching her, hoping that she’ll make a scene. She is subjected to their constant scrutiny. Look at her look at her my God is she going to cry such a baby has she even brushed her hair today it looks a fright. To the terrible girls Ruth does not even have a name. She is the American girl. She is merely a temporary worker, a status with which she has become intimately acquainted.
Oh, poor thing, Natalie croons. She hooks her arm through Ruth’s, her black glossy hair brushing against Ruth’s shoulder. A tear appears in the corner of Ruth’s eye. She brushes it away. Go ask Non-cy if you can take your break now. Even though she is German, Natalie is married to an Englishman and talks in a precise, breathy, English accent. She makes fun of the way Ruth occasionally still says Naaan-cy with her Midwestern accent.
Noncy is their floor supervisor, a tiny frazzled blonde who acts like any inquiry or request is just enough to send her over the edge. She is in with the terrible girls.
Ruth shakes her head no. I’m fine. She manages to squeak out. Then insistent: I am fine.
I am fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. The green girl is a liar. She wears the lie on her face. She paints on a smile.
Ruth performs her magic trick of going dead inside.
Lunch this week? Ruth is Natalie’s new pet. Yes, lunch this week, yes fine, fine. Fine. How about tomorrow? No, not tomorrow. Tomorrow I have off.
The relief of the end of the day. She can be reborn again, if there is anything left to resurrect. She hurries to the employee locker room. Her purse vomits its contents all over the gray concrete floor. I am a mess, mess, mess she thinks. Exposed tampon like a rabbit’s foot. Her lipstick capless and covered with tobacco, like a disgraced crown.
She is such a trainwreck. But that’s why we like to watch. The spectacle of the unstable girl-woman. Look at her losing it in public.
Heart beating frantic, she scoops the guts back inside.
She sees the shine of tasteful Italian loafers. Hiya Ruth! Oh, hi Olly. Fingers of red creep up on her face. Olly works in men’s neckties. Handsomish. Charming. English. There is something about him, though, something about him, something so terribly familiar…Something about his face…A certain squareness of the jaw…The fleshy underside of his lips…
It is HE who she pines for, it is HE who fills her daily thoughts, buried in between darker thoughts and lighter thoughts. It is HIM who she prays to, offering up her daily meditations. HE is her reference point for everything. She tells herself, she must forget HIM. HE is dead to her. HE has no name. She pushes HIM deep inside although HE often surfaces, on the street, suddenly in a crowd, in a stranger’s face.
Need some help. A statement, not a question. Olly crouches down besides her. He is helpful. Why is he helpful? Ruth cannot consider motive. She is otherwise occupied. HE has occupied her mind, colonized her body.
She thinks:
There are strangers here who wear your face.
Yeah, thanks. The green girl is often inarticulate. Speech littered with likes. She cannot translate the depths. (Are there depths? I am still unsure of her interiority. If I prick her will thoughts rush out or just a mess of heavy confusion?)
Olly hands the purse over. It has no name, the purse. It is black with no name. It looks enough like it has a name, from far away, but up close one realizes the purse’s secret, the humiliation of its anonymity.
Good to see you Ruth.
Bye. Feather-voiced. Sending up the American blonde. She is an actress. She is playing herself. She is ready for her screen test. I can think of several blonde Hollywood actresses who could play the part well, yet I do not know their names. They are not as memorable as the classics, Marilyn or Jean, those starry creations that burned bright, died young. I think of young celebrities in the media, stalked by our eyes, the paparazzi, those magazines we read. They exist to draw attention. Aware of the whole world watching. They are green girls too. We give birth to them. Then we destroy them with our insatiable desire to have entrance into their private lives. This is them unmasked without makeup, waiting in a queue at the grocery store, blinking from a sex tape…we watch and watch.
An insight into the lives of countless young women who never knew, or may never know, any other home than the plainest of furnished rooms in a drab hotel.
— Joseph Cornell’s notations for “Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall”
Three in the afternoon. Half the day buried away. Ruth’s days off always oppress her. The realm of choice paralyzes her. To sleep is to choose neither life nor death.
For now, Ruth submits to nothingness. My Sleeping Beauty. She lies in bed still and flat, frozen before an unopened day. Slowly she will thaw. If she moves some spell would be broken. Not a muscle twitches except the delicate fall Rise! fall Rise! of her breath. She has a talent for staying completely immobile for hours, Lot’s wife willing herself into salt. Outside her shell she can make out theslamofdoors theblurofhairdryers thepaddingofstrangefeet.
Housekeeping! Thudthudthudthudthud. Ruth resurrects herself. Can you possibly return in thirty minutes? Please? she cries muffled from underneath the enormity of her buried world, trying to mimic the smoothness of normalcy, the Please? ringing out high and trembling. The terror has seeped into the cracks.
No reply. THEY have left. THEY will return. Some days she doesn’t let THEM in at all but she has no choice today. She has no clean towels left.
Ruth struggles up and out of bed, capsizing her duvet to the floor. Her bed folds out of the closet. As she swings her legs around to get up she bangs into the chair at her schoolgirl desk. She turns the light on, blinking through her blonde hair. She feels dull. Life-hungover.
Her rented room glares at her with its palette of anachronistic greens—chartreusepuke and another shade she cannot place. Pale cucumber, perhaps? Avocado? Some vegetable?
So this is London. This, this is London. A room with four walls. Four smudged walls of moldy green.
The bedsit is housed in an all-female boarding house near Paddington Station. All foreigners and new arrivals. They travel in cliques divided by country, like the Olympics. There are the Spanish girls flipping dark locks zipping up tight designer denim, the French girls sleek like horses swinging expensive purses, the American girls who strut in tight velour sweatpants Greek letters smacking their derrieres. The American girls who will come home from their time abroad with the itchy vaginas of venereal disease and a life-long weakness for fish and chips. At night Ruth listens with growing hatred to their giggles, to the rumbling of manicured feet, cotton in between toes, up and down the hall, their self-delighted promenade.
It is now 3:30. Her headache makes Ruth feel childlike and melancholy.
In the tiny kitchen with tangerine walls, Ruth pours water out of the faucet into the kettle and makes herself a peanut butter sandwich. She forces herself to eat. She feels faint, not of this world. The kettle whistles asthmatically while she chews her sandwich at the little sink, staring into an empty alley through the window. She gulps down a cup of tea. The wet teabag in the sink lies there like a dead mouse.
Her head still throbs. Ruth rifles through her purse buried in her bed for her drugs—packages of aspirin, or whatever they call it over here, that pop out through the tin foil. She finds only the shine of empty gum wrappers.
She checks her voicemail, mechanically. No New Messages, the efficient English phone voice. A female voice. Some days hers is the only voice Ruth hears.
The only one who ever called her was the occasional, impatient Hello Ruth It’s Your Father. I’m Returning Your Call. Or texts from Agnes, the Australian girl who lives down the hall.
She pulls on yesterday’s ensemble pooled on the floor. Hose damp with sweat. She sniffs at her nice black blouse, her only nice black blouse, purchased from the sales rack at Zara. Her nose pricks an overwhelm of worksweet.