Deidre stood to greet me. She was a tall, breastless, wiry woman with a dark, razor-cut bob who wore, like Emily, all black. She reminded me of the women who used to come into the SoHo art gallery where I worked: Ferragamo pumps, chunky gold jewelry, Barneys bags swinging at their sides.
“You must be Lily,” she said, eyeing my dress, then my purse, then my shoes, as I stood to shake her hand. Her skin was so soft in mine it felt nearly liquid.
“Deidre Bergman, the Mid-Atlantic regional manager for the company. Please, have a seat. Thank you, Emily.” Emily responded with a beatific smile. Deidre turned for a moment to draw a pen from a silver cup on her desk, and Emily took the opportunity to mouthgood luckto me.
Deidre’s office smelled like lemon verbena and was furnished in the same style as the front lobby: sleek, low-profile chairs made from chrome and covered with white leatherette, a glass-topped desk, another orchid. Deidre turned to my résumé and ran a long, bony finger down the page. She scanned it with a disconcerting quickness, looked up at me, and was silent for long enough that I felt anxious. A general air of disapproval, of rejection, had filled the room, and I’d barely spoken more than my name.
“Do you have any questions about my résumé?”
“You have an impressive work and educational history. Tell me, why here? Why now?”
I expected this question and had rehearsed the answer to it again and again in my head the night before, but hadn’t landed on anything that spun things right. I needed an answer thatseemed plausible but that wasn’t the truth: I didn’t have much of a choice.
“I want to start over,” I blurted. So much for staying calm. But I was surprised to realize that I meant it. Deidre seemed amused by how earnest I was. I wasn’t like Ramona and Matthew. Or even like Emily, who turned on such a generous, obliging smile for Deidre, even though, just seconds before, she had called her a bitch. I wasn’t like any of them: able to dissemble, able to pretend.
“Why’s that? An art history major at Vassar, lands a job with a prestigious gallery in New York, and leaves it all for a part-time job in Atlantic City. Just seems like an unusual path.”
“It … it didn’t feel like my world anymore.” She stared at me, eyes flashing with what—mockery? knowledge? For all I knew she’d googled me the way I googled this spa; maybe she had read all the write-ups of the show, could trace my path from that life to this desk with as much precision as I could. But to my relief Deidre only held my gaze for a second or two before nodding, apparently satisfied.
“You should know that we are facing an unprecedented number of challenges at this location.”
“What kind of challenges?”
“Well, thedemographichere is quite different compared to our other locations. And you are surely aware of the economic conditions in Atlantic City overall. We are fighting an uphill battle in terms of launching a luxury enterprise.”
“So why did you choose this location?” I was genuinely curious about that. Everyone else seemed to know that Atlantic City was a bad investment. Two more casinos had closed in the past year. Violent crime was on the rise. The billionaire who put his name on two of the largest beachfront properties thirty years ago had gone bankrupt twice. His insignia was scraped from or painted over on the doors and the sides of buildings where it had first been affixed in giant gold letters, now traced in grime. Twodays ago I had walked through the luxury mall that had been built five years ago and seen that it had lost most of its original tenants: Gucci and Louis Vuitton—they were replaced with the kinds of junk shops that cluttered the boardwalk, the ones that sold T-shirts and key chains and little lopsided mobiles made of spray-painted seashells and fishing line. The spa was part of the expansion project everyone had called insane: a last-ditch effort to bring Vegas-grade entertainment to the city while customers were being drained off to slot parlors in Queens and the Poconos.
“We believe that the potential for luxury to elevate daily experience is important. People may not be investing in, say, luxury vehicles the way they used to, but will they still treat themselves to a new lipstick? A facial, on a special occasion? We think so. Our hope is that we will also draw a new sort of client, beyond the career gambler, by offering an alternative to the usual Atlantic City entertainment options. That said, this puts more pressure on how we conduct ourselves here, and more pressure on the value we provide for our guests. If clients with diminished disposable income decide to allot a portion of that income for an experience here and are let down in any way, they will feel not only disappointed. They will feel betrayed. What we offer is a chance to transcend ordinary life through the promise of beauty and clarity of mind.”
“Well, it would be a great pleasure to be a part of that for the clients of the spa,” I said, though inside I bristled at the facile logic behind her speech. It seemed so condescending, to say that women would forget their problems if they had the right haircut or fewer lines around their eyes. Men were never offered this same ridiculous promise: if you look good enough, everything else will be fine.
“Guests.” She smiled. “We always refer to our clients as guests.” At that she slid my résumé off her desk and slipped it into a drawer, and I understood that I had been dismissed.
I made my way back out through the hair salon, where a client—guest—sat in front of a timer like a piece of meat cooking. The fumes from the dye were thick in the air, a forceful chemical tang that hit me in the back of the throat.What wasshepromised?I wondered. What pain or desire was she trying to soothe with a half-head of highlights, a few new layers around her face?
As I approached the desk, Emily looked up and quickly jerked her mouse to click out of an internet browser window. Her face changed when she realized it was me.
“Oh, just you. How’d it go?”
“Fine, I think. Thanks for the lipstick and everything.”
“Sure, it was nothing.”
“Have a good day,” I said, waving like an idiot, and right away I wanted to cringe. My voice echoed in the hush of the lobby, too eager. Too loud.
Emily sighed. “You’ve already got half the job down.” But by the way she said it, I knew it wasn’t a compliment.
When Deidre called me a day later to make me an offer, I thought of Emily’s face as I left that afternoon, of the dread I had felt sipping my drink at the bar. A knot formed in my stomach, yet I heard myself sayingThank you, yes, I’d like to accept. Yes, thank you. Monday is fine.
CLARA
IN THE FOUR DAYS SINCEthe man had come to the shop, the posters asking for information about Julie seemed to have doubled. I saw her face around every corner: in the window of the saltwater taffy store, at the bus shelter on Pacific and Kentucky, the door of Tony’s Baltimore Grill. I couldn’t look at her picture without thinking that there was something hidden in the riddle of her disappearance that I should have been able to see. I felt the same fluttering in my gut that usually meant I was about to have a vision—both uncomfortable and pleasant, almost like the tingle before a sneeze, but it took over my whole body, starting with the center of my forehead and spreading outward through my limbs. It reminded me of the sensation I got when I thought about my mother, tried to picture what she must look like now, or remember the way she smelled, the sound of her voice. But when I tried to picture what was waiting for Julie Zale, I only saw a dark shape, like a spill of black paint.
On Sunday morning, Des and I sat in beach chairs in front of the shop, waving paper fans at our faces. A feral cat crept up from under the boardwalk and splayed itself in the shade of our awning. I poured it a small dish of milk, but it wouldn’t drink and the milk curdled in the heat. A middle-aged couple in matchingkhaki shorts approached from the candy store. A plastic sack of salt water taffy dangled from the woman’s hands. She paused in front of the doorway and stared into the shop.
“Come in,” Des called to them, in the voice she used for clients—honeyed and sweet—though she couldn’t always keep it up. The gruff, cigarette-roughened Des eventually slipped through. “Come find out about your future. We do tarot readings, palm readings, anything you like.”
The woman leaned into the man’s shoulder, whispered something in his ear. He shook his head, took her hand, and they walked on. I watched the sweat stain on the back of his gray T-shirt move down the boardwalk until they disappeared.
