The Imposter Bride (30 page)

“That explains it.”

Carrie laughed.

“I guess my father just goes for weird women. What can I say? My mother wasn’t exactly regular either.”

“True,” Carrie said.

“Even the way she abandoned me was weird,” I said, remembering the bottles of formula neatly lined up in the fridge, an image I’d been told about so often I felt I had seen it for myself; the meticulously planned departure that insured I would not be unattended even for a few minutes; the rocks that arrived, not regularly but consistently, an ongoing communication over the years of my childhood and teenage life, even if the form it took was a ritual of mourning, the stones we left lovingly for our dead.

“I don’t think there’s really a normal way to abandon your baby,” Carrie said, and as soon as she did I felt the old shame creeping back into me. I had thought I was over it, and there was no reason for me to feel it, especially not with Carrie, but there it was, the shame I felt whenever I entered a new situation and people didn’t know me yet, only knew about me, what had happened in our family. I wondered if it would ever leave me completely.

“Don’t be mad at me,” Carrie said. She was back onto our previous subject.

“Mad at you?”

“For what I said about Reuben, you know—”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“It’s fine, Carrie. Really.”

“A hundred percent?”

I wasn’t, but Carrie’s approach when she was contrite was like that of a puppy wiggling near the mess it had made and then licking your nose for good measure so that you couldn’t be mad. “A hundred percent,” I said.

“Good. Because I really didn’t mean—” And then, like that same puppy, she was on to the next mess to be made. “Do you think I should call him?” Jonathan, she meant.

“I think you should leave him alone.

“Too late.” She flashed me one of her winning smiles again.

“You called him?”

“Last night.”

“And?”

“And nothing. He sounded happy enough to hear from me. Not that you can tell anything over the phone. Oh, and you’ll never guess who his new best buddy is.” She paused for effect. “David Czernowitz.”

She waited for my response, but the name meant nothing to me.

“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten Mr. C.”

“How could I forget—”

“David’s his son,” Carrie said.

“He has a
son?
”

“He was in India with Jonathan.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said.

“Yeah, I thought he was in Israel working on a kibbutz.
Though he didn’t really strike me as the picking oranges type.”

“You know him?”

“He was in one of my classes.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

“Tell you what? I barely spoke to him.”

“Still …”

“Still what? If there had been anything to tell I would have—”

“It’s so hard to believe he has a son.”

Carrie gave me a confused look, as if to ask what was so hard to believe. That a man who had been our teacher more than ten years earlier had actually had a life beyond what I was able to imagine for him?

“He invited me to a party tonight.”

“Jonathan?”

“Who else?”

“Are you going?”

She shrugged. “Want to come?”

THE PARTY CONSISTED
of a dozen or so people sitting in a circle on the floor of a basement apartment. Carrie had arranged to meet Jonathan there, and as we entered he rose from the circle to greet us. His hair was long and he’d grown a beard, a style that the boys we knew in Montreal had not yet adopted.

“Hi, Ruthie,” he said, kissing me in greeting. “Hello, Carrie,” he said to Carrie, who was standing just behind me. I noted the slight reserve in his voice and demeanour, a self-conscious demonstration of the emotional distance from Carrie that he had managed to cultivate within himself, and
of his resolve to not fall back into the pit of his hopeless love for her.

“You look like Jesus,” Carrie greeted him in return.

Jonathan didn’t respond, but already, immediately, I could see the first signs of misery returning to his tanned, handsome face.

“My false messiah returned from the land of the idol worshipers,” Carrie said, taking his face into her hands and kissing his mouth. It was a brief kiss but decisive. I saw his will collapse. I saw the resolve that had temporarily firmed his features dissolve, and my heart went out to him. He was a nice guy and would have been on track for a reasonably happy marriage to a girl not unlike one of his sisters, and a career that would enable him to support his family in a neighbourhood and community exactly like the one he had grown up in if not for the relentless attraction he felt to those aspects of life that most scared him. Carrie, for example, whose grip on him had not loosened from the moment she had blindfolded him with his own scarf and led him out of the party where they had just met; free love, which he claimed to believe in despite his more deeply held belief that there’s no such thing as a free lunch; and now, his latest: a spiritual tradition that had no creator at its centre, which is what he talked about as he lit what I thought at first to be a cigarette. It was mind-blowing, he said, to bring his own breath, rather than God, to the centre of his consciousness, which was what he did now when he meditated, a practice that had replaced prayer in his life.

“Sounds like narcissism to me,” Carrie said before inhaling the joint that he passed to her. To which someone else—a man I had noticed the minute I walked in—responded that if there was any narcissism on display it was her own, her flip dismissal of an entire spiritual tradition about which she knew
absolutely nothing, based solely on its difference from the one she already knew.

Carrie looked more amused than insulted—she loved the challenge of a good argument—but Jonathan was clearly incensed by the attack on the woman who had dumped him and made his life a misery for years.

“Back off, David,” he said, and as I looked to see how the man would respond, I knew I was looking at Mr. C.’s son.

Perhaps, had I not known he was a friend of Jonathan’s, had I not half-expected him to be at the party, I would not have been able to place so quickly whose features I was looking at. But I had known; I had more than half-expected. What I hadn’t expected was to find him attractive.

He wasn’t a particularly handsome man, but he was attractive in an unusual sort of way. His eyes were large and deeply set in a face so unpadded with flesh that the contours of his skull were clearly visible. And there was a matching leanness to his body, a spareness that was physical and yet seemed to me a manifestation of character, of a personality that eschewed the extraneous, be it flesh or social niceties.

Jonathan was talking—had been talking for some time already—about whether the universe is ordered by sentience or some other force. After a while other people began to join in. I heard voices raised, lowered, but I didn’t hear the content of their words because my attention was entirely on David C.

He was bored, I thought. Bored with the talk, an endlessly proliferating mass of words as thick as the smoke in the room, bored with the company, bored with the party. He took the joint that was passed to him and passed it along without smoking it. And then, a moment later, he rose and left the circle.

The talk was getting stupider, people acting the way they
thought they were supposed to act when they were stoned: laughing about things that weren’t funny, vacuuming up the bowls of chips and plates of cookies that someone had placed in the centre of the circle. I waited for David Czernowitz to return, but when the joint came around to me a second time, I realized he wasn’t coming back, that he might not have just left the circle, but the party. I rose, shook the leg that was tingling with pins and needles from having been folded underneath me for too long, and moved towards the one room that always served as a place of refuge for the awkward and uncoupled at parties like this, the kitchen, which was a fluorescent-lit galley with a low, stained ceiling and mustard-coloured appliances. Bags of chips and pretzels were piled on the counter, paper plates and plastic cups stacked neatly beside them; bottles of wine and soft drinks filled the sink. And at the far wall of the galley, David, facing the wall, his back to the room.

He was engaged in conversation with a woman whom he seemed to have pinned against the wall. He hovered over her with one hand on the wall just above her head and one on the wall beside her shoulder. The pinning was more psychological in nature than physical, since he wasn’t actually touching her, but it would have taken a deft physical move on her part to duck and slide out from under him. I couldn’t tell whether it was seduction or combat I had walked in on, a flow of rage or lust that was passing between them—the volume of their voices was too low for me to hear the content. I was the only other person in the kitchen and knew I should leave, but my curiosity about him was more powerful than my sense of tact or good manners, so I stayed where I was, telling myself it was public space, after all, and busied myself with reorganizing the plastic cups into shorter stacks.

“As you wish,” I heard the woman say, then she lifted his arm—the one beside her shoulder—as if it were a gate and walked out of the kitchen.

He didn’t move, was still holding his position, one hand on the wall just above the spot where her head had been a moment earlier, the other arm back in place an inch from where her shoulder would have been if she were still standing there, which she wasn’t, so anyone entering the kitchen at that moment would think he was simply leaning against the wall rather than hovering over the emptiness that had been filled just a moment earlier by a living, breathing woman. Anyone just entering the kitchen at that moment might reasonably conclude, in fact, that he was ill or upset, especially since his face was now pressed into his upper arm, a posture that suggested suppressed tears or rage or nausea, or some combination of the three, and was exactly the posture his father had assumed during one of his crying episodes in our classroom almost a decade earlier.

After a moment he dropped his arms and turned around. He pretended not to notice my presence, took a plastic cup from the stack I had just rearranged and poured himself a glass of Orange Crush. I also took a cup and held it out as a way to break into his attention. He filled my cup without looking at me. “I’m Ruth,” I said. He glanced at me then. His eyes were brown, calm, uninterested. “David,” he said.

“Ruth Kramer,” I added.

He drank from his cup, then met my eyes again, his expression conveying to me his hope that with this exchange of information we could bring our conversation to a close. “David Czernowitz.”

“Nice to meet you.” And when he didn’t return the pleasantry: “Was that your girlfriend?”

“I’m hoping she still is.”

“I didn’t mean …”

“To intrude?”

“I was just trying to make conversation.”

He was like an electrical wire that had been stripped of its sheathing. I wanted to make contact. I didn’t question why. I drank my cup of Orange Crush while casting about for something to say. “Coffee or mould?” I asked brightly, pointing to the light brown stain on the ceiling that was just inches above our heads.

He shifted his eyes upward for a moment, shrugged.

“Do you know whose apartment this is?” I plodded on.

“Mine.”

“Ah. Well, it must be nice to have your own place.”

“Not really.”

“Not really?” I smiled, but he didn’t smile back. “So, what, you’re being forced to live on your own?”

He gave me a long, bored look. “Who do you suggest I live with?”

“
I
don’t know. Your parents … your girlfriend …”

“She won’t even sleep with me, so it’s unlikely she’ll move in with me.”

“Poor baby.”

“Do you want to sleep with me?”

The question was like the sting of a wasp, the poison of it taking a second to spread within me. I took his words at face value at first and was merely confused, the question having come out of an exchange coloured by his obvious indifference to me. But then I felt the insult he intended. He found me entirely undesirable, but would sleep with me anyway if that’s what I was after and it would put an end once and for all to
this tedious conversation we were having. I looked at him. His face was a hard challenge.

“I’m engaged,” I answered, perhaps to let him know that there was a man who did desire me, who loved me, in fact.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“This really isn’t a conversation I want to be having.”

“No one’s forcing you to have it.”

And still I didn’t leave. “I knew your father,” I said.

And now he looked at me.

“He was my teacher.”

He waited to hear what I was going to say. What on earth could I say? We went after him like a pack of dogs who sniff weakness? We ejected him like a drop of pus from a wound that’s just beginning to fester, not understanding that the pus is the symptom, not the source of our infection? I looked at his face, at the sharp line of his jaw and the ridges of his bones, which I had wanted to run my finger along from the first moment I saw him, a desire that had not diminished despite what had passed between us.

“You look like him.”

No response. Did he know, then? I wondered. Know what? That I had been part of the young, healthy pack who had driven his ruined father from our sight so we wouldn’t feel his ruination as our own? “How is he?”

“Fine.”

What else would he say to someone like me? Someone with normal parents, he probably assumed. Canadian parents. Someone who couldn’t begin to understand what it was like to have been born of a soul-breaking grief.

“I’m glad,” I said.

I still wanted to touch his face. So I did. I reached out my
hand and he didn’t pull away. I felt the ridge of his cheek and the hollow beneath, cool at first, then warm as blood rushed in beneath my touch. I felt the smoothness of his brow as I swept my open hand across its surface, the fullness of his lips, the mask of his boredom falling away. His face, when I removed my hand, was a boy’s. And before it could harden again, I imprinted his mouth with my thumb. “I’m not who you think I am,” I whispered.