Ms. Taken Identity (24 page)

“Why do you keep hanging out here?” she growls, hands on her hips.

A week to prepare for it and I can’t find my tongue. I shrug. “I just want to talk with her,” I say weakly.

“She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“Why not?”

She rolls her eyes disgustedly. “What do you mean, ‘why not?’ How stupid are you.
Jason
. She hates you.”

“Did she say that?”

“She didn’t have to. I know her. She hates you.” She glares at me. “We all do.” Her eye catches something on the table. “What’s
in the bag?”

“What? Oh, Noni’s”.

“Duh. I can see it’s Noni’s. What did you get?”

I look inside. “Brownies, a cinnamon roll. So she didn’t say she hates me, she just doesn’t want to talk to me?”

“Sounds familiar.”

I take a breath. “Look, Rosie. I know you don’t like me right now. I get it. But I need your help. I need you to convince
her to talk with me, so I can explain some things.”

She snorts. “And why would I want to help
you
?

“Because I’m an ass. And I want to tell her that. And that I love her.”

She grits her teeth and balls her hands into fists, as if I’ve given the only possible answer that would force her to grant
my request. And she hates that.

“Rosie, listen. If she doesn’t like what she hears and never wants to see me again, I’ll accept it. I’ll stop hanging out
here, and I won’t bug anyone, and you’ll never have to see me again.”

She narrows her eyes. “Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Fine. I’ll talk to her.” She starts to leave, then clomps back to my table. “Give me those,” she says, snatching the Noni’s
bag. She charges out and across the street, and returns a few minutes later.

“All right, buster. She’ll talk. Her apartment, in an hour. Me, I would’ve chosen someplace neutral, like a bridge, so I could
throw you off. But that’s her business. But just so you know: I’m on standby. And I’m warning you: if you try anything crazy,
I’ll be there to kick your ass.”

So, finally, a chance for a one-on-one. And just like that my stomach drops, my blood goes cold, my skin gets clammy. A one-on-one
with Marie. As Mitch. Jesus. Can’t I just send her another pie from North Carolina?

I’m ready for just about anything when I get to her apartment. Angry Marie. Bitter Marie. Detached and apathetic Marie. Vindictive
Marie. Maybe she already has a guy over and they’re having sex right now, and she wants me to walk in and see what I won’t
be getting anymore, and
that’s
why she chose her apartment. Maybe she’s gathered up everything I sent her this week and plans to torch it in front of my
eyes, and laugh. Or maybe she’s not there at all. Ha! Talk about the ultimate way to get a message across: invite me over,
then don’t bother sticking around. But I knock on the door, and she’s there, and she lets me right in.

The place looks pretty much the same as it did last Friday when I picked her up for our trip to the mall. No well-endowed
naked strangers, no gifts heaped in a pile next to a gasoline can. Just Marie in jeans and a sweatshirt. And maybe she looks
a little tired and strung out, but overall, she looks good.

We don’t kiss or hug.

“Drink?” she asks.

“Water would be great.”

She returns from the kitchen with a glass for me and something with a straw for her. She settles on the sofa, I take a chair
across from her, and for a long time we just look at each other. In fact, we do this for such a long time that I realize this
is an incarnation of Marie that I hadn’t anticipated: Stare Marie. Finally I look away, like I have important matters to tend
to in the room, such as counting the colored glass bottles on the shelf, or making sure the Latin names on her botanical prints
are correctly spelled, when all I’m really doing is trying to keep track out of the corner of my eye whether she’s still staring
at me—which she is—and trying to figure out if this is some kind of passive-aggressive evil eye interrogator thing, her attempt
to get me to own up to a whole litany of criminal misdeeds. It’s starting to work, because I’m beginning to sweat and think
I may have to tell her about the time I was five and swiped a Snickers bar from Walgreens, or when I cheated on a geometry
test freshman year, or god help me, I may just have to blurt it all out, that I went to Chicago and slept with Katharine;
and that’s the thought I’m trying to beat down when, unbidden—
horribly!
—Katharine Longwell’s breasts pop into mind, her naked, glistening, and not-so-fake-as-it-turns-out breasts, and I realize
I am sitting in a car with no brakes, and I’m about to go off the cliff.

“What are you thinking about?” she finally asks.

“Me? Nothing. Bunnies. The weather.”

“I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. I’m sitting here thinking that we’ve baked cookies together and danced together, and taken
a bath, and had sex I don’t know how many times, and I’ve told you I love you, and you’ve done the same, and I can’t even
get myself to say your name. Your
real
one. So I keep saying it in my head, trying to get the face to match the name. ‘Mitch Samuel. Mitch Samuel.’”

“That’s me,” I want to say, like we’re taking roll. I don’t.

“That other name, ‘Jason Gallagher,’ where’d that come from?”

“My middle name, plus my mom’s maiden name. It’s Irish.”

“Bradley didn’t recognize it. Of course, that’s probably why you chose it.”

Exactly, I nod, a little proud of my cunning. Then I stop.

“And you teach at the university, and you write.”

“And I’m also working on my PhD.
The Canterbury Tales
. Chaucer. English poet from the fourteenth century. ‘Father of the English—’”

“I got it. I know who he is.”

“Sorry.”

She takes a thoughtful sip from her drink and places it deliberately back on the table. She smoothes some wrinkles from the
sleeves of her sweatshirt. “So tell me… Mitch.” The name sticks on her tongue an extra second. “Why’d you do it?”

“Go to the studio?”

“No. Bradley already told me about the book, and doing research, and needing to be around a bunch of people who get worked
up over the label on their purse. Which I want to discuss later. I’m talking about the phony identity. Jason. Why’d you do
that?”

I think about Snoop Dogg and Bono and Jon Stewart, and I’d like to explain the idea of a stage name and tell her that it’s
really not that uncommon. But I know better. “Fear,” I say. “I hate dancing, or at least I did, and I thought I was terrible
at it, and I really couldn’t stomach the idea of putting myself out there on display. So I made up Jason to take the heat
off Mitch. Besides, I figured I’d only be playing Jason for a day or two, just long enough to get what I needed at the studio
and be gone.”

“But when you realized it wouldn’t be so quick. Then what?”

“Then it got hard. I was having so much fun, dancing, getting to know Rosie and Steve and Jennifer and Fran and the whole
crew. And the next thing I know, I’m past the point where I can just say, ‘Hey, guys, my name’s not really Jason, and by the
way, I’ve been spying on you.’ I decided it was better just to keep quiet as Mitch and let Jason do all the talking.”

“Even to
me
? That didn’t bother you?”

“Of course it did. But to be honest, Marie, I just saw you as one of the group. The last thing on my mind was starting anything
with you.”

She gives me a withering look. “And why’s that? Because I’m a
hairstylist
?”

I hate the way she sneers it, because it’s exactly the way I would’ve sneered it before I got to know her. “The first couple
lessons, sure, maybe that’s what I was thinking. What could we possibly have in common? But beyond that,
way
beyond that, you were Bradley’s sister. That was the built-in safeguard. You were off-limits. Of course nothing could happen.
No way anything could happen. Then it happened.”

“As in, we started sleeping together.”

“No. Before that. It was the night we went to the winery, and we were standing on that hill, and I looked at you and realized
that I didn’t want to be without you. Without trying, without wanting it to happen, I was falling in love with you, Marie.
I
had
fallen in love with you. And I couldn’t risk losing you.”

Her face softens and I can tell she’s gone back to that night, to the moonlight, to the kiss, and even in a sweatshirt and
ponytail, she looks as beautiful as she did that night, and I want to kiss her right now. But I can’t. And I can’t believe
it’s come to this, that I’m sitting on her sofa, with her, as I’ve done hundreds of times, and I’m afraid to touch her or
kiss her, not knowing if this is the last time I’ll ever be sitting on this sofa. But I can’t think that way.

“Did you like the pie?” I ask brightly.

She nods, grimly. “I did. And the flowers and clutch and bracelet. All very nice. But you can’t just buy me things and throw
them my way and expect all the bad stuff to just go away. Do you get that, Mitch? Do you understand that’s not the way this
works?

“God, Marie, yes. I get it. I swear. I didn’t send all those things to try to buy you back. You wouldn’t talk to me. It was
the only way I could get anything to you, to let you know how sorry I was. How sorry I
am
. I was desperate.” I feel slivers of that same desperation creeping up my spine right now. “Look, I even did something that
didn’t cost a dime. I made a list of all the things I promise to do, or not do, if you’ll just give me another chance.”

That bit of news catches her off guard. “You made… a list?”

I nod. “Ten items. Sort of like a Ten Commandments, minus anything about the Sabbath. Or killing.”

She looks at me like I’m joking. Which I’m not. Though now I realize I should be, since her face is telling me that anyone
who would actually make such a list, and admit it,
must
be joking.

“All right, then,” she says, settling in. “Proceed.”

“Um, on second thought, I didn’t make a list.”

“You made it. Let’s hear it.”

I suppose at this point I could clam up, refuse to read it, maybe fly out in a huff, but I can’t imagine she’d be ringing
my phone off the hook begging me to come back, since I’m the one who had to beg her for this get-together in the first place.
This is my best shot. So I pull it out of my back pocket with as much of a flourish as I can muster, but what I really need
now is a couple of stone tablets, like Charlton Heston had, even parchment, instead of a folded up piece of loose-leaf

“It’s still a little rough,” I say as a disclaimer. “More in the draft stages, really.”

“Read.”

I clear my throat. “‘Marie.’” I look at her, then back at the list. “‘I promise I will never lie to you again. I promise I
will never pretend to be someone else. I promise I will never be dishonest. I promise I will love you, love you, love you.
I promise I will never take you for granted. I promise I will respect you. I promise I will always put you first. I promise
that I will always forgive you, especially if you do something odd or wacky that I don’t understand at first, but then, when
you explain it, I do.’”

She lets it all sink in for a moment. Then: “That didn’t sound like ten.”

“Oh, it is. Trust me.”

I can tell she’s still not convinced, so I hand her the list. “The ‘love you, love you, love you,’ those count as three,”
I point out.

She looks it over. “So, three to say the same thing, you won’t lie. Three to say you’ll love me, with those words. Three more
to say you’ll love me, with different words. And one to forgive me for a hypothetical wrongdoing that I’d never do, perhaps
on the off-chance that should you ever do something that stupid, which you have, I’d forgive you. Do I have it?”

“Pretty much.”

The whole thing makes her smile—me too—and for a moment it’s back to old times, Mitch and Marie, or Jason and Marie, smiling,
joking, ribbing each other, but most of all, delighted to be with each other. Then, as if she realizes the very same thing,
her look goes hard—toxic, really—and it’s back to new times.

“Do you know what a week I’ve had?” she fumes, flinging the list back at me. “Going from being in love with you to finding
out you’re not who I thought you were, crying my eyes out, hating you, wanting to rip your throat out, wanting it all just
to go away, wanting to be back with you. Do you realize what you’ve put me through?

“Sorry.”

“Sorry.
Sorry
. Fuck sorry. I hate you for putting me through this, you know that? I hate you for making me feel this way about you. Fuck
you, Mitch. Fuck you.”

I sit there and endure her fury, and it’s killing me to see her look at me that way, face red, eyes wide, furious, blazing
holes through my skin, but I deserve every ounce of it, so all I can do is sit there and absorb it and let her do what she
needs to do. Slowly, mercifully, the anger leaches out of her, like a fever, till her breathing and complexion and eyes return
to normal and she looks like Marie again—a sad, pissed, torn version—and she collapses back into the sofa, woman wronged and
hurt little girl, all at once, deflated in a sea of cushions.

“Oh, Mitch. I don’t know what to make of any of it. Maybe I get it. Maybe I understand why you’d do all this, how one thing
led to another. Maybe. But here’s what I’m left with. Not knowing if you’re Mitch or Jason, what parts were real. The bottom
line is, I don’t even know who you really are.”

I move to the edge of my chair. “But you do, Marie. Beneath all the hang-ups and stupidity, it was me, every step of the way,
getting to know you, wanting to spend time with you, falling in love with you. And yeah, if I could do it all over again,
I’d march right into that studio and say I was Mitch Samuel. But the irony is, I couldn’t have done that. Not three months
ago. I was ready to turn around and go home that first night. It took Jason Gallagher to lead me to you.”

Despite the mental gymnastics it takes to understand that one, I think she does, because she looks like she’s ready to cry.
Or hug me. Or throw the table at me. I can’t be certain.