Before You Knew My Name

by Jacqueline Bublitz

  Later, when we get to that next part, it won’t take long for a man with fingers at my neck to prove me wrong. He will mock my sincerity, laugh at the idea of a girl like me making her own world. He will be so sure of his own right to my body, he will leave nothing but the memory of that girl behind.

  We will keep coming back to this part. No matter how hard I try, the streets and sounds of Manhattan will fade, the men with their fruits and their flowers will disappear, and we will end up down there on the rocks. It’s inevitable, no matter how much I try to distract you. Because this hopeful, heaving night is just one part of my story. The other story is this: there is the body of a dead girl waiting, down on the banks of the Hudson River.

  The man who did this has left her there, gone home. And soon there will be a lonely woman who looks down, across, at the dead girl. I can see this lonely woman coming, or see her already there, and she’s sadder than I have ever been, because her sorrow is still simmering. It hasn’t boiled over and scalded her life, which makes her feel that nothing important, nothing meaningful, has ever happened to her.

  I am about to happen to her.

  TWO

  RUBY JONES HAS NO IDEA HOW OLD SHE IS. OR RATHER, SHE knows her age solely in relation to calendars and dates. The number itself remains foreign, this tally of her years on the page, as if the age she has landed at is an irrefutable place, a landmark plotted on a map. In other words, Ruby Jones does not feel thirty-six years old. This age she notes down on forms, the number of candles on her cake, consistently confuses her. So much so, she has been known to experience a jolt of surprise upon discovering this famous woman or that, someone whose life she has observed from afar, is in fact much younger than she is. She could swear these women, with their multiple careers, with their multiple marriages and multiple babies, are her contemporaries. Maybe even older, with all that life crammed in.

  The truth of it is this: Ruby is approximately three years past pretty. Though camera filters are designed to hide the facts of the matter these days, it is a reality she sees in the mirror every morning: the slackening jaw, the fold-down corners of her mouth, the stomach rounded and hips fleshed. She has not had the opportunity to age with someone, has only herself to wake up to each morning, and this is what she sees. A woman well past pretty, still sexy, maybe even beautiful at times, but there is little youth to be found in her features now. She can no longer look young without artifice, and this she cannot deny.

  How to be thirty-six, then? How to understand in her bones what this means, when it is nothing like they told her it would be. They. Her mother. Women’s magazines. The authors who wrote her favourite books growing up. People who should have known better. All Ruby knows for sure is that she is suddenly older than she understands herself to be. Which is how it comes to pass that, in the middle of a makeshift dance floor in Apollo Bay, three hours’ drive from Melbourne (and half a world away from where she wants to be), eighties songs shrieking from cheap speakers in the corner, Ruby Jones makes the decision to throw those thirty-six years she has accumulated up in the air. To close her eyes and see where they scatter.

  She won’t fully understand the gesture as it happens, misremembered lyrics bellowed in her ear, friends stumbling into each other, pulling her into their circle. She is drunk, they are drunk. Sally, the bride, will end up throwing up on the beach as midnight approaches, and Ruby will hold back her hair, soothe her, and tell her what a magical day it was.

  ‘I wish you had someone who loves you, too,’ Sally will mumble when she’s done, mascara tracking down her face. ‘You’re such a great girl. Our precious Ruby.’

  This sentence. This wedding. This late-summer night of clinking glasses and shoeless dancing and misty rain. It has all become too much for ‘precious’ Ruby (or too little, she will decide, when she is thinking more clearly). Her friends in their expensive outfits, drinking their fancy wine, pills popped surreptitiously between the speeches and the band. Sally, drunk-crying, wearing a dress she dieted herself into all summer, marrying the great guy she met on Tinder barely a year ago. The ‘right swipe’, they called it in in their vows, and for the life of her, Ruby couldn’t remember if left or right was the way to say yes.

  Later, at the beach house she and her friends have rented for the weekend, Ruby takes a pillow and blanket and quietly pads out to the downstairs balcony. It is 3 a.m. and everyone else has passed out in their shared beds, couples curled into each other or snoring obliviously against each other’s backs. Ruby is, as usual, the only single person in the group. Though she doesn’t exactly consider herself single, not privately at least. There should be a better word to describe the state she has found herself in.

  Alone.

  That would do it, she thinks, folding herself down onto a damp, wicker sofa. Someone has removed the spongy seat cushions, Ruby can see them stacked under the lip of the second-floor balcony above her, but she does not have the energy to drag the cushions over. It has started to rain in earnest now, and she is glad for the discomfort, for the wet on her face and the unyielding sofa base, pressing into her hip. Back in her room, the world had started to spin. Now, she can see the black of the ocean, hear the inky water of the bay slapping against the sand. The sound seems as if it is coming from inside her, it’s as if she is the one cresting and falling, and it takes a moment for Ruby to realise she is crying, out here on this balcony, alone with the rain and the waves and the starless sky. Soon she is crying as hard as the weather, the accumulations of the past few years rising up out of her. This is not where she intended to be.

  Life, she understands in this moment, has stopped happening to her. She has stood in the middle of too many summers and winters, too many dance floors and other people’s parties, and simply woken up the next day older than before. For so long, nothing has changed. She has been on pause, while the man she loves goes about making his life. Offering the tiniest of spaces for her to fit into, asking her to make herself small, so he can keep her right here. Alone.

  Alone, here.

  She doesn’t want to be here anymore.

  The plan is not entirely clear as dawn approaches, waves and rain and tears saturating everything around her. Ruby won’t even really understand, some days later, as she scrapes together her life savings, books her one-way ticket from Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport to JFK, just what she’s doing, or why. She only knows that she cannot stay here any longer. That she needs, desperately, for something, anything to happen to shake her out of her current state, and New York seems as right a place as any for reinvention.

  In this way, our worlds are spinning closer every second.

  I have an image of her on the plane, coming closer. The way she keeps reaching back toward Australia, folding time in on itself, so that Ruby is both 35,000 feet above her old life and stuck smack in the middle of it. I see her memories playing like an old mixtape, a best-of compilation she has heard many times, but up there in the air even the smallest moments seem tinged with tragedy. The way he looked at her when … the first time they … the last time she … and now she’s pushing her forefinger hard against the small airplane window, blinking back tears. She watches her nail turn white; tiny, perfect icicles forming on the other side of the thick glass. Around her, people have already reclined their seats and started to snore, but I know that Ruby is wide awake for the entire flight, just like I am wide awake that whole bus journey from Wisconsin, this whole same day we make our way to New York City.

  And, just like me, Ruby Jones cannot help but spend the journey returning over and over to the lover she left behind. The proof of him. For me it is a stolen camera. For her it is the last message he sent, right before she boarded the plane.

  I missed you. Past tense.

  I missed you.

  As if there are already years, not hours, between them.

  We arrive within minutes of each other.

  ‘Where to? WHERE to, lady?’

  The cab driver at the bustling JFK taxi rank speaks lou
der this second time, half-shouts at Ruby, and she blinks away the vastness of his question, the heart-stopping open space of it. He just wants an address. She has an address—she can give him an address, if her sleep-deprived mind will just remember the details.

  ‘I … uh …’

  Ruby reads a street name and building number from her phone, offers it more like a question. The driver huffs his acknowledgement and pulls out into the snaking line of traffic exiting the airport. It’s getting dark, there is a grey tinge to the air, something glassy over her eyes. She tries to shake off the lethargy of more than thirty hours of travel, tries to find some small, preserved part of herself that is excited to be here. She felt it, briefly, when she landed at LAX. A little arms-out-wide moment at all the freedom ahead of her. But that was hours ago, hours of transit and bad coffee, before another flight jolted her three hours ahead, so that she’s missed the sun twice over, and has no idea what time it’s really meant to be.

  As Ruby looks out the cab window at her new surroundings blurring by, she thinks maybe that first view of New York’s famous skyline will cheer her up. An iconic bridge she will recognise, or one of those familiar buildings, lit like a Christmas tree. For now, it’s grey plastic bags floating like bloated birds in the trees, and a freeway knocking up against the sloping yards of thin, slate houses; if she can just keep her eyes open, just hold on, she knows these houses and church billboards and chain link fences will soon give way to shimmering water, to neon lights, and those famous metal buildings, narrow as fingers, beckoning. And, with this last thought, Ruby acknowledges she is delirious. Seeing bloated birds and beckoning fingers—she must be dreaming more than awake right now.

  (I am stepping over cracks, shimmying around people, waving at my street signs and statues, as she presses her forehead against the glass of her passenger-side window, watching for those beckoning fingers. At what point in this journey do our paths begin to cross?)

  Struggling to keep her eyes open, Ruby wills the driver to go faster. She wonders if he knows what an important role he is playing in her life right now, delivering her to a new world, a beginning of things, like this. As the driver talks to someone on his mobile phone, his voice so low as to be indecipherable, she acknowledges this man could not care less about her, or the way her heart has seemingly moved up into her throat. It is clearly nothing new for him, this transporting of another lost, hopeful soul to whatever awaits them in New York City.

  She watches his hands slide across the steering wheel, each turn like a clock counting down and understands it is of no consequence to a stranger that she has come here with no plan, no calendar of events. He just wants to get her to her destination, drop her off and get back to whoever he’s talking to, maybe show up at someone’s door himself. Ruby is a task to complete, irrelevant to him and to New York, that neon glow outside her window, getting brighter. She suddenly feels like laughing.

  I could, she muses, change my name, make up a life. That’s how anonymous I am right now.

  And then.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Wha—?’

  The car stops suddenly, and the cab driver half-turns toward Ruby.

  ‘You say, here.’

  He points to a five-storey apartment building on his right. Scaffolding one floor high runs alongside the façade, and a series of wrought-iron fire escapes snake up to the roof, giving off the impression of a building under perpetual construction. Ruby sees that the numbers above the wide front door match those she read out to the driver back at JFK.

  Scrambling for her wallet, Ruby over-tips for the ride, and the driver finally looks at her now, shakes his head slightly, before he pops the trunk and hoists her suitcases onto the street.

  As Ruby watches him speed away, she fights the urge to wave him back to the curb and ask to be returned to the airport. Instead, as the yellow cab disappears from sight, she struggles her suitcases up the concrete steps that lead to her new home, before using her elbow to hit a buzzer that says Press Here. She hears the echo of her arrival on the other side, as she waits, trembling, for the door in front of her to open.

  Mine opens with a knock.

  As Ruby Jones was delivered to her new front door, I was following the blue dot of my phone all the way to the edge of Central Park, then veering around it, just like the map told me to. Keeping the Hudson River on my left, there were soon more apartments than stores and hotels, and bags of household rubbish began to appear on the curb. Rows of thin, leafless trees started to grow up out of the pavement, shin-high fences made of iron turning each one into tiny, walled-off gardens, and it was clear, strange as everything seemed to me, that I had reached the streets where people lived. The frantic pace of Midtown seemed a world away up here on the Upper West Side, the night sky pressing down on my shoulders, the residential streets all but empty. I wasn’t worried though, you could still feel the presence of people on nearby streets, sense all the living going on around me. Other than a small, involuntary jump when a man smoking in a doorway whistled at me, I felt oddly calm as I approached Noah’s apartment building.

  Still. My heart is in my throat when I knock, as if the gesture is pulling all my courage up out of me. I am sweating slightly after being buzzed in from the street, a set of narrow stairs climbed, the Leica pressing against me. Rows of doors remain closed to me, and then the one I have been looking for is right there in front of me.

  Own bed, shared bathroom. $300 P/W—all included …

  Yes, I’ll be paying cash …

  No, I’m not allergic to dogs …

  Here is the full address, if you’re taking the train the closest stop is 96th and Broadway …

  I’ll be coming by bus, I should arrive by 9 …

  As you will.

  As you will. A strange sign off, I thought at the time. But I appreciated this Noah’s efficiency throughout the process. Deal done inside a few text messages, hardly any questions asked. No unnecessary niceties or chit-chat. I don’t even know what his voice sounds like, I realise now, as my knock echoes on the wood between us. The door to Noah’s apartment creaks open and I see one blue eye first, then the peak of a dark blue cap. A polished black shoe. And then something cold and wet brushes against my hand. Before I have time to pull back, a large, brown dog pushes through the half-open door and lunges at me.

  ‘Franklin!’

  Noah appears in flashes between paws and chocolate fur, pulling at the dog’s collar, and the three of us stumble through the door together, a laugh bubbling up out of me from a source I never knew existed. It has an immediate effect, like cool water on a hot day. Any tension I felt slackens, like the strap of my bag as I let it fall to the floor. For a second, Noah and the dog disappear, and it’s just me, standing in the most beautiful room I have ever seen. The polished wood under my feet gleams, and tall, wide windows above thick-cushioned seats give way to walls of books and couches big enough to lie flat on. I can see small, brightly coloured toys, bones and rubber chickens and tennis balls, all scattered across the floor and—my mouth drops open—a shiny black piano sits on the other side of the room. Above the piano is a huge, glittering chandelier, something I have never, ever seen in real life. Each piece of dangling crystal is so delicate, so perfectly formed, that I think immediately of raindrops. Or tears.

  A strange thought comes to me, lands on my shoulder like a feather. How much sorrow has this room seen?

  And now I am aware of Noah holding the collar of the dog, both of them watching me. With my eyes and mouth wide open like a fish in the sand, I know that I have just given myself away. I might as well have pulled out the six hundred dollars cash I have in my purse and admitted this is all I have in the world. I am not, and this must be perfectly obvious, even to the big old dog, someone who is accustomed to nice things. I turn to look, really look, at the man who lives here, the owner of the piano and the chandelier and the books and the dog. He is staring just as hard back at me, a half-smile pulling up the left corner of his mouth. I see now
that he is old. Like grandfather old, maybe sixty-five or seventy, and shorter than me, just. He’s wearing one of those fancy polo sweaters, the ones where you can see a neat shirt collar poking out from underneath, and it looks like he has no hair left under his Yankees cap. Tufts of eyebrow, pale blue eyes. That half-smile of his, and long, fine fingers reaching for mine.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, ‘Alice Lee. It’s very nice to meet you. Franklin’—Noah gestures to the big, brown dog now straining toward me—‘obviously concurs.’

  Later, when I look back at all the beginnings that turned me, inch by inch, toward the river, I will see this was the gentlest of them. Shaking the soft, warm hand of an old man, and then a tour of his apartment, with a large, brown dog leading the way. Fresh towels on the dresser in the bedroom and a closet of empty hangers, ‘Should you wish to hang up your things.’ The offer of a late-night coffee—‘Yes, please’—and the shaking of heads—‘No, don’t worry about that now’—when I offer to pay upfront for my week-long stay.