“Where is she?”
“I’m here.”
It started as a ripple that became a wave as every head turned to gape in awe at Marie in the red dress. A terrible, breath-stealing dress of saturated scarlet like a heart turned inside out; like its architect’s heart torn out and presented, glinting with gory beads of glass. The room fell quiet, all eyes on the train of the gown that dragged with the graceful measure of a peacock’s tail, out behind the screens towards the runway, so heavy and fluid that it might have left behind a wipe of blood on the Lino. With a clatter somebody dropped a tin box of pins that chimed in the silence but still the people weren’t distracted; they couldn’t look away. As the last few inches of embellished mousseline disappeared from view the watchers sagged.
From beyond the screens, there came a collective gasp of audience breath. They cowered before the majesty of the creation in front of them, the perfect expression of heart as art. There was nobody wearing the gown. It was filled in form but no figure, the force inside rippling its curves and swishing its train, but all that the audience saw was its raw radiance, the triumph of the dress made animate by the one who brought it to life.
The girl in this photograph, her name is—wait a minute. You thought there was a face there but you’re just seeing what you expect to see. Shaking the paper the image seems to fade out like this Polaroid is still developing—evolving—even though the glossy surface is dry to the touch. There’s no woman in this photograph, you fool: it’s a dress on a form, a soufflé of a dress with a cascading skirt of champagne-coloured chiffon like whipped, folded cream. Signed across the bottom in ballpoint, Marie Bochert—that must be the creator, the one who brought this dress to life. And what a beautiful dress it is.
Where Shadows Meet Light
Rachel Swirsky
Princess Diana’s ghost emerges at night. There are other ghosts, presumably, but she doesn’t see them. She only sees the living.
At first she haunted Charles and Harry and William, but eventually it grew too painful to think about her life. She even grew tired of the longtime pleasure she’d taken from blowing into Elizabeth’s ear while she slept, making the old woman’s dreams as disturbed and uncomfortable as she had made Diana’s life.
She went overseas to America where she’d once visited the White House and danced with John Travolta in a midnight blue velvet gown that sold at auction for a hundred thousand pounds. This time, she traveled between ordinary houses, some white and others beige and mint and yellow. It was easy to find people she could haunt there, people who owned memorabilia with her face on it, but whose distance from the British Isles meant they didn’t know every detail of her reported life, giving her enough room to dwell and still keep her secrets.
After all these years, the memorabilia remained strange. Coins commemorating her marriage to Charles. Serving bowls and sugar jugs and butter dishes. Rhinestone-rimmed plates. Dolls with plastic distortions of her smile, signed photographs, mint tins, magazine clippings. One family even owned Princess Diana paper dolls with all her famous dresses carefully cut out in miniature, abandoned in the toy box of some grown child who no longer played at being royalty.
In a Florida condominium, she came upon a man whose dearest wish was to be her. She felt his desire hot in his mind when she drew forth from the shadows in his bedroom while he slept. It burned clearly through his dreams, a fervent call: to be Diana.
She lingered.
At first she assumed he was one of those men who want to be women, but after a few nights, she realized she was wrong. He wanted froth and silk and glamour, things that were feminine, but not necessarily female.
He wanted the kind of dazzle that drew the heir to the throne. He wanted to wear spangled red silk chiffon and emerald georgette and white lace embroidered with silk flowers and sequins. He wanted photographers to capture his every angle. He wanted crowds to sigh when he crossed to the other side of the street. He wanted a wedding with thirty-five hundred guests and seven hundred and fifty million more people watching. He even owned the paper dolls—not cut out, but displayed in a cabinet above the dishes, along with a hundred other images of Diana’s face.
Diana couldn’t observe him during the day—in the morning, she evaporated with the sunlight—but Jeffrey was a restless sleeper. When he woke at night, Diana followed him through the dark hallways as he paced the house. He was a fragile-looking man with white hair interspersed among the blond. He wore black silk pajamas with red and gold faux-Chinese embroidery, the jacket done up with frogging. White tabi socks warmed his feet. He was too chic for slippers.
Jeffrey sat at the wicker table in the atrium and rested his head in his hands, staring morosely at the shadows that the palm fronds cast on the wall. Diana settled behind him, integrating with the shadows he cast on the chair, imagining she was tangible enough to comfort him.
She’d comforted homeless children, landmine victims, lepers. She’d shaken hands with an AIDS patient, skin on skin, even when her advisers told her to wear rubber gloves. Now there was no skin on skin, no way to pat Jeffrey’s shoulder and say in the language of touch, whatever’s wrong, you’ll be all right.
His sad blue eyes looked dusky beneath his pale brows. Easy lines folded around his frown, but she’d seen other lines shape themselves around his smile, suggesting that he spent most of his life doing one or the other. His face was easy to decipher, but his mind was a mystery—everything but the core of need that called her name.
Why do you want to be me? she wanted to ask. Don’t you see what happened when I was me?
After dark one night, Jeffrey’s husband came home late with a box wrapped in glittering paper. “Ooh!” Jeffrey exclaimed, coming to accept it. “Ray! You shouldn’t have!” Something in his high-pitched excitement sounded false, but Diana couldn’t discern what.
“Happy birthday,” Ray said, extending the box. Jeffrey pushed his hands away with a gesture that was a touch too hard to be playful.
“Sit,” said Jeffrey, pointing to the couch. “I’ll make drinks.”
Ray settled, shifting a bamboo-print cushion out of his way. Diana wasn’t sure whether he was actually older than Jeffrey, but he looked older, fine wrinkles etching the bags under his eyes. He looked a little fat and a little tired in a pull-over and grey wool slacks. The latter were wrinkled, black and blue ink stains marring the pockets.
Bustling behind the curve of the bar, Jeffrey was immaculate in white pants and a crisply ironed button-down patterned with navy diamonds. He held the bottle almost horizontally as he poured. He looked up at Ray over the stream of alcohol and flashed him a strained smile.
He returned with two shot glasses, one with ice and one without. He handed the first to Ray and stood aside while he drank. He held out his hand for the empty glass.
“Let me get you another one.”
“I’m good,” said Ray, pushing past him to set the glass on a coaster. “Open, open.”
The edges of Jeffrey’s smile vanished. He set his full glass next to Ray’s empty one and took the present. Beneath the glittering green paper, there was a plum velvet box. Inside the velvet box, there were two tickets.
“To the national tour of Forty-Second Street,” said Ray. “Front row, center. Look at the date.”
Stiffly, Jeffrey held up one of the tickets to the light. “Day after tomorrow.”
“You can turn forty-nine at Forty-Second Street.”
“Clever,” murmured Jeffrey, staring at the ticket. He turned it back and forth in the light, glossy paper shining, and then replaced it beside its twin. He traded the box for his drink and knocked it back.
Ray frowned. “I thought you liked Forty-Second Street.”
“I do.”
“Would you rather go to another show? The college is doing Secret Garden.”
“I like Forty-Second Street.”
“I don’t get what’s wrong.”
Jeffrey ran his fingers through his hair, ruining his careful styling. When he looked up at Ray again, he was smiling gently. “I’m just tired.”
Diana watched while they sat, chatting, for another hour. Ray detailed an office farce centering on conflicting operating systems while Jeffrey poured himself another shot and then a third. Afterward, they ate stir-fried vegetables over brown rice, Jeffrey keeping their glasses full of citrus wine.
Was that how other peoples’ marriages fell apart? Marriages that were between two people, without involving press and protocol and a mother-in-law who wields a sceptre?
Afterward, Jeffrey went into the bathroom for a long time. Diana hid in the wall, listening to him weep. When he emerged at last, he went into the bedroom, checking to make sure Ray was asleep before he slipped between the sheets.
Diana had come because she was intrigued by his desire. Now she found herself drawn by his sadness.
Voyeurism diverted her from the griefs of her own life. These had only magnified after death. Sometimes she thought ghosts weren’t whole souls, only the saddest pieces.
People had asked so much of her. She’d tried to give them what they wanted. She prayed, and paced, and purged. Still there were always more needy hands, more photographers, more commemorative plates rimmed with rhinestones.