You're Not You (19 page)

The sounds of the neighborhood were in our ears, the cars revving and the dogs barking and the kids hollering, all distant and somehow welcoming, as though we were just another couple in this neighborhood, who belonged here the same as everyone else.

After a while he pulled me up on top of him, and it felt like it used to, his arms wrapped around my rib cage so tightly it hurt, his eyes closed. Lately, I had been reaching for some kind of revulsion, trying to look at him with distaste enough that I would want him to leave, but then I knew it wasn’t working and would never work—he looked beautiful and intent, his eyebrows knit with concentration, a line of white flesh where his lips pressed together. A smile hovered near the corner of his mouth as I moved over him.

For a moment I watched him, but then I gave up. It felt too sad, too
hopeless, to try and commit his face, his expression, to memory. Better not to attempt it at all. So I eased myself off him and got next to him on my hands and knees, pulling his wrist to bring him up from the bed. He didn’t say a thing. I felt the mattress shift as he moved, the roughness of his knees settling themselves between my own. I looked at the pillow and the headboard, my hands splayed against the blue sheets, and closed my eyes. He got behind me and entered me again, one hand braced on my hip and one arm wrapped around my waist, and we ended it that way.

J
ILL HANDED ME A
bottle of wine after holding it up for Kate to view. Then she leaned over the chair to kiss her cheek. Kate smiled, closing her eyes briefly. I got out the corkscrew.

Jill had said to me once,
I always want to kiss her hello or hug her or something, but I don’t want to be in her face. She can’t exactly get away from me if she doesn’t want me to, you know
?

I’d seen Jill’s point at first, because people were always trying to touch Kate in puppylike ways, petting her knee and her hands, stroking her hair. But later I’d realized few touched her who weren’t paid help. I felt terrible for missing that, but since Evan had left this was the truth. Hillary, Simone, and I all touched her and tried to keep it brisk and unintrusive, but only Lisa and a few of her other friends kissed her hello, or put their hands around her shoulders in a modified hug.

She stepped back and surveyed the makings of dinner. A platter of silky white mushrooms was waiting to be sliced next to a pile of parsley and a bunch of carrots. Pearl onions and stock were simmering in one pan, and another was filled with cubes of beef and two bottles of red wine. The kitchen smelled so rich—all wine and meat and thyme and onion—it seemed we should be able to taste the air. Jill poked at the onions with a spoon. “Did you get this stuff at the market?”

“Not today,” I hedged. Kate and I looked at each other. I said, “We had another errand.” The market would close in winter: Even now it was mainly apples and root vegetables, bunches of shallots and tough, faintly sweet greens with cold-weather heft and chew, thick ribs running
down their centers. The vegetable piles on the tables around the capitol took on the knobby, russet feel of a grandparent’s house: everything serviceable and warming, the air smelling of the earth that clung to potatoes and onions and yams.

“Anything fun?” Jill asked absentmindedly.

“We’ll tell you all about it later,” Kate said.

“Cool.” Jill knotted her hair and skewered it with three sticks so they poked out from her hair like spokes on a wheel. She breathed deeply and said, “It’s so cozy here. I can see my
breath
in our apartment.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. I poured her a glass of the wine she’d brought. She rubbed her hands gleefully and breathed it in. “Are they trying to drive us out?”

“Why?” she said, swallowing a sip. “We never have those big bashes anymore. It’s been like four months since the landlord found Nate sleeping on top of your car.”

Kate chuckled and Jill turned to explain. “It was so late there was dew on the car and he thought it would be refreshing. He’s a total idiot. Come to think of it we haven’t seen him in a while. I barely even see Bec.”

“I’m sorry,” Kate said. “I monopolize her.”

Jill shook her head so vigorously I thought she’d dislodge one of her sticks. “Oh, I don’t mean that. I just meant our place is so much cleaner lately.”

When Lisa arrived, swooping in wearing a huge cape of some sort, we had a fire going and some music on. While she was greeting Kate, Jill sidled up to me where we stood at the counter, her slicing mushrooms and me chopping parsley. She murmured, “Liam called.”

“It’s twenty degrees out there!” Lisa cried. She took her cape off and threw herself in a chair next to Kate, running her fingers through her hair. “Winter is going to be a nightmare.”

“When?” I whispered.

“He called right before I left to come here,” Jill was saying. She moved a few slices to the edge of the cutting board with the blade of her knife. “He kind of tried to be chummy and ask what classes I was taking. He’s such a sleaze.” She watched my face and added, “Sorry.” I glanced over at Kate and Lisa.

“Is that a leather poncho?” Kate was asking. She nodded at the coat Lisa had laid on an empty chair. It looked like a deflated cow.

Lisa picked it up and held it against her. “You don’t like it? I thought it was original.”

I turned back to Jill. “He’s not a sleaze,” I muttered. “And what did he say, anyway?”

“It
is
original,” I heard Kate say. Lisa tossed the cape back over her chair. “You will definitely be the only one wearing it.”

I poked Jill again, but she was watching Kate speak, her brows slightly knit, unconsciously mouthing along as she tried to decipher it. I sighed and repeated, “ ‘Lisa will definitely be the only one wearing it.’ ” Jill smiled, but the joke lost something in the repetition. “Jill, what did he
say
?”

“Oh, he said he saw you somewhere or something and just wanted to say hello.”

That would be today. I hadn’t realized I was driving Kate through his neighborhood till it was too late. At least I had an excuse. If he saw me, he’d see Kate. I was just working. Stalking him was an unexpected bonus.

It had been almost a month since I had talked to him. There were days I thought he’d been a massive waste of time, others when I convinced myself he’d been a learning experience, and still others when it was clear to me that I would never feel about anyone the way I’d felt about him, and certainly I would never have sex again. I let Jill crow about how I had dumped him and how he’d had a Pygmalion complex and an early midlife crisis because she seemed so glad to do it, and because it sounded better than the reality. She was joking, slightly, but her version hurt anyway. It didn’t even matter that I knew she was wrong—he’d never tried to make me over. Was I really so hopeless that she thought I needed a guy to take me in hand?

Nevertheless I let her take me out a lot during those weeks. She was delighted and relieved to finally take part in this relationship in the proper best-friend way, by celebrating its demise in the form of comforting me. She was so upbeat that I began to think I really was well rid of him. Of course I was. But I felt raw inside, perpetually on the verge of either weeping or kissing a stranger.

I thought I saw him at every food cart, every corner, and every bench on campus—a glimpse of reddish hair across a collar, a battered brown leather bag—and it left me perpetually startled, darting glances about library mall like a robin. When I realized how close I really was that afternoon, a wash of prickling excitement had moved over me.

“He called to say hello? I don’t get that,” I said. “I never call to say hi. I call to say,
Come over, I miss you
, or
I never officially won the argument about the Christmas card
.”

“He just doesn’t want you to get over it,” Jill hissed. She finished the mushrooms and set the plate with a clunk on the counter next to me. They were ragged-looking—some thick and some paper-thin, with tags of mushroom skin hanging off their edges. “He wants to remind you in case you’ve forgotten one single thing.”

“Well, I haven’t.” I laughed a little and said, “He probably just misses me desperately.”

His wife had been in the driveway, getting out of the car. Maybe he’d been looking out the window. He was probably having twice as much sex with her now. She was probably reminding him of what a woman his own age could do. I minded her more now than I ever had before.

“Oh, right. Sure.” Jill gave a snort of laughter. She picked up a fork and began mixing a bowl of seasoned flour. She said to the flour, “Don’t call him.”

I reached over and took the bowl from her.

“I already mixed that,” I said shortly. “How about if you just slice the bread.”

She stood there, looking at me and holding the fork. Behind her Kate was saying something to Lisa and Lisa was repeating it, nodding to show she understood. Kate saw me look her way and gave me a quick smile.

It was supposed to be a fun night. I didn’t want to ruin it. What was I really going to get angry at her for? I had no moral high ground. I wasn’t above being petty, but I preferred to be able to hide it.

We sat down to dinner and passed the salad and wine. For a moment as I looked over the table I didn’t care about Liam or Jill hating him or any of it: We had a deep bowl filled with beef burgundy studded with
translucent onions and soft carrots and mushrooms, a crisp green salad glistening with vinaigrette, butter softening in its blue dish. It was beautiful, and I’d made every bit of it. Well, except for baking the bread. I’d learn that next.

There was a pause while they waited to see who would toast and Kate and I exchanged glances. She nodded at me and I held up my glass. Jill and Lisa looked expectantly at us, their faces flushed from the warmth of the house. Jill’s ornamented sticks stuck up from behind her head like antennae. Her eyes shone brightly, and something about that pad of flesh that softened her square jaw and chin like a child’s, and the silliness of the hair ornaments, made me forgive her.

“To moving,” I translated. Kate spoke again and I repeated: “ ‘I’ve made a bid on a house.’ ”

A layer of silence dropped over us. She had told them she was house hunting, but I saw now that Lisa had assumed Kate was just amusing herself, fantasizing rather idly. Even I had thought so, and it may have been true, but the place we saw that morning was a small brick house that seemed like a cottage until you realized how far back the rooms extended. It had window boxes and working shutters, two bedrooms and a study and a nice, though small, kitchen. The kitchen would expand: Kate had cast an appraising look at the wall that separated it from the front room, and I knew it would be knocked out if she had anything to say about it. Kate maintained that most houses had at least two walls too many.

Jill broke the quiet with a little cheer and we drank. I swirled my glass beneath Kate’s nose so she could smell it. Lisa took a sustained sip, her long throat working, and set her glass down carefully on the red tablecloth. After a moment she said, “Congratulations, Katie. You’ll have a lot of fun getting it ready.” She kept on that way through dinner, asking questions and mentioning curtains and paint, but I had seen a look flicker across her face.

Kate and I looked at each other. I’d been hoping her friends were supporting this all along, even though I loved her house and wasn’t looking forward to moving her either. Yet as soon as I saw Lisa’s expression I had the cantankerous urge to contradict her. If Kate wanted to move, she was moving. My job was just to help make it easy.

HELEN ARRIVED AT NINE
, bearing a chocolate cake. I took a little of its frosting on the edge of a spoon and put it in Kate’s mouth to melt on her tongue.

“Are you going to tell Helen?” I whispered. I took the smeared spoon from her mouth. Kate looked meaningfully through the kitchen door to Lisa and Helen, who were curled up on opposite ends of the couch by the fire. Jill was sitting cross-legged in a big easy chair, a coffee cup balanced on one blue-jeaned knee.

“I don’t know,” Kate sighed. Annoyance crossed her face and she said, “Lisa was pretty lukewarm.”

“You think so?” I asked. I was hoping she hadn’t noticed, or I’d misinterpreted. “I thought she seemed happy for you.”

Kate wasn’t buying it. “You saw the look,” she reminded me.

“Maybe I misunderstood. Maybe she thought the beef was tough.”

I put slices of cake on plates and brought them in. I could see Lisa’s and Helen’s heads together, Jill listening to them intently. Helen’s eyebrows were raised so high they disappeared beneath the flat fringe of her bangs. She turned to us as we entered the room, her fingers resting on her collarbone, and said, “Kate, really?”

I was walking behind Kate, so I couldn’t see her expression, but I could guess at it: the steely one—chin lifted, eyelids lowered almost imperceptibly—which she often wore while she was on the phone with her mother, saying,
No, I don’t need any money. Tell Dad I’m fine
.

I moved around in front of Kate so I could translate for Helen when Kate replied, “Yeah. It’s on Chambers Street.”