The Woman Before You: An intense, addictive love story with an unexpected twist.... Carrie Blake
when I asked about slumber positions, back problems, sleeping difficulties, what they wanted in a mattress.
On Monday Steve handed me a multiple choice test and told me to fill it out at his desk. I scored one hundred.
‘Good girl, Marcy,’ Steve said.
‘I’m Isabel,’ I said.
‘Right,’ said Steve. ‘Marcy was the last girl.’
‘My friend Marcy,’ I said.
‘Right,’ said Steve. ‘The redhead. You’re the blond.’
I did what the mattress experts suggested. I acted concerned, sympathetic, professional. Like a kindly family doctor. I’d guide the customers to the most expensive mattress I thought they could afford, murmuring about why it was perfect for them. I even talked about feng shui, if I thought a client was the type to go for it. I never once tried to make clients buy something that I knew was beyond their budget.
Almost always, customers wanted to try out the mattress. Then my role would shift from that of the diagnostician to that of the tactful nurse who leaves the room or turns away when a patient undresses.
It was surprising how many people lay like corpses. On their backs, arms crossed. Even young couples, in love, lay there like statues on a tomb. Staring up at the ceiling, they discussed the mattress. Too hard? Too soft? You would never suspect that they might ever have sex on that mattress. Watching them, you couldn’t imagine the thought even crossing their minds.
The day I met The Customer was one of those weirdly warm, swampy September afternoons. An unusually quiet Saturday. Lately, business had been slow, even though Steve said it was usually his best season, when NYU students were moving into their dorms and convincing their rich parents that they needed a better mattress than the one the school provided. I could feel Steve’s gloom, his disappointment. He’d stopped talking about opening a second branch in the East Village.
Steve had gotten me a small cheap desk, at which I sat, looking out the window at people whose lives were more fun and exciting than mine. Everyone had somewhere to go, someone to be with, shopping to do. I wished them well. Someday I could be one of them. One of the lucky ones. I was determined not to feel sorry for myself—not to give up hope, no matter what.
A mom with a stroller came in and asked if we sold mattress covers for cribs. Steve sounded impatient when he told her to try Babies ‘R’ Us. When she passed me I flashed her a smile that I hoped said, what a cute baby, though I hadn’t actually seen her child under its milky plastic awning.
I tried to concentrate on my book, an anthology of poems based on Greek myths. I was obsessed with Orpheus, on how he could have gotten his beloved Eurydice out of hell if he hadn’t turned around to make sure she was there. What was that story about? Trust? Love? Fear? Stupid faithless men who would ruin everything in a heartbeat if something upset or scared them? Or women who think they can overpower fate and end up trapped forever?
I read the poems till I thought I understood them. Which I never did.
But I guess those poems prepared me for how I would feel about The Customer. For the sheer terror that I would turn around—and that he wouldn’t be there.
I pulled out my phone and scrolled through to a folder of apps I’d labeled ‘auditions.’ It hadn’t been easy to abandon acting. But the truth is I’d found a small workaround, for the time being at least. One drunken night, Marcy, Luke, and I all downloaded Tinder on our phones. It started out as a joke. We would each go on three dates and report back. ‘Come on, nice girl,’ Luke said. ‘Join the modern world. You’re not in Iowa anymore.’ We’d spent the rest of the night swiping left and swiping right, laughing out loud, screaming every time we had a match. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel good when a hot guy matched with me. We switched to beer and took a sip every time we landed on a picture of a guy with a puppy or a guy with a guitar. We were all hungover the next day.
I was surprised by how little effort it took to ‘match’ with somebody. But when I actually started texting with one of these so-called matches, I understood the old ‘plenty of fish in the sea metaphor’ on a whole different level; it was a big sea filled with a lot of creepy fish. The first guy made a joke about how cheesy dick pics were, told me he liked butt play, and then sent me a dick pic. Then there was the guy who sent me a picture of a paddle and asked me what I wanted to do with it. Or the guy who opened the conversation with ‘do u like to be choked?’ Finally, I matched with a guy who had just moved from Connecticut to work in marketing at some greeting card company in Midtown. He missed his mom and had a dog (the adopted, shelter variety—included in his Tinder profile) and lived just a few blocks away from me. Pretty vanilla. But after so many conversations with gross guys about the size of my chest and euphemisms for penises, I could do a first date with Mr Vanilla.
The date was pretty basic. We met at a bar around the corner from his apartment in Williamsburg that had just opened and he’d been meaning to check out. The bar was dog-friendly, so he could have brought his dog, he told me, but he didn’t want us to ‘move too fast.’ I wore a yellow knee-length dress and he wore a button-down shirt and khaki shorts. I could tell he’d gotten his hair cut for the occasion.
We talked about his hometown of West Orange; about what he studied in college, and his favorite TV shows. But when he started to ask me about my life a funny thing happened. I told him I grew up in Ohio, had two brothers, and two parents who were crazy in love. My dad was a historian and my mom was a lawyer. Dad was a total romantic and my mom was a real-life superhero. I had a grandmother I was really close to (actually my great-aunt, but I called her Nana—‘a long story,’ I told him), who passed away last year. The best Christmas present I ever got was my Labrador-mix named Juno, when I was nine. I met my best friend when we were in kindergarten, and I lived with her now.
I watched his eyes light up as I pulled out the props for my character. I could feel how excited he was to know me—this girl with so much potential who knew where she had come from and where she was going. I had written a different script for myself. I became the girl he would want to see again, someone who would meet his dog, his mom, his best friends from home.
After a chaste kiss at the corner, I walked home alone. I deleted our conversation from the app on my phone. I didn’t want a second date. I wanted to preserve that moment. The look on his face when he thought he recognized me, when I became the perfect girl. It was almost like acting except better. I wasn’t just memorizing lines, I was writing them, too. And in real time for an audience of one.
I wanted to feel that way again. To meet someone, figure out who they were and what they wanted, and become the person they needed, then watch them fall in love. Now I was the one not giving callbacks. I’ll admit, it felt good to finally have some power. When Tinder started to feel stale and flooded with perverts, I made profiles on Bumble, Thrinder (even more of a challenge), OkCupid, Coffee Meets Bagel—and each with a slightly different character. On Bumble, I was Riley from Portland, Maine. On Thrinder, I was Lorrie from the Bay Area. On OkCupid I was Amanda from Manhattan. All I had to do was make a new email, and a new Facebook profile (back when Facebook made it easy to do such a thing). I never went on more than a first date—and never took more than a sweet goodnight kiss on the cheek. I was still a good Midwestern girl, after all, and one date wasn’t enough time for anyone to get hurt. I thought of it as more of an ever-evolving character study game. I loved keeping all the scripts in my head at once, remembering which app I met so-and-so on, which backstory to pull out.
That day, I was going on a coffee date with a Mr Matthew from Bumble. I pulled up Bumble and scrolled through his pictures. From what I could see, he was tall with broad shoulders, and dark hair. There were no puppy pictures. There was Matthew on the beach in a tank top and American flag shorts, all square chest and tight, tan quads, Matthew sitting at the center of a group of guys, his thick shoulders wrapped around the two closest to him. But the one I kept swiping back to was a picture of Matthew standing on a pier, the sunset behind him framing his face. His head was thrown up to the sky and his eyes were closed, like he was in the middle of the greatest laugh. He had the best jawline I’d ever seen.
I