Before You Knew My Name

by Jacqueline Bublitz

  Upon reaching the lake, Ruby inadvertently starts running the wrong way. Keeps to the left, runs clockwise as she would back home, and she is soon made aware of her mistake. Joggers coming toward her frown or sigh, a few shake their heads as they pass, and one or two make a show of having to step around her. She starts to say sorry and then changes her mind. Stubbornness prevents her from turning around, running the wrong-right way with the crowd, and something else, too. After years of making herself small, it is exhilarating to take up space for once, to force people out of her way.

  Ruby is still on that runner’s high when she returns to her apartment building an hour later. Saturated through, she is so wet she has to stand on the street and twist the rain from her T-shirt before she can go inside. The guy at the front desk shoots her a rueful smile as she passes by him, but she grins and tells him she likes this kind of weather.

  ‘It’s so refreshing!’

  And now the desk guy looks concerned, as if Ruby’s sudden display of positivity has thrown him off (yes, he’s noticed the takeaways and vodka, formed an opinion of this new lodger from her infrequent appearances these past few days, and privately concluded she’d be gone within a week).

  ‘We’ve got umbrellas to borrow. If … if you want,’ Ruby hears him say unsurely to her back as she steps into the small elevator at the end of the entrance hall, before the doors close between them.

  When she steps under the shower a few minutes later, Ruby remembers the alarmed look on the young man’s face and starts to laugh. To be found odd in New York feels like a triumph, the opposite of disappearing. There, under the hot shower water she closes her eyes and laughs so hard she cries, emotions mixing like wet paint, dripping from her skin. This will be the real beginning, she decides. A kind of baptism, from which she will emerge renewed. Getting out of the shower, towel wrapped tight around her tingling body, she pads to her small closet, finds her prettiest dress. Fingering the soft cotton of the skirt, she imagines herself flowing through the streets of New York in the summer, leaving a bright, happy trail of colours behind her.

  There is a whole world outside these brick walls, and she’s finally ready to crash her way through it.

  This is the thought she is turning over, smiling at, when her phone buzzes from the nightstand. Turning from the closet, Ruby reaches for the phone, checks the glowing screen.

  Hi.

  Images of pretty dresses, of warm summer days and bright colours disappear. The anchor tugs, and a second text message arrives.

  I wish you were still here.

  Ash.

  Ruby sits down hard on the bed. Holds the phone away from her, brings it back to her chest. She sits a full five minutes like this before, heart hammering, fingers trembling, she begins to craft a reply.

  You mustn’t think she’s the only one. I might be having a better time of it right now, but I too have moments where the past feels present, pulls me in. Here’s the thing. You don’t get off a plane or a bus and leave your old self behind. No amount of running or sudden realisation can rewire you like that. Not entirely, not the way those self-help books and daytime talk shows would have you think (I used to watch a lot of those with my best friend Tammy). The way I see it, damage gets packed in your suitcase, people stay on your skin. Some mornings I wake up with Mr Jackson right there behind my eyelids, as if he crept into my bed in the night. And sometimes—it happened yesterday—it is my mother who makes an appearance, the smell of powder and roses, that signature, skin-soft scent of hers inexplicably filling the room. I don’t like it when this happens. Like Ruby, my heart hammers and my fingers tremble. But, unlike Ruby, I do not respond. I wait for the hammering to slow, the trembling to cease, and I stay facing forward. My mother can visit. Mr Jackson, too, if he wants. I just never let them stay too long.

  In the beginning, I disappeared on purpose. Extricated myself from a life I didn’t want, just like Ruby did. But unlike Ruby, I didn’t tell anyone where I went. Not even my best friend. I let Tammy think I had stayed right where she left me; I wanted to slip out of my old life unseen. And if certain people stayed on my skin, if they came along in my suitcase uninvited, at least they wouldn’t be able to cause any fresh wounds. That felt like a start, like I would have time to heal from all the ways they had hurt me.

  I wanted to start over. I wanted to disappear.

  But that’s not the same as being forgotten. To be clear, I never, ever wanted that.

  FOUR

  WE ARE EATING BREAKFAST ON DAY EIGHT WHEN NOAH offers me a job. The next in a series of unexpected gifts. Over the last few days, he has continued to leave mostly small, always useful items in my room, so that I will come home from exploring the city to find a silver water bottle or sports socks on the end of my bed. Whenever I emerge, holding the latest trinket he has left for me, he merely waves at the refrigerator door, where my collection of IOUs is growing.

  ‘I’m not a fan of delayed gratification,’ he said yesterday, when I protested the purple, puffy jacket that sat waiting for me on the dresser. Socks and water bottles were one thing, but the jacket felt extravagant, and I wasn’t sure I should accept it. ‘You’ll pay me back sometime,’ Noah said calmly, dismissing my concerns. ‘Until then, with all that walking you do, there’s no point in catching your death, Baby Joan.’

  I read about crows, taffeta birds I used to call them when I was little, both afraid and fascinated by their crinkle of black feathers. Crows are known to randomly leave presents for people they like and trust; shiny, pretty things, and practical objects, too. It’s their way of communicating without words, and I’ve come to think of Noah’s gifts in this way. Even if I don’t fully understand what I have done to earn his trust so soon, or why he has decided to take me under his human wing.

  (Death birds, my mother used to call them. Harbingers circling, waiting. We never did agree on her superstitions.)

  And now the biggest surprise of all. The offer of money and independence. A job! Noah says I can be his assistant, helping him with the dogs. Noah is a dog walker, see. Up here on the Upper West Side. He used to have some other job, some suit and tie affair downtown, and it must have been important because he owns this place—barrelled windows, piano, chandelier—but he definitely prefers dogs to people these days. Plenty of dogs around here need walking, too. It’s not like they have their own yards to play in, and I’ve never seen one roaming the streets on its own, so it makes sense when Noah tells me he’s been thinking about introducing a home-care service to his business. It will mean people from the neighbourhood have a place to leave their fancy purebreds and cute old mutts when they go out of town on business trips, or spend their weekends in the Hamptons, which is a place rich people seem to go to a lot, though Noah tells me he hasn’t been there himself in years.

  (Noah doesn’t appear to have any friends. If his phone rings, it’s only ever about a dog. And while there is a lot of expensive looking art on the walls of his apartment, I haven’t yet come across a single framed photograph. I didn’t bring any with me either, so I suppose it’s not so strange. Or if it is, we are only as strange as each other. No doubt there are people he sees behind his eyelids, too. People he consciously blinks away, but I figure it’s none of my business who they might be. He is kind to dogs, and to me, and that’s all I need to know about him for now.)

  My mouth is full of bagel and cream cheese as Noah explains the terms of his proposition. Rent, he says, will be taken out of my salary from now on, and this will also cover food and amenities for the apartment. He refers back to scribbled notes on a yellow pad between us, combinations of words and equations in a scrawl I can’t make out, and when he looks up, he tells me this should leave me with a hundred and fifty dollars per week, cash in hand.

  ‘You’ll be required to work four days, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. A combination of dog walking and dog-sitting, depending on who we get on the day. Each dog will come with its own care routine, and you’ll never have more than two, plus Franklin, to look after a
t any one time.’

  He crosses something off in his notes and looks at me with his bright eyes, his hand extended. I see an image of black feathers, rustling.

  ‘Are you in?’

  Alarmingly, I once again want to cry, but I nod silently instead, tongue pushing against the roof of my mouth, because I once read you can’t physically cry when you do this. Even so, my eyes pool with water as I shake Noah’s hand. I know there could not possibly be any combination of numbers in his scribbled equations that would cover rent and food and bills, and still leave me with money in my pocket. I know, too, that Noah doesn’t really need to be in the business of more dogs, that he works not for money, but for contact with his four-legged friends, and a chance to be out in the world from time to time. I’m not always able to read people’s motivations so well, but I know without doubt that this new home-care business has been formed around me. And I sense, grasping at a future truth, this might be Noah’s way of making sure I come back to him each day.

  Thoughts swirling, I am overwhelmed at the door Noah has swung open. I do not know why he is helping me like this, why he shows me a kind of care he doesn’t seem to afford many, if any, other people. Later, when we have grown more accustomed to talking about real things, I will ask him why he placed that ad for a room in his apartment, what motivated this self-confessed introvert to open up a door in his life, too. For now, it’s enough to know that I am profoundly grateful for this place I have arrived at, and as we map out my first shifts at our new doggy daycare, I allow myself to believe I deserve what comes next. The beginning of a life where I take up space, where I belong.

  In a world where some of that kindness of strangers I’ve so often heard about is finally directed at me.

  Are you surprised at how little time it takes for my barriers to come down? I suppose, if things had turned out differently, you might think it a good thing. The way I readily embraced this fresh start, when girls like me so often fall back on their old ways. You might even admire my resilience, want to bump your fist against mine, congratulate me for all the positive changes I am making in my life.

  How about we stay inside that fantasy a little while longer, hey.

  It is as if Ruby has a fever. It has something to do with sex. Or a lot to do with it. Ever since Ash reached out via text, her body has insisted on responding to the slightest provocation. Cool sheets touching her bare legs. Hot shower water running down her back. Even the way she bites into an apple or slides food from fork to tongue somehow feels erotic. She dreams of sex, wakes up soaked in the sheets of it. Upon opening her eyes each morning, her collarbone aches, hot, as if this is where the electric cord of her desire is wired.

  And that cord keeps leading her back to him.

  Ruby is used to wanting Ash from afar, but this new fervour feels different. It isn’t, she soon realises, entirely about her lover, though the memory of his mouth, his hands, instantly and consistently makes her stomach flip. She remembers her grandmother gossiping about a cousin known for her scandalous love affairs—‘Oh, that woman was always on heat’—and this curled-lip, old-fashioned saying perhaps comes closest to describing the state Ruby has inexplicably found herself in, after a week of feeling nothing at all.

  (She has forgotten the small explosion, and the woman on the dance floor at Sally’s wedding. It isn’t always the right moments we remember.)

  Trying to distract herself, Ruby makes lists of places to see, in this second week that somehow feels like her first. Highlighting place names in her journal, she visits the Met, takes the Staten Island Ferry, catches a train to Brooklyn, and walks back over the bridge in the rain. This incessant spring rain is now as much a part of the city to her as the garbage and the scaffolds, as the chain stores on every corner, and the cardboard MetroCard she has in her purse. She is making acquaintance with New York, buoyed by a savings account that affords vodka martinis and French candles for her little studio, and the new Diane von Furstenberg dress she wore to a play at the Lincoln Center two nights ago. One of her favourite film actresses stood half-naked on the stage, so close Ruby could see the coffee stain of her nipples. New York!

  This is the city of her social media posts, of her messages to her mother, and phone calls with her older sister, Cassie, at home with her family in Melbourne.

  There is, however, another New York. The New York of staring at the ceiling in painful anticipation, of waiting for that early morning bell, the electronic ding of Ash’s text messages, the scramble for her phone. She sleeps naked, ready, and he has been unfailing in his appreciation so far. Ash, it turns out, is as present in this city as the one she left behind. It’s as if that first week’s silence has made him try harder to reach her, and their conversations feel as urgent as they did when they first discovered each other, what seems like a lifetime ago.

  I can’t sleep, Ruby. You’ve got me in a wild state. I was thinking about you all day. Show me your—

  ‘No,’ she told Cassie last night. ‘We haven’t spoken since I got here.’

  She hates the lie, knows how disappointed her sister would be if she knew Ruby was still communicating with Ash. But, as she tells herself each morning, this is just a small lie. One small lie, and three hundred square miles of everything else. Tomorrow, Coney Island. The American Ballet. Cabaret in the Village. Another rooftop bar and another over-priced cocktail. She’s trying to do better. But she never promised to be perfect.

  Perfect is something Ruby Jones thinks about a lot.

  She assumes Ash’s fiancée is perfect. Ruby will not be the kind of woman who disparages the soon-to-be wife. She will not be a cliché, no more of a cliché than she has already become, at least. Which means she often swings too far the other way, idealises a woman she has never met, never spoken to. Imagines clean teeth and tidy nails. Clear lip gloss and light foundation. Capri pants and a purposeful watch. A ring finger heavy with a single diamond, and long, shiny hair. A double degree earned easily, and a year spent volunteering overseas. One book read at a time, and a signature dish she brings to parties. Requested by the hosts of course, because everyone loves Emma’s—and here, Ruby’s list of imagined credentials falters. It is one thing to create a version of Ash’s fiancée in her head, form the outline of a person based on the little she knows from social media and overheard conversations. It becomes painful to insert that creation into a whole world, a real world this woman shares with Ash, filled with friends, dinner parties, weekends, plans. When she considers this, Ruby understands, her bones aching, that she is just a scrawl across the page, while Ash’s fiancée is a series of fully formed sentences and punctuations; she makes up whole paragraphs of his life.

  Ruby would be foolish to dwell on everything she is missing out on.

  Better to focus on what she herself brings to Ash. The things she brings out in him.

  ‘I’m not like this with anyone else,’ he once told her, and Ruby believes this, at least, to be true.

  (Are we ever the same person with someone else? And if we’re not, what happens when one of you leaves, where does that version of you go? This is something I have thought about a lot since my mother left me.)

  Perhaps it is the weather, Ruby thinks, causing her fever. The way the constant rain evokes memories of long afternoons spent in bed, reminds her of entwined limbs and slow kisses and drowsing in someone’s arms. Exploring the city on her own these past few days has clearly exacerbated her longing, drawn out her desire for connection. It can’t help that most of her memories of long afternoons spent in bed are imagined, not real; since Ash, there has been no one else, and he was seldom available to her for longer than an hour or two, at best. Ruby’s heart twangs at this truth, a guitar string plucked, and it occurs to her, all of a sudden, that what she really needs is to be touched. It has been days since she has experienced any form of human contact. Weeks, even. A person could go crazy from that kind of deprivation.

  Two days ago, Ruby ran past a small massage parlour on Amsterdam, sandwiched b
etween a computer repair company and a cheque cashing store. Deep Tissue, 1 hr / $55, mid-weekspecial the handwritten sign in the window said. It’s worth a try, she thinks now, and before she has time to change her mind, she’s back out in the rain, heading east. I’m slowly coming to understand this place, she thinks, crossing this street, then that, until she reaches her destination. A little bell sounds as she enters from the street, and a slight man in what looks like silk pyjamas nods from the front desk. She appears to be his only customer, and he is soon leading her to a small room out back, with just enough space for a bed and a cane basket for her clothes.

  ‘Underwear on,’ the man says, and then turns away so she can undress. When he cracks his knuckles, places his hands on her, the world flashes orange behind her closed eyes. It is not pleasurable, exactly, as this deceptively strong man pushes down, cracks bones, kneads into muscle, but it satisfies something in Ruby, brings her back to herself. She has a body, she is nerve and sinew and gristle, and she is in New York City, and she drinks too much vodka, and makes herself come better than even her best lover can, and she pays too much for dresses, and sometimes she doesn’t get out of bed until noon. Her ponytail has bumps, and her teeth are crooked, and as the small man pushes his elbow into the crevice of her left shoulder blade, causing bright sparks beneath her eye lids, Ruby thinks she might have given ‘perfect’ a little too much weight. There is something about being a work in progress, after all.

  When the massage is over, she feels light, spacious, as if the man back in that cramped room has somehow untied all her knots, pushed her out to sea. Is that all it takes, she wonders, slightly embarrassed at her own simplicity. Someone taking care of her for an hour, placing her at the centre of things. She might go back to this man every day, if that’s the case. Just to see how much more he can undo.