“I do.”
“Yes, but I mean you could keep wearing it if we were involved. And I mean all the time — even during the most intimate times.”
I can’t help laughing through my tears. “It wouldn’t be very practical.”
“I wouldn’t care.”
I shake my head and quickly enter my bedroom and lock myself in, saying, “Please let yourself out.”
I hear the front door close, and then for a long time I hear nothing but my sobs.
Chapter Sixteen
I’m at home, up late working on costumes for a historical drama. Deeply depressed by Peter’s revelation, I’m doing my best to lose myself in work, which is not going well, when the phone rings. I pick up because this time the caller ID says “Out of Area,” not “Peter Marrick,” as it did three times today already.
I answer Lily’s question with the truth: yes, Peter has now told me his secret. And no, I cannot accept him.
In the silence, I hear her breathing. And in her breathing, I hear her anxiety.
“What’s his secret?” she asks.
I tell her what it is.
“Maybe you just need a little bit of time to think about it, and you’ll come round to accepting it,” she says, full of hope, almost as though she’s arguing her own case.
“You know I can’t, Lily.” I wish I could add something to comfort her. But I can’t, because I feel dead.
After Lily hangs up with me, Strad joins her for their first night of sleeping in the same room.
They make love, snuggle, and Strad drifts off to sleep. But Lily lies awake, weeping silently inside her mask.
Strad wakes up to the sound of her crying. He’s kind and gentle. He says, “Are you sure you don’t want to get it over with now, and just tell me what this big skeleton in your closet is? I hate to see you like this.” He’s hugging her, stroking her hair.
“No, no,” she says. “Not yet.”
She feels suffocated by her mask, so she turns on the music and takes off the mask. Strad has no trouble going back to sleep, but she only briefly dips into slumber. The hours pass and the music is becoming unbearable to her. Unlike the mask, which asphyxiates only her lungs, the music is suffocating every pore of her being. And yet, the thought of its elimination tomorrow — and of the mask’s — is even worse.
She rushes to the bathroom, overcome by a surge of nausea.
When she emerges, pale but no less ravishing, Strad is awake, propped up on one elbow, watching her with concern. He taps the mattress. She sits. He pulls her to him, holds her in his arms. Using much patience and reassurance, he tries to convince her not to tell him the truth about her mask, since it’s clearly making her so miserable; not to worry about anything, and to just accept his marriage proposal.
She finally agrees.
LATER THAT MORNING, they drive around the island with the top down, her hair and her music blowing in the wind. Reclined in the passenger seat, her head relaxed against the headrest, she’s holding the mask firmly on her lap, just in case. It caresses her hands with its soft feathers made alive by the breeze. And she caresses it back, no longer hating it — at least not today, not right now. She’s engaged to Strad and she’s rarely been happier. He was right; not telling him her secret was the correct decision. All she had to do was embrace this state of things.
They stop for a picnic on a deserted beach, settling down in the shade of a cluster of palm trees. Lily positions her travel speakers next to them and puts a heavy rock on her mask to prevent it from flying away.
Strad looks blissful, feasting his eyes on her exquisite face framed by the turquoise ocean behind her.
THEY SPEND ALL afternoon in her hotel room with the music playing. They make love, they laugh, they talk about their future. He then settles himself in the easy chair and takes a couple of old magazines out of his beach bag to browse while he waits for her to get ready to accompany him to the pool.
“I love you. I adore you,” he says to her.
“I love and adore you, too,” she says, smiling at him.
As she rubs sunscreen into her arms and legs, she notices that something in one of the magazines grabs his attention. He places it down on the ottoman and pores over it. Lily sees him scratching the page with his thumbnail, as though he’s trying to get something unstuck. He’s frowning.
“What in the world is this,” he mutters. He picks up the magazine again to look at it more closely, and that’s when she sees its cover.
She freezes. She knows what he’s looking at.
As vividly as the previous moment represented a life of romantic bliss for Lily, this moment embodies its end.
Strad is looking at a picture of his transcendentally beautiful girlfriend, Sondra, in the magazine, and clearly wonders why the picture is in an article about Lily Stanton, his supremely unattractive musician friend, and why even the caption under the photograph so confusingly reads: Lily Stanton at her piano.
It’s not as though she hasn’t known the risk of photos — hasn’t known that photographs of herself get beautified by the music just as effectively as her physical self does, and that when the music stops, her beauty on paper fades just as quickly as it does in the flesh. She knew she could never let Strad have a photo of herself because as soon as he took it home with him, away from the music, it would no longer look like the woman he loves but like his ugly ex-colleague. She has guarded against this risk by hiding all photos of herself and forbidding Strad to snap any new ones, ever. But it hasn’t occurred to her that one day, on his own, he might stumble upon a photo of her in an old magazine, and that this might happen while the music was playing. That day is today. That time is now.
Strad tries one more time to remove what he thinks must surely be a photo of his girlfriend Sondra stuck on top of Lily’s photo, because he saw the original photo on this very page before packing the magazine in his suitcase and it was unmistakably a photo of Lily. “I don’t get it. Am I dreaming?” he asks.
“In a sense, you are,” she answers.
They stare at each other wordlessly for a long while. Finally, he says, “I don’t want this to be a dream.”
“It was the only way possible.”
He slowly turns his gaze to the music player, and she can see in his face that he finally understands. He reaches for it. He’s about to stop the music, but she says, “No, please don’t. Not like this.”
And so he doesn’t. Instead, he gets up and says, “I need to be alone for now.”
“I understand.”
He goes to the door.
“Strad,” she says.
He turns to her.
“Don’t take the magazine.” She knows that if he does, he will gawk at the hideous photo as it emerges in the silence outside her door.
Guessing her fears, he says, “I’ve seen Lily before, you know.”
“I know. But never through the eyes of her lover.”
He places the magazine on the bed and leaves.
AN HOUR LATER, she knocks on Strad’s door. No answer. She calls the front desk, asks if he’s checked out. He hasn’t. She goes looking for him. She finally sees him, alone, in the business center, gazing at a photo of her — as Lily, not Sondra — on the Internet. And while he’s staring at the screen, he’s humming her music. She’s tempted to tell him it’s nearly impossible to activate the illusion by merely humming the melody. But she steps away from the door without saying anything and without having been seen.
She goes back to her room, buys a plane ticket so she can depart the next day for New York, packs, checks out, and takes a taxi to spend the night at a different hotel.