Before You Knew My Name, Jacqueline Bublitz [best book club books for discussion txt] 📗

In a world where some of that kindness of strangers I’ve so often heard about is finally directed at me.

Are you surprised at how little time it takes for my barriers to come down? I suppose, if things had turned out differently, you might think it a good thing. The way I readily embraced this fresh start, when girls like me so often fall back on their old ways. You might even admire my resilience, want to bump your fist against mine, congratulate me for all the positive changes I am making in my life.

How about we stay inside that fantasy a little while longer, hey.

It is as if Ruby has a fever. It has something to do with sex. Or a lot to do with it. Ever since Ash reached out via text, her body has insisted on responding to the slightest provocation. Cool sheets touching her bare legs. Hot shower water running down her back. Even the way she bites into an apple or slides food from fork to tongue somehow feels erotic. She dreams of sex, wakes up soaked in the sheets of it. Upon opening her eyes each morning, her collarbone aches, hot, as if this is where the electric cord of her desire is wired.

And that cord keeps leading her back to him.

Ruby is used to wanting Ash from afar, but this new fervour feels different. It isn’t, she soon realises, entirely about her lover, though the memory of his mouth, his hands, instantly and consistently makes her stomach flip. She remembers her grandmother gossiping about a cousin known for her scandalous love affairs—‘Oh, that woman was always on heat’—and this curled-lip, old-fashioned saying perhaps comes closest to describing the state Ruby has inexplicably found herself in, after a week of feeling nothing at all.

(She has forgotten the small explosion, and the woman on the dance floor at Sally’s wedding. It isn’t always the right moments we remember.)

Trying to distract herself, Ruby makes lists of places to see, in this second week that somehow feels like her first. Highlighting place names in her journal, she visits the Met, takes the Staten Island Ferry, catches a train to Brooklyn, and walks back over the bridge in the rain. This incessant spring rain is now as much a part of the city to her as the garbage and the scaffolds, as the chain stores on every corner, and the cardboard MetroCard she has in her purse. She is making acquaintance with New York, buoyed by a savings account that affords vodka martinis and French candles for her little studio, and the new Diane von Furstenberg dress she wore to a play at the Lincoln Center two nights ago. One of her favourite film actresses stood half-naked on the stage, so close Ruby could see the coffee stain of her nipples. New York!

This is the city of her social media posts, of her messages to her mother, and phone calls with her older sister, Cassie, at home with her family in Melbourne.

There is, however, another New York. The New York of staring at the ceiling in painful anticipation, of waiting for that early morning bell, the electronic ding of Ash’s text messages, the scramble for her phone. She sleeps naked, ready, and he has been unfailing in his appreciation so far. Ash, it turns out, is as present in this city as the one she left behind. It’s as if that first week’s silence has made him try harder to reach her, and their conversations feel as urgent as they did when they first discovered each other, what seems like a lifetime ago.

I can’t sleep, Ruby. You’ve got me in a wild state. I was thinking about you all day. Show me your—

‘No,’ she told Cassie last night. ‘We haven’t spoken since I got here.’

She hates the lie, knows how disappointed her sister would be if she knew Ruby was still communicating with Ash. But, as she tells herself each morning, this is just a small lie. One small lie, and three hundred square miles of everything else. Tomorrow, Coney Island. The American Ballet. Cabaret in the Village. Another rooftop bar and another over-priced cocktail. She’s trying to do better. But she never promised to be perfect.

Perfect is something Ruby Jones thinks about a lot.

She assumes Ash’s fiancée is perfect. Ruby will not be the kind of woman who disparages the soon-to-be wife. She will not be a cliché, no more of a cliché than she has already become, at least. Which means she often swings too far the other way, idealises a woman she has never met, never spoken to. Imagines clean teeth and tidy nails. Clear lip gloss and light foundation. Capri pants and a purposeful watch. A ring finger heavy with a single diamond, and long, shiny hair. A double degree earned easily, and a year spent volunteering overseas. One book read at a time, and a signature dish she brings to parties. Requested by the hosts of course, because everyone loves Emma’s—and here, Ruby’s list of imagined credentials falters. It is one thing to create a version of Ash’s fiancée in her head, form the outline of a person based on the little she knows from social media and overheard conversations. It becomes painful to insert that creation into a whole world, a real world this woman shares with Ash, filled with friends, dinner parties, weekends, plans. When she considers this, Ruby understands, her bones aching, that she is just a scrawl across the page, while Ash’s fiancée is a series of fully formed sentences and punctuations; she makes up whole paragraphs of his life.

Ruby would be foolish to dwell on everything she is missing out on.

Better to focus on what she herself brings to Ash. The things she brings out in him.

‘I’m not like this with anyone else,’ he once told her, and Ruby believes this, at least, to be true.

(Are we ever the same person