The Woman Before You: An intense, addictive love story with an unexpected twist.... Carrie Blake
which is where I met my two closest friends in New York, in fact my only friends in New York, Marcy and Luke.
I tried out at a few more auditions. I quit again. Everyone was better than me. I could hear them through the walls as I sat in the corridor, waiting for my name to be called. And when I got through the door, I could see the casting directors’ eyes glaze over. I was pretty, but not pretty enough. I wasn’t this enough, I wasn’t that enough. I looked like a million other girls who’d come to the city with the same hopes and ambitions. And boy, were they ever not interested in hearing me do the tragic monologue from Our Town.
Thanks. We’ll call you. Next!
I was running out of money way faster than I thought I would. If I wanted to stay in New York, I would have to make some changes. It wasn’t easy to give up on my dreams. And when I finally called my mom in Iowa to tell her that maybe I didn’t want to be an actress after all, it was as if I’d somehow made it official. Even though I knew my mom loved me and believed in me and wanted only the best for me, it made me furious when I heard, in her voice, that she’d always known how small—how ridiculous—my chances were.
She said, ‘Maybe you should consider something else, dear. Maybe you should think about becoming a psychologist. You’re so good with people, so sensitive. So intuitive. So caring.’
That was when I almost told her what the school guidance counselor had done in that dim cubicle off the gym. But I didn’t.
‘Thanks, Mom,’ I said. ‘I’ll think about it.’
That night, I cried myself to sleep. Could it really be this easy to give up on so much of myself?
Maybe that was part of what I saw in The Customer.
He gave me a chance to act, to pretend to be someone else—someone hotter and sexier than the nice girl I’d always been. But he knew I wasn’t pretending.
And he believed in me. He believed that I could become someone else, that I could do something else. And he let me show him how.
The week I got to New York, I found an apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a studio which was super cheap because it was tiny and had hardly any light and because everyone knew that it was directly over a giant toxic dump site that had never been properly cleaned up. I didn’t care. I wasn’t planning on staying there long enough for it to hurt me. I bought a plant—a cactus. I named it Alfred, I don’t know why.
The cactus shriveled up and died. Too little light, I guess.
I got jobs that paid almost nothing but that I was grateful to get. I helped people figure out how to use the copy machines at Staples until the flash of the machines started hurting my eyes and I got scared that it was going to damage them. I was a receptionist at a nail salon. The Korean girls were friendly and sweet and really brave in the midst of their terrible lives, but the only English they spoke was about nail shape and length and polish, and it made me feel even lonelier than I already did.
I guess that’s how I wound up selling mattresses at Doctor Sleep.
The place was named after Steve—my boss’s—favorite Stephen King novel. Steve lent me a tattered paperback copy of the novel and told me to read it. I got through the first two hundred pages, but it was too scary. It gave me insomnia—and when I finally fell asleep, I had nightmares. It seemed odd to me that a store designed to help its customers sleep better had taken its name from a book that would keep them awake. I thanked Steve for the book and told him that it was my new favorite novel, too.
Obviously, I’d never once in my life said: I want to be what Steve refers to as a ‘mattress professional.’ Believe me, I never thought: Oh, if only I could know everything in the world there is to know about memory foam and pillow tops and coils. If only I could work for a guy named Steve who looks like an aging groundhog, who has creepy, secretive habits and a pitiful business model, and who always stands way too close when he talks to me. Though in fact he never touched me, except once, to shake my hand when he hired me.
I could tell what Steve was thinking and feeling. I saw how he imagined himself: as the king of a vast mattress empire with branch stores all over the city and suburbs.
I decided that Steve was harmless, which didn’t mean that it wasn’t a little disturbing when, on my first day at work, he explained his theory: insomnia is not a psychological problem but an actual disease that only the right mattress can cure.
The showroom had touches—white tile walls, a weird little machine that blinked and beeped like a heart monitor, and to one side, a gurney on which there were stacks of fancy duvets no one ever bought—designed to look like Steve’s sick fantasy of a hospital or operating room. Steve even wore a white lab coat. At first he said that I should too, and he lent me one of his, which smelled of cologne and sweat and said ‘Steve’ on the pocket. But after a week he told me that it was a pity to hide my pretty legs under a uniform.
So he got me a short white medical jacket that came just down to my hips, the kind of jacket an outcall hooker would wear, a prostitute hired to play Naughty Nurse.
Maybe that’s why The Customer got the wrong idea. Except that it was the right idea. The right idea that went very, very wrong.
My name was stitched on the pocket of the medical jacket.
Isabel.
I felt like sobbing when I saw it. It was like a threat: I’d be working here forever, at least for a very long while. But I could tell that Steve was proud of the jacket. That little corner of my mind that had Steve’s feelings in it lit up like a Christmas tree. He was so happy when he gave it to me. I smiled and said, ‘Thanks, Steve.’
‘I can write it off as a business expense. It improves the look of the establishment,’ Steve said.
Was I supposed to say thank you for that?
My friend Marcy, from drama class, had worked at Doctor Sleep for a few weeks. She said it was easier than waitressing: better hours. But she preferred waitressing. I wondered if she’d left because of Steve, but I couldn’t ask a friend, even a friend I saw more rarely now that I’d quit drama class, if she’d set me up to work with a total creep. I didn’t like how Steve looked at me when I tried on the starchy white jacket.
On my second day at work Steve announced that he was in an open marriage, but that workplace romances were strictly forbidden for professional reasons. I was the only person he could have had an office romance with, so I assumed he was telling me something. That was a relief. As I said, he never once touched me, or did anything perverted. If I wanted to keep my job, it seemed like a stupid idea to ask my boss to stand back when we talked. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he took it the wrong way. So I didn’t say anything. I let him breathe his hot breath on me.
Whenever Steve left for his lunch break, he had a furtive, weaselly air. Through the window, I watched him scurry away. I always had the feeling that he was going to see a dominatrix. But weirdly, the part of my brain that told me what someone else was experiencing stayed empty—no picture, no sound—when Steve left for his lunch break. I’d always had an almost telepathic sense of empathy, but now I realized the foolishness of taking any gift for granted, of thinking you would have it forever.
I told myself that it wasn’t fair to blame Steve for being the person he was.
On the day Steve hired me, a Friday, he gave me a large binder full of papers from the International Mattress Retailers Association. He told me to study it over the weekend. On Monday he would give me a test.
I had a bad feeling about this ‘test,’ but I studied just in case it was real and not some euphemism for getting groped by Steve—like the ‘compassion test’ at my high school. I learned about the science of sleep and the fine points of mattress construction. There was even a section about feng shui—the ancient Chinese system that told you where and how to position your bed in your room for the soundest sleep and maximum good health.
The manual instructed me to look friendly, concerned, professional,