"McHugh-VirtualLove" - читать интересную книгу автора (McHugh Maureen F)

I look back and Ian is looking at me. I feel embarrassed, wondering if my
feelings were written on my face.

"You are quite beautiful," he says. My chest constricts, and I feel caught out,
naked. What made him say that? "Here," I say, "everyone can be beautiful." I
mean it to be nice, a way of saying that it doesn't mean anything but it comes
out sounding disparaging. He blushes.

That's a really nice touch, and I wonder how he does it; my program doesn't
include blushing.

"Copies of beauty aren't really beautiful," he says. "They're perfect but all
alike."

"What makes real beauty?" I ask, but I already have an idea what he's going to
say. Something about originality.

"In real beauty," he says, "there is always something strange, an asymmetry."

Alicia isn't asymmetrical in any way. I made her to be like a dancer. And now he
has me thinking of myself as not Alicia. "I'm just not sure I understand you," I
say lightly.

He shakes his head. "I don't say things very well."

"Maybe you are a poet." I am trying to smile, trying to make the appropriate
noises. Trying to keep things from becoming serious.

"No," he says sharply, abrupt, "I'm not."

Sometimes conversations in the Salon are very strange, suddenly intimate,
because it's not oneself that is really talking or more, it is oneself which is
really talking from behind the safety of the mask.

"I haven't seen you in the Salon before," I say.

"I've been lurking" he says. "Ghosting around. I've seen you before.

Can I ask you a question?"

I shrug.

"Do you have more than one persona? If I'm out of line, tell me. But there is
another woman who comes here and something about her reminds me of you. An older
woman in a linen dress, all patterned, with her hair pulled back?"

Kristiana. Yes, she's my persona, but of all the personas to link together,
Kristiana and Alicia. They're nothing alike; Kristiana is an old wise woman,
tall and strong with her gray-white hair pulled back in a knot tied with an
ocher cord. "No," I lie. "No, I'm just me."