You're Not You (6 page)

Or better yet, just ask him to come in. I didn’t have to explain myself. He didn’t seem to realize I had no idea what I was doing.

“Bec?” he’d said. I realized I’d gone silent. He had turned onto my street, and I pointed at our house. The driveway was empty.

I’d turned to look at him. I loved being in a car with a guy, the way the air could change as soon as you were alone. That closeness, his hand on the gearshift an inch from my knee. He had long fingers that bulged at the knuckles. I was holding my backpack in my lap. On either side of us, the driveway was piled so high with shoveled snow that it felt as though no one could see us. I was gearing myself up to say something about coming in, for a hot drink or whatever inane suggestion I could think of, when I met his eyes. He gave me a slight smile and said, “Take that backpack off your lap.”

I just looked at him in surprise for a moment, and he answered me
by picking it up by one strap and laying it at my feet as he reached toward me with the other hand, saying, “It’s in my way.”

I wish I could remember more about that kiss. Our mouths, the scrape of his chin. But mainly what I remember is his hand on my neck and then along my cheek, his fingertips pushing my hair from my face.

“Do you want to come in?” I said. It was out before I’d even thought it through, and for a second I winced, regretting it. I’d handed myself over now.

“Yeah, I do,” he said.

I preceded him into the house. The living room was somewhat clean, at least, and there were no old beer bottles on the floor. I took my coat off without facing him and laid it over a chair. What was I going to do now? He was probably able to tell I was nervous just from the way I’d turned my back on him. So much for calling his bluff. Perhaps he did this sort of thing all the time. Maybe married life was like that, but no one had told me. Maybe no one ever told you until you got married, too, and then they started taking you aside at parties, drawing you into the corner to give you the lowdown on how it really was.
Everybody has these moments
, they’d whisper, slurping at a martini,
these experiences, with other people, and it’s no big deal
.

But I began thinking about his wife anyway. Until Liam and I did something overtly out of line she had remained wispy. But once we were in my house together, our intentions suffusing the air like humidity, she thickened into being. We ignored the fact of her so deliberately then—and ignored the fact that we were doing so—that everything we did took on more weight. It felt as though she was there in the room, standing a few feet behind us, as I laid my bag down on the table, but we wouldn’t turn and acknowledge her. I was impressed, even frightened, by the gravity of sex right then. This wasn’t playful at all.

I should back down, I thought. I should make cups of tea and sit on the opposite end of the couch. I turned back to him. He was standing where I’d left him, just inside the front door, hands in his coat pockets. “You can take your coat off,” I said.

“Oh, right. Sorry.” He draped his coat over mine. Then we looked at each other. He took a deep breath, and I got a little calmer then, once I saw he wasn’t. I gave the wife one more chance to speak inside
my head so I could choose a side—was she real to me or filmy as the ghost in a movie; was this the done thing or were we really crossing a line?—but all that came to me was the silence inside the whole house, the occasional oblivious car passing by on the street, to remind me that no one was watching.

“Come on,” I said, and I led him into my room. The bed was unmade and there were clothes on the floor.

“I take a stand against making beds,” I told him. “It just seems like busywork to me.”

“I want to say some sexy comment about rumpling it,” Liam said, coming closer to me. “But I’m drawing a blank, honey.”

The endearment caught me out, and I paused by the bed. He said it so easily, as though it had been waiting in his mouth for days. I still had a few condoms in my bedside drawer, left unused by my last boyfriend the previous fall, and I took them out and set them on the table. Since I was being so relaxed and up-front. He kissed me, and I reached beneath his sweater to pull his T-shirt from his waistband. He drew back when I did that, looking surprised. I gave him what felt like a mocking smile, unbuttoned his jeans, and then didn’t undress him any further. After a few minutes he did it for me.

My room was the warmest in the house, thanks to the sun that pooled in there all day. Even that afternoon, cold as it was outdoors, we kicked the covers away. Once we were in bed I debated whether to relax for a moment and see what he would do. I loved this part of sleeping with someone for the first time—the second when you just waited to see what they liked, what they wanted to do to you. Most of the time in my limited experience it turned out they were fast and clumsy, but I never stopped being optimistic. He was stretched out on his back, my hand pressed flat on his abdomen. The sun cast a sheen on his skin, showing faint pearly ridges of a faded stretch mark on one hip, the coppery filaments of his pubic hair.

I thought he’d go down on me, but after a little while he unwrapped a condom and put it on. You’re kidding me, I thought. Aren’t older guys supposed to have taken a few courses in foreplay? He hauled me on top of him, but when I tried to turn around to face him, wrap my legs around his waist, he put his hands on my hips and guided me so I
lay facing the ceiling, confused and disappointed, on top of him as though he were a mattress. My head hung down on one side of his neck, our hips lined up, and my legs fell on either side of his. His hands glanced over me and nudged my fingers down to touch myself. His fingers stroked my breasts, his tongue touched my neck, and he slid a hand down over my wrist to be sure I was still stroking myself, and then he was inside me. It was like being fucked by someone you couldn’t see, only feel, and after a while I was pushing back against him with my hips, my knees raised up and my hand cramping as I moved my fingers as fast as I could, until I came.

When I turned around and looked at him, and his expression was so blurred, so rapt, that I felt my breath catch all over again, I pushed his legs apart and lay between them, reached around to cup his ass in my hands, and instead of doing any circular, seductive figure-eights like I thought you were supposed to do but which most guys seemed to grow bored with pretty quickly, I pumped up and down on him. The hell with slow gyrations—I was aware that this was a man’s motion rather than a woman’s, which must be why it had a strange edge of playacting and excitement to it.

After he’d left, I remained in bed, having retrieved the covers from the floor. I would never have admitted this to Liam, or even to Jill, but the encounter made me feel very adult. I didn’t own perfume or pricey lingerie, but right then I felt as if I’d earned the right to both, like getting a license or turning twenty-one.

Yet at the same time, in the humid cloister of the room with the waning daylight and oniony scent of drying sweat, I had a sudden, insatiable urge for salt and something creamy—melted cheese on something, on anything—the same way I once had in high school after coming home from a long night with someone. I had the sense that I’d moved up a level, like the period just after my friends and I all started sleeping with our boyfriends as a matter of course rather than debate. (In retrospect, we seemed to have done this en masse, as if by silent vote.) Except now I seemed to have gotten some idea of what I was doing. Maybe this was why people had affairs—to reexperience all the novelty once you’d actually learned how to have sex.

I really did feel as if I got it now, the same heady realization I’d felt when I realized I had done a handspring in gymnastics before I’d even taken time to think it through. It wasn’t as though I was a virgin, but I was never as confident as I had always tried to present myself. As I lay there I thought perhaps I should never see him again, because I didn’t know if I could duplicate it. But I dismissed the notion almost instantly out of greed and excitement, certain that I’d climbed into a new body, a fresh skin, and there was no slipping out of it now.

BY THE TIME LIAM
and I clambered out of the dewan and left the restaurant it was almost five thirty. “Shouldn’t you be getting home?” I asked. “And what will you do, eat another full dinner?”

He linked his arm through mine as we headed up the walk to my front door. The windows were dark; Jill was still at work.

“I’m at a department meeting,” he said. “I’ve ordered the Californian sub to eat at my desk. Besides, I have the cell phone on in case she calls.”

“Oh.” I was feeling strange; too much spice, too many protein-rich mashes of chickpeas and eggplant. We were at my front door. “Well,” I said, “no more time to spend on chitchat.” He pushed up against me while I unlocked the door. I had reached to take in the mail, but then he lifted my hair up, leisurely twisting it off my skin, and ran the tip of his tongue up my neck.

I left the mail. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s keep these meetings running on time.”

I had to enjoy this while I could, since it was such a tenuous arrangement, dependent on the whims of his wife. He was not in the game of pushing her to notice what he was doing. If she seemed particularly attentive for a few days, or asked an extra question or two, I always knew it. He’d become remote, our conversations as chaste as if I were a student in his poetry class.

All that would have to happen to end it was for that detachment to last a little longer than usual, an extra week or two in which she happened to be affectionate or needy, and that would be it. Our relationship
was a temperamental little pet, some delicate, vivid tropical creature blinking at us inside its glass tank, requiring precisely calibrated humidity and temperature and food in tiny frequent doses and lots of pure water. No loud noises, no startling prods of its scaly belly.

O
N FRIDAY, DAY TWO
, I arrived and found Kate lying beneath a quilt on her bed. Evan was in the easy chair. She smiled at me and mouthed what I guessed was “Good morning.”

“Hi, Kate. Hey, Evan.”

“Morning,” Evan said. “I’m not here.”

“And yet?”

He smiled. “And yet I am, if you need me, but we thought we’d let you take over today and I’ll just be backup. I’m sure you remember what I did yesterday, and if you don’t Kate can tell you.” He snapped open the real estate section of the newspaper. “Is that all right?”

“No problem,” I said. I turned to Kate.

“Okay,” she said. She glanced at the remote as I went to her side of the bed, and I took it from her and set it on the table.

Her nightgown was ivory with thick lace straps and a plain bodice, from what I could see above the quilt. The room was a little too warm for a quilt. I wondered if she was ever too hot or too cold during the periods when she was alone. She wouldn’t be able to do anything about it—just wait.

I brought her chair over next to the bed and lifted her arms by the wrists while I pushed the quilt aside. Her skin was cool and dry, and I kept my fingers wrapped around the knobby bones of her wrist, thinking that this was the first time I had touched her. The white silk gleamed at the crest of her hip bones and the swell of her breasts. Her collarbone was a sharp ledge; when she swallowed the movement fluttered at the dip in her throat. I’d laid her arms at her sides when I removed
the quilt, and there was something so acquiescent about her, her blond hair and white silk, neat as a doll.

I took a deep breath and planned how I would do this. When I watched Evan lift Kate, it seemed almost elegant: pull-and-turn, bend at the knees, and then stand up. I started by taking hold of her ankles and pulling her feet over the edge of the mattress, and then I brought her into a sitting position by her wrists. Her head dropped forward, her hair falling in two sheets around her face. But her feet didn’t end up neatly on the ground like they were supposed to. Instead her knees were curved coyly to one side, and I tried to hold her upright while I aligned her. Evan crossed one ankle over his knee, then shifted again. Our eyes met and I looked away. He opened his newspaper. He could probably do this with his eyes closed, and he had to mind seeing his wife tugged around by some college student. I was working in silence, refusing to meet Kate’s eyes in case she tried to talk to me.

My hair fell into my eyes and I swiped it away. I wanted to ask him to open a window.

I placed my hands beneath Kate’s arms and stood, lifting her. But then, anxious to set her down, I lowered her into the wheelchair too fast, and left her sitting awkwardly on one buttock, leaning against the arm. Then I tripped over the footrest.

Kate said something.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I watched her closely as she dipped her head to swallow and repeated herself. Evan watched over the corner of the paper. He looked poised to get up and come over, but he didn’t.

“ ‘Ray’?” I asked. “Uh, ‘rate my . . .’”

Kate shook her head. She seemed somewhat impatient, and I felt on the verge of impatience myself. For chrissakes, I thought, if you’re going to throw me in like this, accept the fact that I’ll be awkward. I caught a glimpse of Evan giving me an encouraging smile and I took a deep breath. Kate glanced pointedly down at her feet, which were tucked one over the other; I’d managed to make her look like a parody of a shy little girl.

“Your feet?” I guessed. Kate nodded. “Oh, straighten them.” I set her feet neatly side by side. I realized that to straighten her hips I would have to cup either side of her buttocks. Well, I had to. As I
loomed toward her, I couldn’t shake the sense that I was about to kiss her and grab her ass like a high school boy, and I stopped and stood back.

“I don’t think I’m . . .” I trailed off. Kate smiled and shook her head again. She swallowed carefully before she said something. I stared at her lips.

“ ‘Just lift me up’?” I repeated. Kate nodded. Again I grasped her under the arms and lifted her into a standing position, paused to be sure the position was right, pivoted her so she was in front of the wheelchair again, and finally, finally, set her down in the chair.