Don't I Know You? Read online

  “Oh, that’s a tough one. My ex is a filmmaker, and he was always on the road a lot, either in production or on the festival circuit. I used to travel with him sometimes—we went to Cannes one year—but it’s hard, without a role of your own. I just miss sitting around on the couch with someone.”

  “Marriage and couches, man, they go together.”

  “He had to spend six months in Belgium when we first moved in. That’s when I fell for someone who was around all the time. But he happened to be married.”

  “Oh yeah. As in, married-married?”

  “Right. So that messed us up for quite a while. But I always claimed it was Eric’s fault, for leaving me alone so much in the beginning.”

  More tears, which G tenderly swabbed away.

  “We were careless with each other, that’s all.” I sighed. “It’s a miracle we made it as far as we did.”

  “Why did you stick it out?”

  “Oh, you know. Love.” At this G snorted. “And I knew he’d be a good father. Which he is.”

  “That’s huge. Seeing my husband with the children is such a turn-on for me.”

  G was using a brush to paint a gritty white paste on my cheeks and forehead.

  “What products are you using?” she asked.

  This was a question I always dreaded.

  “Well, I buy all those toners and cleansers, then they sit on the back of the toilet and I never use them. I wash my face with soap, usually.”

  “O-kay…”

  “Glycerin soap. And I use Kiehl’s moisturizer.” Kiehl’s was old-school, a New York pharmacy that used to make little vials of patchouli oil in the hippie days.

  But G didn’t criticize. She kept painting away.

  “I think you’d find that exfoliating once a week would make a big difference.”

  “I’ll try,” I said meekly.

  Somewhere on the floor above us, a phone rang, and high heels clicked across the floor.

  “Chris is always asking me to go on the road with him,” G said. “But I hate being ‘the girlfriend.’ You go to the club, the guy on the door stares at the clipboard for a long time, and you say, ‘I should be on there, I’m with the band,’ and finally he gets bored looking for your name and waves you in. You’re always feeling not, like, official. Then I sit around backstage eating all the vegetables on the snack trays.”

  “Yeah, those trays with all that celery! Celery’s a non-food.”

  “I can live with the celery. It’s actually very hydrating and high-fiber. But if I start giving the guys feedback on the sound mix or whatever, I feel like that girlfriend in Spinal Tap, the one who wants to make the band wear costumes based on their zodiac signs…”

  She turned around to rinse her brush in the little sink. I could feel the potion on my face tightening, as if I were wearing pantyhose on my head.

  G’s brows lifted and her red mouth smiled.

  “But he really, really likes me to be there in the audience. So I try to go.”

  She consulted a sheet of paper on the counter and ticked off two items on a list. My tears were now blocked by the drying mask.

  “After our daughter was born, I stayed home and started writing a blog, with recipes and parenting stuff, which amazingly kind of took off. My traffic was insane! I do believe that domestic life can be, like, a spiritual path.”

  “Or not,” I said cheerfully.

  “Then I realized that I was still home all day long, only working harder! So I hired a nanny, and I signed up for an Ayurvedic skincare course.”

  “The balance thing?”

  “Right, and that’s when things really fell into place. The products are natural, and it’s one on one, you know? Which is extremely rewarding.”

  “Well, the work suits you. You have a lovely touch.”

  “Thank you! It’s so nice to get feedback in person. There’s too many haters online.”

  “So do you ever fight around the kids?”

  “Oh, no. We consciously put the kids first. Well, we try to.”

  “I think we expect way too much from marriage.”

  “This year I started to make some of my own lotions and masks. It’s like cooking, only for your face. Here’s my website.”

  She took a sky-blue card out of a drawer and put it on the counter beside my glasses and earrings. Now that the close work was over, she pulled off the scrunchie and shook out her blond hair.

  “So how did you find out?” G asked. “About her.”

  “It wasn’t any one thing. Small nothing moments that I look back on now and think, how stupid could I be, why didn’t I pick up on that?”

  “Whenever Chris gets a crush on someone I can always tell,” said G. Now I was able to look at her right side up. She had a perfectly oval face and her smile was thin, wide, and wry. A little rueful. “He starts kind of posing in the mirror when he’s getting dressed. Fussing about what to put on. Or buying something too hipsterish.”

  “My first clue was when I went to see a friend who was dying. She asked me how things were with Eric, and the words just came out of my mouth. ‘I always feel jealous,’ I said, ‘although I have nothing to be jealous of.’ As soon as I said it, I realized that it was true—he was somewhere else, really.”

  “You feel it in your bones,” G said. “Like a cold draft. It’s awful.”

  “Marriage is kind of a performance, right? You both agree to play your roles. That’s part of the security of it, knowing what comes next. Then one day you realize that the two of you are just running the lines, and nobody’s home.”

  “So tell, about the big reveal.”

  “What?”

  “The moment, the moment you found out.”

  “We were sitting at our kitchen table. We had been to a friend’s birthday party. I was a bit drunk, and that’s when I tend to hammer away at whatever’s bothering me. I was railing away at him. And somehow her name came up.”

  G trundled her chair to the side of me and held up an appliance that looked like an electric toothbrush. She pressed a switch on it and a thin, powerful shaft of light shone out.

  “I’m going to do a few passes with this—it helps stimulate the production of collagen, which pushes new cells to the surface. You might feel a slight tingling.” She began moving it over my face, as if writing on it.

  “He had bumped up his therapy sessions to twice a week, and so I made a joke, like ‘you’re spending more time with her than me.’ Then, drunk, I said, ‘You might as well be sleeping with her.’ And he didn’t say anything.”

  “Bingo.”

  “His face got really pale, and he kind of gathered himself up. It was obvious that he’d been preparing, rehearsing, for this moment.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘I do have feelings for her.’ Nobody says that! Like something out of a nineteenth-century novel. It broke my heart. What he meant, of course, was ‘I love her.’”

  “Uh-oh,” said G, sweeping back and forth with the light.

  “I realized that I had to catch up quickly, like a film on fast-forward, to something that had been going on for some time. The odd part was this rush of relief I felt, that my sense, my feeling of being unpartnered wasn’t something that I had imagined. So I wasn’t crazy after all.”

  “You’re really pinking up here,” said G admiringly, patting my cheek.

  “Anyway, I guess you know what I’m talking about.”

  G turned to the sink and rinsed her hands. She dialed the steamer down a notch. The Balinese music sounded like soft mallets on bones.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “So, tell.”

  She sighed. “It involves some names.”

  “Feel free to change them,” I said merrily. “It’s all the same story.”

  I hadn’t felt so light for ages. Telling someone about my husband’s betrayal was the best spa treatment I could imagine. And I felt a swell of affection for him now, for the two of us having come through it, both knowing exactl
y what the other one had endured.

  “It was during the band’s last tour of the American southwest,” said G with a doleful timbre to her voice already.

  “We’d been talking about starting a family. Chris wasn’t opposed, but the whole question of where we would settle, how often could he be on the road and all that, was on the table.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “And you were acting?”

  “Yeah. That was a problem. There were times when I was a little bit more famous than he was. And frankly, it bugged him. He wouldn’t admit it, but it always came out when we argued.”

  “Careers are overrated,” I said.

  “Once, we were at some event and I overheard him saying, ‘Gwyn’s a great cook, but only when the camera’s on her.’”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah. And I began to notice that on the nights when it was more about me out in public, we’d come home, and…”

  “Ixnay on the sex.”

  “Right. What women used to do.”

  “Well, I’ve never been more successful than my husband, so I can’t speak to that.” I felt quite giddy. My broken marriage seemed like nothing more than a story now, one passed around circles of chuckling women.

  “So you quit show biz?” I was getting the picture that G’s career had been considerably more glamorous than mine.

  “Yeah. I tried being a country singer for a while, which was fun—but it overlapped too much with Chris’s career. Then I took some time off. I went to an ashram in India for a couple weeks, which was, like, life-altering. That’s when I decided that I wanted to do something very modest, but intimate. Service, you know?”

  “Like in AA.”

  “Anyway, that’s when I realized that I wanted to work on people’s skin.”

  I was sorry, at this point, that my skin wasn’t more well tended, for her sake. But on the other hand, I had given her a weedy garden, a challenge. And our time together had been intimate, more private than anything I had experienced for some time.

  “I think we’re done here, Rose,” said G. “I’m going to give you a few samples of that mask, it seems to be working for your skin. And remember—exfoliate, at least once a week. Getting rid of dead skin will make a huge difference.”

  I made a silent vow to follow her advice.

  “You’re very good at what you do,” I said. I patted her arm. “I think you’ve found your calling.” I gathered up my things. The tipping would happen upstairs.

  “Thank you.” She gave me a wad of foil packets, free samples of masks and moisturizers. “And I won’t say have fun at the wedding.”

  “I’ll try not to throw a drink in anyone’s face.” We laughed and she gave me a little hug.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said, swiveling a round mirror toward me. “Take a look.”

  I flipped the mirror to the unmagnified side, and braced myself for redness, or at least that slightly raw, post-facial look. But my face was calm. The green of my eyes had deepened. And my skin looked fabulous.

  Don’t I Know You?

  Was it the moon? Something was shining down on Rose. She could also hear a sharp, staccato sound, like dishes being shattered or a broken toy falling down stairs. No, she realized, it was laughter, human female laughter. Someone out laughing in the moonlight.

  “S’my favorite organ, the liver,” came a voice, a little slurred, with some sort of English accent. “Just hanging out there under the ribs, doing its thing, not a poncy showboat like the heart. And look at the size of it! You could make a bloody nice handbag out of this one.”

  More laughter, and that metallic clatter again.

  I should be working, Rose thought. But on the tops of her feet, she felt a mild, cool weight. That must mean I’m horizontal, she thought. Very good! If she was lying down, there was a strong possibility that she was asleep, and only dreaming.

  Then came a dim but unsettling sensation, a kind of stirring and probing deep inside her. As if she were a bowl of batter with bits of eggshell in it, and someone was trying to fish them out with his fingers.

  The stirring went on, until another feeling, more urgent and ruthless, broke through the membrane of her consciousness: pain. It glittered and writhed, a corkscrew twisting through her. Pain like a state of unbearable intelligence. If she were dreaming, Rose told herself, it was time to wake up and take action, take steps against this noxiousness.

  But she was a stone that could not rise.

  Then the corkscrew withdrew. Rose became aware of a new bubbling sound, a silvery cascade of notes that carried her along like a twig on a current. After a while she recognized this dancing, bright articulation—it was music. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, to be specific, Glenn Gould’s version. She knew every note; it was the soundtrack for her daily stretching routine. There was the faint sound of Gould autistically humming in the background, so she was not inventing this.

  Where in the world was she, Rose wondered, that the moon was shining down on her while her guts felt like the keyboard of a piano being played by Glenn Gould?

  “What a tough bugger it is too,” the English voice continued. “You can drink bourbon morning noon and night for years till your eyes turn the color of piss … then lay off for a week and bingo, the liver’s ready to go again, fresh as a daisy.”

  This time the laughter was masculine, turbulent, a dark and moist convulsion in the chest.

  “But the brain, Christ. I don’t trust that tapioca. All you have to do is bump your head on the bathroom cabinet and it’ll turn on you. It’s just like some chicks, the brain—cheat on ’em once and you’ll be paying for it till you drop.”

  Rose wanted to agree about the cheating part but her lips refused to move.

  “F’rinstance, and this is between us, ladies, I haven’t really been the same since I fell out of that fucking palm tree,” the voice said. “I’ll be in the OR, tackin’ up a hernia or something, nothing fancy, and suddenly my mind’ll go blank, yknowwhammean? Like I’m looking down at someone else’s dinner.”

  More moist rumblings, like swamp gas bubbling up from some primordial place.

  “Some bloke from a newspaper once wrote that I keep a picture of my liver on the wall at Redlands,” said the voice. “S’not true, of course. S’bollocks as usual. But they did make a little video of my liver when I was in Switzerland, doing the blood thing, so I took a peek at that. And it was bloody fuckin’ impressive, let me tell you.”

  Again with the wet, rattling cough.

  “Sweetheart, my hands are tied up here, d’y’mind tipping that bottle to my lips? And help yourself too.”

  “Maybe after lunch,” said the gentle voice.

  Swallowing sounds, protracted.

  “So, yeah … my liver was brown, a kind of nice dark chocolate brown, and it was the shape of … that big rock in Ah-stry-lia, what’s it called?” the voice asked. “The famous one, you know … oh, damn this palm-tree brain…”

  There were feminine murmurs, too soft to be deciphered.

  “Ayers Rock, yes, thank you Cynthia, you are a clever one! Yeah, so my liver in this video looked like that big red fucker.”

  The voice, like the music, began to sound familiar to Rose, but the name that went with it kept drifting away from her. Kevin? No. The voice aroused a certain feeling, though, a friendly feeling, as if she were on her way for a drink with a solid old chum who had just turned up, someone fun from her past. But the pawing sensation in her guts continued, and fought against this warmer current.

  The stirring became an irritable tugging.

  “I keep forgetting how complicated it is in here,” said the voice. “It’s all higgledy-piggledy, like some sort of bloody casserole my mum would make.”

  “There it is, in the lower quadrant,” said a woman. “See? You may need this.” A slapping sound was followed by a new and more terrible pain. Rose’s sense of herself shriveled, like an insect that had blundered into a flame.
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  “I’ve got you now, you little cunt! Get the fuck out!”

  There was a tweezing sensation, then the pain ended abruptly.

  “Oh, it’s a biggie,” said the voice, sounding pleased, “but the margins look clean. Nothing spreading into the pelvic cavity that I can see. Looks like a hemangioma to me.”

  Rose heard a wet plunk. “Take this down to the lab, but bring it back later. I’ve got plans for it.” Again with the loamy chuckle. The female voices giggled.

  “Doctor?” said the gentle voice beside him. “There’s still a bit left in the bottle.”

  “Pass it here.”

  Lengthy gulping sounds ensued.

  “Y’know, some pe’le say i’z a bad idea, to drink while you’re performin’ surgery on other pe’le. But! I pers’nally don’t agree with that. I do not agree with that! Because, if I’m really in the groove, really sort of feelin’ it, y’knowwhammsayin, another bit of the Jack just puts me even more in the groove. Am I right, Cyn?”

  “Shall I clean up the cavity for you?” said the gentle voice. “She’s bleeding quite a bit.”

  I’m bleeding, Rose thought. Pay attention!

  “Oh yeah, Christ, that’s not good, be my guest. Mop away.” Rose felt herself being massaged from the inside.

  “One more clamp … that’s got it I think. Good call, ladies.”

  A fit of coughing came and then subsided. “Y’know, the sight of blood still puts me off. Guts, bones, crazy shit that glistens, that I can take. But if I have to get a needle, some sort of tetanus thing when I fall and cut myself, I don’t even want to see the blood climb up the syringe. Which is pretty funny, right?”

  The gentle voices murmured words that Rose couldn’t make out.

  “Whoa, look at the hemoglobin levels, better top her up. Hand me that bag, Cyn. It’s O type, right? What the hell, A’s fine. Ahanh! Just kidding. Now where’s the portal … annnd in she goes.”

  A warm surge came over Rose, as if she were a loaf of bread being baked. It felt sexual.

  “That’ll get her back out on the dance floor.”

  Rose was getting used to having someone else’s hands inside her. You just had to relax into it, like a hard yoga pose.