The Kate and Julia Story
Agnès Madrigal
The nondescript narrator Kate has featured prominently in Agnès Madrigal’s stories for many years—perhaps so prominently that she serves as an alter ego of the author? Recently, her friend Julia has entered these narratives. Is Julia a person, a character, or just another means of telling a story?
The narrator, gazing at a blank wall, is accused of staring at a piece of paper and writing a story instead. Photograph by Madrigalit and Raw Pixel
“I liked it better when we were in the story together,” Julia says. “You’re nicer to me in the stories. You describe my better parts, you even embellish. Like my glossy corkscrew curls—I loved that—but they’re not so shiny anymore, they’re a bit limp, with gray threads in them, have you noticed that? And my eyes, they’re not really sea-glass blue either, but I wish they were. You never write about these lines forming around the corners of my eyes or the other ones at the sides of my lips. Do they call those marionette lines? That makes them sound so pleasant somehow.”
We’re not in a story. We’re lying on the carpeted floor of the second bedroom on the second floor of Julia’s new house. She sold the old one, the one she shared with Evan, and she bought the new one. Although cheaper and somewhat smaller, the new house is much better than the old one. “The new house has light,” Julia told me when she described it to me after the first viewing. The old one had grown dark over the years, darkening as their marriage had, I suppose, but I don’t share all of my metaphors with Julia. Evan had put up a lot of heavy drapes. He said he didn’t like the neighbors to see them inside.
“Do you think they ever saw us?” Julia asks now. “Even when the curtains were open, could they see through the weird Plexiglas windows? All I ever saw when I tried to look inside was my own reflection, and it usually startled me.” Julia had not, until recently, been one for examining herself, her interior self. It wasn’t that she avoided it so much as she was just busy doing other things, things that interested her quite a bit more, like opening a clothes boutique, like traveling to the Caribbean each winter with Evan, like redecorating rooms. The divorce put an end to plenty of those things, and she became almost immediately vulnerable, seeking—someone else, someone else like the former Julia, would have resisted those feelings altogether, embracing other characteristics, like stoicism, like steel.
“Julia had not, until recently, been one for examining herself, her interior self. It wasn’t that she avoided it so much as she was just busy doing other things, things that interested her quite a bit more, like opening a clothes boutique, like traveling to the Caribbean each winter with Evan, like redecorating rooms. The divorce put an end to plenty of those things, and she became almost immediately vulnerable, seeking—someone else, someone else like the former Julia, would have resisted those feelings altogether, embracing other characteristics, like stoicism, like steel.”
—Agnès Madrigal, from a first draft of “The Kate and Julia Story”
She had always been dainty, birdlike; the blackness of her hair made one conjure a crow, a delicate one, not a raven. She had a small face, with small features, her features seemed nearly pressed into her face they extended outward into the world so little. She had a confetti of soft freckles across her upper cheeks and nose. Her flat lips were colored like the freckles, a little pink, so they matched pleasantly with her light blue eyes in the way that nature occasionally applies an exquisite palette upon some persons. The snowy skin, the pastel eyes and lips, set against Julia’s frisson of black hair—she was a bit shocking to some until they got used to her, and extremely attractive to a few who found her contradiction of soft and harsh a puzzle they wished to solve or just simply had to devour it. Evan, for all of his other flaws, did neither.
She is appealing, even in middle age, I have always found her to be so, and new men enter her life now, asking questions of this appeal, attempting to do something with it somehow, apply it to their world, disassemble it into whatever the parts were that they wanted, as Evan eventually had. I turn my head to look at Julia. She is staring at the ceiling. She is lying like a child about to make an angel in the snow or like a corpse found dragged in the forest. I never see her from this perspective, from the side, with her on her back. It must be how Evan saw her often, how he saw her when he talked to her in bed, or when he just gazed upon her, as I do now, wondering what thoughts were burgeoning inside her mind or if her mind was blank, blank as the plaster ceiling she gazed up at, if she could erase from her mind everything, at least for a while. She might have liked to do so, I certainly saw need for it from the rest of life, the wild cacophony that is possibly all of life.
“She is staring at the ceiling. She is lying like a child about to make an angel in the snow or like a corpse found dragged in the forest. I never see her from this perspective, from the side, with her on her back. It must be how Evan saw her often, how he saw her when he talked to her in bed, or when he just gazed upon her, as I do now, wondering what thoughts were burgeoning inside her mind or if her mind was blank, blank as the plaster ceiling she gazed up at, if she could erase from her mind everything, at least for a while. She might have liked to do so, I certainly saw need for it from the rest of life, the wild cacophony that is possibly all of life.”
—Agnès Madrigal, from a first draft of “The Kate and Julia Story”
“What do I look like?” I ask her. I realize I cannot put it into words, a description of myself. I know I’m small, mousey, and I descend from there, finding adjectives to put myself down. I’m always cognizant not to favor myself, not to boast in any way, but that’s not the exact trouble here. The problem I face is that I cannot see myself. I have never been able to see myself. In photos, I’m surprised; I never appear as I think I do. My expressions, captured by the camera, are not the right expressions, do not convey the mood I felt in such moments. “You look like a woman from a Flemish painting,” Julia says. “I can’t tell you the exact one right now, but I can find it for you later, when I have my phone again.” Julia is always leaving her phone somewhere, never losing it—she is always pretty sure she knows where it is. She’s comfortable without it, I think she’d get rid of it entirely if she thought she could still be connected to her job, to her friends, to the dating app she’s been using obsessively recently, since the last affair fizzled after a few exciting months.
I am lying next to her, under the high vaulted ceiling with skylights, on the soft carpet of her new house—they must have replaced the carpeting before the sale, I can still smell it, whatever of its industry’s perfume clings to the light blue yarns. The whole second floor is covered in the carpet and the aroma. It’s plush, comforting. I’m glad for Julia for that, as I am for many of her small successes, especially after Evan. “You’re not really lying here,” she says, getting up, I think to find her phone, so she can pull up the picture for me, the picture of me. “You’re writing a story,” she says. “I can always tell when you are writing,” she continues, “and I’m starting to be able to feel it when I am in a story and not actually beside you.” I nod, I smile. “Are you writing a story to get me to describe you?” she muses. “You never describe yourself in your writing.” She’s right, of course. We’re old friends, so we know these things about each other, like the things I’m writing about her here. Julia, phone in hand, lies back down next to me, scrolling for the photo. The white of the slanted ceiling is a sheet of paper sloping backward from the roller in a typewriter, and the small stamped words appear over us, scattering like beetles, these words under which we lie, to which we are both beholden here.