At Ellie’s Halloween party I knew quite a few people. I had come with my roommate Mina who worked with Ellie at the magazine. It was the regular magazine crew. I knew them from the other magazine parties. Their costumes weren’t all that clever. There were some hipsters and some ghosts, but I liked that one tall girl in the corner was wearing a dunce cap.
I was standing in the kitchen drinking a glass of water when another tall girl dressed as a Frenchwoman looked me directly in the eyes.
“I know you from somewhere,” she said. She was doing a French accent to go with her costume. She didn’t smile. I didn’t recognize her.
I introduced myself and said I was Mina’s roommate.
“That’s not it,” she said. Reluctantly I offered my job, college, hometown, and childhood summer camp, but she shook her head. She seemed almost angry.
“It’s something else. Your face. I know your face.”
I tried to laugh and began to say something offhand about there being a lot of women of my phenotype at these sorts of parties, but she had turned away from me to pour another drink.
Later in the party I realized she was staring at me from across the room. She kept doing it all night. Once, she even had the gall to point at me while talking to someone else. It distracted me from my conversation with the dunce.
The Frenchwoman came up to me just as I was getting ready to leave the party. She brought a Frenchman with her, who I hadn’t seen until then. He was very drunk, and his French accent was worse than hers.
“I remember how I know you,” she said.
“Oh?” I was struggling to pull on my tall boot.
“The clown picture,” she said.
“What?”
“The picture where you are a clown,” she said.
“What clown picture?”
“I have seen it online,” she said. “You have the big red nose, the white makeup, the funny face.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” I said. I had never taken such a picture.
“You know the clown picture?” she said to the Frenchman.
“Eh?”
“This is the girl from the clown picture,” she said to him.
He looked at me from behind a cloud of alcohol. His eyes lit up.
“Yes! It is her! She is so iconic!” He drew it out like eye-con-ique, and I flinched.
“I think you have the wrong girl,” I said.
I had both my boots on, and reached for the door. The Frenchman grabbed my arm.
“No—it is you indeed. The clown picture, so Y-2-K vibe.”
“I cannot believe you deny the clown picture,” said the Frenchwoman. “We love the clown picture.”
“Let me get my phone to show,” said the Frenchman. “I definitely have the clown picture somewhere.”
“Frédérique,” she chided. “No need, she knows what the clown picture looks like.”
“No, I do not.” I swung open the door and stepped outside.
The next morning I asked Mina who the French people at the party were.
“What French people?”
“The tall girl, and then a really drunk guy.”
“The dunce was French?”
“No, a different tall girl—”
I tried to explain the story of the clown picture.
“So wait—there’s no clown picture of you?”
“Of course not. No idea what they were talking about.”
Mina made a face and looked at her nails.
“Weird.”
She was more interested in talking about the dunce. As she recounted their conversation, I found myself imagining the clown picture. In my mind it was an overexposed polaroid. I was in harlequin makeup, with a plastic red nose, and wore a short, curly red wig and a white babydoll dress. I was looking up at the camera with an exaggerated frown. The clown picture was creepy.
Later that week I noticed a girl my age staring at me on the train on the way to a dinner party. Normally, this behavior would be unremarkable, but I couldn’t help but wonder if she thought she knew me from this clown picture. None of my friends at the dinner had seen or heard of an “iconic” clown picture of me “with Y2K vibes.” They thought this story was funny, but also it didn’t seem to register alarm for anyone else besides me. When I looked at myself in the mirror in the bathroom, I imagined myself in clown makeup. I sat back at the table and one of my friends pretended to squeeze my nose as if I were a clown.
The fall turned to winter without much event. People still looked at me, but I couldn’t tell if it was more than usual. No one mentioned the clown picture again, unless I brought it up. Mina said I needed to get over it. After the New Year, she left the magazine on bad terms, over a union dispute, so I wasn’t going to go to another party at Ellie’s anytime soon. She didn’t care though, because she and the dunce had been in talks about starting their own magazine.
In January I ran into my ex-boyfriend on Great Jones Street. We had broken up the year before because he wanted to be in an open relationship, and I didn’t like him enough to explain why I thought that would be a bad idea. He worked as a retoucher at a gallery, and we chatted about our art-world jobs, and shows we had seen recently. He said he was on his way to meet a friend and started to turn away.
“Wait—you haven’t made any clown pictures of me, right?”
“What?”
“Like a picture of me as a clown?”
“No? What are you talking about?”
“I know sometimes you would post pictures of me on your photography account, and must have unfollowed it and it’s private or you blocked me or something—and these French people I met at a party said they recognized me from a clown picture?”
He frowned.
“I deleted all the photos of you on that account, and the only ones were from that shoot we did at the campsite. I haven’t posted on there in like two years and I don’t know what you’re saying about French people and clown picture—”
“Yes, sorry, never mind. I’m sorry, forget I said anything.”
He said OK in a drawn-out fashion, to let me know that I was being crazy, and told me to take care of myself. He gave me a side hug and crossed the street to walk on the other side.
I was at work a few days later when I got a message from a number I didn’t have saved.
Nice running into u
Lmk if u want to get a drink or take pics sometime soon?
He sent the clown emoji and then a laughing-face emoji and then a black heart emoji. I didn’t reply.
On the express train home that evening, I looked up at one point to watch the local train go by on the neighboring track. Through both car windows, I glimpsed the French people standing in the other train. They were gesturing wildly, pantomiming something, and making each other double over with laughter.