Nine
I’m strolling into a Rodeo Drive boutique wearing a huge black hat and shoulder pads big enough to block traffic when the bright summer sun pierces through my closed eyelids. Burrowing in the soft, fluffy bed, I try to go back to sleep but can’t because Mei is standing by the foot of my bed barking my name.
“It’s time to get up.”
I throw the covers off and squint out the window. The sun’s up but it feels suspiciously early. “What time is it?”
“Seven.”
I groan. “One more hour.” I was up late, alternating between deciding which clothes matched best with the multiple Louis Vuitton bags and learning how to ask people their names in Chinese.
“Ms. Wei is an early riser. She’s already at a meeting.” Mei might not mean to sound smugly virtuous on Fangli’s behalf, but that’s what I hear.
I haul myself up and shuffle off to brush my teeth. When I get back, I examine the outfit Mei has laid on the bed. “Are we going out?”
“No.”
Yet she’s chosen pants with ironed creases. “Can’t I wear yoga pants since it’s only us?”
“No.”
She leaves and I realize my clothes from home are gone. That’s a later problem, though, so I pull on the outfit. The white linen pants wrinkle on contact with my skin, and I immediately stain the black silk top with deodorant and have to change. In the mirror I practice my Fangli wave again, this time with the correct hand. The shoes are adorable sling-backs that I put on to check the full effect.
Huh. I turn around. I hadn’t realized the difference expensive tailoring made because I now have outstanding posture. Do I look like Fangli? The spacious closet makes finding what I need so much easier than trying to sort through a bunch of shirts crammed tight enough to wrinkle, and I quickly locate a high-necked black shirt. I pull it on like a headband, the collar framing my face and the rest of the material flowing down my back, and toss my head. It’s not the perfect facsimile of long hair but I get the idea, albeit with a nunnish feel.
“I came to see if you were dressed.” Mei, who apparently has no concept of privacy, is at the door, staring at my turtleneck wig. I snatch it off and run a hand through my hair.
“Uh, yeah. Thanks.”
She backs out of the room, and I toss the shirt on the bed and follow.
Fueled by coffee and fear of failure, I’m the ideal Fangli student that day. Apparently she does her own makeup except for big events, so Mei shows me the Fangli Standard Face, which necessitates a raft of expensive products to achieve the correct smooth skin and pretty smoky eye. Mei picks up the lipstick, a vibrant red that glides on like a dream, then goes over the edges with a lip pencil before blotting and painting me again.
I stare in the mirror at my lips. It’s been a long time since I’ve had that much color, and I’d forgotten how bright it is. It makes my mouth the glossy focus of my face. No wonder Todd liked it. I shiver.
“Is this Fangli’s usual color?” I ask.
“Chanel Rouge Allure in Pirate,” says Mei. “It’s all she wears in public.”
I stay silent as Mei scrutinizes my face from the side. The makeup is part of a disguise. It’s Fangli’s face being created in the mirror, and when people see it, they won’t see me. I relax slightly.
“Sun damage.” Mei clucks and makes a note on her phone, disrupting my chain of thought. I focus on what we’re doing. “I’ll get better concealer.” She takes a closer look. “And a waxing kit.” Then she reaches over and drags out a mannequin head. “Here.”
On the head is a wig. I haven’t worn one since Halloween, and that was a blue flapper bob. I poke it. “Is this real hair?”
She slaps it on my head like a hat and it is the Lamborghini of hair accessories. It’s definitely all real, and probably the kind to receive regular conditioning. The hair swings as if it’s my own, far better than my turtleneck stand-in, and when I shake my head, it doesn’t budge. It’s been so long since I had long hair that I forgot how fun it was; I whip my head around like I’m about to star in Showgirls until I get a little dizzy. I need to take a photo of this for Mom because she’ll love it.
This time when I go to the mirror, Mei stands beside me with a critical eye before pulling out her phone to show a photo of Fangli in a similar outfit. I arrange my pose like hers—one foot out and slightly twisted in a move my mom also taught me as a teenager—and turn my face slightly up and to the left with that little smile, then scrupulously check the pose and lower my shoulders a fraction. Mei takes a photo and when we look at it, I think maybe this will work.
“Terrible.” Mei taps on her phone.
“What?” Deflated, I move my legs back to my usual slightly hunched stance and pull off the wig. It’s hot.
There’s a knock on the door and Mei opens it to reveal Sam. They whisper together, looking at me, and I try to decide if my better course of action is to pretend I don’t know they are very obviously talking about me or to break into their conversation.
Take the bull by the horns.
“Hey. I’m right here.”
Sam doesn’t look at me. “We know.” He gives Mei an instruction that causes her to disappear out the side door to Fangli’s suite, leaving the two of us alone. Sam walks by to stand near the window, and when he turns to regard me, I swear the light shifts to pool around him. I’ve always wondered about charisma, if it really exists, and with Sam I can feel an excess of energy that simply makes him more attractive. Fangli has it, too, a vitality that draws attention no matter what she’s doing.
I hope to God that’s something that can be learned, because I sure as hell don’t have it.
Beyond that, I can’t decide what bothers me about Sam. I’ve seen him often enough in media that he’s familiar, but when he stands here in person, it’s a whole new ball game.
“You look different from your movies,” I say finally. He’s sharper, icier than he is in the photos. More unreal looking and far more striking.
“I know,” he says dismissively. “Mei says you’re hopeless.”
I object to this. “‘Hopeless’ is a little strong.”
“You are no judge. Walk for me.”
“Why?” I stand my ground.
When he turns, the sun lights one part of his face and shadows the rest like a perfume ad. I groan. “Do you do that on purpose? Pose in the light?” I mimic his stance.
“Of course I do.” He pulls his chin up slightly and that’s it. I burst out laughing. He’s so perfectly arrogant that I begin to see him more as a comedic character than a man. He brings his brows together. “Something funny?”
“Not at all.”
“Really. Because you’re laughing.”
“Well, you,” I admit. “You’re funny. Who does that?”
The knit brows are joined by pursed lips. “Is there a problem in putting your best self forward?”
“I guess not.” I clear my throat to change the subject. “Are you honestly here to watch me walk?”
Sam comes over from the window and stands in front of me. I’d say he was trying to intimidate me because of how he looks down his nose, but it reminds me of one of his roles—he was a lowly delivery guy who also fought crime—and I can feel my lips twitch. He glares at me as if he knows what I’m thinking. “Fangli refuses to let go of this,” he says. He looks over my shoulder and chooses his words. “I said I would help.”
“If you’re looking for ideas, you can help by not being an asshole,” I suggest.
“I can help by making sure you don’t tarnish Fangli’s reputation with your ignorance.” He leans forward. “I don’t like it but I’ll do what I can to mitigate the risk to her, even if it means working with you.”
“A real professional.”
“I work with many people I don’t respect. Or like.”
“Me, too.” We eye each other and I pull back. I’d held out enough of an olive branch. Now it was business time. “Then let’s do this.”
“Walk around again.” He sprawls in a chair and takes up more space than he has a right to.
“Give me a second.” I replay one of the clips on my tablet. On the screen, Fangli, dressed in a white satin pantsuit, strolls by like she’s walking the runway. I can’t do it like that. I throw back my shoulders and decide to simply go. Sam’s eyes follow me as I walk across the room, which, hilariously, is long enough that I can really get some steps in.
When I come back to the center, he looks thoughtful, as if I’m a puzzle to be solved rather than an insect to squish. This is a decided improvement. “That was less ghastly than last night,” he compliments me. “You have a similar walk to Fangli.”
“No, we don’t.” This I’m sure about.
Sam sighs and takes out his phone, which he taps and shoves under my nose. It shows a dark-haired woman walking away through a lobby, her body language confident and natural.
“This is what you want me to walk like, I know. I’m trying.”
“Unbelievable,” he says. “That’s you. Like I said. When you’re being yourself.”
I watch it again and realize it’s me walking out of the hotel the other day. I didn’t know I looked like that. “Why do you have this?”
“I took it when you left to prove to Fangli what a hopeless idea this was.” He looks back at the screen. “You moved better than I thought you would,” he says grudgingly.
“That is a deeply creepy thing to do.” I’m a little awed at his dedication.
“I know.” He says it without shame.
I flop down on the chair next to him and he winces. I guess Fangli isn’t a flopper either. “The problem is when I know I’m being watched, I forget how to move. My hands are too big and flappy.”
Sam motions for me to get up. “It’s because you consider your body a flaccid thing you inhabit instead of a tool to be trained. When Fangli walks down the street, it’s the same as if she’s walking a red carpet or on set. Be conscious of your body, like a dancer. Every muscle has a job. Every gesture has a purpose.”
I don’t like Sam talking about bodies, but I power through. “How?”
“I can’t describe it better than that. Each movement is a decision. You don’t simply walk. You decide every step, every tilt of your head. You think of how you want to look and you make that happen. Your awareness has to be external—what are people seeing? What do you want them to see?”
I look thoughtfully in the mirror. I overthink things on good days, so this advice could well blast me right out of orbit. Think about things more than I do?
“Go again.”
I do.
“That was worse than before.” He rubs the back of his hand against his forehead. “How can a woman not walk?”
“I’m not used to an audience.”
“There’s always an audience,” he says dismissively. “You’ve had the privilege of being able to ignore it.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You can walk down the street and be seen but not noticed.”
Great, now I have Sam Yao stressing my invisibility as a person—exactly what every woman wants to hear.
He keeps talking. “From the moment she leaves her room, every action Fangli takes can be recorded and shared globally. Her public self is a role she plays the same as in a film. Outside these walls, Wei Fangli is a character. She has to think about how she looks all the time because a single unguarded moment can bring international public humiliation and ridicule.”
The unspoken threat is there—as Fangli, that large-scale mortification can be all mine if I bungle this. I grit my teeth and try again. Again.
By the sixth time, I grasp the edges of what he’s telling me. It’s a sense of being conscious of my environment and how I inhabit it. I recall a behind-the-scenes segment of an actor about to walk the red carpet. She’s told exactly where the marks are and shown photos of the scene. Standing near the wall, I survey the room as Sam scrolls through his phone, a slight frown on his face and his attention off me. This time I don’t see it as a way to get from point A to B. I think of where I want to be within it. The room is my setting, not simply empty space with a few bits of furniture acting as obstacles.
“That’s not so bad.” Sam looks up from his phone to watch me, and I stumble slightly as I meet his eyes. He shakes his head and goes back to his phone.
Sam is a character. Fangli is a character. I need to be one as well. I’m not Gracie doing laps of the hotel room. I need to be Fangli.
Inhabiting a new persona is liberating, and Sam tilts his head when I walk by again. “Better.”
By the time Sam indicates I have passed Module 1: The Art of Walking, I have blisters from the adorable sling-backs. “Good enough,” he congratulates me. He checks the time. “Keep practicing. I need to get to the theater.”
I collapse on the bed to see a text.
You alive? It’s Anjali.
Not fish bait yet, I text back.
Prove it’s you.
I send her a photo of me lounging on my closet chair wearing a pair of embroidered heels too high for me to walk in. I don’t know the brand—the name is in Japanese—but I assume they’re pricey.
I accept that with respect. Hotty Hotterman treating you ok?
Not too bad. Today with Sam could have been worse. He wasn’t actively mean.
When’s your first event?
Few days from now. I have time.
We text casually back and forth as I try on more of the clothes and try to decide what feels easiest to wear. I send shots to Anjali, who has a bad habit of liking the most uncomfortable outfits best.
Beauty is pain, she writes. Fangli is a fashion icon. She’s not schlepping to the store in pj’s.
She probably has people to do that for her anyway. Mei had told me Fangli will go straight to her suite after the show, so after some more strolling around the room, I eat and go to bed, legs and feet aching and face slathered with a retinol serum Fangli’s dermatologist has apparently recommended for dire cases.
That’s the end of my first day. I learned to walk.