The History of Us

by Leah Stewart

  Eloise hung up, sorry she’d had to tell Heather, wishing the email had come on another day, any other day, when she could have just said she was working late. Or even better, said nothing at all. She didn’t live with Heather, not yet, and so she didn’t have to account to her for her whereabouts. The impulse to go, which was strong, had come with a slightly sickening, sneaky feeling, like she knew giving in to it was bad for her. Like she was rummaging for food in the dark, past-midnight kitchen, like a raccoon, like a furtive backyard animal. Jason was an emissary from the other life she could have had, and while she understood, of course, why Heather wanted her to let that life go, why that would make sense, she still wanted to look at him and see what she was missing.

  Now it was time to magic the lie she’d told Heather into truth. In the week since she’d told the kids about the house, she and Theo had avoided one another, speaking when it couldn’t be helped with a polite reserve. Theo’s voice was formal and wary when Eloise got her on the phone. Eloise explained what she wanted, maintaining a bright, encouraging voice, and several times using the word great. Listening to herself, she wondered if she would always do the parent thing, the teacher thing, with Theo, and hide her own roiling feelings behind a mask of calm assurance. She could have said that this guy was someone who used to be below her on the career ladder and now he’d surpassed her by kind of a lot and she was both driven by curiosity and hampered by dread in thinking about seeing him. But since he knew she was here she didn’t want to not go and have him imagine she was afraid to see him for the very reasons she actually was afraid to see him. She wanted to be as cool and breezy and comfortable with herself as she had been when she’d known him. Not just pretend to be. Be. She wanted Theo for moral support tonight and, now that you mention it, also on the issue of the house, but there seemed to be some law that she had to pretend support was nothing that she needed.

  “Yeah, that sounds good,” Theo said, but not like she really meant it. Because she was still angry? The thought of Theo being angry made Eloise angry, so she didn’t ask. “Great,” Eloise said again, and then told her niece what time she’d be home, what time they’d leave the house, and my God, it really was like they’d rewound twelve years, like they were headed to parent-teacher night at the high school.

  Jason Bamber. Wow, that, too, had been a lot of years ago.

  She was already running late when she knocked on Theo’s closed bedroom door. This should not have been a surprise to her, and yet somehow it was. This was what Heather rolled her eyes about—not that Eloise was always late but that she always seemed baffled by her own inability to be on time. She was baffled. It wasn’t an act. She wanted to be on time. She couldn’t understand why it never happened. She knew, of course, that she’d always been late before, but that didn’t stop her from hoping she could change.

  “Yes?” Theo said.

  Eloise pushed the door open. “You ready?”

  Theo was sitting on the bed hugging a pink throw pillow in her lap, like a teenage girl who’d been dumped by her boyfriend. “I don’t think I can go.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think I should stay here and do work.”

  Theo’s laptop was closed and on the floor. There were no papers or books on her bed, just Theo herself, who was, Eloise now registered, wearing pajamas. “You don’t look all that busy.”

  “I know,” Theo said. “But I should be.”

  “Theo, I told them I was bringing you. They’ll be expecting you now. And this is a great opportunity for you, to meet him. He’s somebody who could really help you. A letter from him would be—”

  “I know, I know all that,” Theo said.

  “So come on. Let’s go.”

  “I don’t think I’m up to it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just don’t think I can do it. I don’t think I can talk to someone I don’t know. I don’t think I can make him like me. I’m not up to it. I’m sorry. It would be much better for me to try to work, because I’m just not up to anything social.”

  “Why not?” Eloise asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Theo shook her head like the reasons were beyond enumerating. Then she shrugged. Finally she said, “I miss Claire.”

  “Well, go see her.”

  “What?”

  “Go visit her, Theo. It’s not like she moved to another planet.” Eloise thought, It’s not like she died, and behind that thought came a flood of resentment at Theo’s failure to appreciate all that she had.

  “I guess not,” Theo said. “I guess I could just go see her.”

  “It is possible for you to leave the city limits,” Eloise said, against her better judgment, and Theo stiffened. Eloise made it worse. “It’s also possible for you to leave the house.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Theo said, her voice on a trembling edge. “You’ve made that quite clear. But I’m still not going.”

  “Do you not believe me when I say it would be good for you to meet him? Why can’t you ever take my advice?”

  Theo looked incredulous. “Maybe because you never give me any.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You never give me any,” Theo repeated slowly. “Not even when I ask.”

  “That’s completely untrue. I give you advice all the time. I gave you advice about where to go to grad school, which of course you ignored.”

  “Okay, fine, you give me advice about my career. Everything else is up to me.”

  “Well, who should it be up to, Theo? You’re twenty-eight years old.”

  “Now,” Theo said.

  “What?”

  “I’m twenty-eight years old now.”

  “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” Eloise said. “And I don’t have time to find out.” She turned to go, but she still heard Theo say, in a soft but audible voice, “Of course you don’t.” She left angry—and not just angry but hurt. She was trying to help Theo with her career in a way that anyone else in her niece’s position would have been grateful for, and all she got back was attitude, and this accusation that she—what? Trusted her niece? Failed to nag her enough? For four years of Theo’s adulthood Eloise had let her live in this house rent-free, knowing the smallness of a grad student’s stipend. In return Theo had tidied and cooked and done laundry and occasionally paid for groceries. In Eloise’s opinion this was a pretty good deal for Theo. Where was the appreciation for that? Why, instead of thinking about all she owed her aunt, was Theo so certain that her aunt owed her a house? Because, these days in America, not until children have children of their own do they feel any gratitude to the people who raised them.

  In the car Eloise gripped the steering wheel with both hands and took deep breaths. She punched buttons on the radio until she found a passionate song of the late 1980s—“In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel—and she sang along loudly and tried to lose herself in the music and forget her anger and her nerves.

  Once Jason had called her breasts the twin towers of beauty and justice, and in his eyes was the puppyish longing of men who feel overborne and helpless in the face of their attraction to women. “I would make love to your breasts,” he said, “if they were not attached to a woman.” He was too ridiculous to inspire outrage, or much beyond a kind of annoyed bemusement. “But they’d just be two globs of fat in your hands,” she replied.

  Now she wondered if he’d even recognize her, though of course she knew he remembered her from Marianne’s email. She fought hard to keep her expectations low, hating not just that familiar disappointment but the feeling that her own overblown hopes had paved the way for that disappointment to arrive. It was like having a hangover, the sickness made worse by being self-induced. Eloise had once been full of insouciant expectations, but that state of being was now as foreign and distant from her experience as the lives of people in faraway lands, as everything else about elsewhere.

  He recognized her. She’d heard applause as she hustled toward the lecture roo
m door and had slipped inside in time to see him making his way to the podium. Now he said his thank-yous while she made her way into the latecomer’s seat—seven seats in, third row from the back. “Excuse me,” she was whispering when his voice from the front of the room struck her consciousness, because he had just said her name. What he had said was, “I’d like to dedicate this talk to Eloise Hempel.” When her head shot up to look at him, he flashed her a smile and added, “She’s always been an inspiration to me.”

  What was his talk about? She had no idea. She sat in her seat and pretended to herself that she was paying attention, while her mind worked furiously at the question of what the hell that—his dedication—had been. Surely it was only her own insecurity—her own humiliated convictions of failure—that made her think he’d done it to embarrass her, like a hot guy pretending the ugly girl was his date. Because why would he do that? She’d never done anything to inspire such treatment, or if she had she couldn’t remember what it was. Maybe he’d done it to impress her, because the desire to impress her still lingered from all those years ago. Maybe he’d wanted her to rush up to him after the talk, flushed and grateful. It seemed to be Heather’s voice in her head saying, “There’s also the possibility that he meant it.” Yeah, okay, sure, there was that possibility, too.

  After the talk she hung back while Jason received well-wishers, and then saw Marianne, similarly hanging back, as people do when they know they’ll have plenty of time with the anointed one later. She made her way over to Marianne and said hello. “That dedication was so sweet!” Marianne said, and Eloise smiled and agreed that it was. “Where’s your niece?” Marianne asked.

  Eloise explained. “It’s good to know she has the scholar’s necessary selfishness!” she said brightly. Marianne smiled nervously and looked away. She didn’t like to participate in criticism of others, even others she didn’t know, and Eloise could tell Marianne wasn’t sure whether Eloise had been criticizing Theo or not. Eloise wasn’t even sure. She thought of another reason she wished Theo had come—so that when Jason asked her what she’d been up to for the last seventeen years, she would have had living proof of what that had been.

  The last praise offered, the last questions asked, Jason walked toward them up the aisle. He had his notes clenched under one arm and both hands in his pockets, and so looked like a tense person trying to appear relaxed. “That was wonderful!” Marianne said, and Jason thanked her with a sincerity equal to hers, and then he turned and grinned at Eloise. “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said. She was aware that she was supposed to note how much older he looked, or didn’t look, but instead what she saw was that he looked happy to see her. He looked like he didn’t care where she taught or what she’d published. He just looked like he was glad to see her face.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said.

  “Thanks for that dedication.”

  “That was so sweet,” Marianne said again.

  “It was an impulse,” he said. “When I saw you come in.”

  Eloise nodded. They’d never slept together. They’d never even been on a date. She’d been aware that he was attracted to her, but it had never seemed very serious, because his come-ons had been so dumb they’d seemed like jokes. They’d been good banter partners, but all that sexual innuendo had just bounced off her like darts bounce off the edge of the board. So why did she have this nervous energy, and why was she getting a nervous energy from him? Like they had a mutual past, lingering memories of a torrid affair.

  “Shall we?” Marianne asked, and for a moment Eloise had no idea what she meant.

  All through dinner at a crowded downtown restaurant the frisson of excitement persisted, despite the presence of Marianne, one of Marianne’s less interesting colleagues, and another, younger one with holes in her eyebrows where piercings had been removed. Jason kept meeting Eloise’s eye, and she’d hold his gaze a beat too long, and then turn away as flushed as if he’d touched her under the table. He kept talking about her work—how she’d inspired him in graduate school, how much he admired her book, and the articles she’d published since, which she was impressed he’d even read. He said he was a hack compared to her—that he could make an argument, he could do research, sure, but Eloise had a gift for understanding and expression that was, well, it was beautiful.

  “I am pretty amazing,” Eloise said.

  “You are!” Marianne said, and Eloise laughed, because Marianne meant it, and Jason seemed to mean it, and the formerly pierced young woman had known who she was, and at this moment Eloise felt pretty amazing. She felt really damn good.

  After dinner Eloise went outside with Jason, who said with some embarrassment that he’d become a smoker since graduate school. “You started smoking in your late twenties?” she said.

  “I know,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “I was a late bloomer. I don’t know if you noticed at the time, but in grad school I was pretty much going through puberty.”

  Eloise laughed. “I noticed.”

  “I’m sorry for being such an idiot.”

  Eloise shrugged. “You weren’t so bad.”

  “You know,” he said, “I realize I’m literally blowing smoke here, but I meant all that stuff I said about your work and the impact it’s had on me. What are you working on now?”

  “It’s about location and identity,” she said.

  “Sounds interesting. You should send it to me when you’re done.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  There was a silence, then Jason asked, “Do you ever think about leaving here?”

  “Only all the time,” she said.

  “If you got another book out you could do it,” he said.

  “Do you think so? It’s been so long since the first one.”

  “Yeah, but that was a significant book. That means something. Especially if you paired it with something new.”

  Eloise looked out at Fountain Square, where an enormous TV screen was showing a Reds game. “You think so?”

  “I think so. Let me ask you—would you ever consider something besides teaching?”

  “It would depend on the something.”

  “I’m starting a journal out of my department. I have funding, but I don’t yet have a staff. I’ll need an editor, and I’m standing here thinking you’d be great. Is that something you’d consider?”

  “I don’t know,” Eloise said. “I mean, I might enjoy the work. But there’d be complications to leaving here.”

  “Well, we can talk about it. We’ll stay in touch.” He dropped his cigarette on the ground and spent a long time rubbing it out. “I want to say something else, but I don’t want you to think what I say means I didn’t mean what I already said.”

  Eloise laughed. “I think I followed that,” she said.

  “I think we should leave together,” he said.

  “Cincinnati?” she asked, though of course she knew what he meant.

  What was she thinking, saying yes? She stood there waiting while he offered Marianne and her people his goodbyes and thanks, and she could see by their expressions they knew exactly what was going on. She got in her car with the blood high in her face, and then when he got in, too, the click of his seat belt sounded so final, as if there was a contract in the shutting of his door. They both watched in the rearview mirror as Marianne’s car pulled away, taillights bright against the night. And then he reached over and touched her hair. He ran his thumb down the side of her face. She undid her seat belt, and then undid his, and for a few breathless minutes they made out like teenagers in the car.

  She drove him to his hotel with his hand on her inner thigh. She gave the keys to the valet, and held his hand as they walked into the lobby. In the elevator with an elderly couple, she pressed her leg against his and vibrated with anticipation. And then, just as the lights flashed green on his door and he yanked out his key card with a flourish, her phone rang. It was Heather. “Oh, fuck me,” she said, staring at that name on the screen. “It’s like she kn
ew.”

  He was standing there in his open doorway, waiting for her to come inside. “It’s like who knew what?” he said.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I have to go.”

  “What? Really? Why?”

  “I have this life here,” she said. “I really do.”

  He frowned. “Well, of course,” he said.

  Eloise was nearly to Heather’s house when her phone rang again, and though she lectured the kids about using the phone while driving she fished hers out of her bag and checked the screen. She was still in a fraught state of guilty desire and she thought maybe it was Heather, calling to accuse her, or Jason, calling to persuade her back. But instead it was Francine. Eloise let out a breath of exasperation and relief, thought, Oh hell, and answered. “I called the house but you weren’t there,” her mother said, “so I talked to the kids.”

  “Okay,” Eloise said, already impatient.

  “They want the house, too,” Francine said. “So I can’t sign it over to you.”

  They want the house? For a beat or two Eloise couldn’t imagine what her mother was talking about. Who were they? “Theo and Josh?” she said slowly.

  “Yes, honey,” her mother said. “Those kids. What other kids are there?”

  Eloise still couldn’t quite make sense of things. “Theo and Josh want the house? What would they do with the house? Theo’s not even going to stay in Cincinnati, and hopefully Josh won’t either.”

  “Well, Theo’s the one who asked me to stop you from selling it, so maybe the two of you should talk.”

  Eloise said slowly, “Theo asked you to . . . ” She frowned at her face in the rearview mirror, and it looked back with angry puzzlement.

  “At any rate, I’ve come up with what I think is a fair way to decide. I’m going to hold on to the house for now and see who needs it most. Unless there’s some other pressing reason, I’ll probably give it to whoever gets married first.”

  Married? She and Heather could never get married, not in Ohio anyway. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Eloise said. “You told me you were going to sign it over to me.”