Лиана Мориарти - Nine Perfect Strangers

“Thanks,” he said, trying to focus on her very shiny, friendly eyes. “Nice to meet you.”

“What sort of car is it?” asked Frances.

“It’s a Lamborghini.”

“Ooh la la—a Lamborghini!” She grinned up at him. “This here is a Peugeot.”

“Uh, yeah, I know,” he said, pained.

“Don’t think much of the Peugeot?” She tilted her head to one side.

“It’s a heap of shit,” said Ben.

“ Ben! ” said Jessica, but Frances laughed delightedly.

“I love my little Peugeot,” purred Frances as she caressed her steering wheel.

“Well,” said Ben. “Each to their own.”

“Frances says nobody is answering the intercom,” said Jessica. “She’s been sitting out here waiting for twenty minutes.”

Jessica was using her posh new voice, where she made each word sound as fat and round as an apple. She was using it almost exclusively now, except when she really lost her temper or got upset, like last night, when she forgot to be posh and yelled at him, “Why can’t you just be happy? Why are you ruining this?”

“Have you phoned them?” he said now to the cleavage lady. “Maybe there’s something wrong with the intercom.”

“I’ve left a message,” said Frances.

“I wonder if this is like a test,” said Jessica. “Maybe it’s part of our treatment plan.” She lifted her hair up to cool her neck. Sometimes, when she spoke normally, when she was just being herself, he could forget the frozen forehead, the blowfish lips, the puffy cheeks, the camel eyelashes (“eyelash extensions”), the fake hair (“hair extensions”) and fake boobs, and there, for just a moment, was his sweet Jessica, the Jessica he’d known since high school.

“I thought that too!” said Frances.

Ben turned to look at the intercom.

“I could hardly read the instructions,” said Frances. “They were so tiny.”

Ben could read them perfectly well. He punched in the code and pressed the green button.

“I will be absolutely furious if it works for you,” said Frances.

A tinny voice sprang from the intercom. “Namaste and welcome to Tranquillum House. How may I help you?”

“What the hell?” Frances mouthed in comical disbelief.

Ben shrugged. “Just needed a man’s touch.”

“Oh you ,” she said. She reached out of the car and flicked his arm with her hand.

Jessica bent down next to the intercom and spoke too loudly. “We’re here to check in.” It was cute, like Ben’s grandma on the phone. “The name is Chandler, Jessica and Ben—”

There was a burst of static from the intercom and the gate began to creak open. Jessica straightened, tucked her hair behind her ear, worried as always about her dignity. She never used to take herself so seriously.

“I promise you I pressed that code correctly, or I thought I did!” said Frances, as she buckled her seatbelt and revved her tappety little engine. She gave them a little wave. “I’ll see you in there! Don’t try to race me with your fancy-schmancy Ferrari.”

“It’s a Lamborghini !” protested Ben.

Frances winked at him, as if she knew that perfectly well, and drove off, faster than he would have expected, or recommended, on this road.

As they walked back toward the car, Jessica said, “We’re not telling anybody, right? That’s the deal. If anyone asks, just say the car isn’t even yours. Say it belongs to a friend.”

“Yeah, but I’m not as good a liar as you,” he said. He meant it as a joke or even a compliment, but he was leaving the interpretation up to her.

“Fuck you,” she said, though without much heat.

So maybe they were okay. But sometimes the embers of a dying argument sparked without warning. You never knew. He would stay alert.

“She seemed nice,” said Ben. “The lady. Frances.” That was safe. Frances was old. There could be no possibility of jealousy. The jealousy was a fun new development in their relationship. The more Jessica changed her face and body, the less secure she got.

“I think I recognized her,” said Jessica.

“Really?”

“I’m pretty sure she’s Frances Welty, the writer. I used to be crazy about her books.”

“What sort of books?” asked Ben. He opened his car door.

She said something he didn’t catch. “Sorry, what?”

“ Romance. ” Jessica slammed the passenger door so hard he winced.

6

Frances

That’s more like it , thought Frances when she got her first look at the Victorian mansion emerging majestically in the distance. The road was paved now, thankfully, and the bushland became progressively greener and softer. Tranquillum House was sandstone, three storys, with a red corrugated-iron roof and a princess tower. Frances had the delightful sensation of time-traveling to the late nineteenth century, although the sensation was somewhat spoiled by the yellow Lamborghini purring along behind her.

How could those kids afford that car? Drug dealers? Trust-fund kids? Drug dealing seemed more likely than trust fund; neither of them had that creamy entitled look of old money.

She glanced in the rearview mirror again. From here, with her hair blowing in the wind, Jessica looked like the pretty girl she was meant to be. You couldn’t see all the procedures she’d had done to her young face. The thick layer of makeup was bad enough, but oh goodness me, the blinding white teeth, the enormous puffy lips, and the work, it was such bad work. Frances was not opposed to cosmetic procedures—in fact she was very fond of them—but there was something so sad and garish about this sweet child’s plumped-up, smoothed-out face.

Surely all that jewelry she was wearing couldn’t be real, could it? Those massive sapphires in her ears would be worth … what? Frances had no idea. A lot. The car was obviously real, though, so maybe the jewelry was real too.

Up-and-coming mobsters? YouTube stars?

The boy, Jessica’s “husband” (they seemed too young for such grown-up terms), was cute as a button. Frances would try not to flirt with him. The joke might wear thin after ten days. Possibly even bordering on … sleazy? Possibly bordering on pedophilia, darling , Alain would say. It was awful to think of lovely Ben shuddering over Frances the way Frances had once shuddered over the behavior of older male authors at publishing parties.

They used to be particularly hideous if they’d recently won a literary prize. Their dialogue was so powerful and impenetrable it didn’t require punctuation! So naturally they didn’t require permission to slip-slide their hairy hands over the body of a young writer of genre fiction. In their minds, Frances virtually owed them sex in return for her unseemly mass-market sales of “airport trash.”

Stop it. Don’t think about the review, Frances .

She’d marched in the Women’s March! She was not “a blight on feminism” just because she described the color of her hero’s eyes. How could you fall in love with someone if you didn’t know the color of his eyes? And she was obliged to tie everything up at the end with a “giant bow.” Those were the rules. If Frances left her endings ambiguous, her readers would come after her with pitchforks.

Do not think about the review. Do not think about the review.

She dragged her mind back to Ben and Jessica. So, yes, she would remember to be age-appropriate with Ben. She would pretend they were related. She’d behave like his aunt. She certainly wouldn’t touch him. My God, she hadn’t touched him already, had she? The review was making her doubt everything about herself. Her hands tightened around the steering wheel. She had a habit of touching people on the arm to make a point, or when they said something that made her laugh, or when she felt in any way fondly toward them.