You're Not You (22 page)

AFTER AN HOUR I
thought I should knock. I got up, but then paused. If this were a crucial moment it would be the worst possible time to interrupt. I wandered around the living room instead, paged through a book of photographs: a breast, a river, the stem of a lily. An unmade bed, the sheets glowing white. A willow.

FINALLY I DECIDED IT
was time. I knocked and she said, “Okay,” like I was coming in to collect her tea tray.

I pushed her hair behind her ear again, revealing a cheek flushed pink as a geranium. I tried to keep my hands off her thighs as I reached beneath her gown. I slid a hand between her heated skin and the bed-sheets, cupped it beneath her hip, and lifted her pelvis, tugging the butterfly down by its strap. Then I took it into the bathroom, ran it under warm water, and dried it off. I put it back in its box in the nightstand drawer and turned Kate over to her back so her neck wouldn’t cramp from being turned to one side. I didn’t say anything, and she kept her eyes closed the whole time.

I
WAS ON MY
way to hand in a paper, the first big assignment of the spring semester, when I saw Liam again. I was looking through my paper—a study on the representations of demons in medieval painting—as I headed up Bascom, thinking it was slight but that at least it was on time, when Liam came jogging up next to me and touched my arm. I wasn’t even startled. I’d been waiting for this for months. I hadn’t seen him since October. It was February now.

He was wearing a jacket I’d never seen before. His hair seemed redder, as though the winter sun had intensified it.

“Hey, Bec,” he said. We stopped on the hill and stood there awkwardly for a moment. He took off his headphones and then he kissed my cheek. Just a friendly, public, my-wife-knows-you kind of kiss, but—and here it struck me so clearly I didn’t know how I had managed to avoid thinking about it for so long—no one had touched me in months, and the warmth of his mouth made me close my eyes a moment, exhale without meaning to. I was going to have to do something soon. Maybe I needed a butterfly of my own.

“Hey,” I said. “How’re you doing?”

He grinned. “Okay. I’m glad I saw you. I was just thinking about you a little while ago.”

“Oh, yeah? What about me?” I wanted to hear how someone’s perfume reminded him of me, or maybe how he’d been missing me a lot. I’d never called him back, but I’d saved the answering machine tape.

“Just how you were. Curious.”

With him standing right there my resolve was thin. His hair was
shaggy, his eyes greener than I remembered. I bet if I asked him he would come home with me, but standing out here I felt young and callow, bumbling. Where had all the confidence gone?

“I’m fine. I’m the same as I ever was.”

“Okay.” He looked skeptical, then seemed to take a breath and said in a rush, “Listen. I miss you. I think I was an ass to you.”

I didn’t see how I could answer that except to agree that I missed him too, and I didn’t want to admit it. Instead I said, “Did you ever tell her?”

“Maybe someday.” He looked off down the hill. “Things are a little precarious right now. I figure if I feel like shit, then that’s my problem. I don’t get to make myself feel better by foisting it off on her.” He paused, and I kept watching him. Finally he admitted, “I don’t want to tell her, really. I just don’t want to go through all that.”

He ran a hand through his hair. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, stuck his hands in his pockets. I never noticed before how constantly he moved. He switched his briefcase to the other hand.

“Listen,” I said. Who knew if I would run into him again? If I had anything to ask him, I knew, now was the moment. I lowered my voice as a group of girls in knit caps and gloves went by, cackling. “Why me? Or could it have been anyone, anyone pretty?”

“Of course not,” he said. “You because you’re funny and smart and by the way you never seemed to realize how smart you were. Are.” We started walking again. “And I guess it might not have happened if Alison and I weren’t going through a rough patch. But that’s no reflection on you.”

“You were going through a rough patch?” Why did it hurt me to know that? Was he supposed to have told me all about it?

“Yeah. With the move to Madison and this whole switch with her working and me in school . . . it’s been different.” He looked at me and then stopped, taking my arm. “Bec, don’t look that way. I couldn’t have talked to you about it. It wasn’t your problem.”

“Oh, no,” I agreed, keeping a tremor out of my voice. It was so sordid. He should have just gone to a strip club. “The whole thing barely seems to have anything to do with me when you put it like that.”

I’D BEEN DRIVING PAST
a store called A Woman’s Touch for months, but I finally decided to stop in and browse. For a minute after I parked I sat in my car and stared at the noodle shop next to it. I was debating whether I needed to detach the removable face from my new CD player if I wouldn’t be gone long. Kate had given me a slightly exorbitant Christmas bonus, and after weeks of dithering I’d bought a better stereo than my car really deserved. It gleamed in its slot, all black surfaces and green lights shining softly, so sleek and out of place that I had had the car detailed just to make it seem more at home. I’d been driving the long way to and from Kate’s house just for the pleasure of listening to my CDs. I was supposed to detach the face every time, leaving behind a blank rectangle of black plastic and a blinking red light marked security system. This was a lie, but what thief would bother to test it? Finally I took the face off, put it in my bag, and got out of my car.

I’d assumed I’d stroll right in without hesitating, but as I went past the noodle place and record store, it was all I could do not to glance around to see who was watching. It was embarrassing to be embarrassed; I’d thought I was pretty straightforward. Mistress of my own erotic potential and such. But the openness of it was daunting, the way anyone could look you over and ponder what it was you needed, what you’d do with your purchases. I didn’t mind, say, Liam knowing things like that about me, but I could have done without the tacit understanding of the record store clerk who was smoking a cigarette out front. I walked past him without meeting his eyes, and as I went in I turned my back to the door, relieved there were no glass windows open to the sidewalk.

Inside, there was music playing softly, and two women were looking at a silk teddy on a hanger. One woman lifted the silk and rubbed the fabric between her fingers. She grinned at the other woman, who laughed. I smiled nervously at the woman behind the counter, who was plump and blond, in a flowing skirt and muslin blouse. She looked like a waitress in an organic restaurant, which was somehow reassuring.

Along one wall were books and videos, vibrators and dildos and harnesses along the other. I glanced over my shoulder: The other two women were now examining a package of body paints. Then I faced the
vibrators, glad to turn my back on the rest of the quiet store, and set about scrutinizing them as though I had some idea what I was doing. The store was so hushed that I could hear the murmur of the two women as they decided on their purchases. I thought I ought to be acting like a discerning customer, so I picked up a hot-pink vibrator with a long shaft. A pink plastic bunny head was attached to the same base as the shaft, the bunny’s nose facing inward toward the plastic column, like an opposable thumb.

I turned it on. A whirring sound filled the store as the shaft rotated like a joystick and the bunny’s head pattered back and forth, as loud as a woodpecker. I almost dropped it. The whole apparatus seemed extremely complicated. I turned it off, forcing myself not to look over my shoulder.

I kept browsing, sticking to the simple items now. Finally I settled on a Japanese-made purple wand, buying a tube of Silk Glide to go with it after the clerk said, “You’ll want lubrication,” and, to demonstrate, made me run my finger along the sticky rubber of the vibrator. As I watched her wrap the box in tissue paper, sealing it with a pink sticker bearing the name of the store, I began to feel much, much better. What had I been embarrassed about? No one else was self-conscious. This was going to be fantastic. Something new, something exciting, something whenever I wanted it. I took a catalog with me and drove home with the heat blasting, tapping the steering wheel in time with the radio, and retired to my saffron-yellow room.

E
VAN MOVED BACK INTO
their old house right after Kate moved out. “I know I’ve forgotten something,” Kate warned me, and I said it didn’t really matter if she had. I could make the trip over for anything she needed.

But she was more comfortable seeing him than I was, as it turned out. I was there one evening, cleaning her feeding tube after dinner, when the doorbell rang. The look on Kate’s face told me right off who it was. She turned her head toward the doorbell, her lips opening slightly. Her face took on a bit of that stoniness it sometimes did when Evan’s name came up, but there was something else too. Curiosity?

When I opened the door Evan had leaned toward me for a second, as if to kiss me on the cheek, but I turned around fast and called over my shoulder for him to follow me. He was flushed from the cold, snow in his hair, a blue scarf wrapped around his neck. I saw Kate eye it, and thought Cynthia had probably bought it for him. You never see a man buy his own scarf. I was dying to see this woman, to see if she really was, as Lisa had said, very much like Kate. What did that mean—well dressed, slender, a reader of books? Every now and again I thought I saw Evan downtown when Jill and I met up with people, but only once had it really been him. I saw him going into a restaurant just behind someone else. He’d been holding the door, his hand on the person’s waist. It had to be Cynthia. There’d been a glimpse of gleaming dark hair, a black leather coat.

I looked him over as he took off his coat. He had gained weight. I took a perverse satisfaction in the flesh beneath his chin, the slight roundness of his sweatered belly.

He looked around for a place to hang his coat. After a good long minute I took it from him.

“I like your hair, Bec,” he said. I’d splurged at Kate’s salon and had it cut to shoulder length and shaped around my face.

“Thanks,” I said. I pushed it behind my ears.

He looked behind me. Kate had come in. “Hi. You look beautiful,” he said to her. “Really lovely.”

She glanced down at her lap and said, “Hi. Well, let’s go to the study.” Evan didn’t move. There was a long, uncomfortable stillness, and finally he broke it, his cheeks mottled, by looking my way. He didn’t understand her, I realized, and out of fury I just didn’t answer. Kate said it again, and he turned to watch her. She moved her head in the direction of the study, and this time he got it.

“Do you need me?” I asked. Kate smiled and shook her head. He saw her do that and then said, “Thank you, Bec, no.” He shut the study door behind him.

TO WATCH EVAN IN
her new house, seeing their things in this place, was enough to make me pity him. He kept casting startled glances around and recovering himself, reaching out to pick up a knickknack before realizing how presumptuous that would be. He had the tentative air and the diffident, slightly off-balance posture of a man who ought to be carrying a suitcase. I could have sworn he would move right in if Kate let him.

They had worked out a formal separation but nothing further, and Lisa still maintained he would never have left in the first place if Kate had stuck with the counseling. I hadn’t realized they’d spent as much time in counseling as apparently they had, some of it before I even met them. But Kate had given up after several months, saying,
We weren’t getting anywhere. I just don’t have time for this
. And when he came over I saw that he still looked at her the same way, and as she moved ahead of him I’d seen him reach toward her shoulder, in the unthinking way you lay a hand on someone’s neck, smooth their hair behind them, that proprietary way you pretend the other body is yours. His hand swung out toward her, paused, and then he drew it back.