Don't I Know You? (9 page)

That night he wore a beige dress shirt with French cuffs and cuff links with a crest that featured crossed swords. His pants were dark brown and speckled with small stains. He'd saved money on his shoes. He gesticulated so dramatically with his right hand that it took Lily a moment to realize that he was missing the index finger from his left.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, surprising herself by reaching out and touching the wrinkled nub of the joint.

He didn't pull away. He took her finger and pressed it gently but firmly around the place where his finger should've been. The topographical maps of elementary school came back to her.

“The price I paid for the rudeness of pointing,” he said.

She had no idea what he could mean.

He told her about the orphanage in Russia where he had been raised after his parents died, murdered by robbers when he was six. “You can't imagine,” he said, waving his good hand. “Think worse than Dickens,” he said.

“Gogol,” she said, pulling the name from the World Literature class she'd taken at school.

“On your nose,” he said, putting a finger to her nose, and she felt the first warmth of getting something right with him.

He was nothing like she was but familiar nonetheless. She wouldn't have been surprised to learn that even in her neighborhood, where you had to walk for blocks before seeing a white person, he'd watched her play her childhood games on her stoop from his across the street.

Later, he'd revealed that he'd seen her at the bar before, and
she'd understood why he'd seemed so familiar, and she'd felt a little silly and told herself, as she often did, to remember that there were usually logical explanations for all those illogical feelings that wouldn't quite be placed.

“I watched you many times,” he told her. “Always so sad, so pinched.” He made a fist and held it over his heart. “I think in my head, such a beautiful girl.”

And then she didn't feel silly. Hearing him describe her sadness made her think again that
he
was sad. She saw it as the still surface of a frozen lake, and she wanted to put on the ice skates she hadn't worn since her lessons as a child and pirouette through its hardness.

He'd worked his way through Columbia undergrad as a dishwasher in the dining halls, and had continued there for one semester of business school before losing patience with the pace. He'd made investors out of his classmates and professors, selling them on the opportunity of state-sponsored middle-income co-ops and tax-abatement programs. His first building was a seven-story apartment house in Brooklyn Heights that he sold three years after buying it for five times what he'd paid. “The rest,” he'd said, sweeping his arm around as if he now owned all that she could see, “is history.”

She was charmed by his use of clichés. She liked that he'd liked the bar for the same reasons she had. It seemed friendly without being pretentious. He seemed as different from Matthew as possible, yet there was something familiar about the feelings the two men inspired in her, and that, she decided, was a good thing. So when he asked her if he could walk her home, she said yes, as if saying yes were something she did all the time.

They walked down Broadway to 107th. They veered west and walked down West End to 102nd. They crossed West End. She could see her building halfway down the block. She said, “You don't have to walk me all the way,” and he looked at her and threw his head back, laughing his big laugh. “You kill me,” he said.

He put his arm around her and squeezed her to his side. She imagined herself as Eve in reverse. A woman burrowing her way between Adam's ribs, nestling there as if returning home.

S
he had to admit now that it embarrassed her to have to say that she and her fiancé had met at a bar. His friends liked to tease her about it, raising their eyebrows and making their animal sounds. Her parents adored him, thrilled that he'd proposed after such a short time, though in the four months he'd been with her, he'd probably said no more than fifty words to them. It was as if they'd convinced him that they didn't speak English. She could tell they adored him by how they talked about him in the third person. “Look. He seems tired.” “Look. He's watching TV.” “Look. He's eating.” Even when they spoke English, he acted as if they weren't.

She hid the new purchases in the back of what would be her study closet. Nikolai never went in there. He'd already encouraged her to use the room as a study. “You spend so much time over here, you might as well get going on making it your place,” he'd said, passing her his credit card.

She knew that her apartment was a place he only liked to visit. “Lily's Strange and Wondrous World,” he called it. He said her ability to pull together thrift store purchases made the Park Av
enue ladies feel generic in terms of their style sense. It seemed to her that the Park Avenue ladies felt about her something very different from the feelings he described.

In February, she would be a Park Avenue lady. He was not a Park Avenue man, but wore the accessories as if they'd been tailored for him.

He'd tried to persuade her to leave her job in the middle of the year. He said it wasn't all that different from leaving at the end. “You're easily replaced,” he said, not meaning to be insulting. She'd held her ground, and as the wedding grew closer, she was glad. Her days at school were like a sturdy handrail on a steep and unfamiliar set of stairs.

She went to the kitchen to make tea, to loosen the grip seeing Matthew had placed around her chest, to pass the hours before Nikolai would be home, and with him the safety he offered. When she heard his key in the door, the tightness would seep away, and she would close her eyes so they could open to the sight of him walking to her. She hadn't known that feelings like this would be part of a life like hers.

A high school English teacher had made them all write ten-year predictions for themselves before they graduated. Last spring, at the tenth reunion, the teacher had spread them all out. Lily hadn't gone, and when she'd heard about the predictions from the one friend who hadn't let her quietly slip away, she'd been reassured about her own wisdom. The teacher had mailed Lily's predictions to her with a note that said, “Thought you might want these.”

Lily had predicted that she would have gone to graduate school in early childhood development, that she'd be teaching at the job
she'd had since finishing graduate school. That she'd be unmarried, without children.

Her accuracy had pleased her. It was a good and useful trait—accurate knowledge of oneself. Her relationship with Matthew had been a bump on her life's road, and when thought of that way, as predictable as any other part of her life, it was a source of reassurance rather than anxiety.

The appearance of Nikolai in her life had made her feel as if she had been set down on a rolling sea and told to stand up straight. For a month or two, she'd resisted, but then he had made love to her, and then he had proposed, and instead of trying to stand, she'd let herself float, feeling the delicious lick of waves, imagining a wholly different kind of life. A wholly different kind of woman to inhabit that life.

“I make you a better person,” Nikolai liked to whisper during their lovemaking.

Sometimes, just that could bring her to the edge of orgasm.

The service doorbell rang.

She made her way through the kitchen and checked the peephole. A small woman, brown-skinned, thick black hair slicked and twisted into impossible shapes. Multiple hoops hanging from multiple ear piercings. Gold-plated necklaces of various lengths hanging as a shield across the small woman's chest. The woman had no coat. Her dress was wool, tight-fitting. She was wearing black stockings and the wrong kind of shoes. Lily recognized that she was already beginning to think of herself as better than women like this.

She blushed and felt like an impostor. Since Nikolai's proposal, this sensation washed over her occasionally. She hadn't told him,
though it was a sensation she knew he'd find familiar. She had once overheard him answer a friend's “How's it going?” with, “You make it through the day without anyone finding out you are a fraud.” He had shrugged and stuck out his lower lip. “It's a life.”

She collected herself, straightened her sweater, put her house shoes on. I belong, she thought. Right here, opening this door.

“Yes?” she asked, trying to seem kind and curious, but not too curious.

The woman took Lily in, as if checking that she had the right apartment.

“Perhaps you're looking for my fiancé,” Lily said. “He's not back from work yet.”

The woman shook her head. “I know who he is. I'm looking for you.”

Under different circumstances, Lily would've admired her no-nonsense quality. They stood there.

Lily stepped back. “I'm sorry. Come in. Please.” She peered at the woman's necklaces. One of them said
Tina
in gold script. “I'm Lily Chin,” she said, offering a hand. “And you are…” She leaned forward, squinting a little, hating herself as she did it. “Tina?”

Tina shook Lily's hand. She smelled a little of a bakery. “Tina Hernandez,” she said.

She didn't want anything to drink. She didn't glance around the apartment. She sat on the edge of the black leather armchair in the living room, her toes turned in, her hands over her knees.

“So,” she said. “You don't know me from nobody, so if I told you not to marry Nikolai you wouldn't listen, right?” She looked at Lily. “You look good,” she said.

“Thank you,” Lily answered, feeling as if anything could happen. Perhaps part of this new life would be strange visits from strange women.

“So Nikolai's your first boyfriend, right?”

Lily took a breath. “I don't mean to be rude, but who are you?” she asked. “How did you get into the building unannounced?”

Tina glanced at her watch, an oversized yellow happy face on a white plastic band that was too big for her wrist. “No one's ever at the service entrance,” she said. “He'll be home soon,” she added.

Lily waited.

“How do you know that?” she finally asked. Tina didn't answer. Lily reached up and turned off the light.

Tina nodded in the gloom, as if congratulating her on a wise choice.

“Last spring and into this fall, we were together, him and me,” she said. “You know:
together
. I'm sorry,” she added.

She sat back as if the rest was up to Lily.

This fall, Lily and Nikolai had met. They'd gone to the beach. They'd walked through the park. They'd eaten at the hot dog stand. Was she going to spend her life hearing of her lovers' betrayals?

She asked rational and calm questions, and Tina answered her, and Lily imagined the answers as armor. She imagined dressing herself, piece by piece, her soft white body disappearing behind burnished metal. She would not lose Nikolai as she had lost Matthew.

And then she said, “What is it that you want me to do with this information?”

Tina said, “You can't marry him.”

Lily laughed, a short, high bark. She apologized. “Of course I can,” she said.

Tina said, “There's something about him. You can't.”

Lily looked at her levelly.

“I know, it sounds loco,” Tina said. “I can't explain it really. There're things I noticed. Please,” she said. “Please.”

Lily didn't respond well to this kind of neediness. “Don't be ridiculous,” she said. “Things you've noticed?”

“He told me he went to Columbia, but he didn't. He gave my girls notes to give to me.”

“Girls?” Lily asked.

Tina looked ashamed and proud. “Two,” she said. “Four and a half and two.”

“And you have a husband as well?” Lily asked.

“Yes,” Tina said, her eyes large and sad. “I'm not perfect,” she said, “but that doesn't make me wrong about Nick. We went away for a weekend. Two nights it was supposed to be. In the middle of the first night, I wake up and he's gone. Just gone. I had to get a bus home.” She was speaking fast.

Lily had had enough of this. “Maybe he didn't want to be with you anymore,” she said.

Tina looked around as if she might find some help in the room. “It's not so much the things he's done as a feeling I have,” she said. “I'm good at feelings.”

“I'm sure you are,” Lily said, standing.

Tina remained sitting. “Please,” she said. “Please.”

Desperation hung around her, but it was desperation that had nothing to do with Lily, so Lily showed her to the front door and asked her not to contact her again. Tina was still talking as she
walked out into the hall. She was still talking when Lily closed the door and swam back to the life she was beginning to feel she deserved.

T
hey made love. They slept. Lily was not someone who believed in insomnia. It was impractical. But here she was at four in the morning, awake.

Nikolai was on his back, his breathing deep and soft. She rolled onto her side, getting close to his profile. At her movement, he reached a hand out and stroked the curve of her hip. She knew he was not awake. He could love her in his sleep. Sometimes he talked to her, and it was only the blankness of his face in the morning that made her understand that he had been sleeping through the entire conversation.

He had never said anything suspicious.

She draped a leg over him and flattened her hand against his sternum. “Nikolai,” she whispered. She wondered how quiet she could be and still rouse him. How well was he listening for her in his sleep? “Nikolai,” she said again, even softer.

“My treasure,” he said, rolling over, his eyes still closed.

“I need to talk with you,” she said.

“Okeydokey,” he said. He opened his eyes, rubbed them like a toddler, and offered her his face, alert and attentive.