Liza Minnelli in the Bedroom

“Get me a bin Laden. Get me an Osama bin Laden. I don’t care if you ‘ave to knock on every fucking door in Bedfordshire. Find me a bin Laden. Damn it, I need a Bin Laden by Friday.”

This was the first thing Heather heard on pushing once more through the glass doors of Celebrity Lookalikes and Impersonators Limited. Gareth sounded like he was beginning to believe he was the agent of the originals, not the lookalikes—someone with Hollywood clout and chutzpah. Chunky gold jewellery on his wrists and fingers and neck; his black hair slick as oil; his accent Essex.

She, Heather, was Liza Minnelli, and she knew she was Gareth’s best client. Her business card stated: “All singing, all dancing. The spitting image, a dead ringer.” Not that she needed a business card.

As usual she sat herself on the pleather dining chairs in the tiled space they called the Waiting Room. It was a converted chip shop, still reeking of endlessly recycled grease and the dark corkscrews of fragmentary batter called ‘scraps’ which were, incredibly, a delicacy. Gareth was “going up in the world,” or so they said down his local, and therefore in need of premises. Premises. His MacBook sat on the aluminium counter where the till used to be; Heather sat on the peeling chair dressed in one of Liza’s little red sequined numbers. Her wig itched in the oleaginous air. She’d have to fumigate her wardrobe.

“No, no, Gaddafi will not fucking do, I don’t fucking give a fucking shit if your barber “resembles” him, Michael. No—is Colonel Gaddafi fucking Osama bin Laden, no he fucking ain’t mate, alright? No that isn’t funny. No, it is unfuckinglikely that Gaddafi and bin Laden had a sensual romantic relationship—no they weren’t to my knowledge fucking, no. Get me a bin Laden. Wanker.”

Gareth was using an iPhone, but had been schooled on phones you could slam, so he lowered his reading glasses from his forehead to his nose and banged the phone screen with a finger like a saveloy. He appeared satisfied.

“Alright ‘eather, just the lovely lady I was hoping to see today. How’s things?”

“I’m pretty good thanks Gareth, yeah. Who was that going on about Gaddafi?”

“Just Michael being a prick. Look, I’ve got something for you—oh for fuck, ‘ang on, he’s calling back. What? What? What? I’m talking to a lovely lady right now you facking pillock, what?”

At which moment Frank Sinatra entered the chippy. Short, in a grey crosshatch suit, he wore his hat at such a precipitous angle you felt it would fall off. This was one of the many exaggerations in which a celebrity lookalike had to indulge. She always thought it interesting that you could tell more about the original from the lookalike. In caricature, their lines were more heavily drawn. So she absorbed from this man Frank’s true head, lined and shaped like a sphynx cat, and with a sphynx cat’s glazed blue eyes. His own were contacts.

“Mind if I?” he asked her. “Liza,” he added, smirking, nodding. Heather tapped the dining chair by her side. Its pleather was ripped across, exposing vomit-coloured reconstituted stuffing foam.

“Nice meeting you, Frank.”

“You too doll face.” She laughed. He wasn’t doing an accent. He sounded as stridently humble as she. As English. Heather watched as his gaze flicked down to her shoes, then moved jumpily up her legs, hips, torso. Then he was looking into her eyes. His attention silenced her.

Fortunately he continued: “Getting much work?”

“Enough. Yeah, can’t complain.”

He leaned so that his forearm was on his knee. Somehow it was patronising; she didn’t dislike it. He was leaning into her, over her. “Sing too?”

“Of course.”

“It’s harder if you sing. Obviously more money. But you have to look like and sound like the real thing, right?

“Right. And you get the rabid fans.”

“The rabid fans, yeah. They know every note of every song.”

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Frank Sinatra.”

“Funny.”

“Jason Ferrara.”

“Good name—would make a stage name.”

She noticed that he didn’t ask hers. Behind the counter, now with his feet up where fishcakes once idled, Gareth was shouting about the late Queen Elizabeth II. Apparently a booking hadn’t gone well—she’d looked like the Queen, but sounded like she smoked sixty a day.

Frank was still looking at her. At last he said, “When’s your next gig?”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight? Well. I’m free tonight.”

“Why are you in costume then?”

“Oh, I ain’t been here before. Always been solo—never had an agent or anything. Trying to get work. Need to look the part, no? So where’s this gig.”

“Eight at the Lion and Unicorn, Edgerton. You from around here?”

“The Lion and Unicorn—that’s near me. Rough. I don’t go in there. But I’ll make an exception tonight Liza. You do ‘New York, New York’?”

“Course I do. Do you?”

“Yeah. Not as good as you I reckon.”

“You’ll have to judge for yourself.”

“It’s a date.”

*

He wasn’t there. Heather had her virgin gin and tonic (tonic) by the side of the stage and sipped it through a straw, hoping her Liza lipstick wouldn’t rub. Already she’d encountered a beer belly with a mouth who’d approached her to say, “Oi oi it’s Judy Garland.” Not bad—not for a man with twelve drinks in him. But her pixie cut wig was nothing like Judy’s hair.

She opened with ‘Cabaret’, saying “I’d like to sing you ‘Cabaret’ from my film Cabaret based on the musical Cabaret based on the novel Goodbye to Berlin.” Nobody laughed.

The applause was hearty enough, but there wasn’t huge interest. People were getting off, holding court, cadging fags, fixing the wheels of mobility scooters. It was the sort of pub where face tattoos were more than welcome, perhaps fully de rigueur. Windows were open and seagulls squawked in the car park; they couldn’t really have been farther from the sea. England flag bunting, a round of tequila shots. An NHS carer attempting to slide a serviette under the short fourth leg of a table. Heather finished the first half of her set. Then Frank Sinatra entered.

Only he wasn’t Frank now, but Jason Ferrara. Still with the boy’s face and hair, but out of the clothes, and somehow with a different mien, different features. He waded through pub crowds to the bar, leaning forward with his hands together, and tried to order. He had assumed an odd diffidence. All the swagger dispersed with the suit and tie, leaving a small man in a Fred Perry polo. Yet that made her maternal for him, this new vulnerability. It took him a long while to get served. She came over.

“You look a million dollars,” he said, peculiar words in an English accent.

“You look five quid.”

She didn’t mean it cruelly and was glad he laughed.

“Want a drink?”

“I get all mine free.”

“I wanna buy you one anyway.”

“Isn’t that a waste of money?”

“Honey it ain’t wasted if it’s on you. Look at you. You look great.”

“A tonic water then please.”

“Double or single?”

“No, no gin, just the tonic. Slimline.”

“Ah.”

“Watching my weight.”

“But you’re the perfect weight.”

“Exactly. Want to maintain that,” she lied. In fact, she had turned fifty and sensed her body’s natural decay hastening, and even where she dieted there were surprise lumps and slippage. Slimline tonic was a grasp at the idea of youth for her—was a way not to admit of the fear that, for some aspects of her life, it was too late. Heather didn’t drink because she had never experienced love.

Jason got himself a beer and slid her drink along the grimy veneer of the bartop studded with crushed peanuts. “How long you got?”

“Break’s ten minutes. I start again in eight minutes.”

“Enough time for me to ask you then.”

“What?”

“Mine. Dinner. When you free?”

“I’ve eaten.”

“I don’t mean today. I mean in future. At some point. I’d like you to come over. I would like to make a meal for you.”

“I think I’d like that.”

“Think?”

She felt herself blushing. “No. Not think. I know I would.”

He pulled himself up and pulled back his shoulders, as if rising into his excitement. “Great. Great. Any time really. I’m always free. Except when I’ve got a gig, but that isn’t so often. Monday? Let’s say Monday. Seven. I live on this street. 23 Roman Road.”

Heather sipped her sweating tonic. Jason drank in response, demanding she speak next. She said, “How’s work—you busy?”

He took her question at an angle, literally tilting his head, like a puppy, wise in experience, questioning a greater intellect. “Busy’s what you make of it, innit. I’m doing okay. I like it.”

“Is Frank popular?”

“Yeah, he’s always popular. I mean, the people who book me are getting older. Lots of Italians. Italian celebrations, weddings, homecomings. And I’ve had a few charities get me to go into the hospices—y’know how it is. Yeah. They like Sinatra there. It’s comforting for them.”

“Reminds them of the time before they got sick.”

“When they were young, yeah. You ever done it for people with dementia? Well they still think they were twenty-one. I’m singing and they think it’s the sixties, seventies.”

Heather said, “It’s like they’ve skipped out on all the getting old part, and they’re back to it, and they’re happy again, before the disappointments. The aches and pains—mental ones, emotional ones I mean. Yeah. Because there must be, mustn’t there, be a point when you start looking back and you think—god, is this all there’s been? But dementia in a way—I mean, I don’t know anyone who’s suffered from it, but it’s sort of a relief from that. It’s anti-disappointment. It’s terrible for everyone else, but if you can just skip over your problems, overwrite them, and that’s that?”

He had been listening with his eyes over the rim of his pint. He placed it down on the bar now, very deliberately, somewhat musingly. “You’re quite deep aren’t you Liza?” That was his offer to the conversation. A chilling rebuke to her attempt to meet someone on a level that mattered.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think. I’ve never been married. Have you?”

“Not exactly.”

“No?”

He stopped there and she knew he wouldn’t go on. Instead Heather told him she had to get back, prepare for her second half. Jason assented, and inexplicably held her hand, not in the sense of hand-holding, but with a suggestion of fealty. With a suggestion that he would be gallant and subservient and loyal. Again, with a suggestion that he was somehow like a dog, a hound. She climbed the black ramp to the stage; there was no applause.

Might that’ve been the first time she’d felt what she was feeling? Sui generis emotion coupled with sui generis sensation. And the other feeling, the perturbing one that this short brusque man should have inspired so much?

Well, this meant disappointment needn’t be the tonal centre of life. Heather necked her tonic and left it on the corner of the stage. Yes, there was wondrous adventure in every ex-chip shop in the world, and what mattered was your being a blotting paper for the energies more confident than your own. Still the seagulls outside. Jason was talking. She needed to get back into Liza. Singing was the obvious and necessary next step.

Jason watched her closely, and her singing was influenced by his watching, as the entire presentation of your character is always influenced when under observation by someone alluring. Was she finding herself trying harder? Yes—and to look better, more graceful, more unique, more brave.

But as Heather was finishing ‘New York, New York’, her encore, she saw Jason leave the pub by the back door. To smoke? She felt she knew that the answer was no, not to smoke.

*

Heather came to 23 Roman Road on Monday at seven, having spent an hour curling her still-blonde hair, trying to unkink what wearing a wig all day had kinked. She left it half-done and dissatisfied, but passable, and was almost late; she felt she absolutely shouldn’t be late. In one hand she held a bottle of pink bubbles. The cool sleek glass. She rang the bell.

Jason said, “I thought you’d be Liza.”

“But that’s my job,” she laughed, tentatively.

“But well it’s fun though, isn’t it.”

“Me dressing up? You’re not Frank right now.”

“No. It’s fun though. I thought it’d be fun.”

“Well. I love my job.”

“Yeah. This sort of ruins the illusion now though. Can’t be helped I s’pose. Come on.” Jason withdrew his fingers from the doorframe and went inside with his back to her, directly to the kitchen. He did not mention her wine. She twice tried to offer it to him and he twice, staring at her, ignored or failed to see it. So she placed it on the Formica counter, where it seemed too fanciful for his modest singleton’s home, as if itself dressed up, gold foil round the neck, a wavy pink paper label at the waistline.

“We’ll be having carbonara.”

“Oh. Lovely. I love carbonara.”

“Same.”

“Have you got Italian family, Jason? Name like Ferrara.”

He leaned against the fridge. “Probably.”

Silence. She said, “Is it a family recipe?”

“No. Off BBC Good Food.”

“Ah, I love BBC Good Food.”

“Good innit.”

“In the name I suppose.”

“Yeah.”

Heather felt tight in her dress. She felt like sausage in casing. She felt awful. Her hair was all wrong. She hadn’t had time to do her makeup neatly enough, and anyway he didn’t like what he was seeing—that was the transparent fact between them, there as though a wall of stretched cellophane were across the room, which did not stop talk or sight but impeded connection. She sighed.

“I’ve got a beer on the go,” Jason said, but she couldn’t see it. “Want one?”

“I’d rather have wine, if you happened to have any, or a tonic?”

“Don’t do wine. I thought you didn’t drink.”

“I’m drinking today.” She paused. “I brought a bottle.”

“Yeah. Would you open that? I’ll get a glass.”

“Has something happened?”

“What? No. I’m fine.”

“I meant—me?”

Yet she did of course know, had been in the know regarding the same her whole life. It was perhaps the unconscious drive that pushed her to her current profession. Heather, as herself, was dislikable. This she had learned to believe, and now knew as firmly as you know all knowledge. People didn’t like her look, or stance, or manner of speech, or overeager gestures. She had forever been uncomfortable in the world and at fifty had come to recognise it as her own failing, not the failing of ineffable otherness—was, in short, an anxiety she deserved, because she had not succeeded in disinterring herself from it. Heather had only ever wanted to offer herself authentically and the flat words came back time and again: no thank you.

“I had thought you’d be Liza.”

“What does it matter if I’m not Liza.”

“Well I met you as Liza.”

“Yes, but you are aware it’s an act? I met you as Frank but I liked what I saw beyond him.”

“That’s cos you’re a woman.”

“What’s that mean?” She was impatient, and tore at the foil on the neck of her pink champagne. While he was thinking she popped the bottle; she had been given no glass.

“Well just like how women are more into personality, I guess.”

“So you’re not interested in me physically?” She turned as she said this, madly opening cupboards.

“No, Heather. I think you’re good looking.”

“Thanks.” She at last found a glass and poured bubbles to the rim, let them subside, breathed, and poured again.

“But men are more shallow.”

“So you don’t?”

“What?” He sipped his beer, which had materialised, eyeing her with his head tipped back.

“If it’s a matter of shallow that’s physical. You don’t find me attractive.”

“What did I just say? Look, I need to get on with the cooking.”

“All right.”

“Put some music on, there’s my phone.”

She chose the Sinéad O’Connor cover of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. It didn’t connect to any speaker: there didn’t seem to be one: it just played howlingly from his outdated iPhone. Heather suddenly felt it very strange to be listening to music while Jason faffed with pasta. Their conversation was like the conversation you might make with somebody you can’t really hear.

When the carbonara came, a carbonara to which he’d added double cream and grated cheddar, they sat down at his long Ikea table, both on the same side, for there wasn’t room to sit opposite each other in the narrow kitchen. There was a red ceramic pepper at the centre of the table. It had streaks of some condiment on its surface, possibly mayonnaise.

They had the tepid pasta, and dessert, a fruit salad, and then a cold sporadic shag in Jason’s unmade bed.

*

She woke up in beautiful morning. A red sun hazy in the east. It made a play of shadows in red and black about the room. Its light lay red over Jason. Silence twittered with birdsong, the early, more intricate, darting kind.

It was the summer of the heatwave, when people were sleeping in bathtubs of cold water and outside on garden furniture in the night. Mosquitoes came like a modern plague to a country which rarely saw them. People fainted in train carriages. Eight hundred were killed by the weather in three months, and two dozen drowned trying to cool off. Heather left him sleeping. She dressed and went down to the footpath by the railway track.

Rosebay willowherb and too-early blackberries. A pair of tortoiseshell butterflies locked in courtship, flitting in zigzags, one taunting, always pulling away. Heather plucked thistle fluff, and it felt like her late cat’s fur. Buddleias in camp profusion. Ivy with the texture of hairsprayed hair. A woman, likely lost, drove past in a convertible Mazda with a white Monster and fag on the go. Lesser bindweed, cow parsley. Bending spiked translucent rows of summer-grass foxtails. Those which get in dogs’ eyes. Pineappleweed. Hemlock. The maracalike dried seed stalks of curled dock. Razorwire. A sign: No Drone Zone – Overhead Drones Strictly Prohibited. A rough sleeper. Sheep’s sorrel. Baggies. Iridescent greenbottle flies luxuriating on dogshit. Hawthorn, without blossom. Minion graffiti.

They’d agreed she would go to Jason’s gig. But he was doing a care home next, so she skipped it, and he said he had to see her, could he see her? They had drinks in a pub and he didn’t smoke the cigarette she gave him outside; this time they repaired to hers, which felt safer and less safe.

*

Heather’d been seeing him for several months before she consented to see him as Liza. “Not in public,” she’d said. 23 Roman Road again. She wore red and sequins. He opened the door to her, his eyes a little boy’s, his heart impelling him forward.

“Start spreading your legs,” he sang. “I’m cumming today.”

She frowned. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s a joke Hev. Take a joke. Or should I say, Liza!”

“It’s Heather.”

“But you’re the spitting image. Life is a cabaret old chum, innit?”

“Can I come in?”

“Please.”

The moment she was inside and he’d closed the door with a bump of his arse he was upon her, pressing her lumbar into the cold radiator and holding her face with both hands, pushing her back, her head against the mirror in the hallway, one of his legs between her two legs. At least he was proactive—she could at least say that. Jason had a mole on his forehead which looked cancerous. He was almost bald but refused to wear hats, other than Frank’s. He was again wearing the Fred Perry polo he had now worn six times in their courtship; she hadn’t intended to count. His lips were dry with ridged lines on them and too puckered and with flaking white skin as of someone chapped by high winds, yet it was summer and the wind was dead. She felt these flakes of skin through his kisses. It was what she focused on in an attempt to gain control of feeling.

Variations on the same occurred whenever she was Liza.

*

One evening Heather pulled up near Jason’s house. August bank holiday—all the families home, and all the cars in a long neat row on the one side of the street you were able to park. He didn’t have a drive and she couldn’t find a bay. It took a few minutes of slow driving to reach, half a mile away, a place where she could stop. She paused inside, letting the aircon soothe her.

Before dinner she was up in his bedroom. They weren’t clothed, except for his left sock and his boxers round his right ankle. He had two fans going. He had the blinds drawn. Blinds—in the bedroom of an adult. Not curtains. Even drawn they let through huge amounts of light. This was a man impervious to the most obvious sensations. Sweat beaded on his upper lip and his lower, like a ring of blisters. He kissed her and they smudged them into vaguer facial wetness.

His hands came at her and over her and onto her and under her, and, fleetingly, into her. His tongue likewise, but in different places and with different pressure. She replicated his intensity—intensity, not passion—by putting her hands in those locations she felt were apt. She cupped for example the back of Jason’s head, and she reached to his slim-man’s flabby hip, harrying it with hurried fingers. In the background his bedroom TV lit the room mutely.

Heather fled. She had no thoughts about it, only a need which pushed her onwards. She removed her Liza Minnelli wig and threw it to the carpet. Swift and mechanical she found her clothes about the room, dangling off a chair, under the bed, and without mistakes put them on, nothing inside-out, no sleeve caught amidst itself. Just simply and easily. And with as much simple ease and swiftness she, not speaking, ran down the stairs of Jason’s house into his hallway and came to his front door and opened it and left, into the night, where the streetlights of Roman Road were still nostalgic sodium orange, creating their own mist under the peaches and purples of a failing sky. She didn’t even have her shoes on. For the first time, the material realities of life didn’t matter.

Fifty years old she started running into the evening. She hadn’t run or jogged or even exercised at all really, not since school, not since her bronze medal in the relay, when she had benefitted from the athleticism of others, those who were more sure of their bodies and their lives and their place. But she was running now. She was amazed he didn’t follow. She ran on and on, passing the passenger windows of dozens of parked cars, sunset about her, her throat burning, and joy within.

In her car now Heather drove home without music playing. She drove fast. She loved the sunset. She loved the new feeling of driving barefoot, which she had never done before. She had the windows down. She loved the cool of the air whipping into the car and making her seatbelt wild with noise. She loved the colours of the orange lamps going by with increasing frequency, Jason growing further away with each light she counted. She counted over two hundred of them.

*

Four days later Jason Ferrara was at her front door. In two hands he held her black Liza wig.

“Here.”

“You’re returning it?”

“I wanted to see you. The other night.”

“Yes.”

“I get that you weren’t feeling up to it.”

“Yes.”

“You should’ve said.”

“Well it’s hard to articulate. And especially hard to articulate mid-shag.”

“I get that.”

“Do you, Jason?”

“I think I do, yeah.”

“We haven’t ever talked about your Liza thing.”

“My Liza thing?”

“Come on.” She leaned into her doorframe with one hand, more matronly than sultry, like someone looking down at an errant child. “You’re happy to indulge in it but you’re not happy to accept it for what it is?”

“What?”

“You’re holding my wig. You’re literally holding my wig.”

“You should take it back by the way.”

“Yeah, it suits me. I do understand you, Jason.”

He stepped forward, one foot up on the step of the threshold. “Well am I coming in?”

“It looks as though you are, but I haven’t invited you in, so.”

“So?” And he tried to place his other foot up, and she came forward slightly into his path, so that he couldn’t stand without crashing into her, leaving him in a posture like a proposal, one knee higher. “Hev, really? Really? Really we’re doing this?”

“I haven’t invited you in.”

“Well are you going to fucking invite me in?” The wig in one hand, he placed his other on the doorframe, mirroring hers.

“I don’t feel happy to right now.”

“I’ve driven all this way—I’ve driven all the way to yours and you’re not?”

“It’s not so far a drive.”

“Take this.”

He threw the black wig at her. It fell off her stomach between them onto the lip of the door, and then fell, again, like a slinky, over the threshold to the path.

Jason said, “Oh come on Hev, come on Hev. Take it.” He stooped and took the wig and tossed it between her legs into the house.

“I’m not putting it on.”

“Just put it on! Just put it on! How does it fucking harm you anyway? Really? Can you even see it, can you even feel it? Really? You can’t fucking humour me? And why not? Why not? It’s all I ask, isn’t it? Ain’t it all I ask? Come on Hev. Come on. Christ Hev. Christ. It’s just a wig and a bit of makeup. Christ alive. Women. Jesus.”

Jason took his hand off the PVC of the doorframe and rubbed his palm over the whole of his smooth head, a tantrum movement, unbecoming. He looked about himself as if to call out or entreat to others who weren’t there, as a child does at the height of his frustration. He flung his arms to his sides. Then his eyes locked into Heather’s with a cold anger and he stepped up into the doorframe and she stepped back, not meaning to, but having to, and he was in the house.

She backed out away from him because he kept moving towards her and she moved fast down the hallway to the bathroom and opened it up and locked herself inside, the wig shuffled along the lino by the sweeping arc of the door. She felt no urge to splash water on her face. She did not wish to look at herself in the mirror.

*

Wasn’t she spending her days as Liza anyway? Wasn’t she desperate for commendation, recommendation, income, all as Liza? And hadn’t it started as a silly little hobby and become full-time life? So what if she had to do it more often, to get him in the mood? What was the difference in that to being an actual star?

A relationship, if that was what they were generating between them, was sure to be like going to an office. It would have the same rhythms, the same general tediousness and moments of high drama. That was what she understood from the stories she had watched and read. To work you wore a pencil skirt, or nurse’s uniform, or dinner-lady’s tabard—was this worse? Was this not to some degree more glamorous, eccentric, magnificent?

Why was being true to yourself so highly valued? She was sure there was goodness in the supplication or indeed suppression of your own spirit. Sure that this was the origin of duty, and therefore society, and therefore civilisation—that some people did not get what they wanted, but that their not was a way for others to. She was being ridiculous. Heather, face it, be adult, be normal. So little was being demanded that she might as well accede.

How could love ever not be the perpetual presentation a false face? Heather was coming into new knowledge here, learning that to be close to someone only meant a new infinity of barriers, closer ones, true, but barriers nevertheless. Would she get anything like a softening? Perhaps by coming to know the blank facts of what another person wanted, and to begin noticing how they sought to achieve such a want. So the knowledge was humbled, while the feelings continued their pretence.

Was she ever to be satisfied? Had anyone been, of all the people who’d lived lives in all the world? Could this half-measure, this compromise, be good enough? Likewise, did she want perfection?—was there not a reduction of fear in dissatisfaction? It at least meant not having the worry of anything fully achieved becoming lost. That was the children paradox: you wanted them, and, having had them, they became the greatest liability for your soul’s general calm. So too deep perfect love. The only place it could go towards was failure, abjection, loss. Wouldn’t it be better now to have half what she wanted, a glow if not a burning, settling for less, yet with no terror of extinguishment? There were people who were doing worse, weren’t there? Not that she could presently imagine them. She wanted to be understood, and it was her fate that no one would ever understand her. Like many other billions, through all time.

All she had to do to claim a minimum of happiness was to be somebody else. She had learned that, of course, over many years and many prior disappointments. You became a new person every time anyone hurt you with true hurt. It was the simplest defence.

Better to make less of your core character, weaken yourself, alter, shift, than to go on suffering, just as a candle well-used is slowly diminished. She could allow that. Yes—she believed she would love him even if it meant her own abasement. Even if his was the life prioritised by their new joined life. She couldn’t be a mother—she was now too old—but this seemed like a similar thing, with the abnegation and the sacrifice. If you lost out at the expense of a gain, how could it be loss?

*

She looked into the mirror, finally, at last, willing to look now, and took her makeup bag from under the sink, and began to make up her face. The old Liza face, still with a little charm. A few cracks and some swelling, but hers. She supposed this was the beginning of the routine of the rest of her days.

*

Come on, Heather. Close your eyes, close your eyes merely, and pretend that the life you have is the one you always wanted.

*

Please share this story, or forward the email to a friend or family member you think might like it:

Share

I post these all for free and sharing is a real help. Thank you.