CHAPTER 8
He wanted to prove his skill as a manicurist, which he’d mentioned at our first dinner and I continued to express skepticism over. We were in his bed. It tickled when he placed the cotton balls between my toes. He held my calf in his hand—the most intimate pedicure. Now each toenail was the color of a sand dollar. Next he would paint the fingers, a gray blue, like a sky threatening rain. His sister Jenna had left nail polish in the guest-room bathroom.
“How’d you get so good at this?”
“Don’t move,” he said.
He blew on one painted hand. He shook the container of topcoat and, intently, applied it neatly to my nails. I liked how serious his face became.
“Were you amazing at coloring in the lines?”
“It was having so many sisters. I was their indentured manicurist.”
“No!” I laughed. “How old were you?”
“Honestly? Age five through…maybe high school?”
“What!”
“I wasn’t very cool, in case that isn’t obvious.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“They bribed me. Baseball cards as a kid, beer as a teenager.” He set my hands down on two hardcover books he’d strategically placed. “There.”
“I’ll buy you beer.”
“Mani-pedi for a six-pack.”
“A steal, honestly.”
“Hey,” he said. “I have two surprises.”
“You mean, two more surprises? That you’re a manicurist is pretty surprising.”
He presented our iPod, which he’d loaded with songs. Engraving was free, and he’d gotten it engraved—formalizing the fact that it was now ours: “Matthew and Lily.” He showed me how to move the cursor with my finger to locate playlists here, albums and artists there. One of the playlists was labeled “L+M.” I picked it up using only my palm and touched it only using the pads of my fingers. He put the earbuds in my ears because the polish wasn’t dry enough for me to do it myself.
When I pressed play, I was surprised to hear Elliott Smith’s sad voice. The squeak of the guitar strings made my skin feel tight. It was the mix I’d given him—the CD I’d thrown away that night I’d felt, so strongly, that we should stop seeing each other.
“I memorized it,” he said.
“Creepy,” I said, but I was flattered.
I hadn’t known he was paying attention. The song transported me back to that night, how bereft I’d felt, how certain with the disappointment that we weren’t meant to be. I pressed stop.
It was easy, picking up where we left off. At his place, everything was the same: the orchids, still alive, with new blooms, in the foyer. When we tried to catch up there was oddly little to say. He could summarize the past two years, and I could do the same, in a matter of sentences. It should have required more—recounting the time—and yet I could have said more about my day than I could two years. I was certain I was a different person, a changed person, and yet I couldn’t say how. It wasn’t as though I had grown straightforwardly, the way a tree grows. My mother might have said that certain cells had been replaced by newer cells—skin cells, intestinal cells, red blood cells—where others, like my neurons and bones, had deteriorated.
“Surprise number two,” Matthew said. “Close your eyes. Give me your hand.”
I offered one hand and he turned it over, careful to avoid the wet nails. He placed something cold and metal in my palm. I opened my eyes and saw it was two keys on a ring.
“Oh.”
“So you have them,” he said.
My manicured hand resembled someone else’s—unfamiliar, with the gray blue. Though I admired the colors, I saw, now, that they weren’t right with my skin tone.
“I want to do this,” he said. “I don’t want to lose you again.”
Matthew wore an imploring expression. He’d missed a day of shaving and the light hair was coming in around his jaw.
We had been spending nearly every night together, though I made sure, every few days, to return to my apartment. It was an effort to remind myself: This was where I would be, if the relationship failed.
I imagined certain women, women raised differently, constituted of different stuff, running blindly into love, not afraid of what might happen afterward—how things might end. Could I be a woman like that?
Each morning, he woke at five, made himself coffee and a smoothie, and left for the gym. He smelled like the woods, like tobacco. He was embarrassed when I found the bottle of cologne. He seemed able to do more in a day than I could, as though he had access to more time.
Each night, we talked until one of us fell asleep—usually him first. You can fall in love with a person, watching them sleep—and I did. I loved him, already. I hadn’t been careful, like I’d intended to be. It had happened in spite of me—without my permission. But I didn’t tell him. I withheld it. I could feel the words, like physical weight in my mouth, wanting to spill out. But if I said it I wouldn’t be able to undo it, and then where would that leave me?
Matthew blew on my hands. With the lightest touch, he ran the pad of his thumb over one of my nails to check that it was dry. He gathered my hands in his. I’d been holding my breath, and I let it go.
“Me too,” I said. “I want to do this, too.”
All over Matthew’s condo there were mirrors, so it was as though we shared the space with our doubles. When he held me I looked, instinctively, to our reflection. It was like pressing a bruise, wanting to see if the pain lingered. I wanted to see how contradictory we were, as a pair, the difference of our physical bodies: him blond, built, tall; me with my plain black hair and average height and face that didn’t look good, I believed, unless I wore makeup. It was a face that made people ask: Where are you from?
In our reflection, I saw an all-American man with a foreign woman, even though I was also all-American.
“You’re beautiful,” Matthew said, catching me, somehow reading my mind.
“Stop,” I said.
“You are,” he said. “You know what I thought, the first time we met?”
“What?”
“I need to ask her to dinner—that beguiling young woman clutching a shrimp tail.”
Matthew thought I was more special than I believed I was. Who was right, and who was wrong?
Love irrigated everything with new meaning. Loving him fully and well—this was a task I felt up to. I was used to an atmosphere of unease that traveled constantly with me; when I was with Matthew, it lifted. Both of us had been lonely; we weren’t anymore. If our bodies disappeared—if they vanished—and what remained was only our souls, I was certain they would share a resemblance. Both of us had been formed like stones in a river, washed over by our parents’ expectations—the forceful currents of them. No wonder we were drawn to each other.
My issues at work didn’t vanish now that I was salaried. Jerry’s superiors weren’t happy with the website’s engagement numbers, so his moods swung back and forth. Frequently I was a target of those moods.
“You should quit, Lily,” Matthew said. “You hate this job, anyway.”
“What about money?” I asked.
“What about it? What do you need? I can give it to you.”
I shook my head. He didn’t understand.
“It’s fine,” he said. “I promise, it’s really, really fine. I make a stupid amount of money. I couldn’t spend it all myself, even if I tried.”
All I could think of was my mother—her disappointment. Whenever we spoke, I tried to talk to her about Matthew, and she would steer the conversation to my professional life.
She took me to her lab when I was nine, I told Matthew. I realized I’d never shared this story with anyone. I was still ashamed. It had happened so long ago and should have been absorbed into the comprehensible past—a tellable anecdote, like any other story from my childhood—as distant as myth. And yet, perhaps because I hadn’t aired it, it felt recent, and painful.
She’d hoped that I’d fall in love with the work of becoming a research scientist, the way she once had. She’d hoped I might be seduced, as she had. But to me, the fact that everything was invisible rendered it nonexistent. It was terribly simple of me. All I saw were hands in blue gloves, pipetting clear liquids into petri dishes—I couldn’t make sense of it.
I must have seemed bored. I must not have asked the questions she wished I would ask. Afterward, when I begged to get ice cream, she said no, that we were going home. She was like a child who had been refused, and was lashing out. And like that, we were both upset.
I knew, then, that I had disappointed her irrevocably. I adopted her belief in me: that I was small-minded—and would be for my entire life. Now I thought it was naïve of her, too, to believe that particular moment—me so young, displaying a child’s typical response—represented anything.
I remembered so clearly the disappointment on her face, the fear that I would never amount to anything—anything significant, anyway. And to date, she was right: I hadn’t. I was beginning to think it might be fine with me—being ordinary but happy. But this would never be acceptable to her.
She had always longed for more. She had always wanted more than one life could contain.
Matthew said he would have his assistant get my checking account information. She would set up an automatic payment.
“Just to tide you over,” he said, and I didn’t refuse. “So you can decide what you want to do next, you know? Instead of being forced to take whatever.”
He refilled my jam jar of wine. We were in my apartment, and his eyes fell to the empty space in the living room where a couch should have been, then looked to me, suddenly, like he had an idea.
“Move in with me,” he said.
“I don’t know, Matthew. How much is the rent?”
He shook his head. “There’s no rent. It’s all paid for.”
I didn’t reply. What was I so afraid of? I worried that I was doing things in the wrong order: entering a relationship without yet knowing the trajectory of my life—who I was supposed to be. I was afraid to form a self around a person who might disappear from my life as easily as he’d entered it. But Matthew punctured my thoughts.
“I love you,” he said, articulating what I’d been too afraid to.