Don't I Know You? (8 page)

“So why'd he lie?” Juan asked, again.

“Why'd he lie?” Steven repeated, as if repeating it enough would make an answer appear.

“He didn't really lie,” Steven said. “He didn't tell the whole truth.”

Juan was quiet.

They heard tiny bells behind them. It was the Cat Man, an old black man dressed in layers of beige clothes who circled the park pulling a haphazard train of little red wagons, tricycles, toddlers' bikes with training wheels, and a shopping cart behind him. On every handlebar, seat, and basket, a cat. Some with one eye. Some with three legs. One with eight toes. The Cat Man rang finger-bells, clanged tiny cymbals, hit small metal wind chimes, a one-man concert for his cats.

They watched him make his slow way down the path and out of sight.

“You gotta tell someone,” Juan said.

“Okay,” Steven said.

“People don't really like people they work for,” Juan said.

“He liked us,” Steven said again.

“Who liked you?” Phil asked from the path.

Juan glanced at Steven. Steven could tell he was thinking: I can outrun him. Steven didn't think he could. His hand was in his pocket. He closed it around the damp manila envelope.

Phil ducked into the gazebo and sat on the bench across from them. He looked out at the pond. Some guy was rowing a girl and a baby around. He didn't look so happy.

Tell him about Manuel, Steven thought.

Phil moved his feet inches one way, then inches the other. He asked how he'd been.

Steven shrugged. “Good,” he said. It felt like he was keeping everything from everyone.

Phil didn't seem to have heard. “Listen,” he said to Juan. “I need to talk to Steven. He'll meet you at home.”

Juan looked skeptical. “We're supposed to hang out together,” he said.

“He'll be fine,” Phil said. He didn't sound like a murderer.

“I'll wait,” Juan said, pointing at a bench up on the path.

Phil shrugged, and Juan left. He didn't sit on the bench; he walked around it, keeping an eye on them.

“They think I did it,” Phil said.

Steven didn't say anything. Some of the leaves behind the
gazebo were already yellow and orange. There were years ahead of him without her.

“Do you?” Phil asked.

“No,” Steven said. He could feel his heart, but he didn't know if that was because he believed himself or because he didn't.

He waited for Phil to tell him he hadn't.

Phil swept the Burger King stuff off the bench and out the back end of the gazebo with his forearm. Steven watched the cup of soda spill and roll down the short hill to the mud at the edge of the pond.

“I loved your mom,” Phil said. He waited.

“Yeah,” Steven said.

“Think she loved me?” he asked.

Steven still thought of him as his teacher. Phil used to bring green peppers to school for his lunch. He ate them whole, like an apple. It was weird to have this conversation with him. “I don't know how to tell those kinds of things,” he said.

One time his mother had made him sit in a field of daffodils at the base of Belvedere Castle.

Phil looked sad. “She talked about you a lot,” Steven said.

Juan was perched on the back of the bench, watching. Steven waved. Juan still looked worried.

“She talked about you a lot,” Phil said.

It made Steven feel better. He couldn't believe it did that.

An old man and an old woman rowed by. He didn't look strong enough to row them anywhere. They looked like brother and sister. His face said: There isn't anywhere I'd rather be.

“Who do you think did it?” Steven asked, still watching the old couple.

He could feel Phil's eyes on him.

“There was another man,” Phil said.

“I know,” Steven said. There were a lot of other men, he thought.

“We argued about him,” Phil said.

“I know,” Steven said.

“Did you meet him?” Phil asked.

“I don't know,” Steven said. The old woman tilted her head back to the sun.

“There was someone named Kurt,” Steven said.

Phil was quiet, then he said, “I didn't know a Kurt.”

Steven saw his mother with her feet in Kurt's lap, and he was glad Phil didn't have that picture in his mind.

“Could you do something for me?” Steven asked.

Phil was surprised.

“Could you say, ‘I owe you'?”

Phil was confused. He didn't say anything.

“There was someone in the apartment the other day,” Steven said. “Manuel and someone else. A guy.”

“How do you know?” Phil asked.

Steven explained.

“It wasn't me,” he said.

“I know,” Steven said.

They stared at one another.

“So, can you say it?” Steven asked.

He said it and looked at Steven. “Well?” he asked.

It didn't help one way or the other. “I don't know,” Steven said.

“It wasn't me,” Phil said again.

“Okay,” Steven said.

The old couple were laughing. Phil glanced over his shoulder at them. “I don't think they're gonna catch the guy,” he said.

Tell him about Manuel lying, Steven thought. Why aren't you telling him about that?

“Me neither,” Steven said. Time was passing. People had other things to think about. Or they didn't have enough interest in this. In them. He didn't want to be responsible for making people care again, or still. Maybe that's why he wasn't saying anything about Manuel.

He was feeling sorry for himself. His mother hated it when he did that.

“What's gonna happen to me?” he said.

Phil looked at him like he was pulling away on a bus. “Oh, bud,” he said. “You'll move to San Diego and live with your dad and your sister and brother. And things will be hard, and then things'll get easier.”

“And stepmom,” Steven said. “I have a stepmom.”

Phil nodded.

“She doesn't want me. She and my dad have like a contract about it,” Steven said.

“You can't take that personally,” Phil said. “She doesn't even know you. When she gets to know you, she won't feel that way anymore. She'll be ashamed she ever felt that way.”

“I can take it personally,” Steven said.

They sat there.

“Do you think catching the guy would make me feel better?” Steven asked.

Phil didn't answer. He seemed to be considering the question. Steven could be having this conversation with the guy who'd killed his mother. He needed Phil not to be the guy.

“You'll always miss your mom,” Phil said.

It was true. Whether they caught the guy or not, whether his stepmother ever came to like him, whether his father turned out to be someone he admired, whether he turned out to be someone he liked. The one thing he could see in the open space ahead of him was the missing shape of his mother. It was reassuring to know it would always be there. He folded her in half, in quarters. He swallowed her. She would stay there, slowly unfolding for the rest of his life.

L
ily Chin didn't like Christmas shopping. It embarrassed her to walk up Madison laden with bags of unnecessary objects from Nikolai's favorite stores. When the doorman opened the glass doors to Nikolai's building, reaching to relieve her of her purchases, she felt like crying. She registered the extremity of the reaction.

“Whadja get for me?” a vaguely southern voice from behind her asked, and something slipped from her throat to her chest. Matthew Cullen was leaning against a parked car. He wore a tweed jacket with the collar turned up and a black scarf, and squinted at her. He remained good-looking. “Don't I know you?” he asked.

They hadn't seen each other in four years.

The doorman hovered, unsure whether to step in.

Lily stilled her face. “You used to,” she said, in a voice that she hoped held no sense of invitation.

He held a palm to his chest, swaying as if struck. His gestures had always been like that.

The doorman held the door wider, but when she didn't go through it, he let it swing closed, moving a discrete distance away into the depths of the lobby.

Matthew glanced up at the building. “I hear you're getting married,” he said.

He'd always had the ability to make her feel as if she were the setup for jokes she didn't get. She had never asked how he knew the things he knew about her. She had merely sunned herself in the warmth of the knowledge. It had been, for a while, the best intimacy she had known.

“What do you want?” she asked, not unkindly.

He smiled. “There's my Lily,” he said. “Beautiful, brisk Lily.”

She had an image of his naked body in Nikolai's bed. His body had been imperfect in perfect ways. She took a breath. Her chest was closed, the air reaching her lungs thin and tight.

“It's lovely to see you,” she said, gathering her packages.

The doorman had the door open, pretending, in that doorman way, not to see.

Matthew leaned in close and said quietly into her collar, “What have I ever wanted?” She could feel his breath through her scarf.

He waited, and then stuffed his hands into his jeans pockets, and left.

The doorman took her packages, and as she slipped through the front door she managed a thank-you, avoiding his eyes.

Nikolai, Nikolai, Nikolai, she thought, to bring her back to this life. This wasn't just the building Nikolai lived in; this was Nikolai's Building, as in a building Nikolai owned. He owned many.

They would be hers, too, he liked to say, kissing her on the nose.

She did not feel the entrepreneurial glee that she understood he
wished for her to feel when he said things like that, that he himself felt when thinking of real estate. Real estate for him was what education had been for her immigrant parents. What pornography was for others.

They were to be married in two months, on Valentine's Day. His idea. At the Plaza. Also his idea. Everything else was up to her. He trusted her completely. This announcement had had the effect of draining her of her usual confidence in matters of logistics, and she'd spent the last month second-guessing herself and checking everything with him. She did this during meals, riding around the city in his Town Car, during their lovemaking.

Don't worry, he would say, kissing her eyelids or tracing a line down the center of her body as if following a road on a map. What you want is what I want.

But he wanted too many things that she could do without. Horse-drawn carriages, champagne fountains, ice sculptures in the shape of his buildings, heralds blowing horns.

“Crossing things off your lists?” the doorman asked, smiling.

Even her boyfriend's doormen knew she liked lists.

“Trying,” she said. “It's hard,” she added, and then was ashamed for saying it. Whatever was hard in her life was harder in his.

He pushed the elevator button and stood waiting with her. She concentrated on remembering something about him. Nikolai knew the full names of everyone who worked in the building. He knew details about their lives: wives, children, favorite teams. At Christmas, he labeled the holiday envelopes without consulting the list the board sent around.

I'm one of you, she wanted to say. Her father was a bus driver. Her mother was a seamstress. She didn't live in a place like this.
She lived on 102nd between Riverside and West End in a studio. And made the most of what she had. Her rent was probably less than his.

Manuel. This one's name was Manuel. The one, she was fairly certain, Nikolai had known for several years, the one he'd gotten this job for. She tried to think of something else, and came up with nothing but:
Don't tell Nikolai about Matthew
. Their reflections morphed in the dull gold of the doors.

The elevator came, and he held the door with his foot to let her pass, arranged her packages around her, and reached in to press three. All these things would've been easier for her to do.

“Have a nice night, Ms. Chin,” he said.

Oh, yes, she thought. The one who had that way of saying her name. His accent and inflection made her name sound like a gangster's nickname. Lily the Chin. Or maybe like what she was: a preschool teacher.

She tried to remember where he was from. Somewhere Caribbean. Somewhere south and warm. The specifics evaded her.

“Thank you, Manuel,” she said. “You too, Manuel.”

I
t was only four o'clock but the apartment was already darkening. She slipped off her boots and padded around, turning on lights. All the lights, even in rooms she had no intention of inhabiting. She did this anytime she came here. At her parents' apartment in Queens, there were never any lights on. She'd come home from school, and the table would be set for dinner in a dark kitchen; her mother and father would be waiting for her, looking
at each other across a dark living room. When she turned on the lights, they winced.

She wandered the apartment, a balloon trying to find its way back to earth. This will be my living room, she thought. This will be my study. My guest room for my guests. My bathrooms. There were four bedrooms, each with its own bath. It was like a hotel. When she confided to Nikolai that none of it felt like hers, he said not to worry, this was their Trainer Apartment; they shouldn't get too attached. He was grim about being on only the third floor. It bothered him to be eye-level with the trees. In his mind he had them in the penthouse of a building he hadn't yet bought.

She was twenty-eight. She had an undergraduate degree in English from Barnard and a master's in education from Teacher's College. She'd grown up in Flushing, Queens, the only child of Harry and Priscilla Chin. Those were not their birth names, but when they'd come to this country fleeing the Communists, they'd taken American names and never looked back. They spoke broken English to each other even when they were alone. They found her high school interest in China and things Chinese baffling and a little alarming, something to keep an eye on, like a tick bite.

Now their neighborhood was Chinese, but then it had been Koreatown, the streets lined with the telltale vertical store signs. Their Korean neighbors in Flushing regarded the Chinese Chins with a wary eye. Everyone else assumed they were Korean. Walking home from school, she smelled kim chi and one particular brand of Korean incense.

College and graduate school had been happy places for her. It was as if someone had taken her into a clean building, opened a
door onto a tastefully furnished room with a well-stocked refrigerator, and said, “Stay as long as you like.”

She'd found her professors intelligent if not always interesting, and her peers neither, but inoffensive, for the most part, and willing to let her be. For the first year, she'd lived at home, twice a day riding what the regulars called the International Express, the number seven from Manhattan to Queens, which passed through some of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods around: Sunnyside, Woodside, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Corona, ending at Main Street, Flushing.

She'd had the same roommate for the next three years, an earnest and enthusiastic softball player from Minnesota, whom she hadn't spoken to since, a situation about which neither of them harbored ill feelings.

Her senior year, she slept with a tall, shy boy from Nebraska the week before he left to join his father's insurance company in Omaha. He was blond and Nordic and she'd been neither pleased nor traumatized by their quiet lovemaking. She was glad to have her virginity behind her, but had no energy to pursue further lovers.

Matthew Cullen had been a friend of a friend of a friend, whom she'd met the one and only time her fellow graduate students had been able to convince her to go out with them. A good-looking perpetual Columbia student with a soft southern accent. She thought at first that she'd met him before, but there'd been dozens of boys like him at school, southern trust-fund boys going to the proper northeastern colleges, always on the verge of getting kicked out, buoyed by the luxury of the family oil or tobacco business as safety net.

He, however, had kissed her hand, said, “How'd the picnic
go?”, enjoyed her confusion, and then reminded her that he'd flirted with her a year or so back. She'd been walking down 102nd street, carrying a bowl of something, on her way to the park.

“Flirted?” Lily had said, and he had laughed, remarking that it was true, sometimes what he intended to communicate wasn't all that clear.

Her knowledge of and vague contempt for his type were not enough to tamper with the feelings he inspired. He was the good-natured dog she had wanted and been forbidden as a child. The one who tilts his eyebrows at you, letting you know that all he wants in the world is your hand on his head. She had more to drink than she usually did. She smoked a joint for the first and last time in her life. But when they closed the door to her apartment behind them, her head was not spinning. She was, to her considerable surprise, in perfect control of her desires and the behaviors they elicited.

Everything about him said:
If you come to me, I will save you
, and so for months she had gone to him, and gone to him, feeling taken care of in ways that suggested she might never touch the earth again.

And then he had betrayed her with someone about whom Lily knew almost nothing. She had called Lily, and Lily had been reminded of what she had, of course, known all along: asking someone to save you was the same thing as asking for a certain kind of destruction. His genuine sadness about his own behavior did not temper the damage, though it had taken all she had to tell him to leave, to refuse the phone calls, to deny the ache of missing them when they stopped.

And so he returned to her often. The crisp citrus smell of his
cheek, the thick denim of his jeans against the cotton of her underwear, his hand on her hip like a hinge. The way he would say, “I know what you're thinking,” and be right. The version of herself he had revealed, from which she'd chosen to look away.

She'd put herself back on track. Teacher's College for graduate school, an apartment within walking distance, and then a job working at a private preschool in the same neighborhood.

She trusted people until they gave her enough reasons not to. This was a useful trait in the face of two- and three-year-olds and their parents, the liberal white pioneers of the Upper West Side. The children had liked her instantly, tumbling and fizzing around her like bubbles up the sides of a still glass. The parents had not, at least not instantly, watching their children's enthusiasm for this quiet woman with confusion and a small sense of betrayal. There was only one parent whom Lily herself didn't like. Sally Grossman. Sometimes she'd turned the name over in her mouth. Sally's daughter, Ruth, was a blond girl with a round head and Who-from-Whoville blue eyes who had started last fall. Ruth had spina bifida. When they'd interviewed, Sally had closed the interview by saying, “She won't be any trouble. She can't walk.” And Lily had decided she disliked Sally Grossman. And it was hard, once Lily had made up her mind about something, to find a way to change it.

On days when she'd had to talk with Sally more than she liked to, she allowed herself a beer at the bar a few blocks away from school. She'd gone there once or twice as a student and felt, falsely, she knew, comfortable walking in there alone. She always sat at the corner of the bar nearest the bartender, just as she always sat in the conductor's car on the subway. Living
alone, she'd learned some tricks: Put a pair of construction boots outside the door. Next to them, a big dog chain and a water bowl. New York could be perfectly safe if you lived by certain rules and took certain precautions. Since the murder on her block the summer before last, this had been a harder belief in which to maintain faith. Of course, there were murders all the time in New York, but not all of them were two houses down, and not all of the victims had a child in the upper grades of Lily's school.

That woman, she'd decided, based on no real knowledge, must not have had clear enough rules, or must not have stuck to them well enough. After that there'd been the Son of Sam killings, and the blackout rioting and arson, and she'd had to work hard to resist feeling as if the woman's murder had been the beginning of some kind of horrible slide.

One day in September, more than a year after the murder two houses down, someone had spoken to her while she sat on her stool, in her corner.

It was Nikolai, though he introduced himself as Nick. Nick Belov, he said, and because of his odd mix of Russian and New York accents, Lily thought she heard
Belove
, like some archaic form of
Beloved
. She would learn that his accent came and went depending on the audience. The longer he spoke with you, the more he sounded like you.

He was a big man, older than she by ten or fifteen years. His brown hair was layered and already graying. It brushed his shoulders like a feather duster. Everything about him was oversized: his nose, his chin, his cheekbones. He gestured as if on a second-story balcony overlooking a grand piazza filled with thousands of his
people. His eyes were olive green and they swept the room as if on lookout. Behind the movement, she imagined a vast sadness.