You're Not You (16 page)

“No, I do,” I said. That sounded creepy. “You should be able to tell me whatever you want.”

“That’s nice of you,” she said.

“My love life isn’t exactly a clear road either,” I said. “So don’t think I’ll be shocked.”

She looked faintly amused. “You’re too nice to have a fucked-up love life,” she said.

“No I’m not. I’ve been with a couple people I should have left alone. People who were involved already,” I said. I imagined Liam on my doorstep, holding a suitcase, a car screeching out of my driveway with a dark blur of hair in the driver’s side window.

Kate nodded. Her eyebrows had lost their high arch; they were knit together in a straight line.

I went on, not really sure why. “Or one, anyway. But it’s different from this.”

She looked down at the bottles and jars on the counter. I reached over and closed the lid on some eye shadow, recapped a lipstick.

“Let’s drop it, okay?” she said. “Maybe we should let this lie for now.”

“Okay,” I heard myself say. She gave me a brief, stiff smile and turned to leave the bathroom.

I’d blown it. So much for confidences.

I finished cleaning the brushes, closed the door, and lowered the toilet lid so I could sit down. For a moment I felt on the verge of tears, but I took a few deep breaths and got ahold of myself. What, I wondered, would Evan have told her? I pictured them sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, Evan rumpled and still in yesterday’s suit, coffee steaming between them, an untouched cup in front of Kate, set there out of ten years’ habit.
We met at work
, I imagined him saying.
I liked her eyes, her intelligence. She had the client in the palm of her hand. We had a drink. We had lunch. She asked about you. She’s taller than you, heavier. It was sweet; it wasn’t wild. She has a tiny, faded scar below one eye from a car wreck, long toes with the nails painted red. She was very quiet all through and afterward she grinned at the ceiling and got up to shower. It’s not an issue of better. She wasn’t better. She was someone I didn’t know. She was someone who—if we’re being brutally honest—could run a hand over the back of my neck, who could lift her hips beneath me and push back against me. She wasn’t better; she wasn’t worse. But she was nothing like you
.

KATE AND I HAD
one more conversation about Liam. I had been the one to bring it up. I felt so wretched for having told her about him that I couldn’t imagine why I had thought the confession would make her feel better. So the day after that I worked up my courage and said, “I’m sorry about . . . what I told you yesterday.”

I sort of hoped she would need reminding, that she’d already forgotten. But she nodded and said, “It’s none of my business, Bec. I can’t tell you what to do. I’m sure the circumstances are different.” There seemed nothing else to say to that, so I just nodded back. She gave me a little peace-offering smile, which shamed me so much I blurted out, “I think it’s ending anyway.” Maybe she’d forgotten that I’d already said that, weeks ago.

“Well,” she said, “everyone has their breaking point.”

Maybe if I had been there when Evan came to get his things, I would have felt the finality of it. But he had been around less and less anyway, so to me the house without him seemed expectant, as though he just stepped out for a haircut. His side of the closet wasn’t empty, and I glanced through the clothes, guiltily, one day while Kate was in the bathroom. She’d had a bout of constipation and was hoping it was almost over. At moments like this, when I had some privacy in their house, it was so hard not to rifle through their bedroom and look for clues to what had happened. He had left his heavy winter clothes in the closet, a few densely knit sweaters and an overcoat. Maybe he didn’t plan to be gone all winter. I closed the closet door silently.

I wanted to go through their bedside drawers and see if there were videos or erotic books, or if they were just empty pine boards. I wanted to look for a letter that explained the details. I wanted to know how long it had all been going on. Had he asked her permission before the first time? Or had she somehow found out, or he confessed, and then they reached a short-lived agreement? How did she know he was having an affair and not just brief encounters? He must have let it slip somehow, I decided.

I was trying to be supportive, but I couldn’t suppress the feeling that what he was doing wasn’t as bad as she thought. It was and it wasn’t—it sounded terrible, but what if he had just never said a word about it? Evan’s life, I rationalized, had taken a big turn with her illness too, and for the most part I never saw him complain. And I liked him. Or at least I remembered liking him—I hadn’t seen him in weeks. I knew in his position I might have done the same, pretty much already had, and I wanted to defend it somehow. But then I remembered Kate saying simply,
Can’t he wait
? and it didn’t seem so much to ask.

I turned away from the nightstand and looked around at the photos that were still on the shelves: Kate, Evan, Lisa, and a dark-haired man with a beard, somewhere in Italy holding flutes of straw-colored wine; Kate with her arm thrown around an old friend from college, whose head was tilted, and mouth in midsentence. The photo of their wedding, however, which had showed her in a long, slim, blue column of a dress because she disliked white, and Evan in a charcoal suit, was gone. I peered behind the other frames for one turned facedown but found
nothing. Maybe Evan had taken it with him. He probably had set it near the television in his new hotel room, something to comfort him a little, perhaps. I pictured him in a hotel bar, perched on a vinyl stool cushion, sipping at a half-inch of whisky.

Kate called to me from the bathroom and I went to get her, glancing around to be sure I’d moved it all back. The bed was slightly rumpled from the bad job I’d done of making it when I got Kate up that morning, and I thought of them, Kate and Evan, sitting up beneath the covers on the last night he’d been there, watching each other.

LIAM ARRIVED A FEW
minutes early on a Thursday two weeks before school was to begin. I greeted him at the door, still wearing the shorts and T-shirt I’d slept in. He kissed me as he came in, looked over my outfit, and then glanced around the apartment. “Is Jill here?” he asked.

“You know she always leaves,” I reminded him. He made a sorrowful face, which for some reason grated on me. Jill’s discomfort wasn’t new; it was time to stop reacting to it as though he was pained each time he confronted it. By now I found it difficult to imagine that Jill had originally introduced us. Once, she’d been running late, and was still putting on her makeup when he’d arrived. She went into her room when the doorbell rang and shut the door. A few minutes later, from my bed, where we lay without touching or speaking as we waited for the house to empty, we heard the front door open and close, a car start on the street.

We closed my bedroom door after us, a habit just in case Jill arrived early.

Later, I pulled my T-shirt back on and drew the sheet up to my waist. Liam settled himself against the pillow, crossing his ankles, as if all he’d ever come here for was conversation. He looked so relaxed and at home that I found myself blurting, “Kate kicked Evan out,” just to jolt him.

It worked. Liam’s eyebrows rose sharply, and he sat up straighter, crossing his legs and settling himself into a posture that looked a lot more attentive. I shouldn’t have used Kate for effect that way, but it was so satisfying to catch him off guard. When was the last time I’d
managed to do that? By necessity we had worked out this routine, and now I felt its disadvantages. I was always here, waiting for him. On our next day, I decided then, I’d stand him up, or at least be late. Just something to needle him, so he wouldn’t look so comfy in my house.

“How can she?” he said. “Doesn’t she need him? Or someone?”

I’d been worrying about that myself, because guess who would be filling in for the errant husband? Instead of admitting that part of it I stared into my mug of tea and said, “I’ll take on some more hours for now. She’ll hire another caregiver too.”

He nodded slowly, and I felt his gaze on me.

“Did she tell you what happened?”

“A bunch of stuff,” I muttered, suddenly unwilling to give him details, realizing I should have kept it to myself. This had nothing to do with him. “Sex. Other things.”

“Ah. I guess that’s not too surprising,” he mused. He reached over and took my mug from me and sipped from it, then handed it back. I set it on the rug.

“I guess not,” I told him. There had to be things I didn’t know, and though I sympathized with Evan, my first loyalty was invariably to Kate. For a while, back when I first started at the job, I’d really liked him more, but somewhere along the line he seemed to have displaced himself, slipping from the room while I was busy with Kate, and it took me some time to recognize the shift. Kate was getting the short end of a lot of sticks: She was the one with the disease; she was the one who couldn’t physically get up and just go fuck someone else, who, even her family seemed to believe, should take what she could get. It seemed to add insult to injury.

“Was he . . . indiscreet?” Liam asked. His voice was casual. “Did you know?”

I shook my head. “Not really. And she knew, so I don’t know how much discretion was involved. But I never ran into him on State Street with a redhead in a garter belt, if that’s what you mean. Maybe he just sneaked over to some girl’s house every Thursday.”

There was a long silence.

“Do you want me to stop coming over?” he asked.

Though I’d goaded him into asking, actually hearing the suggestion—in a voice that was horribly calm—frightened me.

“Of course not,” I backtracked. “I’m just worried.” I stretched out next to him, hooking a leg over his.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he said finally. “I hope it works out. I do think you have to cut him some slack.”

“I am,” I said. He craned his neck to look at me where my head was tucked beneath his chin, and I shook my head and went on. “Why do you just assume you know my reaction to it? Anyway, what does it matter what I think? If he wants to sleep with someone, that’s none of my business. Maybe he’s crazy about her.”

I waited for him to respond. My head was resting on his chest, rising and falling as he breathed. He smelled of lime-scented deodorant and the slightly ferrous scent of warm skin. Go ahead, I thought, afraid to look at him, give me all the good reasons. But he didn’t enumerate my sexy virtues, my mistress’s tactics that drew him disastrously back to me every time.

“Or,” I said, “maybe he thinks he gets a free pass on that particular vow.”

Liam looked me over, forced a laugh, and said, “You sound like Rush Limbaugh.”

“Well, you sound like some boys-will-be-boys . . .
excuser
.”

“ ‘Excuser’?”

“Apologist.” Goddamn it. You could never just forget a word with an English professor. “You know what I mean.”

If I were watching from above, I realized, I’d have seen my leg hooked hopefully around his knees as though I might go in for a tackle—I wore unsexy clothes, but I’d shaved, moisturized, and put on matching underwear—and a hand clutching him around the ribs. Liam stirred, sitting up, and looked around for his clothes. They were on the floor by the bedroom door.

“Don’t go away angry,” I said.

He reached for his water glass and drank, giving me a look over the glass. “Oh good,” he said, “the passive-aggressive part of the encounter.”

“I’m not passive-aggressive. I’m trying to be honest.”

“Fine. You’re honest,” Liam said. He glanced at his watch. “And I’m out of time.”

“Oh yes,” I said. “The glancing-at-the-watch portion of the afternoon.”

He had put on his jeans and now he stopped, the zipper still undone and the flaps hanging down over his hip bones. His boxer shorts were bunched up above the waistband.

He said, “Why are we doing this now? How come we never have a good time anymore without you poisoning the water?”

“I don’t,” I said, startled. I’d forgotten that he noticed if I was being snippy. I was too busy thinking about how I felt.

He put his shirt on and looked me in the eye as he buttoned it.

“Yes, you do,” he said. “In the past couple weeks I notice you chipping away every time I come over.”

“Please,” I said. “I let a little reality creep in and you’re all aflutter.”

“Right. Last week I was fifteen minutes late and you practically started calling me names.”

I sighed and stared at the ceiling. “Everything was fine till you started telling me your vacation plans.”

“I thought you’d want to know I’d be out of town. Would you prefer I just disappear for two weeks?”

I let that float out there and didn’t answer. I just wanted to punish him a little right then. I would have preferred to be dressed at that moment, but I stayed where I was, my legs crossed at the ankles. “You know, there’s something very disconcerting about a guy who can compartmentalize like you can.”

“Compartmentalize,” he repeated flatly.

“Yup.” I set down my glass and climbed up on my knees. He was sitting on the edge of the bed tying his shoes, and he stopped and stared at the laces. For a second, out of the habit of being near him, I wanted to touch his hair, which had grown down over his collar in the months that I had known him. It had gotten less curly as it grew, rumpled into waves.

“It’s not even all that tough on you to have this little double life, is it?” I asked.

“Believe me,” he said, “it’s getting tougher.”