You're Not You

by Michelle Wildgen

  When the door was shut and I was lifting her to her feet, she said, “Do you suppose you could take care of getting me to bed tonight? Jill can have another glass of wine and watch TV while we finish up.”

  I turned to face her. She was sitting on the toilet with her hands on her thighs, where I had put them.

  “Of course,” I said. I had never known Evan not to be home in time to put her to bed. She seemed to have an idea what I was thinking because she closed her eyes briefly and then said, “Thank you. We can talk tomorrow if that’s okay.”

  “Of course,” I said again.

  When I left her an hour later she was in bed, the light off but the television on. I set the remote on her abdomen, beneath her hand, and made sure each finger was on the right button. Beneath the other hand I put the lifeline. I was worried I’d forgotten something. Normally I felt secure in the knowledge that Evan would take care of anything I had overlooked, but now I kept checking the oven, the lock on the door to the garage.

  “Anything else?” I asked, peeking in on her in bed for the third time. Jill was waiting for me by the front door, and had been for the past fifteen minutes. “Whatever you need.”

  Kate gave me a tolerant smile and shook her head. “Really, no. This is great.”

  “Okay, well, I’ll see you tomorrow. We can talk then.”

  Back out in the living room Jill was looking out the window. She heard me come in and said, “This neighborhood is eerily quiet. Are you sure other people live here?”

  “THANKS FOR BRINGING JILL over,” Kate said the next afternoon. We were at her kitchen table. “It was fun.”

  “Yeah, we had a good time.” All that morning I’d been waiting for her to tell me where Evan was. The jealousy I’d felt the night before seemed very far away. I thought she would continue, but she seemed uncomfortable, glancing around the room and out the windows. “So,” I said finally. “Is anything up?”

  Finally she looked at me. “I wanted to ask you about your schedule. I know school is starting and you already work so much. But is there any chance you could extend your hours a bit? Come by in the mornings and get me up, or help me to bed?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Just for a while? Is Evan going out of town?”

  Kate shook her head. “No,” she said, “he’s moving out.”

  There was a long pause. I realized my mouth was open. Of all the things I had suspected might happen—more arguments, maybe, counseling—I had never thought he would leave.

  “You’re kidding,” I said. I busied myself with my purse, pretending to look for something. Kate just observed me. How did she do it, not being able to fidget when she was nervous?

  “No,” she answered simply.

  I didn’t say anything for a few seconds. I was trying not to put my foot in my mouth. If this had been Jill telling me about a boyfriend, I would have indulged myself in some inventive name-calling. What could he possibly be thinking? This wasn’t the usual situation where you could move out and pop back in and everything would be fine. He could have gone to counseling. He could have made up a bed in the guest room. He could have just kept doing what he was doing and left well enough alone. It had never occurred to me that he would leave her alone, sitting inside that house, with no one to help her.

  “I’m sorry to put you in this position,” Kate was saying. “I’ll hire another caregiver right away, and I know I should have hired one before this. You probably had an idea there was trouble.” I watched her lips carefully, repeating as she spoke. It seemed especially important I understand clearly. She paused and took a breath. “But I had to ask him to leave.”

  “I DON’T WANT TO PRY,” I said the next morning. Kate’s eyes were closed. I brushed on shadow, watching the soft coins of her corneas shifting beneath her eyelids. Cosmetics were spread out over the bathroom counter. “But do you think this is temporary?”

  Kate opened her eyes. “No,” she said, “it’s probably permanent.”

  I stopped sharpening the eyeliner and watched Kate’s lips carefully. “ ‘Permanent’?”

  Kate nodded. She shut her eyes again so I could smudge the gray eyeliner near her lashes. I drew her eyelid taut, bracing my fingers against her temple, and dotted the liner on, smudging it with a Q-Tip. She opened her eyes and peered into a mirror I held up. “More blending,” she said. I flicked a stiff brush over her eyelids.

  “He thinks,” Kate said, “he should have another outlet.”

  “You mean a woman?”

  “And my family acts like I should be grateful . . .”

  I nodded to show I was following, but I could feel my cheeks stinging. In the mirror I saw the flush creep up my neck, and I saw Kate’s eyes alight on me and then shift tactfully away. I swirled a wide sable brush in a jar of powder and then swept it over her face. It left a gleam on the smooth apples of her cheeks, the high slope of her cheekbones.

  “. . . Grateful he wants to live with me, and just accept it.”

  “You talk about this with your family?” I held up three lip liners. Kate nodded at the Tawny Rose.

  “Not willingly. But I got fed up and let it slip.” She let her mouth relax. I cupped her jaw in one hand and with the other feathered the pencil over the rounded wings of her upper lip. I switched to broader strokes over the pillow of the lower one. Kate rubbed her lips together.

  “They think I’m being unreasonable,” she continued.

  “I guess you know what you need,” I said. I was trying to avoid offending her, but it all seemed so fast to me. Shouldn’t it take longer than this to end a marriage? They had seemed so happy when I met them, and still did at times. It frightened me, though, the fact that whatever Evan had done, an affair or two, or whatever, had had such consequences. I realized that I had assumed all along, without ever stating it to myself, that he probably did something of this kind and no one felt the need to deal with it directly.

  I dredged the stiff short bristles of an eyebrow brush in a light brown shadow and then blew away the extra powder in one puff. I brushed it against the grain of Kate’s fine eyebrows. Their arch emphasized the almond shape of her eyes and the high dome of her lids.

  “Thanks.”

  “And you can’t work it out?” I asked. Was this affair really deserving of the name—encounters, perhaps—or was it more the satisfaction of a petty necessity? But not the kind of thing you ended a marriage for. Not in this case.

  And yet how had Kate found out? Maybe it wasn’t the offense itself so much as the manner. At least Liam never let his wife know. At least he was considerate enough to deal with it on his own time. Kate, of course, would clearly disagree. Yet the more I thought about an affair for Evan as something like clinical relief, like the occasional visit to a chiropractor or the Shiatsu guy, the more I felt a prickle of shame and belittlement sweep over me as well. Perhaps Liam was only moved to call me after grading a stack of especially clunky term papers, or a class that hadn’t had a word to say about Andrew Marvell.

  “I did try,” Kate said. “I even thought I could handle it, but he didn’t end up just having a little . . . encounter on the side. It ended up a whole affair. I can’t just sit here while he dates. I need to have some say in something. Why does everyone think I don’t deserve to mind?”

  I thought about Evan meeting a parade of women for brunch, bringing them back to the house on Saturdays while Kate and I went to the market. I thought about his ingratiating smile, which always won me over, his extra bottles of wine and hundred-dollar bonuses for staying an extra hour or two when he was late. I not only never complained about staying late, I thought guiltily, I’d often hoped for it. I liked the wine, and I liked the extra cash.

  “I understand,” I said.

  “I don’t know how I thought it would work,” she said meditatively, looking off toward the wall. “He couldn’t just proposition some woman and get laid. He wouldn’t go to a prostitute. So, of course, he would have to establish a relationship first.”

  I was t
oo surprised to say anything. I closed the powder box and began to clean the makeup brushes.

  “For a while I told him he should have an option, so to speak. I was so fucked up and sad it seemed like it might work better than anything else we’d tried. But I couldn’t handle it,” she said, more briskly. “I had this compulsion to ask for details.”

  She was quiet for a moment. Then she added, “If someone else told me this, you know, if I were just a bystander, I might sympathize with him. I don’t think I’m moralistic. Everyone’s marriage is different, blah blah. But from here it feels like shit, this on top of everything else. And he knows it makes me feel like shit, and he refuses to acknowledge that.” Kate took a breath and looked away. “I just think, I won’t be here forever, maybe not even that long. He can’t just wait?”

  I was running hot water over the eyeliner brush and scrubbing at the bristles. I stopped moving. Kate and I looked at each other in the mirror. She searched my face, calculating my response to this, and then said: “I’m sorry. You don’t want to know this.”

  “No, I do,” I said. That sounded creepy. “You should be able to tell me whatever you want.”

  “That’s nice of you,” she said.

  “My love life isn’t exactly a clear road either,” I said. “So don’t think I’ll be shocked.”

  She looked faintly amused. “You’re too nice to have a fucked-up love life,” she said.

  “No I’m not. I’ve been with a couple people I should have left alone. People who were involved already,” I said. I imagined Liam on my doorstep, holding a suitcase, a car screeching out of my driveway with a dark blur of hair in the driver’s side window.

  Kate nodded. Her eyebrows had lost their high arch; they were knit together in a straight line.

  I went on, not really sure why. “Or one, anyway. But it’s different from this.”

  She looked down at the bottles and jars on the counter. I reached over and closed the lid on some eye shadow, recapped a lipstick.

  “Let’s drop it, okay?” she said. “Maybe we should let this lie for now.”

  “Okay,” I heard myself say. She gave me a brief, stiff smile and turned to leave the bathroom.

  I’d blown it. So much for confidences.

  I finished cleaning the brushes, closed the door, and lowered the toilet lid so I could sit down. For a moment I felt on the verge of tears, but I took a few deep breaths and got ahold of myself. What, I wondered, would Evan have told her? I pictured them sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, Evan rumpled and still in yesterday’s suit, coffee steaming between them, an untouched cup in front of Kate, set there out of ten years’ habit. We met at work, I imagined him saying. I liked her eyes, her intelligence. She had the client in the palm of her hand. We had a drink. We had lunch. She asked about you. She’s taller than you, heavier. It was sweet; it wasn’t wild. She has a tiny, faded scar below one eye from a car wreck, long toes with the nails painted red. She was very quiet all through and afterward she grinned at the ceiling and got up to shower. It’s not an issue of better. She wasn’t better. She was someone I didn’t know. She was someone who—if we’re being brutally honest—could run a hand over the back of my neck, who could lift her hips beneath me and push back against me. She wasn’t better; she wasn’t worse. But she was nothing like you.

  KATE AND I HAD one more conversation about Liam. I had been the one to bring it up. I felt so wretched for having told her about him that I couldn’t imagine why I had thought the confession would make her feel better. So the day after that I worked up my courage and said, “I’m sorry about . . . what I told you yesterday.”

  I sort of hoped she would need reminding, that she’d already forgotten. But she nodded and said, “It’s none of my business, Bec. I can’t tell you what to do. I’m sure the circumstances are different.” There seemed nothing else to say to that, so I just nodded back. She gave me a little peace-offering smile, which shamed me so much I blurted out, “I think it’s ending anyway.” Maybe she’d forgotten that I’d already said that, weeks ago.

  “Well,” she said, “everyone has their breaking point.”

  Maybe if I had been there when Evan came to get his things, I would have felt the finality of it. But he had been around less and less anyway, so to me the house without him seemed expectant, as though he just stepped out for a haircut. His side of the closet wasn’t empty, and I glanced through the clothes, guiltily, one day while Kate was in the bathroom. She’d had a bout of constipation and was hoping it was almost over. At moments like this, when I had some privacy in their house, it was so hard not to rifle through their bedroom and look for clues to what had happened. He had left his heavy winter clothes in the closet, a few densely knit sweaters and an overcoat. Maybe he didn’t plan to be gone all winter. I closed the closet door silently.

  I wanted to go through their bedside drawers and see if there were videos or erotic books, or if they were just empty pine boards. I wanted to look for a letter that explained the details. I wanted to know how long it had all been going on. Had he asked her permission before the first time? Or had she somehow found out, or he confessed, and then they reached a short-lived agreement? How did she know he was having an affair and not just brief encounters? He must have let it slip somehow, I decided.

  I was trying to be supportive, but I couldn’t suppress the feeling that what he was doing wasn’t as bad as she thought. It was and it wasn’t—it sounded terrible, but what if he had just never said a word about it? Evan’s life, I rationalized, had taken a big turn with her illness too, and for the most part I never saw him complain. And I liked him. Or at least I remembered liking him—I hadn’t seen him in weeks. I knew in his position I might have done the same, pretty much already had, and I wanted to defend it somehow. But then I remembered Kate saying simply, Can’t he wait? and it didn’t seem so much to ask.

  I turned away from the nightstand and looked around at the photos that were still on the shelves: Kate, Evan, Lisa, and a dark-haired man with a beard, somewhere in Italy holding flutes of straw-colored wine; Kate with her arm thrown around an old friend from college, whose head was tilted, and mouth in midsentence. The photo of their wedding, however, which had showed her in a long, slim, blue column of a dress because she disliked white, and Evan in a charcoal suit, was gone. I peered behind the other frames for one turned facedown but found nothing. Maybe Evan had taken it with him. He probably had set it near the television in his new hotel room, something to comfort him a little, perhaps. I pictured him in a hotel bar, perched on a vinyl stool cushion, sipping at a half-inch of whisky.

  Kate called to me from the bathroom and I went to get her, glancing around to be sure I’d moved it all back. The bed was slightly rumpled from the bad job I’d done of making it when I got Kate up that morning, and I thought of them, Kate and Evan, sitting up beneath the covers on the last night he’d been there, watching each other.

  LIAM ARRIVED A FEW minutes early on a Thursday two weeks before school was to begin. I greeted him at the door, still wearing the shorts and T-shirt I’d slept in. He kissed me as he came in, looked over my outfit, and then glanced around the apartment. “Is Jill here?” he asked.

  “You know she always leaves,” I reminded him. He made a sorrowful face, which for some reason grated on me. Jill’s discomfort wasn’t new; it was time to stop reacting to it as though he was pained each time he confronted it. By now I found it difficult to imagine that Jill had originally introduced us. Once, she’d been running late, and was still putting on her makeup when he’d arrived. She went into her room when the doorbell rang and shut the door. A few minutes later, from my bed, where we lay without touching or speaking as we waited for the house to empty, we heard the front door open and close, a car start on the street.

  We closed my bedroom door after us, a habit just in case Jill arrived early.

  Later, I pulled my T-shirt back on and drew the sheet up to my waist. Liam settled himself against the pillow, crossing h
is ankles, as if all he’d ever come here for was conversation. He looked so relaxed and at home that I found myself blurting, “Kate kicked Evan out,” just to jolt him.

  It worked. Liam’s eyebrows rose sharply, and he sat up straighter, crossing his legs and settling himself into a posture that looked a lot more attentive. I shouldn’t have used Kate for effect that way, but it was so satisfying to catch him off guard. When was the last time I’d managed to do that? By necessity we had worked out this routine, and now I felt its disadvantages. I was always here, waiting for him. On our next day, I decided then, I’d stand him up, or at least be late. Just something to needle him, so he wouldn’t look so comfy in my house.

  “How can she?” he said. “Doesn’t she need him? Or someone?”

  I’d been worrying about that myself, because guess who would be filling in for the errant husband? Instead of admitting that part of it I stared into my mug of tea and said, “I’ll take on some more hours for now. She’ll hire another caregiver too.”

  He nodded slowly, and I felt his gaze on me.

  “Did she tell you what happened?”

  “A bunch of stuff,” I muttered, suddenly unwilling to give him details, realizing I should have kept it to myself. This had nothing to do with him. “Sex. Other things.”

  “Ah. I guess that’s not too surprising,” he mused. He reached over and took my mug from me and sipped from it, then handed it back. I set it on the rug.

  “I guess not,” I told him. There had to be things I didn’t know, and though I sympathized with Evan, my first loyalty was invariably to Kate. For a while, back when I first started at the job, I’d really liked him more, but somewhere along the line he seemed to have displaced himself, slipping from the room while I was busy with Kate, and it took me some time to recognize the shift. Kate was getting the short end of a lot of sticks: She was the one with the disease; she was the one who couldn’t physically get up and just go fuck someone else, who, even her family seemed to believe, should take what she could get. It seemed to add insult to injury.