Stay With Me

by Garret Freymann-Weyr

  "You know, if you want to wait," he says.

  "Oh, God, this again," I say. "You want to wait until I'm twenty?"

  "Leila, no, not quite," he says. "Not really at all, although, well, of course we can."

  He doesn't sound very convinced, which I think is worth noticing.

  "We'll wait until we know we want to," he says, adding with a laugh, "until you know. I obviously know."

  "I've wanted to since we shook hands at Acca," I say, wondering if he really thinks I don't already know. "I was all, wow."

  One look at his face—startled and slightly embarrassed—tells me that this is the sort of information one keeps to oneself. It could be worse. I could have told him that my body is the one thing in life which I completely trust.

  It breaks out in hives when unhappy. It demands that I eat food I love on a daily basis. In spite of the needing a bra issue, it looks nice in certain clothes. My body's beating heart and coiled bliss were what told me that being in a dark theater was the closest I would get to heaven. The chronic headache that faded after months with my tutor let me know I might find a way to be dyslexic and live. Out here in the world.

  My body gets up every day and falls asleep when it's had it. It's my best self and mine to keep or share. Waiting won't change that.

  "You were all, wow?" Eamon asks, looking a bit recovered.

  "I think the words I used were zing-zang-zoom," I say, and we are back to flirting, which is nice, as I hadn't known you could do that with your boyfriend.

  "My words were please, please help me find a way to ask this girl out," he says. "And all I had to do was read a book."

  Right, of course. He read that book so he could date me. It wasn't to be nice or because he was interested. I totally missed that. I wonder what else he's done with a motive I didn't see.

  I was badly prepared by that biology class. In theory, it sounded easy. And this is fairly easy because it's with Eamon. But what if it was with someone you didn't know as well? Is that the point? That you only sleep with someone you can have the talk with? That seems reasonable, but only in theory.

  "Does everyone have this conversation before?" I ask. "About waiting and stuff?"

  For once I'm glad that I don't have the right words, because other than AIDS I'm not sure what I mean by stuff.

  "It's supposed to happen naturally," Eamon says.

  Ben insisted on talking about it months before we needed to because his brother told him that if I got pregnant, his life would be over. He made me feel like I was putting him in danger. And then, when it was time, I was the one who had to say, Wait.

  "It's a talk women usually start," Eamon says. "Which explains why I'm doing it badly."

  I think of the things I've learned by accident—when to accept jewelry and what to order—and know I'm glad to be learning how to negotiate the where, the when, and the importance of sex.

  "You're doing fine," I say.

  "Good, thanks," he says. "So are you."

  "Will we be graded?" I ask.

  "We'll be judged," he says. "That'll be enough."

  Clare gives me a new set of rules. I cannot spend the night with him. I need to check in with her more often about where I am. The minute I look unhappy or if, once school starts again, my grades slip, this is over. Also, I do realize, right, that it's not going to last forever. Not because Eamon is a bad person, but that without a certain commonality that being roughly the same age provides, the odds are against it.

  "I'm not thinking about forever," I tell her. "It's okay to plan for now, right?"

  "Of course," Clare says. "And you know, it says a lot of good things about him that he likes you. I just want you to be prepared."

  "I have college and work and all of that to prepare for, to last forever," I say.

  When it ends, as he says it inevitably will, or if it ends, which is how I prefer to think of it, preparing won't help me.

  "Just don't get hurt," she says.

  "Not on your watch, huh," I say.

  "No, I mean not ever," Clare says. "Love's hard. Be careful."

  I hug her because even if I can't follow the advice, it's a long way from the elegant kindness which used to be the only thing she gave me.

  I don't know if this counts as preparing, but I find myself forming a new picture of how I'll wind up. No sitting in a café and no eating cake this time, although there are books, but only ones I love. In this new end of my particular story, I have an apartment. It has plants, a well-stocked kitchen, photos of the lost hotels, and a cat. From this place, I go to work, although I can't see yet if it's for movies, TV, or theater. While in the apartment, I conduct my life without grades, judgments, or warnings.

  Twenty-nine

  EAMON'S BODY HAS A TEXTURE and a quality that is different from any I would have imagined, if I had thought to imagine such a thing. And then, for rather a while, I don't think. Things happen which I had not thought could occur with someone else in the room. It's as if he has been practicing on my body for as long as I have.

  When my thoughts finally return, they are of the churches in Poland, with their great, open spaces reserved for those who want a sacred quiet. Of the care taken in everything from the benches to the altar. The oddness and beauty of a hush that almost lets you hear your own blood.

  "A cathedral?" Eamon asks.

  He is by the end of my description getting me some ice water. I now understand how you know when you want to and with whom. It must be this lack of doubt that's making me think of church.

  "Yes," I say, still on the bed.

  I can't quite believe all the different ways my body is soaring and humming. In a second I will put on my shirt and underwear and go stand in front of the air conditioner.

  "I don't think I've ever been told that," he says, bringing the water and my clothes back to the bed. "Here, let me."

  No one has helped me into my clothes with this level of gentle attention since I was five.

  "What did they tell you?" I ask him.

  He kisses my shoulder. "Church is great, it's definitely the best."

  There's such a gap between the images I carry in my mind and what can actually be found in the world. Which is why it takes a few visits for me to see how similar Eamon's apartment is to the one I've been imagining. It's smaller and in a less good neighborhood, but it's clean, full of books and has French movie posters hanging on the walls. In the kitchen, he keeps bottles of water, tuna salad with olives, and plastic containers of sliced cantaloupe, which I eat with my fingers.

  "Do you speak French?" I ask, chinking of Paris, where the Abranels first lived after leaving Egypt.

  "I've no second language at all," Eamon says. "Mostly this was a cheap and easy way to decorate."

  The place in L.A. is nicer, he says. Less crowded, more sun, better view. The reason he keeps this apartment is because while no one would ever choose to live so close to Avenue D, he can't bring himself to let go of the lease. The rent's very low, although more than it was eight years ago when he first moved in.

  "You didn't go to L.A. right after school?"

  "My first job was running errands for the writing staff on a soap opera," Eamon says. "It was worse than the job you already have for Charlotte. At least you get to answer the phone."

  For the soap opera, he researched fatal illnesses, amnesia, adoption laws, and prenuptial agreements. At night, he wrote spec scripts for his favorite shows and sent them out until he got a real job. It sounds like a great time.

  "Why television?" I ask.

  A direct question about work. Old habits are often the best ones.

  "I'm good at it," Eamon says. "I understand what works and what doesn't."

  "You didn't want to write short stories?" I ask, thinking of the Fitzgerald stories full of rich and beautiful people losing their precious blonde girls.

  It occurs to me that they were the first things I enjoyed reading and that I probably panicked at the novel because my tutor wouldn't shut up about
how I wasn't reading properly. There were things in Tender Is the Night that I did like without understanding fully. Next time, I'm going to like what I like and let understanding fall where it may.

  "No short stories," he says, arranging tuna on a cracker and offering it to me. "I do what I do."

  "It is what it is," I say.

  Of course Rebecca would be here. In some ways, I have him because I lost her. Best not to think about, I know, but hard to ignore.

  "That's a little embittered for my taste," he says. "It's more I do what I do because I'm lucky and I like it."

  Even if I didn't already have other reasons to like him—to love him, which I have managed to do in spite of its being an all wrong relationship—this particular statement would seal the deal.

  What's left of the summer melts away so easily that even Rebecca's birthday feels like a bump sailed over instead of a mountain with frightening proportions. The last long weekend at the beginning of September brings the start-over feeling that always comes with packs of paper and three-ring binders. Although school is not where I shine, I like the little rituals it involves. New shoes, sensible skirts, cotton sweaters, and a class schedule.

  On walls which are the same but different, posters announce auditions, meetings, practice schedules, and sign-ups for things like the debate team. Ben likes to say that debates are where our school allows the closest thing to fistfights. Liked to say it, that is. Once upon a time he said it to me.

  Apparently our spat on the phone was not enough. I have, thanks to my best friend and former boyfriend, become a rumor at school. Girls I barely know now approach me as if we've been in the habit of keeping each other updated about all that is important. From things they say about their own experiences with men, dating, and sex, I can tell they think they know something about me. Something which is probably not quite true.

  I set out to discover what kind of information Ben has released into the school. He's done it rather well, and if it weren't about me I'd admire the method. It took a few well-chosen words to younger boys with sisters in my grade. It's the boys themselves who bring me up to date. They're the ones from seventh grade who think I'm so fun to look at.

  And are now in the eighth grade, which they quickly point out before passing on what they know. I'm the new It Girl of Trash, they tell me, having practically forced myself on Ben only to move on to an old guy. Anyone who has met my elderly father knows I have issues no normal guy could resolve. I'll always want, they tell me, a boyfriend old enough to be my father.

  Okay, this is so beyond yuck. It's just nasty enough to make me want a shower. There's no point screaming that Eamon is only fourteen years older than I am. And therefore not old enough to be my father. Gross.

  "Is your dad really like, you know, your grandfather?" one of the boys asks me.

  "No," I say, thinking of Chinatown, which Eamon and I watched the other night because this was a classic I had to see. "He's my father and my brother."

  Draw a family chart explaining that. I'm overly pleased to have stunned them into speechlessness.

  I decide to make myself too busy to dwell on the implications of what Ben has chosen to stress and immediately find that I'm busy without any effort. For the first time ever, I'm genuinely caught up in my classes. Raphael is thrilled to be helping with precalculus, and I start to see how shapes really do come out of those equations. They're totally connected, the way measurements and building plans are. In English we're finally reading the Chekhov plays, which gives me a chance to test my theory about rereading being more fun than it sounds. School is still hard, but I'm not navigating the fog so much as watching it part.

  And, then, almost without warning, the anniversary of the attack on the city is upon us. Raphael decides to go to a church service being offered at St. Patrick's. He says that a lot of the people who died probably did believe in God, so who is he to be an atheist? This was their home too.

  Clare doesn't think the cathedral is her home, exactly, and asks if she can walk me to school. I suspect that it's one morning she doesn't want to be alone in the office. We both stop on the sidewalk at exactly eight forty-six for the minute of silence, even though no one else does. I remember how much I wanted my mother that day. How I watched the news without moving but that it didn't sink in until that night.

  Although we didn't know it then, more bad news was on the way. What did Rebecca think? I suppose she could have thought it was a good time to be leaving. After all, what a mess, but wasn't she curious to know how it would end? Especially with the it so big and impossible. I hug Clare before turning toward school.

  "I could kill her for not being here," my sister says.

  Well, yes. I suppose.

  "And I miss Gyula," she says. "Still. I can't stop myself."

  My hearts cracks a little for Raphael. Although if I love Eamon partly because of Rebecca, then it's only fair to see how my cousin has Clare for the exact same reason.

  "You're allowed to miss him," I say.

  Maybe great love is simply the love that fits. That would explain what happened to Julian and Janie. It wasn't ruined because it ended. It ended when they no longer fit each other. Da and my mother fit and so do Clare and Raphael. Gyula did fit with Clare once, but the shape of her life changed after Rebecca died.

  "I'm not allowed to, actually," Clare says. "And I shouldn't."

  Even I know that should rarely carries the day for this kind of thing.

  "Gyula still thinks you have a date in November," I say. "You could call him."

  "We'll see," Clare says. "Not a day for acting on how you feel."

  I'm late for the memorial assembly because I stay outside to watch my fiercely beautiful sister walk off into her life of hotels, contracts, and decisions. I know that at some point she will find a way to handle it. I also know I would do anything—even get on a plane—to keep her from being hideously unhappy. So would Raphael and maybe even Gyula, if he knew how close he's come to forever blowing it.

  Thirty

  AS A SENIOR THIS YEAR, I can design an independent study to be overseen by Mr. Nordman, our headmaster. I remember when I first heard about this option (from Ben, of course, who is going to build a computer) I thought, No thanks. But over the summer, one of the people I met through Charlotte thought that I should consider reading and studying some plays from antiquity. The recommendations were Medea, Antigone, and Oedipus Rex, and the idea was that if I could come up with set designs for these plays, I could come up with anything.

  Of the three plays, only Antigone appealed to me. The first line is O Sister ... dear, dear sister. Antigone kills herself after being sentenced to death for trying to bury her brother's body. Her boyfriend and then his mother kill themselves from grief. At first I thought I liked the play because here were three suicides you could understand. You could even, given the way the play is written, support them.

  But it was mostly that I had a great design idea for the tower and the battlefield, which I gave to Raphael for approval and then to Eamon for showing off. He thought I might want to read Mourning Becomes Electra.

  "It's kind of based on Antigone," he said. "And it's the same guy who wrote Ah, Wilderness, which you've been carrying around all summer."

  It's also endless (three plays in one) and, as plays go, not the easiest read in the world. As a result, it takes me longer than it should to put a proposal together. I make an appointment to see Mr. Nordman in his office, which smells slightly musty, in order to ask for an extension.

  "You want to do an independent study?" he asks, sounding shocked. "Are you sure?"

  "I think so," I say, wondering if I'm doomed to travel through life always considered some variation of less than bright.

  What did Janie say? That my skin would go to hell and people would think I was stupid. Why didn't I ask her more about that?

  "The deadline's next Friday. I'll give you an extra week," Mr. Nordman says. "Until October eleventh."

  "Thanks," I say. "That's
great."

  "Leila, that'll be the Friday before Columbus Day," he says. "If you miss it, I can't make an exception."

  I have a calendar. I know when the eleventh is. Rehearsals for Ah, Wilderness start on the following Tuesday, which is the fifteenth. The calendar is something I've never had trouble reading. I smile brightly over my wanting to smack him.

  "Thank you."

  Clare gives me a cell phone. It's on her account and she'll pay for it, within reason. We're having one of our home-alone nights even though it's not Thursday. She says Raphael has some things to do at home and that she's too tired to go to German class. We eat dinner and I spread my homework out across the floor. Eamon calls at around ten and we take our usual twenty minutes to say nothing more than hi, I'm thinking of you and I'll call again soon. We have this conversation at least twice a day, even on days we've seen each other.

  Tonight I tell him I have a new phone and give him the number.

  He writes it down, asking, "What did she do that for?"

  "I don't know," I say. "Maybe she thinks I'll need one in California."

  I like to tease him about this. He has such a heart attack at the idea of people thinking I will go where he wants me to. It's funny that he thinks I'll get into a specific college just because I want to.

  "Good night, bunny," he says. "I'll talk to you soon."

  "Night," I say, thinking that soon is my favorite word.

  "I have meetings in Vienna at the end of next week," Clare says when I sit back down on the floor.

  "Okay," I say.

  "It means I won't be here when you meet with Mr. Nordman," she says. "I'm sorry."

  "I'll be fine," I say. "You have to work."

  "I might see Gyula," she says.

  I'm not surprised. Or sad or pleased by this news. I don't think I'll be anything until I know how she is.

  "You called him," I say.