The Girl He Used to Know Read online

  My stomach churned as Jonathan walked toward me, and I calmed myself by flicking my fingers under the table as if I were trying to remove something unpleasant from the tips. When I was a child, I would rock and hum, but as I got older, I learned to keep my self-soothing methods hidden. I nodded my acknowledgment of his presence when he sat down across from me.

  “Eric thought we could partner tonight. I’m Jonathan Hoffman.”

  His jaw was square and his eyes were bright blue. His short dark hair looked shiny, and I wondered if it would feel soft and silky under my fingertips. He smelled faintly of chlorine, and while I hated most smells, for some reason that one didn’t bother me.

  “Annika Rose,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.

  “Monica?”

  I shook my head. “No M.” The confusion surrounding my name had been a constant my whole life. In seventh grade, a particularly vile girl named Maria had shoved my head into a locker. “A weird name for a weird girl,” she’d hissed, sending me fleeing in tears to the nurse’s office.

  “Annika,” Jonathan said, as if he were trying it on. “Cool. Let’s play.”

  Eric and I alternated who played white and therefore took turns enjoying the slight advantage that came with it, and if we’d played together that night it would have been his turn. But since I’d been paired unexpectedly with Jonathan, the pieces in front of him were white and he went first.

  His opening sequence displayed his affinity for the moves of World Champion Anatoly Karpov. Once I identified his strategy, I chose my defense accordingly and immersed myself in the game, the sounds and smells of the food court fading away along with my nervousness. I no longer heard snippets of the students’ conversations as they ate their burgers and fries, or the sizzle of the wok from a fresh batch of chicken fried rice. I didn’t smell the pepperoni pizza hot out of the oven. I played ruthlessly from the start, because every game I played was a game I played to win, but I also took my time and concentrated on my next move. Neither Jonathan nor I spoke.

  The game of chess is largely silent, but to me there is great beauty in the lack of sound.

  “Checkmate,” I said.

  There was a long pause and then he said, “Good game.” He looked around, but only a few of our members remained. Everyone else had left for dinner while we were still playing.

  “You too,” I replied, because the victory had been as hard won as any I’d earned from Eric.

  “You going out for pizza and beer?”

  I stood up, grabbed my backpack, and said, “No. I’m going home.”

  * * *

  The lingering smell of sandalwood incense and Lysol greeted me when I opened the door of the campus apartment Janice and I had lived in for the past two years. The incense was to cover up the faint scent of pot that always clung to her boyfriend’s clothes. Janice would never have allowed Joe to get stoned in our apartment, and she couldn’t detect the smell on him herself. But I had a very sensitive nose and I knew what it was the moment she introduced us. Janice understood that the memories it triggered were something I simply couldn’t handle.

  The Lysol was to counteract the aftereffects of whatever Jan cooked for Joe. She loved to experiment with recipes and spent hours in the kitchen. Her palate ran toward the gourmet side of things, while mine aligned more closely with the dietary habits of a six-year-old. More than once, I’d seen Joe staring at the grilled cheese or chicken nuggets on my plate while Janice stirred something complicated on the stove. I appreciated her willingness to keep the smells in our apartment to a minimum, but didn’t have the heart to tell her that the Lysol and incense only added two of them to the mix. And because I wasn’t the easiest person to live with, I never would.

  “How was chess club?” Janice asked when I came in, threw my backpack on the floor, and flopped onto the couch. It would take hours for me to fully unwind, but being home allowed me to relax slightly and my breathing to grow deeper.

  “Horrible. There was a new member, and I had to play with him.”

  “Was he good-looking?”

  “I’m super exhausted.”

  She sat down next to me. “What’s his name?”

  “Jonathan.” I kicked off my shoes. “I’m so mad at Eric. He knows we always play together.”

  “Who won?”

  “What? Oh. I did.”

  Janice laughed. “How’d that go over?”

  “The same way it always does.”

  “You want me to make you a grilled cheese? I made one for Joe earlier. I had everything in the fridge to make chicken Florentine, but that’s what he wanted. And you said you had nothing in common with him.”

  “He didn’t take me seriously.” Jonathan had made the mistake that others who’d come before him had frequently made: he’d discounted my abilities while being overconfident in his own. I would soon learn that it would be the first and last time he ever made that mistake with me.

  “Next Sunday, you’ll play with Eric.”

  “I’m too tired to eat.”

  “I have no idea what the two of you are saying to each other,” Joe had said the first time he witnessed one of our conversations. To be fair, it wasn’t only because I suspected he was high at the time. Janice had had three years to learn how to communicate with me, and to her credit, she’d mastered my native language like an expert linguist.

  Unable to sustain further conversation, I wandered down the hallway into my bedroom, face-planted onto the bed fully clothed, and slept straight through until the next morning.

  4

  Jonathan

  CHICAGO

  AUGUST 2001

  My phone rings and the caller ID flashes an unknown number as I walk down the street on my way to meet Nate for an after-work drink. I’ve been stuck in meetings all day and the only thing I’m interested in at the moment is an icy cold beer. August in Chicago can be brutal, and my dress shirt clings damply to my back under my suit jacket. When I hear the chime indicating that whoever called has left a voice mail, I figure I might as well find out what it is so I can put out the fire now and enjoy my beer in peace.

  Annika’s voice stops me in my tracks. The odds that she would actually call were only marginally better than my ex-wife and I seeing eye-to-eye on anything now, so they weren’t that great. I move out of the flow of pedestrian traffic, holding a finger against the opposite ear so I can hear her better, and start the message over from the beginning.

  “Hi. I was wondering if you might want to meet for breakfast on Saturday or Sunday morning at Bridgeport Coffee. Whatever time is convenient for you. Okay, bye.” I can hear the tremble in her voice.

  There’s another message.

  “Hi. This is Annika. I should have mentioned that in the other message.” The tremble is still there, along with an embarrassed sigh.

  There’s one more message.

  “I’m sorry for all the messages. I just realized I didn’t give you my phone number.” Now she sounds frustrated as she rattles it off, which is unnecessary because I can retrieve it from my incoming call log. “So just call me if you want to meet for coffee. Okay, bye.”

  I imagine her slumping into a chair after leaving the messages, spent, because I know how difficult these things are for her.

  The fact that she did it anyway tells me something.

  * * *

  The dark bar smells faintly of old cigarette smoke and men’s cologne. It’s the kind of establishment newly single men go to to unwind before heading home to the underfurnished apartments that have never seen a woman’s touch. I hate places like this, but Nate is still in the daily-drinking phase of his divorce, and I remember all too well what that’s like. He’s sitting at the bar peeling the label from a bottle of beer when I walk in the door.

  “Hey,” I say as I sit down beside him, loosen my tie, and gesture to the bartender to bring me the same.

  Nate points toward the window with the mouth of his beer bottle. “Saw you out there. You better shut that phone off
if you want to enjoy your beer in peace.” Nate and I don’t work for the same firm, but their mission statements are identical: All work and no play makes this company a shitload of money.

  “It wasn’t work. It was a voice mail from an old girlfriend I ran into the other day. She said she’d call. I wasn’t sure.”

  “How long’s it been?”

  “I was twenty-two the last time I saw her.” And if I’d known there was a possibility I wouldn’t see her again for ten years, I might have handled things differently.

  “How’d she look?”

  The bartender hands me my beer, and I take a long drink. “The years have been very kind to her,” I say when I set the bottle back down on the bar.

  “So was it serious or just a fling?”

  “It was serious for me.” I tell myself it was serious for her, too, but there are times I wonder if I’m lying to myself.

  “Think she wants to rekindle?”

  “I have no idea what she wants.” That part is true. I don’t even know if Annika’s single. I don’t think she’s married, because she wasn’t wearing a ring, but that doesn’t mean she’s not in a relationship with someone.

  “Still hung up on her?”

  Every now and then, especially right after Liz and I split up, when I was lying in bed alone unable to sleep, I would think of Annika. “It was a long time ago.”

  “I know a guy who never got over the girl who dumped him in eighth grade.”

  “That’s probably not his only issue.” Though it has been a long time, it sometimes feels like it was yesterday. I can hardly remember the names of the girls who came before her, and after her there was only Liz. But I can recall with unbelievable clarity almost everything that happened during the time I spent with Annika.

  Probably because no one has ever loved me as fiercely and unconditionally as she did.

  I look over at Nate. “Did you ever fall in love with a girl who was different? Not just from any girl you’d ever dated before, but from most people in general?”

  Nate signals the bartender for another beer. “Marched to the beat of a different drum, did she?”

  “She marched to the beat of an entirely different band. One you’ve never heard of and under no circumstances ever expected to like.” When Annika would frustrate me, which was pretty often, I would tell myself there were lots of other girls out there who were not so challenging. But twenty-four hours later, I’d be knocking on her door. I missed her face and her smile, and I missed every one of the things that made her different.

  “She must have been hot because that kind of thing never flies when the girl’s just average.”

  When John F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s plane crashed into the Atlantic a few months before Liz threw in the towel and went back to New York without me, his image—along with his wife’s and sister-in-law’s—had been plastered all over the TV screen for days. Because I had no interest in celebrity news, I’d never realized until then how much Annika looked like Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. They shared the same bone structure and blue eyes, and hair so blond it was almost white. They both possessed the kind of striking beauty you’d notice in a crowd. When I ran into Annika at Dominick’s, the resemblance had been even more pronounced. Her hair is shorter than it was in college and now it lies smooth and straight, but she still wears the same color of lipstick, and when my brain registered that fact, a certain memory thawed the ice in my heart a little bit.

  “Annika is beautiful.”

  “So the crazy didn’t matter.”

  “That’s not remotely what I said.” The words come out more harshly than I intended and there’s a beat of awkward silence as we both take a drink.

  I’d be lying if I didn’t admit, at least to myself, that the way Annika looked did play a part in my initial attraction and my willingness to look past a few things. When Eric pointed at her that day in the student union, I couldn’t believe my luck, although I did wonder why such a hot girl was sitting all alone. It would have been easy to dismiss her the way the others had, find someone else to play with next time. But I sought her out again and again because I felt beaten down by the trouble I’d gotten into at Northwestern and bitter from the boulder-sized chip I’d been carrying on my shoulder ever since. I wasn’t feeling very self-confident and losing to a girl didn’t help. I cringe at the memory, and it is only now, ten years later, when I realize how much energy I wasted fighting the inconsequential battles that really aren’t meant to be fought. Annika didn’t know it at the time, but she was exactly what I needed in order to believe in myself again. And in time, I realized she was so much more than just a pretty face.

  “You gonna see her again?” Nate asks.

  Whenever I think of Annika, my mind returns to the way we left things and the same unanswered question. It’s like a pebble in my shoe, uncomfortable but not unbearable.

  But it’s always there.

  I take another drink of my beer and shrug. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  * * *

  When I get home from the bar, I pour a whiskey and stare aimlessly out my floor-to-ceiling windows as the sun goes down. When the whiskey’s gone, I play Annika’s messages again because I’m officially drunk and I’ve missed hearing her voice. Not returning her call seems juvenile and petty, and maybe I’m just feeling sorry for myself because the last two women I’ve loved decided they didn’t love me anymore. By the time Liz filed for divorce, I didn’t love her anymore either, but Annika’s a different story.

  I reach for my phone, and when her answering machine picks up I say, “Hey. It’s Jonathan. I can meet you for coffee on Sunday morning at ten, if that still works for you. See you then.”

  Maybe Annika called because she’s finally ready to remove the pebble from my shoe once and for all. Aside from that, I want to know—despite how I feel about the way our relationship ended—that she’s okay. Though I sensed by the way she carried herself that she’s doing fine, at least on the outside, I need to know if she’s still shouldering the weight of it on the inside.

  Besides, it’s not like I’d say no to her.

  I never could.

  5

  Jonathan

  CHICAGO

  AUGUST 2001

  When I arrive at the coffee shop, Annika’s standing on the sidewalk shifting her weight from side to side, bouncing on the balls of her feet. She stops immediately when she sees me.

  “Good morning,” I say.

  “Good morning.” She’s wearing a sundress, but unlike the clothes she used to wear, this one fits her body. My eyes are drawn to her narrow shoulders and the hollows at her throat and collarbone. “Are you ready to go in?”

  “Sure.” She takes a step toward the doorway, hesitating when she sees the size of the crowd packed tightly inside the small coffee shop. She picked the venue, but I’m the one who chose the time and maybe she would have preferred to meet earlier or later to avoid the rush. If memory serves, this particular location has a spacious outdoor patio, so maybe it doesn’t matter. Instinctively, I stretch my hand toward her lower back to guide her, but at the last minute I pull it away. I used to be one of the few people whose touch Annika could tolerate. In time she grew to love the feeling of my arms around her, my body becoming her own personal security blanket.

  But that was years ago.

  Slowly, we make our way to the counter and place our orders. In college, she would have asked for juice, but today we both order iced coffee.

  “Have you eaten breakfast yet?” I ask, pointing toward the pastry case.

  “No. I mean I didn’t know if you’d already eaten so I ate a little but not really enough to count as a full breakfast, but I’m not hungry now.”

  * * *

  As the words tumble from her mouth, she looks down at her shoes, over my shoulder, toward the barista. Anywhere but at me. I don’t mind. Annika’s mannerisms are like slipping into a comfortable pair of shoes, and though I feel bad admitting it, even to myself, her nervousness has always made me
feel at ease.

  I try to pay, but she won’t let me. “Is it okay if we sit outside?” she asks.

  “Sure.” We sit down at a table shaded by a large umbrella. “You look great, Annika. I should have told you the other day.”

  She flushes slightly. “Thanks. So do you.”

  It’s instantly cooler due to the umbrella, and the color on Annika’s cheeks fades away. When I lift my glass to put the straw in my mouth, she tracks the movement of my left hand and it takes me a second to realize she’s checking for a wedding ring.

  “How’s your family?” I ask.

  She looks relieved that I’ve started with something so neutral. “They’re fine. My dad retired and he and my mom have been traveling. Will’s still in New York. I saw him a few months ago when I flew out to see Janice. She lives in Hoboken with her husband and their six-month-old daughter.”

  “So you’ve stayed in touch with her?” Janice was always more than just Annika’s roommate, so it shouldn’t surprise me that their friendship is still going strong.

  “She’s my closest friend even if I don’t get to see her that often.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “Do you live around here?”

  “West Roosevelt.”

  “I’m on South Wabash,” she says.

  A ten-minute walk is all that separates us. “I wonder how many times we’ve come close to running into each other.”