“Excuse me,” I say. “Can you tell me where I am?”
She lifts her eyes skyward as if I’ve asked about the moon. “Brooklyn?”
The blinking curiosity, stubborn chin, and laugh lines remind me of someone. Her hand flutters to secure an errant scarf end and I know. It’s as plain as the downward-curving nose on her face. I have run across myself on this street in Brooklyn.
“I’m looking for Fourth Street.” I show her the address and she says, “That’s my house!”
“Are you the woman selling her wedding dress?”
“Yes,” she says, having fun.
“Are you seeing this?” I say. She retreats as if to avoid a swing. “That you look like me?”
“The resemblance is uncanny,” she says. “I’m Ada.” She holds out her hand to shake. “It’s around the corner.”
“Right,” I say. “We spoke on the phone.”
“Yes,” she says. “You’re getting married in a few days.” Her mannerisms are what people have told me about myself. The absentminded way of dragging her fingers over her forehead. The pointed, blinking concentration.
“Nothing like the last minute,” I say.
“If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do.” Her horsey, off-putting laugh is what I’ve always feared about mine.
“It’s been a strange day,” I say.
“I’m sorry.” She gestures in the direction of her house. “Come with me. We’re clearly going to the same place.”
We walk with an even pace, each with a tendency to glance at each other midstride the way a swimmer breathes between strokes. We climb the stubby steps of her building, indistinguishable from every other on the block. She removes a single key from her pocket and opens the door.
“I’m making dinner for my husband, who will be home soon.”
I recognize this thin safeguarding as a tactic I’ve used in the city. Her apartment contains an L-shaped family room and kitchen. Urgent wainscoting. A hallway runs alongside the main room, and through a farther door I see sweaters folded on a bed. The distressed, mismatched furniture of the content. Photo booth pictures hover over a small desk—Ada kissy-faced, Ada shocked, Ada pretending to sleep.
A cat sits in the middle of the room, expecting us.
“W!” Ada says, as if she assumed the animal would be out for the night. “This is my cat.” W flexes its foot then from its seated position completes a leap onto a chair.
“Cats make a house a home.” She unwraps her scarf, revealing the curly hair I’d have if I didn’t iron mine. As she fills a kettle with water, the waves clarify and brighten her face. “Do you have a cat?”
“No,” I say. “My mother was allergic.”
“Do you live with your mother?”
“No. I live with my fiancé in Queens but this week I’m staying on Long Island.”
She pulls out a tin of teas. “Would you like some—”
I say, “Would I,” noting every contour of her face and body. A dark, gnarled thing, my grandmother would say. Ada doesn’t wax her eyebrows or even trim them in any way I can detect. The courage this requires stuns me. Her dress bunches over her hips in an unflattering way. When she turns to arrange the kettle over the flame I see our enormous ass.
“Are you close with your mother?” I say.
She straightens. “My relationship with my mother is not terrible. She’s…” Her eyes scan the wall as if it may contain the word.
“No fun,” I say.
“Yes! Not abusive or overbearing. Friends of mine have close, wonderful relationships with their mothers. They know things about each other, like a secret crochet. My mother? She’s fine.”
The flame heating the kettle may as well be inside my chest. She has described the exact relationship I have with my mother. I say, “I’d like to ask you a question that I hate when people ask me.”
“Indian,” she says. “A town near Darjeeling. You?”
“Spanish Basque.”
“The Pyrenees!”
We smile at each other.
She says, “Did your e-mail mention you already had a dress?”
“It was ruined,” I say. “In a birding accident.”
Her eyes register my answer’s vagueness but she says, “Why do you hate that question?”
“Normally it means the person is trying to figure out how I’m different.”
“But you’re trying to figure out how we’re similar,” she says. “Anyway, I’m so used to it I don’t mind anymore.”
She yanks open a closet door and pulls out a dress. It looks exactly as described, if deflated, the way things present in person when you’ve first seen them in a photo. It is cocktail length, scallop hemmed, wide, wandering eyelet lace.
“Try it on?” She nods to a bathroom.
“Yes.” I am here to try on a dress, I remind myself. Any Beckett play I’ve managed to wander into is odd weather that will pass.
I bring the dress to the bathroom and close the door. My job has taught me that private bathrooms contain essential information if you know how to look. A long mirror by the tub. One moderately priced shampoo. Simple, clean. No beauty items spill out of the drawers, in fact, I see none at all. The medicine cabinet contains a single comb and a book of matches from a bar called the Forest. It’s as if the bathroom is for show.
I slip the dress over my head. Unsurprisingly, the length is perfect. Loose in the chest, to my chagrin. I can tell the gems that highlight the scalloping Ada described in the ad as otherworldly are fakes because they don’t carve light like real stones do, stones that have received consideration from a knife or an ocean. Ada runs to silence the screaming kettle when I emerge from the bathroom.
“Twirl,” she says. I lift the edges of the dress and sway. A derelict twirl, but she claps. She says she hopes she looked that beautiful in it and I assure her she did.
“We have nice gams,” I say.
From a stack by the door, she finds a wedding photograph of herself and holds it up next to me. “Won’t your groom go crazy for you in this?”
I cannot remember a time the groom has expressed pleasure or displeasure at anything I’ve worn.
The sound of a gentle knock on the door.
“Hon,” a man calls. “I’ve forgotten my key. Could you let me in?”
Her face fills with upbeat expectancy. “There he is.” She opens the door and kisses the man who’s standing there. They peer at me with the bashful smugness of the newly married. I recognize him, pedal backward, and hit the kitchen table’s mean side. The button-down’s pressed collar, the sleeve of tulips clenched in his fist.
When we met he told me he’d overlook my light skin and winked like an antagonist in a novel. I had never had a relationship that was only for hotels. Lobbies, fresh towels, key cards. There was one hotel we particularly liked, whose rooms were shades of pink, like having sex in a peony. It was near a luxury supermarket that sold what I’d call beautiful foods. I’d fill my basket with fennel, ramps, fat-eared pastas, things I didn’t have at home. I’d preen in the hour before meeting him, thinking that somewhere, every part of him headed toward me.
His wife performed what she termed “spontaneous” plays. Meant to be wild and unique, they always looked exactly the same. I knew them from the coffee shop. I remembered her arid face that never seemed to welcome. The woman who elbows me in the grocery line then turns, face peached with shame. I didn’t see you there, you’re so tiny!
He said Nigerians made the best lovers because they do it all the ways. Like most straight promiscuous men of that track, he believed himself to be a champion of women. This was important self-deception because it enabled him to cudgel unwanted affection with no accountability, and would be news to the women who, like me, had the sensation of being trapped in a revolving door. Sometimes clear air, sometimes stuffy interior, depending on where you were in the rotation. Chatty one day, dismissive the next.
I was not allowed to ask when, how, or what ti
me. Never enough towels, doors with finicky relationships with their key cards. The craving hurt. He and I took jokes too far and conducted night-ruining arguments. I’d sulk on the hotel carpet, carpet another thing I did not have at home. I participated in my own subjugation as if watching myself by helicopter. A little me, silk-slipped on a bedside, waiting. Eating scraps. Not a peony. A garden-variety mistress. The husband’s phrasing exact-unspecific, his tone grave honest. Duped, completely. Trapped and turning. His knife smell could halt my heart.
After I was injured, his texts and calls dwindled, until he was only a blinking name on a social media site he kept carefully out of date.
“Is this a joke?” I say.
He consults Ada for reference and I understand: I am merely another version of her. Her. This pulls an important fixture out of my kindness. “Hon?” he says. “Who’s this?”
“She’s here for the dress,” Ada says. “I’ve asked her to join us for tea.”
“The more the merrier.” The words are tinned, false. He wants to be alone with her. I am an obstacle.
Ada tips hot water into three mugs. I have trouble hating her, though I do, because she makes his eyes shine as he watches her pour. Able to reconstitute a night’s plan if it pleases her. For me, he remained out of reach, at some party whose details were spotty, or changed last minute, or I had apparently misunderstood. Suddenly the offbeat items displayed casually on the room’s shelves are designed to bruise. A joke trophy, a model of an apple.
“It’s an exact replica,” Ada says. “He worked on it for months. The level of detail astounds me.” She beams.
He worked on an apple for months? I peer at it. In its reflective skin, my narrowed eyes.
I sip my tea as an old desire to press my body against him grows and becomes the only emotion in the room. I decide to seduce him while wearing his wife’s—my—wedding dress. I choose a seat on the couch next to him so Ada must take the chair.
“Do you live in Brooklyn?” the husband says.
Ada answers. “She lives in Queens but this week she’s staying in Long Island.”
“On,” he says.
“On what?” She blinks.
“The correct way to say it is, on Long Island.”
“Isn’t it wonderful, how words work?” She smiles. “Has anyone seen any good movies?”
I tell them I have recently seen a movie called Beginners, about a man who has been lying to his spouse for several years. Only after his wife dies is he able to be his true self.
Ada asks if he’s the actor who was recently on that television show, she cannot remember which? I lobby possible shows until we settle on one that both of us suspect is incorrect.
The husband balances the mug on his knee. “Sounds selfish. Lying to your wife for years.”
My neck warms. “Anyone who’d think that hasn’t spent thirty-nine years in a relationship they couldn’t talk about.”
“He was ashamed,” Ada says. “He couldn’t be free.”
The husband says that hiding corrodes an important part of one’s self. His hypocrisy makes me a fearless brat. I say, “None of it matters in the long run.”
Ada mimics my furious face.
His spine straightens. “There is an objective moral code you cannot deny.”
“For humans,” I say. “Who also don’t matter when you think about it.” I fill my voice with the edge that implies he has not examined this or anything very deeply. “That’s the kind of thought that is good on paper but doesn’t hold water in a practical sense.”
“It holds plenty of water,” he says. Whenever he was dismissing my viewpoint, he’d sit like this, one leg propped over the other, at ease. Frat boy resting face. “Life is not a series of easily trackable moments that lead to a big decision. It is imperceptible shifts over time along a line.”
Ada gazes from him to me. How can he, who views arguing as foreplay, marry a girl with nothing to say? I’ve turned on her. She may as well be a stranger. When she tries to speak I interrupt her. “Not for everyone. Your views are myopic.”
His eyes lose their mirth. “It must be difficult thinking like you. The world’s victim.”
“What is happening?” Ada says. “We’re having tea.”
“Well, it makes me happy,” I say. “Are you happy?”
“Happy,” he says, as if testing the word. He worries it is a trick question, which of course it is.
“Happy,” Ada says, feeding him a clue.
He couldn’t be farther away from me and still be on the same piece of furniture. The couch is faded linen and like everything else in the apartment affects a relaxed glee.
He inhales deeply, but Ada speaks.
“I’m happy,” she says. “This apartment is small but I have everything I need. Only yesterday I bought a trash can that fits underneath my desk.” Realizing she is referencing things I don’t know, she explains. “I’m a computer programmer and work from home. Before, every time I had to throw something out I’d have to walk all the way to the kitchen. I’d keep a collection of trash next to me until I had to go in there. Now, anytime I want to throw something out, I can. Instantly. It’s luxurious. What a strange conversation to be having,” she concludes.
Ada is the aggressively positive woman you pray your ex won’t end up with.
We are interrupted by a knock on the door and look at one another, confused. In the doorway, a woman holds a set of keys in one fist and the hand of a little boy in the other. “Your car is blocking me,” she says.
Ada collects her keys, apologizes to everyone, and follows them outside.
The husband and I are alone.
“I’m sorry if I was brusque,” he says, carrying his mug to the sink. I move in to him and cover his mouth with mine. His body is leaner than the groom’s and contains more kinetic energy I realize as he tenses in shock. With reflexive loyalty I notice he has the long limbs the groom has always wanted, as I take his hand and place it underneath the dress. He strains to escape my grasp. I palm his cock, then slide my hand inside his waistband. He is stronger than the groom. He shakes me.
“If I’ve made you think this is appropriate, it’s not.” He is calm.
I experience television miniseries logic. He pretends my advances are undesired but our attraction is so intoxicating I don’t mind destroying Ada’s night, their family room.
“I can’t believe you don’t want this, too,” I say.
He relents. His mouth is warm and I remember how easy it was for him to get me off. Even the well-meaning groom’s most earnest fingering can’t make me come. He pushes me away. “I don’t,” he says.
“Hello?” Ada stands in the doorway. “What’s going on?”
The husband tells her he did not participate, that he is as confused as she. I collect my clothes from the bathroom and shove them into my bag as I walk to the door.
“Who are you?” the husband says. “Why are you here?”
“Where’s your wife?” I demand.
“I’m his wife,” Ada says.
“You’re not. His wife is a performance artist who writhes around onstage in a giant sock.”
He exhibits no acknowledgment. I say to Ada, “You’re a nervous breakdown. Some odd panic I’m having about my life. You’re me,” I say.
“I’m me,” she insists.
“This is the narcissism of the millennial.” The husband speaks as if narrating a zoo exhibit. “She came here because of an insecurity inside of her that demands an audience. There’s a resemblance between you two, that’s all.” They stand against the counter in their one-bedroom where no one has to walk a long distance to dispose of garbage.
“Tell me about your spine,” I say to Ada. “What is it shaped like?”
Surprised, she draws a letter in the air, a capital C.
“A lot of people have scoliosis,” he says.
“What do your wrists and collarbones do when you’re scared?” I say.
“They feel hollow,” she admits. �
�I am me,” she says, sounding uncertain.
“I am,” I say. “I know because…”
My thoughts abandon me. I can’t think of anything that would give me most claim to myself. My name? My driver’s license? An amalgam of affectations associated with the customs of this particular time. A kit of proclivities. Me is possibly not a noun but a way of wearing one’s hair. Just because I believe I am myself doesn’t mean I am. Then I remember I have something that despite being given involuntarily shows up for me every day. I believe in it. It proves me.
“This,” I say, hitching up the side of the dress.
Ada recoils but the husband stares straight on. “My god,” he says. “What happened to you?”
“Do you have this?” My voice trembles.
“No,” she says.
“You didn’t? Get stabbed?”
“I don’t have that.” She lifts the side of her dress to show her seamless skin. “I’m sorry that you do.”
On the gradient spectrum of mes, she is on the other side of pain. A peaceful, unharmed version. Less like me than people who aren’t me at all, and this makes me fucked up and remorseful and desperate. I go at him. “You and I have already dated, though you’re doing a good job of pretending.”
“I’ve never met her,” he says to Ada.
“You saw me every week for two years. We had sex all the ways, which turned out to mean the jackrabbit, like every other guy. You told me my skin was the color of everything you liked. Nicotine. Coffee. We went to Williamsburg, Virginia, together.”
“He’s never been to—”
“I’ve never been to Virginia,” he says.
“You hated everything but the hot apple cider. You drank like a hundred gallons of it. It was old-timey and served in a wooden bowl. Apple.” I reference the apple sculpture as if it has done the damage. “Cider.”
“What apple?” they say in unison, pronouncing the word as if it is preposterous.
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