Stay Up With Me (23 page)

“Oh, please. You think she went in there by accident?” Sylvie said.

“I guess I did.”

“Sweetheart. When my father died, my mother kept me away from the men she was dating.” We were side by side and our arms brushed. My body tensed. “I was sixteen, and I think she thought I'd try to seduce them. And I probably would have in my own insecure way. Not literally, but enough to ruin things for her. In any event, she stayed over at their apartments. At first it was only on the weekends, but then it was like four nights a week. She'd phone to tell me to order a pizza for me and my brother, or Chinese food, whatever we wanted, and to charge it to her American Express card.”

She poured me another margarita, then poured herself one. “I could have stayed out in clubs all night, or had huge-ass parties, and she would have never known. I tried it once, throwing a party, but I ended up getting too nervous about all the people there getting drunk and throwing up, so I kicked them all out.”

“Did she remarry?”

“Yes, to my stepfather.”

“Do you like him?”

“Better than her.”

“Seriously?”

“Let's just say he's a lot less complicated.”

“I find everything about my father's dating depressing.”

“Depressing is when he dates a twenty-year-old.”

“He hasn't done that yet.”

“Then count your blessings.”

I watched her after that. She was unabashed in a way that usually put me off, but in her there was something heartfelt that I latched onto. She disappeared for a half hour or so and then reappeared at my side.

“Feel like getting out of here?” she said.

“You mean the two of us?”

“You think you could do better?” she said.

I tilted my head in mock judgment. She was kind of gawky, I thought, with narrow hips and long skinny arms and an illegible word written on the back of her wrist. Her hair held the shape of a wool cap she must have worn to the party, but she didn't seem to care.

“All right. Let's go,” I said.

 

It was Sylvie's idea
to stop by our house. She wanted to meet my father “in the flesh” and see if he was as dashing as she imagined. When we reached home, Linda was camped in the kitchen, making a pot of coffee.

“Your dad went down to tell the doorman to turn up the heat,” she said. She wore a cashmere V-neck sweater of my father's over a white camisole and looked like a late-career Jane Fonda. “It's freezing in here, don't you think?”

“I'm Sylvie,” Sylvie said. She took off her ski cap and shook out her hair, sprinkling melting snow into the room and onto her glasses, which she removed and placed in her coat pocket.

“And I'm Linda, Andrew's dad's girlfriend,” Linda said. She pulled out three mugs, one that I hadn't seen before, with the Statue of Liberty drinking coffee. She poured us cups and told us about her evening, coaching a room of Bensonhurst kids about writing résumés.

My father buzzed the intercom from downstairs and said he'd be up in ten minutes.

“When he wants things done, he goes out and gets them done,” Linda said, smiling.

I could have told her that was inaccurate, that when my father wanted things done he convinced others to do them for him, but I figured she'd learn that soon enough.

“It's supposed to get down to single digits by the morning,” Linda said. “Are you two in for the night?”

I pretended not to grasp what she was suggesting, but Sylvie said, “No. We just came by to warm up.”

When my father came in and saw that I was with a young woman, he grinned widely. “Welcome to spring,” he said. He asked Sylvie a series of questions about herself, listened with interest to her answers, and then showed her the view. There was something both wistful and very tender in the way he treated us.

 

We walked uptown along
the park.
I didn't know where we were headed, only that Sylvie appeared to have a plan.

We sat on a bench on the path at Eighty-First Street and sipped from a pint bottle of Knob Creek we'd bought at the corner liquor store, assessing the few passersby who'd braved the weather. A young guy, two or three years older than me, hobbled across on crutches.

“He's faking,” Sylvie said. “Grab one of his crutches.”

“What would I do with just one?”

“You could sell it back to him,” she said. “Or you could beat him with it.”

We traveled then to the benches near the Bandshell, where Sylvie said she used to roller-skate. I used to ride my skateboard over to watch people like her, I said.

“I was the one in the hot pants.”

“Really. I think I kissed you once.”

We were at the center of Central Park in the middle of the night. I thought,
This is what unbalanced people do
. Snow dropped down on us. My feet felt cold and wet, and I took another slug of whiskey. I was getting drunk. She rested her legs over mine, and I warmed them with my hands. It all felt forced, and then it didn't.

As though she'd been working up to the question, she asked me, “What's the weirdest thing you can do with your body?”

“I don't understand.”

“I mean, can you do this?”

She touched her elbows together behind her head. “Or this?” She bent her hand back so that her fingertips touched the back of her forearm.

“No,” I said. “Nor would I want to.”

She looked so distraught that I went ahead and wiggled my left ear, something I hadn't done since grade school.

“I knew there was greatness in you,” she said.

At some point, because it was on my mind, I told her about walking in the park with my mother, a week after we'd found out she was sick. I'd been away for the summer and I'd flown back to the city the day before. My mother was critiquing my wardrobe, the holes in my T-shirts and jeans.

“I'm buying you some pants,” she said. “Don't be embarrassed.”

“I won't,” I said.

We went to some stores on Columbus Avenue, and I felt like I was eleven.

She bought me four pairs of pants, two pairs of dress socks, three shirts, and a navy peacoat. It was as though she were outfitting me for a trip. It was the first time I understood there were a finite number of afternoons we'd have together. A hundred. Ninety-nine. The next day it would be ninety-eight.

We never talked about the fact that she was dying, or what she was heading into. I think we both believed there'd be time. But it all went so quickly. The night I came to her with all the questions and thoughts I'd been saving up, her painkillers had made her so dopey she thought I was taking her to the opera. I actually played
Carmen
for her, and she said, head pressed into her pillow, that it was unbearably beautiful. She knew that she was sick, and in bed, but she thought she was young and in bed with the flu. And she asked me on one of her last days if I could make sure her tennis racket was strung, because she'd broken a string the summer before. I took it into a shop, and when they'd finished, I brought it back to show her.

When I reached her, the nurse had upped her morphine, and from then on she was gone.

When my story ended, Sylvie closed her eyes. “You know, I said everything I wanted to say to my father, and he made his peace with me. But I never played opera for him while he was in bed,” she said. “That is such a fucking cool thing to do.”

 

Outside her building
Sylvie declared, “It's been a while since I slept with anyone.”

I just smiled stupidly.

“You're quite adorable,” she said.

Her roommate was away for the weekend. It was a pretty standard grad school apartment, two tiny bedrooms, a kitchenette, a narrow hallway, and a sunken living room decorated with a nice plush armchair and couch that must have come from someone's family. We passed out in our clothes for an hour or two. Then we slept together with them off. Undressed she was far sexier than her boyish clothes and awkward eagerness had forecast, and when she pulled me inside her, I felt irrationally as though I might have fallen in love. At around 4:00
A.M.
I woke up sweating and startled from a nightmare. My mother wasn't in this one. My father had died and I was sorting through his papers and clothes, and I was showing our apartment to a series of Realtors. I asked them each, Have you seen the view over Central Park? It took some effort to determine that my father was snoring in his bed a dozen blocks away, and my relief at this understanding was so overwhelming I wept uncontrollably. In the morning I was curious to find myself in a strange apartment and not in my childhood room. I heard car horns and voices outside, a doorman's whistle. I felt tired still, but in a different way, as though I'd been drugged. I noticed then what wasn't there. The buzzing. I stumbled over to the clock on her desk—9:34.

“You can go if you want,” she said from the bed.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I sort of trapped you here last night.”

There was something fragile in her eyes I hadn't yet seen.

“I'd much rather stay,” I said.

She smiled and curled into her pillow. Her feet dangled from beneath the covers.

I slipped back into bed and drew her to me so that her warm back rested against my chest. I closed my eyes, and in seconds I was out. I slept as I hadn't in years, through that whole snowy day, and when I awoke again, it was night. I threw on my pants and padded down the hallway, where I came across her reading a book on the living room sofa, legs curled beneath her. She glanced up at me. “It stopped snowing,” she said. “Shall we go get a bite?”

“Yes,” I said.

I grabbed the rest of my clothes from the bedroom. We bundled up and headed into the freezing night. On Broadway I felt the wind rip through my peacoat, all the way to my skin, and I was aware then that I had left the first stage of my life and was out in the world in a way I was never before.

Acknowledgments

There a lot of people I want to thank for their help during the writing of this book. The editors who published these stories and offered their sage advice: Jordan Bass, Hannah Tinti, Carol Edgarian, Dave Eggers, Kaui Hemming, Ed Schwarzchild, Evelyn Somers, and Michael Nye. My mentors and fellow writers inspired me and kept me on course: Tobias Wolff, Doug Unger, John L'Heureux, Nancy Packer, Frank Conroy, James McPherson, and Marilynne Robinson. I also want to thank Dan Chaon, Justin Cronin, and Jim Sullivan for their long and ever inspiring friendship. Jason Roberts, Ryan Harty, Eric Puchner, Peter Orner, Keith Scribner, Akhil Sharma, and Ray Isle have been trusted members of the inner circle. Great thanks to Anika Streitfeld, Laura Fraser, Elizabeth Bernstein, and Po Bronson for their close reads and their fellowship. David Berman, John Swomley, and Mark Weiner read countless drafts and offered brotherly love and advice. With great appreciation I want to thank the National Endowment for the Arts, the great women and men at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, and my colleagues and inspiring students at California College of the Arts. David Dodson, Sandra Murray, and Shaye Hester lent me beautiful and quiet places to work. Lisa Barbash, Joy Gould Boyum, and Carol Lamberg gave their love and belief. The tireless and generous Ellen Levine was there from the start. I also want to thank the brilliant and warm-spirited folks at Ecco, especially Dan Halpern, Karen Maine, Michael McKenzie, and the remarkable Lee Boudreaux. Thanks to my parents, Joe and Heather Barbash, and to Hilary, for all and everything.

About the Author

TOM BARBASH
is the author of the award-winning novel
The Last Good Chance
and the nonfiction book
On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11; A Story of Loss and Renewal
, which was a
New York Times
bestseller. His stories and articles have been published in
Tin House, McSweeney's, Virginia Quarterly Review
, and other publications, and have been performed on National Public Radio's
Selected Shorts
series. He currently teaches in the MFA program at California College of the Arts. He grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and now lives in Marin County, California.

 

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Also by Tom Barbash

Fiction

The Last Good Chance

 

Nonfiction

On Top of the World

Credits

Cover design by Steve Attardo

Cover photograph © by Joe Garrad

 

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publications in which the following stories first appeared: “The Break” in
Tin House
and
Distinguished Story—Best American Stories;
“Balloon Night” in
One Story
and on
Selected Shorts;
“Her Words” in
StoryQuarterly;
“Howling at the Moon” in
Chicago Tribune
(Nelson Algren Award Winner); “Somebody's Son” in
Press;
“How to Fall” in
Zyzzyva;
“Letters from the Academy” in
McSweeney's;
“January” in
Greensboro Review;
“Stay Up with Me” in
Missouri Review;
“Paris” in
South Carolina Review;
“Spectator” in
Virginia Quarterly Review;
“Birthday Girl” in
McSweeney's;
“The Women” in
Narrative, Best American Non-Required Reading.

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.