by Leah Stewart
“Huh,” Josh said. He drank more beer. In fact he didn’t Google himself, or at least hadn’t for some time, precisely to avoid commentary like that.
“Who’s Moe Tucker?” Adelaide asked.
“She was the drummer for the Velvet Underground.”
“ ‘What a waste of talent,’ ” she read. “ ‘Any chance of a comeback?’ So Noah’s not the only one waiting.”
“Maybe he wrote that,” Josh said.
“He can’t have written all of them,” Adelaide said. “Your name brings up four million hits.”
“They’re not all me,” he said. “It’s not an unusual name.”
“Blind Robots . . . ” She typed, narrowed her eyes at the screen. “That brings up about two million. I’ve been dating a famous guy, and I’m the only one who doesn’t know it.”
“I’m not famous,” he said.
“You seem pretty famous to me.”
“I guess you’re mad,” he said.
She looked at him now. “I’m embarrassed,” she said. “I feel like an idiot. I can’t believe I didn’t know this huge thing about you. I can’t believe you kept that from me.”
“I’m sorry. I should have told you,” he said, but then, without warning, remorse morphed back into anger. “But what about you? You’re not telling me everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“You had some audition or something. You’re thinking of leaving.”
“How do you know that?”
“I heard you at Carlos’s party. I heard you saying you couldn’t stay here for some guy you just met.”
“Oh,” she said. She leaned forward to return her laptop to the table, close its screen.
“So that’s me,” he said. “Some guy you just met.”
“That’s not true,” she said. “Except it is true, isn’t it? Isn’t that how you’re acting?”
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t tell me about the band!”
“The band is over! The band is done! You didn’t tell me about something that might take you away from here. Something that’s now.”
“Because I didn’t know if it would amount to anything. This choreographer, this guy who came in for New Works a couple years ago and set a piece on me, he asked if I’d audition for a company he’s putting together. But I don’t know if he’ll want me, and I don’t even know if I’d want the job. They’ll be based in New York, but they’re going to travel constantly, and they’re all contemporary ballet. I don’t know if I want to do that.”
“So you haven’t auditioned yet?”
“No. It’s next month.”
“Were you going to tell me?”
“I didn’t really know where we stood,” she said. “I didn’t know how you’d react.”
“I don’t understand that at all.”
“You don’t? Then why didn’t you tell me about the band?”
“Because I was tired of people liking me because of that! Do you know how many girls have dated me just because I used to be a musician?”
“No, I don’t,” she said. “And I don’t want to. But I’ll tell you I can get in the door with almost any guy by telling them I’m a dancer. Isn’t that what happened with you?”
“I just liked you,” he said.
“Well,” she said, “there’s no way to prove that.”
“There’s no way to prove that knowing about my band wouldn’t have made you more interested either,” he said.
“I didn’t need to be more interested.”
“Oh, you could have fooled me. You don’t tell me about something that might make you move. You don’t ever ask me about my job.”
“I didn’t think you wanted to talk about it.”
“Really?”
“Every time I brought it up you made a joke or changed the subject. So I quit asking.”
“Oh.” Even with the reason clear, the agitation remained. He cast about for something else to feel upset about. “What about your friends? Why did it take so long to introduce me?”
“I told you. Some people are freaked out by us. One guy I dated said we were all too thin. He said just by myself I seemed fine but when he saw me with all the other girls it was too weird, how alike our bodies were. He said it made him feel like ballet was a cult.”
“Whatever.” Josh stood up, carried his empty bottle to the kitchen, and set it on the counter. She stood, too, waiting with her hands on her hips for him to return. “So,” he said, “had you heard of us? Did you recognize any of our songs?”
“Yeah,” she said. “If I’d known who you were, you’re probably right. I’d have been interested right away. So I guess I don’t pass the test.”
“Well, neither do I, apparently.”
“What should I have said to you about this audition? Should I have asked if you’d date me if I moved? Should I have asked you to go with me? I was afraid to bring it up. You’ve never even called me your girlfriend.”
“Because I couldn’t tell if you wanted me to!”
“Why didn’t you ask?”
“Why didn’t you?”
She pressed her lips together and shook her head.
“If you get that job, are you going?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Then what is the point of this?”
“I guess if you don’t know, then I don’t know,” she said.
“Seems like we understand each other for the first time,” Josh said.
“How could I understand you?” she said. “You didn’t tell me who you were.”
“Yes, I did.”
“No,” she said. “You didn’t.”
She was right. He didn’t want to say so. So he said, “You’ve never even let me see your feet.”
She looked away. He saw that she was standing in fourth position, her posture upright as ever, and found that he could no longer bear to look at her. Her loveliness was an affront. He’d left his bag right by the door. It was a matter of only a few steps to reach it, almost no effort to pick it up, to open the door and step outside. He thought he heard her say his name before the door closed behind him, but he couldn’t be sure. She didn’t follow him. If she’d really wanted to, she could have followed him, chased him down the hall in her stupid, hateful socks.
He wanted to be alone, he thought, but he realized when he unlocked the door to his house—his old house—that he’d been hoping someone would be there. But all the lights were out, and though he went from floor to floor and room to room turning them on, he couldn’t find another person inside.
19
When Theo was small, she’d gone through a phase of being terrified her parents would abandon her, and her parents, in turn, had been alarmed by the unwavering intensity of her fear. She was young enough—five or six—that she probably wouldn’t have remembered this later, except that this particular phase had made such an impression on her parents that they’d brought it up several times through the years, the same way they’d often told her how she’d once said, after passing her cold on to baby Josh, “Is that very nice to take away a person’s vaporizer and give it to a baby?” and that she’d tormented three-year-old Josh mercilessly by referring to his overalls as “OshJosh.”
The story they most often told was about her falling asleep on the stairs. She’d refused to go to bed before her parents did, afraid they’d sneak out of the house when she wasn’t awake to stop them. If she came downstairs, or they caught her out of bed, they took away her TV time and her desserts and her bedtime stories, so she took to creeping halfway down the stairs and waiting there, running back up to her room when she heard them coming. One night she fell asleep on the stairs and tumbled down them. Her parents heard a terrible thumping and came running. She lay on her back on the landing looking dazed and hurt, but not making a sound, still trying not to alert them to her misbehavior. They checked her over and made her tell them how many fingers they were holding up, and then they carried her back upstairs, put her in th
eir own bed, and climbed in on either side of her. This part she thought she remembered, her father’s arm around her, her mother’s hand stroking her hair. “Why would you ever think we’d leave you?” her father asked. Her mother said, “Don’t you know that’s the last thing we’d ever do?”
Theo didn’t want to be alone now any more than she had then, but she feared—she knew—that eventually she would be. Sitting on the stairs—an act of hopeful desperation. Trying to stop what couldn’t be stopped. Trying to keep an eye on people, who nevertheless eluded you the moment you dropped your guard. Her parents had left her with Eloise; now Eloise had left her, too, and Claire, and though Josh hadn’t technically left her, he held so many things against her that just being around him exhausted her, struggling to keep all that resentment at bay. She was tired of trying not to fight with him. She had friends, of course, but none of her closest ones were still in Cincinnati, and so here she was lying awake at dawn on a Sunday in bed next to this sleeping boy, which maybe was a cosmic kind of sitting on the stairs, neither here nor there, neither up nor down, waiting for somebody to come along and get her.
Could she maybe, possibly, be over Noah? Was it possible she was falling for Wes? She tried to catch herself off guard with these questions, surprise herself into a definitive answer, but this was difficult. Ha! her mind said. I knew you were going to ask that. And then, smugly, said nothing more. She needed a clarifying moment. She awaited epiphany. In the meantime she had to act on what she did know, which was that she shouldn’t take indefinite advantage of Wes’s generosity.
But this conviction left her with a dilemma. It made little sense to get her own place here when she didn’t know how long she’d be staying, and had come here to save money in the first place. And had no money in the second place. It was this dilemma that had woken her early. She reviewed its particulars again and again without arriving at any conclusions.
As the room lightened, she got out of bed without waking Wes, and then, without exactly making a decision, she got dressed, found her bag, and went outside. In fall Cincinnati mornings grew darker, headed toward a winter when it would be pitch-dark from 5:00 P.M. to 8:00 A.M. Pretty soon it would seem strange to see people on the sidewalks in the morning and the evening. Shouldn’t we all be in bed? She walked to her car, parked three blocks away, and then she got in and started it. She couldn’t think of where to go, so she went home. When you can’t think of anywhere to go . . . Had she seen that stitched on a throw pillow somewhere?
The house was still and dark, of course. She let herself in quietly and closed the door as if trying not to wake someone. Though the sky was getting brighter, the rooms were still dim, but she felt a resistance to turning on the lights. She went into the living room and stood in the center of it looking around. She felt like a visitor to a museum of her life. All the framed photos on the surfaces, a pair of her earrings waiting in a decorative dish on the bookshelf. It was like a set designer had planned this place.
She walked up the stairs, trailing her fingers along the banister. How long would she remember what the wood felt like beneath her hand? Maybe she wouldn’t remember at all, never having reminded herself to pay attention. Still, she knew. She knew without remembering. But without the banister there to touch, how would she ever know she knew? Sense memory doesn’t work without input from the senses. She needed the house. Why couldn’t Eloise understand how much she needed it?
She was walking past Josh’s room to hers when his door suddenly opened. Theo started back, clapping her hand over a scream. There, in a pair of boxers and his skinny white chest, was her brother. “You scared the shit out of me!” she said. She felt startled awake, jarred out of her melancholy mood.
He looked at her with a zombielike glaze. His hair was tufted out on one side, and he had a pillow crease on his cheek. “I guess I fell asleep,” he said. He scrubbed at his face with one hand and looked at her again.
“What do you mean you fell asleep? It’s pretty early for you. Weren’t you just asleep in the normal way?”
He shook his head, then said around a yawn, “I was up most of the night.”
“Doing what?”
He lifted a shoulder, looking away like he didn’t want to tell her.
“What are you doing here, anyway?”
“I’m staying here for now. I came back on Friday.”
“Did you ask Eloise?”
“No,” he said. He ran a hand through his hair, making it wilder, and looking at him she saw the little boy he’d been. His hair a wild explosion of curls because their mother loved it that way, his big eyes, his endless series of T-shirts featuring pictures of guitars, because though their mother bought him other shirts those were the only ones he’d wear. She remembered the intense look of concentration he used to wear in the backseat of the car, trying to learn the words to a song on the stereo, the way he’d mumble his half-understood version of the lyrics, the way she used to tease him about what he got wrong, her parents saying, “Theo, be nice. He’s your little brother, be nice,” and suddenly she felt a surge of tenderness for him like she hadn’t felt in quite some time.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
He seemed to seriously consider the question before offering her a rueful smile. “I don’t really know,” he said.
“What were you doing all night?”
He sighed. “I feel stupid telling you.”
“I won’t judge,” she said, and he looked so skeptical that she was torn between defensiveness and laughter. “For once,” she said.
“I was writing songs.” He watched her for her reaction, and she tried to keep her face neutral, afraid if she responded with too much excitement he’d get mad. “I finished a couple that had been in my head awhile, and then I wrote two new ones.”
“Wow,” she said.
“I know, right? I don’t know if they’re any good, but they feel like they’re good.”
“I bet they’re good,” she said, and she grinned at him. “I bet they’re really good.”
“Well,” he said. “I appreciate your faith.”
She turned away briskly, because a nice moment should be preserved, and said, “There’s still coffee in the house, right?”
“Yup,” he said. “I picked up a few things yesterday, so there’s half-and-half, too.”
“Oh, thank God,” she said. She headed for the stairs.
“You’re such a baby,” he said. He grabbed a T-shirt from inside his room and followed her.
“You put cream in your coffee, too,” Theo said.
“Yes, but I can drink it black.”
“I can, too. I just have to pretend it’s medicine. Nasty, nasty medicine.”
“Medicine’s not always nasty. Remember how we loved it when we were little?”
“Oh, the pink ear infection stuff. That was my favorite.”
“I was always partial to cherry Tylenol,” he said.
“That stuff sucks,” Theo said, “but to each his own,” and then they were in the kitchen, and he wanted to use the French press instead of the coffeepot, and she called him a snob, and he said he just had better taste than she did, and then she made a show of seeking his approval about how well she’d ground the beans, and really, they hadn’t gotten along this well, this easily, in such a long time that she felt nearly giddy with the relief and pleasure of it. She wouldn’t press him on his situation. She wouldn’t ask him a single thing.
“So what are you doing here?” he asked, when they were sitting at the kitchen table with their mugs.
“I’ve been feeling a little homeless,” she said. “I can’t decide what to do about that. So I came back home.”
“You’ve been staying with that guy?”
“Wes, yes.” She took a sip of coffee, burned her tongue, and grimaced.
“That rhymed,” Josh said.
“It did indeed.”
“Are you making faces because of him?”
She shook her head. “Burned my tongue.”
He nodded and blew on his own coffee with an air of concentration. She could tell he, too, was trying not to ask too many questions. Sometimes she forgot, in her conviction that their problems were all about his sensitivities, that she, too, had buttons to push. “He’s a great guy,” Theo said. “But he’s a little young for me.”
“How young?”
“He’s twenty-two.” Josh looked so neutral at this news that Theo laughed. “You can react,” she said.
“That’s not so bad. He’s allowed in a bar.”
“True,” she said. “That is what I look for in a man.” She sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing. I honestly don’t really know what I feel about him. Or where I should live. Or what I’m doing here.”
“Here at the house? Here in Cincinnati?”
“Here in the world,” she said.
Josh tested the coffee and pronounced it cool enough, so Theo drank some, and for a moment they sat there in silence. Then he said, “Why don’t you come back to the house, too? It’s silly for it to sit here empty while we impose on other people.”
“The way Eloise has behaved is just so unfair.”
“I don’t worry so much about fairness.” He grinned at her. “I’m the middle child. I’m more about negotiation.”
“You’re the good one,” she said.
“I’m the good one.” He sighed. “Allegedly.”
“Truly!” Theo said. “You came to pick me up that night from that bar, and you never asked any questions. I don’t even know if I thanked you.”
“Was that you thanking me just now?”
“I think it was,” she said. She pretended to consider. “Yes, it was.”
“I have to tell you, Theo,” Josh said, but then it took him a moment to go on. “About Sabrina. You were right. I was an asshole.”
Just the day before, Theo would have been thrilled by this admission. Now she resisted it. “Oh, I don’t think so.”
“I mean I was pathetic.”
