by Leah Stewart
She sighed. The question punctured her unreality, reminded her too much of the actual world. “More,” she said. “A million real dollars, that would be good. Several million.”
“What would you do with it?”
“Buy my house,” she said. “No, sorry, that’s the real world. Buy the Bolshoi Ballet and make myself the prima ballerina. And perform nothing but Swan Lake.”
“Did you really want to be a ballerina?”
“I don’t know why I said Swan Lake,” she said. “That’s not actually my favorite ballet. That’s Claire’s favorite ballet.”
“I guess she’s on your mind.”
Theo shook her head, as if that would dislodge Claire from it. “I don’t want to think about her,” she said. “Let’s return to not thinking about her.”
“Done,” he said. “So what’s your favorite ballet?”
“When I was little it was The Nutcracker. Now I usually prefer the contemporary stuff. I get a little bored with the storybook ones.”
“Don’t you like to see princesses get rescued from poverty and spinsterhood?”
“And evil stepmothers. Don’t forget them.”
“If you had an evil stepmother I’d rescue you from her.”
“Well, you rescued me from my evil aunt,” Theo said and then fought the guilty urge to explain that her aunt was, of course, not actually evil. “Do you have some kind of prince fantasy?”
“No, but I did want to be a fireman when I was a kid. I also wanted to be a superhero. That was a long-standing ambition.”
“That’s very traditionally male of you.”
“Well, ballerina’s not exactly breaking the mold.”
“Damn it,” she said. “I wish I’d wanted to be a fireman.”
“Not too late.”
“I don’t want to, though.” She sat up and rolled her shoulders so they cracked. “Maybe nobody should have given me the impression that it mattered what I wanted. They should have sent me to military school. Talked to me about duty. And necessity.”
“I think those things come up whether you go to military school or not.”
“The thing is, what used to look practical all of a sudden isn’t. Like, law school. Remember when everybody thought law school guaranteed you a job? I should have gone to nursing school. Or, what’s the other thing?”
“What other thing?”
“The other thing they keep saying where there are still jobs.”
“I’m not sure that sentence was English,” he said.
“I think you know more about duty and necessity than I do,” she said.
He shrugged one shoulder. “Oh, I don’t know. You mean because of my mom?”
“Can I ask you about that now?”
“You could have asked me about it before.”
“I know. But I didn’t want you to think I was asking about it because I thought you’d be mad if I didn’t ask about it.”
“First I would like a signed affidavit testifying to your reasons for asking.”
“That might take some time. Can we get a continuance?”
“No. You have to state right now, for the record, why you’re asking.”
“I want to know more about you.” She rolled her eyes up at the ceiling, smiling sheepishly. “Why does it embarrass me to say that?”
“It’s scary to be sincere,” he said.
“For me, anyway.”
“For you, anyway.” He grinned. “Except about history.”
“So tell me. What’s your mom like?”
“She’s . . . ” He looked up at the ceiling himself, thinking. “She’s one of those people who’s really bright but never quite figures out the right use for their brightness. You know? She started out wanting to be a playwright—young, like fifteen. She won a national competition and got one of her plays read by actual actors in New York. And then she quit doing that and decided to be a linguist sometime in college. There might have even been something else in between. I think there was.”
“So far it’s all language-related.”
“Yeah, she has a real facility with language. She spent some time in Japan during college, and she’s still fluent.”
“And she speaks Swedish.”
“That’s right. She taught herself Swedish. I don’t even know how many languages she speaks. French, Spanish, Japanese, Swedish. I’m forgetting something.”
“English?”
He laughed. “Well, yes. But I’m forgetting some others, too.” He shook his head. “She’s really pretty amazing.”
“So now she’s a linguist?”
“No. My dad is. He teaches at OSU. They met in grad school, but she dropped out. She never finished her dissertation.”
Theo shuddered. “Oh, dear,” she said.
“I think she was kind of lost after that, because she almost immediately started having children, and she made a project of teaching us languages, but then once we went to school I don’t think she knew what to do with her time. I’d come home from school and she’d be in her bedroom watching TV. She’d switch it to a kids’ show and I’d sit with her and watch.”
“Where were your brothers?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “They never spent time with her like I did.” He picked up her hand and matched the palm to his. “In retrospect she was probably depressed.” He was frowning.
She said, “You were too young to pick up on that. You shouldn’t feel bad.”
He shot her a grateful smile. “I know,” he said. “But I do wonder about my dad. Anyway, then Anders wanted to take tae kwon do, so she signed us all up for it, and she turned out to have a gift for that, too. Now she’s an instructor.”
“Really,” Theo said. “That’s not where I thought this story was going.”
“She’s really amazing,” he said. “But of course she started too late to compete seriously, and I think she regrets that. At least that was one of the things she started obsessing about when she got really depressed. That, and she was always having these fights with people, or thinking they’d slighted her, and she’d tell you the story and it just sounded like nothing, you know? Like just the crap that everybody bumps into all day long. But it all made her so anxious. She wasn’t sleeping. I was a sophomore by the time I realized how bad it was getting, and then that semester when I was in your class was when she checked herself into the hospital.”
“How long was she there?”
“About a month.” He was just holding her hand now, stroking the back of it with his thumb. “She’s in weekly therapy now, and she’s medicated, and everything seems okay. But that was a pretty rough time. I really thought for a while she might do it.”
“I can’t believe you were going through all that while you were in my class.”
“Part of it, anyway.”
“I had no idea.”
He gave her a rueful smile. “Well, good. Why should you have?”
“I mean your work didn’t suffer.”
“When I focused on work I didn’t have to think about things. I’d just really pay attention to the reading. Everything else was just background noise. I was focused on . . . Abraham Lincoln.”
She wanted to make a joke, something about Lincoln, but she recognized the impulse as a desire to dodge an emotional moment in which she might say the wrong thing. And then suddenly the thing she wanted to say was I love you. Let’s get married. She swallowed the words back, as appalled and embarrassed as if she’d uttered them. She didn’t touch him, even though she wanted to. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what I would have done, but I wish I’d known.”
He leaned over and kissed her. Then he pulled back, looked at her like he couldn’t quite believe his luck, kissed her again. Who wouldn’t want to be kissed like that?
“So that’s my mom,” he said. “I’ll take you to meet her sometime.”
She nodded, although the thought of that filled her with panic, and then she wondered whether the panic came from the story o
f this brilliant, thwarted, medicated woman or just the thought of what it would mean to meet Wes’s mother, and then she wondered whether she should now begin making confessions about her own upbringing. Wes knew, of course, that her parents were dead, but she’d never gone into detail about what that loss had meant, and never wanted to, or maybe she did want to, but if she did she’d probably cry, and then he’d hold her while she cried, and my God at this rate of increasing emotional intimacy she’d end up either fleeing the city to escape him or actually marrying him. So she said, “You know what phrase I hate? Just loathe beyond all reason? Made love.”
He didn’t miss a beat. “So you don’t want me to say, Let’s make love.” He lowered his voice seductively. “I just made love to you.”
“Ugh.” She put her hands over her ears. “Stop it.”
“Sweet sweet love,” he said. “We made it and made it. Or maybe you prefer knocking boots.”
She took her hands off her ears and grinned at him. “Bumping uglies.”
“Beast with two backs.”
“Schtupping.”
“Roll in the hay.”
“Roll in the sack.”
“Doing it.”
“Banging.”
“Boffing.”
“This could go on all day,” he said. “Let’s do something else.”
“Like what?”
“Have you ever been to the design school?”
She shook her head.
“It’s really cool,” he said. “I’d like to show it to you.”
“You wouldn’t rather . . . hump?”
“Hump?” he said. “Hump? Really?”
She laughed. “I couldn’t think of another one.”
“Hump,” he said again. He kissed her and rolled out of bed to get dressed. All those synonyms for sex, and neither of them had said fucking. She found that she was grateful for that.
Wes had been right: the design school was cool, in the way that Mac computers and Volkswagen commercials were cool: sleek, with bright colors on expanses of white creating a wink-wink austerity. She liked the way the hallways split in two, seemed to crisscross on their way up and down. She passed a glass-walled classroom, filled with worktables instead of desks. “We have class here sometimes,” Wes said, pointing to an area set off from the hall by dangling wires. Sketches were pinned to the wall, and Theo crossed to look at them, noticing as she did that Wes was hanging back a little, as if suddenly shy. “Is one of these yours?” she asked.
It was indeed—a drawing of a faucet, something it had never before occurred to her needed to exist. But of course! As Wes had told her, someone needed to design everything. Someone always had to be in charge. She asked him questions and he talked and pointed, explaining the way things worked. Watching him Theo was overwhelmed with longing. Why wasn’t she studying design? Or architecture? Or urban planning? She wanted to be able to sketch something, then make the something she’d sketched. Why couldn’t she do that? Why hadn’t she tried?
“I think it’s amazing you can do that,” she said.
He turned, wearing a look of genuine surprise, and a slow smile spread across his face. “Thanks,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” she said. She felt at once gratified by how touched he seemed, and uneasy. Why was he so touched? Why did he give her such power over his emotions, more power than she wanted to have? To recover from her confusion, she moved away toward a flight of stairs, and Wes followed.
“Look up,” he said when they got to the bottom, so she did, and was startled to see a student perched high above her on a ledge, feet dangling carelessly down. He had a laptop in his lap, holes in his jeans that exposed his bony, hairy knees. “How’d you get up there?” she asked. He didn’t answer. He didn’t move. Maybe he had earphones in. She took another step down to see him from another angle. “Hey,” she said, and when he didn’t move, “Hey, up there.” She looked at Wes, who was watching her with an expectant smile. “Is he doing some kind of performance art?”
Wes shook his head. “He’s not real.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.” He pointed at a tiny sign on the wall. She moved to read it and saw the name of the piece—Ethan—the name of the artist, the fact that the work was given in honor of the students. “Ethan. Huh,” she said, turning back to the guy. “He’s amazingly lifelike.” She studied him again. That knee. How was someone able to make that? When she’d been a dancer what she did was far more ephemeral than a sculpture, but still it was physical, it was the leg extended, the arm raised, the body leaping. When she danced she made something—she made something out of herself. Now her life was all ideas—ideas folded into other ideas, so that sometimes she lost track of her own argument. She took the concrete—the facts, the numbers—and made it abstract. It was probably no coincidence that when she gave up dancing she turned entirely to intellectual pursuits. Her body wasn’t good enough, so she’d see what she could do with her mind.
She startled at the feeling of Wes’s fingers slipping through hers. Now that’s physical, she thought wryly, because at his touch she felt a certain and immediate desire, as if her whole body was a button he could press. What she wanted from Wes was so beautifully clear, and maybe just for today she wouldn’t think about her uneasy feeling that he’d been right to worry she was using him. Just for today she wouldn’t think about anything. Just for today she’d let things be.
Outside they strolled down the sidewalk, still holding hands, awaiting a destination. “Let’s go get coffee,” Wes said.
“Metaphorical coffee?”
“I don’t think that has caffeine,” he said, and she laughed.
“Theo!” somebody said. Startled, she looked up. The sun was in her eyes, and for a moment she saw nothing but the dark outline of a person on the opposite side of the sidewalk, closing in. She made a visor of her hand. “Noah?” she said.
“In the flesh.” He was carrying a Starbucks cup, wearing an old T-shirt and shorts with a dramatic tear on one leg. A long thread dangled from the tear.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. She was still holding Wes’s hand. She couldn’t let go now. It would be awful to let go. Resisting the urge, she tightened her grip.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Noah lifted his coffee cup, as though to say he’d come for that. “I’m not teaching today, and there are no papers to grade yet. So I’m out wandering.” He had a sheepish air, as if she’d caught him doing something embarrassing, when she was the one who’d been caught.
“I’m just surprised to see you,” she said.
“Likewise,” he said. He looked at Wes, and then back at Theo expectantly. Theo introduced them, and then Wes had to wiggle his fingers free, because it was his right hand she was holding and he needed it to shake Noah’s. She put her own hand in her pocket, as if to hide it. The two men said it was nice to meet each other, or she assumed they did. It was hard to hear over the blood thrumming in her ears.
“What are you two up to?” Noah asked.
“We were looking at the design school,” Theo said. “Wes was showing me around. I’d never been there—can you believe it? Yeah, it’s pretty cool.”
Noah nodded. “I’ll have to check it out.”
“Yeah, you should, you definitely should.”
Noah made a move, as if he was going to go on past them, as if he was going to go check it out right now. But then he stopped. “So how do you two know each other?” he asked.
Theo really wished he would stop saying you two. “We met in a bar,” Wes said, knowing, she supposed, that she wouldn’t want to confess the truth, at the exact moment that she suddenly felt compelled to do so. “Wes was my student,” she added.
Noah’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh.”
“Yeah,” Theo said, trying to make a joke of it. “He was young and nubile, so . . . ” She and Noah both looked at Wes, as if he were on display, and Wes obligingly struck a pose, putting both hands on his hips. She couldn’t decide if she was g
ratified that he played along, or disgusted. “I’m kidding, of course,” she said. “We only just . . . I mean, we just met again. He’s not my student anymore.”
Noah nodded slowly. Theo was in agony to know what he was thinking, but there was no way to find out besides asking directly, which she couldn’t do, and which was no guarantee of finding out. “Josh is at my place,” he said to Theo. “I don’t know if you knew.”
“No, I didn’t,” she said. “Okay. That’s good.”
“He wondered where you were.”
“Okay,” she said again, which made no sense as a reply. If Josh wanted to know where she was, he damn well could have called her, so there was no reason for her to feel guilty, no reason for Noah’s tone to have that hint of reproof. “Well, I’ll call him,” she said.
“Great,” Noah said. “I’ll tell him.” He looked Wes in the eye and said, “Nice to meet you, man.” Wes said it back, and then Noah raised his coffee cup at Theo and went striding off as though he had some urgent purpose, which they all knew very well he didn’t.
Theo started walking in the opposite direction, just to move, and Wes fell in beside her. She didn’t notice the silence between them, so deafening was her embarrassment, her conviction that any slim chance she might have had with Noah was now forever and ever blown. “You could have told him you were staying with me,” Wes said after a block or so.
“Yeah, but it was already bad enough,” Theo said. “Jesus.” It took her a moment to notice that he’d stopped moving, standing in the middle of the sidewalk so that two chatting girls had to split to go around him. She went back to him. “What are you doing?” she asked, and only then did she really look at his face and register the anger there.
“That was him, wasn’t it,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. He resumed walking, not looking at her, and she fell into step beside him. She expected him to want to talk about it, to argue or plead. She was braced, her shoulders high and tight. But he didn’t say anything, and so neither did she, even as her initial agitation passed and she grew uneasy with his silence. With the grip of her own emotions loosened, she had room to worry about his. He was angry, that much she knew, but what specifically was he angry about? He could be angry at the reminder that Noah existed, or at her for the way she’d acted and the things she’d said, or at himself for the way he’d played along.
