The Faces of Strangers (16 page)

NORA

New York
City
March 2003

Nora had thought long and hard about how her best friend would view their friendship once she had made her decision. After hemming and mulling and hawing and stewing, Nora decided to attend Claire's wedding as a regular guest instead of as a member of her wedding party. Claire had hugged Nora, and promised her that it didn't change anything between them. Nora watched from an aisle seat as Claire's sister stood at the altar, beaming in her promotion to maid of honor. Nora clutched her black notebook in her hand until it began to perspire and ink bled onto her palms. She put the notebook into her purse at that point; she couldn't risk anything happening to it. She hadn't allowed it out of her sight since Paavo had returned it to her. But as much of a disappointment as it had been to not participate in Claire's wedding party, she had to admit that she'd come a long way. The support group had been great for her. She'd put her self-consciousness aside and asked her friends to start wearing things that might help her to identify them. She'd started to post some of her photo portraits online and had been receiving some positive feedback about her use of lighting and angles. And then she'd had a breakthrough.

Nora had been attending the group for six months when she and her father made a trip to the grocery store together. The two walked down Twenty-Sixth Street in silence until Nora stopped to point at a bus stop movie poster.

“Ugh,” she said. “He's such a dirty old man, don't you think?”

“Nora—” Arthur stopped walking “—you recognize that actor?” Arthur was unabashedly ignorant of celebrity faces, names and gossip. He'd pawed through an issue or two of
People
while waiting at the dentist, but tossed the magazines aside when he didn't know anyone in the photos, and more importantly, when he didn't care.

“Come on, Dad, you have to know Jack Nicholson.”

“That's not the point.
You
know him, Nora. That's all that matters.”

A quiet but fierce smile crept across Nora's face as she recognized the importance of this potential truth, not allowing herself to fully believe it yet. Nora and Arthur picked up their pace as they neared the grocery store with its wide paneled windows plastered with neon posters for luminously colored fruit and triple-liter bottles of cola. Instead of grabbing a cart and consulting Stella's list, they veered left toward the cashiers where Arthur grabbed a battered
People
magazine and flipped through its pages. He opened it at random and turned it around to face Nora, covering the type with his palm.

“Who is that?” he demanded.

“Ricky Martin.”

Arthur moved his hand and nodded, his eyes flitting from the page to Nora's face like fireflies. “And this?”

“Britney Spears.”

“That.”

“Hillary Clinton.”

It appeared that celebrities hadn't been spliced from the recesses of Nora's mind.

“Nor, we can use this to help you,” Arthur said. His voice traveled up a scale as his excitement mounted. “You can use people that you recognize to remember other people. You know—I look like that hunk, that guy you and your pals are always going on about. That Brad Pitt fellow.”

Nora let out what could only be described as a guffaw. The first guffaw in fact, since before her accident. “Hardly.”

But he'd been right. Her father had been onto something. She could use celebrities to help her place people; it could be her prop, which she'd been asked to identify at her first group session. The notebook that Nicholas had given her was filled with notes on bone structure, moles and facial hair. But this was easier, Nora realized, to liken people to celebrities. She rewrote her book, thinking long and hard about the people in her life and who they resembled. Her father couldn't have been further from Brad Pitt; he was more like a young Sam Waterston, with his heavy brow and his patrician nose. Her mother was a perfect marriage of Elizabeth Taylor's delicate elegance and Christiane Amanpour's all-knowing onyx eyes. Nicholas was like that boy on the Campbell's Soup commercials, the one who races home in the rain with his dog to be comforted with a steaming bowl of soup in his mother's kitchen. Claire was, without a doubt, the epitome of the lead singer of Stardust, the teenage band that seemed to be overtaking MTV each time she turned it on.

But when Nora met Paavo on the evening of his arrival, she was stumped. He wasn't unattractive, but he wasn't particularly memorable, either. He was toothy like a boyish Ted Kennedy, but almost as pale as Edward Scissorhands. She scribbled a few notes into her notebook and hoped they would suffice.

When she'd misplaced her notebook, she'd felt completely lost and then completely embarrassed when Paavo returned it to her. But then she'd started talking to him. He just seemed to get it. The cool thing about Paavo was that he didn't carry any emotion on his face. He neither smiled nor sneered. He was a blank slate, and she didn't have to worry about being herself around him. She began to run into him on purpose, in the kitchen, in the living room. He began to seek her out after he'd returned home from school and finished his homework. She began to crave his strange little riddles because they were so silly and thoughtful and unique.

A few weeks before Paavo was due to head back to Tallinn, Nora stuck her head in the doorway of the guest room, where he was sitting on the bed fiddling with a Rubik's Cube.

“Hit me,” she said.

“I've been saving this one all day for you,” Paavo said, turning the grids of the cube. “I don't have teeth, but I bite.”

“A comb? No wait, that has teeth.” Nora came and sank down into the chair next to Paavo's bed. “Okay, I give.”

“The cold.”

“I've been meaning to ask you why you like riddles so much.”

“I don't know,” Paavo said, looking down into his lap.

“Yes you do. Tell me.”

“I suppose because they make you think. They're never really what they appear to be. When you think it's one thing, it's really another. When your brain can't fathom that there could be an answer to a clue, there always is one. And when a riddle makes you feel completely useless, completely ridiculous, that this combination of words has baffled you, that the world is falling down around you, somehow the pieces of your mind come together like the plates of the earth under our feet, and you come up with this answer that makes total and complete sense and all is right again.”

“That's deep, Paavo,” Nora said. “You think differently than I do. Because try as I might, I'm not as quick as you are.”

“You have to approach them from another angle, the one you don't think of at first,” Paavo said. “It's sort of how I think you should maybe approach your condition.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the prosopagnosia. You feel stifled and limited by it.”

“Obviously. How else am I supposed to feel?” Nora stiffened, taking her legs out from underneath her and hugging herself.

“That's instinctual. I don't blame you. But what if you conquered it? Like I have been doing with wrestling with Nico. What if you got to understand it from the inside out?”

“How am I supposed to do that? I'm already going to this group and reading everything I possibly can about the subject, which, I've gotta tell you is difficult to find.”

“So you have an opportunity to add to a missing dialogue. You can study it. You can take classes that help you understand, and you can write a memoir or a paper to help others that feel as lost as you do.”

“I guess so...” Nora said, chewing on a fingernail.

“Nora,” Paavo said. “It can become something you own instead of something that owns you.”

“Well, what about you?” Nora asked.

“What about me?”

“What are you going to do about the neo-Nazis?”

“How do you know about them?” Paavo asked. He leaned back against the headboard on his bed. Nora pulled her chair forward.

“Nico. Don't be mad at him. He's worried about you. He just wants to help. And so do I.”

“It's just so embarrassing,” Paavo said, picking up the Rubik's Cube again and rotating the sections around. “Like I'm some baby or something.”

“Bullying has nothing to do with being babied,” Nora said. “Bullying is a cowardly thing to do, and ganging up on one person isn't right or fair.”

“Well, it's a tough time in Estonia right now, identity-wise. Somehow these boys found out that my grandparents are Russian, so they're making my life miserable. After years of oppression, once Estonia claimed its sovereignty, a lot of Russians ended up staying here. There's still a huge divide. And the more conservative Estonians, like them, believe they should leave the country altogether. It's a conflict we'll be dealing with for years to come.”

“But why should you have to deal with it? It's not your cross to bear.”

“It is, Nora,” Paavo said, flicking the last row of colors into place as he solved the Rubik's Cube. He tossed it onto the bed, where Nora picked it up and turned it around in wonder. “I'm the next generation. And it's turned me into this scared little person who stays inside all day long reading books on coding like a nerd. I'm such an STD.”

Nora snorted. “You know what that means?”

“Come on, it's so obvious. Your whole family mumbles it whenever anyone else says anything remotely European-sounding.”

“The Grands
are
pretty transparent,” Nora said, shrugging. “Why don't you take your own advice?”

“Which is?”

“So you're a self-proclaimed nerd now. But you like coding, right? You like computers?”

“I do. They are like one big riddle.”

“So what's wrong with that? Go with it. Computers, coding, that can be your thing. Who says you have to play sports? It's not a prerequisite for life.”

“I just don't want to be scared anymore.”

“You don't have to be. Do you know how intimidating that was just watching you solve that puzzle? Dive headfirst into what you love. Don't let this situation own you. Own it yourself.”

MARI

Tallinn
March 2003

That winter, the silence had seemed to own Mari. In the lead-up to her departure for Moscow, it felt as if her career had come to a screeching halt. The calls had stopped. The stack of glossy magazines that Mari bought before her auditions lay stunted. Vera had considered going out to buy the latest issues, and clearing away the ones that she and Mari had read and reread until they'd memorized how to make an exfoliation mask from the contents of your fridge, or how to form a perfect French twist. But that felt disloyal to her daughter, who now ghosted about the house like a mirage, her face drawn and dismal.

Estonian winter had seemed to mirror her demeanor; the sun rose glumly in the mornings to its apex in the frigid sky. Mari usually lived for the short daylight hours in the winter, spending as much time as possible outdoors. But she'd shrunk from the sun like a vampire, avoiding the elegant columns of light that filtered in through the windows as though they were sipping softly at her strength. She poured herself like a puddle in a chair and spent her time drinking tea and flipping through the same pile of magazines that seemed to taunt her.

Vera tiptoed around her daughter as though she were an active volcano, behaving as though the slightest movement might set off cascading streams of molten lava. She replenished Mari's teacups and made her sandwiches. She tried hiding the stack of magazines, but Mari discovered them and ferried them up to her room, at which point she began staying there throughout the day.

When Leo had appeared at the table for lunch alone one day, Vera headed upstairs. She knocked softly at the door. “Lunchtime,” she called. There was a soft moan from the other side of the wood and Vera pushed the door in.

Mari was lying on her side toward the wall, her face contorted in agony. Her fringe was plastered to her forehead and her blouse stuck to her back, slack with sweat. Vera sat beside her. “Are you ill? What's happened?” Mari had a hand curled over her body while her other one signaled for her mother to leave the room.

“I won't go,” Vera retorted. “Tell me what's the matter.” Mari pushed at her mother's shoulder urgently, and Vera sprang up just in time to have Mari roll over onto her side and deposit a stream of clear liquid from deep within her body into her wastepaper basket.

“You need to eat something,” Vera said. “Come downstairs and I'll make you a light broth. It's probably just a virus.”

Mari shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “I'm too tired,” she whispered.

“Well, then, you're going to the doctor,” Vera said, squeezing her shoulder. “Get your shoes.” Vera watched as Mari pushed herself off the bed in slow motion, her eyes sunken into her head, deep purple clouds of exhaustion puffing around the sockets. When she removed a piece of stray hair from her mouth, Vera saw her fingers, swollen and pink like the tiny blood sausages in the glass case at the market. Mari's normally full lips were chapped and deflated. An alarming thought sprang into Vera's mind but she flicked it away as though it were a tiresome gnat. She created a buttress of pillows and leaned her daughter against it.

“Levya,” she called. She heard his footsteps, and Leo appeared, huffing. His barrel chest protruded over his towel as he clutched it around his only slightly thinner waist.

“I'm about to sauna,” he said. “What is it?”

“Mari isn't well. Can you drive us to the doctor?”

It was confirmed: five weeks in. The fetus was the size of a peppercorn. There were small indentations in a pin-sized head that would become a nose, eyes and ears.

Vera felt her lungs collapse. She gripped the back of the chair to feel herself hold something, to feel her arm muscles engage, to feel as if she had power over something, anything. In that small, sterile room, Mari and Vera both felt the space getting smaller and smaller by the moment, closing in on them, capturing them like a cage. Vera looked at her daughter. While her body quavered like a leaf, Mari's face was clear and undisturbed; if it had been a pond, Vera could have skipped a stone effortlessly across it. Mari hadn't spoken since they'd arrived at the office, but Vera answered all the questions the doctor had asked of her, at least when she knew the answers. She didn't know a few things—did she smoke, did she drink, the date of her last period. She didn't know when it had happened, with whom or, for goodness' sakes, why. There were a thousand questions to ask her daughter, but Vera found herself asking only one: “What do you want to do?”

Mari held herself upright and looked at her mother for the first time. “I want to go home,” she whispered. Vera held her hand out and Mari put hers in it.

* * *

Leo could tell precisely what was wrong with his daughter. Mari had returned from the doctor weeks earlier hanging from her mother's arm. Vera had shuttled her upstairs and told him that she was under the weather. A slight flu. But he was no fool. He wanted to know, how had it happened? Where? And with whom? He wondered if it had been some sleazy, sweaty Ukranian model; he tried to shudder the thought away, but flashes of strange overbronzed skin against Mari's porcelain body kept rising in his mind. He didn't ask Mari that first afternoon as Vera had requested, taking care not to voice the very questions that were plaguing his mind. Mari spent most of her time in bed now, languishing like a flower that badly needed watering, pushing herself up to sit when Vera arrived with a tray or a glass. Her face had become withdrawn and pale. The stack of magazines that had littered the perimeter of her bedside had been cleared away and replaced with a trail of Hematogen wrappers that whispered in the breeze of the open window like the carcasses of dried leaves. How ironic that Hematogen, the Russian candy bars constituted of cow's blood enriched with iron and vitamins, were what Mari craved these days when both she and Paavo had resisted them so obstinately as children.

“How are you?” Leo asked, opening the door and indicating the wrappers on the floor. “Ema said you wanted more. I can get some this afternoon.”

“Thank you, Papa. That would be great. They seem to be the only things I can keep down.”

“Are you okay, Mari?” Leo asked cautiously. His daughter seemed too weak to snap back at him, but he knew that her rage could build and erupt when she had the ability to do so. “What can I do, my baby?”

It turned out that Leo, despite his constant nagging that Mari's beauty, and certainly now her modeling, were sure to get her in trouble, fell over himself in kindness toward his daughter. Upon his return from work, he dampened washcloths and peeled open more Hematogen bars. He cleaned out her trash bin after she heaved into it. He smoothed the hair away from her face while she was sleeping, murmuring over her lithe body that finally quieted after being rocked by waves of nausea.

Neither Leo nor Vera demanded to know the father's identity. There was an unspoken rule in the house not to worry Mari with such details, to stress her out any more than her body already was. At times Leo yearned to close the door to her bedroom and withhold any more Hematogen bars until she disclosed the information. But his concern for her well-being and that of his unborn grandchild's was stronger than his curiosity.

The season had passed fitfully; Vera and Leo fretted over their daughter. In her ninth week, Mari braved the stairs. She held the banister with both hands, edging sideways as though the staircase were a ship and would cant with the next rising swell. She sat at the table opposite her parents and told them her plan. She would leave. She would go to Moscow; Viktor had told her that was where her future lay. She has exhausted everything she can in Estonia. There is nothing more for her here.

“But what about the baby?” Vera asked, her fingers gripping the edge of the table.

“What about it?” Mari said. “I will have it there. I want to start new. I want to do this, Ema. I've thought it through.”

“Mari, you have no idea what difficulty a baby will bring,” Vera said. “How will you support yourself?”

“What else? I'll model.”

“But you haven't told Viktor about your condition, Mari. How can he say that your future is in Moscow when your future has been completely rewritten?”

Mari stuck her chin out. “I'm not showing yet. Plus, Viktor said I'd make more in one week in Moscow than I would in a month here. It's true—those insipid Tartu boys make double what I make when I am working triple as hard. This country is completely backward. I can't stay here if I want a future for myself and for the baby. I'll put it away. I'll save. But I have to leave, Ema. If I don't, I'll be stuck here forever. Papa, tell her.”

There were two single mothers in Leo's office that each left at five thirty on the dot every day. Neither of them went for a drink at the bar around the corner. Neither of them attended the office outing each summer or the Christmas party in the winter. Now that he thought about them, he realized that it wasn't necessarily their home lives that made them look harried when he arrived at the office; they had already been there working for hours. He made a mental note to be kinder to them, to ask after their children. “Mari, I'm not sure,” Leo said. “You're so young. To be balancing a career and a baby in a new town... I'm not sure you're thinking this through.”

“It's not a new town,” Mari said, her eyes flashing. “We have been there before. I can do this. I need you to believe in me.” Vera and Leo exchanged glances.

“Let us think about it,” Vera said, placing her hand over Mari's.

But that wasn't good enough for Mari. The next morning after Leo returned from work, he found his wife standing in the kitchen, clutching a piece of paper to her chest, her face shifting like the early tremors of an earthquake. Leo had the foresight to ask in Estonian,
“Mis viga?”
Vera snapped out of the trance—whether from shock of the language or from realizing that someone else was home with her—to show the note to Leo.

Mari's letter had requested her family to give her space. She was going to Moscow, to have the baby there. She was going to live off the savings that her previous year of successful modeling had brought in until she gave birth, at which point she was going to find another agent, who would bring in more jobs. She would coax her body back into modeling shape—Cindy Crawford had done it, Laetitia Casta and Elle MacPherson. Mari had the same drive, the same resolve when she put her mind to something. She would take care of herself, go on long walks in order to maintain her lean, long legs. She would rub her belly furiously with shea butter and later, with a vile concoction of stewed herbs and roots that she'd wrap and press against her stomach even once it was small and taut again in an effort to avoid stretch marks.

It doesn't matter who the father is. He's not involved and I don't want him to be. I ask that you respect my decision to do so. This is my path, and I am going to follow it through.

Leo read and reread the letter and then took the stairs two at a time to his daughter's room where he saw her closet emptied and half her bookshelf bare grinning like a toothless old crone. Mari was gone.