The Other Girl

by Ana Teresa Pereira

Part 1 appears in this issue

conclusion

There were little things... Perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed them if it wasn’t for the growing suspicion inside of me.

Marie had always hated white sheets; she seemed unaware of the reason, and I imagined it had something to do with a childhood memory, perhaps a visit to a sick or dying relative. She liked them stamped, or blue, or green. That week she made the bed with some white sheets I didn’t remember, with a lacy stripe, also white.

Marie loved the mornings. She was the first to wake up, she took a shower before me, she came back smelling of flowers and with her hair wet and ran downstairs to make breakfast. Now she seemed to resist the idea of getting up and, even though breakfast was on the table when I got down, she barely touched the food and took only a cup of black coffee. Marie had always liked her coffee with a bit of milk, and the buns and rolls still warm as the boy from the bakery had left them at our gate some minutes before.

Between her and the cat, there was now a distant relationship. She fed him and touched him slightly on the head as if she had forgotten how to caress a cat. Vince spent the day outdoors and, in the evening, didn’t cuddle on her lap but on the rug under my desk.

The deep passion I had felt for Marie since the beginning wasn’t gone; when we made love, I forgot all my doubts; but I woke up in the middle of the night full of anxiety and had the impression that the woman breathing beside me was a complete stranger.

And occasionally. I caught her looking at me with the same strangeness I felt.

She no longer went to the door, to say goodbye, when I left for work. When I reached the gate I turned back, with a little hope of seeing her leaning at the window, but there were no signs of her. The cat was almost always there, near the gate, waiting to be cuddled, but afterwards he didn’t go back to the house, he went into his maze of walls, backyards, and dead-end back streets. I suppose he accepted the food people gave him in other houses, because he barely touched what Marie left on his plate.

And she no longer waited for me when I came back from the station in the evening. She was usually preparing dinner, those simple, tasteless meals that had taken the place of the comfort food I liked so much.

A Saturday evening, we went to the cinema. There was a Spanish movie I really wanted to see, but she preferred one by Michael Haneke. We both hated the films of Haneke. His arrogance to think he was showing a mirror to the spectators when what the images reflected was himself. Some films can be mirrors, but not his. When we left, I was fighting my usual repulsion, but Marie just looked thoughtful.

We went to our favorite bar. Marie didn’t ask for her martini but for a vodka. I looked at her. The almost invisible make-up had given place to a heavy mask, a cherry lipstick. The dress had a deep cleavage, and I didn’t particularly like it. Men turned back to look at her.

We danced a little. Marie was very light, she let me lead her, but that night she danced like a professional and made me feel clumsy. I clenched her waist with my hands almost till the point of hurting her.

When we went back to the table, I felt the words taking shape in my lips and didn’t try to stop them. “Where is Marie?”

In her eyes, for a moment, there was a glimpse of understanding. More than understanding, amusement. I felt a deep rage.

“What have you done with her?”

She laughed, as if it was a joke. And I laughed too, because I couldn’t do anything else.

“Don’t you like my dress?”

“It’s new.”

“I bought it a few days ago.”

“I thought you didn’t like red.”

She shrugged. “I think it suits me.”

I didn’t say anything. But she insisted. “Don’t you agree?”

I took a deep breath. I put my arm round her shoulders, and a man sitting at the counter that had been watching her stared at his glass.

“You look very beautiful.”

* * *

I decided to take a week’s holiday in the beginning of December. I wanted to concentrate on my play.

I had stopped writing because of Marie. So that she could have a nice house and work in her paintings without any financial pressures. But I needed to work again, it was a good play and, even though the second act wasn’t advancing, I had no intention of giving up.

The first day, she left after breakfast with the wicker basket she used for shopping. I sat at the desk, opened a notebook and stared at it for a few minutes. Then I fetched my jacket and went down the lane. It didn’t take long to catch sight of her. She was wearing jeans and her dark blue coat, comfortable boots. She entered the usual shops, but more than once I noticed the gaze of the sellers following her with a kind of uneasiness. At the bakery, she had coffee and ate a brownie.

We prepared a simple lunch, fish and salad and a bottle of cheap wine we both liked. Then she went to the shed in the garden.

I sat on the kitchen doorstep, staring at the shed. The truth was I knew nothing about Marie. I didn’t know her family. Her father who she sometimes said was a clown, sometimes a mime, sounded like a character in a story. But the same happened with the girl sitting on the border of a well in a deserted garden where the mimosas were starting to bloom. And the smell of the mimosas that I went on feeling over the years, in her hair, in her body, even when she bought a new perfume...

Perhaps Marie had a twin sister, who had come looking for her in England and took her place. Or perhaps a double, a girl who had seen her once, from the window of a bus, in an unknown town, and had looked for her from then on. I was not far from considering the idea that she had been replaced by an alien, by the spirit of a dead ancestor.

I stayed there, smoking, for a long time. Then I went in, sat at the desk, but couldn’t write a single line.

The following afternoon, she went for a walk in the woods. I waited a few minutes and went to the studio. The door was locked, and that had never happened before. But I found the key easily, under a pot of geraniums.

It was dark inside and I pushed the curtains made of heavy cloth. I had always liked that place. The large glass window from which we could see an alley in the garden and the shadows of the woods. The canvas against the wall, the two tables, the easel, books and sketchbooks. The long shirts she used when she was working hung from a nail behind the door.

Now I was in a different place. The atmosphere was stuffy, vaguely menacing. The paintings were almost all faces, her face, mine, other men’s.

They were strange faces, barely recognizable. As if the skin and the flesh were almost gone, and we could see the bones. They had nothing to do with her Impressionist paintings, the light, the hope, occasionally a moment of grace.

I started looking for the canvas, the other ones, the ones I admired. I felt a little better when I found them, as if it confirmed that Marie and our years together hadn’t been a dream. Before this girl there had been the other one, the one I loved and for whom I had left my plays and got a job, I who had always thought if my life was a job I would quit.

It was getting dark, and the trees seemed closer, under a starless sky. The faces on the canvas were gone, those terrible faces, she and I naked, exposed, turned inside out. But I could feel their presence, a low sound, as if someone were whispering in the dark. I asked myself where the violence I felt inside of me came from. That willingness to kill I had never felt before.

I went out and dropped the key in the pot of geraniums. I entered the house through the back door and had the impression no one lived there. I didn’t feel the smell of dinner. I thought bitterly that the farce was over, the nameless farce we had been playing for a few weeks.

She was sitting in the drawing room with a book on her knees and pretended to read.

“I’ve seen your last paintings.”

“And what do you think?”

“What have you done to Marie?”

She kept her eyes on the book. “I am Marie.” Her voice was calm, without any trace of fear. And she looked so beautiful, in her jeans and a red T-shirt. And she smelled so good. If I touched her, she would feel so good...

I went towards her, my fists clenched. Only at that moment I noticed the grey form, curled in the sofa. Our cat was sleeping peacefully, against Marie’s thigh.