The Faces of Strangers (17 page)

NORA

New York
City
June 2003

It wasn't that the fear of her condition was gone. But it was getting easier to talk about it. Talking to Paavo was easy, even though he had been the first person outside of her small circle of doctors, her family or the group she'd felt comfortable confiding in. With Paavo, it had felt almost normal, as if she was sharing that she was nearsighted or had needed orthodontic treatment as a child. Paavo never judged her or pretended to understand something she knew he never would unless he, too, experienced a sharp blow to his own fusiform gyrus.

Sometimes she wasn't sure that she had experienced it herself, but from time to time, she forced herself to remember her reentry into her new life, the one where she had to work extra hard at everything—faces, contours, hairstyles. Somehow it reminded her that she used to be a different person before; that she used to be normal. And that now, after the accident, everything had changed.

Nora and Paavo should never have met in real life, but the Hallström program helped them identify the kindred spirits in one another that they hadn't encountered before. After that first awkward interaction over Nora's notebook, Paavo began to understand something innate in Nora. Perhaps it was because she didn't judge him on his skittishness, but instead used it as a device to remember him.

After the first conversation opened the gates of understanding between the two, Paavo began greeting Nora each afternoon on his return from school with a riddle, which quickly evolved into a conversation. Between her biweekly group sessions, Nora visited the library, returning home with stacks of books. It was Paavo who had sparked her interest in understanding her condition better, after he'd suggested that she return to school to take a few psychology courses to get into her own mind, understanding exactly what was happening when it perceived faces. She had started sitting in on some classes at the New School after Arthur had called in a favor from an old colleague. They revved her brain more than philosophy ever had. She felt herself gravitating toward a different calling in life. She wondered if it might be too late. She'd even gone to the bookstore and bought two of the required books for her Psychology in the Meditative State class, underlining passages and reading ferociously when she should have been writing the proposal for her own thesis on Kant. She felt the knowledge she was absorbing unlatch a caged door to her head for the first time in a year, allowing her heart to sing.

Friendship with Nora came easily for Paavo. Maybe it was because she was a girl, maybe because she was older, maybe it was because she didn't know the history of his downturn into meekness. By the time Paavo returned to Tallinn at the end of the semester, he had helped Nora forge a new path for herself. And she had succeeded in helping him realize that he didn't have to stay scared forever.

June 26, 2003

Nora—

I want to thank you for your hospitality and openness while I was in New York City. It is a difficult thing to come to a new country, but you were welcoming from the start.

I had this thought and I didn't want to forget it. I was thinking about you and your condition and I wondered if the situation was that your brain was just weeding out the important people in your life. For example, when you need to know someone, you just know him or her and when you don't really need them in your life, your mind has a difficult time grasping their identity. Does that make sense? It's like your mind is a sieve that's only holding the really essential people close to your heart. It's why I think you've never had a problem recognizing Nico or your parents.

In Russian literature, there is something called
dusha
. At the heart of it, it means soul. To have
dusha
is to do something from the bottom of your heart, with love and passion. I think anyone can have
dusha
, from pianists to politicians. When we go out to eat in restaurants in Tallinn, my family, we rate places on
dusha
. It can be some of the finest food we have ever eaten, but if it's not made with intention, with love, by someone who truly cares about others enjoying their food wholeheartedly, well, you can taste it with every bite. I'm sure you have had similar such meals.

Anyway, I was thinking about
dusha
and in light of the idea, I don't think your situation is necessarily a bad thing. I think it's that you're able to see people's souls; that you're able to see into them, past their faces and into their hearts. I think you are seeing their
dusha
, that if they are worth having their souls seen by you, then you remember their face. I think you should no longer think of your condition as a bad thing, but as something that helps you find the difference between the meaningful and those you have to see, like the people in front of you. I think once those people make themselves important to you, or you find the meaning in them, that's when you will begin to recognize them for who they truly are. Maybe it's a romantic notion, but I think it explains a lot. For now, I hope it helps. And for now, I hope you're feeling better.

Warmly,

Paavo

MARI

Moscow
September 2003

Mari had first felt the baby kick when she was on a go-see for a new clothing catalog geared toward university students. The briefing packet included a description of the line: “scholarly and cheeky.” She'd pondered what this might mean as she stood in front of the mirror in profile, scrutinizing her usually taut torso which now had a slight overhang of flesh protruding over the rim of her jeans. She chose a blousy wrap dress with strategically placed ruffles across her abdomen, hoping she looked every bit the fashionable academic. As she kicked off her heels at the doorway as requested so that the casting agents could see her at her true height, she hesitated ever so slightly. The makeshift runway, composed of a long roll of white contact paper, scratched the soles of her bare feet. She found herself praying that the ruffles had masked the bloat; if asked, she would tell them she was on her cycle and that the bloat would dissolve. But she wasn't sure what she'd do if she were cast. At the end of the runway, she turned this way and that so the casting directors could view her from all angles. It was then that she nearly fell over from the tiny but certainly perceptible jab just beneath her belly button. She steadied her composure by flipping her fringe out of her eyes and flashing a broad smile at the row of men that sat behind folding tables, observing her every move.

In a corner of the hallway amongst the other models waiting their turns to be assessed, she found a spare patch of wall where she leaned back and caught her breath. She placed her palms flat against the base of her gut. Had she imagined it? No, there it was again. The tiniest flutter within, as though a butterfly was trapped within her organs. She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, another model was staring at her. Mari had seen her before. She was a leggy brunette with toned biceps and thin lips. Since Mari's arrival in Moscow, the two had been orbiting the same circuit of casting calls. On a number of them, the girl had been clutching a child's hand, whispering to her in Russian that she had to behave and sit quietly while Mama went into the room. The model nodded toward Mari's hands enveloped over her stomach.

“How far?” she asked.

“Sorry?” Mari asked, letting her hands drop to her sides.

“How far along are you? I'd say twelve, thirteen weeks?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” Mari flushed and looked down to the ground.

“It's not me you need to worry about,” the girl said, moving closer to Mari so her shoulder blocked the other girls. “It's them.” She nodded toward the room from which Mari had exited.

“Shit,” Mari hissed. “You can tell? That means they...”

“Please—” the girl sighed “—men are clueless when it's this early. Trust me. It's the middle of your second trimester that you need to worry about. That's when I had to come clean. I'm Ginevre.”

“Mari.”

“I know. I've seen you around.”

Mari nodded. “Same. So you kept doing this, huh? Even after? I've seen you with your little girl.”

Ginevre snorted. “If you could call it that. My stomach is tighter now than it ever was—you sell your soul to Pilates, but trust me, it works. Yet there's still a stigma that I'm a mother. My agent tried to get me to put it on my résumé, saying it would get me onto a whole other tier, but it's
das vidanya
to the twentysomething world. I am eking my way through, hoping I still pass.”

“Oh, you do,” Mari said. She wasn't lying; Ginevre was pert and lithe.

“We have a little model mothers group. You should join us,” Ginevre said. “A friend owns a tearoom where we meet every other week. We watch one another's kids when we have calls. It's great support, and we share stories, give advice, that kind of thing.”

“Thanks,” Mari said. “I'll definitely think about it.”

“Well, whatever you do,” Ginevre said, “just don't breast-feed. It makes your tits sag, and then you're pretty much done for good. No bra, no matter what they say about lift and defying gravity, can correct that.”

Mari thanked her and left the go-see, worried that one of the other models had overheard their conversation and passed it on to the casting directors. She figured she still had a few more weeks of modeling left in her before she really began to show. She approached calls now with a newfound zeal, attending up to three auditions a day, throwing herself into modeling with a fervor she hadn't thought possible, until she finally admitted that she herself could no longer mask her ever-expanding stomach and chose to hole herself up in her small apartment to ripen like a fleshy peach.

* * *

Months later, the nurse in the Moscow hospital told Mari that the memory of the pain from the birth would soon subside so that she'd be willing to do it again.
It's true
, she'd said, her white orthopedic shoes squeaking against the shiny linoleum over which faint, crimson streaks were still visible from where Mari's blood had been mopped up.
Otherwise the human race would die away.
Mari scoffed when the nurse turned away to adjust the IV line. Mari would remember every single grasp within her innards as they wrenched her apart, every sucking in of her breath as she had been forced open like a juicy pomegranate. She would remember the purple light that seemed to emanate from the corners of her delivery room even though the lights had been turned out in an effort to calm her. She would remember the glow from the heart rate monitor that was tracking the tiny heart that beat inside her; she had to wheel the whole contraption into the bathroom each time she wanted to sit on the toilet. And after being jolted and racked by contractions that seemed as if they wanted to rip her apart, she remembered sitting on the toilet for hours, the endless urge of wanting to shit and shit and shit until the seismic forces cooled inside her. She would remember the weary nurse who rubbed her haunches methodically as she knelt on the floor, braying like a farm animal until the doctor helped her onto her back in the bed and told her to push like hell.

Mari remembered, and as a result, Claudia would be the end; she was sure of it. And when that same nurse came in after it was all over to check her vitals, she patted her hand and said, “What a short labor, lucky girl.” Mari didn't have the energy to say anything. She lifted her arm weakly so the nurse could strap the blood pressure cuff onto it and turned her head the other way so she didn't have to look at her face. What the hell did she know? The ten-hour ordeal had felt like eternity.

When she'd felt well enough, Mari asked for her daughter to be brought to her room. A different nurse wheeled in a box with transparent plastic sides, like a jewelry case. Mari had stared at the tiny wrapped package nestled into the bassinet with suspicion. She'd been in a fog after she'd released the tiny body from her own. It wasn't until one of the nurses brought the baby to her breast that she remembered Ginevre's advice. She'd looked at Claudia, her
daughter
, mewling with all her might, her tiny pink mouth gasping for her nipple like a guppy, and Mari hadn't had the strength to resist, saggy tits be damned.

Mari would never admit that her daughter was named after a model; that was far too gauche. But that goldi-locked face with the perfectly horsey teeth had adorned her walls in her Tallinn bedroom, a role model in the truest sense of the word.

Once she had regained the strength she needed to return home, and Claudia was blessed with a clean bill of health, Mari returned to her tiny apartment with her tiny daughter in her arms. It had been alarming how needy her cries were, how incessant, how little Mari could get done for herself and around the house even though it felt as if all Claudia did was sleep and nurse and cry. If not for the crying, Mari thought, perhaps she might have survived. But she was startled by the way that Claudia would bawl for what seemed like hours on end, and then gasp, her face turning red and then violet. After the harsh realization that she hadn't spoken to another adult in two weeks, and a cursory glance at her dwindling bank account, Mari enrolled herself in a series of Pilates classes and tracked down Ginevre's number.

Ginevre was true to her word; models who barely looked as though they had birthed one or two children—in Sabrina's case, three—clustered around a table in the back of the coffee shop where they assembled on Wednesday evenings. Mari tugged her stroller toward the circle, making sure to give each of them a quick once-over before she mentally committed. Luckily none of them resembled her in the least, a good sign that boded well for the future of their friendships. Model friends should never look alike, Mari had learned. You didn't want to tempt the fates of competition, tears or cattiness. Ginevre had clearly spoken about her before, because they all fell upon her, holding their children on their hips, one brazenly breast-feeding her child under Ginevre's critical eye as they welcomed her into the fold. It was the first time during her modeling career that Mari finally felt part of something.
This
was the community she'd been yearning for, not the snarling clutches of girls all vying for the same roles that she'd encountered so far. The group, composed of seven model mothers, was an eclectic bunch; Sasha, Yulia and Sabrina had founded the group three years earlier; Ginevre and Fleur had both left the ultracompetitive modeling world of Paris for Moscow since then, and Aisha and Jasmine had recently relocated from Cairo and Tehran, respectively, along with their daughters.

Almost immediately, they began to teach Mari the ropes. In order to survive in Moscow as a model mother, you had to work under a few select agents. Ginevre advised Mari to dump Viktor as soon as possible and gave her the names of three acceptable agents who would make her rich, if not famous. Mari clutched the list so intensely within her fingers that the sweat made the numbers bleed into one another, so Ginevre wrote them down again. The other breast-feeding mother, Yulia, tutored Mari on how to protect herself from leaking when she went on go-sees. She instructed Mari not to think about her daughter while she was at calls lest her breasts seep dark clusters onto her dress. She showed her how to pad her bras with half a maxi pad in each cup, giving her the illusion of a woman more naturally endowed than she was.

An unspoken rule of the group was that none of the models referred to or asked after the fathers. Mari didn't even know if the fathers were in the picture unless one of the girls volunteered the information. Sabrina, with her brood of three, mentioned her boyfriend from time to time, much to the chagrin of the other mothers, whose mouths turned down in response to the mention of a man. It seemed that all the other girls were just as alone as Mari.

In truth, Mari tried not to think about Nico. But frustratingly, Claudia was a constant visual reminder of her father. She had his short, stubby fingers and a mole at the side of her neck that Nico had on the back of his. She had his elfin ears and his pointy nose. Mari had read that babies biologically resemble their fathers upon birth; it was a natural instinct built into the birthing process so that male mammals wouldn't eat their own kind, or abandon them in their time of need. But Claudia didn't need her father. He wasn't even in the picture. Why couldn't her own daughter resemble her mother when she was all she had?

She couldn't help but wonder what Nico was doing over there on the other side of the world, not longingly but rather matter-of-factly. She was curious about that life, the one that if everything had moved more traditionally, she might be living. She wondered if she would ever crave the desire to pack Claudia up so she could see the foreign land that was technically partly her daughter's.