Before You Knew My Name

by Jacqueline Bublitz

  ‘Why did she leave me here?’

  ‘What?’

  Tammy is up on her elbow now, facing me.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You mumbled something, Alice. What did you say?’

  I had not meant to ask that essential, unanswerable question out loud. This would break all the rules. There are some things you only speak of when you’ve had enough cheap booze to pretend you don’t know what you’re saying. When you’ve drunk so much alcohol you can no longer hide the fact you’re split down the middle with grief, still fresh with it. As if it all happened yesterday, not years ago, when you were only fourteen years old. In these moments, while your best friend holds your hair back, and you throw up weed and last night’s tin-can spirits, everything comes tumbling out. Words as violent as the bile burning your throat. How you wanted to die, too, on that kitchen floor, how you wanted to climb right into the fire as they closed those dark, heavy curtains around her coffin.

  I was fourteen years old when my mother shot herself in the head. She pulled the trigger a half hour before I arrived home from school. Ensuring she would be well dead by the time I got home. How do you ever find the right words to question that?

  If the pain slips out when you are drunk, you never reference it the next morning, never talk about it when you’re sober. Just the same way you never ask Tammy what she meant when she said she had uncles not monsters under her bed when she was growing up, and you know to pull her away when she attempts to stumble off with a pair of college footballers at those Friday night parties you gatecrash together. You take care of each other at night. And then you wave off that care in the morning. These are the rules you’ve got going, and this is how you both survive.

  ‘Okay, weirdo. Whatever.’

  Tammy shrugs away my long silence, then waves the strip of paper in my face again.

  ‘Call him, Alice. Call Mr Jaaaaaaackson. You’re not a student anymore. He’s not your teacher, and besides’—she reaches over and moves a wayward strand of hair away from my eyes, her own eyes glinting—‘he’s hot. So, so hot! And let’s be honest. It’ll be the easiest money you’re ever going to make around here. Hell, I’d do it, too, if I were half as pretty as you. But ain’t nobody needs to see me like that.’

  Tammy folds the piece of paper into my hand, closes my fingers around it with her own.

  ‘Call him. Do it. What have you got to lose?’

  She doesn’t wait for me to respond.

  ‘The way I see it, Alice Lee. The answer to that would be nothing the fuck at all.’

  ‘You comfortable, Alice?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  I’m lying. My legs already ache, and a muscle in my left arm won’t stop twitching. When he first moved my arms, when he asked me to hold still in this position, I wondered how hard it could be to stay like this. Reclined on a small couch in the pose he’d asked for, comfortable in my jean shorts and white singlet, it really did feel like the easiest money I’d ever make. Two hundred dollars to stay still and let a man draw me. Easy. It only took a minute for everything to start aching.

  ‘This is just the practice round, Alice,’ he’d said as he lifted my arms over my head. ‘Just so I can get a feel for how to capture you best. Every single body is different, and I need to learn about yours. Okay?’

  When he leaned in so close, I could smell weed and scotch, and see how his fingers were stained black at the tips. I stared at his short, dirty fingernails, as he bent one knee and gently pushed my legs a little further apart. It made my stomach flip, the nearness of those fingers, and my nerves threatened to reveal themselves in a stupid, girlish giggle. I didn’t want to do anything wrong. And not just because of the stack of twenty-dollar bills he’d put down on the table next to me. I wanted to please him.

  Mr Jackson.

  We all wanted to please Mr Jackson.

  Once, in junior year, he’d come over to my desk, and I could smell that heady combination of weed and scotch, even then. I was holding my breath as he stared at my sketch of a ballerina at the barre, the tension I had tried to capture in her muscles, when, without saying a word, he ran his fingers lightly between my dancer’s charcoal legs. Just for a second, a gesture so quick no one else in class would have noticed. But I felt it. I felt it as if he had run those fingers between my own thighs. As he walked away, I had no idea whether the butterflies swarming in my stomach signalled pleasure—or a desire to run from the room.

  In my final semester, he talked to the class about life drawing, how you couldn’t really paint people unless you understood what was happening to their bodies, to skin and bone and curves. He said the best portrait artists always began with the naked form. He wanted to bring in a life model for us to draw but the school board wouldn’t allow it, so we’d just have to take his word for it—or see for ourselves once we graduated.

  ‘Maybe even try it from the other side,’ Mr Jackson had teased the class, staring straight at me.

  ‘It’s Jamie, not Mr Jackson,’ he’d chided when he helped me take off my coat this afternoon. ‘I’m not your teacher anymore, hey.’ And I’d automatically said, ‘Sorry, Mr Jackson.’ Which made him laugh, and lightly touch my cheek. He said he was glad I had called.

  ‘It isn’t easy in this town’—he’d waved his hand about, as if there was no need to finish the sentence.

  He understood. I didn’t need him to tell me that it’s never easy around here.

  The ad Tammy pressed into my hand said: Life models wanted. $200 cash. Potential for further work. My hands shook when I called his number.

  ‘Yes, I’m eighteen now. Yes, I’ve done this before. Yes, I’m still painting and, yes, it will be good to see you, too,’ I said on the call.

  All lies, except the last part, or maybe that was the biggest lie. Thinking of two hundred dollars in cash, and the distance this could buy me.

  Now, I am alone with Mr Jackson for the first time ever, watching him look from me to his sketch pad and back again, his tongue set between his teeth as he draws. He doesn’t look like the other men around here. He is slight, and tanned, and he has stubble instead of the full beard everyone seems to grow these days. He’s not wearing shoes, and his jeans, frayed at his ankles, are taut around his thighs. He used to wear slacks when he was teaching. In jeans he looks lean and coiled, and I realise I’m sketching him, too, working out the curves and lines of his body.

  Skin and bone and curve.

  ‘That’s a serious face you had just now,’ he says, stepping out from behind his easel. ‘Just when I think I have you, Alice, your expression changes.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry. I guess I’m … concentrating. And, um. My arm kind of hurts.’

  I let it drop and sit upright on the couch.

  ‘It’s harder than I thought.’

  A slip. My second lie is revealed so easily, and he catches it immediately. Sees what he must have suspected. I have not done this before.

  ‘You want something to help you relax? It’s after’—he checks his watch—‘two o’clock.’

  I nod, and Mr Jackson—Jamie—rolls a tight smoke, then sits down beside me. The couch is draped with a white sheet. Our thighs touch and he doesn’t move away.

  He holds out the joint and I take a deep drag, feeling a burn in my throat and nose. It’s better quality than I’m used to, and the second hit makes me cough until I’m doubled over.

  ‘God. You really are an amateur, Alice.’

  Mr Jackson says this affectionately, laughs softly as he pats his hand against my back. With my head between my legs and his hand on my back, I’m afraid to sit up. The room is too small, it’s spinning around me, coming too close. It might be his fingers or the smoke, or what I’m doing here. With my art teacher, who used to look at me in class, and now he’s reaching around, sliding his hand over my belly, pushing me upright again.

  ‘Can I take this off.’

  Maybe it’s a question. Some other day I’ll wonder if it wasn’t really a question at all. I’ll wo
nder if I could have said no to the weed, and those stained fingers pressed against my skin, pulling the straps of my singlet down. I’ll wonder why I didn’t try out that word, see where resistance would take me. But, for now, I simply close my eyes and nod. Missing the look on his face as he removes my singlet, and then my shorts. Unaware of the gleam when he reaches for a camera sat next to that stack of twenty-dollar bills and fixes the lens on my body.

  Does it matter that I never actually said yes? I knew what was being asked of me. Life models wanted. $200 cash—Mr Jackson was clear enough about what he wanted. I don’t suppose I had any right to be surprised by the camera, or what it would lead to, eventually. It must have seemed, to him at least, like a natural progression.

  He might even say I asked for it.

  Back in Melbourne, Ruby is showing her sister the website of the long-stay studio apartment she has booked on the Upper West Side.

  ‘It’s small,’ she says, taking a sip of the wine Cassie has poured for her, ‘but it has everything I need.’ Next, they look at maps of the neighbourhood. ‘I’ll run here,’ Ruby says, tracing her finger around the blue of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park, ‘and maybe here’—her finger travels to the western border of the map, to a thick green line that snakes alongside the Hudson River. ‘Riverside Park. I read it’s less crowded there. More . . . local.’

  ‘Is it safe?’ Cassie asks, and Ruby rolls her eyes.

  ‘New York is one of the safest cities in the world these days.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re going there by yourself,’ Cassie says. ‘You have to be more careful when you’re travelling on your own.’

  ‘I’m always on my own,’ Ruby responds, and now it’s Cassie’s turn to roll her eyes.

  ‘Yes, well. We know why that is, don’t we! Here’s hoping you do more than run in New York then, little sis. Or’—Cassie tilts her wine glass at Ruby, narrows her eyes—‘here’s hoping you run for long enough that you finally get away from that man, and the hold he seems to have on you.’

  I moved in. I supposed you could call it that. The way I just never went home that first afternoon. That first night. We didn’t do anything. Not really. And we still don’t. Although, it has been one week since he slid my singlet off. Since his fingers pressed against my skin as he rolled my shorts from my hips. He’d said ‘No underwear’ during our first phone call, when he told me what time to come over to his house. ‘And wear something soft. No lines, I don’t want lines, Alice.’ I had followed Mr Jackson’s instructions carefully, dressing as if it were ninety degrees outside instead of forty, shivering under my thick winter coat. There wasn’t much for him to peel away that very first afternoon, not much effort required to leave me completely exposed on his small, sheet-draped couch.

  A week later, and my stomach still flips at the memory of it. Up until then, I had never been naked in front of a man. Never been looked at up close. Oh, I’d had sex before, if that’s what you can call it. Fumbling fingers, and thrusts under sheets at various parties, but nothing like this. I’d never been seen until that moment, with Mr Jackson sliding to the floor, looking up at me. The way he said ‘Like this’ as he reached up and spread my legs. On his knees, with those fingers running up the insides of my thighs, pushing them further apart.

  ‘I want to photograph you like this, Alice.’

  The room tilted sideways. He used to watch me in class. I had that same stomach-pit feeling of sinking and floating, and I wanted him to keep touching me, wanted to cover myself, wanted to get up and run. I stayed perfectly still instead, pushed all the shaking deeper. This is what he had said was required of me, after all.

  ‘I will need you to stay perfectly still.’

  I said, ‘Yes, of course. I have done this before.’

  He now knows this to be untrue, although I haven’t yet told him my real age. It’s not a lie exactly to keep that from him, not like the lies I’ve told Gloria—when I went back to pick up some clothes, I told her I was going to the lake with Tammy—but more like an omission. Something better left out of the story because it doesn’t serve any purpose. It’s bad enough he knows I lied about my experience as a model, that he could see the way I flinched every time the camera clicked.

  I still jump a little now, though I am getting used to our new routine. I thought, last night, wide awake on this couch, how quickly the strangest thing can come to feel normal, ordinary. That first afternoon, as he photographed my naked body, I sent myself somewhere else, somewhere above the lens, maybe even out of the room entirely. I trembled as he took one shot of me then another, sure he was coming too close, seeing too much. But I never once asked him to stop, never asked him to go back to his easel instead, and when Mr Jackson was done taking his pictures, he wrapped me up in a soft blanket and we talked all night about art and God—‘I believe they’re the same thing,’ he said—and we ate homemade nachos, and he never touched me, not in the way that leads to other things. I slept on the couch, wrapped in that blanket, and the next morning when I showered, he photographed me there, through a half-opened shower door and, later, back on the couch he wanted to do it again—‘The light is beautiful right now, Alice’—and this time I didn’t send myself somewhere else. I stayed locked on the lens, that single eye opening and closing on my body. I felt powerful, staring straight back at it. Mr Jackson showed me some of the images later, and the pale exposed skin, the soft triangle of hair between my legs meant nothing to me. I couldn’t stop looking at the way my eyes were blazing. The slight snarl of my lip.

  He said I was mercurial and made up my bed on the couch once again.

  And now we are a whole week into this new arrangement. Our conversations have ranged all over the house, and when he goes to school for the day, I am happy here on my own, looking through his library of books by men with names I only sometimes recognise. Nietzsche, Sartre, Jung. And someone called Kierkegaard, who says: It begins, in fact, with nothing and therefore can always begin, which I like the sound of, and almost understand.

  When Mr Jackson comes home with groceries and beer, we cook dinner, drink a little, and then he photographs me a new and different way.

  ‘It’s not pornography,’ he says one of these nights. He has asked me to put my hand between my legs—‘relaxed, like this’—and perhaps he has caught my hesitation this time, the confusion around where this might lead.

  ‘Pornography has its own purpose, its own merit, Alice. Don’t let the conservative claptrap of this town turn your head. But we’re not doing that, anyway. This is about your body, about showing the world how you inhabit your strong, beautiful body. All the incredible things you can make it do.’

  Later, he shows me some videos on his laptop, pornography of merit. Women and men coiled around each other, gasping, clinging, looking, for the most part, like they are in some kind of pain.

  ‘Agony and pleasure. They can look like the same thing,’ he tells me when I start to protest, and it is true I cannot see the difference, cannot understand whether I am afraid or expanding somehow as I watch these scenes unfold. I know I ask to watch more, and I know I am wet, saturated by what I am seeing on the screen. I feel conflicted by this pleasure, the way it both horrifies and excites me.

  What Mr Jackson is showing me cannot be unseen, this much I do know. But, as he leaves me alone for yet another night, I cannot for the life of me figure out what he expects me to make of this new world, beckoning.

  Later, I see what he was doing, why he made me wait. He needed to know I could be trusted. He needed to know he was safe. As if my safety did not come into it at all.

  The night of Ruby’s work farewell, she finds herself thinking much the same thing. Ash had stayed away from her all night, kept to the other side of the bar, so that she spent the whole evening looking for him, forgetting it was her own party, barely registering each ‘I’ll miss you’ or ‘Remember when . . .’ that came her way. By 11 p.m., it was the knot in her stomach, not the cheap champagne, making h
er sick, and she excused herself, walked home in tears. How could Ash ignore her like that? On the one night no one would have questioned their closeness, when everyone at the agency seemed to be throwing their arms around her, confessing their affection. Even then, he kept his distance from her.

  He showed up at her apartment twenty minutes later.

  ‘I have half an hour,’ he said, checking his watch. As if thirty minutes could make up for the whole night she had lost waiting for him. When he leaves that half hour later, booking an Uber from her phone instead of his own—‘Just to be on the safe side’—she wonders if he had planned it this way all along, and simply neglected to tell her. Had he considered letting the night be about her, about what made her feel safe, for once? Or was it only ever about him?

  She knows the answer to that, of course. We both do. But at this point, we’re still weeks away from understanding the real consequences of our connection to such careless men.

  SEVEN

  IT HAPPENS DURING ONE OF THE LAST BIG SNOWFALLS OF the season. Mr Jackson arrives home late from school with little flurries on his shoulders and in his hair. We both stand in the open doorway and watch as snowflakes weave their way to the ground, streetlamps turning on one by one, their glow making it look like it’s the stars that are falling. I’m not wearing a jacket and he puts his arms around me, pulls me in close. We’re there for minutes or hours, I don’t know which. I only know that I am shivering, and he too is shaking when he turns to face me.

  ‘Alice?’

  The kiss is gentle, a question. I try to answer against his mouth, but I am suddenly as slivered as the swirling, falling snow. I am in pieces as he pulls me inside, closes the door, his mouth still on mine as we stumble toward the couch.

  We are about to fall when he breaks away and laughs, a sudden, awkward sound that bounces off the walls and puts a distance between us.

  ‘Jesus. What a cliché I’ve become.’