The History of Us

by Leah Stewart

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s totally legal to check me out. I’m not your student anymore. I’m not even an undergrad.”

  “This is such a weird conversation.” She peeked at him through her fingers. “I was a lot more comfortable talking to you about history.”

  “Let’s talk history then,” he said. “Let’s just talk.”

  She removed her hand from her face and looked at him. Oh, boy. He was awfully cute. “I can’t remember anything about history,” she said.

  He laughed. “No, me neither.”

  “Now you’re insulting me!” she said. “I didn’t say anything memorable?”

  “You’re a good teacher,” he said. “But the main thing I remember is the aforementioned huge crush.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Right.”

  “I assume you’re aware that I’m propositioning you,” he said.

  “You are? And what does your proposition entail?”

  He glanced at her mouth, and he looked all overcome with desire, and he also looked quite adorably nervous. He wanted to kiss her, but it was hard to tell if he was going to. Theo leaned forward and put her hand on his thigh to stabilize herself, and maybe for other reasons, too. She frowned, blowing out air like a child imitating a horse. He waited. Maybe she would kiss him, just to see. She leaned in a little further, and a little further, and there they were: lips. Lips, and then—oh, hello!—tongue, and he was a good kisser, even in this awkward lean-to position where they couldn’t really embrace without falling off their stools.

  “Hmmm,” she said, sitting back. She rubbed her lips together like she’d just put lipstick on.

  “Did I pass?”

  She smiled. “Yes,” she said. “But there will be a final.”

  He lived in an apartment above the bar, which was awfully convenient. “Did you plan this?” she asked him as they walked up the stairs.

  “Sure,” he said. “But I didn’t think it’d actually happen.”

  “No, I mean, did you rent this apartment in case you met girls at the bar?”

  He laughed, looking through his keys for the right one. “No, but it is turning out to be convenient.” He unlocked the door and, with a flourish, pushed it open.

  The place felt very postcollege, and that gave Theo pause, but not as much pause as if she’d been sober. At least he had band posters on the walls and not beer and buxom girls. Theo took a leisurely stroll around the borders of the living room. Thrift-store couch that had seen some ill treatment by a cat. Huge TV. Lots of houseplants. The posters were for Band of Horses, Neko Case—“I love her,” Theo said—Frightened Rabbit, Grizzly Bear. And, hey, Blind Robots. “No way,” she said, pointing. “That’s my brother’s band. Was. Was my brother’s band.”

  “Are you serious? They rocked, man. They were totally awesome.” He winced. “Did I just ruin this? Talking like that?”

  She laughed, thinking of Noah and his fondness for superlatives. “Apparently I like men who talk like that.”

  “Yeah? There’s more where that came from.” He was coming closer now. He had that going-to-kiss-you look. She felt like she was braced at the starting line, waiting for the gun to go off. “Uh-oh,” she said.

  To her surprise he stopped. “Uh-oh what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Did I say that out loud?”

  “Did you not mean to?”

  “You looked like you were about to kiss me.”

  “I was about to kiss you. Is that bad?”

  “No, no, no. I’m for that. I’m pro that. Let’s get to the kissing.”

  But he hesitated. Why was he hesitating? He’d apparently had a crush on her for ages, but ten minutes in close quarters and she’d already ruined it. She took a step toward him, wobbled a little, put a hand on his arm. He put his arm around her back, but gently, not with anything remotely resembling passion. Then he took his other hand and touched the side of her face. He slipped his palm around to the back of her head, and then, at last, he kissed her, but this, too, was gentle, and closemouthed, and brief. He pulled away, letting his hand slide down her arm until it grasped her hand. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “I think maybe you’re too drunk.”

  “What?” Oh, shit, this was disappointing. But not over yet. “You’re drunk, too.”

  “Yes, but I’m thinking now that you’re drunker than I am. Really we should be the same level of drunk.”

  She pulled her hand from his. “So you’ve changed your mind.”

  “I didn’t change my mind.” He shook his head as if to emphasize this.

  “But you won’t . . . ”

  “I don’t think so, no.” He still had an arm around her back. His hand was warm through her shirt. “I’d like to, though.”

  She didn’t know what to feel. “You certainly are honorable,” she said.

  “Would you rather I wasn’t?”

  She looked at him. “No,” she said. “Yes.” She walked around the couch and sat down on it. Against her will she remembered an afternoon in Noah’s office, the last time she’d visited before her resolution not to stop by anymore. Somehow the conversation had drifted into how hard it was to maintain a long-distance relationship. He’d been leaning toward her, his voice low and pained, as he said, “I just don’t know what will change things. I don’t know if anything will.” She thought of putting her hand on his shoulder. She could feel that if she did that, if she murmured a few words of encouragement or comfort, he might pull her into a hug, and then maybe as she lifted her face from his chest he would kiss her. Oh, God. She was on the verge of making that happen. She could see that future shimmering into being. But he had a girlfriend, and she wanted, always, to do the right thing. So she didn’t touch him. She said, “I’m sure it’ll work out,” in a voice so loud and falsely bright that he looked startled, and then she made some excuse to go.

  “I had a reason for getting drunk,” she said now, in her best approximation of a conversational, casual voice. “I might lose my house.”

  “Oh, no.” Wes came around the couch, too, and sat next to her, if a cushion’s length away. “You can’t make the mortgage?”

  Theo laughed, startled by his misapprehension. “It’s not my house like that,” she said. “I don’t own it. It’s the family house, since the 1950s. But I live there. So it’s my house that way.”

  “How will you lose it?”

  “My aunt wants to sell it. She was waiting for my younger sister to leave, and now she’s gone.”

  “Where did your sister go?”

  “She went to New York,” Theo said. “She’s a ballet dancer. When I was a kid I wanted to be one, too. I danced until I was seventeen. But I didn’t have her talent. I didn’t have the body. I did, however, have the feet.” She slipped off her shoe and pointed her toes to show him. “Do you see that? I still can’t wear some shoes because I have such a high arch.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Look,” she said, impatiently. She lifted her leg onto the couch and rounded the top of her foot, her exceptionally good foot, which even after all these years still remembered its perfect curve.

  He traced the curve with his finger. “Pretty,” he said.

  “I don’t know why my brother and I don’t matter. My aunt thinks I need to move away, and my brother, too, and she wants to get rid of the house, like it’s this old dog that shits all over the place and needs to be put to sleep.”

  “Your brother from Blind Robots? He’s back here?”

  “Yup. He lives down the hall from me.” She wasn’t sure how she felt about the interest in Wes’s voice, the fact that Josh was the subject he’d chosen for a follow-up question. She pulled her foot away and put it back in her shoe. “He’s not very exciting, I hate to tell you.”

  “He’s not playing music anymore?”

  “The other night I heard him playing his guitar, but no, not really,” Theo said. “Enough about him. You want to know another secret? I’m not really writing my diss
ertation anymore.”

  “You’re not?”

  Theo shook her head elaborately. “I’m a fifth-year PhD, and I got a fellowship this year to work on the dissertation, because everyone thinks I’m so promising and I just needed this year to finish it. But you know what? I have finished it.”

  “Really? Well, why don’t you—”

  “What? Apply for jobs? Ha! You sound like”—she shook her head again—“everybody. You sound like everybody. I want to amend my last statement. I haven’t finished it. I’ve written everything but the introduction. It’s not that I can’t finish what I start. It’s that I can’t start what I finished.”

  Wes considered her a moment. Then he said, “Do you want to tell me why?”

  “I don’t know why,” she said. She leaned her head back, closing her eyes so tears wouldn’t fall. “I guess I just don’t want to leave.”

  “You can’t get a job here?”

  “Probably not. Schools don’t like to hire the people they trained, even if there was an opening.” Her eyes were still closed, and so it seemed like talking to herself when she said, “And I can’t decide if it’s okay that I want to stay, or if it means something is wrong with me.”

  “I’m not objective,” he said, “but I don’t think anything’s wrong with you.”

  To her immense embarrassment, she was leaking tears. “How old are you, anyway?”

  “I’m twenty-two.” He said it like an apology.

  “Why did I come up here?” she asked, in a voice that was peevish, and belligerent, and sad.

  He put his hand on her shoulder, his fingers tickling the back of her neck. “I asked you to.”

  “Then why’d you let me make such an ass of myself?”

  “Don’t feel like that,” he said. “I don’t want you to feel like that.”

  “How do you want me to feel?”

  “Happy.”

  She stared at him. Was he simpleminded? “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m going to make a call.”

  She called Josh, who’d been so pissed at her before but now didn’t even ask for an explanation, just said he’d be right there. Josh was the only person she could call who would come get her without asking questions, who would, for God’s sake, be nice. She’d spent so much time protecting him from his own niceness that she sometimes forgot how much she herself had always relied on it. When she harangued him for always putting others first, she failed to think about the times he had done that for her. Once, exhorting him to break up with Sabrina, she had slammed her fist on the table right in front of him. “Jesus Christ, man,” she’d said. “For your own self-respect.” It had been so much easier to protect him when he was little. When she was nine and he was seven they’d had a snowball fight in the backyard with some neighborhood kids, including a boy named Chase, who was older than they were and bordered on being a bully. Breaking the rules of combat, Chase hit Josh in the face with a piece of ice. Josh’s hands flew to his face, and when Theo pulled them away to see the damage, there was blood on his skin and on his gloves. Chase stood a few feet away tossing another ice ball from hand to hand, the look on his face a mixture of triumph and guilt. Theo ran at him in a fury, and he turned to flee, so that she tackled him from behind, slamming his face into the snow. She pummeled his puffy, snowsuited shoulders while he lay there, stunned, she thought later, by the shock of retaliation. What had eventually made her stop? She couldn’t remember. She did remember Josh’s face afterward, his sweet, blood-and-water-streaked face, wearing an expression of awe. He’d had crystals of snow in his eyelashes.

  Now Josh got out of his double-parked car and came around with his fists at his sides, like he was there to protect her, like he was bracing for a fight. She saw his eyes go past her to Wes, who’d insisted on accompanying her outside but stayed back by the door while Theo made her slow and careful way to the car. “Hey, man,” Josh said, in a way that was friendly but not really, and Wes said, “Hey.” He put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall, but he didn’t go back inside.

  Josh came around the car to open the door for Theo, and as she stepped inside he asked, “Is that guy bothering you?” Theo nearly laughed at the question. It was so beautifully, typically male. The answer was yes, of course, but not for the reasons Josh might be imagining, so she shook her head.

  “Thanks for coming to get me, Joshy,” she said. “I’m too drunk to walk home alone.”

  He looked at her, surprised by the naked emotion in her voice. “Of course,” he said. She leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. She looked so sad, about the house, he assumed. He sympathized, he really did, and he might have said so earlier if she hadn’t immediately jumped down his throat. He shut the door gently and then gave it a pat. His steps were slow as he made his way back around the car. That guy was gone. Whatever Theo said, her mood, this scene, must have something to do with him, and suddenly Josh wanted to find the guy and punch him in the face. Seeing Theo vulnerable was akin to being in free fall. He grabbed anger like a handhold and clung to it, stood there a moment squeezing his keys in his hand. He was seriously considering going inside, this twenty-six-year-old man who had never, in all his life, been in a fight. A rapping sound made him jump, and he turned to see Theo leaned over to frown at him out the driver’s-side window. “What are you doing?” she said. He couldn’t quite hear her, but he could read her lips, as well as her expression. His anger withdrew. Suddenly she seemed exactly like herself.

  They drove back to the house in silence. Theo had returned to her position as soon as he got in the car: head back, eyes closed. He wanted to ask her what was wrong, but the idea made him nervous. It occurred to him that lately when he wondered why they couldn’t seem to talk anymore, what he was wondering was why he couldn’t talk to her. Had she ever come to him with her problems? He couldn’t remember a time, but until things got really bad with Sabrina, he’d always gone to her with his. In a moment of familial telepathy, he, too, was visited by the memory of the time she clobbered the neighbor boy, whom Josh could picture although he couldn’t remember the kid’s name. He’d been sitting in the snow, cold and wet and crying as blood streamed down his face, and Theo had been a superhero swooping to his rescue, the way she’d flown at that boy. He’d stopped crying immediately, filled, as he watched her pummel that kid, with the certainty that he was safe. He wondered if she remembered that moment with as much clarity as he did. He thought of asking her, but for no reason he could name, the silence between them seemed too hard to break.

  8

  When Theo called, Josh had been standing at the open door of Adelaide’s apartment, having just arrived to pick her up for their first date. Adelaide was wearing a slim, pale dress and high heels, and her dark hair was down. Their reservation at a nice restaurant was in fifteen minutes’ time. Even as he said, “Oh, sorry, hang on,” and answered the phone, he wondered why he was doing it. Probably guilt over the last thing he’d said to Theo, before she’d walked out of the house and disappeared. He was surprised she’d call him after that, and the fact that she had gave him a presentiment that something was wrong. “Okay, this is really bad timing,” he said after he hung up, “but I have to go pick up my sister. She’s unbelievably drunk.”

  “It’s so early,” Adelaide said.

  “I know. It’s not like her, but she had a fight with my aunt this afternoon.” He put the phone in his pocket slowly, deciding what to say. “Do you want to come with me?”

  “Oh.” Adelaide frowned. “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh,” he said in turn. “Right. Okay.” He was flummoxed. “Well, we’ll miss our reservation.”

  “How about this? You go get your sister and take care of her, and I’ll order pizza. You can come back here with a bottle of wine.”

  “Really?”

  She shrugged, then nodded, an ambivalent response if he’d ever seen one. “A first date at a fancy place is usually uncomfortable anyway,” she said. “You know, the place mak
es you feel so formal. We can be relaxed here.”

  He hoped she was right. He felt anything but relaxed walking away from her door. He’d been tense all day, anticipating the date, and Eloise’s timing in delivering her news hadn’t helped. As soon as Eloise had withdrawn to her room, parting from him with a hug that suggested she thought he was on her side, he’d tried to put the whole thing aside to think about later. But the weird scene with Theo and that guy—that kid—brought back his dismay and confusion, and he began to feel that way too much was riding on this date, although what the “too much” was he couldn’t be sure. By the time he took Theo home and got her upstairs with Advil and a glass of water and had her reassure him two or three times that she wasn’t going to throw up, nearly an hour had elapsed, and he still had to stop and pick up wine. He got two bottles, not knowing whether Adelaide liked white or red. For an anxious, manic moment he considered getting more, because he didn’t know if she liked Pinot Noir or Zinfandel, Sauvignon Blanc or Chardonnay. Driving back to Adelaide’s he played the music loud to drown out his nerves. He pictured her sitting with a cold pizza, staring angrily at the clock. He hoped she’d waited a little while to order it.

  There was no cold pizza, no angry stare, just Adelaide, still in her dress of ambiguous color, but now a few inches shorter, and wearing ankle athletic socks. She opened the door and stepped way back to let him in. “The pizza should be here soon,” she said, closing it behind him. “How’s your sister?”

  “She’s okay, I guess,” he said. “She was really wasted.”

  “And that’s unusual.” She went ahead of him into the kitchen, and he followed. The apartment was kind of a boring, new-building place, the sort where everything would work but nothing had any special charm. He hoped this was no reflection of her personality.

  “Yes, that’s unusual,” he said. He leaned against the counter and watched her reach up to retrieve wineglasses from a cabinet. “Really unusual. I’m sure it was the fight with my aunt, but the way she lost her temper was unusual, too. She’s one of those people who prides herself on keeping it together. They both are.”