People Who Knew Me

by Kim Hooper

  We played like we were above all that.

  We played dumb.

  I’d started taking notice of a few love affairs in our building—north tower trysts, I called them. I could see it in their eyes in the lobby, in the elevators. It was an attentiveness to surroundings, a concern for who might see through their charade as they pretended to be consulting about business, using code words that, in a language only known to them, translated to, I want to fuck you in a storage closet. Because that’s how these things go. They’re sinful and impulsive and thrilling. They occur in the backseats of cars, on corporate-carpeted floors, in secret rooms that only janitors know exist. There are bruises and rug burns and pulled muscles and an urgency usually reserved for greedy, impulsive teenagers. They—these trysts—are exciting because they’re dangerous. They can break up marriages, families. They can cause two people stupid enough to conduct their affair on the same floor of the same building to lose their jobs—and much, much more.

  But Gabe and I were just friends.

  * * *

  The margaritas came in glasses the size of bowls. I licked the salt off the rim of mine and took a drink.

  “This is pretty good,” I said. “Peter was right.”

  I perused the menu, trying to decide between a combo platter involving a tamale and an enchilada, or a trio of tacos. I felt Gabe’s eyes on me, perusing me instead of his own menu.

  “Does Drew know about me?” he asked. It was out of nowhere; we never talked about Drew. I made a point of pretending that he didn’t exist, effectively placing myself in two different worlds—the world with Gabe and the world with Drew (which was really a world without Drew).

  “Of course he knows about you,” I said.

  Gabe looked to me for more information.

  “He knows you’re an old friend from college. I didn’t remind him that you were the date I ditched for him all those years ago,” I said. “Would you like me to tell him that?”

  He rolled his eyes, annoyed.

  “Come on, Em. We know I don’t give a shit about that. And you know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  I released my shoulders from their tensed-up position by my ears and put down my menu.

  “He knows you hired me at Berringer,” I said, knowing this wasn’t what he was talking about, either. That was really all I’d told Drew, though. I didn’t mention the dinners out with Gabe, the drinks, the attraction. Some nights, while I was out with Gabe, Drew called and left messages. The next day, he’d ask where I’d been. I claimed I’d made friends—girlfriends—at work and was out with them. He claimed he was happy for me, happy to hear I was having so much fun. We were both terrible liars.

  “So he doesn’t know much of anything that matters,” Gabe said flatly.

  I wanted to tell him there was nothing between us that mattered, but I knew that wasn’t true. He would argue back with a truth that would only make it impossible for me to continue compartmentalizing my life, guilt-free.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” I said.

  “Look,” he said sternly. “I like you, Em. I liked you way back then and I like you now.”

  I stared into my margarita, hoping to find some kind of resolution among the floating ice cubes.

  “I like you, too,” I said weakly.

  “I don’t like you in the way I like Doug at work,” he said. “You must know what I mean.”

  I nodded because I couldn’t bring myself to form the words that agreed with him. I didn’t know if I was ready to make all this real. We hadn’t kissed, nothing had happened. We could just keep going as we were, playing dumb.

  He went on: “I’m not sure how much longer I can keep this up.”

  “This?” I asked softly.

  “If you haven’t noticed, I don’t date anyone. I’m just waiting. For you. Maybe you should do me a favor and tell me to stop.”

  But I didn’t want to tell him to stop.

  He hadn’t even taken a sip of his margarita. Everything he said was said sober, clearheaded.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” I repeated.

  He provided the words on my behalf: “I know you like me—in that way—too,” he said. Then: “What I don’t know is if you would like me if you didn’t resent him so much.”

  “Him” being Drew.

  I looked up, as if startled by a sudden loud noise.

  “Whatever I feel for you has nothing to do with Drew.”

  I was angry and let it show. If Gabe knew me as well as Drew did, he would have known that I only use such a defensive tone when I’m aware I’m wrong.

  “I think it has a lot to do with Drew. You’re lonely. You’re angry at him. If you betrayed him, I bet you feel like you’d just be making things even between the two of you.”

  I was quiet.

  “And you wouldn’t be wrong in making things even. Maybe I would want that, too, if I were in your shoes,” he said. “But I’m in my shoes and I don’t want to be someone’s weapon of revenge.”

  “You’re not that,” I said.

  “I know I’m that,” he said. “I’m asking if I’m just that, or if I’m something more.”

  He was different from Drew. He wanted to understand how I felt, what I wanted. He pressed, he challenged. Drew did neither. Drew played the role of the oh-shucks, unobservant-but-well-meaning guy. He didn’t ask what he meant to me, he didn’t ask if I still loved him, if I was unhappy. He didn’t possess the courage to want to know.

  “You’re more to me,” I admitted, both to myself and to him.

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  If he was taking the risk of asking me such things, I could take the risk of being honest.

  “I think about you all the time,” I said. And I did. When I went to bed at night, I resorted to kissing the back of my hand, like a desperate teenager, imagining his lips. When I woke up in the morning, I picked out my clothes according to what would be most attractive—for him. The fantasies sustained me.

  “What about Drew?”

  “I don’t really think about Drew,” I said.

  Whatever resentment I’d felt for Drew had given way to a sort of apathy. I wasn’t angry anymore; I wasn’t anything. I’d been under the impression that a marriage was in trouble when there was bitterness and rage. But, in the months that had passed since Drew had moved in with his mom, I’d realized that a marriage was truly in trouble when there were no feelings at all.

  “So what are we doing?” Gabe asked. He clasped his hands together, like he did at the conclusion of business meetings.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a question I’ve been going out of my way to avoid.”

  He sighed. The waitress came to take our order.

  “We need a minute,” I told her. She nodded and walked away.

  “Life’s short,” Gabe said to me, looking at me intently, refusing to blink.

  “It is,” I agreed, holding his stare.

  Not taking his eyes off me, he raised his hand in the air like a kid with an answer in elementary school, catching the waitress’s attention. She returned to the table, little notepad in hand again.

  “Can we just get the check?” he said to her.

  She looked at him strangely, then nodded, put her notepad back in the pocket of her apron, and went to a register at the rear of the restaurant.

  “Let’s go to my place,” he said. It was a demand—not an invitation. “I have leftover Moroccan takeout.”

  * * *

  I’d expected his place to be the kind of swanky bachelor pad you see in movies featuring high-powered businessmen looking for love. In those movies, the guys always have commitment issues. They subsist on liquor and have a woman’s bra strewn across some piece of furniture. They decorate to attract the bra-flinging women—modern, sleek, sharp edges everywhere. Their couches cost a few grand and aren’t even comfortable, but that doesn’t matter because this type of man is never home anyway.

  Gab
e’s place was not like that, though. It was in Greenwich Village, so it cost him a penny prettier than any penny I’d ever see, but it was humble, wholesome even. He admitted that he didn’t know a thing about how to make a home; he relied on the Crate & Barrel store on Madison for guidance, even knew the name of one of the employees—“Jeff with a G,” so Geoff, a gay guy who moonlit as an aspiring ballet dancer. Gabe’s couch was full of soft pillows. A throw blanket was resting on the armchair. It wasn’t folded neatly, as if he’d recently used it, curled up in it to watch TV late at night. There wasn’t a liquor bottle—or bra—in sight.

  “I love the dining table,” I said.

  “Reclaimed wood from a barn upstate. Supposedly.”

  I wanted to linger there, in the dining area, for hours. I wasn’t sure what would happen if we ventured toward the bedroom. I went into the kitchen, drew a finger across the marble countertop, as if checking for dust. I even opened his refrigerator, inspecting his daily life. There was a carton of orange juice and some white Styrofoam take-out containers.

  “The Moroccan food?” I said.

  He nodded. He was humored by me, my snooping.

  “Want some?” he asked.

  I shook my head. I had too many knots in my stomach to be the slightest bit hungry.

  He walked toward me, entered the space I’d previously considered personal, my own. We’d never been so close before. I could smell his breath—musty, unfreshened, but not bad. I closed my eyes, either to prepare for him to kiss me or to play the childhood game of believing the entire world vanished if my vision went black. I was terrified and exhilarated simultaneously, the way you feel before a huge drop on a roller coaster.

  He put his hands on my arms, as if to steady me. I thought of Drew, but only about how he was with his mom, in Jersey, so far from this, so far from ever having to know about this. He said he’d acquired his mom’s early bedtime—seven o’clock. He wasn’t even awake.

  Gabe kissed my forehead first, left his lips there for a while, introducing them to my skin slowly. I tilted my chin up toward him, offering him my mouth. He took it—gently, with care. I’d never kissed someone with such full lips before, lips that could envelop mine. Drew’s lips were thin. When he smiled, they disappeared completely.

  “Do you have any idea how long I’ve wanted to kiss you?” he said, still just inches from my face. I pressed my lips together like I did after putting on balm or gloss.

  “I have a pretty good idea.”

  I wanted to say more. I wanted to ask what this meant. I wanted to ask where it would go from here, if it could go from here. And, most of all, I wanted to ask, Should we feel guilty? because I knew he would comfort me by saying, No.

  I was quiet, though. I wanted him to say the next words, make the next moves. Somehow, in my mind, this made me a passive participant, less at fault.

  He took my hand and, for me, that would have been enough excitement for the night—to hold that hand until dawn. There was a single hallway leading to the one bedroom. He led us until I stopped him.

  “I can’t,” I told him. I didn’t want to cross the threshold, as if I held some superstitious belief about what may happen if I did, as if Drew would hear an alarm in his head the second I stepped into another man’s bedroom. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.

  “You’re being awfully presumptuous, Ms. Overton,” he said. He’d never accepted Morris.

  “I just want to sleep—actually sleep—with you,” he said.

  It was a trick, I was sure. We’d get into bed with this lazy intention to “just sleep” and end up doing anything but that. Promising to behave ourselves would only make it more alluring not to.

  “Sleep is good,” I said, accepting the trickery. “It is a school night.”

  He took my hand and led me into his bedroom. He had a large king bed—unmade, which assured me he hadn’t planned for this, hadn’t anticipated talking me into this. Aside from the bed, there was a single nightstand on the right side of the bed—“his” side, I concluded—and a dresser with the top drawer opened slightly. There were no candles, none of the usual tools for romancing. Maybe he didn’t do this all the time. Maybe I was a little wrong about him.

  He straightened out the sheets, which were disarrayed and pulled over to the one side—the nightstand side, “his” side. He unbuttoned his shirt like it was nothing, like we had already shared some kind of domestic bliss. His chest was bare—he either trimmed the hair or there wasn’t much there to begin with. His muscles were as defined as they’d been in my mind, putting to rest the cynic’s notion that nothing is as good as you imagine it to be. Then he unbuckled the belt of his pants, let them fall to the floor. There he was, standing in front of me, in a pair of silk boxers—black. I sat on the bed, waiting for him to tell me what to do. He walked over to me, stood over me, one leg on either side of my two pressed-together thighs. Then he started unbuttoning my blouse, slowly, looking at me with each button as if to ask, Is this okay? I gave him small nods. When he was done, he rubbed his hands along my sides, up and over the front of my bra. He kissed me, his weight compelling me to lie back on the bed. We pressed against each other, his boxers and my skirt the only barriers to what we really wanted.

  We must have done that—just pressed against each other and kissed—for an hour, maybe two. My mouth got dry, my chin and cheeks reddened by the stubble on his face. After one o’clock in the morning, he pulled me under the covers with him. I rested on his chest—now sweaty, even though restraint was all we’d exercised.

  “What am I going to do tomorrow?” I asked. “I don’t have anything with me. I can’t wear the same clothes I wore yesterday. People will know. Cassie will know.”

  Cassie, the receptionist, the gossip every office has, there to provide the entertainment necessary for mundane hours to pass.

  He felt my forehead with the back of his hand. “You feel feverish,” he said. My mom used to love that Peggy Lee song—you give me fever. She’d play it when getting ready for dates.

  “You should take a sick day. You can relax here,” he said. “Eat those Moroccan leftovers in the fridge.”

  I liked the idea of lying in bed at his place, sipping his coffee from one of his mugs while wearing one of his football T-shirts. He was a Jets fan. More than anything, I liked that he trusted me to stay there. Either he knew I wouldn’t snoop, or he didn’t have anything to hide.

  “And next time,” he said, “bring a change of clothes.”

  TWENTY

  Nurse Amy said most people have fewer side effects with Taxol. Apparently I’m not most people. I have “the weird breast cancer.” And, thanks to Taxol, I also have joint and muscle pain, tingling in my hands and feet, and most enjoyable of all—diarrhea. I also have a horrifically bad attitude.

  A lady at the infusion center gave me a book called Getting Through Cancer after I politely declined an invitation to her church. She just reached into her purse and handed it to me. Either she carries around copies on a regular basis to share with fellow patients, or she had me targeted as “a troubled person” and was waiting to pounce. I skimmed it. It’s full of all kinds of hokey tips and Bible quotes. It says I should list five things I’m grateful for every day. It says that cancer is “an emotional journey.” It says the grief of a diagnosis has the five stages of any heart-wrenching event—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I am only familiar with anger.

  There are days I want to take up Al on his offer for paid leave. Sometimes I can’t stand being around normal, healthy people. Their worries are so petty, their laughs so careless, their priorities so mind-boggling. I overheard a distraught woman saying to her girlfriend, “I will just die if he doesn’t call me,” and I wanted to grab her by her neck and say, No, you will not die. That’s just it—life goes on with all its silliness and stupidity while I’m dying. Perspective isn’t always a good thing; sometimes it makes you feel fucking alone.

  Last week at the bar, this husband an
d wife came in. I’d never seen them before. They were talkers, yammering on and on about how they used to live in Topanga Canyon and how they remember seeing Charles Manson around. They were just teenagers at the time and claimed he was “as strange as you’d suspect.” The woman sipped on a Long Island iced tea while her husband pounded back scotch on the rocks. Then they turned the discussion to me.

  “How long have you had cancer?” the woman asked.

  I was wearing my scarf but, like Claire said, it doesn’t really hide that I have cancer; it just makes my cancer a little prettier to look at.

  “Diagnosed in September,” I said.

  “Breast?” the woman asked. It’s strange how people assume bartenders are so willing to share details of their personal lives, as some kind of fair exchange.

  When I nodded, the woman turned to her husband and said, “Mary St. Clair had cancer, remember?” And they had a little sidebar about Mary St. Clair while I cleaned out some glasses, trying my best to exit the conversation.

  “She is totally cancer-free now,” the woman said to me, an unwelcome invitation back. People do this a lot—use examples of their cancer survivor friends, lovers, neighbors, family members to insinuate that I have nothing to worry about. Al, bless his heart, mentioned his Aunt Pauline. Even JT said a “lady friend” of his beat breast cancer—twice. They don’t know I have this rare and aggressive kind of breast cancer, though. If I die, they might think I was just weak, not up to the fight. I need to tell Al the percentages. He needs to know my odds aren’t good. Because Claire may need him. The conversation will happen. I’m procrastinating.