The Likeness

We watched the phone videos again and again, Frank hitting Pause every few seconds to snap his fingers at some detail: “See that? How her head tilts to the right when she laughs? Show me that angle… See the way she looks at Rafe, and there, at Justin? She’s flirting with them. Daniel and Abby, she looks at straight on; the two lads, it’s sideways and up. Remember that… See her with the cigarette? She doesn’t tuck it into the right-hand side of her mouth, the way you do. Her hand crosses over, and the smoke goes in on the left. Let’s see you do it… See that? Justin starts getting all worked up about the mildew, and straightaway there’s that little glance between Abby and Lexie, and they start talking about the pretty tiles to take his mind off it. There’s an understanding there…” I watched those clips so many times that when I finally went to sleep-five in the morning, mostly, Frank sprawled on the sofa in all his clothes-they slid through my dreams, a constant undercurrent, tugging: the brusque cut of Daniel’s voice against Justin’s light obbligato, the patterns of the wallpaper, the rich tumble of Abby’s laugh.

They lived with a kind of ceremony that startled me. My student life was spur-of-the-moment house parties, frantic bursts of all-night study and non-meals involving crisp sandwiches at weird hours. But this lot: the girls made breakfast at half past seven every morning, they were in college around ten-Daniel and Justin had cars, so they drove the others-whether they had tutorials to give or not, home around half past six and the guys made dinner. On weekends they worked on the house; occasionally, if the weather was good, they took a picnic somewhere. Even their free time involved stuff like Rafe playing piano and Daniel reading Dante out loud and Abby restoring an eighteenth-century embroidered footstool. They didn’t own a TV, never mind a computer-Daniel and Justin shared a manual typewriter, the other three were in enough contact with the twenty-first century to use the computers in college. They were like spies from another planet who had got their research wrong and wound up reading Edith Wharton and watching reruns of Little House on the Prairie. Frank had to look up piquet on the internet and teach me to play.

All this stuff, of course, got right up Frank’s nose and inspired him to more and more creative flights of bitchery (“I’m thinking this is some weird cult that believes technology is the work of Satan and chants to house plants at the full moon. Don’t worry, if they start gearing up for an orgy, I’ll get you out; by the looks of them, it’s not like you’d enjoy it. Who the hell doesn’t have a television?”). I didn’t tell him this, but the more I thought about it, the less bizarre their lives seemed and the more they enchanted me. Dublin goes fast, these days, fast and jam-packed and jostling, everyone terrified of being left behind and forcing themselves louder and louder to make sure they don’t disappear. I had spent my time since Operation Vestal going fast too, headlong and gritted, anything not to stop, and at first the unabashed, graceful leisure of these four-embroidery, for Christ’s sake-was as shocking as a slap. I had forgotten even how to want something slow, something soft, something with wide spaces and its own sure-footed swaying rhythms. That house and that life hung in my mind cool as well water, cool as the shadow under an oak tree on a hot afternoon.

During the day I practiced: Lexie’s handwriting, her walk, her accent-which luckily for me was a light old-fashioned County Dublin, probably picked up from some TV or radio talk-show host, and not all that different from my own-her inflections, her laugh. The first time I got that right-a delighted, helpless bubble of a laugh, running up the scale like a tickled kid’s-it scared the shit out of me.

Her version of Lexie Madison had been, comfortingly, a little different from mine. Way back in UCD, I played Lexie as cheerful, easygoing, sociable, happiest at the center of the action; nothing unpredictable about her, no dark edges, nothing that could make dealers or buyers see her as a risk. At the beginning, at least, Frank and I thought of her as a custom-made precision tool, built to suit our needs and do our bidding, with a very specific goal in mind. The mystery girl’s Lexie had been more mercurial, more volatile, more willful and capricious. She had come up with a Siamese kitten of a girl, all bounce and chatter and little explosions of mischief with her friends, aloof and ice cool with outsiders, and it bothered me that I couldn’t trace that thread backwards and work out what her goal had been, what job she had precision-made this new self to do.