The Imposter Bride (17 page)

“Maybe so,” he allowed. “But that doesn’t mean we can ban it from our bedroom.”

“I was just taking a break from it, enjoying one afternoon …”

He wondered if she’d been spoiled once. There was something in her tone … It made it possible for him to imagine her as a girl who had ruled a rich father with a stomp of her foot and a petulant toss of her hair.

“I didn’t realize it bothered you so much.”

“It didn’t. But when this arrived …” She stroked the surface of the vanity with her full open hand.

“We’ll have our own place soon,” Nathan promised. “Just another few months. Half a year at most. You’ll be able to choose all the furniture. Every piece. It will all be what you like.”

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s how I felt when it arrived. To think that your sister could have known exactly what to send me. As if she knew me.”

“But … she doesn’t know you.”

“I felt like she did.”

“Because she sent you a vanity that you like?” He was trying to understand, but was worried too. Was Lily losing touch with reality, spending all her days alone in her room as his mother described? It had been a week since she had last offered to do the shopping, his mother had reported, a week since she’d left her room during the day for anything other than the required appearances at meals and the walk alone on the mountain that she took every morning after breakfast. “I doubt Nina was even the one who chose it.” Although he and
his mother had not discussed it, he too suspected that Nina’s role in the matter had been limited to contacting Levine’s Fine Furniture, and that it was Nina that Levine had in mind when he chose it, not the anonymous bride to whom he was sending it. “It was Levine, that piece of—”

“My mother had a vanity just like this.”

Nathan stopped talking. It was the first image from her childhood that she’d offered him.

“I used to watch her making herself up before my father came home. She was like an artist, my mother, remaking herself every evening. So many pots of cream, so many colours—and she never forgot to dab some of her magic on our lips and cheeks as well. On all of us—there were four of us, all girls. No brothers, my poor father.” She smiled in a way that suggested her father felt no lack at the absence of sons, was never anything less than delighted to be greeted by his freshly painted collection of girls every evening. “It was the lipstick I liked the best. Though it wasn’t a stick at all. It came in a pot, like her rouges. She used a brush to apply it to her own lips, but for our lips, she always used her finger.” She closed her eyes for a moment as if summoning the layered scent of her mother’s skin and the feel of her mother’s finger as she applied cream to her daughter’s lips.

And she was trying to, but nothing came to her. She opened her eyes again.

“The vanity was going to be mine. Because I was the eldest. It was going to be her wedding present to me.”

Nathan met her eyes in the mirror.

“So you see.”

“See what?”

“It’s as if your sister knew me, somehow.”

“But, Lily, sweetheart …”

“Don’t ‘sweetheart’ me with condescension in your voice.”

“I wasn’t condescending. I was just … Look, it’s great that you love it, but it’s not like Nina knew beforehand that you would. She doesn’t know you, after all. You don’t know her.”

“I do know her.”

“You do?”

“Not personally, but I know who she is. I saw her in a play once.”

“You saw Nina?”

“Do you have another sister?”

“No. I’m just surprised you haven’t mentioned it before.”

“It was just a bit part.”

“Still.”

Lily shrugged.

“Was she any good?”

“She wasn’t terrible.”

“That bad?”

Lily smiled. “She wasn’t, actually. It was her Hebrew, her accent. You couldn’t tell what she was trying to say. But aside from that she was—”

“Bad enough for you to remember her.”

Lily smiled again. “I remembered her because I was expecting a letter at that time from a certain Sol Kramer in Montreal, Canada, who might be interested in matrimony. The woman who was helping me with my arrangements had put your brother’s name forward just a few days earlier, so, of course, the name Kramer in the playbill caught my eye. I didn’t know anything about Sol yet, that he had a sister in Tel Aviv, but it seemed like quite a coincidence that I should go to a play
where one of the actresses had the same last name as a man whose offer of matrimony I might soon have to consider.”

Nathan took this in, this very ordinary fluke that Lily seemed to see as something more. “It’s not exactly an uncommon last name, Kramer.”

“Maybe not,” Lily agreed. “But then I saw her again a few nights later.”

“In another play?”

Lily shook her head. “At a café near my apartment in Tel Aviv. I didn’t usually go to that café, but it was a terrible night outside. The rain was pouring down the way it does there, driven by the wind that howls in from the sea—it could drive anyone mad, that wind. I didn’t want to be alone in my apartment.

“I was sitting on my own, reading a book, trying to read a book, but there was a group at one of the other tables, a noisy group that kept getting noisier. They were about my age but they seemed of another generation, another world almost. Which I suppose they were, in a sense. Their laughter took over the place and I felt more and more uncomfortable sitting alone while they laughed. More and more alone. I tried to ignore them, to concentrate on the book I was reading—leaving wasn’t an option; the apartment I was living in had no heat, and I knew the lights would probably be out too in such a storm. But there was no ignoring them. Maybe they were no more brutish than any group of young people anywhere, but their loud confidence seemed to me an insult—I can’t explain it—their laughter …” She shrugged, remembering.

“And then I noticed a girl among them who seemed familiar to me. Almost immediately I recognized her as the girl from the play. The girl with the last name that soon might be mine.
I felt a connection to her already.” She looked at him. “Does that seem strange?”

“Not really,” Nathan said, though it did, a little.

“It seemed like too much of a coincidence to be just that.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was like it was a sign, almost, seeing her again. I started to think about what the chances might be of such a coincidence, to wonder why I had suddenly decided to go to a café that I didn’t usually frequent.”

“A sign of …?”

“What I should do, what direction I should take when the letter arrived.” She glanced at him again. “Don’t look so worried. I know what I sound like.”

“You don’t sound—”

“I’m like one of those old ladies I used to see in cafés in my childhood, pathetic creatures with papery skin who were so lonely they’d attach themselves—in their fantasies, at least—to anyone who spared them so much as a glance.”

“You were so alone,” Nathan said.

“Yes. I was so alone,” she repeated, as if explaining something to herself. “And there was something about her that kept drawing my eye, not just her name. She was more made-up than her friends. There’s a particular style, a plainness of style that’s cultivated by some circles there. The girls don’t wear a stitch of makeup, for example—that’s too bourgeois for them. Or too European—I’m not sure what it is. But this girl, with her plum lips and kohl-lined eyes … she brought to mind a bird of paradise who happened to land in the midst of a flock of starlings.”

That would be Nina, all right, Nathan thought.

“I wondered if she might have just come from the theatre, from another appearance on stage, but then my musings were
interrupted by a new eruption of laughter, accompanied now by shouts of greeting. ‘Ezra, Ezra,’ they shouted, and I turned to see who had inspired such an enthusiastic greeting. Their hero stood in the entrance for a minute, shaking the rain off his coat, removing the drenched newspaper that he had used as a makeshift hat. They were all still calling out and laughing, with no sense that there were other patrons in the café. I shifted my glance back to them and saw that the girl I had noticed before wasn’t laughing or smiling, wasn’t participating in any way in the elaborate collective greeting. She was applying fresh lipstick, looking into the mirror of her compact with such concentration she seemed not to have even noticed the new arrival. Which made me understand at once that he was the reason for her made-up face, that she’d been waiting the entire evening for this moment. I turned to give a second look at the man who had elicited such a well-planned display of indifference. He sprawled on the nearest empty chair, one long arm thrown around the shoulder of the nearest female at hand—not the bird of paradise, who pretended not to notice. She rubbed her lips together to smooth her lipstick, snapped her compact shut and got up to leave.”

Nathan could see his sister in the scene that Lily had just described: the feigned indifference, the snap of the compact. He’d seen that scene so many times before that there was a staleness in it for him.

“She wove her way through the maze of tables, towards the door, holding her head high just in case he was watching her.”

“And was he?”

“No.”

Of course not, Nathan thought. “She’s the star of her
own play, my sister. She just hasn’t noticed that no one else is watching her.”

“
I
was watching, Nathan. Am I no one?”

“Of course not. You know I didn’t mean it that way. I meant—”

“She kept her head high, her eyes straight ahead, so dignified. Like a queen.”

“But she’s not a queen, Lily. That’s the point.”

“Oh, hush. She has style, your sister. That’s the point.”

“She’s obviously carrying on the same sorts of debasing love affairs over there that she was carrying on here.” Nathan shook his head “Though at least there my poor mother doesn’t have to witness them.”

“Your poor mother. You see why I didn’t tell you this before?” And to Nathan’s offended look: “She has imagination, your sister. She has class. She reminded me so much of one of my sisters. Who was actually the one my mother promised the vanity to.”

She turned back to the array of lipsticks and creams she had arranged on the vanity over the course of the afternoon. “It wasn’t really like what I just described to you.”

“What, she tripped on her way out the door?”

Lily smiled. “An actress like your sister doesn’t trip in the middle of an exit like that. I meant my mother at her vanity. It wasn’t like I just said to you. I barely ever watched my mother make herself up at the end of the day. I was with my father, helping him with his business. That’s where I went after school. By the time we got home, my father and I, they were often already in bed. And even if I had been there … We weren’t close, my mother and I.”

“You fought?”

“Not even. I didn’t even bother to fight with her. I thought she was trivial, that I was better than her.”

“A lot of girls don’t get along—”

“I regret it now, of course, but I didn’t have the time of day for her, with her hats for every occasion, and her gloves and shoes to match, and her lipsticks and rouges. She knew it; it must have hurt her.” Lily removed the lipstick she had just applied, opened another one, a brighter, redder shade. “I didn’t have time for this. Lipsticks, rouges, rules about how ladies do and don’t leave the house.”

She was describing a woman very much like herself, it seemed to Nathan. Had she not been like this before?

“It was my father I was close to, his world that interested me. His business. His life.”

“What was his business?”

“Import–export.”

Nathan nodded, imagined exotic carpets from Persia, objets d’art from God knows where, fashions from Paris, style, elegance. A male version of the mother she had just described.

“During busy times his hours were very long.”

Nathan nodded again. “But why were you the one who helped him?” Surely a business like that could afford hired help, he thought.

“He had no sons, and I was the eldest, so …”

“The honourary son.”

“More or less.”

Was the father cheap, then, unwilling to pay for hired help? Something about the scenario wasn’t quite right, a young girl having to work long hours like that when the family obviously had wealth. “You don’t look like a son to me,” he said.

She smiled. He got up from the bed to stand behind her, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders.

“Though maybe my eyes deceive me.” He moved his hands down from her shoulders along the curves of her upper body. “Mmm. No. You definitely don’t feel like a son.”

She leaned back against him, her eyes closed. That smile, he thought, that release in her body. It cut through everything he didn’t know about her, made her next words seem like a regretful caress: “You know your mother’s waiting for us in the kitchen.”

“I know,” he said. “And she’s already not in the greatest mood.” Just another few months, he thought, and they’d be able to move into a place of their own.

“We don’t need to keep it,” she said.

“Keep what?”

“The vanity.”

“Of course we’ll keep it. You love it.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t love it. It was just when it arrived … it reminded me of my mother.”

“So? What better reason?”

But Lily was already shaking her head. “It was never meant to be mine, my mother’s vanity. It was going to go to my sister when she got married. The oldest after me. She’s the one who loved to sit with my mother, watching her.”

“But that was your mother’s, Lily. This one’s yours. Ours. From my sister.”

“I found myself wondering today who might have it now. What woman looks in my mother’s mirror. What she sees.”

“What she sees?”

“I hope she sees my mother.” She smiled at him in the
mirror. “Don’t look so worried. I don’t really think my mother’s haunting other women’s mirrors.”

“I’m not worried,” he said, but he was, a little. She’d been trying to summon her mother all day, he sensed, with the lipsticks and creams that she said weren’t really her.

The next day when he returned from work the old maple bureau had been moved back into the bedroom and the vanity was gone.