You're Not You

by Michelle Wildgen

  “Don’t say it,” he warned me. “My manly axle-grease shampoo was out so I used Alison’s designer stuff. I think it’s vanilla. Or ginger. Something muffiny.”

  I stepped back and looked at him. I didn’t think it was as funny as I was supposed to, but how could I? What I disliked wasn’t the fact that he used his wife’s shampoo but the specificity of his wife, whom I forced myself to perceive as a vague, cloudy presence of no reality, like someone who has always just left the room. We rarely spoke of her, so I could usually ignore her existence.

  “You’ve ruined muffins for me,” I told him. I was half-joking.

  He raised his eyebrows apologetically and sat down behind his desk, gesturing for me to take the chair before it. “What brings you here? I thought you were working tonight.”

  “ ‘What brings me here?’ ” I repeated incredulously. I couldn’t tell if he was jokingly acting like my professor or if he just slipped into the habit in this environment. So I sat in the chair and said, “I haven’t talked to you in a few days. I’m quitting the restaurant. I’m working for a woman with ALS.”

  “Lou Gehrig’s?” he asked. Show-off, I thought. “That was fast.”

  “Yeah, I know. It was a lot quicker than I was expecting. I only interviewed the other day. I made sure all my shifts were covered at the restaurant so I get an okay reference, though.”

  “Good idea,” Liam said, absently. He was peering down at a paper on his desk. I decided not to answer. Finally he realized he’d been silent for several seconds and looked up again. “What do you do?”

  I gestured helplessly. “I didn’t do anything today,” I said. “But tomorrow I start doing just about anything and everything. It should be pretty simple. Her husband does a lot of the hard stuff.”

  He nodded at me. “Oh,” he said, “she’s married.”

  “Yup,” I said.

  “Do you like her?”

  “I like him,” I answered truthfully. “I haven’t decided how I feel about her quite yet. She’s very funny, and very self-possessed . . . but she’s hard to know, I guess.” I felt uncomfortable admitting that I wasn’t sure how much I liked a woman who was in a wheelchair—I felt I ought to love her right away. But I knew I wasn’t looking forward to being around her again, knowing I’d feel so inadequate as I tried to figure out her speech, even though she would try to keep things light.

  There was another long pause. This wasn’t going right; it was awkward and intrusive and he smelled of his wife’s shampoo. I clapped my hands on my knees, trying to be brisk, and then stood up. “I just stopped by,” I told him. “I should be going.”

  He got up and took my hand. “I feel odd seeing you here,” he said. “It’s risky.” He sighed. “It’s no riskier than anything else, though. You want an early dinner?”

  We went to a Middle Eastern place down the street from my apartment. It was as safe as any other place, since no one else was eating at four in the afternoon. We went in, shook hands with the proprietor, who knew us by now, and were led to the dewan. The proprietor held the curtain open for us and then let it slide shut when he went to get water.

  The dewan was a low round private table curtained off from the rest of the dining room by rosy damask. Liam always wanted to sit there, and I didn’t mind that it was probably more for the subterfuge than the romance. I still loved ducking behind the heavy fabric. I didn’t care that it was a little uncomfortable, the tabletop so low you had to splay your knees beneath it, hunching over your food.

  We sipped at the pitcher of water on the table—it was scented with orange blossom and I always ended up knocking back most of it—and Liam slid across the cushions and kissed me. After a while he touched my neck and smiled at me. A silly grin flashed across my face though I tried to stifle it.

  “Every restaurant needs one of these,” I said. It was our running joke. We also thought grocery stores should have them, bars, pharmacies.

  “My office needs one of these,” he said.

  We ordered chicken with olives and lamb stew, then leaned back against each other in the cushions. He ran a fingertip beneath the hem of my shorts and watched me.

  “What’d you do today?” I asked.

  He pushed his fingertip further beneath the denim and stroked it along a curve of skin before answering me. “Begged my officemate not to use the word hermeneutic ever again. Spent my lunch hour haggling over the cost of a transmission.” He removed his hand, sat up, and took a sip of water. “Well, hearing about haggling. Actually Alison does the negotiating.”

  I sat up, too, briskly tearing off a piece of pita bread. At times Liam seemed to forget I had never met her, and would say, in the offhand tone that assumed I knew Alison’s inability to let an argument die or her disastrous love of salted cashews, “Well, you know her.”

  I did not know her. During the first couple months with him, I confessed it all to Jill but added that I could never have slept with Liam if I had ever met his wife. I would have drawn the line, I insisted, with a woman I knew and had spoken to. Yet during that period I often lay in bed, considering him, and with a terrible certainty I understood that I was the strumpet of the piece. Occasionally I tried to tell myself that his having a wife actually made it better, that it was that much more he had to walk through to get to me. All that lying and effort. It was unsettling, the ease with which I had slipped into this.

  Jill didn’t offer much, though I prodded her endlessly at first, unable to keep it a secret and desperate to know what she thought—provided she thought it was exciting. Jill may have done her share of good works, but she was no prude. She’d had plenty of make-outs at parties with guys whose girlfriends had gone home early. She was noncommittal when she knew I wanted her opinion, saying nothing when she knew I wanted reassurance. Her reticence only made me bug her more. When and if she did tell me I was being a bitch and to knock it off, the remorse would set in and I’d get my morals back. Sometimes I thought I had only misplaced them, set them on top of the fridge or some other spot I never thought to look.

  But really guilt didn’t change anything. I still liked it, and liked him, and I didn’t want to stop sleeping with him. Simple as that. I knew, tangibly as a stone dropped in my lap, that Liam’s wife could have been my friend or my roommate—maybe even a sister if I had had one—and I would have done this anyway. I was, I suspected, inches from becoming a rifler of purses, neglecter of children, and smacker of dogs. Who knew what else I would turn out to be capable of?

  WHEN I MET HIM, back in February, I glanced at Liam’s ring and wrote him off immediately. Or rather, I never wrote him in. So I shook his hand and smiled with nothing more than politeness when Jill introduced him as the teaching assistant who taught her class. I didn’t flirt or present myself to any great advantage, and so it was all the more flattering when his interest became clear anyway. Had I been wasting my time trying to be sexy since I was fourteen? Was it really this effortless?

  Anyway, the day I met him, I saw Jill and this stranger walking toward me on library mall, where I had stopped to buy a cup of coffee from a cart. From a distance, with their red hair and fast strides, they looked like siblings. I threw together an image of him as they approached, one with freckles and a snub nose, a charming gap between the front teeth. Someone a little immature and hyper.

  But up close I saw I was wrong. His eyebrows were nearly horizontal lines, red-brown shot through with the same blond that tipped his lashes. His nose was not remotely snubbed. His hair was a mess from the wind that blew off the lake. He looked as though he should have freckles but he didn’t. His eyes were dark green. He shook my hand and settled his gaze on me.

  “A redhead named Liam,” I’d said. “Not much ancestral mystery there, huh?”

  He smiled. “I’m not Irish.”

  “Oh. Well. Shut my mouth.”

  Jill laughed.

  A few days later I saw him again. He was coming out of the library, flipping through a sheaf of papers, a frown on his face tha
t dropped away when I stepped in front of him. Later I went to meet a friend in the English building and glimpsed him through the window of a classroom door, standing at a chalkboard in a red flannel shirt, laughing. I was jealous of the class in there, getting that kind of response from him. I’d treasured the way I could make him laugh the few times I had spoken with him, the way he gave in to it so completely he let his head tip all the way back, and I stood out in the hallway with my winter hat yanked down around my ears, watching him talk to a bunch of undergrads like me.

  After that I ran into him on campus several more times, often enough that I wondered if I had been crossing his path for years and only now noticed. We would walk on together in the same direction, picking our way over the ice and packed snow. Once I noticed him turn a corner after we parted, heading back the way we’d come, and I stood there and watched him go, wondering how far out of his way he’d gone to talk to me.

  I never remembered what we had talked about afterward, only that there were never silences, that we both had a tendency to leap into each other’s stories, embellishing as we went, encouraged by the other person’s amusement. We didn’t have much background in common, but we had the same sense of humor. He’d lived all over as a child, and I had never even moved from my old room until I left for the dorms. He was fascinated by the sheer Americana of my childhood, its parades and drive-ins and football games. “I didn’t realize that wasn’t just an old stereotype,” he said once. “It sounds so fun. You really had bonfires?”

  “You really lived in Thailand?” I countered.

  He nodded. “I developed a real taste for dried shrimp,” he said. “But why does every single bar in Wisconsin offer a Friday-night fish fry?”

  You think you’re just being terribly friendly until one day you start to catch on. Because it was always near zero we stopped for coffee, tugging our gloves off with our teeth and peering at each other through the steam. The weather made it easier; we were always inviting each other into some kind of shelter: the bowl of chili at the pub, the foggy windows in a café.

  “It was a lot of fun for a while,” he told me one day. This was in January, a few weeks after we met, and we had run into each other on State Street (at that point our “unexpected” meetings had been happening in the same place, Mondays and Wednesdays, around two o’clock) and ducked out of the cold for some coffee. He was telling me about the job he’d had before he moved here. He’d written about music for Chicago magazine, freelanced around town, and basically cobbled together a living. “You actually have to go to clubs and see bands,” he continued, “and it’s not goofing off. The rest of the time you’re at home writing in your sweatpants.”

  “You didn’t have an office at the magazine?” I’d always imagined writers sprawled in a break room, wearing blue jeans and funky glasses, popping outside every now and again for a joint or a pizza.

  “Not the freelancers. I barely saw the editor for the first year I wrote for them. Frankly, after three years of it, I was getting a little hungover. Just in general. Your friends start buying apartments and cars with mufflers, and you still smell like smoke and old beer all the time. It gets in your skin.”

  “Oh yeah, I know,” I said, nodding enthusiastically. Here at last, something I could relate to. “Jill tries to guess the daily special by the smell of my hair.” In truth I was exaggerating my impatience with this kind of job. A few months later I would be ready to move on, but waiting tables was still fun to me back then. I liked bumming cigarettes off the bartender and getting a decent buzz after my shift on employee-discounted drinks. Yet as I talked to Liam I began to nurture the first seeds of discontent with the late hours, the potatoey-smelling aprons, and the way I came home from work not clean and rumpled, as a teacher would, but literally filmed with grease. This sort of thing was a kid’s job, was what I heard him say, and I was all set to agree.

  “I figured I could still go see bands and write about music or whatever, just make it a hobby like normal people. Plus by then Alison was ready to move somewhere quieter, a smaller firm.” He peered into his mug, swirling the coffee around.

  “You miss it, though,” I said. He looked up at me, startled, and then started laughing.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I do. Thanks for giving the lie to my ready-to-grow-up routine.”

  “I never believe people when they say that.”

  We watched each other, smiling. He leaned back in his chair, stretching out his legs, and crossed his ankles. Our feet were propped against each other, but neither of us moved them away. “The job sounded a lot better when I told people what I did than when I was actually doing it. You know.”

  I didn’t know, actually. I had never had a job description that elicited anything but a tactful nod. The best you could say about my various means of employment was that they were usually over quickly. But Liam didn’t seem to know that, and I had the bizarre feeling he truly assumed I knew what it was like to have a great job you just didn’t love anymore. I wasn’t going to disabuse him of the notion, so I nodded sagely and made noises of agreement.

  “A Ph.D., though,” I said. I shook my head. “I can’t imagine being able to handle that.”

  “Why not? You ought to be thinking about something beyond undergrad.”

  “I guess so.” Both Jill and I had watched our grades slide downward since we had moved in together, regretful but uninvolved, as though their deterioration were divorced from us and our apartment with its freezer full of gin and vodka, and the games of rummy and poker we were continually offering to each other.

  He looked exasperated. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Alison tells me I do this sometimes—you don’t need me to guide you. You know what you’re doing.”

  “Oh yeah,” I agreed. “I know exactly what I’m doing.”

  We watched each other silently, and I didn’t look away. I was testing him. At the time I thought he might be amusing himself by putting out the occasional signal—the eye contact, the hug hello to the kid who was too naïve to know better—and I thought I’d call his bluff.

  The silence continued. He could have done a lot of things right then—touch my hand, brush my hair out of my face. It was that sort of moment. Instead he stayed still, holding my gaze so intently I had to know it was purposeful, and said, “Do you need a ride home?”

  At that point, I was almost more curious than anything, still in that bluffing mood to see how far he’d go. I didn’t really think we’d sleep together. He was married, though that condition seemed to me a lot like his peripatetic childhood, something relevant to him but also far away and not very real to me. I thought he might kiss me in the car, apologize, and leave.

  On the way to my house I wondered whether Jill would be there, hoping she was at class. Liam and I talked, but I was distracted, dredging up some reason to invite him in. I had always used a pretext, and so had everyone I knew. We were always mentioning specific, obscure books or CDs not just to impress but in the hopes of being asked into the apartment for the necessary loan or return. But that day I couldn’t think of a thing to offer. Musically the furthest afield I had gone was late-era Beatles. I couldn’t offer him unknown blues bootlegs, as I would later learn his wife had. He was earning a Ph.D. in literature, and though I sometimes read several books a week, they were the sort with a bloody handprint on the cover. I didn’t know wine or even beer, so I had nothing there. The heater in the car was a little sluggish. Maybe I could ask him if he needed to get warm.

  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.