Amy Inspired (31 page)

I was kneeling on the floor, fishing for the grade book that had fallen behind my desk. He peered under the desk, startling me, and I hit my head on the keyboard tray in my rush to stand.

“Do you knock?” I asked.

“The door was open.” He helped me up. “Maybe I should have made an appointment.”

He sat exactly as my students did, facing me directly, the corner of the desk between us. He crossed his legs. He looked around the room.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been on this side of a teacher’s desk without being in trouble.”

I arched my eyebrow.

He smiled faintly. “Maybe this is no different.”

“How did you know I’d be here?”

“I was leaving the studio and saw your car.” He rubbed his thumb ineffectually against a spot of white paint staining the worn knee of his jeans. “So were you by any chance out by the studios last night? I thought I saw you out the window.”

I hesitated just long enough.

“It must have been someone else,” he rushed to say.

“Probably.”

Thankfully, Everett returned to the office. Eli said hey and shook Everett’s hand, a gentlemanly quirk he had with people he was particularly fond of.

“Anyway.” He slapped his knee, giving up on the paint. “Kevin and I are having some people over tomorrow tonight. I was wondering if you wanted to come.” He turned to Everett. “Both of you,” he added quickly.

A warning in my head told me to say no. “When?” I asked.

“Eight-ish.”

“Will there be student poetry, is the question,” Everett said.

“No,” Eli assured us. “There’ll be a film if we can get things rigged right, but no student poetry, I promise.”

I told him I would think about it.

He stayed long enough to inquire after Zoë. He stayed long enough to be polite. And then, as if overcome with a sudden change of emotion, he left abruptly with a hasty “See you.”

His unexpected visit bewildered me. He’d never called. For two weeks I hadn’t seen or heard from him and now he asked me over as casually as if I were one of his dozen studio acquaintances.

“What’s new with our ever-wandering hero?” Everett asked. “He looked almost peevish. The drama unfolds with Jillian?”

“Everett,” I said wearily, “shut up.”

Zoë’s father mailed me a check for two months’ rent.

“He didn’t have to do that,” I told her, having talked her into a phone call. “I’m sending the money back.”

“He wants to give it.” She was breathing hard into the phone. Leg lifts. Her shin splints were worse, and she hadn’t been able to run since returning home. She did hours of calisthenics to de-stress. “It makes him feel useful. He needs something to make him feel useful.”

“If it makes him feel good.” In reality, I’d needed the money. Summer was coming and I’d been trying to save for the long months with no paycheck.

She finished her exercises, greedily drank a glass of water.

“How are Valerie and the baby?”

“They’re fine.”

This was the part of the conversation where Zoë would want Copenhagen news. She would inquire after everyone, indulge a moment in the normalcy of our lives. I provided detailed if not overly enthusiastic updates on Everett, on Lonnie, on the worst sentences from my students’ essays. When she asked about Eli I finally told her he’d moved out.

“What? When?”

I told her.

“Why?”

“He needed more space to work.”

“You didn’t kick him out.” It was more a warning than a question.

“Of course not. It was mutual. It was getting awkward, the two of us alone in the apartment together. I don’t think Jillian would have liked it.”

That last bit about Jillian was particularly deceptive. I’d practiced telling Zoë everything, but I couldn’t bring myself to make an issue of what I was trying so hard to pretend hadn’t happened.

“I guess it’s for the best,” she said.

When I asked how her father was doing she was quiet a moment. “He acts like he’s all right. But I know he’s not. It’s the way he stares sometimes, completely checked out. Hold on, he’s in the room.” She said something to her father. There was a pause. When she returned she spoke louder. “Amy, I found a manuscript. He keeps it in his desk drawer and it’s nearly a foot thick.”

“What’s he working on?”

“The story of his life? I don’t know; I didn’t read it. He usually writes quickly. It’s not like him to hold on to something like this … He hasn’t published for years.”

She’d spent most of college dealing with the idea of losing one parent, a fear she could share with the other; she’d always been close to her father. Over the last three weeks, however, she’d developed a new anxiety, the fear that the cancer would take them both.

When Eli said he was having “a few people” over he meant all of The Brewery staff and half the sculpture class. Kevin had arranged what furniture they had in rows before an old projector screen. People sat wedged hip to hip, girlfriends sat on their boyfriends’ laps. The movie was French and in black-and-white, two things that promised a long and tedious night.

I arrived late and sat in the back. To my right a folding table had been spread with pizza and plastic bowls of Cheez-Its and popcorn, the food men buy for Super Bowls and art openings alike. While Kevin cued the second film, I picked at the food. Beside me an undergraduate wearing a jumper intended for a seven-year-old was trying to impress a fellow artist with a description of her latest installation piece. I felt suddenly tired of the college scene: the same events recycling themselves over again, the flirtation masquerading as professional discourse.

As the lights went out a second time, Eli took the seat beside me. I kept my eyes on the screen.

“I’ll warn you now,” I whispered. “From back here it’s impossible to read the subtitles.”

“Trust me,” he whispered back. “It wouldn’t help.”

He smelled of incense, of paint.

I pointed out that he’d invited all of Copenhagen.

“Yeah, well, you know Kevin; he has a way of drawing a crowd.”

He winked. Kevin was the shyest man I knew.

As the film began, he leaned in to explain the plot, his head bowed toward mine, even when the rising volume of the room made whispering unnecessary. Ten minutes into the screening everyone was talking as if the film wasn’t playing at all. Two students from Kevin’s sculpture class came to sit with us. Reluctantly, I moved from the couch to a folding chair to make room for Art Major Number One, who asked if I had seen other work by the director. I said no. Did I like French films? I didn’t speak French, I replied shortly. Art Major Number Two was a young woman, tall, with the legs of a Versace model. Her bony knees knocked against Eli’s. She was doing an imitation of one of her professors, one hand on her hip, the other gesticulating wildly. Eli laughed. They talked half an hour before he thought to introduce me.

He introduced me as the friend of a friend.

“Nice to meet you,” Art Major Number Two said. I reached to shake her hand, but she only raised herself ever so slightly off her chair, forcing me to stand and cover the distance between us. Since I’d already abandoned the couch to conduct this little greeting, I announced I would be back and escaped to the stairwell.

Eli found me digging for my coat on the pile that had collected by the door.

“You’re leaving?” he asked.

“I have class tomorrow,” I said.

“Let me give you a ride.”

“I’d rather walk,” I replied.

He followed me down the stairs. “Amy, what’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Something’s wrong.” He opened the door for me. “If I did something to offend you, tell me. I want to know.”

I turned to face him. “I’d like to know why you go out of your way to invite me over only to spend the entire night ignoring me.”

“I sat right beside you.”

“And proceeded to talk to everyone else.” I tried to walk away, but still he followed. “You introduced me like you don’t even know me.”

“I introduced you as a friend,” he said, his tone defensive. “I thought that’s what you wanted: friendship. I’m having a friendship with you.”

“We had our friendship, Eli, and it was perfect the way it was. Why did you have to ruin it?”

He didn’t respond immediately. “You said what we did was a mistake,” he said slowly. “That our friendship was important and that it was best I leave so we could keep it. That I hadn’t hurt you.”

It pained me to hear all the things I’d said.

“I left,” he said. “I waited, and I figured it had been long enough maybe we were over the whole thing.” He shuffled along to catch up with me. “Will you slow down?”

“Well I’m sorry, but two weeks isn’t long enough for me to just ‘get over things.’ ”

He was baffled. “It never once occurred to me that you felt anything more for me. You never let on that you wanted anything else.”

“Why would I? You’re
with
Jillian, Eli. You’re taken.”

“That’s not working and you know that as well as I do. Amy! Would you please
slow down
?”

We had reached the corner of the downtown park. I walked to the bus station and sat obediently on the nearest bench.

“Thank you,” he said in exasperation. He remained standing.

The park fountains played to our left. A tower of water shot into the air, then twirled as it fell, a pirouette of liquid beads dissolving. Just as the first fell, a second jet of water shot up a foot from the first, swirled in the air, folded in on itself. On they went, one firing off as the other fell in the orderly succession of a Rockette kick line.

“I got the print you sent,” I said quietly. “I really appreciated it.”

“I’m glad.” He didn’t sound glad at all.

“What do you want, Eli?”

“I thought that was obvious.” He joined me on the bench. “Do you really think I slept on that futon because there wasn’t another bed in town that might be more comfortable? Because I couldn’t afford my own place?”

“Then why didn’t you leave?”

“Amy, I didn’t think anything would happen. I always thought you generally disapproved of me, that you put up with me. But that didn’t change the fact that I wanted to spend time with you. I would never have stayed if I’d known …” He paused. “If I’d thought you felt anything for me.”

“Well, I felt things for you.You’re funny and sexy and talented.” I sounded so angry the compliments sounded more like indictments. “You even like my stories.”

He smiled. He looked at me the way every woman wants to be looked at. “Amy Gallagher, you are the most interesting woman I have ever had the misfortune of living with.”

“What about ‘you’re beautiful’,” I said. “Or ‘I’m deeply attracted to your intelligence.’ ”

He told me I was beautiful and gently touched my cheek, ran his thumb across my lower lip. He told me he was very attracted to my intelligence. He would have kissed me if I’d let him.

I told him to take me the rest of the way home.

We walked side by side. When he reached for my hand I let him. He laced his fingers through mine. The streets were empty, and in the moment’s anonymity I was free to enjoy what it would be like to belong to Eli. All our other many walks through campus, hands in pockets and cautious distance between our bodies, seemed unnatural in retrospect.

I asked what he was going to say to Jillian.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t quite figured that out yet.”

“You have to tell her.”

“Of course I have to tell her.” He let go of my hand, slipped it back in his pocket.

“Look,” I said. “I’m not interested in anything that’s not going to be serious from the beginning.”

“Neither am I.”

“I don’t want to date and I don’t want to mess around.”

“We’re in total agreement then.”

I crossed my arms. “There’s no way you and I would ever work.”

“Why not?” He shrugged, half laughed, as if I’d given him reason to hope.

“We don’t want the same things,” I said, exasperated by his good humor.

“Try me.”

I tried to imagine Eli holding a child or balancing a checkbook. With complete honesty I confessed, “I don’t even know where to start.”

“I promise you, I’m breaking up with Jillian.”