Do I Know You?(19)

So neither do I.

Decisively, I move for my suitcase, where I ferret into my toiletries bag for the bobby pins from when I was a bridesmaid in my college roommate Mara’s wedding a few months ago. One YouTube tutorial later, I’ve pulled off a messy bun, with one asymmetrical strand of hair framing the right side of my face.

It looks good. Not great.

I don’t care, because it looks like Eliza from Boston.

Feeling inspired now, I dig into my makeup bag. Normally, I gravitate toward lighter lipsticks, but this Eliza spends her days bundled in sweaters and scarves. I pull out the darkest shade I have, enjoying myself now. Having fun dressing up in character. Brown eyeshadow comes next—not my normal palette either, but I don’t hate the effect. When I step into the stilettos I brought for this trip but haven’t yet worn, I look back into the mirror to take in the full effect.

It’s exhilarating. I almost look like a different person, even while I’m wearing my own dress.

My eyes snag on my wedding ring, still sparkling on my left hand. Graham was right, but I don’t want to leave it behind. I unclasp my necklace and slide my rings onto the chain, then return the necklace to my neck. The rings rest over my heart, the platinum cool on my skin.

In the mirror, my bare hand completes the strangeness of the sight in front of me. The parallel Eliza, leaving her hotel room on her own.

I’m not even sure why I’m going to this mixer—it’s not like I want to meet anyone. I just got out of the pool earlier this evening restless, deciding I couldn’t sit around waiting for my own husband to ask me out. I have to do something.

The sign on the hotel patio for the mixer caught my eye while I was heading up here in my bathing suit and robe. David, I figured, would be going, and possibly my husband with him. I’d turned in the opposite direction—needing my stilettos, yes, but figuring my visit might not be the worst way of spurring Graham to ask me out. But he seemed content spending the night in.

Still, my hopeful heart whispers, maybe he’ll be curious enough to come see me.

Despite this one hitch in the day, I won’t deny how much I enjoy this game we’re playing. There’s something freeing in our pretense. I feel like I can ask him questions and I’m allowed to not already know what he’ll say. Like I have permission to not know him. To not expect him to know me. If he comes tonight, I don’t know if he’ll like my look—my hair up, my darker makeup. I want to find out, though. It’s exciting, provoking reactions out of him, uncovering new details of the man I married in his responses to the unexpected. Sifting for gold on shores I thought I’d wrung clean of fortune.

I want him to get to know Eliza from Boston. I want to get to know Graham, the investment banker from Santa Fe. I wonder, if we really were strangers, if I’d be intrigued by him.

I think I would.

It’s not entirely unfounded speculation, of course. Hand on my necklace, I remember the eager-yet-playing-it-cool twenty-three-year-old Eliza who walked into Verve coffee on Melrose in white denim shorts, looking for the guy she met online. I was attracted to Graham the moment I laid eyes on him. Even when he was a young law student, I could feel how his golden hair and Midwesternish charm weren’t the whole story. There’s an intensity to him, a precision magnetic to me from the very start. If anything, in our past few interactions here, it’s only gotten sharper, seductively so.

I wonder if he would feel the same way. Would he be attracted to this me? It’s a question hiding other, more immediate ones. If he found out the woman he ran into a couple times in this hotel was going to the mixer, would he go to meet her? Would he dress to impress the way she is?

I smile at myself in the mirror. There’s only one way to find out.





10


    Graham


I WALK INTO the lobby in my favorite fitted dress shirt, my hair still damp from my quick shower. I feel pulled in opposite directions. Half of me remembers my idyllic Jacuzzi, the quiet of the California cliffs surrounding me.

Half of me would rather be nowhere else but here.

The lobby is packed with people in cocktail attire. Groups stand and converse at the high tables next to the bar set up by the registration desk. While this is officially a welcome event for the dating workshop, no one is checking in guests. It’s easy for me to wander into the room like I belong.

My pulse is quick. I spent the walk over—on paths I navigated successfully this time—wondering when Eliza would get here, or whether she’d reconsider even coming.

I’ve never found knowing myself to be challenging. I knew from the beginning of law school I would find being a lawyer fulfilling, and I was right. When I met Eliza, I recognized the spark of rightness in me from our first conversations. I know what I want.

But immersed in this game of Eliza’s, I feel the pull of questions I’m genuinely confused by. In flashes over only the past day, I’ve found the guy I used to be. His charisma, his quickness. I just can’t manage to hold on to him, like how the image of lightning burns in the sky for split seconds following the strike, then disappears into the night. But if I could hold on, would he even be me? When does pretending to be myself become . . . living?

I’m distracted from these questions when I walk into the room to notice I . . . don’t find Eliza. My first thought is to hope she bailed, which would give me time to retreat to my room, to work myself out to do this right.