Don't I Know You?

by Karen Shepard

  Her accuracy had pleased her. It was a good and useful trait—accurate knowledge of oneself. Her relationship with Matthew had been a bump on her life’s road, and when thought of that way, as predictable as any other part of her life, it was a source of reassurance rather than anxiety.

  The appearance of Nikolai in her life had made her feel as if she had been set down on a rolling sea and told to stand up straight. For a month or two, she’d resisted, but then he had made love to her, and then he had proposed, and instead of trying to stand, she’d let herself float, feeling the delicious lick of waves, imagining a wholly different kind of life. A wholly different kind of woman to inhabit that life.

  “I make you a better person,” Nikolai liked to whisper during their lovemaking.

  Sometimes, just that could bring her to the edge of orgasm.

  The service doorbell rang.

  She made her way through the kitchen and checked the peephole. A small woman, brown-skinned, thick black hair slicked and twisted into impossible shapes. Multiple hoops hanging from multiple ear piercings. Gold-plated necklaces of various lengths hanging as a shield across the small woman’s chest. The woman had no coat. Her dress was wool, tight-fitting. She was wearing black stockings and the wrong kind of shoes. Lily recognized that she was already beginning to think of herself as better than women like this.

  She blushed and felt like an impostor. Since Nikolai’s proposal, this sensation washed over her occasionally. She hadn’t told him, though it was a sensation she knew he’d find familiar. She had once overheard him answer a friend’s “How’s it going?” with, “You make it through the day without anyone finding out you are a fraud.” He had shrugged and stuck out his lower lip. “It’s a life.”

  She collected herself, straightened her sweater, put her house shoes on. I belong, she thought. Right here, opening this door.

  “Yes?” she asked, trying to seem kind and curious, but not too curious.

  The woman took Lily in, as if checking that she had the right apartment.

  “Perhaps you’re looking for my fiancé,” Lily said. “He’s not back from work yet.”

  The woman shook her head. “I know who he is. I’m looking for you.”

  Under different circumstances, Lily would’ve admired her no-nonsense quality. They stood there.

  Lily stepped back. “I’m sorry. Come in. Please.” She peered at the woman’s necklaces. One of them said Tina in gold script. “I’m Lily Chin,” she said, offering a hand. “And you are…” She leaned forward, squinting a little, hating herself as she did it. “Tina?”

  Tina shook Lily’s hand. She smelled a little of a bakery. “Tina Hernandez,” she said.

  She didn’t want anything to drink. She didn’t glance around the apartment. She sat on the edge of the black leather armchair in the living room, her toes turned in, her hands over her knees.

  “So,” she said. “You don’t know me from nobody, so if I told you not to marry Nikolai you wouldn’t listen, right?” She looked at Lily. “You look good,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Lily answered, feeling as if anything could happen. Perhaps part of this new life would be strange visits from strange women.

  “So Nikolai’s your first boyfriend, right?”

  Lily took a breath. “I don’t mean to be rude, but who are you?” she asked. “How did you get into the building unannounced?”

  Tina glanced at her watch, an oversized yellow happy face on a white plastic band that was too big for her wrist. “No one’s ever at the service entrance,” she said. “He’ll be home soon,” she added.

  Lily waited.

  “How do you know that?” she finally asked. Tina didn’t answer. Lily reached up and turned off the light.

  Tina nodded in the gloom, as if congratulating her on a wise choice.

  “Last spring and into this fall, we were together, him and me,” she said. “You know: together. I’m sorry,” she added.

  She sat back as if the rest was up to Lily.

  This fall, Lily and Nikolai had met. They’d gone to the beach. They’d walked through the park. They’d eaten at the hot dog stand. Was she going to spend her life hearing of her lovers’ betrayals?

  She asked rational and calm questions, and Tina answered her, and Lily imagined the answers as armor. She imagined dressing herself, piece by piece, her soft white body disappearing behind burnished metal. She would not lose Nikolai as she had lost Matthew.

  And then she said, “What is it that you want me to do with this information?”

  Tina said, “You can’t marry him.”

  Lily laughed, a short, high bark. She apologized. “Of course I can,” she said.

  Tina said, “There’s something about him. You can’t.”

  Lily looked at her levelly.

  “I know, it sounds loco,” Tina said. “I can’t explain it really. There’re things I noticed. Please,” she said. “Please.”

  Lily didn’t respond well to this kind of neediness. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Things you’ve noticed?”

  “He told me he went to Columbia, but he didn’t. He gave my girls notes to give to me.”

  “Girls?” Lily asked.

  Tina looked ashamed and proud. “Two,” she said. “Four and a half and two.”

  “And you have a husband as well?” Lily asked.

  “Yes,” Tina said, her eyes large and sad. “I’m not perfect,” she said, “but that doesn’t make me wrong about Nick. We went away for a weekend. Two nights it was supposed to be. In the middle of the first night, I wake up and he’s gone. Just gone. I had to get a bus home.” She was speaking fast.

  Lily had had enough of this. “Maybe he didn’t want to be with you anymore,” she said.

  Tina looked around as if she might find some help in the room. “It’s not so much the things he’s done as a feeling I have,” she said. “I’m good at feelings.”

  “I’m sure you are,” Lily said, standing.

  Tina remained sitting. “Please,” she said. “Please.”

  Desperation hung around her, but it was desperation that had nothing to do with Lily, so Lily showed her to the front door and asked her not to contact her again. Tina was still talking as she walked out into the hall. She was still talking when Lily closed the door and swam back to the life she was beginning to feel she deserved.

  They made love. They slept. Lily was not someone who believed in insomnia. It was impractical. But here she was at four in the morning, awake.

  Nikolai was on his back, his breathing deep and soft. She rolled onto her side, getting close to his profile. At her movement, he reached a hand out and stroked the curve of her hip. She knew he was not awake. He could love her in his sleep. Sometimes he talked to her, and it was only the blankness of his face in the morning that made her understand that he had been sleeping through the entire conversation.

  He had never said anything suspicious.

  She draped a leg over him and flattened her hand against his sternum. “Nikolai,” she whispered. She wondered how quiet she could be and still rouse him. How well was he listening for her in his sleep? “Nikolai,” she said again, even softer.

  “My treasure,” he said, rolling over, his eyes still closed.

  “I need to talk with you,” she said.

  “Okeydokey,” he said. He opened his eyes, rubbed them like a toddler, and offered her his face, alert and attentive.

  She imagined what she would say. She imagined the impact on his expression.

  “Something is wrong?” he asked.

  What had she expected? That he would come to her new and virginal? That they would’ve sprung from the ground, earth’s first couple, finding each other across a wide and empty space? She understood that part of why she loved him was because of what her life had been before him. Surely the same logic applied to his feelings. Yet she had told him all about Matthew. What did it matter? What mattered was that he had come to her at all.

  She touched his c
heek. “Do you love me?”

  His expression softened into the opposite of worry. “You crazy girl. You silly chicken.” He wound a finger next to his temple. “You are loco,” he said, pulling her to him.

  She rested her head against his chest. She rose and fell with his breaths. He combed her hair with his fingers and sang her a song she didn’t know in Russian.

  “Silly goose,” she said. “Not chicken. Goose.”

  What had Matthew ever wanted? Everything. Nothing. And all that lay between.

  seven

  She stood in her mother’s sewing room on a small stool in front of a three-panel mirror. She wore what would be her wedding dress but what right now looked like color and texture without shape. Her mother knelt at her feet, wearing her work clothes. Lily had always thought of them as peasant pajamas. Her lips held a bouquet of pins.

  Lily didn’t like looking at her mother’s head from this angle. And she didn’t like looking at her own reflection. She closed her eyes, but felt too dizzy to stay that way. She scanned the room. This had been her bedroom. Her mother had sewed in the corner of the living room by the window until Lily had gone to college. Her mother’s Chinese friends had all worked in Manhattan’s garment industry, riding the subway with each other and their Dominican coworkers, but Priscilla had insisted on staying at home. Lily remembered marveling at the enormity of what her mother could make in that small space. She’d spend several days hunched over indistinguishable piles of cloth, and then would rise, shaking out a silk pantsuit, a set of Chinese bridesmaid dresses, a pleated skirt with matching collared shirt.

  None of this talent had been passed on to Lily. Nothing from her father either, the bus driver with the perfect safety record and the wall full of commendations from the Transit Authority. He knew his passengers’ names.

  She’d tried taking Driver’s Ed once. She’d been too terrified even to touch the wheel, and after several minutes the instructor had squeezed her arm, told her that driving wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and reached across to open her door and release her.

  In China, her parents had been physicists.

  Sometimes she felt like a character in a fairy tale, the child delivered to the childless couple, never able to fully know or be known.

  When her mother had moved into Lily’s old room, she’d done so as unobtrusively as possible, leaving as many of Lily’s old belongings as she could. Her spelling bee ribbons and awards, her collection of tiny dollhouse food, the Collier’s Encyclopedia set they’d paid for in monthly installments, her ice-skating trophies, her class pictures in matching frames that her mother had bought in bulk at the Woolworth’s when Lily started kindergarten. Her science fair projects, the poster boards warping and gathering dust. Her father had raided some of them for his own puttering, so they stood there on the shelves, hints of their former selves. Trying to discern the original projects was like identifying a body from dental records.

  “Why don’t you get rid of all this?” Lily asked.

  Her mother’s mouth was still full of pins. She shrugged and kept at the hem. Lily had picked the pattern out of a Vogue pattern book. Her mother had wanted to know if Nick liked the dress. Her parents liked saying his name. They said it like they said America.

  She felt her body warm with anger and resentment. These were impractical feelings she’d banished successfully from her day-to-day life by eliminating their cues. Now, in front of a mirror her father had jerry-rigged from three cheap mirrors that were supposed to be hanging on the backs of hollow doors, above her mother circling her on her knees, Lily was angry. Why didn’t her mother do what most seamstresses did—tap her on the calf and make her do the turning? Why did she insist on crawling around like a slave?

  Her father was humming in the kitchen, cooking dinner for them. Jiao-tse and something else. Shredded pork and a steamed whole sea bass. It was as if all his talents as a physicist were sublimated into cooking. He had three shelves of cookbooks and tried a different recipe every night. It was the only extravagance they allowed themselves, and Lily stood there thinking of it as pathetic.

  “I’m never coming back here,” she said.

  Her mother sat back on her heels and looked up at her.

  “Save this stuff if you want it, but don’t think you’re saving it for me,” she said. She never spoke to her mother like this. She barely spoke to her at all.

  Her mother was less pained than baffled. In the kitchen, her father’s sounds had quieted. She could tell he was listening.

  Her mother put the last pin expertly in Lily’s hem. She stood and plucked at the material around Lily’s shoulders. Instantly the mass of cloth looked more like a dress.

  Lily made a small growl.

  Her mother looked at her. Her broad face offered nothing but care. She smoothed her gray hair, tucked a piece back into her bun, as if this gesture alone could set the world straight.

  “Why you think we keep all this stuff, crazy girl?” she asked. “Not for you.” She thumped her chest with her small, wide hand. “We love you,” she said, as if speaking to a deaf child. She tugged expertly at the sleeves of Lily’s dress. “You so much smart girl and not know this?”

  Lily felt the anger receding, but couldn’t figure out how to back out of the situation gracefully. “Well, you should stop thinking about me so much,” she said. “You’re supposed to think about each other.”

  Her mother put a hand to her forehead. “Ai ya,” she exclaimed, exasperated. “I love him; he love me; we love you. It why we love you,” she said, enunciating slowly, and Lily had a glimpse of her mother, the physicist, laying out to dimwitted students how the world works.

  “Ask Nick,” her mother said.

  The assistant at the Columbia Student Records Department wasn’t being rude, but neither was he being helpful. He had a hawk’s nose and a puffed chest, both of which gave him the air of an aristocrat. She almost expected him to speak with a British accent. But his forearms were thick and covered with tattoos: the back of a girl’s head, a hammer and shovel, a map of Vietnam. She felt wariness descending on her like a cloak. Sometimes, she’d learned, when you looked Vietnamese it didn’t matter that you weren’t.

  They stood on either side of a Formica counter in a windowless room, and she smiled and told him that she needed to know if a Nikolai Belov had graduated. She wasn’t sure of the year. Around 1960, she thought. She stepped back and waited for him to open a drawer and pluck out a file.

  He apologized and said he was sorry, but he couldn’t give out that information—university policy.

  She hadn’t planned well enough. She wasn’t prepared.

  “But I need it,” she said.

  “Why?” he asked, and she was surprised again and at a loss. Clerks were supposed to grant or deny permission, not ask why.

  He was waiting. His eyes were paying such sharp attention that it made her think he was avoiding himself.

  “The woman my fiancé used to sleep with has noticed things about him,” she said.

  He looked as if this was the sort of thing he’d expected. He nodded. “When’s the date?” he asked.

  “Valentine’s Day,” she said.

  “Four weeks,” he said, as if measuring whether that was enough time to get through all that they had to accomplish.

  She waited. Nikolai thought she was meeting with the caterer. “I’ll come with you,” he’d said. “No,” she’d insisted, she was working on a surprise for him. “With the caterer?” he’d teased.

  She was not good at subterfuge. Now she would have to meet with the caterer. Now she’d have to come up with a surprise. And still Nikolai would think her behavior odd.

  “You look like the Vietnamese prostitute I lost my virginity to,” the assistant said.

  “I’m Chinese,” she said, as if that meant she wasn’t allowed to remind him of anyone.

  “Do you believe the woman?” he asked.

  Lily felt as if she’d been rapped on the bridge of the nose.
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  “I suppose you do,” the man said. He leaned over the counter but stopped short, thank goodness, of touching her.

  She was turning into something she abhorred: a woman for whom need was a technique. She wondered how much he would help her. She wiped at her eyes, though they didn’t need wiping.

  “You don’t have to cry,” he said.

  He told her to wait, and he disappeared down the long rows of filing cabinets, and she stood up straight and did as he’d instructed.

  Nikolai was standing in the foyer when she got back to the apartment as if he’d been there since she left, a loyal pet, her own palace guard.

  “Where’s my surprise?” he asked.

  She held up a white bakery box tied with red and white cotton string. He smiled. He loved sweets. He put out his hands, palms up and together. It made him look as if he were offering a shrugging apology. “Grossinger’s?” he said. He believed you found the best and stuck with it. He went clear across town to Grossinger’s for rum cake, down to the Fillmore East for music, next door to that for Ratner’s fresh kosher rolls, up to Jimmy’s Soul Food in Harlem for ribs, pickled beet and cucumber salads, and four different types of pudding. Sweet potato was his favorite.

  “In the kitchen,” Lily said, moving past him.

  She put the box on the counter and kept a hand on it, searching a drawer with the other hand for the scissors. He reached across her and tried to rip the string apart. The box creased and bent. “Goddamn Jesus Christ,” Nikolai said.

  She loved bakery string. She loved its strength and color. She loved the odd little contraption the spools of it hung from next to the register. Who thought of these machines? she often wondered. Who decided what we needed and how to give it to us?

  She snipped the string, opened the box, and swiveled it to him as if presenting a diamond necklace in a velvet setting. Inside was a black-and-white cookie. On the white side, a small plastic borzoi stood. Next to it, a shar-pei’s tiny paws disappeared into the chocolate icing.