Stay With Me (19 page)

And so, before he arrives to get looked over, I take my secret out and examine it. I like him the way I have never liked Ben, which makes me sad for Ben, but it's too glaringly true to ignore. I like Eamon the way I might have liked Gyula, if he'd ever wanted to be friends with me. A combination of curiosity, alarm, and flat-out glee.

Okay, then. I can live with this. Even without knowing anything about what Eamon's hidden away. I doubt that the way he likes me involves any alarm or glee, more a kind of reluctance, but it's enough that he might or would like me at all. If I were totally different—smarter, older, whatever.

T
HE VISIT FOR
E
AMON TO MEET
my wannabe parents takes place on a Sunday afternoon. A family friend agrees to spend an hour or so with Mr. Greyhalle, who doesn't need chronic observation so much as company. We come back from the mountains early and Clare goes out to buy chocolates and pumpkin bread. Raphael promises me no one will be
awful.

"You're very good to let me worry about you," he says.

"Yes," I say, thinking that if he can keep on making Clare happy I'll let him do anything.

Eamon's talent for putting people at ease, which I first observed at Acca, also appears here. It turns out that the last TV show he worked on was one of Raphael's favorites. The show about aliens, monsters, and fighting evil was, they tell me, a huge hit with what Raphael calls
inept science types.

"Well, no wonder I never heard of it," Clare says. "I'm not a genius science type."

I love Clare for transforming Raphael's
inept
into
genius.

"She didn't have cable until two years ago," Raphael says to Eamon.

Because Rebecca insisted. I remember that discussion when my sisters moved in together.

"Leila's not a big fan either," Eamon says. "Do you even like movies, bunny?"

"Everyone likes them," I say, trying to think of the last one I saw. "Of course."

"She's like my mother," Clare says. "Loyal to the stage."

"It's a dying art," Eamon says. "Even my father will tell you that."

"What did Janie always say?" Raphael asks Clare. "Only a dying art can demand your whole life?"

Eamon tells us that while this may be an admirable point of view, he has nonetheless invited some people to his father's for me to meet. A production designer because I like to build sets and a producer, who is a lot like Charlotte, although she works in TV Movies also. I may find, he says, that only working in theater is limiting.

"Leila seems very ambitious," he says to Clare and Raphael.

I'm not, but they both agree with him so quickly that I wonder. Well, there are things I want, goals I have, and I do work to get them. I thought only people like Clare or my mother, with easy-to-spot careers, were ambitious, but I see how it might fit for me too.

Clare says that from the moment I saw my first play, I announced that I was moving into the theater. I have no memory of this, but it feels right. Eamon is telling them that when we first met, I was reading a book for school and,

"I've never seen anyone quite so intent on conquering something," he says. "Very impressive."

"She's always been really determined," Raphael says.

I wish they would stop discussing me like this. Enough already.

"You know, when I was seventeen, I was wandering around India," Eamon says. "Looking for my life."

Apparently a common thing to do in India, for they have a little discussion about temples, chanting, and the benefits of travel over meditation.

"I went to Thailand and Cambodia after college," Raphael says. "I almost stayed. What finally brought you home?"

"I met one too many people who thought searching was living," Eamon says. "I promised myself I would finish school and always have a job."

"I came back for grad school," Raphael says. "Work's very handy when you're looking for meaning."

"That's true even in television," Eamon says.

"Rebecca used to go to an ashram in Massachusetts," Clare says. "She thought of maybe going to India one day."

Something in her voice catches and Eamon quickly steers the conversation away from Rebecca and her useless plans for the future.

"So my thoughts were that if I can help Leila meet people who can really help her..." he says. "Well, you know, that would, that would be good."

He may be making Clare comfortable enough to have an unguarded Rebecca moment, but he's not having nearly the easy time he had when he was last here. Raphael asks how Eamon's father is doing. Which is how I find out that Mr. Greyhalle is seventy-one. How can he be only four years older than Da? Mr. Greyhalle's already had cancer, broken his hip, contracted viral pneumonia, and almost started a fire by forgetting to turn the stove off. When Eamon says,
Dad's just got old age catching up with him
I think my heart is going to stop.

"It's a lifetime of bad habits," Eamon says.

Well, Da has good habits. Does he? Doesn't he? If anything happens to Da, my life will crack into a much bigger
new now
than it did when Rebecca died. I remind myself that my mother is with him. I calm down. Eamon is saying,

"My father's not ready to hire help, so I'm the next best thing,"

"That's got to be stressful," Raphael says. "Does he resent your helping him?"

"The stress is nothing compared to turning a Japanese cartoon into an American episodic," Eamon says.

I recognize a nonanswer when I hear it and I know how much Rebecca would have liked him. I also understand—as clearly as I know anything—that if she were still alive, Eamon and I would never have met. Why is it that the things I know give me a bigger headache than the things I don't.

The visit ends with Eamon's drawing a floor plan of the monster-haunted castle from his old TV show and Raphael making a beautiful drawing of the DNA in the disease his lab is analyzing.

"Well, it was very nice to meet you," Eamon says, standing up. "And not nearly as awkward as when I met my prom date's parents."

"Yeah, sorry about that," Raphael says.

"No, not at all," Eamon says. "You should know her friends."

And just as he is smiling at me, Clare, obviously possessed by one of the aliens from his show, says,

"We weren't vetting you or anything. I mean, we trust Leila to make her own decisions about dating.'

"Okay, now I feel awkward," Eamon says. "Is this where I need to tell you I have a girlfriend?"

"You do?" This comes out all shocked-sounding, and I decide I must also be possessed.

"Not helping," Eamon says to me.

"No, look, I'm sorry," Clare says. "Really, all I meant is that, in this state at least, you know, the age of consent is seventeen."

"Also not helpful," Raphael says.

Clare looks from Raphael to Eamon and then back to Raphael, who starts to laugh. Clare looks horrified with herself for being so weird. Age of consent? Hello,
there has to be sex involved before that becomes important. And before that he'd have to ask me out.

For that matter, I was still months away from seventeen when Ben and I slept together. Did he break the age of consent, or does being the same age give you an escape clause? Funny that there should be laws about all this.

"I'm sure that's useful to know," Eamon says. "But what with my father and work, I'm kind of overly occupied for dating."

And yet he was not too occupied in April. And May. Does this mean he's lying now or didn't mean it then when he said he wanted to take me out to dinner? Or did dinner and going from there not mean
dating
? Dinner, presumably, would be legal at any age.

It doesn't matter. He's called me ambitious and impressive. He's sat here for an hour. He wants to introduce me to people whose work I might learn from. I've had great friends, but Eamon is outdoing himself.

"I'm so sorry," Clare says again. "That came out all wrong. Rest assured, Leila will kill me as soon as you leave."

"Are you kidding?" Eamon asks. "She thinks you walk on the moon. Nothing you say to me is going to change that."

Clare looks at once embarrassed and pleased. I'll always be in Eamon's debt for being the one to tell Clare that she's important to me.

Before my parents left, I remember being slightly alarmed by how indirectly news flowed to and from Clare, Da, Raphael, and even William. But now, this business of giving and receiving information through third parties makes sense. Or feels familiar. It is, I'm certain, part of why I know anything about Eamon. Why I've been able to be friends with him. It's all taken place softly, the way being with Rebecca
did.

I could see almost right away that Eamon kind of clams up under direct questioning. However, thanks to my sisters, I'm very good at getting information from people who guard it. Since my return from Poland, I've learned where Eamon went to college, the names of his eleventh grade English teacher, his first girlfriend, and his brothers, ages forty-seven, forty-five, and forty.

Eamon's mother was Mr. Greyhalle's second wife (there were two after her) and she now lives in Boston, where she teaches third grade. Her parents, dead for almost twenty years, lived in Ireland, and Eamon is named after his grandfather.

"She was supposed to be Dad's trophy wife," Eamon said about his mother. "But she had the wrong personality."

It's amazing what people will tell you when you are in the midst of discussing their work. Work does not make him quiet. He has a lot to say about television—its function as entertainment, why he can't write for sitcoms, what you lose with a mass audience and what you gain. Buried and revealed in all this are tiny details about him, which are important to me. Because, like Clare, he is important.

Interesting how all the people I love have work at the center of their lives. Work which is the biggest piece of who they are. My mother, Janie, Clare, and especially Da, if you look at his
save the world
jobs. Not Rebecca, though.

Although she worked long, hard hours both at the hospice and the bakery, I never felt that she was passionately attached to either. Perhaps my sister was just unlucky and never found her version of Mom's lab or Janie's lights. Maybe she should have kept looking, a thought that clearly failed to occur to her.

A
T THE START OF
A
UGUST
, Charlotte decides to stay with the revival that's losing money but pull out of the Isaac Rebinsehn play. She feels terrible, since this is the first time she won't play a critical role in bringing his work to Broadway. However, Isaac has already caused one director to quit and the actors he wants are, in Charlotte's view,
all wrong.

"Ever since that monster-hit in London, Isaac's abandoned the concept of a group effort," Charlotte says. "The Brits ruined him."

Although her accountant calls it misguided loyalty, Charlotte insists on lining up money people (called
angels
) to replace the amount she's pulling out. As for the rest of her job—doing everything that matters other than investing the money—she says her partners can find someone else to do all of the work for all of the blame.

"I feel old," she tells me. "It used to be I stayed ahead of change much better than this."

Eamon's father, who still goes to his office for two or three hours in the mornings, calls her, trying to broker a peace.

"Listen, Theodore," I hear her say. "You're too late for that."

There are other projects in the pipeline, and the phone never shuts up. Underneath the din, though, one can sense Charlotte's quiet gloom. It's clear that one huge drawback of having work that matters to you is that it can break your heart as easily as a great love gone wrong.

On the day of Eamon's dinner party, I get a letter in a blue airmail envelope. It's not from my mother, who writes every week, but an address in London.

Dear Leila (if I may), Thank you for your note, which was just now forwarded to me at my flat here. I will be back at Hopkins by mid-October and would be more than happy to meet with you at any time thereafter. You are certainly welcome at my home or office, but if necessary I could come to the city. Rebecca's death came as a shock and I cannot even begin to fathom your loss. Please know that my thoughts are with you and Clare during this time. I look forward to meeting you upon my return. Cordially, Adrien.

At the bottom of the page, he has written his e-mail address, his two numbers in Baltimore, and a number in London, with the words
rarely in
next to it.

I was right, I think. He knows Rebecca's death has been a loss. Adrien Tilden is a sign I saw because I wanted to, but that doesn't mean he isn't also a real one. And yet I have to face the fact that if he knew anything, he'd have written it. Or phoned. But maybe it's a small thing he isn't sure caused it, but that I'll recognize as being ... what?

I'm really grasping here and read the note again. He knows Clare's name. Is that proof that he knew Rebecca even better than I'd hoped? I reach for the phone and dial Clare's office.

"Honey, knowing who I am doesn't mean much," she says after I've read her the note.

"Are you sure?" I ask. Only those who know me well have heard my sisters' names.

"There are people I've worked with in Germany and all over Budapest who know I had a sister named Rebecca," Clare says. "I don't think any of them know me. Not in an important way."

"I just can't believe Rebecca didn't talk to someone," I say. "It's not natural to make that big of a plan all alone."

"I know," Clare says. "I wish she hadn't."

This, as usual, is pointless.

"I have to go," I say. "And pour myself into that dress of yours."

Said dress is dark blue with thin shoulder straps and tiny pearl buttons along the sides. It is, my sister has assured me,
casual but elegant.
Even after taking it to the tailor for letting out, it looks like it has been sewn onto my body. There's just so much of me.

My legs and arms are all endlessly long, and if I could I'd tape my breasts down. I'm not
super skinny
the way anyone this tall should be, so I have to settle for
good enough.
There's room for improvement in every female body, and as my mother never tires of saying, if I didn't need a bra I'd be unhappy about that.