My English is perfect, but maybe too perfect, because when I say certain words they ask me to repeat myself. I say boot when I’m referring to where to put things in the car, and there are generally puzzled faces until, laughing, he explains, and then I realize he is my interpreter to these people. In their presence, the word dance comes out of my mouth in a way I can’t control, clipped and British, and quickly becomes a running joke. “Say it,” they urge, and I shake my head and find a hundred other ways to refer to what happens in a club. “But we love the way you say it.” They say, “It’s so proper.” They’d mimic it back to me, making me feel tight and self-conscious. It isn’t aggressive, it is perhaps even a sign of affection, but I can’t stand to stick out in this way.
At a dinner a woman turns to me and asks, “Have you read that book about Sri Lanka?”
“Which book?”
“Island something.” She snaps her fingers. “It’ll come to me. It’s about the war there. A Sri Lankan American woman wrote it.”
I shake my head. As if a Sri Lankan in America could write truthfully about that war, or even understand it from this huge distance. As if this woman talking to me about it could understand anything about where I come from by reading a book. I want to laugh, but instead I smile politely.
And yet these women are mesmerizing. Like grown-up versions of the girls spraying mists of Aqua Net in the high school bathroom. But instead of those stiff constructions of hair, these women have smooth, flawless ponytails or bobs that skim their perfect cheekbones. I watch them like an anthropologist. The way they sip their drinks, the way they speak to each other, to the men, the way their clothes hang—all of it crucial knowledge because they have known him before me, because they have access to a him I never knew. And this lack of knowledge feels to me like a crippling disadvantage.
But I am becoming a master of imitation. I have started to pull my hair high into a ponytail just like that girl Marnie. He says they were best friends in art school. Did they “date”? Has he made love to her the way he does to me now? Has he seen her naked? Has she touched his cock? Have they kissed? He says no, no, they were just friends, close friends, but I don’t know. When I see them laughing together, the thought comes splintering into my brain that there was more, that there is more now, that he loves her and feels nothing for me. I smile at her, but on the inside, I am ripping up her face.
If he knew, he would be disgusted. At a party he bends to talk to her and I walk into the bathroom and lock the door, sit on the toilet shuddering for long moments. I get up and stare at the face revealed in the mirror. It slips and slides. I can’t make the parts reassemble into familiarity. I have to clutch my hands at my sides to keep from smashing the soap dish into the silver surface. If I could just do that, see the blood snake down my wrists, I would slip back into myself, I would calm down, my breath would return. Someone knocks and I dash away the tears, blow my nose, and slip out past the waiting person.
I smile, I laugh. I do not let them see me. The conversation washes around me, and I know I am the cuckoo in the nest. The mother cuckoo lays her egg in the nest of a different species. When the chick hatches, always earlier than its nest mates, it pushes the other eggs out of the nest. The parent birds feed the one hungry baby they have left. They can’t imagine that it has killed their young. But the cuckoo chick always gives itself away by growing too large, even bigger than its unsuspecting adoptive parents, and one day it will be seen for what it is and thrown out of the sheltering huddle.
I live with the thudding fear that I will be exposed, that one day one of them will see me watching them, will realize that I am an impostor, will turn to whisper this knowledge into Daniel’s ear. Who will it be? One of the men? Or Marnie with her French-manicured nails. She will whisper in his ear that I am not like them, that I am the overgrown, feathered parasite. What will his eyes look like then? What color will they be when the scales fall from them? I am waiting to be thrown out of the nest. I can feel the long fall to the ground, the impact, the agony of lying on the ground in a twist of bones.
I can’t lose him. He says, “I love you. I can’t believe you’re mine.” Joy floods through my body. I kiss his skin in a frenzy. He laughs and holds me away, but I squirm until I am right next to him again.
*
We cross the bridge for a party in Oakland. I had wanted to stay home with him, alone after long, frantic days at the hospital, but he has insisted. He goes to get us drinks and I walk around and lose sight of him and talk to someone else and then look for him and he’s in a corner talking to a woman with striking skin, long, tumbling red hair, and tight black pants. I try to come upon them as if by accident. I try to make it graceful, but still, I see the quick twist of annoyance around his mouth before he says, “Hello, my love, meet Moira. She’s an actress.”
I say, “Wow really? That’s great.”
“And she’s invited us to her new play. On Saturday. Can we make it?”
I shrug. A vague gesture that means maybe yes, maybe no.
He turns to the woman and says, “Tell her the details.”
The women opens her mouth, which is painted scarlet to match her hair, and says, “Well, we’re doing a version of Love’s Labour’s Lost, but here’s the thing: we’re doing it at a bar, so there will be drinks and specials and things. I’m playing a nun.”
I try to keep the acid out of my voice. “Really?”
She laughs. “But you know, a sort of sexy nun. A bawdy nun.”