vodka, and you don’t have to look past their repelling facade. But this—this is a whole different beast. How do you rebuff someone who is genuinely trying to connect with you? How do you look them in the eye over a cup of coffee, for God’s sake, and hold yourself at arm’s length?
It’s easiest to judge from a distance. That’s why the Internet has turned us all into armchair critics, experts at the cold dissection of gesture and syllable, sneering self-righteously from the safety of our screens. There, we can feel good about ourselves, validated that our flaws aren’t as bad as theirs, unchallenged in our superiority. Moral high ground is a pleasant place to perch, even if the view turns out to be rather limited in scope.
But it’s much harder to judge when someone is in your face, human in their vulnerability.
* * *
—
Ten more minutes of making small talk with Vanessa—spinning lies about my mother, my yoga career, my powers of healing (Hello, I am Saint Nina!)—and I am so drained that I can barely see straight. It’s time to get to the point of all this. Finally, I beg off, saying that I need to shower, and let Vanessa lead me down the hall and back toward the rear of the house.
When we’re almost at the kitchen, I halt abruptly. “I left my yoga mat in the other room,” I chirp, and dash back down the hall before she can stop me.
Back in the library I softly, silently, fish a camera the size of a pencil eraser from the hidden pocket in the waistband of my leggings. I scan the room and then sidle over to the bookshelf I’d noted during our conversation, one built into the corner with an angle that takes in the sweep of the room. I tuck the camera between two faded volumes—I, Claudius and The Richard D. Wyckoff Method of Trading in Stocks—and position it just so, and then step back to examine my handiwork. The camera is invisible unless you’re specifically looking for it. I grab my yoga mat from under the couch, where I discreetly kicked it while we were talking, and slip back out into the hallway.
I jog back, flushed and breathless. Vanessa is waiting for me exactly where I left her.
“You found it.”
“Under the couch.” She’s staring at me, and I wonder, Does she know? But of course she doesn’t. She has no clue. The adrenaline that flushes my body makes me feel more alive and righteous than an entire hour of asanas did. This is going to work. This is why I’m here.
So when she throws her arms around me and hugs me, it takes me a minute to realize that she is not celebrating my small victory, but is instead anointing me as her new confidante. “I’m so happy that we’re going to be friends,” she breathes in my ear.
She thinks that we are friends.
In her arms I am Nina and then I am Ashley and then I am Nina again, my identity as amorphous and shifting as a cloud caught in the wind. Too much of this and I may lose my grip on myself.
“Of course we’re friends,” Ashley murmurs into Vanessa’s ear.
I still hate you, Nina thinks.
And then both of us hug her back.
* * *
—
Back in the caretaker’s cottage, Lachlan is sprawled on the couch with his computer in his lap, surrounded by pastry crumbs. He looks up at me when I come in. “You could have brought me a cup of coffee, at least.”
“There’s a Starbucks in Tahoe City, be my guest,” I say. I throw myself down on the couch next to him and pick up a half-eaten scone from the coffee table. It’s stale. Famished, I eat it anyway.
Lachlan fiddles with his keyboard. “I was watching you out there, and you know, you’re not that bad at yoga. Maybe you should consider it as a career option, if all this doesn’t work out.”
“Do you have any idea how much a yoga teacher makes?”