The Vanishing Half(56)

“You’re observant, Stella,” he said. “I don’t think anybody’s ever asked me about these before.”

She noticed everything about him, but she didn’t tell this to anyone, especially not Desiree. This life wasn’t real. If Blake knew who she truly was, he would send her out of the office before she could even pack her things. But what had changed about her? Nothing, really. She hadn’t adopted a disguise or even a new name. She’d walked in a colored girl and left a white one. She had become white only because everyone thought she was.

Each evening, she went through the process in reverse. Miss Vignes climbed onto the streetcar where she became, again, Stella. At home, Stella never liked to talk about work, even when Desiree asked. She didn’t like to think about Miss Vignes when she wasn’t her, although, sometimes, the other girl appeared suddenly, the way you might think about an old friend. An evening lying about the apartment, and she might think, I wonder what Miss Vignes would be doing right now. Then there she was, Miss Vignes lounging in her lush home, a fur rug peeking between her toes, not this cramped studio she shared with a sister who always smelled like starch. Or one night, when they’d stood outside a restaurant waiting to be served at the colored window, she thought, Miss Vignes would not receive her food out an alley window like a street dog. She couldn’t tell if she was offended, or if Miss Vignes was on her behalf.

Sometimes she wondered if Miss Vignes was a separate person altogether. Maybe she wasn’t a mask that Stella put on. Maybe Miss Vignes was already a part of her, as if she had been split in half. She could become whichever woman she decided, whichever side of her face she tilted to the light.



* * *



—

NO ONE IN THE ESTATES knew what to make of it: Stella Sanders crossing the street to visit with that colored woman. Marge Hawthorne swore she saw her venture over months ago, Stella ducking her head as she carried a cake in her arms. “Welcoming that woman here, can you believe it?” Marge asked, and nobody did believe her, not at first. Marge was always imagining things; she’d sworn twice that she had seen Warren Beatty at the car wash. But then Cath Johansen spotted Stella and Loretta at the park, sitting side by side on a bench. Their shoulders rounded, casual and easy. Loretta said something that made Stella laugh, and Stella actually reached for Loretta’s cigarette and took a drag. Put that colored woman’s cigarette in her own mouth! This detail—specific and odd—made the story stick, not to mention the fact that Cath was telling it. She’d always been a little enamored with Stella, orbiting around her like a satellite planet happy to be washed in her light.

But when she told the other ladies about Stella and Loretta, Cath said that she’d never known Stella well, not really, and besides, there was always something a little strange about that woman. Betsy Roberts interrupted to tell the group that just that Monday, she’d seen Stella walking across the street with her daughter.

“That’s the shame of it,” she said. “To bring that little girl into all of this.”

But what all of this meant was anybody’s guess. No one said a word to Blake Sanders, who’d noticed Stella’s strangeness but had already accepted that his wife was the type of woman who fell into moods he could not decipher. His mother had warned him about her, said she wouldn’t be worth the trouble. He’d just started dating Stella then, but she’d been his secretary for two years already; he spoke to her more than to anyone else in his life. He could sense by the shape of her shoulders if she was in a bad mood; he could read in the slant of her handwriting when she was hurried. But dating Stella felt like unfolding an entirely new mystery. He never met anyone else in her life. No family, no friends, no former lovers. Back then, her distantness seemed dreamy. Romantic, even. But his mother said that Stella was hiding something.

“I don’t know what,” she’d said, “but I’ll tell you this—her family’s still alive.”

“Then why would she say they aren’t?”

“Because,” his mother said, “she probably comes from some backwoods Louisiana trash and she doesn’t want you to find out about it. Well, you’ll find out soon enough.”

His mother had wanted him to marry a different girl, one who came from a certain pedigree. In college, he’d escorted that type of girl to dozens of formals—society girls who bored him to tears. Maybe that’s why he was drawn to the pretty secretary who came from nowhere and had nobody. He didn’t mind her secrets. He would learn them in good time. But years had passed and she was as inscrutable as ever. He came home early from work one afternoon, calling her name, and found the house empty. When his wife and daughter finally returned, an hour later, Stella, surprised to see him, bent to give him a kiss.

“Sorry, darling,” she said. “We were at Cath’s and I lost track of time.”

Another time, he’d beaten her home because she’d stayed too late at Betsy Roberts’s house.

“What were you two talking about?” he asked later.

She was sitting in front of her vanity mirror, brushing her hair. One hundred strokes each night before bed; she’d read it in Glamour once. The red brush blurred, mesmerizing him.

“Oh, you know,” she said. “The girls. Little things like that.”

“I’ve just never known you to be like this.”