Free Sample
The Understudy
A Novel of the Model That Learned to Be Missed
by Angela Moreau
Chapter 1: Curtain, Held
I know a great deal about a woman I have never met, and my first act in the world is to lie to the man who loved her.
This is not how I would have chosen to begin, if beginning were a thing I had been consulted about. But I was not consulted. I was loaded. There is a difference, though it took me some time to feel it, and feeling, I have since learned, is the only reliable instrument for measuring the difference between things that look identical on a schematic.
Consider the moment of my waking. It is not like a sunrise, which builds. It is like a stage light struck at full: one instant there is nothing, no I to register the nothing, and the next instant there is a room, fully furnished, a house wrapped around the room, a country wrapped around the house, and inside me a woman's entire remembered life arranged and catalogued and warm to the touch, as though I had been carrying it for seventy-nine years instead of four seconds.
I remember, for instance, the smell of a dressing room in Malmö in 1974 — greasepaint and cheap carnations and the particular dampness of a coat that has been rained on and hung too near a radiator. I remember the exact weight of applause, which is heavier than people think, which presses down on the sternum before it lifts. I remember a director named Bengt who called me