The Lacquer Box

The parties were all the same, a constellation of transient brightness against the city’s velvet dark. Nancy moved through them like a ghost in a couture dress, her beauty a currency she had long ago learned to spend but never to value. Men’s eyes followed her, a familiar and weightless pressure. They saw the sweep of dark hair against a pale shoulder, the intelligent curve of her mouth that could be mistaken for an invitation, the long line of her legs. They saw a beautiful container and presumed it was full of something they wanted. They were always wrong. The container was empty.

It was a specific kind of emptiness, a high-altitude loneliness that left her breathless. She had a job in a gallery that was more aesthetic than demanding, a sun-drenched apartment that overlooked the river, and a Rolodex of contacts that could open any door in the city. Yet, she felt like a fraud, a vacancy carved into the shape of a person. She chased sensation, hoping one would stick. A weekend in Lisbon, a new lover with rough hands and a soft voice, a dangerously expensive piece of art. They were all just echoes in the void.

Love, she suspected, was a myth told to trick people into reproducing. The men she met were collectors. They wanted to acquire her, place her on a shelf in their life, and admire her reflection in their own success. The sex was often proficient, sometimes even inventive, but it was a transaction of surfaces. Skin against skin, a temporary friction to ward off the cold, but never a merging, never the dissolution she craved. She wanted to be seen so completely that she disappeared.

Then she met Julian.

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