Don't I Know You? Page 10

  Nikolai peered at them. “You had to meet with the caterer for this?” he asked.

  “I didn’t meet with the caterer,” Lily said.

  He was holding the cookie on his flat hand. He looked like a waiter with an impossibly tiny tray. “Do I eat the dogs?” he asked.

  Without him, she was doomed. How, after glimpsing this, could she go back to the awkward sons of her mother’s friends? The single fathers who sometimes lingered after school, their children dressed for the outdoors, burdened with their backpacks, impatient with fathers and fathers’ desires. Any man after this would be merely and devastatingly not Nikolai.

  “You didn’t graduate from Columbia,” she said.

  He put the cookie on the counter. The dogs regarded them with their painted eyes. “Who told you that?” he said.

  “Tina,” she said. “Tina Hernandez,” she added.

  His eyes were like firecrackers with the sound off.

  She put her hand on his. “I know about Tina. I know about Columbia. So don’t tell me a story,” she said, “unless it’s the true one.”

  He held on to the edge of the counter and leaned in and then away like he was doing push-ups. “That bitch,” he said. “That fucking nothing.”

  He went on like this. There was, she had to admit, something satisfying about hearing him spew such hatred toward that particular woman. It occurred to her that some of it might be performance.

  He could’ve said almost anything. She’d been ready to believe almost anything. But even she was having trouble finding anger and rage reassuring. She was going to have to leave, she thought. Just as she had left Matthew. Someone was trying to make clear that this life was not to be hers.

  And then he stopped. He took her by the shoulders and leaned his forehead against hers. “Hold me up,” he said.

  His need for her was like aloe on her burns. Already his rage was only a moment, something she might’ve missed if she’d been looking the other way.

  His eyes were wet and rimmed with red. “Come,” he said, taking her hand, leading her out of the kitchen. “Come to the bedroom, and I will tell you everything.”

  She was feeling things she knew she shouldn’t be feeling under these circumstances. Knowing that made her feel them even more. When she was twelve, she’d taken a long pull off a girlfriend’s cigarette and imagined her head as an upside-down moxi-bustion bowl, and had been thrilled, swooning more from her imagination than from the nicotine. She’d reacted afterward with equal melodrama, never smoking again.

  Now, she allowed herself to enjoy the small slippery flips her stomach performed at his touch. She followed him through the apartment, turning the lights out on her way.

  In the bedroom, he sat on the bed, his hands laced between his knees. He asked her to sit with her back to him as he talked. There were too many things, he said, that made him ashamed.

  She did as he asked, perching on the edge of the bed, one foot tucked behind the other calf like a movie star.

  “The first lie,” he began, as if reading a chapter title. His parents had not been murdered by robbers. His mother had been beaten and worked to death by his father. He didn’t know why he lied about this. He supposed he was ashamed at not having been able to save her. He’d been only six, but his brother had been only eight, and he’d gone after their father with a small shovel. The blows had not been strong enough to do away with his father right there and then, but he’d died of infections resulting from the injuries. His brother had earned the right to hold his head high. Nikolai had not. This probably had been the reason for their slow and steady drift away from each other during their years at the orphanage. If his brother wanted something, he found a direct way to get it. Nikolai was better at the other ways. They hadn’t seen each other since Nikolai had run away from the orphanage.

  “What was his name?” Lily asked. Her foot was asleep. She rotated it in small circles.

  “Mikhail,” he said, as if speaking it too loudly might conjure him.

  “It would’ve been sometimes nice in the life after Russia, to have older brother,” he said.

  She felt as she did when a favorite preschooler took her aside to whisper something secret: she never knew whether to believe the drama or take it as further evidence of lying. Nikolai continued: The boat trip to America. Staying awake and walking for the whole first day and night in his new country, marveling at his luck, at whatever had allowed him to get this far. The chaos of Times Square, and the way it felt like home.

  She began to understand Tina’s feelings. It had nothing to do with what he was saying. Here he was, telling her everything, and it was as if a poisonous gas were leaking quietly into the room.

  She shook her head. He was talking about reinventing himself, making a background he could be proud of. Did it really matter so much that he had not gone to Columbia? That the money for his first building had come from loan sharks and bookies? Either way, the ending had been the same: He was a success. He was someone who could’ve gone to Columbia, who could’ve belonged from the beginning. He loved her.

  “Tell me about Tina,” she said, turning to face him.

  He put his hands over his face, and she thought about the story the Communists told about Chiang Kai-Shek’s capture. He had stuck his head in a hole, hoping that if he couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see him. It was a completely unreliable and unlikely story, but it was retold nonetheless, even by non-Communists like her parents.

  “I should’ve told you about her,” he said. He crossed his arms and tucked his hands into his armpits.

  She wanted five-senses descriptions, real-life details only an eyewitness could know, and maybe then these pulls at her belly would cease.

  “Who else has there been?” she asked.

  He looked sad.

  “Many, many,” he said.

  She was grateful for his straightforwardness, but was this where she would have to draw the line and walk away? Was any of what he was saying a deal breaker? She had never before had to ask herself to identify her breaking point.

  “I think it’s a common thing,” he said miserably. “When you lose a mother at an early age.”

  It might be, she thought. She had no idea.

  “Since you, there’s been no one,” he said. “Only Tina, and she is crazy. When I met you, I told her we were finished, and she said she would kill herself. She said she would kill her children.”

  Outside, it had been dark for hours. Lily wanted to lie down.

  “What should I have done?” he asked as if she might actually answer. “What could I do?”

  Only Tina, Lily thought. And Tina is crazy.

  “Since you,” he said, “there is no one.” He took her hand and held it in both of his. “You are everyone,” he said.

  He’d told her everything and nothing. But she saw Tina gliding smoothly away from them, and that in itself was seductive. Here was Lily’s life coming back to her, intact, a penthouse in a new building.

  The note was slipped under the service door when Nikolai was out. Again, no announcement from downstairs. How did this woman move around the building so easily?

  It was written on a sheet of lined yellow paper that hadn’t been so much folded as stuffed into a plain white envelope. In round, teenage-girl handwriting, it read: “You told him? Now you gotta help me. Please. Please.” There was a phone number. “(Between 8 and 4.)”

  He’d talked to her. She hadn’t realized how much she’d invested in Tina being the one he talked about, not to. The intimacy of the night in their bedroom seeped away, as if guests she hadn’t known were in the apartment had filed through the bedroom door one by one, quietly circling the bed. She had an unpleasant image of Nikolai, Tina, and Matthew standing in a little group, talking about her.

  Lily reread the note. The “Now” was challenge and accusation. Now that you’ve told him. It raised issues of responsibility. It made it impossible for her to step away gracefully from somebody else’s messy business. You owe
me, it said.

  She replaced the note in its envelope and slipped it into the pocket of her date book.

  When she wasn’t teaching, she was planning. It was easy to do nothing about Tina Hernandez and the note she had written. Lists appeared in Lily’s notebook, and she rode them like waves.

  Once, sitting next to a lovely gay man in his flower store, choosing centerpieces, she’d had to fight the urge to tell him about Tina and Nikolai and this feeling that sometimes bubbled to her throat.

  Another time, she’d passed Saint Patrick’s and had made it all the way to the confessional before remembering that she wasn’t Catholic.

  One afternoon, around the sand table with Gabriel, her favorite boy, his hair a mess of wiry dreadlocks, she asked him how you could tell if someone was lying. He passed her a plastic dinosaur and told her to bury it.

  Her parents made her crazy with feelings of impatience and arrogance and a vague childhood sense that she’d done something wrong. She began to see the wedding as the beginning of her life without them and all that they made her feel.

  She began formulating sentences in her mind, all of which began with: When I get married.

  She started avoiding her own apartment, spending more and more time at his. She began making a habit of waking him in the middle of the night for lovemaking. At first, he was thrilled, and then he began to tease her, holding his hands in prayer. “Have mercy,” he said.

  On a Friday morning in early February, ten days before the wedding, she stepped around the corner of Madison on her way to the crosstown bus, and there was Tina. She had two girls with her. They looked about three and four, almost twins. Two large backpacks dwarfed them. They had matching hats and scarves, rainbow-colored with pom-poms at the ends of them and the tips of the hats. They stood on either side of their mother, holding her bare hands with mittened ones. They could’ve been Lily’s students.

  Tina’s hair was not the art object it had been the last time. It was pulled back into a ponytail. She wore dusty pink sweatpants and a man’s black sweater beneath her open coat. Her face was clean. She looked like she had many things to do in a very short amount of time.

  “How are you?” Lily asked, glancing at the clock on the bank behind them. She stressed the are, as if she’d just been in the midst of thinking about Tina’s well-being.

  “He won’t leave me alone,” she said.

  Lily’s heart thumped. For a moment, she misunderstood.

  Tina took her hands away from the girls’ and held out the edges of her coat like the Ghost of Christmas Present. “Hang on to this,” she said.

  Lily watched the girls grab hold. She’s a mother, she thought.

  Tina reached into the neck of her sweater and pulled out a key on a shoelace. In that one gesture, Tina became twelve, coming home from school by herself, letting herself into an empty apartment. Lily’s friends with working mothers had had shoelaces just like it. She’d envied them for their access to grown-up worlds without the grown-ups.

  Tina balled up the key and lace and held it out to Lily. “Three fifty-five Riverside Drive,” she said. “A Hundred and Eighth street. Apartment three C.”

  Lily couldn’t bring herself to reach for it.

  “Mama,” the older girl said, tugging on the coat. “We’re gonna be late.”

  Tina palmed the girl’s head. The girl relaxed, as if her mother had given her an answer.

  “It’s a place he keeps,” she said.

  Lily overheated in the winter air. She could feel sweat between her breasts. “I don’t want that,” she said.

  Tina kept her fist out. “I understand you don’t wanna help me,” she said. “But if I’m in trouble, you’re in trouble.” She took Lily’s hand and held it as if she were going to read her palm. “Help yourself,” she said. “Seems like you’re good at that.”

  Lily took it. She put it around her own neck, tucking it into her turtleneck. It was warm against her chest. She thought of Nikolai’s way of humming against her skin as he kissed her.

  “There’s a journal,” Tina said. “In the bottom drawer of the oven. He took it from someone’s apartment. You read it,” she said.

  She didn’t seem crazy. She didn’t seem needy. She was scared, and even through her fear, concerned for Lily. It made Lily know that both the concern and the fear were genuine.

  “Come on, girls,” Tina said. “Say good-bye to Ms. Chin.”

  “Good-bye, Ms. Chin,” the girls sang out in unison, and then they were gone.

  Lily stood. Passersby made moving around her a noisy event. They wanted her to know she was inconveniencing them. An old woman walking a small dog in a red sweater and matching booties told her to step to one side or the other.

  At school, she found a note and a phone message from Matthew. She wasn’t surprised. The note said: “Answer your phone.” The message said: “Come find me.” Was everyone going to be leaving her notes? She did not have time for Matthew.

  She made it through lunch. As she and the assistant teacher sat in their tiny chairs pulled up to the tiny tables, helping the children pour their own juice out of plastic measuring cups into paper cups, she held her stomach and told her assistant that she didn’t feel well, she thought she had better go home.

  There was much concern from the other teacher and the children. “Do you have a headache?” Gabriel asked. “My mother has headaches.”

  She was asked if she wanted to throw up, to poop. Concern was voiced about who would take care of the class.

  The assistant teacher began a long and captivating narrative about how the rest of the day would go, and Lily slipped out into the gray afternoon.

  Three fifty-five Riverside Drive was on the corner, an almost-grand building of yellow brick with subtle architectural flourishes. Not the kind Nikolai liked. Not even the kind he’d own, and he had very few criteria for those.

  She stood outside it until children coming home from school gave her looks.

  There was no doorman, just two sets of double glass doors, one propped open with a piece of wood. The lock on the inside doors was duct-taped. Lily scanned a panel of nameplates and buzzers for the apartment numbers. The name next to 3C read Carpanetti.

  The elevator was old, a brass door with a porthole window. Every now and then one of the numbers lit up the way it was supposed to.

  A man and a teenage girl came into the lobby just as Lily stepped into the elevator. She recognized him from work. He was a teacher in the upper school. “Sam,” the man said to the girl, “hold the elevator.” Lily held the door for them. The girl, beautiful and blond, thanked her and told her father to hurry up. They pressed eight, and the father watched Lily press three. He had a Channel Thirteen tote bag over his shoulder. He was the kind of guy who carried tote bags and believed in raising his blond daughter in this neighborhood.

  He smiled at her, a stranger being nice.

  “I’m visiting someone,” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows. “That’s nice,” he said. He smoothed his daughter’s hair absentmindedly.

  There was something sad about both of them. Lily found herself wondering where the mother was.

  The door opened on three, and Lily strode out, turning left and walking down the long hallway until the elevator was gone and she could stop and get her bearings.

  The smells were the smells of all Upper West Side buildings. Curries and stews. Grease. Cleaning fluids.

  3C was at the end of the hallway. She listened at the door. She knocked and waited. The key fit and turned easily.

  The front hall was small and bare. She shivered.

  The kitchen was to her left, closet-sized, with a skinny window looking out to the next building. The appliances were sized for tiny people. The oven drawer moved easily, as if recently oiled. There between a roasting pan and a cookie sheet was the journal.

  Why did he have a cookie sheet here? she wondered. Did he make cookies?

  Should she take the journal or read it here? She marv
eled at how little she had thought this all out. She panned her mind for his schedule today. Her mind was a windless plain. She never knew his schedule. She didn’t really even know what he did all day. What did someone who owned buildings do? Did he spend his time perusing a table spread with glossy photos of tall buildings?

  The journal was soft-covered, fake leather. 1976 was embossed on the front in gold. A red flat cord hung from its seam. She smoothed her hand over the cover.

  She should go. Who knew who might show up here? People she didn’t want to meet. People she didn’t want to know about.

  The central room was filling with afternoon light. There were two armchairs and a Danish-looking couch. Some attempts had been made at furniture arrangement. The two walls without windows were lined with pressboard bookcases. The shelves sagged with books. She’d had no idea he was such a reader but understood that it made perfect sense. The books bothered her more than the bed. On her way here she’d imagined the unmade bed with its unfamiliar sheets. This is where he goes, she’d thought, with his many, many others.

  But now, she wanted to weep. This was not a place he went to be with others. This was a place he went to be with himself. Occasionally, it was clear, he let others in. But it was a haven from his daily life. Lily was part of his other world. She was whatever the opposite of haven was.

  The elevator door opened. Footsteps were coming down the hall.

  She sat on the couch facing the door and straightened her back, the journal on her thighs. This is how he’ll find me, she thought.

  A door opened and closed, the locks tumbling back into place.

  She opened the journal. It was not his handwriting. It was not his name in the upper right-hand corner of the first page. Of course it wasn’t. Tina had said he’d taken it from someone’s apartment. Gina Engel, in the kind of writing that suggested penmanship classes, exercise books with dotted lines.

  Lily felt something let go. She hadn’t wanted to read Nikolai’s journal. Gina Engel’s journal? That was fine. How bad could that be? Immediately, the feeling that had let go grabbed hold again. Tina had wanted her to read this for a reason. Things could always be worse than you’d imagined.