You're Not You

by Michelle Wildgen

“She and Evan used to come here a lot,” I explained.

  “Oh. Lucky. What do you suppose ‘special treatment’ means?” Jill asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I told her. “Maybe we get a massage.”

  I opened the wine list and recognized nothing, so we asked for glasses of champagne. There was a pause while we studied our menus, and then I said, “You look really good, you know. I like your hair.”

  Her hair was no longer scarlet but auburn, and the effect against her skin was kinder and warmer. She was wearing big silver hoops and a black silk shirt, her mouth the color of a berry.

  “Thanks.” Jill blushed slightly. “I toned it down for interviews. I got this internship thing and just thought I should screw them into thinking they’d hired a professional.”

  “Well, I love your unprofessional look too,” I said. “But you’re graduating soon, et cetera.”

  “Et cetera,” Jill agreed. She sipped her champagne. How adult we seemed, dressed up and out to dinner without parents or even boyfriends along. I liked this. I could develop a real taste for it.

  “What’s the latest with this trip this summer?” Jill asked.

  “I’m doing a little research,” I said. “In a way I want to push for Turkey, you know, or Bangkok, but then I remember that I’ll be the one navigating all this. So we’re thinking start small. Florence, maybe. Paris. It’s all new to me anyway. Think you’ll come?”

  She rolled her eyes. “God, I hope so. Let me know when you have a date set and I’ll see what work looks like.” She chewed some ice and then said, “How are classes?”

  “They’re not bad. I’m just taking the two, you know, the Renaissance art and then the lit class.”

  Jill laughed. “You’re not even taking anything in your major?”

  I started giggling like a fool, trying to keep it quiet so we didn’t seem unsophisticated. Next to us a woman with upswept ash-blond hair glanced our way over her wineglass.

  “Not one pathetic marketing course?” Jill went on.

  I caught my breath. “Oh god, I hate my major,” I said. I started laughing again. “I hate ad people and marketing people. I think they’re all full of shit.”

  “SPECIAL TREATMENT” TURNED OUT to mean courses we hadn’t ordered but which kept arriving nevertheless, accompanied by thumbnail descriptions. Each tiny portion was set before us with a flourish, gleaming against the black plates like jewelry or tiny works of sculpture that demanded some admiration before we even thought of touching them. There was a fat ivory-and-coral lobster claw with pale green endive browned at the edges; thick coins of gold-and-garnet beets laid with chunks of bacon; a creamy, rosy-beige disk of duck’s liver atop a doll-size salad of mushrooms and greens. I kept wondering how they had done this, asking myself if they had roasted the beets or boiled them, if you could get the endive like this just by searing it or whether it needed braising first.

  “Wake up,” Jill whispered.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “How do you think they got this olive crust to stick on the lamb?”

  “They have free labor to do it for them,” Jill said. “Didn’t you see that article in the Cap Times?”

  “What, like slave labor?” I paused in chewing my lamb. “I wouldn’t have come here if I thought they had some dicey illegal immigrant thing going on.”

  Jill sipped her water. “No, it’s some apprenticeship thing. People come in and work for free because it’s an education or an honor or something. I think a lot of high-end restaurants do it.”

  Now I remembered. I’d read part of it to Kate. “Just think, some unpaid geek might be back there plating our next course even as we speak. I’m kind of jealous, actually. I bet they taste everything.”

  By the time we had finished coffee and cognac and agreed to call a cab and get my car in the morning, I was leaning back in my chair, hazy with goodwill and dazzlement.

  “Can you imagine the people who come here all the time?” Jill said.

  “Sure. Evan and Kate did. Maybe now he and Cynthia do. But they probably don’t disgrace themselves quite like this. Well. Maybe Cynthia does.”

  I was trying to imagine taking my parents to a place like this. After I’d cooked for her birthday my mother had conceded that just steak wouldn’t have been as nice. But I could just hear them: my mother asking question after careful question before she finally ordered the chicken, my father going straight for the steak and asking for a baked potato.

  I took a last sip of my coffee. I really couldn’t see my parents here. It embarrassed and even hurt me a little that I didn’t really want to.

  Jill was looking thoughtfully around the room, which had gotten darker and quieter as other people finished their meals and ours kept going on. Her lipstick was long gone and her cheeks were flushed from the wine, a faint sheen across her nose. She—and I, I bet—looked a little worn and tired out by food and wine, like we’d both been made love to instead of cooked for. The music was interrupted every now and again by laughter from the bartender, a murmur from another table.

  “How’s life at Kate’s?” Jill asked. She poured a little cream from a silver pitcher into her coffee. She normally drank it black but had informed me a few minutes before that she believed in using everything put before her at a good restaurant. Then she had used the tiny silver tongs to drop one lump of brown sugar and one lump of white sugar into her cup.

  “It’s good,” I said. “It takes some getting used to. Someone else’s house and all.”

  “Well, if you ever need to move back in just let me know.”

  “Why would I need to do that?”

  Jill looked away. “No reason. Just if you decide it wasn’t such a good idea.”

  I felt a plum-sized knot of misgiving gather just below my diaphragm. “You don’t think it was?”

  She shook her head and laughed lightly. “Of course it was. I just mean if something comes up, or whatever. I don’t mean anything. You feel good about it, right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I feel great.”

  I WOULD HAVE LIKED to go back with Jill to our old apartment and just sleep on the couch. I missed being back there after a long night, drinking coffee in the morning and arguing over whose turn it was to go for scones. Since I had left, we still saw each other once a week or so, for lunch or on Friday nights for fried cod and beer. It was a shock to me how much I missed her. I didn’t have these throw-away moments with Kate, sitting around between school and work in the dead time of an afternoon, and running into each other, happily tipsy, in the living room at the end of a long night. At Kate’s everything was organized, right down to when one of us would leave the house to give the other some space. Jill and I always stumbled into cooling-off periods like that when we realized we were arguing over whose teacup was in the sink, who’d bought the toothpaste that tasted like cough syrup.

  It wasn’t that Kate and I didn’t get along. It just had taken me more time to get used to this new arrangement than I had expected. I had thought it would be easy to get comfortable in a house I already knew so well, so I was doubly surprised to find myself wandering back to my room and closing the door when Hillary or Simone was there. The house, I saw, became another place when they were in it. They moved through it differently than I did; I saw them set the remote and the flower vases in different spots than I would have, and I heard by the rhythms of the showerhead that they did not bathe Kate as I did. Hillary’s showers were over quickly, and I imagined her standing three feet away, hosing her down like a Chevy. I detected the same scent hovering around Kate’s skin each day Simone was there, and it turned out she used a lavender oil to massage her shoulders and arms after her shower. “Do you want me to do that too?” I had asked Kate.

  “Oh, you don’t have to,” she said. “It’s just a little extra Simone always does.”

  I heard in her voice that faint note of surprise at having to explain something to an outsider. It was a private thing, I gathered, a little ritual Simone had devised. I cooked, H
illary took her around for the brisk and boring errands, and Simone, who’d briefly attended massage therapy classes, rubbed her shoulders. It should have pleased me the way we divided up the duties of providing Kate with little comforts and pleasures here and there, but I found it discomfiting. I’d felt I knew the most intimate things, and did the most for her, was trusted the most by her, but maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I lived here because I was the least of three evils. Maybe on my nights off Kate, blushing, asked Simone to get the blue butterfly out of the nightstand. Or maybe it was understood, and she didn’t even have to ask.

  EVENTUALLY, AFTER A MONTH or so, I felt less like a visitor. I would stay out in the living room, reading, forcing myself not to put the book down and jump up when Kate arrived with Hillary or Simone. This is my home too, I reminded myself, staring at the print on the pages. I can sit here and read in my home, on my couch.

  When Lisa showed up her presence was like a blaring stereo. It stirred us up. She jolted the quiet of the atmosphere in Kate’s house, her voice hoarse and loud where Kate’s was so tiny and mine—I had recently realized—had become sympathetically, unconsciously soft. She strolled into the living room with glasses of wine or beers for each of us, pausing to swirl it under Kate’s nose if it was one she liked. When Lisa was around I was furthest from feeling like a visitor, or even an employee.

  “How’s Jill?” she asked one night. We were sitting in Kate’s bedroom watching The Godfather. I had put Kate against a pile of pillows on her bed, and Lisa and I had dragged a couple armchairs to each side of the bed.

  “I saw her downtown the other night with this hot little thing,” Lisa continued.

  “That’s Tim,” I said. “She met him at her new job. She’s deeply involved. Now she wants to fix me up with all his friends.”

  Lisa laughed. “She looks deeply involved,” she said. She glanced at Kate. “The ‘Guess what I’m going to do to you in the car’ look.”

  “I think we all remember the look,” Kate answered, with a sardonic roll of her eyes. “However long it has been since we had it ourselves.”

  I did know the look. When Jill talked about him her face took on a secretive, voluptuous expression, her gaze cast off to the side, eyelids slightly lowered, mouth opening just enough as she considered him that it showed the whiteness of her teeth. Every now and again a smile surfaced and disappeared again. It was that face that says you’re thinking of something you won’t share, but you’ll keep it there with you, like extra money in your pocket. It was kind of maddening. I had forgotten about that sensation, but, seeing evidence of it, I felt how it had been that first time after Liam left the house, when I kept thinking of the backpack he’d pushed to the car floor.

  Well. Good for her. Jill may have exuded such general contentment that Lisa could spot it twenty yards away, but I was becoming more distanced from sex every day, like a foreign language I’d forgotten to practice. At least I tried to practice. My Japanese purple wand had gone from whimsical purchase to sexual oxygen. The problem now was the monitor we’d strung between Kate’s and my rooms in case of an emergency. I couldn’t, wouldn’t, fire up my vibrator with those around. Mine was only a speaker, not a transmitter, but the connection was too intimate, somehow, and I couldn’t shake the sense that I’d be broadcasting my lonely passions into Kate’s room and all over the house. I thought of turning off the monitor and switching it back on when I was done, but when I tried it once I was sure it only telegraphed my intentions: that suggestive click off to dead air and then, eventually, the sated, quiet static.

  So instead I took sybaritic showers and baths, accompanied by ever-filthier narratives in my head. The baths felt secret and hidden, like when I was eleven or twelve and had just discovered the perfect use for the warm jet of the faucet. My parents never said anything about those baths, which often took forty-five minutes, and neither did Kate. (Unlike Kate, my mother occasionally had rapped on the bathroom door when, enthralled, I had probably run the water bill into the thousands. From where I lay with my ears beneath the warm shelter of the water and my eyes shut against the bright overhead light, the knock on the door was always startling, shocking me up through the water’s surface like a criminal rejected from the depths of a puritan lake.)

  Half the time it wasn’t even that I was so desperate for sex itself. I wanted the distraction of it, the concentration that excluded everything else. Sex with myself satisfied something completely different from what sex with Liam had done. With him, self-awareness was so much of it, the way I felt him watching me, as though I must be so irresistible. But alone, I didn’t do any of the things you see in magazines, the ones that tell you to admire yourself in the mirror and revel in your beauty and what have you. Alone I was an instrument, a working tool of the simplest sort.

  When Jill offered to set me up with one of Tim’s friends I didn’t even pretend to hesitate for form’s sake. I’m sure she had in mind some nice conversation over dinner, but I was thinking about the end of the night when I and whoever this guy was would get rid of the other two. I wanted out, out of my own body and out of my quiet bedroom. Let someone else join in.

  Kate, of course, was in a similar dilemma, but the only solution we’d come up with for her was structure. I put the blue butterfly vibrator on her about once a week—often Thursdays, for some reason neither of us elucidated—and then went for a walk. I told no one about this, not Hillary or Simone or even Jill, and I don’t think Kate ever said anything to Lisa. No one thought to ask me anyway. As I once had, most people were content to assume that Kate had forgotten sex when she got the diagnosis. I wasn’t too embarrassed to admit what I did. Had someone implied there was anything unusual or distressing about the situation I would have protested. I think I might even have meant it. But whatever my involvement in her sex life, it was, as always, not mine to reveal. It was Kate’s, and it remained the one topic we did not bridge with humor or self-mockery. Everything else was fair game, which made the taboo even stronger. Even Cynthia, whose name was close to verboten in our house, came up for the occasional jab, especially if Lisa were there to spur it. But we talked around the vibrator and the nights Kate chose to use it. She cast her gaze in its direction and I followed, and we didn’t have to say a word.

  Eventually I had decided I was wrong in assuming Hillary and Simone did the same thing for her. Kate still seemed mortified by the whole process. I couldn’t imagine her putting herself through it with more than one person. Sometimes I thought I should just say something to her to break the tension, make reference to my visit to A Woman’s Touch or leave a pornographic novel lying about—not to out Kate but to out myself. I thought it might be helpful to expose, so to speak, my own habits, just so we were both out there, equally vulnerable.

  One evening, I strolled around the block, waving to neighbors and checking my watch to see if the hour had gone by. I had my winter coat on but unbuttoned. April had been even slower to warm up than usual, and we’d had more than one flurry. As I walked I began thinking about the butterfly. After the first time I put it on her I’d done a little Web research—unsure if I was being a good, clinical caregiver, figuring out precisely what my employer needed and wanted, or if I was intruding: She couldn’t even come without me trying to figure out the physiological functions. What there was on the ALS sites was fairly general—the nerves weren’t affected, and the muscles that affected sexual function weren’t either. Then the sites went on to talk a lot about the partners, and intimacy, and touching. There was only so much I could take away from it, not being Evan, or an actual lover.

  When had she bought the butterfly? Maybe it had been a gift from Evan years ago, a lagniappe before it had become a necessity. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she had bought it once she felt her hands giving way, the muscles getting softer and duller. (Was there a Web site or catalog out there that specialized in sexual fulfillment for the disabled? The idea almost stopped me in my tracks—if there wasn’t, there should be. I felt brilliant.)

  I
kept picturing Evan presenting it to her as a gift, wrapped up by her plate at dinner one evening, balanced atop the ice in a bucket of chilled champagne. But even when I tried to think kindly of him I couldn’t, and I imagined this as the most backhanded of gifts, the replacement, the turning away.

  Why, I thought, stumbling over a tricycle on a sidewalk, did he get to go off and find sex somewhere else? Lately I just kept coming back to it, over and over. Why was it that he lived across town, rolling around naked and sweaty on a bed or a floor or the manicured lawn with Cynthia, while Kate and now I lived in a house so overheated with suppressed sexuality that it barely needed a furnace?

  I turned the corner back to Chambers Street and checked my watch. An hour already. I jogged up the drive to the front door. I wanted Evan there with us, sleeping fitfully in a little room of his own, his skin constantly stippled with a rash of excitement until he finally gave in and spirited himself away for a solitary shower of his own, desperate for romance.

  sixteen

  I’M SORRY. I JUST . . . I feel awful,” I said. I stood beside her bed, arms crossed over my breasts. Kate, on her belly, looked back over her shoulder at me, one eyebrow arched.

  “How bad is it?” she asked. “I can tell it’s bad.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I said, staring down at her skin. I was stalling. It was bad, but not as severe as I had feared at first: a bruise in the middle of one of her buttocks, but no breaking of the skin. The contusion was the size of my palm, plummy and vivid, with an oval splotch in the center that would soon turn yellow, like a serpent’s eye. I was more worried about a red patch I’d noticed near the base of her tailbone, which could be the beginning of a pressure sore. We moved her from her chair to her bed to a recliner several times a day, and padded everything in sight with foam and sheepskin, but with bad circulation and her bones pressing on her skin, sores were a big risk. Looking at that red spot now, which could have been a sore and could also just be a mark from the fall, I felt as if I’d just hit something with my car. My job included keeping her free of sores—and not dropping her—and I’d fucked it all up.