I’m starting to panic. Not because she’s yawning—I know that’s from a lack of sleep, and I know that in a way the lack of sleep was my fault. I’m more worried that we’re not talking to each other, that we’re not learning anything more about each other.
Then I tell myself to stop. Calm down. I am putting too much pressure on a single day. I have to believe that, like all other couples, we’ll have plenty more days after this.
I follow her from room to room, circling around the centuries and the continents. Rhiannon pauses in front of a woman named Madame X. She is a very white matron in a very black gown, painted by John Singer Sargent as she looks to the right. I get a sense that she isn’t looking at anything in particular; she’s looking off to the right so she can be painted looking off to the right. That is how we will remember her.
“Have you ever looked like that?” Rhiannon asks me.
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever had a day when you looked like that?”
There are people nearby. They might hear us.
Rhiannon must see my alarm; she laughs and says, “Don’t worry—this is New York. I’m sure you can say anything and nobody will care.”
I study the painting. I think of really white skin, of being afraid of sunburn. I try to remember a dress, any dress….
“I’m not sure. I don’t really remember what I look like. It’s not that important.”
“That’s weird,” Rhiannon says. “I see a painting like this, I wonder what it must be like to have that face, that skin, that much sophistication. But I also know I’m never going to look like that, or live that kind of life. But you might.”
“I love that you’re thinking that way,” I tell her. “But that’s not the way I think. Maybe I should—I don’t know. I guess I could look in the mirror more. I just don’t really see myself when I’m other people, if that makes any sense.”
“Let me ask you—what do you look like right now?”
I tell her the truth. “I have no idea. I know I have short hair, because I can feel it’s short.”
“But what color is it?”
“Brown?”
“Ish. I’d go with auburn. What about your eyes?”
“I have two.”
“But what color?”
“I have no idea. Why would I pay attention to that?”
“Are you pretty?”
“I would never think that. I mean, if other people were reacting to it, I’d notice, I guess. But I never look in the mirror and go, Oh, hey, how pretty am I today?”
“God, that must be nice.”
“Do you?”
“I mean, those aren’t the exact words I’d use—but I definitely notice whether it’s a good day or a bad day.”
“You couldn’t possibly have a bad day!”
“Thank you. But no. I definitely have bad days.”
“Then what’s today, on the good-to-bad scale?”
“I had two hours of sleep and took the fastest shower I could. I think that escorts me straight to the bad-day category.”
“Well, that just proves it. You have no objectivity. Because your bad day is pretty great.”
“I never claimed objectivity. And neither should you.”
“It was a compliment!”
“I’m aware of that. But I’m still stuck on the fact that you don’t know what you look like.”
“I’ll never know what I look like.”
“You know what I mean. The body you’re in.”
“But that’s what I’m saying—it’s not me. I don’t remember what they look like because they’re not me.”
A man walking through the gallery gives me a long, strange look. So much for Rhiannon’s theory about saying crazy things in New York. A guard walks in on her rounds, and the man tells her, “Have a good day, Irene!” He keeps walking, and she calls out, “You have a good day, too, sir!” Then, under her breath, she asks, “Do I know you?”
“So when you picture yourself, what do you picture?” Rhiannon asks.
“I don’t picture anything. I don’t have a shape.”
“Everything has a shape.”
“Then I don’t have a discernible shape.”
I know these are all obvious questions she’s asking. I know they mean she’s thought about me, and what it must be like to be me. But they’re still questions nobody has ever asked me before. And I worry that she’s not satisfied with my answers.
“How do you picture me?” I ask.
“I just remember you as you were, whichever day. I’m sure that will change once there are more days. But right now, I remember you that way, and know I’m both right and wrong each time.”
“So how do you know it’s me?”
“Because your reaction to me isn’t what Arwyn’s would be. There’s a kindness there I can recognize. An affinity. A way of seeing the world, and of seeing me, Rhiannon, in it. From that very first day.”
“So it doesn’t matter that I don’t have a shape?”
“What I’m saying is that you do have a shape. It just isn’t made of skin and hair and eyes and cells and blood. It’s made of other things.”
I think about this as we wander into the surrealist galleries and I look at the works and the names of their makers. Am I shaped like a Giacometti sculpture, a person worn down into the thinnest of lines? Am I a Miró, a floating circus of whatever shapes appear? Dalí paints lions of varying degrees of facelessness coming out of eggshell-colored rocks and calls it The Accommodations of Desire. Picasso reduces us to geometric noise. Magritte divides a woman’s body into frames and calls it The Eternally Obvious. This—all of this—is more like who I am. But not exactly.
Rhiannon stands next to me as I stare at Picasso’s Nude Standing by the Sea.
“Maybe that’s me,” I say, nodding in its direction. “More a contortion than a person.”
“I don’t think so,” Rhiannon says quietly. “That’s not the A I know.”
I know my sudden despair is ridiculous. But I look at her and I think about me and I think, How?
I don’t want her to think I’m so serious—not this soon, not this early in us being back together. So I say it like this: