Book Read Free

3

Page 14

by Julie Hilden


  ‘No, I’m sorry, you can’t. Could you give it back, please?’

  But she makes no move to lift it from her neck. Instead she only looks at me levelly.

  ‘Come on, give it back,’ I repeat.

  ‘Okay, okay.’ She is laughing, but it is such a snorty little laugh, it reminds me of crying. She’s hurt, I can tell.

  Another moment passes. Finally she hands back the necklace – the small hand icon a charm in her palm, as it was in mine that first day with Ilan. The hand is the same, but I am a grown-up now – my loss.

  The next morning I awaken to the feeling of a single finger trailing slowly along the arch of my foot. I start: ‘Olivia!’

  ‘I love your arches,’ she says.

  ‘Please don’t do that. I’m jittery enough here. You scared the hell out of me.’

  ‘Sor-ry,’ she virtually sings at me. She’s wearing my chain – Ilan’s chain. I touch my neck instinctively, out of disbelief; she must have taken it as I slept. Quickly I segue my touch into a small rub, to try to mask its meaning. But she’s noticed.

  ‘I want the chain for a while,’ she says. ‘Please?’

  ‘It’s Ilan’s.’

  ‘I only want it for a day or two. I’m seeing a gallery owner today. I need a little lucky charm.’

  ‘Okay, but I’m going to miss it all day.’

  ‘I’m going to miss you all day,’ she says. ‘I’ll call you later, okay? And I’ll take you to dinner if I get the show.’

  ‘Sure,’ I say reluctantly. ‘We can do that.’

  When Olivia calls me later, she announces, jubilantly, that she got the show. Later, we meet at an expensive restaurant she has chosen.

  ‘The necklace worked,’ Olivia comments as she reviews the menu.

  ‘Can I have the chain back now?’ I ask her. I can’t restrain myself, even though I know I’m being rude.

  ‘Not now,’ she tells me. ‘Let me tell you about the meeting. I have all these ideas for how to arrange the work, it’s a very interesting gallery, and it’s divided in two, so I can play on the doubling, the similarity between the images of you and of me.’

  I listen as carefully as I can, but find it hard not to be distracted by the sight of the chain. By the end of the meal, she still has not returned it, and I know I cannot ask for it again, not now. I can only hope she will return it soon, before I have to ask.

  * * *

  That night, Olivia goes to sleep before I do, and I watch her sleep – her mouth open, her face child-like, her eyes mere half circles. The hand on Ilan’s chain is now hidden beneath the neck of the white T-shirt she wears; I can only see its links disappear at its collar.

  I am tempted to lift the chain off her neck – as she must have done to me the previous night – but I stop myself.

  It is only a chain, I remind myself, only an object. She wants it only because she is jealous, insecure, because she loves me and is vulnerable. And she is right to be jealous, right to worry; it is not mere paranoia. She believes I’m still in love with him, and she is right: I am.

  I think to myself, If her only fault is that she wants me too much, that she wants all of me, how much of a fault is that? Some people would say I should be glad of it.

  Olivia’s show goes up about a month later, and it is well received. She has agreed not to use any of the sexual pictures of us together – I am afraid Mr Resnick will somehow see or hear of them – but even so, I am still nervous to attend the opening.

  When I arrive, though, I find that I should not have worried: she has protected me. None of the images trouble me at all, except insofar as they are disturbing in themselves; none unduly reveals me. And Olivia adeptly conceals our relationship – joking to a reporter that she must be a true narcissist, since she has chosen a model who looks just like her.

  She refers to me as her model throughout the opening, and for the first time in my life, I begin to feel truly beautiful. Though I know I don’t look perfect, it matters that she thinks I do – that she believes my face, my body, are lovely and interesting enough to photograph. I was never complimented when Ilan sought doubles of me – I felt it must underline my inadequacy somehow, or his need to perfect me. But when she doubles me in her photos, I somehow feel greater: more powerful, more whole.

  When we return home after the opening, I write for a while. Olivia says she is going to take a nap in our bedroom, and leaves me alone in the writing room.

  I should be focused on Olivia, thinking about her show, about how caring she was toward me there, but it is Ilan who remains on my mind. I lose myself in writing about him.

  When I finally look up at the clock, I am surprised to see how much time has passed. It was that way when I was in bed with Ilan too, I remember – as if our encounters occurred outside of time.

  * * *

  Hours later I enter the bedroom to join Olivia, expecting her to be asleep. Instead I find her sitting up on the bed, holding my wedding dress, in its plastic covering, on her lap.

  ‘I found it in the back of your closet,’ she says. ‘I love it. It’s so elegant.’

  I have told her she can take anything she wants from my closet. And as Olivia and I have shared our clothes and makeup – as I have used her glittery eye shadow and she has borrowed my black tights – it has almost seemed as if we are converging. Once, I even tried on her bright red dress, and when I did, I felt like a different person.

  ‘Will you put it on for me?’ she asks, holding up the dress. ‘It’ll be romantic.’

  ‘No, it won’t. It’s Ilan’s mother’s. She died of cancer. It would be disrespectful to her, and to Ilan, too.’ There is silence for a moment. ‘I can’t believe you would suggest it,’ I add.

  ‘Maya, I didn’t mean to be disrespectful, but Mrs Resnick is dead, and so is Ilan. It won’t matter to either of them one way or the other. Please try on the dress. It’s important to me.’

  ‘It’s important to me not to,’ I protest.

  But even as I complain, despite the sick feeling that washes over me, I begin unwrapping the wedding dress from its plastic sleeve.

  Soon I am holding it up, so that it opens to me like a white tulip; stepping into it and adjusting my breasts in its bra cups; offering my bare back to Olivia so she can zip it up.

  Again the silk stretches smooth across my stomach, just as it did after the operation. Once I am wearing the dress, Olivia asks me to lie down on the bed, and I do. She pushes my skirt up and to the side – the cloud of fabric in which Ilan’s mother walked, his father once told me, as if she glided; in which she floated, years ago, to her groom.

  With the skirt’s layers cleared away, Olivia begins to tongue me.

  I begin to squirm on the slippery silk of the dress’s lining. It is only a matter of time. It is the usual surrender, I know: my special, patented surrender to the worst in me, taught to me by Ilan Resnick, who knew it well. What I am doing makes me want to cry, and yet I do not stop.

  Soon I squirm not just on the silk lining but on my own wetness as well. Olivia’s tongue on my clitoris is insistent as she pushes for the response she knows she will get, whether I like it or not. She flicks her tongue and I flinch noiselessly: I will not give her the satisfaction of moaning.

  She pushes my thighs apart, pressing on them hard to spread them wide – just as I have done to her. She slips her tongue deeper and licks me faster and faster. All at once I tense, and then the spasm of feeling subsides. But still I am quiet. The struggle is won and lost silently as she feels the contractions of my orgasm fade away, hears my breathing return to normal.

  Olivia rises, but a moment later, she stoops to kiss me. As she leans over me, like a bridegroom leaning, the small hand on Ilan’s chain lowers, until it rests in the hollow above my sternum, with chain links pooling around it. As she kisses me, all I can feel is that small, cold hand.

  Afterward she looks at me beatifically – thinking, perhaps, that the tears in my eyes are from pleasure, or at least from enlightenment. Th
inking, perhaps, that this was just what I needed.

  Before we go to sleep, she whispers to me, ‘I love you. I’ve loved you for a long time now.’ But I say nothing. I am so angry, I still cannot speak.

  I sleep poorly and awaken shattered, sweating. Next to our bed, I see my wedding dress cast off on the floor – a stiff corset perched above a spreading, shining skirt, like the frozen curtsy of an invisible bride – and the cold, silent fury I felt last night comes back to me.

  I rise and dress. All the clothes I pull on are soft: a loose black sweater with a high neck that covers my scars, gray fleece pants, slippers. I want to be a soft, quiet, small person at whom no one could feel anger, even as I do what I know I must.

  I look around our bedroom and see all the small ways in which Olivia has changed it – the traces of Ilan she has removed, the small things of hers she has introduced. I touch the shining fabrics, examine the graceful vases. I look at the large wooden jewelry box that we now share.

  On the dresser, there are the photographs of me she has taken and framed. It is the series of us together that she took with a timer, to mimic the Prada store’s mirror. In them, we were caught every few seconds – in the midst of laughter, in the midst of a kiss, in the midst of the past itself.

  But I feel as I do when looking at photographs of the dead: the time these photos depict is so far away from me now. It is as if it recedes into the past before my eyes. The camera, on its timer, continues to click, but the subjects are gone; the dressing room, empty, is still recorded; the mirror still stutters its identical images.

  I see how Olivia has carefully readied this place for us, as if it were a dollhouse built to hold a miniature life. And for me, I realize, she has carefully readied a life as well, the life I once wanted – as if it, too, were a room I have only to move into.

  It all moves me – the photos, the objects, the care and the love. It is a beautiful life, the one Olivia has been building for me. But I am afraid I would be a stranger in it. My real life is still here with Ilan. Mr Resnick was right, after all, wasn’t he? There is only one life. I already live it.

  * * *

  I leave the bedroom to find Olivia sitting at the breakfast table, paging through a book of photographs. As I approach her, I see they are of me. She strains her neck upward to kiss me, and I crane my neck downward and, for the last time, I let her.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ I tell her bluntly, meaning to soften it but finally just saying it. ‘I need to be by myself for a while. I need you to move out. I’m not ready.’

  ‘Maya, this will pass. It’s only jitters, like when you’re getting married.’

  ‘I didn’t have jitters when I got married. I knew it was right. And this feels wrong to me.’ A tear trickles down my cheek, and Olivia’s face softens.

  ‘Okay, maybe we went too fast,’ she says. ‘The wedding dress thing was a mistake, and I’m sorry. We can take it more slowly, and just date for a while. I’ll move out. I love you, Maya. I don’t want you to do anything you’re not ready for. Maybe it was too soon.’

  ‘You’re not understanding me. I don’t think we can date, not now. I think I need to be alone for a while, maybe permanently.’

  ‘I want you to know, I know what this is about. It’s about Ilan.’ She is so furious she is shaking.

  ‘It’s not about him, it’s about me for a change.’

  ‘No, you’re lying – I can tell it’s him. We could have gotten a new apartment together, but you stay here because of him. You certainly have the money to get another place, I see those statements.’

  ‘Nothing here is private, is it? Not my wedding dress, or my writing, or my money.’

  ‘Stop it! You’re just trying to sidetrack me. Listen to me. You could have a new life, but you choose to stay here, because he lived here. You keep your job because he used to work there, when you could easily get a better one. I don’t understand it. I treat you so much better than he ever did.’

  ‘I know you do.’

  ‘So what is it I have to do to get you to love me?’ She has been raising her voice, but now she drops it. ‘I wish you would tell me,’ she whispers.

  ‘I’m sorry, I really am. I know you must feel like I wasn’t truthful all these months, but I’ve been trying to fight it. I didn’t really know until now. I still feel married. I can’t be with anyone else until I don’t feel that way anymore.’

  She collects herself, stands, and draws herself up in anger. ‘Fine, stay with him, you deserve each other.’ I notice that she, too, has taken to speaking of him almost as if he were alive.

  As she leaves, I watch her hesitate as she considers slamming the door. Then I hear the click as she changes her mind and pulls it, with precision, shut.

  * * *

  In the evening, I am surprised when she returns.

  ‘I want to sleep next to you,’ she says. ‘I have nowhere else to go.’

  She starts crying again, in great gasps of sobs.

  ‘There’s your studio, isn’t there?’ I know how cold I sound, but I wish powerfully now that she would leave. With the wedding dress, she went too far; I can’t forget about it, or get over it.

  ‘There’s not even a mattress at the studio,’ she reminds me. ‘I sold everything, remember?’

  ‘Okay, you can stay tonight. But it has to be the last time. Tomorrow I’ll help you find another place, and we’ll get you some furniture.’

  In bed, she reaches for me, but I push her away. With choked sobs, she cries again, with her back turned to me.

  I don’t comfort her. I don’t want to give her false hope, and I am distracted by my own wish to be alone.

  We each sleep near an edge of the bed that night, each wrapped in a separate white sheet – allowing enough room between us for a third person, even one as large as a man, to lie.

  When I awaken the next morning, she is gone. Her things are gone too – packed up and taken away. I feel both relief and sadness, and beneath them, a strange, irrational dread – the same dread I felt with Ilan near the end. I try to ignore it; without fully knowing the reason for it, I do not know what I can do to quiet it.

  That afternoon, I open the window and hear a little girl crying outside, in the playground across the street. I listen for a long time. It is eerily as if the sobs to which I listen are somehow my own, remembered from some lost and long ago childhood day, or intuited from some unhappy future – perhaps a near future, brought to me by a strange mirror that is the reverse of the Prada store’s, a mirror of what is to come.

  Yet it is only coincidence; this girl does not cry to me or for me, does she? It’s simply that she happens, outside my window, to cry.

  Still I listen, as if in memory or to a prophecy. I listen to bring the pain of hearing the little girl to the point just before I myself would have to cry out from it – it is another knife, another pressing down, another moment of wondering if a deep enough cut could open me. Finally, just before the tears would have begun, I close the window.

  That night, in the silent apartment, I take my journals out from where I locked them away, in Ilan’s desk. It is the first time in weeks that I have felt safe enough to do so.

  I open the most current of the journals and begin to write. As always, I write about Ilan – and to him, as well. My journal entry for the night is this one:

  This is a love letter, make no mistake. Ilan, my love for you is not deserved, it simply is. I carry it with me like a stone.

  I’ve learned what you already knew, what you had known ever since you were a child: if you love someone and they die, and you cannot speak to them beforehand, you end up speaking to them afterward forever. I know now what you meant when you said you learned more about your mother every year, even though she’d died long ago. Each day I learn more about you.

  Since you died, I’ve written like someone possessed, and now I am close to finishing. I am so glad of that – for I long to stop writing and sleep, so I can dream you on me, dream you in me once ag
ain.

  I fall asleep knowing I will dream of Ilan, and I do. But a few hours later, while it is still pitch-black, I am awakened by the sound of a key turning in the loft’s door.

  Hearing the slight noise, I can barely think straight. A few seconds ago I was asleep, curled into myself compact as a seashell. My mind races with panic.

  I hear a man’s tread, similar to yours but lighter, as if you were now the ghost I have wished you to be. For a second I wonder if it is your father – he still has a key – but then I realize he could never walk so easily, so steadily.

  It is then that I see her, moving soundlessly through the single sharp-edged shaft of light that a streetlight casts into the loft. Her head makes a small dark silhouette like the head of a boy. Her long hair, for the first time since I have known her, is pinned up.

  I make out gradually, with increasing unease, what she is wearing: a man’s dark suit, a white shirt, and men’s loafers, their leather glossy. Clothes from your closet, Ilan – the small one I never open now. A black belt of yours too, fastened at the last notch but still loose on her. And in her hand, your small silver gun.

  The box had been left unlocked, unprotected, I realize. I had locked the desk drawers that held my notebooks, but not the one that held the gun. She had only to open it while I was asleep, take it with her one day – yesterday? long ago? – and bring it here now.

  As she stands there in your clothes, holding the gun uncertainly in front of her, the resemblance to you hurts and scares me. It is very dark, she is only a few inches shorter than you were, and the loose shirt that hides her breasts conspires, along with her narrow hips, to make her body almost resemble yours.

  ‘If you want him,’ she announces, standing before me in the slant of the light, ‘you can have him. I can be him.’ Her eyes are puffy, red from crying, unfocused, but the set of her jaw is determined: she will not give up.

  ‘No,’ I tell her. ‘Please don’t. It’s not going to solve anything.’

  ‘Take off your sweater,’ she instructs me. Obediently I pull it, soft and white, over my head. The air is cold on my skin. A few strands of white wool have stuck to my lower back, my sternum – places where, as soon as I saw her, I began to sweat with anxiety.

 

‹ Prev