This weekend we have an excerpt from If I Would Leave Myself Behind, by Lauren Becker. The excerpt is from the novella in this collection of a novella and stories. Becker has a voice to be reckoned with. It is one you will not easily forget. The book is out now from Curbside Splendor. Go here to buy it. –Matt Salesses, Good Men Project Fiction Editor
♦◊♦
He thinks things about me I do not want him to think. He stops at my desk, his cologne invasive. He leaves himself behind.
He wants to take me with him. Anywhere I want to go. He asks if I want to go to Paris. He asks if I have eaten escargot. I tell him I don’t care for escargot. I tell him snails taste like mushrooms, which I hate.
Steak tartare? Duck a l’orange? Pâté and champagne? He will buy me bottles of the best champagne. I tell him I have work to do. He looks at me with x-ray eyes and tells me to think about it. He’ll talk to my boss and get approval for last-minute vacation time.
He has seen me with my boss and knows my boss has never taken me further than the hotel two blocks away. He has seen my Eiffel Tower paperweight and guessed, correctly, that I have never been to France. He has guessed, also correctly, that I would like for my boss to be asked to approve my vacation with another man.
I consider Paris. He would look better in Paris. I would tell him to wear less cologne. I would tell him I wanted separate rooms. I would drink his champagne. I would not let him in my room.
He would become angry. He would accuse me of accepting his offer with no intention of holding up my end. He would say I was a tease and a thief.
He would buy me a bottle of Chanel No. 5. He would buy me a scarf from Hermès. He would apologize and tell me he drank too much champagne. He would drink too much champagne again that evening and take away my scarf.
He would take me to the Loire Valley for wine tasting. He would take me to the finest restaurants and shows. I would wear dresses and high heels. We would take cabs.
This would continue for two more nights. With two nights left, I would let him buy me expensive lingerie. I would tell him to shower. I would turn off the lights and drink champagne in gulps while he soaped away the cologne. He would wear even more the next night.
We would not visit the Eiffel Tower. I would see it from the window of our high-rise hotel. I touch the tip of my Eiffel Tower. I go to my boss and ask him to take me to the hotel two blocks away. We drink a bottle of grocery store wine. He smells like nothing.
♦◊♦
She turns red when she looks at me, hears my voice. Bright red, like she’s being cooked from the inside. Her body, formless, clothing arranged and rearranged. She might attack. I know she is capable.
I met her at work. No eyelashes. Bald patches on her head. A compulsive disorder. Heavy. A hormonal condition. After 5 minutes, I didn’t notice.
We ate lunch together almost every day. Egg salad on sourdough, no tomatoes, for her. Turkey on wheat for me. She announced in an e-mail that we were no longer friends. I eat tuna on rye.
When she looks at me, not often, she looks like hate. She must know I won’t tell. There’s no one to tell.
I think she wants to take skewers and pull her secrets from my head in a performance of multiple lobotomies. She will barbecue them and feed them to her husband, who won’t know what he’s eating. He will think they are mushrooms.
Her husband, six and half feet, bony, perpetually dazed. He follows her like a newborn duck that imprints on the first living thing it sees. He woke up and saw her. He will not imprint elsewhere.
A smear of mayonnaise near her lip, she told me he will leave. I wiped her face and told her she was wrong.
She asked me what it’s like to be pretty. I said I didn’t know. When she declared our estrangement, she accused me of calculated betrayal. I don’t remember what I said to her husband.
I don’t want her husband. I want one that pulls me at his will by my pretty hair. I told her. We told each other things. Her husband was her first. The only boy I loved called me stupid and shut my arm in a car door. She knows that, nine years later, I think of him every night. Every morning.
I pretended not to see her pull out, then swallow her hair. I love her patchy scalp. I love that she is pregnant. I love that she hates her pregnancy.
The girls at work offered to throw her a baby shower. She refused. She and her husband will certainly have an ugly, lanky child. She blames it already for making her uglier. I know her. She will turn her rage on him.
♦◊♦
You asked me to write you a letter one time when you left to go to Seattle for awhile. You stayed in a hostel, or you told me you were going to stay in a hostel, and you gave me the address and told me to write you. And I did and I never heard back and you never came back.
I met this guy who used to do what you do or did, living in all these different places. Staying in hostels, getting to know places and people for a little while before moving on or deciding to stay awhile and find someplace a little cleaner, a little less transient. He told me how the last hostel he was in had this big bin of letters. Sealed envelopes addressed to people who had passed through weeks or even years before. Sometimes he churned the envelopes with both hands, looking for girls’ handwriting, opening letters and cards and reading news from sisters and love from girls who would never hear back.
He found me in Seattle. I wrote you a letter. The letter you asked for, but couldn’t wait. I put in a picture of me. My dad took it so it wasn’t sexy at all, but I felt sexy inside because it was for you. This guy read the things I wrote for you and he looked at my picture and he wrote me back right away. He sent a picture of himself. He has brown hair, like you, but his eyes are blue and he is half a foot shorter, but still pretty tall. He sings songs to me in Spanish. He is from Iowa.
He has an apartment with a one-year lease and a job with health insurance. He doesn’t go away. He doesn’t ask me to write him letters, like this one, addressed to a place I’ve never been.
♦◊♦
My mouth tastes like the old piece of carpet my dog sleeps on. I wish I could kiss someone I hate. I sit up too fast and am thrown back by a dizziness I’d forgotten. My head gargles memories of former hangovers. This one stewed in whiskey sours and Cabernet.
I sit up again and assess. My favorite dress, white with red apples, is red wine-stained. The stain is similar in color and shape to the apples. The dress might be salvaged.
The wedding wasn’t going to be a good time. It was the usual excessively public, glassy, tiniest bit off-key couple of hours that precedes a private decline. I hung out with the bartender, laughing at drunken guests. When I became one, our friendship grew distant.
The couple, James and Jamie, was not as precious as their coupled names. Both previously married, both wore scars that should have faded hope to practicality. The five-tiered cake and bridesmaids embarrassed me. It was a second time, not a do-over.
I declined the salmon and drank wine for dinner, followed by whiskey sours at the bar. I drank from boredom. James’ first wedding was tedious enough, and I was the bride. I wore the apple dress on our honeymoon in Greece. It’s the last white I’ll wear.
A good-looking man asked me to dance. Too drunk, not drunk enough to forget my resolve, I politely excused myself to go to the ladies’ room, telling him we’d dance later. He smiled in a way that not long ago would have made me wash his dishes, make his bed, fix his breakfast, have his children and think it would last forever. I said quick goodbyes to James and Jamie and made my unsteady way to a cab, shoes off, dress yanked to mid-thigh.
Before I could pull the door closed and tell the driver my address, the man from the wedding settled me into the backseat and climbed in beside me. “Give him your address, sweetheart.” I did.
“Why did you sneak out like that? We were going to dance.” The cab driver tried to make eye contact with me in the rear view mirror. I met his eyes briefly and looked away, back to the man. I did not speak or adjust my dress. I knew most of James and Jamie’s friends. I did not know this man.
“Come on, angel. You look so pretty in that dress.” His smile was not the one from the wedding. Still, I did not speak. The man pushed his hand between my legs, rough in soft places. His fingers inside me, I thought I should have danced.
He removed his hand and told the cabbie to pull over. He slid out of the car and leaned in before closing the door. He smelled his fingers.
“I’ll call you.” I nodded. I still did not know his name. He smiled, like when we met, and he was the handsome man again. From the wedding. Who wanted only to dance.
“Miss, are you all right?” Even in my condition, I knew the cab driver had seen much worse.
“Drive me home, please.” He looked at the meter and drove.
♦◊♦
This morning’s sun is punitive. I brush my teeth and tongue until my mouth releases the dregs of canine flavor. I shower, hot as I can stand, for the time it takes to wash my face and hair. Stepping out of the shower, I realize I’m wearing socks.
I am not surprised I put on socks before passing out wearing the dress. I don’t like the feel of bare feet. I wear socks everywhere but the beach. And usually the shower. I would tell James.
He thought the socks were cute, then annoying. I loved the mole on his neck, then measured it by sight daily until I was sure it was growing, pushing on my face when we kissed, more and more rarely.
I check the apple dress, soaking in Woolite in the kitchen sink. The wine apple fades but fans out in an amorphous pink. I cannot reverse what is started.
In the end, James asked me why I was leaving. I told him. I told him nothing. Same old me, not you.
I could not tell him it was him, not me. The way he set the alarm and microwave on even numbers, no zeros. The dog-eared book pages. His frequent use of the word “literally.”
He stopped saying my name. “Honey, where are my car keys?” “Hey, let’s get going. We’re going to be late.” “Did you pick up my shirts from the dry cleaner?” I stopped saying his. He didn’t notice.
I had nothing of my own. I went into the bathroom to put on makeup and he had to pee. I went to the kitchen for leftover Lo Mein and found him eating the last few bites from the red and white container. Everything was ours. The bed, the remote, the refrigerator. I became stingy. Angry. He tiptoed. It angered me more.
We say each other’s names now. We tease each other about the quirks. My anger clings.
I banish myself to my bed. I am a hazard. Spilt water on important mail. Bloody thumb from cutting radishes for a salad. It won’t stop bleeding. I consider making a blood apple on the dress.
I want someone in the bed with me. Nobody I know. The one whose presence does not intrude. The one who wants only to dance. Someone to bandage my finger and fix the spill. To say my name. To nurse me through my hangover. He will have to find me. He will have to make me let him stay. I cannot be the you it is not, or the me who it is, at the end.
No longer a danger, I leave my bed and scrub at the stain on my dress. Its fortuitous shape is gone. It only spreads more.
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Reprinted with permission of the author