Stay Up With Me (2 page)

 

Friday night they went
out
to a movie together, a black comedy her son had been talking about for days, and afterward they walked the fifteen blocks home. The boy had laughed throughout, but now she was dissecting the story, explaining how it could have been better. She was pointing out inconsistencies in the plot, and funny parts she'd found more depressing than funny, until she saw that she was essentially ruining his experience of it.

“I guess it did kind of suck,” he said.

 

“Don't you ever just
go to a movie to enjoy it?” her husband asked, when he called that night. This had been a favorite argument of theirs.

“Sure,” she said. “But I don't enjoy crap. I wish I did. I'm tired of disliking things.”

 

As she went to
sleep that night
she heard her son slipping out. Without thinking of what she was doing, she threw on her long coat and boots and followed him, her nightgown underneath. The night was cold and mostly empty. A homeless man slept at the door of a dry cleaner's. A few bankers or lawyers scuttled home for a few hours' sleep; others, ties loosened, were out having late drinks around window tables of the neighborhood eateries. Most of the stores were decorated for Christmas with lights and Santas; the Gap had a reindeer in a down vest. A thin man with small wire-rimmed glasses waited while his dog watered a bare tree. The boy walked by the restaurant and picked up the hostess. When she walked out the door, they rounded a corner and kissed hungrily, illicitly, like adulterers in a bad movie when they've sneaked from the dinner party into the kitchen. Having seen him in love before, and sweetly, it was odd and depressing to see him this way: as a man with an impersonal libido.

He talked animatedly to her as they walked.
About what?
the mother wondered, and then she realized he was describing a scene from the movie they'd been to. He stopped in the middle of the block to finish, the streetlight above him casting his gestures in long, graceful shadows. The action sounded so much more compelling in his words than it had been on the screen; he had in fact added details and lines of dialogue that improved it. He was similar to his father in that way. Anything that happened sounded better coming from her son. It occurred to the mother that he was better suited for enjoying the world than she was. The boy laughed and the hostess just watched him. She kissed him seductively, her hands running from his chest to his shoulders. And then she did something that made the mother queasy. She ran her hand between his legs. It happened so fast the mother wasn't sure she hadn't rubbed his thigh or grasped for something in his front pocket.

“
Helloo,
” the hostess said.

He's a college sophomore, the mother wanted to say. He still plays knock-hockey with his friends who come over, still collects rare stamps.

They went and had a drink at a nearby tavern. The mother watched through a window as the boy ordered drinks at the bar and brought them back to the table. It had gotten colder out, the wind had hardened, and the mother thought briefly of returning home. She was driven by curiosity, or perhaps by the impulse that causes some people to watch cars crash into each other, or fires overtake homes. At the same time she felt protective of the son she'd raised. She supposed fathers went through this all the time with their daughters—the sudden and alarming realization that their offspring had become eye candy for the masses, not simply for the right boys, who would be scrutinized and carefully selected. The hostess leaned ahead, resting her assets on the table before her. She was making girlish facial expressions, attempting to present herself as his age, which she definitely wasn't. She wasn't old. She was between their ages. The same age, the mother thought, as the woman who dated the boy's father. She imagined the two of them in Seattle after the boy graduated, double-dating roommates, sisters perhaps, who would argue when they were together in the women's room who would get Dad and who'd sleep with Junior.

At the moment she'd decided to head home, she heard her name called. She turned and started walking, but the voice followed. “Elaine. Elaine, is that you?”

She stopped then; it was Joyce Taft, from the fifth floor of her apartment building.

“Hi, Joyce.”

“I thought so. Are you all right? I saw you standing out here. It's awfully cold out.”

“Yes, I'm fine.”

Joyce was examining her, as if hunting for clues to explain this behavior. The mother wondered if the neck of her nightgown was showing above her coat. She thought she should say something else so she said, “I just came out to clear my head.”

Joyce nodded and the mother understood she would soon become a story Joyce would tell to a half-dozen people in the building:
She's been like that ever since Warren moved out.

“I'm heading home, if you'd like company,” Joyce said.

The mother looked at the window; they were walking toward the front cash register.

“Thanks, sure,” the mother said.

 

He was back home
at around five. The mother and the boy didn't see each other until the early evening.

That night as they stood in the kitchen, she managed to get him to say he'd been seeing the hostess.

“I don't want you to see her again,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I don't.”

“I like her.”

“You like her.”

“I do,” he said, as though defending a great principle.

“Is she your girlfriend?”

“No.”

“What is she?”

“She's a friend. Am I getting the fifth degree here? Do I need a lawyer present?”

“You can do what you want.”

“I've had a good week.”

She didn't know what he meant by the comment.

“Go ahead and screw her if you want,” she said, unfortunately, pointlessly.

Her boy did a strange thing then. He started crying.

 

He didn't go out
that night or the next. He watched TV on his own, or read in her study. He wasn't friendly or particularly unfriendly.

After three nights of this, the mother asked, “What happened to the hostess?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Nothing?”

“I blew her off.”

And that was that. He went out with friends that weekend and for a few nights did nothing. She'd walk by the hostess and draw looks and then she stopped walking by.

 

One day on her
way home
she felt the hostess following her.

“What did you tell him?” the hostess said.

The mother turned and faced her. The hostess had on a thick navy turtleneck sweater over tight black jeans. She had a small stack of Buongiorno's menus in one hand, as though to remind the mother of where she'd just sprung from.

“I told him I didn't want him seeing you.”

“Why?”

“Because I don't want him to. He's nineteen, what are you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“He's just a kid.”

“No he's not.” She raised her eyebrows. “
Believe
me, he's not.”

The mother's hand jumped out and slapped the woman. The woman slapped the mother back, and then they were yelling at each other and swinging their arms. A waiter and the stout old manager ran out to break it up.

“Pathetic bitch,” the hostess said beneath her breath.

 

She had always imagined
a life for her son that would exceed her own: more travel, better clothes and food, a little land maybe, near a body of water; an unimpeachably bright, elegant, and decent partner, whom the mother could imagine as a daughter, the one she'd never had, for whom she could now buy sweaters and stylish scarves and sign the gift cards
Love, Elaine.
But what if what she wanted wasn't what he wanted? What if this hostess was what he wanted? Her awful little apartment, her abject little life. And what if they had children and they looked not like him at all but like her? She pictured two children, four and six with the hostess's face, those small dull eyes and those sunken nostrils.

It occurred to her the hostess would tell her son about the incident. She'd describe the mother as crazy, and the boy might agree.

 

She called the boy's
father
and there was no answer. It was eleven thirty New York time. She tried again at one and reached him. After a little banter about her writing, he asked, “What's up?”

“I hit her,” she said, surprised at her own disclosure. “And she hit me back.”

“Who?”

“The hostess.”

The line went silent, and the mother considered telling him she was joking.

“You hit her?”

“Yes. It was a mistake, okay? But she hit me as well. The people from the restaurant broke it up.”

“I don't know what to say. Let it go. It's his life. Jesus, Elaine, you hit her?”

“I didn't call to be
upbraided
.”

 

She dreamed that night
the hostess was pregnant and that she'd given her son a disease.

 

She didn't see the
hostess
in the restaurant window after that. One day she saw in the doorway the manager who'd broken up the fight. She asked him what had happened to the hostess.

“We let her go,” he said.

“Over the incident?” the mother asked.

“Yes, of course. We don't condone that kind of thing. I hope you and your husband will come back and eat with us again,” the man said.

 

Two days later
she met with her editor. They went to lunch to talk about the new pages, which were about the failed-birthday-party scene in
East of Eden
(the moment that launched the late 1950s and '60s youth culture, she postulated) and the influence of the Beats and the French new wave, and when the mother returned to the office, she found herself speaking at great length on all these subjects with the receptionist, a sophomore at Bowdoin College in Maine, an English major, with green eyes and lovely teeth, who wanted someday to be an editor. She had read the mother's last two books.

“What I loved about them both was how personal they were. Whatever you're writing about it's as if you're speaking to one person, to a good friend. That's what you make the reader feel like. You made me feel like it. I felt smart reading your books; smarter than I usually feel, anyhow.” She laughed.

There were still ten days left in her son's vacation.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” the mother asked.

 

They would go to
the movies
and then get Indian food. He was doing her a favor, the mother said, because the girl might end up editing one of her books someday. The night started slowly, but before long the boy was telling his stories, and the girl listening, then telling a few of her own. The mother prodded them both with questions. They had much in common, she thought. But there were enough differences for them to learn from one another. When the girl excused herself to go to the restroom, the mother said, “Is this awkward? I mean my coming along like this.”

The boy smiled, “No. It's kind of fun really. It's like being on the
Charlie Rose
show.”

“I'll head home after this and you can do whatever you want.”

 

On their walk back
to the apartment the girl asked more questions of the mother, how and where she worked, which authors she liked to read. Many of them the girl too had read. What was gratifying was how well the boy held his own in the conversation. He was never entirely an intellectual, but he was smart, and inquisitive, and there was reason to believe he'd grow into an interesting, expansive adult, given the right company. Already they were laughing easily at each other's jokes. And besides, there was nothing wrong with the fact that the girl was a knockout, at least by the mother's standards.

 

Christmas Eve the mother
filled
the boy's old red-and-white stocking with candy he wouldn't eat, a book, and two CDs she knew he wanted. The next morning they listened to Christmas carols and opened their gifts. She encouraged the boy to open his father's gifts in front of her. There was a beautiful blue ski parka, to accompany the skis she had bought him (they'd worked this out weeks ago on the phone) and, as a surprise to the mother and the boy, a laptop computer.

She had been outspent again, but she didn't mind.

She had given him something better.

 

They saw each other
the next three evenings, and they were planning on going to a New Year's Eve party at a SoHo restaurant that the girl's high school friends had rented out. The mother got them theater tickets for a show on December 29, and this time she resisted going with them. She would go to a late movie by herself so that they could get settled in the apartment after the show. Part of this, she knew, was an attempt to make up for getting in his way with the hostess, but he'd someday understand, or maybe he already did.

It had turned out so well, she thought. He seemed happier. The girl could visit him at school. And the mother thought there were advantages to having a girlfriend at another college. First of all, long-distance relationships were often the most romantic. Second of all, they left you more time for your friends and your schoolwork. Relationships in college were difficult to maintain. There were so many distractions, and those distractions were healthy. The boy was on an intramural basketball team and played bass guitar in a band. It didn't matter that by his own admission the team wasn't very good and neither was the band. She didn't want him to have to give up anything.