Читать книгу The Woman Before You: An intense, addictive love story with an unexpected twist... - Carrie Blake - Страница 6

It’s always a nasty shock to learn that what you believed was your deepest self, your inner core, was, all along, only your surface. It’s even more shocking to discover how fast that clean, pure surface can crack—and reveal the darkness and dirt beneath.

On the surface I was a nice girl; the girl you want to have coffee with after yoga class, the girl whose shoulder you cry on after your break-up, the girl you call to watch your kids when the babysitter cancels at the last minute.

My senior year in high school, they actually tested us for compassion—to see how much sympathy we had. Our principal’s wife taught in the college psych department, and everyone said that the test was part of her research. We knew that this was probably not approved by the Iowa Board of Education, but no one objected. If you refused to take the test, it meant you had no compassion. You weren’t a nice person. You failed.

The school guidance counselor, Mr Chambers, took us one by one into a side room off the gym, a windowless cubicle that reeked of disinfectant and old sneakers. He asked a lot of questions. I aced the test without trying. Would I risk my life to save someone? Sure. If I won the lottery, how much would I give to charity? Fifty percent. Did I usually assume that a person was telling the truth or lying? Mostly, telling the truth. It depended on who the person was.

Mr Chambers put his hand on my knee. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. He stared into my eyes. His eyes were liquid and brimmed with fat tears under his dark bushy eyebrows.

I ignored his hand inching up my leg. I pretended not to notice.

I answered his questions truthfully. I said what I thought. I didn’t have to think. I didn’t mention the fact that, all through the test, his hand kept edging further up my leg. Did he think he was being encouraging and supportive? Affectionate and kind?

Finally, I slapped his hand away, like a pesky mosquito. He raised his hand, and shook it from side to side, as if he were waving goodbye to me. After a few minutes, he put his hand on my leg again. I wanted to say something, to yell at him, to scream. But I didn’t. I just sat there, answering his questions.

To be fair, he never got further than my lower thigh. And maybe that was the real compassion test, underneath the fake one. Question: Did I think Mr Chambers was a disgusting perv who should be locked up for the rest of his life, or did I think he was a sick man who needed help? Answer: I thought he was a disgusting perv who needed help.

My friends and I never talked about what happened in that cubicle, and I think I learned something from that, though I couldn’t have said what it was. At least not then. Not yet.

Later, after everything had happened, I thought back to that day. And I thought I knew what the lesson was: Be careful. Trust no one. You never know the secret reason behind what seems to be happening. When (and if) you find out, it’s usually more sinister than whatever you could have imagined.

I’d always taken people at their word. Once, I ate a giant spoonful of cayenne pepper because a mean girl told me it was cinnamon candy. I dove into a slimy pond that a cute boy told me was clear. Everyone laughed when I came up for air, slicked with algae and mud.

For years the joke was on me. But what saved me was that I always somehow knew what people were thinking and feeling. It wasn’t anything weird, like telepathy or ESP or anything like that. But it was a little like that. I looked at the person and I knew. I could feel what they felt.

It was strange, I could almost see into their hearts and minds. It was like a new window opening up on an electronic device, a tablet or a phone. There was me, and there was that other person in a corner of my consciousness.

I sat with the kid at the party who needed someone to talk to. I stuck up for the bullied. I comforted the kids with problems at home. I wasn’t afraid to do the right thing, though I didn’t always know what it was. Even the cool kids came to like me for it. I was like their conscience, so they didn’t need to have one. Doing the right thing was a service they paid me for, with their friendship.

I never told my super-nice high school boyfriend that our hot romance bored me. Why would I hurt his feelings, telling him how often I was thinking of something else—a movie I’d seen, what Mom was cooking for dinner?—when we had sex in his bedroom after school while his parents were off at work? I was always relieved when he made that funny little snorting noise after he came. It meant that the sex part was over, and I could lie with my head on his chest and think my own thoughts, which I actually sort of liked. I was good at playing the girl in love for the time being.

After we graduated high school he went off to Oberlin. I could have gone to Oberlin, too. I got into all of the schools I applied to. And yet, despite the objections and fears of my mother, who thought that New York was a dangerous and scary place, I was going to New York to be an actress. Theater was the only place I felt at home. But this didn’t fit in with the kind of girl I was supposed to be—the one who went away to college to study hard, and then went to grad school to study harder, until I became a lawyer or a psychologist or a director of marketing at some startup company. Thankfully, my mother had raised me to be an independent person, to believe in myself, to be strong and not to let anyone make decisions for me. My dad had been killed in a car wreck when I was four, and she’d supported us since then, without a man to help her. She was an inspiring example of how a woman could be her own person and follow her own lights. And now she had to stick by her own principles, even though she worried about me.

My boyfriend and I pretended to be really sad about the fact that circumstances beyond our control were separating us. I could tell that what he was feeling was mostly relief … and happiness that he was leaving town to start over somewhere else. Maybe he’d meet a girl who honestly thought that he was interesting and sexy. We broke up with a long lingering kiss and hug. We were Midwesterners. We were nice.

On the day I met The Customer, that niceness began to crumble. That do-the-right-thing conscience started to peel away, like the papery skin that flakes off after a sunburn, and you can’t stop picking at it because it hurts so much and it feels so good. When that clean, pure surface was burned away by sex and need and desire, I was left with my true self: all body, all skin, all touch, no soul, lustful, depraved, and corrupt.