The Overdue Life of Amy Byler

by Kelly Harms

  We go out for drinks afterward and talk nonstop at a low table in a dark corner. It’s just a glass of wine each, consumed over two hours of talking, but something about my stomach is tight and high, like the wine has been pushed straight into my bloodstream, like I am at once drinking on an empty stomach and couldn’t eat another bite. People clear out and the bar sits empty, but the bartender reassures us twice that they are open for three more hours. We are talking about Antony and Cleopatra, the sequel of sorts to what we just saw, and I say something about Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra being a strange kind of style icon and how a bright student once pointed out the perversity of a white woman shellacked orange to play a brown-skinned ideal of beauty. I muse aloud about how her movie made box office records in a time when people still called some grown men boy in many corners of this country. And then I talk about how The Help could have been a YA novel if it had had slightly different marketing and how I got a disciplinary warning for assigning Coffee Will Make You Black to my seventh graders. And now I’m basically free-associating about books set in the 1960s, and then he takes me by the hand and says, “This is exactly how it happened.”

  His tone is so different from just a moment ago that I sit back and pull my hand away. “How what happened?” I ask. Are we talking about serpents’ eggs or Cleopatra’s milk baths or how he wouldn’t let me pay for my own dinner?

  He shakes his head. “You must know what I mean,” he says. “How you seduced me. When we first met.” He locks eyes with me, and I swear there’s something desperate in them. Something just a bit . . . hungry.

  I cough. I sputter. “I have never, in my entire life, seduced a single person.” I am trying to keep our conversation light, but it is not feeling light at all.

  Daniel inclines his head. “What do you think you’re doing right now? Sitting there looking beautiful and saying all kinds of interesting things. Of course I want to kiss you all the time. It’s very frustrating.”

  I incline my head back at him in surprise, mirroring his behavior. “Thank you?” I ask. “I mean, I’m not actually sure. Was that a compliment or a criticism?”

  He sets down his long-empty wineglass with a little clunk. “It’s . . . it’s a little bit of both. Amy, you are beautiful. You’re so fun to talk to. But you’re making my life very difficult lately.”

  My eyes widen. “But! The friend thing was your idea,” I tell him.

  He nods. “And it was a smart idea. You’re on your sex-spree momspringa thing, but I’m not having a . . . a dadspringa. I’ve been trying to protect myself. But you must know—must have always known—that just friends wasn’t what I really wanted.”

  I shake my head. “If being friends was a ruse, it was your ruse. I always thought that we should just have a doomed affair.”

  Daniel thinks it over. “But that doesn’t sound very good either.”

  I put my hands up, as if to say, You didn’t come up with anything better.

  He sighs and looks at me imploringly. “We’ve got to figure this out. I haven’t felt like this about anyone in a long time, Amy. It feels intractable. You’re very smart about the things I like to think about. You say the most interesting things about books. You’re always going around winking at life, and great ideas come to you like you’re snapping your fingers. And your kids sound amazing and your friends are devoted and you are so, so beautiful to look at and it seems like you’re just getting prettier the longer we’re friends, which . . . how does that seem fair to you?”

  My mouth glues shut. I try not to drown in his compliments. “That’s a very nice thing to say,” I finally choke out.

  Daniel shakes his head. “I had such a solid plan to keep you at arm’s length.”

  I feel dizzy and confused. I’ve lost control of the conversation. It feels like a fever dream. Daniel reaches for my hands on the table again, but this time I don’t pull away.

  “I don’t want to be kept at arm’s length,” I tell him. “I feel fidgety when you’re around. You make me nervous and excited. This whole time I’ve been hoping that you’d change your mind and just, I don’t know, grab me and kiss me?”

  He checks my eyes to see if I’m serious. Then, slowly, he puts his free hand on my cheek. Traces it to my lips. Tilts up my chin.

  I open my mouth to say no. To remind him that I don’t want him to get hurt, that I’ll be gone at the end of the summer no matter what happens between us tonight. But no words come out.

  He looks at me a little helplessly. “I think I’m going to kiss you,” he whispers. “And worry about it tomorrow.”

  I exhale. “Oh, thank god,” I say. And then, because I can’t resist it for even one more second, I lean forward and close the last six inches between our lips myself.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Dear Mom,

  I bought that book you told me about. It was made into a movie, just so you know, but I clicked right past the DVD on Amazon and bought the book instead because I am a wonderful, dutiful daughter. It looks really boring. Who falls in love with a paraplegic? Wait, is the “friend” you mentioned in your last email a paraplegic? Also, is that “friend” a “boyfriend”? I know you are trying to be all stealthy, but it is the first “he” you’ve mentioned this summer, and if this is “his” daughter’s favorite book, does that mean you’ve met his kids? Is it serious? Is this my new daddy? I wish you could just give me one tiny crumb of information.

  Speaking of not telling Dad, Joe and I are both super nervous about our camp weeks. I don’t know if you realize this, but the last time Joe was on a plane was when we all went to Arches National Park when he was seven. He doesn’t remember how layovers work, and now he’s flying all by himself to Alabama with a stop in Atlanta. He’s freaked out. He doesn’t want to seem ungrateful to Dad, but all he remembers from that last trip is how Dad lost his shit in the Chili’s to-go area when me and Joe were bickering, and Dad went off by himself to have a beer, and then we missed our connection, and we all got stuck in Las Vegas overnight. I think it may have deeply affected Joe’s ideas about air travel.

  So I am secretly making him a map of the Atlanta airport with the gates he’s most likely to have to travel between. Also, next time we talk I’m going to check with you and see if it’s ok for me to slip Joe my phone when he leaves. We aren’t supposed to have our phones with us at all during the day at Team USA camp, and anyway I don’t have any friends there to text with, and I’m pretty sure no one will want to hang out with the youngest, worst diver there (that’s me). If I want to talk to anyone from home, I can snap on my iPad from my dorm room.

  If Joe has my phone, I think he’ll be much less worried about worst-case scenarios. And I told him, if he gets stuck in Atlanta (or Las Vegas), all he has to do is call you, and you’ll probably charter a plane to get him home.

  Or . . . another option, just a spur-of-the-moment thought, just popped into my head: I could give Joe my phone to keep, and Dad could buy me the new iPhone with the 3-D camera that just came out. And since I know you are thinking it, no, twelve is not too young to own a phone. He likes to spend his free time solving math problems, Mom, so I think it’s safe to say his childhood is basically over, if it ever happened at all. Besides, when I was twelve, everyone I knew already had a phone, and they made fun of me for being “almost Amish.” (I may have mentioned that at the time?)

  Anyway, I guess I’ll check that with you too. Or . . . maybe it would be better if I just run it past Dad?

  Love,

  Your evil (but brilliant) daughter, Cori, who, let’s face it, will probably be texting you from a new phone by tomorrow.

  —

  Talia:

  Daniel AGAIN?

  Amy:

  Yes, Daniel again.

  Talia:

  Lena, are you hearing this?

  Lena:

  ’Fraid so.

  Talia:

  What are we going to do with her?

  Lena:

  Plan their wedding.

 
Amy:

  HUSH YOUR MOUTH

  Ooh hold on I think he’s awake.

  I put my phone down on the nightstand in a hurry. Facedown because I know those two will be at it for a while now.

  It’s not fast enough.

  Daniel rolls over, grabs the hand that was a moment ago holding my phone, and pulls it around him. I let him, snuggle closer, smell his chest. He yawns. “You’re worse than my students with that phone,” he says. “First thing in the morning, really?”

  I open my mouth to defend myself but then close it again. He’s right. I feel like a nineteen-year-old. I just woke up in bed with my crush. My arm is around him. His arm is around me, lower. His skin is hot. Waking up next to him makes me a strange combination of giddy and drowsy.

  “I was excited,” I finally confess. “You’re very cute.”

  He smiles. “You are a knockout. And I have to admit, I am very pleased that you’re still here. Last time I woke up while you were rolling my sleeping body out the door.”

  “Yes, but that time was a mistake. Last night wasn’t a mistake. Just so you know. I wasn’t drunk. I knew what I was doing.”

  “You knew what you were doing the other time too. I am sure of it. Consent is kind of my fetish.”

  I nod. Of course I knew before too. We were tipsy, but I was all for it in the moment. I just didn’t know how weird it would feel in the morning. “This time I don’t feel as, like, shocked by myself. This was premeditated.”

  “First-degree seduction?” asks Daniel.

  “It was the shirt,” I say. I gesture to the translucent top I had on last night, which is now flung to the farthest corner of the bedroom. “I think it was supposed to go over another shirt.”

  “It was not the shirt,” he tells me. “It was the you being you.”

  I smile. Then I frown. “Are we going to do this again?”

  “Do what? The sex? I certainly hope so.”

  I blush. “Well, yes. Or the, um, not-friendship thing.”

  Daniel looks down at me. “I would very much like to be not friends with you.”

  I sigh heavily. “I am going back to PA in five weeks. I’m worried about how we’ll feel when it’s time to say goodbye.”

  Daniel nods. “I am going back to work in five weeks. And I’m one hundred percent sure it will be awful to say goodbye.”

  “Phooey,” I say.

  “Indeed,” he agrees.

  We are both silent for a very long time.

  Then I try, “We could accomplish a lot in five weeks. I once read the complete works of George Sands in a month.”

  “As worthy as that pursuit would be, I would rather try something else during the time we have left.”

  “Edgar Allan Poe?”

  “I’m thinking more along the lines of an ancient Sanskrit text.”

  I shake my head at him. “The Kama Sutra is a surprisingly long book. We’d never make it past Marking with Nails.”

  “We could just skip to the illustrations.”

  “Good idea. That would free up time to see more plays. Hear some music, too, maybe. Go to the MoMA and the Guggenheim.”

  “Order in breakfast and read the new-releases section over coffee?” he suggests.

  “My god, yes,” I tell him. “A thousand times yes.”

  “Ok, I’ll call for delivery. My treat, since I have ten thousand a year,” he quips as he stands up. Some combination of his naked butt and his picking up on my Austen reference and shooting one back makes me swoony.

  “Wait. Daniel—tell them to deliver it in a half hour,” I tell him. He looks back at me and sees the glint in my eyes.

  “Forty-five minutes,” he amends and is back in my arms three minutes later.

  —

  I’d like to tell you what follows over the next month is a Nora Ephron montage. I’d like to say that Daniel and I tilt our heads sideways at sculpture gardens and walk over Central Park bridges a couple of times and laugh and throw popcorn at each other at the Film Forum and then suddenly we are in love and we both know it. But what transpires between us after that night is something at once less picturesque and more binding. We go to the museums but don’t stop talking long enough to actually look carefully at the art. We spend too long trying to decide where to eat until we get hangry and have to go to Gray’s Papaya for hot dogs. We wait on the platform for a train for thirty minutes, run out of things to talk about to pass the time, start playing Words with Friends, get stuck on an X, and then lose ourselves again in a conversation about the etymology of the word relax and the merits of Zoolander as a touchstone of generational connection. We climb onto subway cars that look blissfully empty, and then it turns out that they are being used as a toilet by homeless persons. Or the air-conditioning is broken. Or, in one truly upsetting instance, a mariachi band is practicing in that car, never moving along but just starting their set over and over and over again for timing.

  It rains every day for a week, and we lie around Talia’s apartment reading first chapters of YA novels we think might work for the Flexthology, and we hardly talk at all for several hours when Daniel is reading Jacqueline Woodson for the first time and I’m reading The Girl Who Drank the Moon. We get lost in Chinatown and end up in a restaurant we realize only after ordering has a C rating from the health department. We plan to go to the park for a walk and end up drinking martinis all day in the Plaza instead.

  We don’t talk about the future, at all. We talk about our lives and everything that makes them full and meaningful, but we behave as though September is never coming and we will be traipsing through hundred-degree subway tunnels for the rest of our days. The only time we even slightly bump up against future plans is when we take video calls from Kathryn, who is getting ready to roll out her Flexthology pilot in Chicago. With her, there will be a first day of school, and it will feature this project we’re all so invested in. But for Daniel and me, it is forever August.

  Then one day, the sanitation department goes on strike, and the garbage begins to build up on the sidewalks, and the stolen kisses on side streets in the twenties become an exercise in rat spotting. And when you are with someone so wonderful that an actual rat running across your foot on the street does not ruin your mood, you realize: I’ve gone and fallen in love. Every day we say, “We should spend tomorrow apart, because we are grown adults, not teenagers on spring break.” And then every night we say, “Well, maybe tomorrow.”

  His daughter, Cassandra, Snapchats him a lot from her mom’s house in Westchester, where she spends her summer. And by a lot, I mean constantly. She sends pictures of every meal, asks for movie recommendations when he hasn’t been to a movie theater in a year, asks him if her mom was pretty when she was pregnant, and then tells him ten minutes later, “Don’t worry Dad I’m on my ●.”

  I watch in amazement every time he pulls out his phone—it’s always her, asking random questions about anything. This girl thinks her father knows everything. I am starting to think the same. He dabbles in New York architecture, can name the different kinds of clouds filling the skyline, and explains the origins of every one of those special honorary street names like Jerry Orbach Way (53rd Street) and Billie Holiday Place (139th) whenever we pass them. His favorite is called Martin Gold Avenue, after a very charitable-sounding activist for seniors who painted over graffitied mailboxes in the Bronx for his considerably long life. “He also wrote a lot of worked-up letters to his congressmen,” Daniel tells me. “I’m not sure how effective he was.”

  I say, “Well, I have never noticed a single graffitied mailbox in the Bronx,” and he says, “Have you ever been to the Bronx?” and the next thing I know we are on the 4 train uptown to meet his daughter for lunch.

  —

  Daniel’s daughter is very beautiful. Intimidatingly so. I say this as the mother of a girl whose beauty is so deep and wide that people often notice little else. “She’s so pretty,” they tell me the moment she is out of earshot, and they sound surprised. Cori is quite prett
y, but most of the time I see her as a girl in an unflattering swim cap, with strong shoulders and thighs from diving, taking earbuds out of her ears and striding up a ladder with purpose set into every feature on her face. Or I see her wrapping her hair in dechlorinator, wearing fuzzy pajamas, flopping on my bed and telling me what to wear and making fun of my shoes. She is not an object of beauty, like a vase or a fine tapestry, but more of an object in motion. I’m sure the same can be said of Cassandra, but what I see are Daniel’s gorgeous cheekbones, plus jet-black hair and the body of a ballerina. She is sitting in the little Vietnamese restaurant waiting at a four-top when we arrive, and she looks up from her phone and then back again and then takes a picture of us just like that. I am startled and unnerved.

  “This is her, eh?” she says to Daniel as he slides around and gives her a hug. I am not sure if I should pretend not to be there or what.

  Daniel laughs and says, “In the flesh: Amy Byler.” He gestures to me sideways, like I am the prize on a game show. “Sexy librarian, mother of two, bringer of your father out of a very long dry spell.”

  “She’s cute enough. She lives in the country?” she asks her dad. Not once has she looked directly at me, and even so, I can feel a bit of animosity heading my way. Well. Daniel did mention she had sharp edges.

  “Yes. And she’s going back there in less than a month, so don’t get attached.” All this time I am standing there feeling like my limbs are growing longer and longer and my knuckles will soon hit the ground and I will eventually turn into a boneless puddle and wash away on the floor.

  “So I shouldn’t call her Mom?” asks Cassandra.

  “At this rate she may ask you to call her a cab,” quips Daniel.

  I cannot bear it any longer, so I clear my throat. They both turn to me as though I just walked in. “I’m going to go ahead and take off my invisibility cloak now!” I announce. “I’m sorry to have eavesdropped on you for so long—honestly I forgot I had the damn thing on.” I pantomime taking off a big cape and draping it on my chair and then sit down opposite Cassandra. I stick out my hand to shake.