You're Not You

by Michelle Wildgen

  She started to laugh. “No, mine,” she said. She blushed, and looked away, then said, “I need something, you know?” There was another pause. “You just put it on me and put me on my stomach and go out for an hour or so and that’s it.”

  I was blushing too. I thought I had gotten over this. Wiping away urine or shit was just cleaning. Even with bathing her I just relied on briskness, and my hands stayed safely behind a sponge or a removable showerhead. But now I was as mortified as on my first day.

  I hadn’t dealt with this yet and frankly I’d thought I’d never have to. That there was a clitoris tucked behind the lips of her vagina was something I knew but had been pretty careful not to consider. I had never even considered how sensitive she might still be—I’d imagined her rather numb, her flesh inert as clay, from knees to waist. I’d always assumed she was angry at Evan for getting the sex she couldn’t have, but now I realized she was capable at least of some things. He just wouldn’t give it.

  I brushed my hair behind my shoulders.

  “No problem,” I said. I laid the covers to one side and reached beneath her nightgown. I drew her underwear down, trying to be gentle and less businesslike than usual, folded them, and set them on the chair. She was still blushing a little, gazing firmly at the lamp as I came back to the bed. I put the two loops around her ankles and eased the butterfly up, lifting her legs as I went to make it easier.

  I settled the butterfly on the soft brown curls between her legs. I was thinking of my own body and I tried to put it low enough that it would touch her clitoris. I adjusted the straps over her hip bones. “Is that all right?”

  Kate nodded. “Thanks,” she said. I nudged the tiny switch on with my fingernail, and the butterfly began buzzing. We both ignored it, and the sound was muted by her body when I turned her onto her stomach, making sure her head was comfortably to one side and her hair out of her face. I started to leave, but then I stopped at the door, one hand on the light switch.

  “Do you need anything else?” I looked back over my shoulder at the headboard of the bed. I focused just above her blond hair.

  “No, thanks,” Kate said, and I nodded and took a deep breath. I turned out the light.

  OUT IN THE LIVING room I turned on the television. The volume was too high, and a laugh track burst out. I lowered it and flipped through the channels. I didn’t know what Kate could hear from her bedroom, but I didn’t want her to have to hear canned laughter or the screams from a cop show. I had switched the lights off earlier and now I reached over and turned on a lamp as I searched the channels. There was nothing—wildlife shows, the Food Network, football games. Nothing at all romantic. Finally I tried the stereo. There was a jazz CD in it from dinner, and I raised the volume enough so that Kate could probably hear it, but I couldn’t hear anything from the bedroom.

  AFTER AN HOUR I thought I should knock. I got up, but then paused. If this were a crucial moment it would be the worst possible time to interrupt. I wandered around the living room instead, paged through a book of photographs: a breast, a river, the stem of a lily. An unmade bed, the sheets glowing white. A willow.

  FINALLY I DECIDED IT was time. I knocked and she said, “Okay,” like I was coming in to collect her tea tray.

  I pushed her hair behind her ear again, revealing a cheek flushed pink as a geranium. I tried to keep my hands off her thighs as I reached beneath her gown. I slid a hand between her heated skin and the bed-sheets, cupped it beneath her hip, and lifted her pelvis, tugging the butterfly down by its strap. Then I took it into the bathroom, ran it under warm water, and dried it off. I put it back in its box in the nightstand drawer and turned Kate over to her back so her neck wouldn’t cramp from being turned to one side. I didn’t say anything, and she kept her eyes closed the whole time.

  ten

  I WAS ON MY way to hand in a paper, the first big assignment of the spring semester, when I saw Liam again. I was looking through my paper—a study on the representations of demons in medieval painting—as I headed up Bascom, thinking it was slight but that at least it was on time, when Liam came jogging up next to me and touched my arm. I wasn’t even startled. I’d been waiting for this for months. I hadn’t seen him since October. It was February now.

  He was wearing a jacket I’d never seen before. His hair seemed redder, as though the winter sun had intensified it.

  “Hey, Bec,” he said. We stopped on the hill and stood there awkwardly for a moment. He took off his headphones and then he kissed my cheek. Just a friendly, public, my-wife-knows-you kind of kiss, but—and here it struck me so clearly I didn’t know how I had managed to avoid thinking about it for so long—no one had touched me in months, and the warmth of his mouth made me close my eyes a moment, exhale without meaning to. I was going to have to do something soon. Maybe I needed a butterfly of my own.

  “Hey,” I said. “How’re you doing?”

  He grinned. “Okay. I’m glad I saw you. I was just thinking about you a little while ago.”

  “Oh, yeah? What about me?” I wanted to hear how someone’s perfume reminded him of me, or maybe how he’d been missing me a lot. I’d never called him back, but I’d saved the answering machine tape.

  “Just how you were. Curious.”

  With him standing right there my resolve was thin. His hair was shaggy, his eyes greener than I remembered. I bet if I asked him he would come home with me, but standing out here I felt young and callow, bumbling. Where had all the confidence gone?

  “I’m fine. I’m the same as I ever was.”

  “Okay.” He looked skeptical, then seemed to take a breath and said in a rush, “Listen. I miss you. I think I was an ass to you.”

  I didn’t see how I could answer that except to agree that I missed him too, and I didn’t want to admit it. Instead I said, “Did you ever tell her?”

  “Maybe someday.” He looked off down the hill. “Things are a little precarious right now. I figure if I feel like shit, then that’s my problem. I don’t get to make myself feel better by foisting it off on her.” He paused, and I kept watching him. Finally he admitted, “I don’t want to tell her, really. I just don’t want to go through all that.”

  He ran a hand through his hair. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, stuck his hands in his pockets. I never noticed before how constantly he moved. He switched his briefcase to the other hand.

  “Listen,” I said. Who knew if I would run into him again? If I had anything to ask him, I knew, now was the moment. I lowered my voice as a group of girls in knit caps and gloves went by, cackling. “Why me? Or could it have been anyone, anyone pretty?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “You because you’re funny and smart and by the way you never seemed to realize how smart you were. Are.” We started walking again. “And I guess it might not have happened if Alison and I weren’t going through a rough patch. But that’s no reflection on you.”

  “You were going through a rough patch?” Why did it hurt me to know that? Was he supposed to have told me all about it?

  “Yeah. With the move to Madison and this whole switch with her working and me in school . . . it’s been different.” He looked at me and then stopped, taking my arm. “Bec, don’t look that way. I couldn’t have talked to you about it. It wasn’t your problem.”

  “Oh, no,” I agreed, keeping a tremor out of my voice. It was so sordid. He should have just gone to a strip club. “The whole thing barely seems to have anything to do with me when you put it like that.”

  I’D BEEN DRIVING PAST a store called A Woman’s Touch for months, but I finally decided to stop in and browse. For a minute after I parked I sat in my car and stared at the noodle shop next to it. I was debating whether I needed to detach the removable face from my new CD player if I wouldn’t be gone long. Kate had given me a slightly exorbitant Christmas bonus, and after weeks of dithering I’d bought a better stereo than my car really deserved. It gleamed in its slot, all black surfaces and green lights shining softly, so sleek
and out of place that I had had the car detailed just to make it seem more at home. I’d been driving the long way to and from Kate’s house just for the pleasure of listening to my CDs. I was supposed to detach the face every time, leaving behind a blank rectangle of black plastic and a blinking red light marked security system. This was a lie, but what thief would bother to test it? Finally I took the face off, put it in my bag, and got out of my car.

  I’d assumed I’d stroll right in without hesitating, but as I went past the noodle place and record store, it was all I could do not to glance around to see who was watching. It was embarrassing to be embarrassed; I’d thought I was pretty straightforward. Mistress of my own erotic potential and such. But the openness of it was daunting, the way anyone could look you over and ponder what it was you needed, what you’d do with your purchases. I didn’t mind, say, Liam knowing things like that about me, but I could have done without the tacit understanding of the record store clerk who was smoking a cigarette out front. I walked past him without meeting his eyes, and as I went in I turned my back to the door, relieved there were no glass windows open to the sidewalk.

  Inside, there was music playing softly, and two women were looking at a silk teddy on a hanger. One woman lifted the silk and rubbed the fabric between her fingers. She grinned at the other woman, who laughed. I smiled nervously at the woman behind the counter, who was plump and blond, in a flowing skirt and muslin blouse. She looked like a waitress in an organic restaurant, which was somehow reassuring.

  Along one wall were books and videos, vibrators and dildos and harnesses along the other. I glanced over my shoulder: The other two women were now examining a package of body paints. Then I faced the vibrators, glad to turn my back on the rest of the quiet store, and set about scrutinizing them as though I had some idea what I was doing. The store was so hushed that I could hear the murmur of the two women as they decided on their purchases. I thought I ought to be acting like a discerning customer, so I picked up a hot-pink vibrator with a long shaft. A pink plastic bunny head was attached to the same base as the shaft, the bunny’s nose facing inward toward the plastic column, like an opposable thumb.

  I turned it on. A whirring sound filled the store as the shaft rotated like a joystick and the bunny’s head pattered back and forth, as loud as a woodpecker. I almost dropped it. The whole apparatus seemed extremely complicated. I turned it off, forcing myself not to look over my shoulder.

  I kept browsing, sticking to the simple items now. Finally I settled on a Japanese-made purple wand, buying a tube of Silk Glide to go with it after the clerk said, “You’ll want lubrication,” and, to demonstrate, made me run my finger along the sticky rubber of the vibrator. As I watched her wrap the box in tissue paper, sealing it with a pink sticker bearing the name of the store, I began to feel much, much better. What had I been embarrassed about? No one else was self-conscious. This was going to be fantastic. Something new, something exciting, something whenever I wanted it. I took a catalog with me and drove home with the heat blasting, tapping the steering wheel in time with the radio, and retired to my saffron-yellow room.

  eleven

  EVAN MOVED BACK INTO their old house right after Kate moved out. “I know I’ve forgotten something,” Kate warned me, and I said it didn’t really matter if she had. I could make the trip over for anything she needed.

  But she was more comfortable seeing him than I was, as it turned out. I was there one evening, cleaning her feeding tube after dinner, when the doorbell rang. The look on Kate’s face told me right off who it was. She turned her head toward the doorbell, her lips opening slightly. Her face took on a bit of that stoniness it sometimes did when Evan’s name came up, but there was something else too. Curiosity?

  When I opened the door Evan had leaned toward me for a second, as if to kiss me on the cheek, but I turned around fast and called over my shoulder for him to follow me. He was flushed from the cold, snow in his hair, a blue scarf wrapped around his neck. I saw Kate eye it, and thought Cynthia had probably bought it for him. You never see a man buy his own scarf. I was dying to see this woman, to see if she really was, as Lisa had said, very much like Kate. What did that mean—well dressed, slender, a reader of books? Every now and again I thought I saw Evan downtown when Jill and I met up with people, but only once had it really been him. I saw him going into a restaurant just behind someone else. He’d been holding the door, his hand on the person’s waist. It had to be Cynthia. There’d been a glimpse of gleaming dark hair, a black leather coat.

  I looked him over as he took off his coat. He had gained weight. I took a perverse satisfaction in the flesh beneath his chin, the slight roundness of his sweatered belly.

  He looked around for a place to hang his coat. After a good long minute I took it from him.

  “I like your hair, Bec,” he said. I’d splurged at Kate’s salon and had it cut to shoulder length and shaped around my face.

  “Thanks,” I said. I pushed it behind my ears.

  He looked behind me. Kate had come in. “Hi. You look beautiful,” he said to her. “Really lovely.”

  She glanced down at her lap and said, “Hi. Well, let’s go to the study.” Evan didn’t move. There was a long, uncomfortable stillness, and finally he broke it, his cheeks mottled, by looking my way. He didn’t understand her, I realized, and out of fury I just didn’t answer. Kate said it again, and he turned to watch her. She moved her head in the direction of the study, and this time he got it.

  “Do you need me?” I asked. Kate smiled and shook her head. He saw her do that and then said, “Thank you, Bec, no.” He shut the study door behind him.

  TO WATCH EVAN IN her new house, seeing their things in this place, was enough to make me pity him. He kept casting startled glances around and recovering himself, reaching out to pick up a knickknack before realizing how presumptuous that would be. He had the tentative air and the diffident, slightly off-balance posture of a man who ought to be carrying a suitcase. I could have sworn he would move right in if Kate let him.

  They had worked out a formal separation but nothing further, and Lisa still maintained he would never have left in the first place if Kate had stuck with the counseling. I hadn’t realized they’d spent as much time in counseling as apparently they had, some of it before I even met them. But Kate had given up after several months, saying, We weren’t getting anywhere. I just don’t have time for this. And when he came over I saw that he still looked at her the same way, and as she moved ahead of him I’d seen him reach toward her shoulder, in the unthinking way you lay a hand on someone’s neck, smooth their hair behind them, that proprietary way you pretend the other body is yours. His hand swung out toward her, paused, and then he drew it back.

  WHILE THEY WERE IN the study I straightened up the living room. I could hear the low rumble of Evan’s voice, and the occasional answer from Kate. What if they did get back together? I tried to imagine everything changing around all over again: Evan moving into this house, my schedule scaled back to part-time. Maybe I ought to have wanted that for Kate—I knew I should want them to work things out, for Evan to do as she asked for whatever amount of time was left, but the idea of accommodating him all over, just when things seemed resettled, infuriated me. And it was terrible that I wasn’t even angry on her behalf. I liked what I had here.

  Besides, even if he did decide to ask to move back in, to get back together, how could he do it? It shouldn’t be a businesslike transaction, but that was what he would have been reduced to. What were you supposed to do, close your eyes and dive in for a conciliatory kiss? She couldn’t give a lot of clues about how receptive she was, and I couldn’t imagine Evan feeling secure enough to risk it. What signal could she give him to kiss her?

  It made me think of how I used to punish Liam, turning away because I knew he’d follow, if we had had an argument and I felt I was in the right. There must have been something in my posture that told him I would be receptive if he tried to touch me, even if I was ignoring him. May
be it was my head turned slightly toward him to hear his movements, my hand curled on the bedspread, my open palm facing him—but he could always see it. He would turn me back to him, his hand a hard cradle at the back of my skull, and sometimes it made me moan in surprise before he even got to kissing me. You could not use that kind of motion with someone who couldn’t signal you back with a hand on the neck, a leg slung open. You couldn’t even let that force well up behind your actions, because nothing pushed back to keep the balance equal. So you’d stifle it. You could be gentle, definitely, you had to be gentle, but even then the options were limited. I just thought a person would get tired of a tender love scene every time.

  One of the last times Liam and I were together, I tried being still and letting him make love to me as though, physically, I could not return it. I did it for a moment. I did it just to see. I left my legs still draped around the backs of his knees, my arms where I’d wrapped them around his neck. My head slid up and down and shoved the pillow to one side. My hair rubbed roughly against the headboard. One arm fell to the bed as he moved, and I had let a sound escape me, because sounds were allowed. Sex changed without the resistance on my part, that push upward. It felt like—it was, of course—being fucked, the receiver of the action, and for a moment it was exciting to see what he did when he was, in a way, alone. My arm flopped out over the edge of the bed, rolling back and forth as he moved, and he’d glanced at it before pushing his mouth back against my hair. What the hell are you doing? he’d said. His breath was ragged and harsh in my ear. Move. Move.

  twelve

  WE WERE IN THE living room after dinner, early in March, watching the snow come down. I’d made a fire. On the coffee table was a list on which I had checked everything off, but it was satisfying to look at so I hadn’t thrown it away. We had mailed packages, ordered two more cases of nutrition shakes, written letters to two state congressmen and five or six university researchers about abortion rights and funding ALS research, and placed holds on three books from the library.