by Adam Haslett
“The usual,” I said. “I badgered homeless kids to present themselves in a professional light.”
He chuckled, and took another sip of his drink. “Well, I finished my second act,” he said.
I was headed into the bedroom to change, but stopped in the doorway. “Really?” He grinned with an openness and satisfaction I hadn’t seen in him in a long while.
“That’s great,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“It’s just a draft. But thanks.”
He followed me into the bedroom and watched me start taking off my work clothes. He’d made the bed as well, and put away the laundry. For once, there was nothing to be disappointed in. Which left me with just the feeling of the disappointment itself. I tried to let go of it as I looked for my shorts and sneakers, to shuffle the weight of it off, the semiconstant low-grade suspicion that he was inadequate. That he didn’t have enough energy. That I had to provide it for both of us. That I would resent this no matter what else he did, or how well he managed his insulin.
He was standing by the door, smiling, as if his good cheer were nothing unusual. He hadn’t gotten his hair cut in a while and it hung down over his forehead, his dark curls set off by his pale, nearly unblemished skin. His boyishness had always been part of his allure. He was thirty-one, two years older than I was, but could pass for twenty-five. The most handsome man I’d been with. And the most ardent. At the beginning. Which had made a difference—his confidence. I want you. He’d been able to say that, clearly and aloud, before he knew what my response would be. Standing on the back porch of a triple-decker in Somerville, in frigid air, while the party carried on inside behind fogged windows. He’d put his red plastic cup down before saying it, his arms at his sides, unguarded, looking right at me. I’d had no time to think. When he leaned forward, I took the kiss, and gave it back. I wasn’t interested in being seduced. I was too wary for such credulity. But Paul had seduced me.
That was three years ago, back east, when I was still getting my master’s, and he was working at the Brattle, spending his mornings on his short film. We’d come out here to San Francisco as much to leave the place we’d both grown up as anything else. We’d found an affordable apartment far from downtown, and jobs that covered our rent, groceries, and student loans. For the first couple of years this had seemed like its own achievement, requiring nothing more. Paul’s college friends Laura and Kyle came for long weekends from Boulder, and we visited them in the summer, exploring parts of the country we had never seen. For our second Thanksgiving, I persuaded my mother, Michael, and Alec to fly across the country and I produced the full meal from our galley kitchen, after which the place seemed more like a home.
When Paul drank more than a diabetic should or we argued about petty domestic things, I would employ a kind of preemptive nostalgia, filing the episodes away under the heading A Couple’s Early Years. This generous retrospective of the present leaped ahead to forgive our moments of anger and doubt, and the occasional day when the frustration and recriminations between us became grinding. It helped alleviate my sense of having been duped into believing Paul would be the person to deliver me from my family, rather than imitate it. And really it was okay, and most often better than that, being the object of his desire, sensing he would never leave me. That we were safe.
In summer, when there was more daylight, I used the track in the park, at the old polo grounds with their crumbling bleachers and weedy track. There, at least, I had a discrete lane and a clear shot. But in winter, I settled for a dead-end street nearby with barely any traffic. It would have been simpler to take up distance running, but I’d never got in the habit, or felt the satisfaction of it. I ran to move as fast as I could, to the point of no more speed to give, not just once at the end of a long run, but over and over in a rhythm: sprint, release, jog back to the line; sprint, release, jog, until my legs gave out and my chest hurt. I’d been timing myself for too long to give up the stopwatch, but I didn’t run to hit a number anymore, it just let me know how hard I could still press. There was no audience. I didn’t do meets. I wasn’t even running against my own best time, though I could have.
I kept it brief, knowing Paul was cooking, bursting hard and early on hundred-yard dashes, and running back to the line faster than my usual recovery speed. I quickened my pace the more tired I got, holding up only for the occasional passing car, or people crossing the street on their way home, a few of whom were used to me now and nodded or waved. The lamps high up the electric poles lit the street in a yellow brightness, no trees to block their glare, just the two rows of parked cars, the wide sidewalks, the barely indented strips of curb in front of the garage doors with the No Parking signs, and the shaded windows above—a couple of blocks of the Outer Sunset never more than Sunday quiet.
Eventually, my muscles gave out, and I got to that deep, whole-body fatigue that made the pain worth it.
These were the moments of the week when my mind was clearest. When the internal nagging stopped, I noticed the air and the sound of the city, and things became simple again.
I wasn’t happy. This much came as no great revelation. But my unhappiness had become mired in a routine that obscured the obvious choice, which I kept trying to avoid. I had to quit my job. Kids like Jasper didn’t get work because we hit the ratio, as my boss called it, of clients to applications, like hitting a monthly sales figure, all to ensure the state would renew our contract. If they found jobs it was because, mostly without our help, they managed not to feel so shitty about themselves for long enough to actually want a life. And that’s what I wanted to be a part of. Their feeling better.
San Francisco was lousy with therapists and social workers, but if I registered with Medi-Cal, and got the agency to give me some of their overflow of counseling referrals, I’d have as many people as I was willing to take, albeit for a pittance. I could make it on my own, if I took on enough clients. And if Paul went back to working full-time.
The fog off the ocean cloaked the lights only a few blocks ahead as I began walking home, and soon encompassed me in a cool drizzle. When I got upstairs, I went straight into the shower, and stayed under the hot water awhile.
Paul had made a vegetable stir-fry with peanut sauce, and, in a rare flourish, broiled chicken to go with it. I asked him about his good day, about how much revision he thought the new act would require, and how he wanted to move forward from here, listening to him think it out aloud, which I knew he found useful, and seemed tonight to even enjoy. I wished he would share these things more with his friends, but he’d always been hesitant about it, and counted on me as a sounding board more than anyone else. I listened for a good while, glad to sense his mood lifting.
At some point, after a pause, I mentioned what I’d been thinking about on my run.
The first thing he said was “When?”
Before I could answer, the phone rang in the living room. Our eyes met, but neither of us moved. We remained like that for a moment, as the phone rang a second and then a third time, frozen in another little episode of our ongoing struggle to control the disposition of each other’s bodies. The daily tussle of two people in a small space, opening and closing doors, navigating a kitchen and bathroom, nudging and reaching over and gently pushing, often with affection but often too with this petty resistance.
After the third ring, Paul was the one who stood, and walked into the other room. He told whoever it was to hold on. Then he returned to the kitchen, took his seat opposite me, and, picking up his knife and fork with great deliberation, said, “Michael.”
“I told you about her—Bethany—from the record store, the Aphex Twin fan, we had the drink at the Middle East last week, and I called her the next day and we had pizza that night in Kenmore? I told you about it, that we were together for five hours and she told me everything, about just getting out of the hospital, and her parents not wanting to talk to her, but that her mother was sick and she needed to go back to Cleveland to see her, remember?
�
��It was like we were in a relationship right away, she trusted me that much, and she said she thought she might love me, and I told her all about Dad and Caleigh, and she said she wished I could come to Cleveland with her, but that her parents think everyone she’s met in Boston is part of the problem, and that she just needs to go back and get into school there. But then after that, after I talked to you, I’ve seen her every day since then, except Tuesday—I had a temp gig. And she told me she wasn’t going to be leaving right away, which was obviously a huge relief, because she needed to get her rent money together first, so I felt relieved, like we weren’t racing toward some kind of deadline.
“Because at that point we still hadn’t really said anything official to each other, and we hadn’t slept together, because I didn’t want to pressure her, she’s obviously in a transitional state. And I didn’t want to bring her back to Ben’s anyway, because then he’d ask questions about her, and I just didn’t want to deal with all that. But I did take her home on the T to Allston not last night but the night before. With no ulterior motive. But we were still talking when we got there, and she asked me up to her place, and I did actually end up spending the night, not in her bed, on the floor, on her roommate’s air mattress, and obviously I didn’t sleep, but around dawn, she did reach out and take my hand, and we actually did end up getting together that night. Or that morning. Which, I didn’t even know if that would happen, because she’s been mostly with women, but she said I was different, and that she was so glad we’d met, that no one had ever listened to her the way I did, and we went out afterwards for bagels, and spent the rest of the morning together until I went home to get meds. Which was yesterday.
“And then we were supposed to get together tonight in Central Square at seven o’clock, and I called her to confirm but there was no answer. Not for hours. And when I finally got her roommate, her roommate said she was out and she didn’t know where she was. Which is when I tried you at work. But anyway, obviously I just went to where we’d agreed to meet, and I waited two and a half hours figuring she was just late, but she never showed up, she just didn’t show up. And when I call her roommate’s now I get the answering machine—I’ve left three messages already—but I don’t have any other number for her, so I’m thinking of going over there now, but it’s close to midnight, and by the time I walk to the T, get over there, and figure out what’s going on, I’d miss the last train back, but I don’t know what else to do. What should I do?”
Across the street, a young couple with a fancy stroller passed under the streetlight, returning home from dinner at one of the places up on Irving, and it struck me our mother would never have been out this late with a baby.
“You just have to give her space,” I said. “You shouldn’t go over there now. She probably just needs a day off. You should go to bed.”
“I can’t go to bed, something’s happened. She’s been late before, but she’s always showed up, and now nothing, which means either she’s in some kind of danger, or—and I don’t even want to think about this—she’s decided to end everything between us, maybe because of something I said that I didn’t realize offended her, or she was just lying to me and doesn’t care at all, which I just couldn’t stand, it would just be a nightmare, so it’s not as if I can sleep, but I just don’t know if I should go over there now, or if that could make things worse and I should just white-knuckle it until the morning. That’s what I’m trying to decide.”
“I just said to you that you shouldn’t go over there.”
“But I can’t decide if I should or not.”
I could hear Paul rinsing his plate in the sink. He hadn’t waited for me, and I didn’t blame him.
“Michael.”
“What?”
“This isn’t about her.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve talked about it. The panic, it isn’t about her.”
“That may be—I’m not opposed to that thesis—but she’s the only solution to it, there’s no other solution.”
“You met her a week ago.”
“Yeah. What difference does that make? I’m as in love with her as I’ve ever been with anybody.”
“That’s absurd, and you know it is.”
“Right, then. Well. I thought at least you’d empathize—being abandoned like that.”
“You haven’t been abandoned. She flaked on one date. She just got out of a psych ward, you slept together for the first time last night, and what is she? Nineteen? And you’re thirty-one—”
“Twenty, she turned twenty last month.”
I closed my eyes, and saw him there in his room at Ben’s, his heart racing like a bird’s. He would have already talked to Caleigh about all this for a couple of hours at least, but that wasn’t enough. As soon as he’d gotten off the phone with her, he’d dialed my number.
Nothing I could say would help. It wasn’t for my advice that he’d called, no matter what he told himself. Tomorrow my mother would phone and ask if I’d spoken to him, and tell me that she was worried about him, about this Bethany woman, and how upset he seemed, as if it were a new and wholly discrete problem. And after that Alec and I would compare notes, gauging together how serious the episode was, to no more fruitful an end than measuring it against our own tolerance for more of the same.
“And she doesn’t care about my age anyway, she said so, she said that I understood her better than anyone she’d ever met, and that I listened to her more than anyone. And I don’t have any problem with her being twenty. If we really understand each other, none of that matters. We could move in together while she’s finishing school, and I can help her with her work, and with dealing with her parents. I think that’s the plan, we haven’t talked about it fully, but I think she’s open to that, and at this point I need that to happen, I can’t wait any longer, which maybe it’s harder for you to get, being with Paul, but Bethany is perfect—I know you think that isn’t possible—and I don’t mean she’s a perfect human being, but when am I going to meet someone that much younger than me who’s willing to share their life with me, and reads James Baldwin? Who isn’t Caleigh. She said she wants me to help her with her thesis, and then help her get into grad school. But if something’s happened now, or her roommate or someone else—her parents maybe—are starting to talk to her about me, and maybe turn her against me, I have to talk to her, it’s the only way. I guess if I miss the last train, I could take a taxi home, I could definitely take a taxi. But you think I shouldn’t. That I should just wait?”
My food would be cold by now, but I wasn’t hungry anymore. In fact, I didn’t feel much of anything but the ache in my thighs from the sprints. The straining to be there for him, to be as close as I could to sitting next to him on the edge of his bed, hooking myself into each phrase and turn of his worry—it gave out eventually, as it always did, into blankness.
Most often, I just started saying, “Uh-huh,” agreeing with him however tendentious he got, and after a while I could beg off, having sympathized, if only by ceasing to argue. But tonight he was threatening to leave his room at midnight in a panic, which would only get worse when he reached her empty apartment or her roommate asked him to leave. He couldn’t protect himself from the impulse, even if he glimpsed its desperation. And so the only thing to do was wait it out, to stay on the phone talking about Bethany, asking him more about their week together, hearing if not listening once more to his dread fantasies of why she hadn’t appeared. Which is what I did.
Long after I had tired of it, so did Michael. Not enough that he wanted to stop talking about her, but a bit. Enough to drain the energy he would have needed to get out of the house.
“I guess I could just wait and try calling her again in the morning,” he said, finally.
I told him that sounded like a good idea, and that I hoped he would get some sleep.
“Trouble in paradise?”
Paul stood with his back to me at the sink, doing the dishes. When next we squabbled, he might bring
this up, his having cooked and cleaned. He was banking domestic credit.
His question was snide, though not as mean as it sounded. He liked Michael. He enjoyed his company. He just thought that I indulged him. His own sister he spoke to once every three or four months. She had problems, but for whatever reason, they weren’t his. Likewise his parents, who were divorced and single. His family seemed, more than anything, incurious about one another. As if they’d known one another well in the past but had moved on now and resented, without saying as much, the need to keep up. It wasn’t so terribly unusual. Or, for that matter, pathological. I just simply couldn’t imagine it. Having the option to disattend.
“He was pretty worked up,” I said. In the cupboard, I found a recycled takeout container and put what was left of my dinner in it for lunch the next day. “Sorry about the meal.”
“No worries.”
“What I was saying before—”
“You want me to work full-time again.”
He said it flatly, without anger or apparent consent. He knew as well as I did that his working more was the only way I could afford to attempt my own practice. At least at the beginning. He’d known it all along. We had discussed it.
“I don’t mean next week,” I said.
He’d begun to sweep the kitchen floor. I wished he’d just fight me in the open, rather than going quiet, resentment staying crouched in his throat, waiting but never pouncing. But I did it, too. Always cautious, lest an argument break out that we couldn’t control.
Later, he took his book into the bedroom and lay down to read. He didn’t look up from the page as I came in and undressed. But when I sat on the edge of the bed and put a hand flat on his chest, in peace, he set the book aside and rested his hand on top of mine.
