Then Came You (14 page)

Stately as a statue at the head of the table, Laurena wore a kind of nun’s robe made of raw white silk, with her hair, still brown, in a heavy plait over one shoulder, and no makeup except for a single slash of red on her lips. When she was in her twenties, she’d carved swastikas into her belly with a shard of glass, and done installations where she’d run face-first into pillars until she collapsed. She’d lit her long hair on fire, and stood perfectly still for hours with her partner holding a switchblade to her throat, his thumb hovering over the button that would pop the knife into her neck. Here in New York, she was performing a piece entitled
See/Be Seen,
where she’d sit at a table for eight hours at a stretch, across from whoever cared to face her. After dinner, there was a preview. I remember the appreciative murmur as she gathered her skirts and crossed the room to take
her seat. I thought about how silly the whole thing was, how far from what I thought of as “art,” as she took her seat, arranging the folds of her skirt. To me, art was a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music, not some senior citizen sitting behind a desk.

“Go on,” said Marcus, urging me toward the empty space across from the artist. I crossed the floor, heels clicking, and sat down, my smile firmly on my face, my hair swept into an updo, my makeup professionally applied (at two hundred dollars a pop it was an unwelcome expense, but I couldn’t skip it, not with photographers on hand).

Laurena regarded me. I looked back, legs crossed, hands folded in my lap. My eyes were on hers, but my mind was wandering. I was thinking about how many calories I’d consumed that day and whether the walk I’d taken at lunchtime, twenty blocks up Fifth Avenue with a circle around Bryant Park, had burned most of them off. I was wondering how soon Marcus would ask me to marry him, whether he’d ask me what kind of ring I wanted or just buy something himself, and thinking about my little apartment and whether I’d keep it, whether he’d give me the kind of allowance that would let me slip twenty-three hundred dollars to the landlord each month unnoticed, and whether there was anything besides my clothes that I’d take with me. Probably not, but I wanted to keep that apartment. It was my secret lair, my bolt-hole, my hideaway, in case I ever had to run, to go to ground. Thoughts like this were running through my head in a pleasant, lazy loop when suddenly the artist’s gaze caught me and pinned me. My face flushed, and my eyes widened. I felt as if I was being X-rayed, like my skin had been stripped off, like this woman with her plain, strong-boned face knew not only everything I was thinking but everything I was, and everything I’d done to turn myself into the woman who was sitting before her, all the parts I’d manipulated, reduced or amplified, edited and changed.

Before I could stop myself, before I knew that I even intended to speak, I found myself blurting, in a husky whisper that hardly sounded like my voice, “It wasn’t really a baby.”

Her eyes widened almost imperceptibly. The moment seemed to spin out forever. I felt my skin prickle and my mouth go dry as I sat there, trembling, every muscle tensed, waiting for . . . what? For her to say something? To stand up and yell
liar,
or
fraud
? For her to proclaim, in the accented voice I’d heard on tapes of the performances she’d given, that she knew my real name? She couldn’t speak, I reminded myself. Silence was part of her shtick—her performance, to use a nicer word, but shtick was what it was. She sat. She observed. She could see and be seen, but she would never say a word.

I sat, forcing myself to hold still until my heartbeat had slowed and my legs weren’t shaking, until I was sure I had control and that no one in that well-dressed crowd had heard what I’d said.
You might see things,
I told the artist in my head.
But I go out, I walk in the world, I do, I change.
Then I gave her a smile—more of a smirk, really—and rose from the chair. With my head held high and my face composed, I crossed the enormous room, gliding over the marble floor, feeling the lights that had been set up for the taping burn against my skin. Marcus slipped his arm around my waist. “Welcome back, gorgeous,” he whispered into my ear, and I felt adrenaline surge through my body.
I win,
I thought.
I win.

A few days later, we woke up in bed together, and I put my arms around his neck and murmured, in my sleepiest, sexiest voice, “You know, we can’t keep doing this. It’s not a good example for your children.”

“Well, then,” he said, and reached across me, opening the drawer of the bedside table and pulling out the little velvet box I’d been waiting for since I’d spotted him in Starbucks: my diamond
as big as the Ritz. “I know it’s early days,” he said, his voice curiously humble, “but I’m sure about you.”

I spent three months planning a wedding—his kids, my friends, a few of his business associates and all of his assistants, who probably knew him better than any of us. Then there was the honeymoon, moving into his place, which spanned two entire stories of the San Giacomo, one of New York City’s grand old apartment buildings that stood along Central Park West. It was months before I had occasion to think of the artist again, the way she’d looked at me, the mocking curl of her lips, the way her eyes had widened as she’d stared and seemed to say without speaking,
I know what you are. I know exactly what you are.

I
was in the basement of T.I., one of the eating clubs on Prospect Avenue, standing in a circle of three other couples with a beer in my hand, nodding while my boyfriend Dan Finnerty talked about a hockey game. Whether this was a game he’d played in or merely a game he’d seen I wasn’t quite sure, and it was too far into the conversation to interrupt and ask him, so I nodded and smiled and laughed when laughter seemed required. When my telephone buzzed in my pocket, I tried not to look too eager as I grabbed for it.

“Excuse me,” I shouted in the direction of Dan’s face, then trotted up the stairs to the second-floor ladies’ room. You could feel the bass of the stereo thumping through the floor, but it was by far the quietest place in the building.

“Hello?”

“Julia?” It was my father ...and he sounded like he was drunk. Even in that single word I could hear the edge of his voice, the way the
I
of my name sounded mushy.

My heart sped up. “Where are you?” I asked as I imagined the possibilities. In a bar. In a bus station. In a car accident, on the side of the road, in a spill of twinkling glass, with an ambulance’s light washing his face in red.

He didn’t answer. “I wanted to tell you I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Dad.”

“No, it’s not.” He sounded stubborn; a little boy refusing to believe it was bedtime. “It is not okay. It’s not okay what I did to you guys ...what I did to you mom. I’m so ashamed of myself.” He was crying now, horrible choked-sounding sobs, and even though it wasn’t the first time he’d done this, called me up apologizing and crying, I could never keep from crying myself.

“Dad.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and I could hear the sound of something slamming. Was he pounding his fist against a table? Was he hitting himself? “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Dad.” I leaned against the wooden wall. Somewhere not far away, normal college students were enjoying a normal college night. Soon someone would suggest a game of croquet, where you chugged a beer every time you whacked your ball through the wickets. Dan would be the game’s most enthusiastic participant.

“You deserve better than me.”

An icy blade slid into my heart. “Dad,” I said carefully. “Are you thinking about hurting yourself?”

He managed a chuckle. “More than I have already? Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”

“You’re going to be okay,” I told him. “Just hang on. You’ll go to Willow Crest. They can help you there.” But I was talking to a dial tone.

I squeezed my eyes shut. Tears were rolling down my cheeks. Where was he? Was he all right? And who could I call to ask? Not my mother. She wouldn’t go looking. Not the cops, because what would I say? He called me and he was crying? I sat on the toilet, cradling my face in my hands. How had it come to this?

“Jules?”

I peeked through the crack, and there was Kimmie Park, a
girl I knew slightly. She’d been one of my first-year hallmates and, this year, a coworker in the admissions office.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, still sitting on the toilet. Here I was, five weeks away from graduation and the bright future my degree was supposed to ensure, and I was huddled in a bathroom, crying. Maybe it was the hormones.

I’d called Jared Baker three days after I’d met him in the mall. The questionnaire, all twenty-five pages of it, had arrived in my mailbox the next day. I’d sent in the forms, and then, a week later, biked to the clinic for an interview and another lengthy survey. What was my favorite movie, my favorite food, my favorite song? I gave answers that were somewhere between the truth and what I thought would please the customers, saying Hitchcock and Jane Austen instead of
Pretty Woman
and the occasional trashy celebrity biography, writing that I loved listening to classical music, which was true only on nights I couldn’t sleep.

The next week I’d undergone the most thorough physical of my life, plus an interview with a psychologist, an earnest young woman with curly brown hair and small round glasses. A middle-aged nurse with an iron-gray bob and, I eventually learned, disturbingly cold hands showed me how to give myself hormone shots, right underneath my belly button. A doctor wrote me a prescription for the needles and the medications I’d inject, drugs to maximize the number of eggs I’d produce. “You may experience some mood swings, or feel like you’re having really intense PMS,” he told me, but what I’d noticed was feeling weepy all the time. Alone in my room, the sounds of people shouting and laughing outside, a half-dozen different songs blaring from iPod speakers propped up against open windows, I’d pull out the one picture I kept of my father, from a trip we’d taken to the beach. I’d look at my younger self, the cutoff jean shorts and the braces, my father, strong and handsome in his jeans and alligator shirt,
and just cry and cry, which wasn’t like me at all. My mother was the family’s designated weeper. I got angry. I made plans. Mostly, I kept myself to myself, acting the part of a normal girl, a girl who belonged here, a heedless, laughing, bright-future girl whose father had never been in the newspapers, or in rehab, or in prison.

I watched the space underneath the stall door, waiting for Kimmie’s feet to move. They didn’t.
I’m fine,
I told myself.
Everything’s fine.
But it wasn’t. It was my senior year and I was finishing four years on a campus full of people who I didn’t know and who didn’t know me. Not even my boyfriend knew how, on Mondays, I took the bus by myself to the mall and ate alone at the food court. Nobody knew the truth about my family; no one knew the story of my dad. Instead of real friends, I had acquaintances, interchangeable classmates I could sit with at dinner, who’d go in with me on a late-night pizza or walk with me to the clubs, people whose names I wouldn’t remember a year after graduation. Now it was June. Too late for fun, and instead of fond memories, I’d be left with nothing but regrets.

Suddenly the tears were back. I buried my face in my hands, choking back sobs.

“Jules?” came Kimmie’s soft voice. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

I nodded, then realized she couldn’t see me, and managed to croak out an answer. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.” Peeking through the seam between the door and the wall, I could see her, standing in front of the row of mirrors. Kimmie had glossy black hair, so long it brushed at the small of her back, a sweet face with a pert nose and neat white teeth, and a figure that was notable only in the way in which it resembled that of a ten-year-old boy. She wore Keds, laced and tied in bows, and had a slightly pigeon-toed walk.

Kimmie was a biochem major, and she played violin in the orchestra. Freshman year, I’d see her in the mornings, leaving the dorm for the day, with her black violin case in her hand and, on her back, a blue backpack as pristine as the day it had arrived from the L.L. Bean store (more than once I’d wondered if she had a closet full of dozens of navy-blue backpacks and just kept rotating through them).

The two of us were friendly enough. We’d laugh as we sorted through stacks of applications, rolling our eyes at the obvious ways the high-school seniors tried to game the system. “Do you think anyone,” Kimmie would ask, pinching an essay between her thumb and first finger, “actually wants to spend a summer teaching English in Bosnia?”

“I don’t think I’d even want to spend a weekend there,” I replied. We’d trade off taking panicky phone calls from the students or, more often, their parents, and sometimes at the end of our shift we’d walk to the student center and split a slice of cake (I’d have coffee, she’d drink tea). We weren’t friends, exactly, but that winter, Kimmie had started dating one of Dan’s friends, a high-fiving, barrel-chested lacrosse player named Chet who had, in the uncharitable parlance of my classmates, a touch of yellow fever. He’d dated a series of Asian girls since his arrival on campus—Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, conducting his own private waist-down tour of the Far East. For the past few months, I’d been seeing shy little Kimmie everywhere—sitting across the table from Chet in Firestone Library, trotting lightly up the stairs to his third-floor dorm room in Henry Hall, taking little birdie sips of her go-cup of beer in the Ivy basement, her hand with its short, unpolished nails resting lightly on Chet’s brawny forearm.

I waited until I knew I couldn’t avoid coming out and letting her look at me. I flushed the toilet, rubbed my eyes, slipped the
elastic off my ponytail and shook my hair out around my face, hoping it would cover up some of the blotchiness. Then I stepped out of the stall.