I come to the Elysian Society early, before I’m scheduled to meet with a client, and slip directly into Jane’s office. I’ve brought money along, folded tight and moist inside my palm. My pulse is rapid against the knot of bills.
Jane barely glances up when I enter. “Can I help you?”
I shut the door behind me. “I’d like to talk in private.”
Jane’s office is ripe with signs of ordinary life. A birthday card pinned on the corkboard, a cardboard cup of pungent-smelling coffee on the corner of the desk. The framed photo of a graduating teenager, cheeks pebbled with acne.
“I need lotuses,” I say.
“Oh?” Jane licks her thumb tip, turns over one page of a thin yellow sheaf.
“For my own purposes,” I add, unnerved by her lack of interest.
“The lotuses are strictly controlled,” Jane says. “You of all people should know that.”
Her voice is neither surprised nor accusatory. She’s like an actress reciting the expected lines, testing me with her coolness.
“I’m willing to pay,” I say. “Whatever it takes, I’ll pay.”
Jane keeps her head bent. Her cheeks are too bright with blush, an unnatural layer over her skin, and she smells like laundry detergent, hairspray. I wonder if she wears these markers to remind the bodies that she’s better than us. She goes home to a husband and children and friends, secure that she’s never been mistaken for anything other than exactly what she is.
“Five years,” she says, at last, addressing her desk. “After five years of being the model employee, you want in on this? Why the change of heart?”
“I want to open myself up to new opportunities,” I say.
“You want to open something,” Jane says. “Don’t get poetic about it with me. I’ve been doing this for years too, remember. I’ve heard all the excuses.”
Her quick contempt is like a strike. I shut and open my eyes, letting myself become immune. “What do I have to do?” I ask. “Just tell me.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“What does Ana do?”
Jane doesn’t rise to the challenge. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“If you’ll work with her, it only seems fair to work with me.”
“Life isn’t fair,” Jane says.
“You’re right.” My spine lengthens. “For instance, what you’re doing, it wouldn’t look good if it ever got out. You might not be doing anything wrong yourself, but life isn’t fair. Other people might not agree.”
At this, Jane looks up. “You’re not trying to blackmail me, are you?” She laughs once.
“How many other people know what you’re doing here?” I ask. “I’m the only uninvolved person who knows. The others can’t expose you without revealing their own participation. But if you won’t sell me the lotuses, I don’t have any motivation to protect you.”
It’s a flimsy argument, but in my mouth, the words are unflinching as weapons.
The silence builds between us. Then Jane stands abruptly, slides open a long drawer on the opposite side of the desk. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, anyway,” she says, brittle. “Suit yourself, if it means that much to you.”
Glancing over the edge of the desk, I see the wastebasket, a nest of crumpled paper. And a pair of eyes. A photo that’s been torn into pieces, leaving the strip of face from forehead to nose intact. I recognize the style of the portrait: I’ve assumed this pose myself, once each year. Hair pulled back, face scrubbed clean, standing against an unadorned white wall.
These images are arranged in a photo album for prospective clients, our faces collected between white leather covers. I’ve imagined strangers sitting in Mrs. Renard’s office, suppressing tears, taut with that stubborn pride people draw on in painful moments. I imagine them examining me and deciding, yes, she’ll do, or moving past me without interest.
The eyes in the wastebasket prick at my memory. I know her. Even from this small section of her face, I know her. Cloudy blue irises beneath eyebrows fine as pen strokes.
“Here we are.” Jane’s hand withdraws, clutching an orange plastic bottle. Thin silhouettes of lotuses cluster like fingerprints. “I’ll give you eight to start with.” She pauses, looking me up and down. “You’ve brought money, I hope?”
When Jane tells me how much it will cost, I know she’s watching me to gauge my reaction, taking a mean pleasure in this. I duck my head to hide my face. It’s three weeks’ pay, easily. Ana hadn’t mentioned this side of the arrangement.
“Don’t worry,” Jane says. “You stand to earn it back and more, if you’re smart.”
As she counts the money, I glance again at the eyes. They hold a hint of a smile, a faraway quality. The closed-off wisdom of an old morgue photo or a marble saint.
Jane tips the lotuses off the edge of the desk into the mouth of an envelope. “The one rule I expect you to follow above all others, Eurydice, is this.” She pauses to lick the envelope flap, her tongue a startling wedge of wet pink. “Watch out for yourself,” she says. “You go into this with your eyes open. Don’t come crying to me if it’s not what you expected.”
“Of course,” I say. “I won’t. I wouldn’t.”
Jane holds the envelope out to me. After the briefest hesitation, the knowledge of everything I’m about to do teeming in my head, I accept.
“The real shame is that you’re not cut out for this kind of work,” Jane says then. She speaks so flatly that I can’t tell whether she’s making a prediction or a threat. “I always hoped you’d keep away from this. You’re going to be eaten alive.”
I call his office. It’s seeping into evening, but calling him while he’s at a public space feels like a safe compromise. The phone rings five times before he answers. “Hello?”
I was expecting the buffer of a secretary. For a moment, it’s as if my lips have been sewn shut. “Mr. Braddock?”
“Who is this, please?”
He doesn’t recognize me. “Edie,” I say. “From the Elysian Society.”
Patrick is quiet. Then: “Right. Of course. Hello.”
I want to hold his voice inside my mouth and savor it. “Is this a bad time?”
“No, you’re fine.” A rustle on the other end. A creak, as if he’s adjusting his weight in his chair. “So what is this about? Just a social call, or am I in trouble?”
It’s the carefully cheerful tone that keeps other people at bay. Politeness as armor. “I wanted to—” I start, but the words lodge in my throat. “I want to make sure you’re doing all right,” I say instead.
“Well, I am, thanks.”
“We haven’t seen you lately.”
“Things have been busy at work.” There’s silence for a moment, and I bite the slippery underside of my lip. “I wasn’t aware that I’d been gone long enough for anyone to notice,” Patrick says.
“We’ve missed you at the Elysian Society,” I say.
“How long has it been? A week?” His voice lightens even further, that false friendliness as sharp as a needle.
It has been two weeks. It’s nearing the end of April now. Once, I would have agreed with him that fourteen days is nothing. Since I met Patrick, though, the passage of time has taken on a startling weight.
“Mr. Braddock—” I begin.
“Just Patrick. We don’t have to get formal.”
“Patrick,” I repeat. “I’m calling because our last conversation concerned me, and I wanted to address that.”
“All right.”
“When you asked how long people stay at the Elysian Society, I could tell you were disappointed in my response.” It could be risky, saying it aloud. It’s possible he wasn’t disappointed at all, and that my words will plant that seed in Patrick’s mind.
“I wouldn’t say disappointed,” he says after a moment. “Surprised. Maybe.”
“You don’t feel closer to Sylvia,” I supply. “And you’re afraid you never will again.”
A long silence. “I guess that’s true.” He laughs under his breath. “Am I that transparent?”
“I’m calling you because I have an idea.” And I tell him, presenting everything to him as cleanly as possible: a business proposition. A legal contract.
When I’m done, there’s silence on the other end. I rub my thumbnail against my thigh while I sit cross-legged on my bed, pressing the nail down hard into my flesh. I close my eyes and colors flower against the back of my eyelids. I open them again and look at the indented circles on the tender insides of my thighs.
“I’d like that,” Patrick says at last.
The next afternoon, I find Ana in the waiting room. She’s slumped and staring at the TV, dark brown eyes catching a reflected hint of the rushing waterfall on the screen. She runs a lock of hair through her fingers again and again; I watch the shiny black strands slide through her fingertips in a hypnotic rhythm.
When I sit beside her, Ana starts, looking at me as if I’ve woken her from a deep sleep. “How have you been?” I ask.
“Oh, fine, thank you.” She matches my formal tone with enough exaggeration to slip from sincere to mocking.
I study the fine fan of her lashes, and her short, blunt hair held back with pins. She looks exhausted, shadows collecting underneath her eyes. “What happened with your client that night?” I ask, dropping my voice to a hush. “Are you still seeing him?”
“God,” Ana says. She laughs under her breath. “One favor and you’re my mother?”
“If he’s still bothering you, you can go to Mrs. Renard. I’d vouch for you, I’ve seen the way he acts.”
“And you think she’d help me?” Ana asks. “Thanks anyway.” She sighs. “It’s not a big deal. Rob just wants more from me than I can give right now.”
“What more could he want?” I ask.
Ana visibly shakes herself, a quick movement, as if she’s working an ache out of her muscles. “He wants me to go full-time,” she says. “Go permanent. He’s been riding me about it for a while, but it’s worse lately.”
On the TV screen, a vast field of yellow flowers lies ringed by distant mountain peaks. Thousands of blossoms, so uniformly bright that they hurt my eyes.
“He wants me to be her,” Ana continues. “Live with him. Wear her clothes. For a few months. Enough that he can be with her day in, day out, not just for a night at a time.”
“Ana—” On the screen, a breeze blows across the surface of the blossoms, stirring them into a froth. Like waves moving over the water.
“I need the money. I can’t even answer my phone anymore because I’m afraid of creditors, and—” Ana stops, a stubborn look pulling over her face. “Anyway. That’s why we fought. Now you know. Happy?”
Ana, her hair dyed dishwater blond or flashy red, curling up next to a stranger at night and waking to kiss his cheek, changing into a too-small blouse that she never chose for herself. A wild sensation overwhelms me: too many doors flung open at once.
She’s watching me. “Well, you look awfully calm,” she says. “Aren’t you going to tell me not to do it? That I have so much to live for, that I shouldn’t throw my life away for some heartbroken asshole?” When I don’t answer, she tries for a smile. It comes out a wince instead. “Yeah, I guess not,” she says. “Maybe it is a good plan for a girl like me.”
“I never said that.”
But Ana’s lost to me, her mouth crimped into an inflexible line, staring at the TV screen. After a second, I rise and leave, and it’s not until I’m moving back toward Room 12 that I realize I meant to ask her about the pale blue eyes, discarded in the wastebasket.