Don't I Know You? (10 page)

She imagined what she would say. She imagined the impact on his expression.

“Something is wrong?” he asked.

What had she expected? That he would come to her new and virginal? That they would've sprung from the ground, earth's first
couple, finding each other across a wide and empty space? She understood that part of why she loved him was because of what her life had been before him. Surely the same logic applied to his feelings. Yet she had told him all about Matthew. What did it matter? What mattered was that he had come to her at all.

She touched his cheek. “Do you love me?”

His expression softened into the opposite of worry. “You crazy girl. You silly chicken.” He wound a finger next to his temple. “You are loco,” he said, pulling her to him.

She rested her head against his chest. She rose and fell with his breaths. He combed her hair with his fingers and sang her a song she didn't know in Russian.

“Silly goose,” she said. “Not chicken. Goose.”

What had Matthew ever wanted? Everything. Nothing. And all that lay between.

S
he stood in her mother's sewing room on a small stool in front of a three-panel mirror. She wore what would be her wedding dress but what right now looked like color and texture without shape. Her mother knelt at her feet, wearing her work clothes. Lily had always thought of them as peasant pajamas. Her lips held a bouquet of pins.

Lily didn't like looking at her mother's head from this angle. And she didn't like looking at her own reflection. She closed her eyes, but felt too dizzy to stay that way. She scanned the room. This had been her bedroom. Her mother had sewed in the corner of the living room by the window until Lily had gone to college. Her mother's Chinese friends had all worked in Manhattan's garment industry, riding the subway with each other and their Dominican coworkers, but Priscilla had insisted on staying at home. Lily remembered marveling at the enormity of what her mother could make in that small space. She'd spend several days hunched over indistinguishable piles of cloth, and then would rise, shaking
out a silk pantsuit, a set of Chinese bridesmaid dresses, a pleated skirt with matching collared shirt.

None of this talent had been passed on to Lily. Nothing from her father either, the bus driver with the perfect safety record and the wall full of commendations from the Transit Authority. He knew his passengers' names.

She'd tried taking Driver's Ed once. She'd been too terrified even to touch the wheel, and after several minutes the instructor had squeezed her arm, told her that driving wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and reached across to open her door and release her.

In China, her parents had been physicists.

Sometimes she felt like a character in a fairy tale, the child delivered to the childless couple, never able to fully know or be known.

When her mother had moved into Lily's old room, she'd done so as unobtrusively as possible, leaving as many of Lily's old belongings as she could. Her spelling bee ribbons and awards, her collection of tiny dollhouse food, the Collier's Encyclopedia set they'd paid for in monthly installments, her ice-skating trophies, her class pictures in matching frames that her mother had bought in bulk at the Woolworth's when Lily started kindergarten. Her science fair projects, the poster boards warping and gathering dust. Her father had raided some of them for his own puttering, so they stood there on the shelves, hints of their former selves. Trying to discern the original projects was like identifying a body from dental records.

“Why don't you get rid of all this?” Lily asked.

Her mother's mouth was still full of pins. She shrugged and kept at the hem. Lily had picked the pattern out of a Vogue pattern book. Her mother had wanted to know if Nick liked the dress. Her parents liked saying his name. They said it like they said
America
.

She felt her body warm with anger and resentment. These were impractical feelings she'd banished successfully from her day-to-day life by eliminating their cues. Now, in front of a mirror her father had jerry-rigged from three cheap mirrors that were supposed to be hanging on the backs of hollow doors, above her mother circling her on her knees, Lily was angry. Why didn't her mother do what most seamstresses did—tap her on the calf and make her do the turning? Why did she insist on crawling around like a slave?

Her father was humming in the kitchen, cooking dinner for them. Jiao-tse and something else. Shredded pork and a steamed whole sea bass. It was as if all his talents as a physicist were sublimated into cooking. He had three shelves of cookbooks and tried a different recipe every night. It was the only extravagance they allowed themselves, and Lily stood there thinking of it as pathetic.

“I'm never coming back here,” she said.

Her mother sat back on her heels and looked up at her.

“Save this stuff if you want it, but don't think you're saving it for me,” she said. She never spoke to her mother like this. She barely spoke to her at all.

Her mother was less pained than baffled. In the kitchen, her father's sounds had quieted. She could tell he was listening.

Her mother put the last pin expertly in Lily's hem. She stood
and plucked at the material around Lily's shoulders. Instantly the mass of cloth looked more like a dress.

Lily made a small growl.

Her mother looked at her. Her broad face offered nothing but care. She smoothed her gray hair, tucked a piece back into her bun, as if this gesture alone could set the world straight.

“Why you think we keep all this stuff, crazy girl?” she asked. “Not for you.” She thumped her chest with her small, wide hand. “We love you,” she said, as if speaking to a deaf child. She tugged expertly at the sleeves of Lily's dress. “You so much smart girl and not know this?”

Lily felt the anger receding, but couldn't figure out how to back out of the situation gracefully. “Well, you should stop thinking about me so much,” she said. “You're supposed to think about each other.”

Her mother put a hand to her forehead. “
Ai ya
,” she exclaimed, exasperated. “I love him; he love me; we love you. It
why
we love you,” she said, enunciating slowly, and Lily had a glimpse of her mother, the physicist, laying out to dimwitted students how the world works.

“Ask Nick,” her mother said.

T
he assistant at the Columbia Student Records Department wasn't being rude, but neither was he being helpful. He had a hawk's nose and a puffed chest, both of which gave him the air of an aristocrat. She almost expected him to speak with a British accent. But his forearms were thick and covered with tattoos: the
back of a girl's head, a hammer and shovel, a map of Vietnam. She felt wariness descending on her like a cloak. Sometimes, she'd learned, when you looked Vietnamese it didn't matter that you weren't.

They stood on either side of a Formica counter in a windowless room, and she smiled and told him that she needed to know if a Nikolai Belov had graduated. She wasn't sure of the year. Around 1960, she thought. She stepped back and waited for him to open a drawer and pluck out a file.

He apologized and said he was sorry, but he couldn't give out that information—university policy.

She hadn't planned well enough. She wasn't prepared.

“But I need it,” she said.

“Why?” he asked, and she was surprised again and at a loss. Clerks were supposed to grant or deny permission, not ask why.

He was waiting. His eyes were paying such sharp attention that it made her think he was avoiding himself.

“The woman my fiancé used to sleep with has noticed things about him,” she said.

He looked as if this was the sort of thing he'd expected. He nodded. “When's the date?” he asked.

“Valentine's Day,” she said.

“Four weeks,” he said, as if measuring whether that was enough time to get through all that they had to accomplish.

She waited. Nikolai thought she was meeting with the caterer. “I'll come with you,” he'd said. “No,” she'd insisted, she was working on a surprise for him. “With the caterer?” he'd teased.

She was not good at subterfuge. Now she would have to meet
with the caterer. Now she'd have to come up with a surprise. And still Nikolai would think her behavior odd.

“You look like the Vietnamese prostitute I lost my virginity to,” the assistant said.

“I'm Chinese,” she said, as if that meant she wasn't allowed to remind him of anyone.

“Do you believe the woman?” he asked.

Lily felt as if she'd been rapped on the bridge of the nose.

“I suppose you do,” the man said. He leaned over the counter but stopped short, thank goodness, of touching her.

She was turning into something she abhorred: a woman for whom need was a technique. She wondered how much he would help her. She wiped at her eyes, though they didn't need wiping.

“You don't have to cry,” he said.

He told her to wait, and he disappeared down the long rows of filing cabinets, and she stood up straight and did as he'd instructed.

N
ikolai was standing in the foyer when she got back to the apartment as if he'd been there since she left, a loyal pet, her own palace guard.

“Where's my surprise?” he asked.

She held up a white bakery box tied with red and white cotton string. He smiled. He loved sweets. He put out his hands, palms up and together. It made him look as if he were offering a shrugging apology. “Grossinger's?” he said. He believed you found the best and stuck with it. He went clear across town to Grossinger's
for rum cake, down to the Fillmore East for music, next door to that for Ratner's fresh kosher rolls, up to Jimmy's Soul Food in Harlem for ribs, pickled beet and cucumber salads, and four different types of pudding. Sweet potato was his favorite.

“In the kitchen,” Lily said, moving past him.

She put the box on the counter and kept a hand on it, searching a drawer with the other hand for the scissors. He reached across her and tried to rip the string apart. The box creased and bent. “Goddamn Jesus Christ,” Nikolai said.

She loved bakery string. She loved its strength and color. She loved the odd little contraption the spools of it hung from next to the register. Who thought of these machines? she often wondered. Who decided what we needed and how to give it to us?

She snipped the string, opened the box, and swiveled it to him as if presenting a diamond necklace in a velvet setting. Inside was a black-and-white cookie. On the white side, a small plastic borzoi stood. Next to it, a shar-pei's tiny paws disappeared into the chocolate icing.

Nikolai peered at them. “You had to meet with the caterer for this?” he asked.

“I didn't meet with the caterer,” Lily said.

He was holding the cookie on his flat hand. He looked like a waiter with an impossibly tiny tray. “Do I eat the dogs?” he asked.

Without him, she was doomed. How, after glimpsing this, could she go back to the awkward sons of her mother's friends? The single fathers who sometimes lingered after school, their children dressed for the outdoors, burdened with their backpacks, impatient with fathers and fathers' desires. Any man after this would be merely and devastatingly not Nikolai.

“You didn't graduate from Columbia,” she said.

He put the cookie on the counter. The dogs regarded them with their painted eyes. “Who told you that?” he said.

“Tina,” she said. “Tina Hernandez,” she added.

His eyes were like firecrackers with the sound off.

She put her hand on his. “I know about Tina. I know about Columbia. So don't tell me a story,” she said, “unless it's the true one.”

He held on to the edge of the counter and leaned in and then away like he was doing push-ups. “That bitch,” he said. “That fucking nothing.”

He went on like this. There was, she had to admit, something satisfying about hearing him spew such hatred toward that particular woman. It occurred to her that some of it might be performance.

He could've said almost anything. She'd been ready to believe almost anything. But even she was having trouble finding anger and rage reassuring. She was going to have to leave, she thought. Just as she had left Matthew. Someone was trying to make clear that this life was not to be hers.

And then he stopped. He took her by the shoulders and leaned his forehead against hers. “Hold me up,” he said.

His need for her was like aloe on her burns. Already his rage was only a moment, something she might've missed if she'd been looking the other way.

His eyes were wet and rimmed with red. “Come,” he said, taking her hand, leading her out of the kitchen. “Come to the bedroom, and I will tell you everything.”

She was feeling things she knew she shouldn't be feeling under these circumstances. Knowing that made her feel them even
more. When she was twelve, she'd taken a long pull off a girlfriend's cigarette and imagined her head as an upside-down moxi-bustion bowl, and had been thrilled, swooning more from her imagination than from the nicotine. She'd reacted afterward with equal melodrama, never smoking again.

Now, she allowed herself to enjoy the small slippery flips her stomach performed at his touch. She followed him through the apartment, turning the lights out on her way.

In the bedroom, he sat on the bed, his hands laced between his knees. He asked her to sit with her back to him as he talked. There were too many things, he said, that made him ashamed.

She did as he asked, perching on the edge of the bed, one foot tucked behind the other calf like a movie star.

“The first lie,” he began, as if reading a chapter title. His parents had not been murdered by robbers. His mother had been beaten and worked to death by his father. He didn't know why he lied about this. He supposed he was ashamed at not having been able to save her. He'd been only six, but his brother had been only eight, and he'd gone after their father with a small shovel. The blows had not been strong enough to do away with his father right there and then, but he'd died of infections resulting from the injuries. His brother had earned the right to hold his head high. Nikolai had not. This probably had been the reason for their slow and steady drift away from each other during their years at the orphanage. If his brother wanted something, he found a direct way to get it. Nikolai was better at the other ways. They hadn't seen each other since Nikolai had run away from the orphanage.

“What was his name?” Lily asked. Her foot was asleep. She rotated it in small circles.

“Mikhail,” he said, as if speaking it too loudly might conjure him.

“It would've been sometimes nice in the life after Russia, to have older brother,” he said.

She felt as she did when a favorite preschooler took her aside to whisper something secret: she never knew whether to believe the drama or take it as further evidence of lying. Nikolai continued: The boat trip to America. Staying awake and walking for the whole first day and night in his new country, marveling at his luck, at whatever had allowed him to get this far. The chaos of Times Square, and the way it felt like home.