Paris, 1979

The actress has not left her apartment in three days. Anne is worried but Charles is not.

“So, she’s in one of her moods,” he says, rolling a cigarette, licking it shut. His tongue is covered in white film. “Should we alert the CIA?” 

Anne says nothing. Through her binoculars, through the silk curtains in the actress’s apartment, she can see only the suggestion of shadows. 

Around three in the afternoon, the actress’s lover comes to the apartment. Under his arm is a paper bag. Based on what she has found in the actress’s garbage, Anne knows that it is filled with vegetables and booze. The actress likes tomatoes, green peppers, cheap vodka, and St. Germain. She also likes pills, which are generously provided by a doctor in the 14th  arrondissement.

A couple months ago Anne and Charles broke into his office. It was Anne’s second week working for the General Directorate and her first time committing a crime. Of course, it wasn’t really a crime, as Charles reminded her more than once, but it had that thrill. Later the same night, as Anne lay in her bed, every cell in her body glittering, she knew she could never again have any other job.

Anne and Charles have been watching the actress together for almost a year now. Before that, it was someone else’s job. Anne is thirty, and one of the only women in her division at the General Directorate. She is the subject of much gossip and ridicule and a little admiration. Charles is in his fifties and, Anne thinks, considers himself some kind of a cowboy, with his slightly pointed shoes, his slow drawl. They will sleep together someday, she suspects, but she’s in no hurry.

The actress is an American who rose to fame in French movies. Then she started getting political, which made her government angry, and they took revenge. Charles privately disapproves of this.

“You’re telling me that was a threat to national security?” he said once, as they watched the actress on her balcony, lighting her cigarette again every few seconds as the wind  blew it out. Even with the weight she’d gained, she was still a tiny woman, elflike and frangible.

“Maybe you’re underestimating her,” said Anne. “Think of Olga Hepnarová. Ulrike Meinhof. Small women can do big damage.”

Charles snorts. “Or maybe we’re wasting our time.”

But the Americans have asked them to keep an eye on her, their gorgeous traitor, and so they do. They go through her mail and garbage. They set up cameras and recording devices in her apartment and in her doctor’s office. They keep a log of her coming and goings, of which there are very few.

Anne is getting concerned. The actress has no friends, only doctors and lovers. She is getting fat and wasting away at the same time. It could mean she’s getting ready to do something drastic. Charles thinks this is ridiculous.

“She’s an actress. Have you ever met an actress? They all get like this eventually.”

Anne has not, in fact, ever met an actress, and she’s dying to know if Charles really has, but is embarrassed to ask. Compared to him she always feels like a schoolgirl, a star student who is only playing detective. Any day now someone is going to say, alright, the game is over, you’ve done very well, you can go home now.

It’s getting dark. Charles is hungry, so he runs to buy them each a sandwich while Anne stays in the car, her binoculars fixed on the apartment. A light flickers on behind the curtain.

“I think she is getting ready to leave,” says Anne.

“Please, God,” says Charles.The light stays on for a few minutes and then goes off again.

“Maybe she’s going to bed early,” says Anne.“It doesn’t count as going to bed early if you haven’t left bed all day, does it?”

“Is there an official definition?”

“What a great use of our country’s time and money this is,” grumbles Charles. He is very concerned with the French taxpayer, apparently.

“You never know. Someone important might make contact,” says Anne, though lately she, too, has been growing tired of the actress, of the vast nothingness that constitutes her life.

She eats her sandwich and wipes her hands on her skirt. In the first couple of months of their surveillance, she and Charles wore disguises: hideous curly wigs and false noses, but now they don’t bother. There is no sign that the actress knows she is being watched. Or maybe she is just so used to being watched that she doesn’t notice an extra two pairs of eyes.

But sometimes Anne is convinced the actress knows they are there, that she is putting on a show for them. Some days she gets all dressed up, in high heels and red lipstick, and walks around the block in circles.

Once she left the curtain open as she danced, naked except for a silk scarf around her head. There was no one else in the apartment. Anne and Charles watched in silence. Anne expected Charles to make a dirty joke, but he did not. What they were watching was more sacred than sexual and he knew it.

It’s been months, though, since the actress did anything like that. Anne wonders which is more depressing: watching the actress’s life or living it.

Anne and her mother live about a pet store. It doesn’t smell as bad as it might. Anne has her own bathroom and if she comes and goes through the service entrance, she can go whole days without seeing or speaking to her mother. They both prefer it like this. Anne’s mother has long despaired of her daughter finding a husband, and Anne has long despaired of her mother caring about anything important. You would think living through a war would give a person a sense of priorities, but apparently not. Anne’s father died during the war, not fighting, but drinking himself to death. To Anne this is a little bit funny, but she doesn’t know anyone who agrees. Toward the end, his skin was so yellow it left stains on the bed sheets.

Anne does not have a boyfriend. If she wants to sleep with a man, all she has to do is go to a bar with a notebook and a pen. Then she pretends to be very interested in what she is writing, even if it is really just hello hello hello over and over again. The more absorbed she looks, the sooner someone will approach her and ask what she is writing about.

“A poem,” she will say.

“Can I read it?” the man usually asks.“Absolutely not,” Anne says, and goes from there. But she’s not in the mood this evening. On the metro, she examines her reflection in the dark window. She gathers all her hair at the nape of her neck to see what she’d look like with the actress’s boyish haircut. Not good.

Tonight, Anne’s mother is up later than unusual, reading a magazine on the couch. The television is on but the volume is off. She seems very absorbed in the magazine, all the beautiful women using their beautiful bodies to sell things she could never afford.

“Big day?” asks her mother, sitting up.
“Huge,” says Anne.
Her mother kisses her forehead.
“My brave little soldier,” she says, and then goes back to her magazine.

Anne’s secret favorite thing is listening to her mother talk about what a good child she was. "Like a little doll,” her mother often says. “So good, it was almost creepy." Anne learned to read when she was only five, and even before that she was content to entertain herself, needing almost nothing from adults or other children. She liked stuffed animals, and her dollhouse, and playing dress-up, but she also liked just watching, just listening.

"All my friends were so jealous," her mother says. “Their kids were running around and screaming like savages, and there was you, with a bow in your hair, an angel."

Anne doesn't remember her childhood particularly well, but she does remember those bows. Pink satin, blue grosgrain, black-and-white gingham. Where are they now? Why didn’t her mother keep them?

It's not the easiest subject to bring up, Anne's childhood, because it leads to memories of her father, who neither she nor her mother enjoy talking about, at all. Still, Anne has some strategies.

“What was that book you used to read me?" she might ask. "About the dog who wanted to be a ballerina. I had a dream about it last night." There was no such book, as far as Anne knew, and there was no certainly no dream, but it was a way to get the conversation started. Or: "Whatever happened to that woman you were friends with? I can’t remember her name. She had two little boys. I think they were twins?"

She knows the whole thing is not quite normal, but Anne can’t help herself. She misses being so adored. As she watches her mother turn the thin glossy pages, she considers asking about the ribbons. Surely, they must be somewhere, some box at the top of a closet, or stuffed in the back of a drawer. She imagines herself showing up to work wearing one of them, her head topped with a bow like a present. She imagines Charles, too stunned to even laugh.

“Good night,” she says. “Sleep well.”

America is so afraid of the Soviets they’ll drive a movie star insane, just in case. It’s pathetic. Empires fall all the time. It’s not something to weep over. Would the people – the people, whatever people – be angry if they knew what Anne and Charles were doing: spying on a woman just because the Americans asked nicely?

Maybe they wouldn’t care. She isn’t even French. Or maybe they would be furious that the government is torturing this innocent beautiful suffering woman. Maybe they will execute Anne and Charles by firing squad. Maybe they will demote them to desk jobs.

The actress was so beautiful in her movies. Of course she was – it was both her job and her destiny. Her beauty was so complete that when you saw it in the dark theatre, it felt like she could swallow you whole.

A few days before Easter, something happens. Around eight P.M, the woman who lives in the apartment beneath the actress’s stares up at her ceiling. Then she holds out her hand to confirm that water is dripping from it. She calls out to her husband. He, too, holds out his hand. There is definitely a leak.

“We should go in,” says Anne.“For a leak? Really?”

“Yes. Just in case.” The actress’s bathroom is the one room they cannot see from the street.

“And if it’s nothing? How will we explain what we are doing there?”

“We will pretend to be a couple, considering buying a place in the building,” says Anne, already exiting the car. “She won’t give a shit.”

This isn’t exactly protocol – they ought to call and get approval from someone – but Anne doesn’t want to wait and she knows that Charles won’t want to seem like a coward. He follows her inside.

“Nice place,” he mutters, as they trudge up the stairs. He’s not incorrect.

The door to the actress’s apartment isn’t even locked.

“Wait here,” Anne tells Charles. The actress is less likely to be spooked by her than she is by a big man in a suit. To Anne’s surprise, Charles obeys without complaining.

Anne goes straight to the bathroom. Water coats the floor, flowing out into the hallway. It smells like candles, lavender, cigarettes, whiskey, soap, and something else, something Anne does not recognize, subtle and poisonous. The actress is in the overflowed bathtub, her eyes closed.

“Charles!” Anne yells. “Come here!”

“Jesus,” he says. “Is she alive?”

Anne holds her fingers to the actress’s beautiful neck. “Yes, but quite unconscious. Help me lift her.”

Charles scoops the actress out of the tub. With her in his arms, he looks like the Virgin Mary holding dead Jesus.

“Where should I put her?” he asks.

“The bedroom?”

She follows the two of them down the hallway. The bed is covered in magazines and clothes and cigarette butts. Anne pushes the debris onto the floor. Charles sets the actress down gently. Anne goes to the closet to find a blanket with which to cover her.

“We should call a doctor,” Charles says. “She might have taken something.”

“Oh, she’s definitely taken something,” says Anne. “But we can’t call a doctor. No one can know we were here.”

“Then we should have left her in the bathtub,” says Charles. “You think we should have let her drown?”

They stare at each other from opposite sides of the bed. The actress moans quietly. She sounds like a baby animal. 

“She won’t remember any of this,” says Anne.

“No, I don’t think she will,” Charles agrees. “Let’s just get out of here.”

Before they exit, Anne puts one more blanket over the actress’s naked, shivering body. She and Charles drive back to the Directorate in silence.

By the time Anne finishes all her paperwork, it’s one in the morning. The metro is almost empty. A man in a white shirt is reading a biography of Trotsky. An old woman is scowling at the scarf she is knitting, in hideous shades of red and brown. A young couple sits with their fingers entwined, staring at nothing.

Anne wonders if there is a single passenger in this car who wouldn’t slit the throat of the person standing next to him if it meant getting home a little faster.

I am going to live in the forest, she tells herself. I am going to live far away from everyone, from everything. She imagines a cottage surrounded by dirt and moss and wildflowers, nursing injured baby birds back to health. But she'd settle for the inside of a hollowed-out tree. All she wants is to go away, to be far enough from the world so that no one can hurt her, so that she can’t hurt anyone, either.

Instead, she gets off at her stop. She takes her shoes off outside so the sound of her heels will not wake her mother. In the kitchen, she opens the refrigerator, but everything inside it looks disgusting, poisonous. She fills a glass to the brim with vodka.

After a couple of sips, she walks very quietly into her mother’s bathroom and retrieves a bottle of sleeping pills from under the sink. She pours a handful of them into her palm and stares at them for a few moments. Then she pours most of them back into the bottle. In the kitchen, she drops the remaining pills into the glass. They make a clinking sound, like little bells. 

She drinks, and wishes she could listen to music, but she doesn’t want to wake her mother. Instead she opens the window. Now she can hear the whine of a siren, drunk men arguing about god, the anguished howl of a dog.

Nicola Maye Goldberg is the author of the novel Nothing Can Hurt You.  Her work has appeared in Vogue, New York Tyrant, Joyland, and elsewhere.  She lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

Other Women will be published by Verso in February 2026.