Who is Maud Dixon?(56)

Florence laughed. “Well, I have like seven followers on Instagram, so don’t worry, I’m in no danger of falling into that career.”

Nick nodded enthusiastically. “See? That’s what I mean. Fuck what everyone else thinks of you, right? Fuck the likes and the comments and the constant posturing.”

“Exactly,” Florence agreed, aware even as she said it that she spent most of her time worrying about what other people thought of her.

But Helen didn’t.

Florence leaned forward and plucked Nick’s lit cigarette from between his fingers. “So what brings you to Semat?” she asked, taking a long drag.

“The wind.”

“You’re one of the kiteboarders?”

“Yeah. You?”

Florence laughed. “No. Definitely not.”

“I was serious before. You should try it. I can teach you if you want.”

Florence tilted her head. “I’ll think about it.” She wondered whether Helen would accept his offer or think herself above it. The problem with trying to predict what Helen would do in any given situation was that Florence had always found her highly unpredictable.

Well, she could be unpredictable too. She put a hand on Nick’s thigh. “Come here,” she said.

Fifteen minutes later, Florence was straddling him on a bare mattress, a filthy sleeping bag bunched at their feet. She unbuttoned his shirt roughly. He sat up and held her face in his hands. “You’re beautiful,” he told her. She pushed him back down.

“Say my name,” she said.

“Helen,” he gasped.

“Again.”

“Helen.”





33.



Florence dipped the last nub of her croissant into a small pot of jam and popped it in her mouth. She poured what remained of the coffee from the French press into her cup. Then she lit a cigarette from the pack she’d brought downstairs from Helen’s room. She tapped it on the edge of her plate. She smiled when she saw the red lipstick mark on the filter. Watching the gesture she’d seen Helen make countless times, she had the sensation that she was actually looking at Helen’s hand. It was unnerving. She took another drag. She thought she could feel the smoke charring her lungs, transforming her into Helen from the inside out. Then she was overwhelmed by light-headedness and stubbed the cigarette out in the jam.

Last night had been exhilarating. Not the sex—Nick had been altogether too stoned and too floppy. But the entire evening had been a revelation. She’d been Helen. She’d actually been her.

What had at first disappointed Florence about the scene—the shabbiness of the surroundings, the charmlessness of the company—had turned out to be the perfect environment in which to incubate her new self. Disdain, after all, has always been a useful stepping-stone to confidence, and that was what was required of her now. Something verging on hubris, not her usual muck of insecurity and self-doubt. Among the Helen Wilcoxes and Amanda Lincolns of the world, Florence was used to feeling small and inadequate. But last night, she’d had the sense that Meg and Nick and that girl who’d asked her for writing advice had actually been impressed by her. The power had been in her hands for once.

Helen had loved power. Not physical power; that was irrelevant. Emotional power, psychological power—that was her currency. She’d enjoyed exercising it just as a musician or a dancer takes simple, sheer pleasure in his craft. In conversation, Helen had dictated the direction and the tone. She constantly withheld information for no good reason, and she’d loved to throw Florence off guard with outlandish assertions. Even Mississippi Foxtrot was, at its heart, an exploration of power—first the power that lecherous Frank wields over Ruby, and then Maud’s, after she wrests it away from him in a single act of violence.

Florence’s own attempts to master interpersonal power dynamics had often floundered. Her friendships in middle and high school had been based on little more than a shared fear of absolute alienation. In college, she’d made friends in her English classes but none that she developed any particular closeness with. She’d always needed to retreat into solitude after spending a few hours in anyone else’s company.

This, then, was someplace she could practice a new way of being in the world; a way of relating to people not as a supplicant but as the object of supplication herself.

Just calling herself by a different name, a name that was for her associated with such magnetism and strength, had retuned the whole tenor of her being. She’d felt…transfigured. Even among people who didn’t matter, who didn’t know that Helen was a world-famous writer; even alone in the back of the taxi on the way home. Putting on the guise of Helen, she really had felt more commanding, more interesting, more worthy in every possible way. Oddly, she felt more like herself—more like the woman she had always suspected was somewhere inside her.

She’d even seduced Nick, just to see if she could. She, who’d only ever been the mark, if rarely that.

Florence took a sip of orange juice and swished it around her mouth to get rid of the nicotine taste. She moved from the breakfast table to the desk inside where the laptop was set up. There was another email from Greta, this time to her own account:

Hi Florence,

How’s Maud doing today? Think she can get on the phone? I don’t want to bother her while she’s ill, but I just found out that TPR would want to publish the interview in the Fall issue so we’re working with a bit of a time crunch here.