A Cell With White Walls, by Jenny Bahn

“He’s here.”

Carey has rounded the corner and is facing me with her tan skin and her beautiful hair, her lips that are always perfectly glossed and her milk white teeth.  She’s not smiling.  My stomach falls through to my horribly pink feet, viciously pained from walking in faux leather heels that do not stretch.

I walk straight to my purse and unzip my ugly purple makeup bag, my mother’s Lancôme gift-with-purchase that she then gifted to me.  I pull out a Vicodin I stuck in there that morning.  Last year it was Xanax, which would be a more appropriate chemical compound given the current circumstances, but beggars can’t be choosers.  Anything to disconnect me from reality, anything to make the details feel soft and benign as a pilled cashmere sweater.

Greedily, I pop it into my mouth and try to swallow without inadvertently taking my gum down with it.  The pill and the gum get momentarily stuck together and I begin to feel the white pill begin to disintegrate against my tongue.

Please, let the drugs be quick.

I brush my hair and rouge my cheeks, smear something pink on my lips.  Look pretty.  Look like something a person loses and then regrets.

“Hand me something tight,” I say, and from that point forward the interns are passing me skin-tight jumpers and mini dresses, handed to me with snickers and smiles and a vague knowing of what is going on.  As I round the corner, my hands are sweating.

And then, I see him.  I see him see me.

Fifteen minutes later, he has finished snacking on breakfast muffins and drinking coffee next to the catering table overlooking a dreary Hudson River, a choppy bluish gray as insignificant as the color of my own eyes.  I walk past his table, the same one  where I first saw him exactly one year ago.

“Hey,” I say.

I am amazed the word came out of my mouth.

“Hey.”

We’ve broken the seal.

I walk the room, my proud strides belying the feeling of dulled panic in my stomach, the seizing of my heart.  I watch myself in every mirrored reflection, petting down my hair and making sure I don’t look sad and washed out.  On a few occasions, I laugh next to another model, just to look like I am unfazed that he is here, that I have forgotten about him entirely, even though I think both of us know it is a lie.

Then again, I don’t think he ever understood what I saw in him, likely because he was aware of his own toxicity better than I ever could have.  What he had first presented himself as was a lie, a projection of the better man he wanted to be in a very distant future that would remain forever on the horizon.  His love was a mirage that stood miles away from me in the distance, some image of beauty and respite rippling in the dessert heat, never to be touched.

I once had too much faith in people.

I change into more clothes.  Cutout jumpers in black silk crepe.  Velvet and brocade dresses with plunging necklines.  Penitentiary-orange dresses with shirt-proportion hemlines.  I keep my hair down, blonder than it was this time last year, the result of an identity crisis and a potent desire to be anyone but me.

I’m wearing an outfit that’s finally something their store wants to buy.  He grabs his camera.  “Can I take a picture of you over there?” he asks.  He looks at me with something like an apology, maybe not for what he did but for being there, for knowing what it must be like to be me, standing in front of him in a pair of pants and a knit sweater, waiting for him to acknowledge the clothes but not the person inside.

I follow behind him.  In his wake, I smell his cologne.  Antichrist by Caron in Paris.  Soap and cinnamon.

It is then when I get sad.

He walks me to the same white wall where he first took a picture of me last year, where he looked at me and not into the camera and said, “Is it wrong of me to say that all I want to do is kiss you right now?”  There is none of that today, exactly 365 days later.  I stare into the lens and make sure that I am relaying strength and confidence, not pathetic longing or deep regret.

“Thank you,” he says, and when he looks at me he looks sad but I think his sadness is an act, an obligation.  He is the well from which all of my distrust has sprung, and he is to be trusted the least.  I mutter an “mmm hmm” and walk back to my closet to try on more sexy clothing.

The hours wear on.  Clouds cry over Manhattan, fog clings to skyscrapers, the words “NEW YORKER” glow crimson somewhere uptown.  My feet scream in pain, the bottoms rubbed raw and the bones surely bursting with new stress fractures.  The Vicodin has long worn off and whatever disconnected fizz I was able float in has since fallen away, leaving just me – that broken-hearted and pathetic girl he once said wonderful things to.

“Is this for you?”

I am standing in front of him in a black jersey jumper.

“No, thank you,” he says, looking up at me with his gray eyes, his hands covered in a smattering of new tattoos.

“Is this for you?”

I’m standing in front of him in an embellished poncho and stretch leggings.

“No, thank you.”

He once told me I was the best thing that had happened to him.  He once invited me home for Christmas.  “I fucking love you,” he said.  Now, all I get is a generous nod and infinite “No, thank yous.”  On one occasion I am standing next to him while he discusses my outfit with a sales rep.  He wanted another pair of pants, he says to her.  I offer to put them on.  “Jenny,” he says, looking pained by the familiarity of knowing my name.  “Could you just put on the other pair of gold pants.”  I eek out an “mmm hmmm” before walking to the back to change.

“Is this for you?”

I am a real girl, standing in front of him, some months ago, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, my hair messy and long.

“No, thank you.”

I walk around the room, the day disappearing excruciatingly slow, melting into something horrible.  I watch him out of the corner of my eye.  I see him talk to other girls – the British model with the mousy hair and the pretty nose, the intern with the Navajo mini-skirt and the cheap earrings and the face I liked yesterday.  I see how they look at him and how he looks back.  I see them talking and I am boiling with jealousy, if not of them but of the countless other girls whom he has not ruined yet.

You can have him, I think.  And inside I laugh a cruel laugh, knowing that I am still hurt, knowing that I am a liar.

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