The Palace of Illusions Read online

  “You took his money.”

  “No shit,” she says, straightening. She picks up her beaded clutch, clicks it open, and drops the money and credit card inside.

  “You’re stealing his money.”

  “I’m liberating it. Let’s go. He looks dead to the world, but you never know.”

  “You’re a thief,” I say. Mona is a thief. I wonder how I could not have known before. It seems like the most natural thing in the world.

  She comes over and pulls me up by one arm. I stagger and fall into her. Her perfume’s too strong and she smells like all the cigarettes she’s had, and I gag and taste the fries I ate earlier, rising on a tide of champagne.

  “Wait.” I go into the bathroom, squat down and crouch over the toilet, but nothing happens. I pull a hand towel off the rack, wet it under the faucet, and wipe my face. Don’s ring is on the counter, just like I thought. It’s there next to his electric toothbrush and a tube of mint Colgate he’s been squeezing from the top instead of the bottom. I pick up the ring; it’s a plain gold circle, and inside, in cursive, the name Debbie is engraved. I close it in my hand, and when I come out I slip it into my purse so fast Mona doesn’t even notice.

  We head out of the room and along the hall to the elevator. It’s one of those mirrored ones. The walls below the mirrored part are dark wood, and the floor is thickly carpeted, and a brass railing runs all the way around. I look at us in the mirror as we descend, and Mona watches the numbers light as we go from 5 to L. We look like shit. The skin under Mona’s eyes is pouchy, and there are small red veins in her cheeks where her foundation’s worn off. My eyes are bloodshot, the lids drooping. I forgot my hat, and my hair is flattened and tangled.

  In another couple of minutes we’re through the lobby and out of the building, on the sidewalk, empty now except for a few shadowy bodies stretched out in doorways. We walk fast toward my car, our heels echoing and amplified, like we’re on a movie set. The fog is in, and it looks like there’s no sky at all, like the movie takes place in some damp underground world where the sun never shines. I know where we are, though. I can’t see the moon, but I know it’s out there somewhere, a well of light. I tell myself I could throw myself into it any time I wanted. I tell myself that, even though I know who I am.

  BREATHE

  Breathe in, the teacher—roshi, guru, leader, whatever—says, so, okay, so far, so good, deep breath, hold it, let it out on a long exhale. Amber, my roommate, smiles at me, like, Isn’t this going to be great, isn’t California so cool? and I look back like, Yes it is, even though I don’t think so. Already my knees are bothering me from sitting cross-legged. We all take a few more deep, noisy breaths. We’re supposed to close our eyes, but I peek around at the class, trying to spot someone cute who might want to talk to me later, until the teacher, woman, enlightened being, bitch, catches me, and her soft open eyes get hard, and I zip mine closed again.

  Be still, she tells us. Go inward. She has some kind of accent I can’t figure out. She sounds a little like that waitress in Montpelier, Vermont, where I spent Christmas with my parents. They didn’t want to have Christmas at home in Florida anymore; they said it would be better if we were somewhere with snow. We stayed in a farmhouse, and it was really cold. My parents went tromping around through the woods in galoshes and boots and cross-country skis, and I stayed in by the fire under a big quilt, feeling lonely and sad and fat. I felt like a big icicle was dripping inside me, without ever melting. So I don’t want to go inward. Right now I want to go home, ignore my freshman comp homework, and curl up on the couch and watch The Tudors, the entire series, for the second time on Showtime On Demand. I want broken treaties and assassination plots and girl baby after girl baby being born to King Henry VIII, while he gets more and more desperate for a boy.

  Watch your thoughts, the teacher says at this point, and I get that, that’s easy; I just imagine my TV, a thirty-two-inch flat screen I got from Best Buy. I watch Amber telling me I should do something else besides eat and watch my new TV night and day, and then I watch her fill the fridge in our dorm apartment with probiotic ginseng drinks and baked tofu, and then I rummage around on my own shelf for some sugar cookies I baked and put in there to cool. I hate them warm from the oven. I will eat the dough all day long, though. That’s bad, I guess, because raw eggs can infect you with salmonella, but if I die from eating raw cookie dough I don’t think I’ll mind; I’ll just pitch over in our kitchen with a big smile.

  So now I’m thinking about death. The death thought looks like a lump of buttery sugary dough and raisins, and then it looks like a shiny balloon that’s starting to crinkle and sag, and then it’s a baseball cap—a pink baseball cap just floating in space with no person in it. Then, as I watch, the cap falls sideways into a tunnel like it’s being sucked out of my head, and my little sister, Bethany, appears in all her dead glory, or rather in the slide show my parents made of her afterwards, that we all watched projected on our living room wall when we got back from the cemetery. It’s mostly pictures of her when she was healthy. There’s one of us in our bathing suits at Lake Placid one summer, and another where we’re posing with our Easter baskets, in bunny ears. There’s only one of her from near the end. She’s wearing lipstick and blue eye shadow and that baseball cap on her head, looking like Cancer Awareness Poster Girl, a goofy smile on her face, like she didn’t throw up the morning our dad took the photo.

  I don’t really want to watch the slideshow in my head so I open my eyes again, just let them slowly part to tiny slits so the room looks fuzzy. The teacher, woman, skank, catches me again, so I open my eyes all the way and look straight at her and give her a gentle look, like I’m all blissed out, and she nods her head at me and closes her own eyes and opens them, like, It’s all good. Which it is not, but here we are.

  I must have given her some signal because she suddenly says, Let’s all chant some Aums. Everyone tries to hold their Aum longer than everyone else and some people cheat, taking a second breath while other people are still letting out the first one. I get my Aums over with as fast as possible. All I want is to get out of here and go home and order a big gooey sausage-pepper-onion pizza from Red Boy and eat the whole thing in front of the TV. Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey are down with the sweating disease. They’re going to recover from that, but they’re done for, anyway. Wolsey will get arrested for treason and kill himself, and Anne will stand on the scaffolding bravely addressing the crowd, saying nice things about Henry, who ordered her head cut off. She’s going to forgive the black-hooded guy with the sword, and kneel down and pray. She’ll look up at the sky. Black birds will flap around for an instant in the blue. I really want to see that episode again.

  But the class, torture session, boredom hour, has just begun.

  With your eyes closed, says our guide, simply watch your breath. She says this looking straight at me, so I have no choice.

  But how are you supposed to watch your breath? My breath doesn’t look like anything. First I imagine my tongue is a road, and my breath is wind whooshing down from some black space in the back of my head, but I can’t really see the wind. All I see is a long road disappearing into the horizon. I make my teeth the mountains and put some tall trees on either side of the road, and I add a river behind the trees on one side, flowing in the same direction as the wind. I see the leaves shaking, and some of them coming free to land on the road, and then a car comes by and runs over the leaves. I see a dragon kite with a long green tail. I see the river flowing into an ocean, and waves scrunching up into white foam, then one big wave carrying all the dead kings and queens of England and Wales and Scotland and France and Spain, smashing them on the shore, and there’s a sand castle on the shore that also gets wiped out. The towers turn to wet stumps and the moat fills with salt water. Soon there’s nothing, and then some man’s big shoe print appears. Thinking about the ocean makes me have to pee, and I wonder if I’m allowed. Amber is sitting on the cushion next to me. I wonder if I can get away with whispering to her and asking if we can go. Probably not.

  The room is warming up from all these bodies breathing.

  Inside my head I see the space heater glowing in the bedroom Bethany and I used to share. I remember a night I was lying awake in the dark, listening to the little fan in the heater. This was right before she got sick, before we knew how bad it was all going to be. I watched car lights crawling through the window, along the carpet between our beds and up the wall, sliding across our dressers. Bethany was asleep in a pocket of shadow. Her feet stuck out of the covers on the side of the bed. Her feet were all I could really see of her, when a car came by and the beams went over them like clear water, and I was kind of hypnotized by how they looked, small and perfect, like an angel’s feet might look, or a fairy princess’s—she’d been running around all day in a green tutu and a pair of pink and purple wings. I imagined her falling off some glittery cloud to land in our bedroom, her long hair fanned out around her face. Then she sighed and shifted, rolled over, maybe, and I couldn’t see even her feet anymore. I knew she was there, though, right beyond the arc of the car lights. That’s what I see now. Our old room and everything that belonged there, Bethany and me and our dressers and the lights of other people going back to their houses at night. I watch my breath fill the room, and I hold my sister inside it as long as I possibly can.

  THE OTHER WOMAN

  It would end in disaster, everyone said, and everyone was right, but everyone was on the outside of the situation and therefore did not know everything. She was on the inside, living with a man and in love with another woman, loving the man but not being sure anymore she should live with him, loving the extravagant Italian meals he cooked and the way he stood frowning when he painted in the corner of their living room that served
as his studio, loving his longish black hair on the nape of his neck. But she also loved the longer black hair of the other woman, and how the other woman would kiss her and then pull back and look at her intently and then kiss her again, laughing; the other woman’s mouth was softer than the mouth of the man she lived with, and she could not stop thinking about kissing her.

  The man she lived with knew that she cared for and admired the other woman, who was older; he admired the other woman as well. She was a well-known artist represented by a prestigious gallery. So far, he had been in only a couple of inconsequential group shows, but the other woman assured him that his work would be appreciated in time. He loved his girlfriend, whom he called his partner. The other woman sometimes stayed over when they all had drunk too much, sleeping in their king-sized bed with them, and though nothing had happened between any of them (though he wasn’t positive about what, exactly, had or hadn’t happened on the days the two women went off alone to spend time together), he enjoyed the aura of sexual possibility. He felt as though he had two beautiful women, and when the other woman was around he felt sexier than he did with his partner, whom he had lived with for nearly six years now.

  The other woman had not been with anyone for a long time, and longed for a man to be her partner. Instead, this lovely, sensual younger woman had appeared in her life to confuse and exhilarate her. Every day she listed to herself the reasons why she should not be drawn more closely into this relationship with a young couple, but in the end those reasons did not seem very important when weighed against her own loneliness. She liked the man very much; he was generous and witty, and he had promise as an artist. She was drawn to him sexually, but the younger woman had declared that she was far too jealous to share the man she lived with. The other woman thought this was wise, because things would likely fall apart very quickly if the three of them were to start up anything in bed. She thought it would be wisest not to sleep in their bed at all, but she lacked the willpower to carry through on this insight. It felt too good to lie between them, or on the side next to the wall, to occasionally feel one or the other’s arms around her, to wake to the man making coffee and asking if anyone wanted toast, and if so, cream cheese, butter and jam, or just butter?

  The life the young woman was living with her partner, that had once been so satisfying, had now begun to seem hollow and dull unless the other woman was around. Yet she also felt as though she was betraying her partner every time she felt this, and thought that if the other woman were not around, they might eventually return to their former domestic ease and intimacy. She tried not to call the other woman, but still she thought of her all the time, and in the end would invite her over, and feel immediately as though life was interesting again. The three of them played cards, or watched movies; they cooked meals together, or he cooked for the women while they cuddled in bed, reading to each other. On weekends, they all sometimes drove upstate for an afternoon to visit antique stores and farmer’s markets. At parties they sprawled comfortably together on their hosts’ couches while everyone speculated about what was going on between them. The other woman was having an affair with the man, or had become a lesbian; after years of painting men, she was now exhibiting female nudes, several of which clearly resembled the younger woman.

  But the other woman had not become a lesbian and was not having an affair with anyone. It was true that the younger woman had modeled for her. But she had only kissed the younger woman, less than a handful of times. She thought she might really like the younger woman as a friend, and not a lover, but then again, life was mysterious; maybe, now that men did not seem as interested as they used to be, it was time to experiment, to explore another aspect of herself. How could she do this with the younger woman, though, without feeling as though she were betraying the friendship of the man? Even if he didn’t mind—and she wasn’t sure whether he would mind—she would make herself too vulnerable to the woman. Sex always made her vulnerable, and it would not be wise to give her heart to someone who also, clearly, lived with another person, slept with him every night and sorted through the bills with him and discussed who would use the car that day and who would take the train. No, it was impossible to enter into any kind of sexual affair, and she grew jealous that the younger woman had someone, while she had no one, only this halfway and increasingly unsatisfying relationship.

  The man could not figure out how to make his partner happy. He would come home from work and find her crying, or in bed in the middle of the day. Lately, she didn’t want to leave the house, and he often ended up having to do the grocery shopping and other errands. He was glad that she had the other woman as a friend to talk to. She called and texted the other woman every day. Whenever she talked to the other woman, her voice grew light, and happy, and he felt this was a good sign, and that soon she would shake off whatever was bothering her.

  Then the other woman had a show in England and went away for several weeks. The man’s partner grew more and more withdrawn, and often seemed angry at him. She was never in the mood to make love. He worried now that she would fall into the kind of terrible depression she had suffered around the time they had first met, when he had been married, when the woman who was now his partner had been the other woman. What a mess that had been. Disaster, in the end. Eventually that time had begun to feel like the distant past, as though those miserable, confusing events had happened to other people. All that was over, finished.

  Although lately, certain memories of his ex-wife had resurfaced. How she had woken him one morning by putting her mouth on him. How she would laugh after accidentally burning dinner, or spilling wine on their new sheets, but be upset at mishearing something he said. The times she had slammed a door on him, only to immediately, contritely, open it again. The images struck him with surprising clarity and immediacy. At night he lay in bed with his partner, filled with those images, painful reminders that in spite of his deep love for his wife, and his best intentions, he had failed to keep his promises to her; when his partner rolled over in sleep and moved against him, he turned away.

  NIGHT OWLS

  Sometimes I like to take off from campus and go downtown to the fancy hotels, where they have piano music and the bartenders wear tuxes. I order a Lemon Drop and read Charlotte Brontë or Jane Austen in the muted bar light, wearing a tasteful black dress, my hair piled demurely on my head, little ringlets escaping down my neck. I wait for a man to come over, which never takes long. But when I get upstairs, into a room with him, I change completely. I order him to take his clothes off, to lie down on the bed and close his eyes. They always smile like crazy at that point, they can’t believe their luck. I tell him I’m going to make him feel good, and I can see he’s thinking about how he’ll tell the story the next day to his best friend at work, about meeting this girl in the hotel bar. I put my hand on him through his briefs or boxers and remind him to keep his eyes closed. I take out my lace handkerchief, and the chloroform, and before he knows what’s happening he’s passed out and I’m straddling him, my fangs in his neck, his blood pouring down my throat.

  The men I meet downtown are perfect: married, a little drunk, a little overweight. It’s bad if they’re thin, because by the time I have my fill they’re practically comatose. I don’t want to kill them, just feed on them enough to keep me going. If I were a full vampire it might be different, but I’m only half, on my dad’s side. My dad has to kill people to get enough. I understand, I guess, but I don’t like to think about it, and I’m happy I never killed anyone. Even the coma thing only happened once.

  So tonight I’m sitting in a fancy bar off the lobby of the Marriott with my Lemon Drop, reading Edith Wharton. It’s The House of Mirth, for English Lit. Lily Bart has just blown her chance to marry the rich but boring Percy Gryce. She’s supposed to meet him to go to church, but instead she sneaks off with this guy Selden and sits on a bench in the woods with him. It’s early in the novel, but I can already tell that she’s not going to end up with Selden. She likes money too much, and while her heart is with Selden it’s pretty clear he won’t be able to afford her. Lily’s a creature of comfort, and she can’t change. She has to have expensive gowns and lavish dinner parties and Mediterranean vacations. I put the book down on the bar, thinking how sad it is that people can’t just follow their hearts.