I Am Not Afraid of Him

"Fame is a room with no doors, only mirrors. It takes a very long time to notice that you cannot find your own face."

Four months earlier

The first week of June, Sophia Lindqvist was on the cover of three magazines, and in none of them did she look like herself.

The photographers had done it with light. She had stood for six hours in a studio in Chelsea in a black column dress that cost more than her first car, under lamps that made her skin glow like paper held to a candle, while a young man in a leather apron told her, with great sweetness, to think about something dangerous. She had thought about her mother. She had thought about a man in a cardigan. The young man had said, That's it. That's the one, and clicked, and she had looked at the proofs afterward and seen a stranger with her bones, a long cold elegant creature with eyes like bottle glass and a mouth that seemed to be keeping a secret from the camera.

The Woman Who Listened to the Monster, said the headline on the first. The Ghost with the Pen, said the second. Inside the Editor, said the third.

Nathan had bought all three and left them on the kitchen table, and then, with a peculiar, shy courtesy, had moved them to the drawer so that she would not have to look at them over breakfast.

…

The talk show was taped on a Tuesday in front of four hundred strangers.

She sat in a white chair on a pale blue stage, under lights as hot as a hand, with a glass of water at her elbow and the book on her knee. The host was a handsome, silver-templed man named Gordon Ruiz, whom the whole country trusted to be sincerely sad about other people's tragedies. He leaned toward her with his forearms on his knees and his hands clasped, in the posture of a priest, and said in a voice that went through the room like warm honey, "Sophia. I have to ask you what everyone is asking. You sat with this man for five months. In his house. Alone. Weren't you afraid?"

The audience hushed. She felt it settle over her like a cloak.

There was a monitor to her left that showed the shot as the viewers would see it. She glanced at it. A woman in black on a blue stage, her hands folded, her head slightly bowed, with an expression of thoughtful, cool, courageous regret. It was a very good picture. It had everything. She could see already how the clip would travel.

And in the back of her mind, quite distinctly, she heard a quiet voice say, Does it frighten you more that I said it, or that you want to keep it?

She smiled. It was a small, grave, unsteady smile. She had practiced it in the mirror.

"No," she said. "I was not afraid of him."

A ripple went through the audience. Someone said wow, quietly.

"I want to be honest," said Sophia. "I was afraid of the idea of him. I was afraid of the book, and what it would cost me, and whether I had the right. But when I sat across the table from him, when I looked him in the eye, I found..." She stopped, and let the silence stretch, and it seemed to her that her voice came from some distance away, as if she were listening to a recording. "I found that he was smaller than the thing he'd made himself into. I'm not afraid of him, Gordon. I don't think I ever was."

The applause began as a patter and became a thunder. Gordon Ruiz had put his hand over his heart. Someone in the third row was on her feet. A young woman in a green dress was crying openly, mouthing thank you, and the camera swung in on her and held, and Sophia, sitting very still in the white chair, with the lights beating on her face and the sound rolling over her like surf, thought with perfect clarity:

I am lying.

And then, a moment later, with an even deeper chill, And it is the best thing I've ever said.

…

Yingying arrived on the third of June, a little before nine, with a bakery bag.

She was standing at the door of Sophia's office when Sophia came in from the elevator, a small, slight, serious young woman in round glasses and a gray cardigan too large for her, with a black bob cut in a straight line at the jaw and both hands clasped around the neck of the bag. She had the look of someone who had been standing there a long time and was prepared to stand a good deal longer. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick.

"Ms. Lindqvist?" She bowed her head slightly. "I am Jiang Yingying. I am the summer intern. Mrs. Doyle said that I am to be assigned to you." A pause. "I brought buns. They are sesame. They are from a shop in Flushing, my landlady's cousin has it. I did not know if you liked them. I did not know what people bring."

"What people bring," said Sophia, slowly, "is usually a résumé."

"I have also brought that." The girl blushed to the roots of her hair. "But I thought it might not be enough."

Sophia took the bag. It was warm. A small greasy stain had spread across the paper, and a smell came up from it, toasted seed and sweet dough, so ordinary and so kind that she felt her throat catch. She opened the door of her office and stood aside, and said, "Come in. Sit down. Tell me what you want to do with your life, and then eat one of these, because I haven't had breakfast, and I'm not going to eat them alone."

They sat on opposite sides of the desk, with the bag between them, in the clear morning light.

She learned a great deal in the next half hour. That Yingying was twenty-four, and from Chengdu, and that she was in her second year of a master's degree in comparative literature at Boston University. That she spoke three languages, and was learning a fourth, and kept a notebook for every one. That she had grown up above a tea shop, in a street of old wooden houses, with a mother who sold dumplings and a father who had died when she was nine. That she wanted, more than anything, to learn how a book was made. And that she had come to New York for the summer because of a single book, which she held out to Sophia across the desk, with both hands, as one offers a thing to an elder.

It was a small paperback with a faded cover and a title in Chinese. The Salt Orchard. It had a drawing on the front of a woman standing among dead apple trees, in the snow, with her face turned away.

Sophia stared at it.

She had written it at twenty-eight, in a rented room in Providence, in eleven weeks, in a fever. It was a small dark book about a woman who inherits a farm and finds the dead trees whispering in her mother's voice. It had sold two thousand copies in English and been forgotten. Someone in Taipei had bought the translation rights for a pittance. She had never seen the Chinese edition. She had forgotten it existed.

"Where did you find this?"

"In a bookshop in Chengdu, when I was seventeen. In a box of used books. It was the only horror novel I ever read, and I read it eleven times." The girl's voice was low and level. "My cousin had died that spring. And I could not go into a room without hearing her. And your book said that the dead do not wish to be exorcised. They only wish to be heard. It was the first thing anyone had said to me that I could believe."

Sophia said nothing for a long moment. The sunlight lay across the desk, on the bag of buns and the bitten fingernails and the soft old paperback with its woman in the snow.

"I'm sorry about your cousin," she said, at last.

"Thank you. It was a long time ago." The girl lowered her eyes. "I do not like to talk about her. I only wanted you to know why I came."

It was true. Sophia would think of it afterward, in the dark, many times, with the sick, bewildered clarity of someone looking at a photograph of a person who has since turned out to be a stranger. It was perfectly true, and it was not all of the truth, and the girl had told her so much of the one that she had never thought to wonder about the rest.

…

The penthouse closed on the twelfth.

Nathan did not come to the signing. He had said that he would, and had put on his good suit, and then, standing in the hall with his hand on the doorknob, had taken it off again. "I can't," he said. "I'm sorry. I'll draw you anything you like. I'll put in the shelves. I'll give you the best desk in Manhattan. But I can't go and watch you buy it."

"It's only an apartment."

"It is thirty-one floors in the air. It is a glass cage with a view." He rubbed his eyes. "And you will fit it perfectly. That is what frightens me."

She went alone. The agent, a glossy woman in a cream suit, led her through white rooms, one after the other, all empty, all echoing, into a hall where a tall gilt mirror hung on the wall opposite the door. It had been left by the previous owner, an old dealer in antiquities, who had said it was too heavy to take. The glass was foxed at the edges. She stood in front of it with her hands in the pockets of her coat and saw a tall woman in a gray cashmere cardigan, with her hair coming down, and a pale, composed, exhausted face.

"It stays with the apartment," said the agent. "If you'd like it gone, I can have someone take it."

"No," said Sophia. "Leave it."

She did not know why. It was simply that, for the first time in six months, she had looked into a glass and thought, I recognize her.

…

The box was waiting on the hall table when she came home.

It was a small wooden crate, tied with raffia, delivered by courier in her absence and signed for by Nathan, who had left it unopened. Inside, packed in a nest of tissue paper, was a bottle of red wine. It was a Burgundy, old, the label stained and soft with age. There was a card tucked into the neck, in the tiny black wire hand that she knew better than her own.

A person who celebrates should not celebrate alone. The fourteenth, Friday, at eight. I have so much to tell you. D.

She read it twice. The house was very quiet. From the kitchen came the small clatter of Nathan washing a pot, and a faint, tuneless humming that he did when he was afraid.

She went upstairs to the study and sat down at her desk. The window was open. The plane trees stirred in the dusk, and across the roofs the sky had turned to a lovely washed lilac, deepening into violet at the edge. She did not turn on the lamp. She took out of her bag the small black recorder she carried everywhere, the one she had bought in a drugstore the night she had signed the contract, with a trembling hand she had found, that night, to be perfectly steady. She opened the compartment. She took out the old microcassette, and set it in the drawer with the forty others. She took a new one from the box. She fitted it in.

Then she took a pen, and wrote on the label, in her small, neat hand, a number.

41.

She weighed the recorder in her palm for a long moment. It was nothing. It was a little piece of black plastic with a red light that blinked when it was listening. She thought of Nathan's rule. She thought of a man in a cardigan who had said, I will be standing outside, in the cold, with a flashlight. She thought of a girl with bitten fingernails, in the next room, who was labeling the boxes of the archive with a felt-tip pen, humming something from Sichuan, in the last light of a Tuesday in June.

Then she set the recorder in the pocket of her bag, with the cassette inside it, and snapped the clasp.

She was only going to a party. She was only going to listen.

The red light blinked once, in the dark of the bag, like an eye.