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

with someone else? And if we’re not, what happens when one of you leaves, where does that version of you go? This is something I have thought about a lot since my mother left me.)

Perhaps it is the weather, Ruby thinks, causing her fever. The way the constant rain evokes memories of long afternoons spent in bed, reminds her of entwined limbs and slow kisses and drowsing in someone’s arms. Exploring the city on her own these past few days has clearly exacerbated her longing, drawn out her desire for connection. It can’t help that most of her memories of long afternoons spent in bed are imagined, not real; since Ash, there has been no one else, and he was seldom available to her for longer than an hour or two, at best. Ruby’s heart twangs at this truth, a guitar string plucked, and it occurs to her, all of a sudden, that what she really needs is to be touched. It has been days since she has experienced any form of human contact. Weeks, even. A person could go crazy from that kind of deprivation.

Two days ago, Ruby ran past a small massage parlour on Amsterdam, sandwiched between a computer repair company and a cheque cashing store. Deep Tissue, 1 hr / $55, mid-weekspecial the handwritten sign in the window said. It’s worth a try, she thinks now, and before she has time to change her mind, she’s back out in the rain, heading east. I’m slowly coming to understand this place, she thinks, crossing this street, then that, until she reaches her destination. A little bell sounds as she enters from the street, and a slight man in what looks like silk pyjamas nods from the front desk. She appears to be his only customer, and he is soon leading her to a small room out back, with just enough space for a bed and a cane basket for her clothes.

‘Underwear on,’ the man says, and then turns away so she can undress. When he cracks his knuckles, places his hands on her, the world flashes orange behind her closed eyes. It is not pleasurable, exactly, as this deceptively strong man pushes down, cracks bones, kneads into muscle, but it satisfies something in Ruby, brings her back to herself. She has a body, she is nerve and sinew and gristle, and she is in New York City, and she drinks too much vodka, and makes herself come better than even her best lover can, and she pays too much for dresses, and sometimes she doesn’t get out of bed until noon. Her ponytail has bumps, and her teeth are crooked, and as the small man pushes his elbow into the crevice of her left shoulder blade, causing bright sparks beneath her eye lids, Ruby thinks she might have given ‘perfect’ a little too much weight. There is something about being a work in progress, after all.

When the massage is over, she feels light, spacious, as if the man back in that cramped room has somehow untied all her knots, pushed her out to sea. Is that all it takes, she wonders, slightly embarrassed at her own simplicity. Someone taking care of her for an hour, placing her at the centre of things. She might go back to this man every day, if that’s the case. Just to see how much more he can undo.

Ruby is smiling, imagining herself completely unfettered, when her phone vibrates in her jacket pocket. Someone waking up on the other side of the world, she thinks. Probably Cassie, whose children generally have her up at ungodly hours. Taking the phone out of her pocket, shielding the screen with her palm, it takes three reads before she fully comprehends the message. Even then, sentences fully formed, she struggles to make sense of the arrangement.

Work is sending me to New York in July for a conference. Can you believe that shit? Start finding the best rooftops, babe.

Ash. Following her to New York. Two months before the wedding. Two months before he will marry his perfect girl.

The chain in Ruby’s stomach twists. The rain suddenly feels like a slap.

To think she was this close to floating away.

FIVE

AT DINNER ONE NIGHT, PART WAY THROUGH OUR SECOND week, I ask Noah to tell me about the city. Now that we’re working together, we have taken to sharing meals and stories, too. Where our first conversations were like trading cards, each of us collecting basic information about the other, trying to make a set, now we talk over cereal or sausages about science, and politics, and religion, and all the things that come into my mind that I want to know more about. He says I must have had a pretty poor education, and when I think about all the different small-town schools I went to, and where I ended up, I can’t disagree. I don’t mind so much when Noah tells me the truth, which he does quite often, now that we spend a lot of time together. The idea that truth is hurtful puzzles me. Seems like lying to a person does all the damage.

‘I had to teach myself most things,’ I told him the other day. ‘From library books and TV shows, mostly. Or watching what other people do.’

‘An autodidact, then,’ he answered, and when he explained what that word meant, I said there should probably be a nicer sounding word for something as important as growing yourself up.

‘Indeed,’ he said with a smile, because he seems to like truth from me, too.

When he asks me what it is exactly that I want to know about New York, I shrug and say whatever it is he thinks I should know. Things that might not be so obvious when I look left, right, up.

Here are some interesting things he shares with me over take-out Chinese: there are 472 subway stations operating around the city, transporting five and a half million people from here to