Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

“Oh, shit,” Elizabeth said. “Not again.”

“Lizzzz-eeeeeeee,” Naomi said. “I’m in New York! Come and have coffee with me! Come to the office! I want to show you what we’ve got put together so far. I think you’ll go craaaaaaaazy for it.”

“Hi, Naomi,” Elizabeth said. “How are you?” She rolled her eyes at Deirdre. It’s nothing, she mouthed.

“I’m freezing my ass off because the air-conditioning in the office is on autopilot, but other than that I’m perfect,” Naomi said. “I’ll e-mail you the address. Come today, my afternoon is totally clear. You need to see our Lydia. Ciao-ciao!” She hung up.

Elizabeth set the phone back in its dock and looked at the pile of paper on her desk. She’d already done her work for the day — she’d responded to all the agents and all the clients. Everyone had their marching orders. There was more to do in the office, of course — there always was. But no one would mind if she took a few hours to go into the city.

• • •

Naomi was set up in a conference room in the Fifties, on Fifth Avenue. Elizabeth had had to give her name to three different people sitting at desks, each of whom whispered into a phone and looked her name up on a computer. The last gatekeeper, an effete young man wearing a bow tie, told her to wait and that Naomi’s assistant would be right out. A girl with a small, neat Afro and bright red lipstick came swanning out a few minutes later.

“Elizabeth?” she said, sounding bored. “Follow me.”

They walked past stainless-steel half walls and glass-enclosed offices. Elizabeth peeked into each of them, just in case there were any visiting movie stars. The studio released prestige movies, award winners. Naomi was no slouch. Finally they reached a door. Elizabeth saw Naomi inside, talking to another young woman, whose back was turned. Elizabeth stopped — even from behind she could see it — this woman, whoever she was, was their Lydia. And if Elizabeth didn’t know better, she would think that it was her Lydia, too. The hair was just right — thick and dark and wild, as if it had never been brushed. It wasn’t just fashion — Lydia didn’t own a brush, or a comb, or a blow-dryer. She’d practically set those things on fire when she moved to Oberlin for school. Scarsdale was in her rearview mirror, and she was never going back.

“Hiiiiiiiiiii,” Naomi said, opening her arms wide. “It’s the genius!” She was taller than Elizabeth expected, with thick-framed glasses and perfectly straight California-blond hair down to the middle of her back.

“Who, me?” Elizabeth asked. She let Naomi embrace her, inhaling a cloud of sweet perfume.

“Yes, you!” Naomi pulled back, holding Elizabeth’s arms out. “Darcey, this is Elizabeth Marx, who wrote ‘Mistress of Myself.’ She fucking wrote it. Can you believe that? Like, it didn’t exist, and then Elizabeth wrote down the words, and it was a fucking song.”

Darcey stood up and turned around. It wasn’t just her hair that looked like Lydia’s — it was her eyes, her cheeks, her chin. Elizabeth understood immediately why Naomi had wanted her to come.

“Oh, my God,” Elizabeth said.

Darcey did whatever actresses do in place of blushing. She smiled, and turned her face from side to side. “I know,” she said. “I was literally born to do this. If I had a dollar for every person who ever told me I looked like Lydia…”

“You wouldn’t even have half your salary for this movie! Ha!” Naomi pulled Elizabeth closer, and then pushed her toward a white leather office chair.

Darcey sat back down in a chair opposite Elizabeth. Elizabeth tried to look away but couldn’t, which Darcey seemed to enjoy, smiling widely every time she caught Elizabeth staring.

“I also found this,” Naomi said. “You’ve seen it, of course, but we did a little work. Check it out.” She grabbed a remote control and aimed it at the ceiling. Curtains slowly lowered, making the whole room dark. A screen illuminated on the far wall, and with another button push, a familiar song started to play.

Kitty’s Mustache had made three music videos. They were all shot by an Oberlin kid named Lefty, whose real name was Lawrence Thompson III. He had a good camera and was in love with Zoe. She’d slept with him once or twice, Elizabeth suspected, just to keep him in the band’s employ, or maybe she just let him see her naked. The first two videos, for “Frankie’s Lament,” a song Elizabeth had written about their landlord, and “Magic Lasso,” a song about Wonder Woman, were both okay, shot in and around campus, mostly in their grimy apartments and in empty classrooms and in the arboretum, but for the “Mistress of Myself” video, they’d spent the day on a cold beach on the banks of Lake Erie.

There they were — in full goth mode, all of them dressed entirely in black, standing side by side on the beach. Small snowbanks were in the foreground. It was Lefty’s masterpiece, his Swedish art film. “How did you get a copy of this?” Elizabeth asked. Lydia’s hair whipped around her face. They’d brought out some of their instruments, but Lefty decided they should leave them in the car. It was like “Wicked Game,” except instead of Chris Isaak and Helena Christensen, it was all Elizabeth’s screaming mouth. At one point, Zoe lay down in the sand and rolled around. Lydia scowled. Andrew spent half the video with his back to the camera, which he claimed was his silent protest of his own role in the patriarchy.

Elizabeth leaned forward. It was a close-up of Lydia’s face — only it wasn’t Lydia. It was Darcey. “Wait,” she said. “How did you…?”

“I know, it’s seamless,” Naomi said. “Our guys are fucking great. Once they retouched a birthmark on Angelina Jolie’s boob for a three-hour movie. They added a birthmark! She refused to do makeup, said it was something to do with child labor, or maybe with her children, needing more time or something. Makeup can seriously take hours every day, so it was worth it to let her sleep in with all her kids and then just spend an extra million on Photoshop or whatever. It’s amazing, right?”

“How did you get this? The original, I mean?” Elizabeth had a copy on VHS, but she’d heard through friends that Lefty had burned all his films after he decided to go into the family investment-banking business, so as to set himself free from his artistic dreams. As far as she knew, hers was the only copy.

“Not for nothing, Lydia’s archives are in surprisingly good shape for someone who died of a heroin overdose,” Naomi said. “She kept everything. If you didn’t know better, you’d think that she was a librarian. Seriously. Color-coded, in chronological order, the whole nine.”

“That is so strange,” Elizabeth said. “The Lydia I knew was a mess. She didn’t even know how to balance her checkbook.”

Naomi’s assistant laughed. “Checkbooks. That’s like a flip phone, right? But for money?”

“I’m serious,” Elizabeth said.

Naomi nodded. “I think this is something you’re really going to sink your teeth into, Darce — on the outside, she was this wild child, you know, this fuckup, but on the inside, she was always plotting for her historical legacy.”

“I totally get that,” Darcey said.

Elizabeth folded her hands in her lap. Her Lydia wasn’t a wild child or a fuckup. Her Lydia was self-centered, and unreliable, and kind of a jerk. Her Lydia had never been interested in having female friends, at least until pretty famous actresses started coming to her shows, and then she seemed to be one of the gals. But Elizabeth knew that those pictures — or her Buddhism, or whatever she called it — didn’t really mean that she had changed. Elizabeth had tried with Lydia; they all had, especially Andrew. At first, it had made Elizabeth jealous, all the nights that Lydia would just happen to be curled up with Andrew on his couch, her socked feet tucked under his legs. This was after Elizabeth and Andrew had made it clear to the band and everyone that they were a real couple, and still, there Lydia would be, batting her eyelashes and asking Andrew for help putting air in her bicycle tires, as if she were ever going to ride that stupid fucking bicycle.