She had no idea whether he was joking or not.

"Listen," Meredith said, "my friend isn't feeling well, so I'd better take her home, but it was really nice to see you. Thanks for inviting us."

"What?" His features returned to their stern equilibrium. "You're leaving already?"

"I'd love to stay, but Mish-she's really exhausted. I'm afraid she might have SARS or something and I wouldn't want her spreading it around the party."

He nodded solemnly. "That would be bad."

"Yes. Yes, well."

He grabbed her by the arm without warning, pulled her toward him and inhaled her hair.

"You look wunderbar."

"Thanks."

He bent down and began to kiss her throat. "You must come to Munich."

Meredith muttered something about work.

Gunther drew back and looked at her. "You don't approve of my work, do you."

Meredith shifted from foot to foot, wishing she were a better liar.

"I've felt misunderstood for most of my life-don't you see that's what these photographs are about?" he said.

Meredith could barely bring herself to nod. "But those people..." she said.

Gunther looked exasperated. "They are not people. They are subjects."

"I have to go," she said.

"So go."

Two hours later Mish and Meredith sat draining a bottle of pinot grigio at a booth in a wine bar around the corner from the flat on Coleville Terrace.

Mish put down her gla.s.s and threw her head back. "Sitting around, getting tipsy, moaning about men. Isn't it all just so London?"

"I guess so."

"Oh, I know what we should do! Let's go to Sainsbury's and get a box of those Quality Sweets and go back to your flat and watch Big Brother!"

"My mother doesn't have digital. And, by the way, it's Quality Street, not Sweet."

"C'mon, Mere, buck up," Mish said, pinching her friend's chin and wiggling it like a faulty light switch. "So Gunther wasn't the one. You can't expect to find him at the first party you go to."

"I know." Meredith stuck out her tongue and looked toward the ceiling. It was an expression she only ever used around Mish.

"So you didn't tell him what you really thought?"

"No way." Meredith pushed away her gla.s.s. "Why would I? I mean, he's essentially a p.o.r.nographer. No-worse than a p.o.r.nographer; he's a s.a.d.i.s.t p.o.r.nographer who's also cruel to animals."

"I thought he was good-looking."

"So did I, but that's not enough in this case. I mean, come on. I'm not looking for a one-night stand here; I'm searching for the father of my firstborn child. In all likelihood my only child. It's probably the biggest decision I'll ever make in my whole entire life. Anyway, who knows if it even would have worked. At my age..."

Mish lowered her face into her hands and rocked her head from side to side. "So much pressure."

"What do you mean?"

"Why do you always have to make sure everything is perfect? Maybe if you'd just let things unfold..."

Meredith looked at her nails and noticed the pale pink polish she'd applied just yesterday was already starting to gray. Something about the newsprint over here. It rubbed off too easily. Maybe Mish was right. That was what everybody always said, wasn't it? That you only ever find the thing you're looking for when you stop searching altogether and let things happen for themselves. But how to stop trying to control the story? It was the only way she knew.

Meredith's previous relationships had all been variations on a theme. She started off distant, a little cool, remote. This seemed to spur men on, and it was easy because the chill was something she came by quite naturally-at first. There was a lovely period while they wooed her: phoning half a dozen times in a single night, sending flowers with only the flimsiest excuse, showing up in places where they knew she would be. It was when she was keen on someone that things went wrong. Eventually, if she liked the guy enough, Meredith would submit to the chase. Go to bed with him a few times. Insist on splitting the bill here and there, so he wouldn't think she was cheap. Then the day would come when she realized that now she was calling him more than he called her. She would find herself acting out a kind of reverse courtship-using all the tactics he had used early on, except that now her actions took on a slightly paranoid edge. She sent anxious, mushy e-mails and showed up at his office. She insisted that they talk about us. Finally one day, more often than not in a crowded restaurant over lunch, he would reach across the table and take her hand and mutter something about "not being ready." "Ready for what?" she would always demand-for she had never, ever, not even at her weakest point, brought up the subject of marriage or children. But she knew what these men meant, and that such serious topics had been in the air, uncontainable, ever since the first date.

"What did your doctor say?" Mish asked.

"Him? It doesn't matter-he's taken."

"Sheesh, Mere, when did you become such a man-eater?" Mish leaned across the table and shoved her. "I meant, what did he say about your health. Like in terms of your, you know, baby-making capacity."

"He said I'd better stop messing around. s.h.i.t or get off the pot. You know, time is of the essence. That kind of thing. He said..." Meredith trailed off, thinking of Joe's voice on the other end of the crackly telephone line. "I haven't spoken to him in a few days."

Mish set down her winegla.s.s with a clatter. "A few days? You mean you've spoken to him since you arrived here?"

"So?"

"Does that not strike you as just a little weird?"

"Not really. I mean, okay, maybe a bit. But it makes sense."

"How?"

"For one thing, I am a little weird. And besides, is it so strange for a doctor to take interest in his patient's welfare? I mean, is there anything against that in the Hippocratic oath? And for your information, he's not a regular gynecologist; he's also an internationally recognized fertility specialist."

"Really." Mish's eyes narrowed, zoning in on Meredith's face. She paused. "Is he hot?"

Meredith covered a grin with both hands. "Maybe."

"I can't believe you're flirting with your gyno." Mish wrinkled her nose. "That is so David Cronenberg or something."

"I never actually..." Meredith began, and then thought better of it. "This is gross. Can we talk about something else?"

They sat for a few moments listening to Kylie Minogue panting over the stereo backbeat.

"There's still that Shakespeare guy," said Mish, upending the wine bottle in its cooler. "He seemed pretty into you."

Meredith smiled. "I think he was drunk."

"Most people in this city are-haven't you noticed? I don't think it's worth holding against him."

"He invited me to the country to see his pet birds."

"Really?" Mish stabbed out her cigarette and made a circle in the ashes. "I had a parrot once. My brother taught it to say 'f.u.c.k you,' so my mother got rid of it."

"These are totally different. I think he hunts with them. To be honest, I don't really understand it."

"Killer birds." Mish rocked back in her chair and honked. "That is so medieval. You have to go."

"Well, we'll see if he even calls."

"You gave him your number?"

Meredith shrugged and looked at the ceiling.

"You little s.l.u.t!" Mish cried, and with an involuntary push of her boot, tipped her chair over backward.

The following morning was Sunday. Instead of succ.u.mbing to a hangover, Meredith got up early and went for a run. She took a random route, jogging along street after street of pastel-painted brownstones, indistinguishable except for their exotic names: Chepstow Villas, Ladbroke Grove, Arundel Gardens, Penzance Place, Hippodrome Mews. To her surprise, she found she still knew the neighborhood by feel-as if a map of its curvy crescents and private, gated garden squares had been imprinted on her DNA. She ran up and over the hill, past grand, six-story mansion blocks with whitewashed wrought-iron Juliet balconies and potted palms sprouting in their front courtyards. At the summit she stopped and raised her face to the sky, letting the moisture gather on her face. She closed her eyes and opened them again, noticing, for the first time, the way the chimneys poked up from the rooftops like rows of stubby fingers. It was not raining so much as dewing, as though the atmosphere were being spritzed from the nozzle of an enormous spray bottle.

When the blood-thump in her ears quieted, Meredith continued down the other side of the hill. The streets were full of discarded blossoms-the last foliage of spring, blown from the trees by an early morning wind. The street cleaners hadn't been around yet to clear away the debris, and the pavement was coated in a layer of this sweetly rotting snow.

Meredith trailed her hand through the waxy shrubs that pressed out through the fences. A holly bush p.r.i.c.ked. She stuck her finger in her mouth.

When she came to Clarendon Cross, she paused to stare in through the windows of the little shops with their painted signs and ruffled awnings. A store window crammed with beaded lampshades and lace table shawls filled Meredith with a toothachy claustrophobia. Beside it was a linen boutique with nothing but shelves of folded sheets in neutral colors. A kitchen store advertised a sale on wicker picnic baskets. A gallery specialized in religious icons-sacred gilt antiquities stripped from European churches now being sold off as bathroom and foyer tchotchkes for the grand homes of the London haute bourgeois.

In the window was a glittering bra.s.s etching of the Madonna and Baby Jesus. The mother's eyes were downcast in an expression of milky shyness. Her infant son, by contrast, was improbably alert. In one tiny hand he held his mother's naked breast like a piece of fruit he was saving for later; the other hand was raised in the air as though he were just coming to the punch line of a complicated anecdote.

Meredith turned and saw two little girls in duffle coats and pirate hats returning from church or brunch with their parents. The adults-slim, tweedy bohemians in their mid-thirties-bickered gently over something. The children amused themselves in the square by jumping up and down on a bench they had found with a loosened board.

"My turn!" the smaller girl demanded, outraged when her sister refused to yield her place on the sproingy surface. The wood groaned and threatened to snap under the older girl's weight. Meredith felt a twinge of panic. She had a mental vision of the crack, the little girl falling backward, head hitting the cement, a tiny stocking-clad leg rammed into a splintery crevice. The parents, however, seemed oblivious to danger. They looked back and continued their halfhearted dispute (the wife was obviously winning). The girls switched places.

She continued on her run, heading south toward the river, through Ladbroke Grove, across Holland Park Road and into the land of million-pound urban manor homes with their splendid gla.s.s awnings and great bowed front windows. Here was one of the few areas in London where residents reserved the right to live in much the same way that their recent ancestors had. Domestics in uniform threw open shutters and gardeners swept stray twigs off flagstones and dumped them into mulch buckets. Meredith ran on, inhaling the expensive perfume of other people's lives.

Eventually she came to an ivy-covered wall with a small door in it. Meredith darted through and ran up a crooked set of log stairs embedded in the mud. She remembered Holland Park from the haze of early childhood; only then it had seemed less like a park and more like an enchanted forest. She continued through the cultivated glades and garden paths, past the man-made pond with the statue of grumpy Lord Holland in the middle, down the laurel walk, and through the Kyoto Garden with its tinkly waterfall and tiny j.a.panese houses made out of stone. She cut across the periwinkle ground cover and ran through a gap in the hibiscus shrub, and when she emerged she found herself in a topiary maze surrounded by low walls. Women were pushing carriages-perambulators-with plastic tents draped overtop to keep out the mist.

Meredith jogged on the spot for a moment, trying to decide where to go next. Through a spray of willow branches, she glimpsed a swish of peac.o.c.k feathers, tempting her back farther, around the bend in the path to where the gardens opened up to the rest of the green.

When she turned the corner, Meredith felt almost physically a.s.saulted by the view before her. In the center of the path was an island of gra.s.s fenced off by a series of knee-high iron arches. The animal sanctuary was a sort of cageless zoo populated by terminally bored peac.o.c.ks and tamed rabbits snacking on compost. It was not the scene that shocked her but the memory. Meredith knew exactly what it felt like to reach her hands out in front of her chest and feel those very iron arches in her fists. Looking at their height, she couldn't have been more than four or five at the time.

Yes, it was all bleeding through, like one screen image dissolving into another. A day much brighter than this one, and cooler too, judging by the bite of the metal in her grip. A scratchy wool beret on her head she wished she could take off but didn't dare. They had come here to feed the rabbits. Or one particular rabbit, who Meredith believed was Peter the Rabbit despite the fact that he was black.

This was the memory: the hand of a man reaching down toward her. Skin like soft, worn leather and hairy at the knuckles. On the pinky finger was a ring. A thick gold band. A flash of jade. In her memory, the hand unfolded before her eyes to reveal-what was it? Something pale green and waxy. A wedge of cabbage? Of course! To feed the bunny. And then herself, a small child, still wobbly on her feet, taking the cabbage and throwing it over the fence, giggling, waiting for the black bunny to come and fetch his treat. Meredith could see the bunny, the cabbage, the big hand that she reached for, but try as she might she could not bring the whole man into focus.

11.

If only they wouldn't touch her so much.

After autograph hounds and those nude photos on the Internet, the touching was definitely the worst thing about Kathleen Swain's job. The poking, the prodding, the fiddling with laces and clips and zippers. The powdering and repowdering and pincurling and plucking of follicles. In her twenty-five years as a working actress, Kathleen had been groomed to within an inch of her life, and she was sick of it. But the more the preening annoyed her, the more she needed it. The vicious cycle of aging. And so she submitted to the ever--burgeoning hours of adjustments. Some days she felt that if one more smiling lady came at her with a daub of liquid foundation, or a yawning eyelash curler, she would simply disappear-poof!-having been primped to death.

Not to mention the misery of small talk. Day after day, hour upon hour of sitting in an overheated trailer trying to turn the conversation around to what the hairstylist did for her summer vacation. (As if she cared! And yet, one obviously couldn't talk about oneself. She'd learned her lesson on that score after she showed up for makeup one morning several years earlier with an unstoppable nosebleed, then spotted the following week's tabloid headline: KAY SWAIN DRUGS h.e.l.l-accompanied by a paparazzo shot of her stumbling out of the gym without makeup.) No, these people, as chatty and folksy as they might seem, were not to be trusted. And the only way to get them to stop asking questions about you was to ask them questions about themselves, their families and their grim little Wal-Mart-furnished lives. This, however, required feigning an interest. And while Kathleen Swain was paid millions to pretend emotions she did not feel in front of the camera, she found doing the same thing in real life to be a ch.o.r.e.

Luckily Vicky from Ess.e.x, the new makeup artist on the Crouch show, seemed to need absolutely no prompting when it came to pouring out the details of her personal life. As she put the final touches on Kathleen's eyeliner, she continued the monologue she'd launched into forty-five minutes earlier when she began sponging beige foundation on her subject's forehead.

"An' I told 'im the last time I saw 'im, I did. I said, darling, I love you too, but I ain't putting up wif no more of this nonsense wiffout a ring. I'm a traditional girl, see? Not one a fese old slappers who jes goes 'round s.h.a.gging everyfing that moves fer the b.l.o.o.d.y fun of it. If 'e wants a good time, 'e can go down the road and get 'iself some of that, 'e can."

Kathleen's gaze slid over to the portable television in the corner. The volume was turned down on an episode of a soap opera, one of those grim dramas that followed the lives of a group of depressed and unattractive poor people living in a hard-luck town-the sort of show that could have been made only in Britain. Or Canada. On the screen a teenage girl was spoon-feeding mashed banana to an infant. An old man in a shopkeeper's ap.r.o.n walked into the frame and they began to shout at each other, jaws chomping noiselessly at the air.

Just as Vicky was about to launch into the story of her sister's recent divorce ("Di'int trust 'im as far as I could throw 'im. And was I right?"), the trailer door swung open and the new costume girl staggered in carrying a bale of petticoats, purple taffeta and corsetry that made Kathleen's lower back spasm just looking at it.

"Morning ladies," said Mish, dumping the garments on the nearest daybed. "Another frock for the return rack. Our dear director has decided he doesn't like taffeta-apparently it interferes with the light."

Vicky acknowledged Mish with only the slightest nod. As she applied a final dusting of powder to the plasticized tip of Kathleen's nose, Vicky continued with her story. "As I was saying, Miss Swain, my sister Abbie, she gets 'itched up to this bloke and wiffin two months the police is called in 'cause 'ees-"

Kathleen turned her cheek and Vicky hovered above her face with the powder puff. "Vicky, I think that's enough for now. It's time I got into my costume. You're free to go."

As Vicky packed up her case and huffed out of the room, Kathleen turned her attention to Mish. The girl had her back to Kathleen and was anxiously sorting through a rack of vintage undergarments, which, with their array of laces and stays and hooks, resembled torture devices. Even more painful to look at was Mish's own outfit, Kathleen thought. How could she bend over-let alone walk-in that skirt and those ridiculous clogs? And that black lace top-it was simply beyond the beyond. A one-way ticket to the back pages of Us magazine, if worn on a red carpet-which, thank G.o.d for this girl, it never would be. She watched without lifting herself from the makeup chair as Mish dropped an ancient garter belt between two hatboxes.

"f.u.c.kb.u.g.g.e.r. Sorry, Ms. Swain, I'll be with you in just a moment."

Kathleen felt a rare but not unfamiliar wave of self-disgust wash over her. When did I become such a complete b.i.t.c.h? she wondered. Was it before or after wardrobe girls started having better bodies than me? She vowed to try to be nicer to her inferiors, more folksy and down to earth, like Julia Roberts, who was said to always be chumming around with the crew and who had actually ended up marrying that handsome second camera a.s.sistant.

Mish handed Kathleen a piece of stretchy flesh-toned undergarment that looked, to Kathleen's eye, like a linebacker's jockstrap.

"What's this for?"

"It's for under your corset. To keep everything...smooth."

"And who requested this, may I ask?"

Mish seemed to stiffen. Smiled. "No one requested it. The company sent it to me and I just thought you might want to try it. Apparently Nicole Kidman wore one all the way through Cold Mountain."

"Nicole?" Kathleen wrinkled her nose and looked down at the support garment, held gingerly between her thumb and forefinger. "But she's a stick."

"Exactly." Mish nodded.

"Well, okay. I guess it can't hurt, can it?" Kathleen smiled. On second thought there was something about this new girl she liked. Trusted, even. In fact, she seemed to recall having had a conversation with her earlier in the shoot. Or was that the other one with the dark hair? Anyway, she felt unusually relaxed with these Canadians. English accents made her tense. She slipped off her robe and began struggling into the girdle, rotating her hips like a novice belly dancer while hoisting the elastic up over her thighs. Mish stepped behind her and began to help.

"I've become such a disgusting pig ever since I started trying for a baby," Kathleen laughed, feeling proud of herself for employing self-deprecating humor (very endearing and down-to-earth). "It's all the folic acid I have to eat now. Bowls and bowls of peanuts all day long. I mean, really you're only supposed to have a small handful, but I haven't allowed myself nuts in decades. Once I get started I can't stop. It's like..."