Stay Up With Me (19 page)

She smiles at me like a little girl, like the girl in the sleeping bag. I can hear her wheezing hard through that broken nose, and I try to get my breath to match hers. For a minute or so it is just the human noise of one imperfect breath, two broken bodies working together. I feel a warmth rush over my head.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks. I stop at a light behind a van filled with kids staring out the window. One presses his nose into the glass and turns his head sideways, which Abby doesn't see. She is looking at me.

“How good life is,” I say.

 

At the theater we
play
the overview game. Abby and I eavesdrop or spy on people and try to size up their lives from their faces, their arguments, their clothes. We sit at diners and watch old couples arguing, or new couples awkwardly ordering breakfast after they wound up somehow in bed together. We lay bets on whether they'd make it to a third date, or a fifth. “I'm betting he blows her off on the fourth date, comes up with a phantom stomach flu,” Abby would say.

We walk along the second-floor railing, looking down on people buying drinks, posturing, talking. People are young here, high school and college, woolen caps and piercings. There are a few older earth types and the teaching crowd but I don't see anyone I recognize.

“He's driving her crazy,” Abby says.

“Who?”

“That guy in the gray T-shirt. He's driving that woman crazy.”

The two are talking to another couple.

“Look where she's standing. Look at her hands,” she says.

They're clenched in balls, okay. And the man in the gray T-shirt has his shoulder just past her so he can't really see her while he speaks. Yes, I can see that. We stand watching. The woman from the other couple touches the man's shoulder while she speaks to him. He laughs.

“What do you think she's telling him?”

“She's complimenting him on something, it looks like,” I say.

The woman, the gray T-shirt's date, pulls up closer to the other woman, leaning forward like a runner pushing for an inside lane. Then the two guys start talking, as though there's no one else there.

Abby's look says
Can you believe this?
And then I realize I know these people. I don't say anything. The guy in the brown suede blazer—I think his name is Daniel—says something to the group and then walks over to the line by the bar. Abby takes my hand and squeezes it. And then, this is what amazes me. From the bar, Daniel looks straight up at Abby and grins.

She smiles back and then turns away.

“That was strange,” I say. “You know that guy?”

“I don't think so,” she says, but a chill runs through my chest. What does that mean:
I don't think so
? Daniel's look is the kind a guy gives someone he knows, maybe slept with. I glare down and watch him order his drink and rest his elbows on the bar, and when I turn toward Abby, she is walking slowly away.

When Liz Phair, pale and wispy, takes the stage, I drift into a funk—torturing myself about Daniel. I don't hear the music; I just see him. I remember where I know him from, high school. He was a year behind me, bright, loud, and into politics. He played in a band, I think, and his father taught at one of the universities, which is what I think Daniel is doing now. That and getting a Ph.D. in something. It's amazing what you can remember when it comes down to it. I don't know if Abby knows him, but his grinning at her silences me.

I imagine him meeting her at a Cornell party, Abby in ripped jeans and a thin white T-shirt, and this pretentious fuck rattling on about art and music, while people around them hold wineglasses and tilt their heads thoughtfully. Then he takes her to his apartment where as a prelude to hooking up they listen to our music and tell each other our stories. That's what kills me—they talk in our voices.

 

Later that night
I dream I'm with Abby, and we run into Lynn. Her hair is streaked with blond highlights now, and she's clearly done time at the gym. She has a child in tow—things have panned out for her—and she looks at Abby and says, “My God, Willie, she's beautiful. She's young but she's absolutely beautiful.”

I say, “I know. We're living together now,” and Abby turns her head away, declining her role in this. I say “This is what I wanted” or something like that, and Lynn's kid starts untying my shoe. I'm telling him to stop and Abby starts walking away. I run after her, diving on her eventually, and when I wake up I'm kissing Abby and holding her tight, though she's still snoring and smelling like sleep.

When I shift on top of her, legs around her stomach, she whispers, “
Easy,
cowboy
. I'm not going anywhere.”

 

I'm thinking of Daniel
when Abby tells me her friend Carl is having a breakdown, and she's thinking of spending the weekend at his house, do I mind?

“What's the problem?” I ask, trying to sound trusting. I can't imagine that analyzing Carl is what she's longing to do.

“He's just got a lot of pressures. Too much to live up to. He's got no one else to talk to.”

I know Carl. Carl was in the painting class I taught last fall at the college, the one where I met Abby. He is stick thin and pockmarked, and he drew ghetto scenes of New York, where he grew up, long-bodied men and women with exaggerated features. He is someone who I imagine has crises all the time.

“Well, why don't you ask him to come here,” I say.

“Sure, if that's okay with you,” she says.

“Let me think about it,” I say, but there's no way I'd let that fuckup in my house.

“I'm losing my friends,” she says. “I'm losing them because I'm not ever seeing them. It's starting to get to me—being
here
all the time.”

“Let me think,” I say. “Sure. Do what you want.” I'm pouting.

I'll be thirty-seven in less than a month.

I go back to work on the rocker, and I listen as Abby talks on her cell phone.

“Hi, Carl,” she says, and she tells him she doesn't know about the weekend. She laughs a lot and tells him to eat well and take care of his body and she gives him a list of breathing and relaxation methods to work on, rib cage out, shoulders back, and some yoga chants that she'd taught me. “Rama, Rama, Rama,” and then, I couldn't believe this, she starts singing to him on the phone. The voice is like a ten-year-old's, singing high-pitched, third-grade songs: “The Muffin Man,” “Frère Jacques,” the
Brady Bunch
theme, and I feel like I've caught her in bed with someone.

 

Last summer I saw
Lynn's wedding announcement in the Sunday
Ithaca Journal
. There was a photograph of my ex in a white gown, looking very pretty, like it was her first wedding, and next to her was a stout, long-haired man in a morning coat, a real estate broker from Syracuse named Evan. I was amazed at how little I felt. It was as if I'd barely known her, as though she were some girl I'd hung out with a half-dozen times.

If pushed, I can remember her being high-strung, doting, and as determined to talk through our issues as I was committed to avoiding them. We stayed together four years, two of which I stayed true and never went out much and the others where I rarely came home before 2
A.M.
, and I'd sleep on the living room sofa. It was the period after we lost our baby and everything shut in on us. She got pregnant in our second year, and for a while it brought us close; it really did. I built a crib and a high chair in my workroom, and I thought about ways in which we could make more money as she got bigger and went to sleep earlier than me every night. Things weren't perfect between us, but I thought being parents would ground us in a good way—rid us of the threat of possibility; I am not good when I have too many options.

I read in a book that only 2 percent of pregnancies that make it past the sixteenth week end in miscarriages. Lynn's happened in the twenty-third. The doctor at University Hospital said our baby just died, “aborted” was his word. He spoke like a man who has had children, and he said there would be nothing to keep us from having one “down the road.”

Then he put his arm around me and told me Lynn would be fine, we would have each other and that's what was important, which is what people always feel the need to say.

It was the start of a period in my life in which I stopped paying attention and walked around dreamy and not in myself. I thought about trying again, about talking about things other than our pregnancy, which had so dominated our life. I grew quiet and I found ways to get out of the house. I did this, although I never blamed Lynn for anything.

When I stopped sleeping with her, she left me notes and a DVD, which I was supposed to watch, and she asked me to go with her to see a counselor she'd been seeing at the college.

I went once. He said it seemed like Lynn and I wanted different things out of life, and I agreed. He scheduled us for a Flexibility Workshop he was holding that weekend, and I drove instead to Albany, where I stayed with my friend Neil for a week. Neil has never married.

When I came home again, Lynn had moved out. It took about two months to set up our wedding and four years to work out a divorce. We argued a lot but I think we ended well, no hate or anything—just piles of paper to sort through.

I thought of calling to surprise her and congratulate her, and I thought,
No, that's going backward, move ahead; concentrate on what you have.

I tell part of that story to Abby—the part about not moving backward—by saying I want her to spend the weekend with me and not Carl. We'll book a cheap flight and head off to the Yucatán. It isn't her fault, I tell her, but Carl should know not to call her like that.

She says he's my friend that's all, he needs me like you need me. I say I'm sorry but that's how I feel. She says she can't go to Mexico, she's failing school. She says she's spent so much time at my house she's failing three out of four classes, do I care?

“More than you could ever imagine,” I say.

“No, really. I'm
losing
myself with you. I'm giving so
much
and I'm not getting anything back. I look at someone or I talk to someone on the phone and you freak. You change, just like that, and you don't talk about it. We talk about
me
and all
my
problems but I feel like I don't know you.”

And while she speaks I watch her hands move and her eyes flare and her chest push forward in breath. I can see her knees and part of her thigh beneath her ripped jeans. I imagine us in fifteen years. I'll be fifty-two and she'll be my age now, teaching at a junior college or a high school, somewhere like California. I'll have gray hair and an old-man paunch, and Abby will look like an adolescent boy's fantasy of a hot professor, a copy of Proust or Emily Dickinson tucked under her arm.

“Really,” she says, and steps back from me. “Tell me something. Tell me something you never told anyone.”

So I tell her a story about stealing money from my dad because I wanted to go to New York and how he found out and decided to take me down there himself on a Greyhound bus, which makes her happy and soft again, though it isn't true; I never stole a thing.

 

Before I take Abby
to Carl's house, I take her to a thrift store on Buffalo Street to buy a pendulum rod and bob I saw there. If she's going away for a couple of days, I tell her, I am going to finish a grandfather clock, something I want to do before I'm forty.

“I'm not going for a month or anything,” she says. “I'll probably be back Sunday night.”

She has my motorcycle jacket on, my sunglasses, and a pair of my sweatpants, and I'm thinking of what my house has become. We haven't done a dish in two weeks and the sheets are thick with dust and sex, and it occurs to me I could whip the whole house into shape over the next few days. It might improve my state of mind.

The sky is gray and low as I crest the knoll by two small farms down from Buffalo Street; silos decaying, empty of corn, two bales of hay sitting there like junked cars. It is gray for so long where we live, you forget what spring is like, that it will even come at all.

When we turn onto College Avenue where Carl lives, Abby rests her head on my shoulder.

“Thank you,” she says.

She has a pair of ice skates tied together at her feet and when I look ahead at Carl's house, a jaundiced two-story student building, I see him in front with his own pair.

I pull the car into his driveway and Carl walks over to Abby's side.

“What's up, Willie?” he says.

“Nothing, Carl. Nothing but clocks and snow.”

He looks at me puzzled, and then hugs Abby hello.

As Abby walks into Carl's house, I'm thinking about sticking around, about hanging out with Carl and his roommates around a bong and some music. We'd order out a pizza, maybe watch a basketball game, which I like to do sometimes. But my sense is that Abby doesn't want me there.

I'm starting the car and driving toward Homer through the thick gray air, which has frosted with light snow. The farther I drive, the clearer it gets.

I picture them bounding down the hardened playing fields to the hockey ice, which is empty now because the team is away. They'll be swirling around, holding hands maybe, and making circles in the dim light of the rink. She'll be singing those songs again, grade-school songs, like a music box that you wind and wind, and then let loose.

 

I open the windows
now and let the cold air in. I drive north for a long while until it's dark out and I can't recognize any of the town names. I turn off my headlights then and gun the engine and I think,
This is what it feels like to be lost.