Don't I Know You? Page 12

  Finally, she said simply, “I’m glad you showed me this place.”

  She could see relief in his eyes. He had been worried, she thought. He had been worried about her reaction. Maybe Gina Engel had been one of the many. That meant only that, nothing more.

  “What we want, we’ll move to our apartment,” he said. “I don’t need this place anymore.”

  Would this be what Tina had done to them? A lifetime of Nikolai offering her exactly what she wanted; a lifetime of her inability to trust his offerings?

  No, she thought. Things could always be worse. To find the truth, she had become someone who lied. Here he was making his offerings, and her own lies spread out on their surface like an oil spill.

  Tell him, she thought. Tell him about fear and worry, how they feel and what they can make you do.

  He pulled her onto the rug and took her shoes off and palmed her feet, pressing her arch in the spot that was always sore.

  The rug smelled of books and cigars, and the other smells of this small country of his. Just yesterday they had been completely new. Today they were already known.

  She opened her mouth to ask him her questions, to raise her confusions and have them eliminated. Just tell me, she would say to one of her hesitant preschoolers. If you don’t tell me, I can’t help you. She imagined all the times a child had released his secrets and she still hadn’t been able to help. Did she really want his secrets? Did she really want to share hers?

  “What are you doing?” he asked, looking up at her, lifting her hips, rolling her panty hose off with the palms of his hands. He opened and closed his mouth, imitating her.

  “Carp kisses,” she said.

  She believed she could never know if the person she was promising to spend the rest of her life with was the right person with whom to make that promise. All she could do was stack whatever odds she could in her favor, not do anything stupid, and hope for the best.

  She would neither ask her questions nor seek his answers nor offer her own, and that knowledge made her sadder than she’d been since Tina had rung the doorbell. She was breaking all her rules. She was not stacking odds in her favor, and she was doing something stupid. And all of that made it impossible to hope for the best. She hadn’t earned the right to hope for the best.

  Monday it snowed. School was postponed and then canceled. Nikolai said he would stay home with her. She told him she had far too much to do to have him underfoot. She stood with him in the foyer, tying his scarf the way he liked it. She thought that the more days she put between Friday and now, the more chance she had of living this life.

  “You’re trying to get rid of me,” he said. He was smiling.

  “You’re right,” she said. She stood on her toes to kiss him. She palmed the side of his face. Its smoothness was always surprising. He seemed like the kind of man who should have rough skin.

  He kissed her back and pressed them against the wall. His framed prints rearranged themselves with small noises. When he hugged her like this, his need for her was something she could hold.

  “The other day,” he said. “Friday. Did you go by your apartment during the day?”

  She opened her eyes over his shoulder. In the mirror, she could see the back of his head, her fingers lost in his hair.

  “I don’t remember,” she said. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Someone thought they saw you wandering around the West Side.”

  “Someone?” she said. The papers had said Gina Engel had been stabbed. Her son had found her in the foyer.

  He was still holding her.

  He rubbed his hand back and forth across the small of her back. “A guy who works with me,” he said.

  He bundled her hair in his hand and tugged gently. “So, were you wandering?”

  “I work on the West Side,” she said. She tried to pull back. He wasn’t moving. The corner of a frame was pressing into her shoulder blade. “Are you following me?” Her tone was not what she’d intended. She glanced at the front door. It was double-locked.

  “You betcha,” he said, pulling her head back, leaning down to take her chin in his mouth. “I’m following you. I’m having you followed.”

  He reached his hand down the back of her jeans and slid his finger inside of her.

  “I know your every move,” he said, closing his mouth over hers.

  She closed her eyes and a groan moved up her throat. Fear, arousal, she hadn’t been able to tell the difference in weeks.

  As soon as she was alone, she bundled up and left, having given him enough time to get out of the area. Manuel was not on the door. She hadn’t seen him since their phone conversation.

  Already the snow was to the tops of her boots. She bent her head against the large wet flakes.

  At a phone booth she huddled over the phone as if over a campfire. She held up a gloved finger, ready to disconnect if Manuel answered.

  It rang and rang. The answering machine clicked on. Manuel’s voice. “Please. If this is Tina. Please. Tell me where you are. I’ll come for you. Wherever you are, I’ll come.”

  Lily hung up.

  The snow eddied around the booth. Her whole world was this one ratty phone booth.

  The street was undisturbed snow. A woman in a red ski suit glided by on cross-country skis.

  Had Tina walked out on Manuel? Had he found out about Nikolai?

  Her mind expanded and contracted. The other possibilities moved through her like a pulse.

  She opened the booth door and threw up into the snow.

  She walked to the 19th Precinct on Sixty-seventh Street and stood across from it. One officer was shoveling. Another was watching, rocking back and forth, heel to toe, hands in pockets, like a parody of a cop on a stoop.

  She tried to decide if he seemed friendly. Parked cars had been transformed into rolling hills. Children were sledding down town house stoops.

  The cops started lobbing snowballs at each other. Unbelievably, she found herself laughing.

  They noticed her. A snowball floated across the street in a high arc and landed at her feet.

  She made another one and threw it back. She had never thrown a snowball before. And because she couldn’t imagine what she would say to these two men, couldn’t imagine where to begin, she didn’t say anything. Instead, she stood across the street for a few minutes, pitching, winging—all those verbs that she’d never been the subject for—not-so-well-packed snowballs at two handsome young cops, no one saying a word, all of them smiling like children.

  She walked across the park and uptown to her place. She hadn’t been there in days, and she knew when she opened the door that someone had been there in her absence. The smells were wrong. The hallway light was on.

  She tried to decipher the disturbances. It went without saying that nothing like this had ever happened to her before, or maybe even found lodging in her imagination. So there was something almost wonderful about it, as if she had been walking along and someone had taken her face and turned her toward something that was available and possible, all the things she’d been missing by looking only straight ahead. It wasn’t a completely healthy reaction, but it was the one she experienced nonetheless, and she felt it was only fair and honest to recognize it as such.

  The two chairs on either side of the small dining table were angled away from the table and each other as if they’d argued. There was a fresh half-gallon of skim milk in the fridge. A brand she never bought. The bok choy she’d left in the vegetable crisper was there, limp and wet, a new pint of robust cherry tomatoes next to it.

  The bed had been remade. The sheets and blankets hung, un-tucked, off the sides and ends. The pillows were at the foot.

  Her drawers, the old trunk in the closet, the shoeboxes on the closet shelf had all been gone through. The lids sat skewed like awkward smiles.

  Matthew was not a possibility. It was Nikolai. She could smell his aftershave. It came in a dark glass bottle shaped like a polished rock, and she liked it so much that she used
it herself on occasion.

  It didn’t surprise her. He was sending her a message about intimacy. It was the same part of him that insisted on dropping by friends’ apartments unannounced, walking into coworkers’ offices without knocking.

  There were crumbs around the toilet. He liked to snack while using the bathroom. Her hand towel was not hanging on its hook. She knew she would find it wherever he had gone next.

  She did not know how threatening she should find the message he was sending.

  She brushed her teeth, avoiding herself in the mirror.

  She imagined telling someone that the first thing she’d done upon discovering that her apartment had been searched in her absence by her fiancé was to brush her teeth. She imagined telling someone that he’d searched her apartment. She did not want to think about Gina Engel.

  Maybe this would be her life, she thought. Her husband would present her with his varied and slightly menacing oddities.

  Oddities, she understood grimly, might be the wrong word to describe what was going on here. Or it might, she understood equally grimly, be the perfect word.

  She spit, rinsed, sat on the toilet. Her mind was not made for this kind of problem. She could barely get her mind around the physics of weather. Reading the installation instructions for her stereo system had made her anxious and sleepy.

  But one way or the other, she was going to have to do something. There was no getting around that.

  She tried to think of people she admired. What would they do?

  She tried to think of someone who would not look at her in disbelief, who would not say, touching a concerned hand to her forearm, Of course, you know you have to leave him. You know that you’ve stayed this long is not a good sign.

  “I find Nikolai Belov completely admirable,” she said to the ceiling. She closed her eyes and repeated the sentence quietly to herself, switching back and forth between past and present tense.

  She went to the window. Outside, it was early afternoon and still snowing. At those children’s concerts her parents had taken her to at Lincoln Center, behind the musicians a giant pad of paper ran the length of the stage. A woman ran here and there in sensible shoes, drawing to the music with a thick black marker. Her shoes made soft thumps on the wooden stage. Lily had liked listening for them.

  She put her palm to the glass. The snow took no notice.

  Was she trapped or protected?

  She went to the phone and dialed Nikolai. His phone rang. One way or another, there would be answers. She reminded herself that she was the kind of woman who could take solace in what she had.

  Take solace, she told herself. It’s what you do best.

  nine

  On her way to meet him, she walked by Gina Engel’s building. It was on the same block as hers, closer to the park.

  The snow blew off the river. She walked with her eyes closed. There was no one else on the sidewalk, and she was moving too slowly to hurt herself. She stopped by a man trying to dig his car out. He stabbed his shovel into some snow, sat next to it, and stared into space.

  This whole part of the sidewalk had been taped off after the murder. She hadn’t known what had happened until the next morning when she’d gone to do her shopping. She’d met Muriel Yablonsky from 8D on her way back. “You met her,” Muriel had reminded her. “At the block party.” Lily didn’t remember. “Yes,” Muriel insisted. “Her son got lost.” Then Lily did. She hadn’t liked her.

  After Muriel gave her the details, Lily remembered thinking that she hadn’t asked to know any of it.

  She’d been stopped on the street twice—once by a detective and once by a reporter. Both men’s lack of enthusiasm matched her own. No, she hadn’t seen anything unusual. No, she didn’t know the woman or her son. Yes, she lived alone, and no, she told the reporter, she wasn’t more worried now about that.

  She’d had one dream about the murder, and when she woke with a start in the middle of the night, she’d strained to remember it, knowing that was the surest way to watch it slip away for good.

  A window in Gina Engel’s building opened and a woman’s head and torso appeared. She was an older woman, but her hair had been dyed jet black and was styled around her head in soft waves. She called down to the street. “Almost?” she said.

  “Almost,” he called back, not moving from his hill.

  The woman disappeared; the window slid shut.

  She wondered if Nikolai had come here often. She wondered how they’d met. Had he been introduced to Steven? What had Steven thought of him?

  She imagined a sleepy boy stumbling down the hall to the bathroom in the middle of the night, running into Nikolai, naked and carrying two whiskey glasses down the hall.

  What was wrong with her? Other people’s narratives were just that—other people’s.

  What would she ask him? She didn’t want to have the conversation they had to have. She wanted to be on the other side of it.

  Snow made epaulets on her shoulders. It fell off her hat.

  The man with the shovel regarded her. “So,” he said, looking up at the thick sky. “Snow.”

  She nodded. She’d seen him around the block.

  “You just standing?” he said.

  “I’m waiting for someone,” she said.

  He nodded.

  She wished she hadn’t said anything. Now what would she do? Nikolai wasn’t meeting her here. She’d have to walk away, pretend she’d been stood up. Minutes would have to pass before she could do that.

  He regarded her. “Don’t I know you?”

  Matthew’s face and voice appeared for her. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  He was unpersuaded. “I know you.”

  She shrugged.

  “I live here with Mommy,” he said, gesturing toward the window that had opened.

  He was a grown man. It seemed charming and creepy at the same time. He was wearing blue sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt. His hair came out from under the hood. It was below his shoulders, straight and brown. He was wearing athletic socks with plastic sandals. In the snow.

  “You like baseball?” he asked.

  Lily checked her watch. She needed to move on. Nikolai would be waiting.

  “I like the Yankees,” the man said. “They’re the crème de la crème of the baseball world.” He held his hand up like he was measuring someone tall.

  She could barely follow this conversation. She registered her surprise at his vocabulary. Snob, she thought. You are a horrible person.

  “Sixth game of the series, nineteen seventy-seven,” he said. “Bleacher seats, a post right in front of them. I was supposed to go with this girl from the building. Said she was a fan, but something came up, so I scalped her ticket. Guess how much I made?”

  Nothing was really required of her in terms of a response.

  He stood up. His pants were soaked. His feet must’ve been numb.

  “One-five-oh,” he said. He made an “okay” sign. “Man,” he said. He seemed happy thinking about it.

  He hadn’t made eye contact during the entire conversation.

  She took a step back. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “I just remembered.”

  He held his hands up like he was surrendering. “Sure,” he said. “You go.” He picked up his shovel. “Maybe I could give you a call,” he said. “You know, sometime.”

  Lily brushed the snow off her coat, shook out her hat. “Oh,” she said. “I’m going to have a husband.”

  “Sure, sure,” he called as she walked away. “Bring your husband,” he said. “Come by anytime. I’m here mostly.”

  She kept herself from running. He was just lonely. Lonely was threatening, she thought. For the first time, she felt shame at what she had done to Matthew. She assuaged the guilt by reminding herself that he liked to believe he needed people more than he actually did.

  She bowed her head and watched her feet make their thick march through the snow. She was not like that. She did not want to be a person who was lonely
. She did not want to be a person who was alone. “I’m going to have a husband,” she said to her feet. “I’m going to have a husband.”

  Nikolai had wanted to meet at his West Side place. She was late, but he wasn’t there yet.

  She used Tina’s key. What’s one more thing to explain? she thought. She would tell all, he would too, and they would go on together and alone, leaving Matthew Cullen and Tina Hernandez and Gina Engel and all the rest at the gate.

  He’d already started packing up. She tried to guess which piles were to be saved. She hoped that he’d chosen what she would’ve chosen. The photo of young Nikolai, the samovar.

  She checked the oven drawer. The journal was gone. It was becoming impossible to keep track of the possibilities of the situation. She needed a flow chart.

  She wandered back into the living room with the cookie sheet and put it on what she felt sure was a throwaway pile.

  A collection of postcards was stacked in piles, a cityscape beneath the glass coffee table. Next to the postcards was a box of note cards. Black-and-white photographs of Asian foods. A bowl of noodles, a pork bun, a custard tart, dumplings. One of the envelopes had “Steven” written in block letters on it. It was a picture of a bowl of rice. Inside, in the same block letters: “I think of you often and wish you well.”

  The door swung open, hitting the wall hard. Nikolai was there, a gun in his hand.

  “Lily,” he said, somewhere between anger and relief. “How did you get in here?”

  “You have a gun?” she asked. She was sitting on the floor. The gun was small and black.

  He slid it into his coat pocket, unbuttoned the coat, and flapped the snow from the black cashmere like a bird contemplating flight. “Everyone has a gun,” he said.

  Even the boys she’d known in high school, the Chinese ones in Chinese gangs, hadn’t had guns.

  He was standing over her. He smelled of snow and vaguely of gasoline.

  “I don’t think that’s true,” she said, standing.