Page 4 of Nantucket Reflections
Ingrid Helin was still on stage, reading the first chapter of CAT’s much-anticipated memoir, the most important memoir by an artist in history, those who had advanced copies were saying, when Julia’s phone blew up with messages from her publishing house’s head of PR, Nicole.
NICOLE: Julia, where are you? I can’t find you in this crowd.
NICOLE: Listen, I looked into what that journalist was just screaming about, and we need to meet ASAP. This could be a disaster waiting to happen.
NICOLE: I don’t want to ruin the reading, but this is serious.
Julia’s heart pounded so much that the world seemed to tilt. It was a nightmare. She texted Nicole back, telling her to meet her backstage, and she rushed away from Charlie, away from Ingrid, away from the crowd. Charlie was hot on her heels, though, not interested in letting her deal with this crisis on her own. They’d done everything together since they’d gotten back together, and he wouldn’t let her out of his sight. When they reached the backstage area, he took her hand and told her to breathe. “Everything is going to be all right,” he told her.
But Julia wasn’t so sure, not now that Nicole had looked into things. Nicole was a Harvard graduate and a PR professional who’d come to work for Julia because she wanted to “build something from the ground up,” so to speak. Julia’s company at that time had been quite small, a boutique literary house that had been ready to take on the world. With CAT’s memoir, they’d been open to anything, for the next step on a major scale. But now? Were they?
Nicole looked sweaty and nervous, her face flushed and her eyes wide, as she read something on her phone. Julia hurried up and touched her arm. Nicole nearly jumped out of her skin. “We did everything we could,” she told Julia, her voice a rasp. “To make sure that CAT was really CAT. The real deal! Didn’t we?”
“We talked to a lawyer,” Julia remembered. “We verified countless parts of the memoir itself. We made phone calls to Italy. We…”
But Nicole’s face wrinkled up with shock. She turned her phone around to show a photograph of the woman they’d thought to be CAT—the woman who currently waited behind a closed door to be introduced as CAT. The photo on the screen was taken in 2017, eight years ago, at a nightclub in Mallorca, where she wore neon sunglasses and bounced around.
“So? Maybe she parties a lot?” Julia suggested, her heart pounding.
“But in the memoir…” Nicole reminded her.
“I know. I know.” Julia pressed her fingers to her temples and remembered what so-called CAT had given them: a memoir in which she’d nearly died during the making of her murals, a memoir in which she’d fought valiantly to stay alive and keep making them. But if that timeline was correct, there was no way CAT was sick during 2017, because it was clear that at that time she was drunk and wild and out of control.
“Maybe she’s lying about her story?” Julia rasped. “Or maybe that woman back there…”
Julia knew what she wanted to say.Maybe she isn’t the real CAT. Neither of them wanted to say it out loud.
But there wasn’t time to make sense of any of this. Ingrid Helin was taking her bow, and the audience was applauding, but in a lackluster way that suggested they were still thinking about what the journalist had announced before the reading.
“How did you find that video?” Julia whispered.
“Someone shared it and said NOT MY CAT,” Nicole said, whipping her screen around.
“But we’ve been so safe about this,” Julia whispered. “We haven’t let anyone know who we have back there!”
“Then how did the journalist know anything?”
“Maybe he was bluffing?” Julia demanded.
Nicole shook her head, her eyes glossy. But now, the door to the dressing room screamed open, and Tina, the event planner, gestured for the woman they thought was CAT to follow her. Ingrid was on stage, gushing about how much she loved CAT, how emotional she was to finally meet her in the flesh, and how lucky they all were to see her, to ask her questions, to hear her speak—and finally, to hear her side of the story. “CAT has done for women artists, for women muralists, what no other woman has. She’s changed the world.”
The woman who walked out of the dressing room was long-legged and dark-haired, wearing dark sunglasses and a sleek black leather catsuit. She was in her mid-forties, with olive skin that suggested that, just as she’d written in her memoir, she was Italian. And wasn’t the first-recorded CAT mural in Positano? Back in the summer of 2015? Wasn’t that what everyone said?
“Everyone hates successful women,” Julia whispered to Nicole. “Maybe this will all blow over when they find another successful woman to hate?”
“Or maybe more proof that she isn’t CAT will come out and destroy our credibility,” Nicole stammered, then bit her lip. “My professional opinion is that we have to get out in front of this.”
But how could they possibly? CAT was already coming out on stage, her arms raised to address her massive crowd. The audience roared again, presumably because this CAT fit the way they’d always imagined CAT: slender and hot and mysterious and European. She drew Ingrid into a hug and blew kisses at the hundreds who’d appeared for her, some of whom had paid hundreds of dollars just to have a meet and greet and get the memoirs signed, after her speech.
Julia’s heart thudded. She knew better than to rip CAT off stage and demand answers from her, not now that so many people had eyes on her. But as she and Nicole watched, Nicole’s phone blew up with more and more replies to the 2017 video, with people asking questions. Was that the real CAT? Where did this video come from? Was this really the most mysterious artist in the world, the one with the most political things to say, the one who’d remained anonymous for so many years? It wasn’t enough for them.
But the woman who called herself CAT, the woman on stage just now, was performing for her fans, thanking them in a mix of Italian and English for coming out.
“As you know,” she was saying, “this is my first public appearance, the first time I’m addressing my fans from behind the cover of darkness. It’s the first time I’m not hiding behind a paintbrush, the first time I’ve decided to say my real name.”
“What is your name?” someone from the crowd called out.
Julia’s hands were in fists. Nicole looked pale and green.
