Don't I Know You?

by Karen Shepard

  He waited, and then stuffed his hands into his jeans pockets, and left.

  The doorman took her packages, and as she slipped through the front door she managed a thank-you, avoiding his eyes.

  Nikolai, Nikolai, Nikolai, she thought, to bring her back to this life. This wasn’t just the building Nikolai lived in; this was Nikolai’s Building, as in a building Nikolai owned. He owned many.

  They would be hers, too, he liked to say, kissing her on the nose.

  She did not feel the entrepreneurial glee that she understood he wished for her to feel when he said things like that, that he himself felt when thinking of real estate. Real estate for him was what education had been for her immigrant parents. What pornography was for others.

  They were to be married in two months, on Valentine’s Day. His idea. At the Plaza. Also his idea. Everything else was up to her. He trusted her completely. This announcement had had the effect of draining her of her usual confidence in matters of logistics, and she’d spent the last month second-guessing herself and checking everything with him. She did this during meals, riding around the city in his Town Car, during their lovemaking.

  Don’t worry, he would say, kissing her eyelids or tracing a line down the center of her body as if following a road on a map. What you want is what I want.

  But he wanted too many things that she could do without. Horse-drawn carriages, champagne fountains, ice sculptures in the shape of his buildings, heralds blowing horns.

  “Crossing things off your lists?” the doorman asked, smiling.

  Even her boyfriend’s doormen knew she liked lists.

  “Trying,” she said. “It’s hard,” she added, and then was ashamed for saying it. Whatever was hard in her life was harder in his.

  He pushed the elevator button and stood waiting with her. She concentrated on remembering something about him. Nikolai knew the full names of everyone who worked in the building. He knew details about their lives: wives, children, favorite teams. At Christmas, he labeled the holiday envelopes without consulting the list the board sent around.

  I’m one of you, she wanted to say. Her father was a bus driver. Her mother was a seamstress. She didn’t live in a place like this. She lived on 102nd between Riverside and West End in a studio. And made the most of what she had. Her rent was probably less than his.

  Manuel. This one’s name was Manuel. The one, she was fairly certain, Nikolai had known for several years, the one he’d gotten this job for. She tried to think of something else, and came up with nothing but: Don’t tell Nikolai about Matthew. Their reflections morphed in the dull gold of the doors.

  The elevator came, and he held the door with his foot to let her pass, arranged her packages around her, and reached in to press three. All these things would’ve been easier for her to do.

  “Have a nice night, Ms. Chin,” he said.

  Oh, yes, she thought. The one who had that way of saying her name. His accent and inflection made her name sound like a gangster’s nickname. Lily the Chin. Or maybe like what she was: a preschool teacher.

  She tried to remember where he was from. Somewhere Caribbean. Somewhere south and warm. The specifics evaded her.

  “Thank you, Manuel,” she said. “You too, Manuel.”

  It was only four o’clock but the apartment was already darkening. She slipped off her boots and padded around, turning on lights. All the lights, even in rooms she had no intention of inhabiting. She did this anytime she came here. At her parents’ apartment in Queens, there were never any lights on. She’d come home from school, and the table would be set for dinner in a dark kitchen; her mother and father would be waiting for her, looking at each other across a dark living room. When she turned on the lights, they winced.

  She wandered the apartment, a balloon trying to find its way back to earth. This will be my living room, she thought. This will be my study. My guest room for my guests. My bathrooms. There were four bedrooms, each with its own bath. It was like a hotel. When she confided to Nikolai that none of it felt like hers, he said not to worry, this was their Trainer Apartment; they shouldn’t get too attached. He was grim about being on only the third floor. It bothered him to be eye-level with the trees. In his mind he had them in the penthouse of a building he hadn’t yet bought.

  She was twenty-eight. She had an undergraduate degree in English from Barnard and a master’s in education from Teacher’s College. She’d grown up in Flushing, Queens, the only child of Harry and Priscilla Chin. Those were not their birth names, but when they’d come to this country fleeing the Communists, they’d taken American names and never looked back. They spoke broken English to each other even when they were alone. They found her high school interest in China and things Chinese baffling and a little alarming, something to keep an eye on, like a tick bite.

  Now their neighborhood was Chinese, but then it had been Koreatown, the streets lined with the telltale vertical store signs. Their Korean neighbors in Flushing regarded the Chinese Chins with a wary eye. Everyone else assumed they were Korean. Walking home from school, she smelled kim chi and one particular brand of Korean incense.

  College and graduate school had been happy places for her. It was as if someone had taken her into a clean building, opened a door onto a tastefully furnished room with a well-stocked refrigerator, and said, “Stay as long as you like.”

  She’d found her professors intelligent if not always interesting, and her peers neither, but inoffensive, for the most part, and willing to let her be. For the first year, she’d lived at home, twice a day riding what the regulars called the International Express, the number seven from Manhattan to Queens, which passed through some of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods around: Sunnyside, Woodside, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Corona, ending at Main Street, Flushing.

  She’d had the same roommate for the next three years, an earnest and enthusiastic softball player from Minnesota, whom she hadn’t spoken to since, a situation about which neither of them harbored ill feelings.

  Her senior year, she slept with a tall, shy boy from Nebraska the week before he left to join his father’s insurance company in Omaha. He was blond and Nordic and she’d been neither pleased nor traumatized by their quiet lovemaking. She was glad to have her virginity behind her, but had no energy to pursue further lovers.

  Matthew Cullen had been a friend of a friend of a friend, whom she’d met the one and only time her fellow graduate students had been able to convince her to go out with them. A good-looking perpetual Columbia student with a soft southern accent. She thought at first that she’d met him before, but there’d been dozens of boys like him at school, southern trust-fund boys going to the proper northeastern colleges, always on the verge of getting kicked out, buoyed by the luxury of the family oil or tobacco business as safety net.

  He, however, had kissed her hand, said, “How’d the picnic go?”, enjoyed her confusion, and then reminded her that he’d flirted with her a year or so back. She’d been walking down 102nd street, carrying a bowl of something, on her way to the park.

  “Flirted?” Lily had said, and he had laughed, remarking that it was true, sometimes what he intended to communicate wasn’t all that clear.

  Her knowledge of and vague contempt for his type were not enough to tamper with the feelings he inspired. He was the good-natured dog she had wanted and been forbidden as a child. The one who tilts his eyebrows at you, letting you know that all he wants in the world is your hand on his head. She had more to drink than she usually did. She smoked a joint for the first and last time in her life. But when they closed the door to her apartment behind them, her head was not spinning. She was, to her considerable surprise, in perfect control of her desires and the behaviors they elicited.

  Everything about him said: If you come to me, I will save you, and so for months she had gone to him, and gone to him, feeling taken care of in ways that suggested she might never touch the earth again.

  And then he had betrayed her with someone about whom L
ily knew almost nothing. She had called Lily, and Lily had been reminded of what she had, of course, known all along: asking someone to save you was the same thing as asking for a certain kind of destruction. His genuine sadness about his own behavior did not temper the damage, though it had taken all she had to tell him to leave, to refuse the phone calls, to deny the ache of missing them when they stopped.

  And so he returned to her often. The crisp citrus smell of his cheek, the thick denim of his jeans against the cotton of her underwear, his hand on her hip like a hinge. The way he would say, “I know what you’re thinking,” and be right. The version of herself he had revealed, from which she’d chosen to look away.

  She’d put herself back on track. Teacher’s College for graduate school, an apartment within walking distance, and then a job working at a private preschool in the same neighborhood.

  She trusted people until they gave her enough reasons not to. This was a useful trait in the face of two- and three-year-olds and their parents, the liberal white pioneers of the Upper West Side. The children had liked her instantly, tumbling and fizzing around her like bubbles up the sides of a still glass. The parents had not, at least not instantly, watching their children’s enthusiasm for this quiet woman with confusion and a small sense of betrayal. There was only one parent whom Lily herself didn’t like. Sally Grossman. Sometimes she’d turned the name over in her mouth. Sally’s daughter, Ruth, was a blond girl with a round head and Who-from-Whoville blue eyes who had started last fall. Ruth had spina bifida. When they’d interviewed, Sally had closed the interview by saying, “She won’t be any trouble. She can’t walk.” And Lily had decided she disliked Sally Grossman. And it was hard, once Lily had made up her mind about something, to find a way to change it.

  On days when she’d had to talk with Sally more than she liked to, she allowed herself a beer at the bar a few blocks away from school. She’d gone there once or twice as a student and felt, falsely, she knew, comfortable walking in there alone. She always sat at the corner of the bar nearest the bartender, just as she always sat in the conductor’s car on the subway. Living alone, she’d learned some tricks: Put a pair of construction boots outside the door. Next to them, a big dog chain and a water bowl. New York could be perfectly safe if you lived by certain rules and took certain precautions. Since the murder on her block the summer before last, this had been a harder belief in which to maintain faith. Of course, there were murders all the time in New York, but not all of them were two houses down, and not all of the victims had a child in the upper grades of Lily’s school.

  That woman, she’d decided, based on no real knowledge, must not have had clear enough rules, or must not have stuck to them well enough. After that there’d been the Son of Sam killings, and the blackout rioting and arson, and she’d had to work hard to resist feeling as if the woman’s murder had been the beginning of some kind of horrible slide.

  One day in September, more than a year after the murder two houses down, someone had spoken to her while she sat on her stool, in her corner.

  It was Nikolai, though he introduced himself as Nick. Nick Belov, he said, and because of his odd mix of Russian and New York accents, Lily thought she heard Belove, like some archaic form of Beloved. She would learn that his accent came and went depending on the audience. The longer he spoke with you, the more he sounded like you.

  He was a big man, older than she by ten or fifteen years. His brown hair was layered and already graying. It brushed his shoulders like a feather duster. Everything about him was oversized: his nose, his chin, his cheekbones. He gestured as if on a second-story balcony overlooking a grand piazza filled with thousands of his people. His eyes were olive green and they swept the room as if on lookout. Behind the movement, she imagined a vast sadness.

  That night he wore a beige dress shirt with French cuffs and cuff links with a crest that featured crossed swords. His pants were dark brown and speckled with small stains. He’d saved money on his shoes. He gesticulated so dramatically with his right hand that it took Lily a moment to realize that he was missing the index finger from his left.

  “Oh,” she exclaimed, surprising herself by reaching out and touching the wrinkled nub of the joint.

  He didn’t pull away. He took her finger and pressed it gently but firmly around the place where his finger should’ve been. The topographical maps of elementary school came back to her.

  “The price I paid for the rudeness of pointing,” he said.

  She had no idea what he could mean.

  He told her about the orphanage in Russia where he had been raised after his parents died, murdered by robbers when he was six. “You can’t imagine,” he said, waving his good hand. “Think worse than Dickens,” he said.

  “Gogol,” she said, pulling the name from the World Literature class she’d taken at school.

  “On your nose,” he said, putting a finger to her nose, and she felt the first warmth of getting something right with him.

  He was nothing like she was but familiar nonetheless. She wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that even in her neighborhood, where you had to walk for blocks before seeing a white person, he’d watched her play her childhood games on her stoop from his across the street.

  Later, he’d revealed that he’d seen her at the bar before, and she’d understood why he’d seemed so familiar, and she’d felt a little silly and told herself, as she often did, to remember that there were usually logical explanations for all those illogical feelings that wouldn’t quite be placed.

  “I watched you many times,” he told her. “Always so sad, so pinched.” He made a fist and held it over his heart. “I think in my head, such a beautiful girl.”

  And then she didn’t feel silly. Hearing him describe her sadness made her think again that he was sad. She saw it as the still surface of a frozen lake, and she wanted to put on the ice skates she hadn’t worn since her lessons as a child and pirouette through its hardness.

  He’d worked his way through Columbia undergrad as a dishwasher in the dining halls, and had continued there for one semester of business school before losing patience with the pace. He’d made investors out of his classmates and professors, selling them on the opportunity of state-sponsored middle-income co-ops and tax-abatement programs. His first building was a seven-story apartment house in Brooklyn Heights that he sold three years after buying it for five times what he’d paid. “The rest,” he’d said, sweeping his arm around as if he now owned all that she could see, “is history.”

  She was charmed by his use of clichés. She liked that he’d liked the bar for the same reasons she had. It seemed friendly without being pretentious. He seemed as different from Matthew as possible, yet there was something familiar about the feelings the two men inspired in her, and that, she decided, was a good thing. So when he asked her if he could walk her home, she said yes, as if saying yes were something she did all the time.

  They walked down Broadway to 107th. They veered west and walked down West End to 102nd. They crossed West End. She could see her building halfway down the block. She said, “You don’t have to walk me all the way,” and he looked at her and threw his head back, laughing his big laugh. “You kill me,” he said.

  He put his arm around her and squeezed her to his side. She imagined herself as Eve in reverse. A woman burrowing her way between Adam’s ribs, nestling there as if returning home.

  She had to admit now that it embarrassed her to have to say that she and her fiancé had met at a bar. His friends liked to tease her about it, raising their eyebrows and making their animal sounds. Her parents adored him, thrilled that he’d proposed after such a short time, though in the four months he’d been with her, he’d probably said no more than fifty words to them. It was as if they’d convinced him that they didn’t speak English. She could tell they adored him by how they talked about him in the third person. “Look. He seems tired.” “Look. He’s watching TV.” “Look. He’s eating.” Even when they spoke English, he acted as i
f they weren’t.

  She hid the new purchases in the back of what would be her study closet. Nikolai never went in there. He’d already encouraged her to use the room as a study. “You spend so much time over here, you might as well get going on making it your place,” he’d said, passing her his credit card.

  She knew that her apartment was a place he only liked to visit. “Lily’s Strange and Wondrous World,” he called it. He said her ability to pull together thrift store purchases made the Park Avenue ladies feel generic in terms of their style sense. It seemed to her that the Park Avenue ladies felt about her something very different from the feelings he described.

  In February, she would be a Park Avenue lady. He was not a Park Avenue man, but wore the accessories as if they’d been tailored for him.

  He’d tried to persuade her to leave her job in the middle of the year. He said it wasn’t all that different from leaving at the end. “You’re easily replaced,” he said, not meaning to be insulting. She’d held her ground, and as the wedding grew closer, she was glad. Her days at school were like a sturdy handrail on a steep and unfamiliar set of stairs.

  She went to the kitchen to make tea, to loosen the grip seeing Matthew had placed around her chest, to pass the hours before Nikolai would be home, and with him the safety he offered. When she heard his key in the door, the tightness would seep away, and she would close her eyes so they could open to the sight of him walking to her. She hadn’t known that feelings like this would be part of a life like hers.

  A high school English teacher had made them all write ten-year predictions for themselves before they graduated. Last spring, at the tenth reunion, the teacher had spread them all out. Lily hadn’t gone, and when she’d heard about the predictions from the one friend who hadn’t let her quietly slip away, she’d been reassured about her own wisdom. The teacher had mailed Lily’s predictions to her with a note that said, “Thought you might want these.”

  Lily had predicted that she would have gone to graduate school in early childhood development, that she’d be teaching at the job she’d had since finishing graduate school. That she’d be unmarried, without children.