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the car. She had spent the previous two weeks hiding in the house, curtains drawn, rationing out the food that I’d bought. “Oh my God,” she kept saying on the drive. “Oh my God.”
    I said, Might I venture a couple of observations, ma’am? First that we will be in and out of the clinic within forty minutes and that you can keep your sunglasses on if that would make you more comfortable. Secondly that truly nobody is looking for you. You are being hunted no longer, that is over, it’s gone.
    She pulled herself together then and commandeered the rearview mirror to reassure herself that she was a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty now. She said, “Will you please stop calling me ma’am?”
    Her lips are fuller and I think she was pleased with the result, when the swelling went down and it was apparent she wasn’t going to be left with a permanent pout. “They’re quite sexy, aren’t they, Lawrence?” Even in the midst of anguish she can flirt.
    In November she went through with the nose job in Rio, although I didn’t think she needed it. But when you have been the world’s most photographed woman it is difficult to believe that you are safe from discovery. And by the time I left her in North Carolina three weeks later (I had the house all arranged in advance of course) I could see that it had been done with artistry. Also that she was absolutely right to have had it done. Adding a new nose to the new mouth, the difference seemed not incremental but exponential, as it appeared to alter, as perhaps indeed it did, the very proportions of her face.
    21 January 1998
    God knows what she is doing with herself now. I try to imagine it and I can’t. She imagined it so many times, a “normal” life, but always with a man, the one who would take her away from it all. That was never going to happen and even she could see that in the end.
    I gave her some books, Vanity Fair, Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment. She said, “It’s terribly sweet of you, Lawrence, pretending I’m clever enough for this stuff.”
    What will she be doing now? What does her morning look like? Perhaps she’s taken up gardening. Maybe she has a library card.
    It is too difficult to imagine her living life on a human scale, and I don’t know whether to put that down to exalting her too highly or patronizing her too much. When she wasn’t out in public, she was frequently alone in a room with a sofa, an embroidered cushion, a television set.
    She did love watching the soap operas, but there never was a drama to match the drama of her life. However difficult that was (again, the dryness) she must miss it, and when I was with her last she seemed almost to resent the fact that she could go about her business with ease. When, for instance, I took her to the hospital for the rhinoplasty, she did not gasp all the way there as she had on the previous trip to the clinic, although she would, according to the brochure, be under “close observation” during the stay. This time she was sullen, almost silent, and when I asked her if she was worried she said, “Why should I be? I’m just one amongst dozens.”
    That was true enough. Rio is probably the plastic surgery capital of the world. Buying a new nose was as simple as buying a new dress from a catalog; you can pick the style you prefer from a batch of photographs.
    I blanched, though, when we went into the reception room and saw her picture gracing the cover of many of the magazines they had there. She, however, was a step ahead of me. She picked one up and told me to hold on to it. At the “consultation” with the surgeon, a pretheater chat when she was already in a hospital gown, sitting up on a gurney, I had the magazine facedown on my lap and I felt it burning my knees. She was makeup-free with just a few strands of dark hair escaping from the plastic cap. After the preliminaries, the surgeon, a suave fellow, a lounge lizard in scrubs, began to scrutinize her profile. Two