“Rachel explained what had happened: Helen had phoned earlier in the week pretending to work for one of my well-known clients in order to make an appointment in that writer’s name. Then she simply showed up as herself, convinced she’d be let in anyway.
“Well, I guess her confidence was warranted because I did ultimately invite her into my office. Mostly because I could tell that Rachel was starting to panic.
“Helen dropped her manuscript on my desk and told me she’d revised it based on my feedback, and she’d like me to read it again. Then she plopped down in a chair and said—I can still hear her twang—‘I’ll wait.’
“I didn’t know whether to laugh or call security. Long story short, I eventually got her out of my office with a promise that I’d read it over the weekend, and I did, obviously, end up taking her on as a client. As you know, Helen can be quite…compelling. In fact, I see some of that same grit and ambition in you.”
“Thanks,” Florence said, unsure whether she was actually being complimented. She’d rather be known for her talent than her ambition.
“So listen, take another look through the manuscript this afternoon, and call me on my cell tonight. I’m always up late.”
Florence said she would, feeling a mixture of elation and shame.
*
That evening, Florence struggled to give Greta answers that wouldn’t disappoint. She’d only seen a portion of the work, and many of the sections weren’t even in chronological order.
“I think she’s probably written, like, sixty pages?” she said. “It’s about a woman who travels to Morocco to work with a childhood friend. So far, not much has happened. I think something bad is going to happen though. The tone is very dark and foreboding. It feels like she’s building to something, but I have no idea what. I don’t think she even knows what it is yet. She gets really frustrated when she writes. I can hear her throwing stuff in her office and cursing.”
“Well, Helen has never been what you would call placid.”
“Few great writers are.”
Greta paused. “Don’t stroke her ego too much, Florence. It does her no favors.” Then she seemed to check her tone. “How are you doing up there, by the way? Believe me, I know Helen can be a difficult person to work with. I can only imagine what she’s like to live with, especially out there in the middle of nowhere.”
“Actually,” Florence said, “I love it.”
She was telling the truth. The seclusion was a relief. She had grown up in an apartment whose door was constantly flying open or slamming shut. Her mother always had on the TV or the radio or both. And she was never quiet. She sang, she hummed, she talked to herself, she talked to Florence, she talked on the phone, she talked to the radio, to the TV, to her neighbors, to her frequent visitors. And what she talked about more than anything else was her daughter, her brilliant daughter.
Florence’s sanctuary had been their small shared bathroom, which was covered in teal tiles and crowded with Vera’s beauty products. Florence liked to take long baths in there. She would lie with her head underwater and her knees jutting up so she could relish the heavy, enveloping silence, shivering slightly with the beat of her heart.
Here, deep in the woods, there was silence all the time, except when Helen played music. But the opera didn’t bother Florence the way her mother’s radio did, with its car dealership ads and traffic reports and caustic DJs. If anything, opera was like a very noisy form of silence.
Florence found Helen’s relationship with opera fascinating. How had she gone from Hindsville, Mississippi—population 3,200 （she’d Googled it）—to knowing the words to Verdi? Or what they call tomatoes in France?
When Florence had arrived in New York, she’d been overwhelmed by the diffuse, esoteric, truly foreign knowledge that had been accrued by seemingly everyone but her. She tried to look things up online, but the sheer volume of information the Internet provided—the combative free-for-all spirit of it—overwhelmed her. She didn’t want everyone’s opinions. She wanted the right opinions. She wanted to know that red roses were tacky. She wanted to know how to pronounce mores. People like Amanda Lincoln and Ingrid Thorne would never understand the innumerable advantages they had over others. This was how the social order was maintained. Someone who grew up with parents who read Philip Roth and went to the theater and told their children where to put their knife and fork when they were done eating could dismiss others as uncultured or impolite, and it accomplished the same thing as calling them white trash without the same taint of classism. But if your mother wore tight clothes and slathered on tanning oil and thought Philip Roth was a discount furniture store in Jacksonville, where did that leave you? What if you wanted a different life? How did you get from A to B? How did you become the type of person who belonged in B?
Florence didn’t know.
But Helen did. Somehow, she had learned the rules.
Florence finally mustered up the courage to ask Helen how she’d done it, not sure whether Helen would understand the question or, if she did, be offended. But she had responded candidly.
“Exactly as you’d expect,” she said. “I watched very closely and then I played the part. If you pretend for long enough, anything can become natural. And I mean truly natural. I wouldn’t listen to opera or drink expensive wine if I didn’t genuinely enjoy them.”
Florence was reminded of a brief stint in her childhood when her mother had decided that she ought to be an actress. She’d signed Florence up for acting lessons and dragged her to countless auditions.
Florence had hated nearly every part of it—the ridiculous games they played in class, the hammy staginess of the other children, the attention—but she’d loved pretending to be someone else. She’d strip away all her own quirks and become clean and pure and empty. That’s when she first realized that she could build herself into someone new. Someone better.
Living in near-isolation in upstate New York, Florence was starting to accomplish the first half of that process: the demolition. Her interactions with other people had always been the scaffolding by which she’d constructed her personality. Since those interactions had dwindled to nearly nothing, the old Florence, with no outlet for expression, seemed to be disintegrating day by day.
She was happy to encourage the process. She threw out clothes that didn’t look like Helen would wear them, which meant most of her wardrobe had to go. Certainly anything bright or flouncy. With few exceptions, Helen wore clean silhouettes in shades of navy, black, and white. Occasionally she would throw on a discreetly patterned scarf or sculptural jewelry, but most of the time she went unadorned. Florence couldn’t afford the labels Helen wore, but she ordered rip-offs from Zara and H&M online. She went through Helen’s Amazon order history and took note of the books Helen had bought and the movies she had watched. She devised a kind of curriculum for self-improvement. She even asked Helen to teach her how to cook.
She felt a strong desire to fade out of view, to ease off screen and then return, triumphant, in a new guise. She didn’t want anyone to witness the process. It would be like showing someone a rough draft of her writing, which she—contrary to Helen—would never do.