You're Not You

by Michelle Wildgen

  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.

  three

  ON 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 backu
p. 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.

  Evan applauded. “I know it’s a lot harder than it looks,” he said. “You’ll be good at this, though; I can tell. I bet you’ll be better than me.”

  He was only being nice. I knew I’d botched the very first thing I’d done for her, and I didn’t ever want to try it again. I made some sort of grimace that was meant to evoke a smile, and preceded Kate to the bathroom.

  She asked me to start by brushing her teeth. With her head tipped back, her mouth open, I set to work with an electric toothbrush, concentrating on not touching her gums with the whirring bristles. Her teeth were very straight on top, the middle bottom teeth overlapping, and the glistening peaks of her molars stippled with dark pools of fillings. I counted six. Her head trembled a little with the movement of the brush, and I put a hand at the back of her skull to steady it. Her hair was warm and a little tangled from being slept on. I watched her tongue move from side to side away from the brush and the toothpaste foam, and finally she let it lie in the center of her mouth so I could run the brush over it. I had to be careful not to use too much water or she could choke on it—Evan had told me that her throat no longer closed off efficiently.

  The dental part went well, at least. I tried to make it last a little, just as a respite from the chair and the shower that was coming, but you can only brush someone’s teeth for so long. Finally I gave up and rinsed the brush. I wiped her mouth off with my hand, but even as I did it I knew that was wrong. Of course I should have used a washcloth. I froze for a moment, and I could see in her face that she had decided to let it slide. Instead she said something else, but I didn’t get what it was—something about the shower. I nodded and smiled, but I was looking at the huge walk-in shower with its sliding door and trying rather desperately to remember what Evan had told me the day before. Fine, I thought, it’s common sense. I turned on the water, the handheld attachment spraying away toward the wall, and started to put her into the plastic chair inside the shower. She looked pointedly at my leather sandals and said, moving her lips carefully for me, “You’ll want them off.” I kicked off the shoes.

  “So, remind me: I lift you to a standing position, take off your nightgown, and then move you? Or put you in the shower chair and take it from there?”

  “The chair is more stable,” she said. I repeated it after her and she nodded, so I put her into position in the white plastic lawn chair, which had suction cups attached to the feet, and then I lifted her nightgown up. I lifted each leg to free it and then pulled the back of the gown up from beneath her buttocks. Then I lifted one arm at a time and took the whole thing off over her head, her hair catching for a moment in the straps before falling again, and I slung the gown over to the counter.

  I looked around for a sponge or brush, and found an oversize one dangling on a hook. Thank God, I thought. Even with babies I felt like a pervert washing them with my bare hands. I wanted a nice huge sponge with lots of surface area. If they’d had shower gloves I might have liked those too.

  I reached for the showerhead and turned back to her. Her head was down, her arms set on each arm of the chair where I’d placed them, her feet straight in front of her. The ridges of her ribs were faintly visible. Her breasts were small and set far apart, the peach-colored nipples contracted. Her thighs spread slightly against the chair seat, the triangle of pubic hair darkening against the spray of water as I washed it over her shoulders and chest and legs. I leaned her forward slightly and sent the water down the string of vertebrae. Her hair grew dark at the ends, and when she laid her head back for me to wet it I saw that her cheeks had flushed slightly from the heat of the water.

  I turned away as I squeezed soap on the sponge. I didn’t want to see her just then, the naked wings of her collarbone and her small puckered nipples and blush spreading up her chest. As I lathered up the sponge I thought about her saying when I interviewed that she’d had ALS for two years. It wasn’t that long. Who knew how long it had taken her to get used to being bathed by other people? At least a few months.

  She hadn’t said a word since we got in the shower, and her eyes were still shut, her brows slightly knit against the spray. I sudsed her shoulders and the thin columns of her neck and arms, keeping my fingertip
s behind the sponge and away from her wet skin. The warm water sprayed my clothes and my legs, and once you got in there and started washing her, the shower was not as big as it had seemed. Still, I was doing okay. I almost started to believe in my own skills. This was just something we caregivers did.

  I lifted her arms to wash her armpits, which bore a little patch of dark stubble. I saw a razor on the shelf but decided not to do anything unless she asked. I had washed her limbs and her torso, letting the sponge glance over her breasts as though they were no more private than elbows. Now, I realized, I would have to run it between her legs. People did that in the shower.

  It was a strange time to think about my mother. But as I drew the sponge between Kate’s thighs and then washed her back all the way down to the cleft of her buttocks, I was recalling washing with my mom. I suppose when I was very young it was easier than bathing me separately. But it had always seemed an arbitrary and bold thing for her to do, and I still remembered standing in the shower, looking up the landscape of her body, its wide hips and the sturdy muscle at the front of her thighs and the moon-colored curve of the bottoms of her breasts, the brisk slapping sound of her cupped hand—my mother did not believe in washcloths—mittened in lather as she rubbed at the gray-shadowed skin of her armpits and the flat curls of pubic hair. Her breasts and the flesh of her upper arms trembled as she reached, businesslike, into the dark hollow between her legs, and I had watched her and thought, Oh, I’d better do that too. It embarrassed me to wash myself in front of my mother, so I’d turned silently away toward the green-tiled corner of the shower and done it, one fast scrub as though I were brushing something away. I didn’t look at my mother’s face when I turned back. I looked at the crease across her belly instead.

  I did the same thing with Kate now, a brief wipe with the sponge and then a rinse. I hung the sponge up on its hook, turned off the water, and turned back to her. Without the hot spray it felt chilly in the shower, but her cheeks were flushed even more deeply than they had been before, her neck blotched red. She had said nothing, not even a directive, since we had gotten in the shower. She dropped her chin a little farther and looked away, toward an empty corner of the shower.