Julia doesn’t remember the woman at the party, except that the woman was middle-aged (Julia would have thought: old), silk-shirted and pearl-necklaced (Julia would have thought: dowdy), and Julia remembers her gaze, because it was a puzzle. She couldn’t tell how much of the disapproval from the woman at the party was aimed at her (the very young woman at the party), and how much was aimed at him (the white-haired man at the party, who liked to muse, “You think I’m an old man,” as they lay naked Saturday mornings in his enormous white bed). Julia was twenty-two the night of the party. Twenty-two and wearing the lavender angora sweater the white-haired man had bought her, the slacks, the black heeled boots—the ensemble she had recently twirled in to the applause of the receptionist in the offices of the newspaper that did not pay her enough to move out of her mother’s bedroom, in the tourist town where Julia had just graduated college, an hour up the freeway from the party. An outfit Julia never forgot over the decades to come, because the receptionist cooed, “Oooh girl, looks like you’ve got yourself a sugar daddy!” and Julia stopped spinning, and the receptionist raised a long-fingernailed hand to her face and sputtered, “Oh, I’m sorry hon, I didn’t mean it like that, I swear hon, it was just a joke, sweetie,” and Julia dashed out of the office and down the stairs to the street, bracing hands against knees, sick enough to vomit right there in the clean sunshine. Because she knew that she had planned, all week, for the white-haired man to take her to the department store. And she had hoped he would set those five twenties on the nightstand (“Don’t be silly, you shouldn’t have to starve”) as she remained beneath the white sheets and he dressed. She remembered too well closing her eyes to the view of his toddler-like distended belly and his buttocks’ stretch-marked flesh and wishing that she and the man could be disembodied, and voiceless, for surely it was only his odd proportions and his nasal voice that confused her, and not the things he did and said, because he loved her, that was what he said again and again, and she was Pure of Heart, he said, and only scared. Like a lost cat. “Abandonment issues.” The money on the hotel nightstand, the clothes in the department store bag.
Julia wore that lavender angora sweater as she sat across the table from the woman at the party.
The white-haired man looked to the party host and announced, “Julia here has the best taste in Champagne, it’s really a precocious talent of hers.” And the woman at the party flinched. Across the crowded shadowed table, Julia saw the woman’s shudder and she would never forget how the older woman flinched and drew a veined, puckered hand to her elbow as though she already knew the details of the first night in the white-haired man’s condominium: the tiny living room and the white carpet and the white walls and the white sofa and the balcony above the trash-crammed alley and the man hoisting the bottle and untwisting the gold-wire cage and pulling the cork and saying, “I just knew you’d have the best taste in Champagne.” Their first date. He smelled medicinal and up close his eyebrows were freshly shaven, his face too white, and so too was—they soon migrated there—his enormous ice-floe of a bed.
Yes, the crow-footed eyes of the woman at the party revealed that she knew all of that.
Close to a decade later Julia wrote a story about the woman at the party. Julia doesn’t remember what she made the woman at the party say in the hall as they parted, in the story, whether the woman said, “You don’t need him, you know,” or maybe, “Get out while you can.” The crux of the story as Julia wrote it was guilt and confusion and finally deciding that the woman at the party did not like her just because the woman at the party was no longer young. The crux of the story was that it was shameful to use someone the way she had used the white-haired man, even though she had believed, at the time, that she loved him. Julia wrote this story, which was never a good story, and put it away for fifteen years. Then one night, when she was the age the white-haired man had been the night of the party, Julia thought of the story, because of all the other stories suddenly filling the airwaves and the endless scrolls of updates, stories of film moguls and chefs and executive editors and dissertation advisors and gymnastics coaches, stories of business meetings in hotel rooms, flattery and Champagne, closed doors and hulking men walking naked out of the shower making wide-mouthed lunges. Had Julia experienced anything like that? In her case, Julia mused, the white-haired man never had much power. Wasn’t that an aspect of her guilt? His boasts that he could help Julia’s writing career amounted to a brandishment of outdated advice and third-tier contacts. His “townhouse in Santa Monica” (touted at the bar around the corner from the newspaper office where he bought Julia a drink) proved a white stucco shoebox next to a liquor store, beneath a vista-less block of sagging telephone wires. At the time Julia had used this evidence as reassurance: If she’d wanted to use someone, she would have chosen a richer target. And anyway, she hadn’t chosen him. He’d chosen her. Calling her mother’s house the morning after they’d met at the bar. Tickets to the ballet, if she’d come to L.A. Julia recalling his chuckle, his white hair. He was shorter than her, too short in a way that provoked her sympathy; he was...harmless.
And one weekend after another, in that white bed like an ice floe with his shaved white eyebrows he stroked her and said, “You’re amazing, you’re just so open, so generous.” And a numbing feeling came over her like a third glass of Champagne.
A paralyzed feeling like meeting the gaze of the woman at the party.
Julia asked, once, pretending to tease, if he shouldn’t date women his own age.
“I’ve tried dating women my own age,” he said, emerging from the spare room with wooden beads wrapping his pale short-fingered hands, his face wearing the half-lidded expression he assumed after his 30 minutes of meditation every morning. “Women my age get bitter,” he said. Outside the white-carpeted room, a garbage truck slammed the cans. “It’s a shame. Sad, really. They all just...close down.”
The white-haired man said this other times, too, times when Julia hadn’t asked. Would this sad closing down someday happen to her? As though to ward it off, she opened her eyes as he mounted, his short white legs straddling and his toddler belly bouncing against her ribs; she forced herself to look in his face as he came with his shaven eyebrows clenching; and afterwards she found the will to smile when he said, “What we have is so beautiful and open, don’t you think? It’s so rare. I’m almost tempted to say...you should marry me.”
He said this last bit also at the café on Venice Beach where he liked to point out celebrities and said, “Don’t be jealous. They’re nothing compared to you.” Was that true? At college parties, which was all she’d known, she had been a commodity in oversupply, which she interpreted as a personal failure and an embarrassment. The droop of a spaghetti strap over a shoulder, the reveal of white bra like a child’s underwear. “You shouldn’t try so hard to be sexy,” the captain of the water polo team had said in the keg line.
But gazing over Venice Beach, the white-haired man stroked Julia’s cheek and noted the aging diva’s facelifts sotto voce. “So sad,” he said. “So desperate.”
The woman at the party was nothing like Julia’s mother. And yet, in a way, she was. She was the version of Julia’s mother Julia wished had sat across from her the night the white-haired man took them to dinner at the touristy restaurant, the night the white-haired man, two years older than her mother, proposed that Julia move in to his condominium. Why, at that dinner, had Julia’s mother not flinched like the woman at the party? No, Julia’s mother smiled indecipherably and ate halibut. She needs me to move out of her bedroom, Julia had thought.
Or maybe that wasn’t it? Julia’s mother had begun leaving wedding magazines on the kitchen counter, and one day not long before the white-haired man took Julia’s mother to dinner she and Julia had walked by a brick-lined courtyard and her mother had said, “Oh this would be a beautiful place for a wedding!” Then added, again indecipherably, “Not that you’d be having one...soon.”
What would Julia’s father have thought? But Julia dared not really summon him to her imagination. The last memory she held was of him entering her room while she dressed, the week before he died, when Julia was 10. Her father gaping at the lumpen flesh newly rising from her chest, then stammering to close the door.
But if her mother would narrow her eyes, if she would make a face, just for a moment, like the woman at the party—it would be horrifying, briefly, then better.
But no. The white-haired man paid the bill.
Her mother came to visit the condominium once, two weeks after Julia moved in. Brought along Julia’s grandmother, while the white-haired man was out on a business lunch. Her mother and her grandmother poking around like strangers at an open house, surveying the white living room and the white sofa and the white refrigerator that always housed extra Champagne. Her mother and her grandmother opening the sliding glass door to the balcony and her grandmother saying “oh my” at the garbage-piled alley below. Neither the mother nor the grandmother said a word about the enormous white bed.
The mother noted that Julia had her own space to work in the meditation room. “That’s nice of him to provide,” she said.
The desk in the meditation room was, in fact, the site of much conflict between Julia and the white-haired man. Julia had hung a bulletin board above the desk. On this bulletin board, along with pictures of the family Labrador and a few articles she’d managed to publish, she had pinned two postcards from a museum show. The images were paintings by Francis Bacon. In one painting, a pale man lay on a white bed, his face grey and distorted, like rotting flesh; he seemed to have one black eye. Inscribed in a circle, his penis hung limp, echoing the lightbulb hanging in a circle above.
It was a tragic, interior image. Strangely, it drew Julia in. But the other painting lunged.
In the other painting, a creature with a bulbous grey body like bulging testicles and a long, craning neck stood above a pedestal against a blood red background. At the end of the long neck a mouth bared rows of blood-splattered teeth. The snarling creature wore a blindfold.
For the past year Julia had found these paintings inexplicably companionable. She felt a curious kind of calm in staring down their ugliness. The images on the postcards fascinated her. They did not scare her.
But the white-haired man walked out of the meditation room shaking. His fingers strangled the wood beads. His voice was like water about to boil. “You have to take those pictures down.”
Julia felt a threat tantamount to death. That bulletin board was the only space for her in the apartment, she said.
The white-haired man, when angry, became taller. His dark shadowed eyes seemed to stare from above. “Those images are repellent and disgusting and I will not look at them. You have to take them down.”
When at last his stare defeated her, she shouted like a child, “Get away!” Locked herself in the meditation room and cried. When she emerged, the white-haired man had opened Champagne, filled the glasses atop the white coffee table.
The bed seemed larger than ever, an uncrossable tundra. “Your body is just begging to have a baby,” he said, face pained with pleasure, as he pushed inside.
She had left the newspaper job that did not pay her enough to move out of her mother’s house when she moved in with the white-haired man. The plan, which the white-haired man did not seem to care much about, was to find a better job in Los Angeles and save up. The white-haired man did not like her to talk of saving up. He said they should live in the present. He did not want to make plans. “You’ll understand someday,” he said. “Life is so beautifully surprising.”
When they met, Julia had just deferred entry to a graduate school in New York. If she saved, and if she swallowed her courage and took out the loans, she could still go, next fall. She even dared to say this, the night of the party, when the host asked about her life beyond Champagne: She willed her eyes away from the gaze of the woman at the party and declared, “I’m saving up to go to graduate school next fall.” The white-haired man set down his fork with a sharp clatter.
The woman at the party noted this. The lines of her mouth puckering.
Julia is now 45. She is middle-aged (not old). She is professional (not dowdy). She is married to her second husband. He is twelve years older, but they met when she was thirty-five. They do not drink Champagne. He does not know much or care much about the white-haired man.
Over the years, the shame that caused Julia to write the initial story about the woman at the party has muted to bemused incredulity. Ah, youth! What twenty-two-year-old can know her own heart? An entry after one of their spats: I can’t believe how ungrateful I’ve been to poor John! I can’t believe how lucky I am that he understands me better than I understand myself.
But there in her journal in her journal she finds scenes she hadn’t remembered. She reads on.
Then, after an hour of reading, she walks into the kitchen toward her second husband, in his apron, tending the pots so carefully. He says, “Are you OK?”
She says, “I can’t believe I never saw it.”
Had the woman at the party?
The white sofa. Julia curling into him. If they’re going to talk about marriage, maybe they should discuss...practical things? Graduate school. How would she go to graduate school?
“You’re overthinking everything because you’re scared.” He strokes, he speaks kindly, but when she refuses a second glass, he says, “I see.” She tries the warm up approach again. The deferral is only good for one year, and...“Sweetheart,” he says tolerantly, the remote now in his hand, the screen flicking between movie choices. “Let’s relax tonight.” She slides away. “It doesn’t become you to pout, you know.” The screen flashing black, the long plastic remote clattering on the white coffee table as he faces her. “Listen: Your attitude is ugly. You’re just being negative.”
And she hits him. Swats him. On the arm, the way a child would.
She hits him again and says, “Why don’t you just go away?”
The way his mouth opened into a snarl, and his eyes with their black circles closed.
Shouting. “YOU JUST ENDED THE RELATIONSHIP.”
She remembers, now, how she’d cowered in the corner of the white sofa. Then his voice between his teeth, quiet and monotone, the words the journal preserved: “You better go pack your things because you’re going home tomorrow and you’re not coming back.”
That wasn’t the end. If the scenes in the journal had ended there, she would still feel guilty. She would reason she was still primarily to blame; she should have left him sooner. She should have been more self-aware. More mature. The ways she’d lashed out at him! Getting pissy if he wanted to pay for valet parking!
When he’d apologized an hour later, in the enormous white bed, she had told herself she was lucky. She wrote that in the journal later: Over the last week I’ve treated John awful—worse than ever—and finally now having nearly destroyed our relationship I feel truly remorseful. Thank God, she’d written, for his patience. Stroking her hair. “Of course I didn’t mean it, I would never leave you. Sweetheart. Oh, sweetheart. You were right. I need to listen.”
The golden bubbles rising, the soft hiss of froth.
“All twenty-somethings are tortured, sweetheart. I know you’re scared but I’m not going to let you push me away. Shhh, shhh, it’s okay. We’ll get through this.”
But she hadn’t yet sipped.
She said quietly, remorsefully: “I have to move out.”
And this time the transformation happened in a flash. This time the snarling mouth breathed into her face, and his eyes were closed and his teeth were bare:
“FUCK OFF AND DIE!”
What had that expression been on the face of the woman at the party? Disapproval, yes, condescension, yes, weary frustration, yes.
Jealousy? No.
Anger? No.
To see ourselves truly can be a sight beyond bearing.
Julia looks in the mirror now and sees a middle-aged, professional woman, the face a bit weathered, brown-spotted, crow-footed. The face of a traveller who has discovered lands no one can discover on your behalf. She does not flinch at this view. She is glad her mirror is well lit.
She has pinned the postcard of the snarling creature back above her desk. Between sentences, she enjoys staring calmly at his wrath.
Julia wore that lavender angora sweater as she sat across the table from the woman at the party.
The white-haired man looked to the party host and announced, “Julia here has the best taste in Champagne, it’s really a precocious talent of hers.” And the woman at the party flinched. Across the crowded shadowed table, Julia saw the woman’s shudder and she would never forget how the older woman flinched and drew a veined, puckered hand to her elbow as though she already knew the details of the first night in the white-haired man’s condominium: the tiny living room and the white carpet and the white walls and the white sofa and the balcony above the trash-crammed alley and the man hoisting the bottle and untwisting the gold-wire cage and pulling the cork and saying, “I just knew you’d have the best taste in Champagne.” Their first date. He smelled medicinal and up close his eyebrows were freshly shaven, his face too white, and so too was—they soon migrated there—his enormous ice-floe of a bed.
Yes, the crow-footed eyes of the woman at the party revealed that she knew all of that.
Close to a decade later Julia wrote a story about the woman at the party. Julia doesn’t remember what she made the woman at the party say in the hall as they parted, in the story, whether the woman said, “You don’t need him, you know,” or maybe, “Get out while you can.” The crux of the story as Julia wrote it was guilt and confusion and finally deciding that the woman at the party did not like her just because the woman at the party was no longer young. The crux of the story was that it was shameful to use someone the way she had used the white-haired man, even though she had believed, at the time, that she loved him. Julia wrote this story, which was never a good story, and put it away for fifteen years. Then one night, when she was the age the white-haired man had been the night of the party, Julia thought of the story, because of all the other stories suddenly filling the airwaves and the endless scrolls of updates, stories of film moguls and chefs and executive editors and dissertation advisors and gymnastics coaches, stories of business meetings in hotel rooms, flattery and Champagne, closed doors and hulking men walking naked out of the shower making wide-mouthed lunges. Had Julia experienced anything like that? In her case, Julia mused, the white-haired man never had much power. Wasn’t that an aspect of her guilt? His boasts that he could help Julia’s writing career amounted to a brandishment of outdated advice and third-tier contacts. His “townhouse in Santa Monica” (touted at the bar around the corner from the newspaper office where he bought Julia a drink) proved a white stucco shoebox next to a liquor store, beneath a vista-less block of sagging telephone wires. At the time Julia had used this evidence as reassurance: If she’d wanted to use someone, she would have chosen a richer target. And anyway, she hadn’t chosen him. He’d chosen her. Calling her mother’s house the morning after they’d met at the bar. Tickets to the ballet, if she’d come to L.A. Julia recalling his chuckle, his white hair. He was shorter than her, too short in a way that provoked her sympathy; he was...harmless.
And one weekend after another, in that white bed like an ice floe with his shaved white eyebrows he stroked her and said, “You’re amazing, you’re just so open, so generous.” And a numbing feeling came over her like a third glass of Champagne.
A paralyzed feeling like meeting the gaze of the woman at the party.
Julia asked, once, pretending to tease, if he shouldn’t date women his own age.
“I’ve tried dating women my own age,” he said, emerging from the spare room with wooden beads wrapping his pale short-fingered hands, his face wearing the half-lidded expression he assumed after his 30 minutes of meditation every morning. “Women my age get bitter,” he said. Outside the white-carpeted room, a garbage truck slammed the cans. “It’s a shame. Sad, really. They all just...close down.”
The white-haired man said this other times, too, times when Julia hadn’t asked. Would this sad closing down someday happen to her? As though to ward it off, she opened her eyes as he mounted, his short white legs straddling and his toddler belly bouncing against her ribs; she forced herself to look in his face as he came with his shaven eyebrows clenching; and afterwards she found the will to smile when he said, “What we have is so beautiful and open, don’t you think? It’s so rare. I’m almost tempted to say...you should marry me.”
He said this last bit also at the café on Venice Beach where he liked to point out celebrities and said, “Don’t be jealous. They’re nothing compared to you.” Was that true? At college parties, which was all she’d known, she had been a commodity in oversupply, which she interpreted as a personal failure and an embarrassment. The droop of a spaghetti strap over a shoulder, the reveal of white bra like a child’s underwear. “You shouldn’t try so hard to be sexy,” the captain of the water polo team had said in the keg line.
But gazing over Venice Beach, the white-haired man stroked Julia’s cheek and noted the aging diva’s facelifts sotto voce. “So sad,” he said. “So desperate.”
The woman at the party was nothing like Julia’s mother. And yet, in a way, she was. She was the version of Julia’s mother Julia wished had sat across from her the night the white-haired man took them to dinner at the touristy restaurant, the night the white-haired man, two years older than her mother, proposed that Julia move in to his condominium. Why, at that dinner, had Julia’s mother not flinched like the woman at the party? No, Julia’s mother smiled indecipherably and ate halibut. She needs me to move out of her bedroom, Julia had thought.
Or maybe that wasn’t it? Julia’s mother had begun leaving wedding magazines on the kitchen counter, and one day not long before the white-haired man took Julia’s mother to dinner she and Julia had walked by a brick-lined courtyard and her mother had said, “Oh this would be a beautiful place for a wedding!” Then added, again indecipherably, “Not that you’d be having one...soon.”
What would Julia’s father have thought? But Julia dared not really summon him to her imagination. The last memory she held was of him entering her room while she dressed, the week before he died, when Julia was 10. Her father gaping at the lumpen flesh newly rising from her chest, then stammering to close the door.
But if her mother would narrow her eyes, if she would make a face, just for a moment, like the woman at the party—it would be horrifying, briefly, then better.
But no. The white-haired man paid the bill.
Her mother came to visit the condominium once, two weeks after Julia moved in. Brought along Julia’s grandmother, while the white-haired man was out on a business lunch. Her mother and her grandmother poking around like strangers at an open house, surveying the white living room and the white sofa and the white refrigerator that always housed extra Champagne. Her mother and her grandmother opening the sliding glass door to the balcony and her grandmother saying “oh my” at the garbage-piled alley below. Neither the mother nor the grandmother said a word about the enormous white bed.
The mother noted that Julia had her own space to work in the meditation room. “That’s nice of him to provide,” she said.
The desk in the meditation room was, in fact, the site of much conflict between Julia and the white-haired man. Julia had hung a bulletin board above the desk. On this bulletin board, along with pictures of the family Labrador and a few articles she’d managed to publish, she had pinned two postcards from a museum show. The images were paintings by Francis Bacon. In one painting, a pale man lay on a white bed, his face grey and distorted, like rotting flesh; he seemed to have one black eye. Inscribed in a circle, his penis hung limp, echoing the lightbulb hanging in a circle above.
It was a tragic, interior image. Strangely, it drew Julia in. But the other painting lunged.
In the other painting, a creature with a bulbous grey body like bulging testicles and a long, craning neck stood above a pedestal against a blood red background. At the end of the long neck a mouth bared rows of blood-splattered teeth. The snarling creature wore a blindfold.
For the past year Julia had found these paintings inexplicably companionable. She felt a curious kind of calm in staring down their ugliness. The images on the postcards fascinated her. They did not scare her.
But the white-haired man walked out of the meditation room shaking. His fingers strangled the wood beads. His voice was like water about to boil. “You have to take those pictures down.”
Julia felt a threat tantamount to death. That bulletin board was the only space for her in the apartment, she said.
The white-haired man, when angry, became taller. His dark shadowed eyes seemed to stare from above. “Those images are repellent and disgusting and I will not look at them. You have to take them down.”
When at last his stare defeated her, she shouted like a child, “Get away!” Locked herself in the meditation room and cried. When she emerged, the white-haired man had opened Champagne, filled the glasses atop the white coffee table.
The bed seemed larger than ever, an uncrossable tundra. “Your body is just begging to have a baby,” he said, face pained with pleasure, as he pushed inside.
She had left the newspaper job that did not pay her enough to move out of her mother’s house when she moved in with the white-haired man. The plan, which the white-haired man did not seem to care much about, was to find a better job in Los Angeles and save up. The white-haired man did not like her to talk of saving up. He said they should live in the present. He did not want to make plans. “You’ll understand someday,” he said. “Life is so beautifully surprising.”
When they met, Julia had just deferred entry to a graduate school in New York. If she saved, and if she swallowed her courage and took out the loans, she could still go, next fall. She even dared to say this, the night of the party, when the host asked about her life beyond Champagne: She willed her eyes away from the gaze of the woman at the party and declared, “I’m saving up to go to graduate school next fall.” The white-haired man set down his fork with a sharp clatter.
The woman at the party noted this. The lines of her mouth puckering.
Julia is now 45. She is middle-aged (not old). She is professional (not dowdy). She is married to her second husband. He is twelve years older, but they met when she was thirty-five. They do not drink Champagne. He does not know much or care much about the white-haired man.
Over the years, the shame that caused Julia to write the initial story about the woman at the party has muted to bemused incredulity. Ah, youth! What twenty-two-year-old can know her own heart? An entry after one of their spats: I can’t believe how ungrateful I’ve been to poor John! I can’t believe how lucky I am that he understands me better than I understand myself.
But there in her journal in her journal she finds scenes she hadn’t remembered. She reads on.
Then, after an hour of reading, she walks into the kitchen toward her second husband, in his apron, tending the pots so carefully. He says, “Are you OK?”
She says, “I can’t believe I never saw it.”
Had the woman at the party?
The white sofa. Julia curling into him. If they’re going to talk about marriage, maybe they should discuss...practical things? Graduate school. How would she go to graduate school?
“You’re overthinking everything because you’re scared.” He strokes, he speaks kindly, but when she refuses a second glass, he says, “I see.” She tries the warm up approach again. The deferral is only good for one year, and...“Sweetheart,” he says tolerantly, the remote now in his hand, the screen flicking between movie choices. “Let’s relax tonight.” She slides away. “It doesn’t become you to pout, you know.” The screen flashing black, the long plastic remote clattering on the white coffee table as he faces her. “Listen: Your attitude is ugly. You’re just being negative.”
And she hits him. Swats him. On the arm, the way a child would.
She hits him again and says, “Why don’t you just go away?”
The way his mouth opened into a snarl, and his eyes with their black circles closed.
Shouting. “YOU JUST ENDED THE RELATIONSHIP.”
She remembers, now, how she’d cowered in the corner of the white sofa. Then his voice between his teeth, quiet and monotone, the words the journal preserved: “You better go pack your things because you’re going home tomorrow and you’re not coming back.”
That wasn’t the end. If the scenes in the journal had ended there, she would still feel guilty. She would reason she was still primarily to blame; she should have left him sooner. She should have been more self-aware. More mature. The ways she’d lashed out at him! Getting pissy if he wanted to pay for valet parking!
When he’d apologized an hour later, in the enormous white bed, she had told herself she was lucky. She wrote that in the journal later: Over the last week I’ve treated John awful—worse than ever—and finally now having nearly destroyed our relationship I feel truly remorseful. Thank God, she’d written, for his patience. Stroking her hair. “Of course I didn’t mean it, I would never leave you. Sweetheart. Oh, sweetheart. You were right. I need to listen.”
The golden bubbles rising, the soft hiss of froth.
“All twenty-somethings are tortured, sweetheart. I know you’re scared but I’m not going to let you push me away. Shhh, shhh, it’s okay. We’ll get through this.”
But she hadn’t yet sipped.
She said quietly, remorsefully: “I have to move out.”
And this time the transformation happened in a flash. This time the snarling mouth breathed into her face, and his eyes were closed and his teeth were bare:
“FUCK OFF AND DIE!”
What had that expression been on the face of the woman at the party? Disapproval, yes, condescension, yes, weary frustration, yes.
Jealousy? No.
Anger? No.
To see ourselves truly can be a sight beyond bearing.
Julia looks in the mirror now and sees a middle-aged, professional woman, the face a bit weathered, brown-spotted, crow-footed. The face of a traveller who has discovered lands no one can discover on your behalf. She does not flinch at this view. She is glad her mirror is well lit.
She has pinned the postcard of the snarling creature back above her desk. Between sentences, she enjoys staring calmly at his wrath.