The Other Rebecca

by Emma Brewer

Leaving is complicated, at first. It is a whole production, gathering the breast pump and all the pieces and bottles. Collecting her mother-in-law from the train station and giving her list after list of baby concerns. Fretting. Changing into an old dress amongst the rubble of their room, and then once they have stepped out into the night, the awkwardness. Neither of them knowing how to start the pretending. They had established only the general parameters: Each of them would be a plausible version of themselves, a Rebecca and Jack who hadn’t met until now. Rebecca has prepared more, developed a dynamic backstory for her character, while Jack is inventing as he goes. His eyes search widely, as if the details of his life were to be found swirling in the ether above Rebecca’s head. Something about having sold a screenplay which was dropped, and coasting on that paycheck while waiting for the next idea. She tells him she owns a confectionery boutique in Geneva and is here to meet with a chocolatier.

The more they drink, the more committed to character they become. Rebecca is enchanted by how nimbly Jack makes up answers to her questions. A stage play with five different endings, all of them bad. A hapless agent named Serge. It ignites a desire to tell equally amusing anecdotes. She invents spontaneous bonbon flavors—rosemary cream, cayenne and maple—as if speaking dollops of richness into life. For a moment she is frustrated with herself, that within this exercise in near-limitlessness, she can only imagine flavor combinations that already exist. But it’s fine; he can’t stop staring at her mouth. She takes him to a bar with a secret entrance and is thrilled by his shocked delight. Who else, these days, would be impressed by a speakeasy? By the coats, she decides to kiss him. It’s absurd, the flutter of hot nerves, the crackle of anticipation; it’s like they have both stepped into an honest reality in which they have never kissed before. 

Tripping back into the hotel, a half-thought erupts into Rebecca’s head, blazing and drunk: I’m going to fucking blow this guy’s mind. Already, frantically scraping off her tights, she’s following the fantasy into the morning, to the flight back to Switzerland, where she’ll look back on this night in her filthiest daydreams.

One year later, it’s easier to return to the anniversary game. Leaving is a smooth affair. There is no pump, no decision to be made about the hotel. Jack’s mother knows the way from the station. Their room is on the top floor of the hotel, and all the walls are windows. This time Jack waits at the bar, while Rebecca gets ready upstairs. She plugs her phone into the room’s speakers. In real life there is no music to dress to, there is only the everyday chaos of oatmeal and fish sticks and frenzied shouts for help at the changing table, and all of it smelling like constant, salty temptation from the chicken shop downstairs. In real life there is no slow arrangement of hair, there are no darkening windows in which to glimpse her own topless silhouette as she slides her tights up. There is no applying and removing three lipsticks to choose the perfect red. Now she is gliding down to the bar, high and panting.

The more they drink, the more Rebecca sobers. Jack is using the same jokes as last year, and when he realizes, he pivots hard into silliness, invents storylines that don’t add up. This time his latest film premiered at Telluride to what he keeps calling “early buzz”; he asks no questions of her. He steers her toward the same secret bar she took him to, into the same coatroom, impatient to be kissed like the other time. Rebecca glances at all the doors, believing that somehow she’ll catch the Rebecca and Jack from a year ago, tripping around the corner. In their room, with Jack’s face burrowed into the back of her tights, she meets her eyes above the city; her lipstick has dried to scabs.

The next year, they fall into their roles like slipping into a nap. In the hotel bar Rebecca asks Jack if he’d like to try being other people for the night. He looks momentarily frightened. We are, aren’t we? He’s broken a rule, dropping character, and she frowns. 

But you broke first. 

Not exactly. She was asking as her character. So now he is the screenwriter pretending (for fun!) to be a navy pilot from Georgia, while she, the Swiss confectioner, pretends to be a classical cellist. At one point Jack looks at his phone and his face brightens. He pumps the air.

My mom got us a bunch of corn!

Rebecca shakes her head.

The more they drink, the quicker they flip through imagined situations; as the traveling cello player she confesses that she occasionally enjoys pretending to spy for Russia, and that she’d like him to be a bartender she can kidnap. As the bartender, he tries to fool her into thinking he’s a porn director. They are laughing but desperately tired. At the coat rack, Rebecca is dehydrated; she turns her mouth away. She is afraid of circling closer and closer to the truest fantasy, settled in the deep like a monster: herself, alone in the room, smoothing lotion on her own legs, with nobody waiting.   

Three a.m. at a diner, Jack dozes at the table, Rebecca looks out the window and sees the other Rebecca. She is strolling by, arms loose, heading to an after-party. Her purse is filled with truffles. Tomorrow she’ll fly back home again and she wants to achieve maximum enjoyment before morning. It takes a few blocks for her to notice that she’s being followed, that another Rebecca is tapping down the dark sidewalk behind her, breathless. 

Rebecca lets herself be guided into an alley, allows her backless dress to be shuffled against a stone wall. She touches her hand into her purse, runs warm chocolate across Rebecca’s lips like a gloss. She hears herself whisper, Tell me everything. 

Published November 14th, 2021