The History of Us

by Leah Stewart

  “Oh hell,” Eloise said. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay. I’m not very good with new people. I do much better with an audience than I do up close.”

  Eloise laughed. “I feel the same way about myself,” she said.

  “Josh isn’t like that, though,” Adelaide said. “Even though he used to be a performer. God! I just can’t believe I didn’t know that. Do you know what I did, after we fought and he left? I bought all his music.”

  “You did?”

  “I’ve been listening to it ever since. I can’t stop listening to it. It’s really good. And also, you know, it’s Josh.”

  “I do know,” Eloise said. “I know what you mean.” Adelaide had said his name with such feeling, Eloise was sure she loved him. Loved him enough to work this out? Loved him enough never to hurt him? Did anybody love anybody enough for that?

  “I’m sorry,” Adelaide said. “You wanted to ask me something.”

  “Oh,” Eloise said. “Yes. But I don’t know exactly what it is.” She gave the other woman a weak and sheepish smile. “I guess I want you to explain Claire to me. I guess I thought you might understand.”

  Adelaide frowned. “You mean her quitting?”

  “I guess,” Eloise said. “I guess that’s what I mean.”

  Adelaide went on frowning, her gaze on the floor. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t imagine quitting. And it’s not like she talked to me about it. I’m sure she didn’t want to tell me.”

  “That’s probably true. She really admires you.”

  “But I wouldn’t judge her. I know how hard the life is. I mean, I’m sorry about it—it’s a loss to ballet, because she’s amazing, she’s really something special, and when you teach and you see that kind of talent you want it to be put to use.”

  “I know.”

  “Yeah, you know what?” Adelaide said abruptly. “I’m lying. I am disappointed in her. I don’t think she really wanted to quit ballet. I don’t think she really found the love of her life. I think she just got scared.”

  “Really?”

  “She was probably freaked out by leaving home. I had to refuse to teach her anymore, you know. That’s the only way I could get her to audition for other programs.”

  “I remember that.”

  Adelaide glanced at her. “She took it hard, didn’t she. I remember when I told her she seemed like she was struggling not to cry.”

  “She took it hard,” Eloise said. There had been crying on the floor, followed by a quiet, doomed resolve. Eloise’s heart had ached for her, and yet she’d thought this pain was necessary—thought Claire needed to go. “But I was grateful to you.”

  “All I wanted when I was her age was to go to New York.”

  “Me, too. But not Claire. Claire gave that up to stay here, and now she’s run off again, left Gary, but I don’t know where she’s gone. I don’t know if I should try to find her, or just leave her alone.”

  Adelaide shook her head. “She’ll turn up,” she said. “If she’s not still here she’s gone somewhere she knows.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know. She wouldn’t go someplace new. She wouldn’t strike out on her own.”

  “You’re so sure.”

  “I understand her. She puts everything into her dancing. It’s almost like she has no resources outside of that. She’s spent all her time thinking about how to move onstage. She’s got very little idea how to move through the world.”

  “So there’s nothing to her but the dancing?”

  “No, no, I didn’t mean that. More like, she wishes there was nothing else to life.”

  “Is that how you feel?” Eloise asked.

  “I used to,” Adelaide said. She gave Eloise a small, rueful smile. “I’m trying not to anymore.”

  Giving in to her impulse, Eloise put her hand on the other woman’s arm. Her slender, elegant, strong but fragile-looking arm. Eloise looked her in the eye and said, “Josh loves you.”

  Adelaide’s color rose. “Really?” she said.

  “I don’t want you to lose each other,” Eloise said. “Call him. Go see him. Don’t let him go.”

  Adelaide seemed caught by Eloise’s intensity. “I won’t,” she said. “I promise.”

  So maybe she’d fixed that one, Eloise thought, walking out toward the parking lot. Maybe she’d done something right. Could she manage something else? Somewhere she knows, Adelaide had said. Where did Claire know? She knew Cincinnati. She knew New York, but it seemed unlikely she’d have gone there. She knew Sewanee, Tennessee, where her grandmother lived. Sewanee, where Francine had gone to school and then returned, that tiny town on top of a mountain, that remote and quiet hideaway.

  Eloise waited until she reached her car to call, and then she took a deep breath and pressed the necessary buttons.

  “Oh, thank God,” Francine said. “Where have you been? I’ve been calling the house.”

  “I was out of town. Plus I’ve been staying with someone. Why didn’t you call my cell?”

  “I hate cell phones,” Francine said. “Who are you staying with? That woman Heather?”

  Eloise froze. “How’d you know?”

  “She answered the phone once when I called, and when I asked for you she asked who was calling, and introduced herself like there was some reason for us to know each other.”

  “But you never said anything.”

  “No, because you didn’t.” Eloise could picture her mother’s pleased-with-herself expression. “I know more than you give me credit for.”

  “Clearly.”

  “I don’t know why you wouldn’t tell me.”

  “I don’t either,” Eloise said. “Obviously there wasn’t any point to not telling. So I’m looking for Claire. Is she there?”

  “Of course she’s here. Why do you think I’ve been calling you? She took a bus here,” Francine said. “She went to Nashville and then came here. She just brought this one little bag so I thought she wasn’t staying long.”

  “But . . . ” Eloise prompted.

  “But now it seems like she might stay indefinitely! I mean it’s already been five days. And she’s not really herself, Eloise. I open a bottle of wine and she drinks two-thirds of it. And then she’s sleeping it off half the day. She cries. She says she’s ruined her life. All she talks about is how everyone hates her and will never forgive her.”

  “I see,” Eloise said.

  “She’s always been so poised, so graceful,” Francine said, clearly wistful for that previous version of her granddaughter. “You never knew what she was thinking.”

  “Not lately anyway,” Eloise said.

  Francine sighed. “It’s all a bit too much for me, honestly.” Something in her voice brought to mind Eloise’s first day back in Cincinnati, after Rachel died. Her mother on the bed, a dark sculpture of grief. Her mother asking, “Why did she leave her children with me?” For the first time Eloise imagined that there had been not just petulant anger in that question but genuine sorrow, genuine desperation, genuine regret. She’d held so much against her mother for so long. The way she was never quite there in the room with you, the way she always seemed to be thinking about something else, the way she always had reasons not to do things for you. She was tired. She was overwhelmed. Life was too chaotic. Maybe, for her mother, all of that had been not just an excuse but the truth. Funny that Eloise felt this sympathy—maybe even empathy—for Francine now, at this moment, as her mother made her way to one more exasperating, predictable request.

  “Can you come get her?” her mother said.

  21

  Theo was in the middle of a paragraph that could go two ways. She got up from her desk without paying attention to what she was doing and went down the stairs, her mind still turning over sentences, in an unthinking search for something to eat. She took the back stairs into the kitchen and found an open bag of chips in the pantry. At the counter she stuffed chips in her mouth, staring into space, and then
there was a sharp rap at the door, startling her so badly she crumpled the bag in her hand and crunched the chips within. “Dammit,” she said, both about the chips and about the person at the door. Because who could it possibly be? It couldn’t be anyone. Maybe the mailman, or the UPS guy. She went slowly toward the door, trying to see out the sidelights who it was, and she caught a glimpse of a blurry male figure, not in uniform, and too short to be Josh. The conviction leapt into her mind that it must be Wes, and she felt so horrified at this idea that it was hard to understand her disappointment when she opened the door and the person standing there turned out to be Noah.

  “Oh, hey,” Noah said. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”

  “Yup,” she said. She looked down and saw potato chip crumbs on her breasts. “Pardon my messiness,” she said, brushing them away. “I was just taking a break to do some mindless eating.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, were you working?”

  “I was, but come in.” She moved back, pulling the door the rest of the way open, and after a moment of hesitation he stepped inside. “Were you looking for Josh?” she asked, pushing the door shut behind him.

  “I was,” he said. “It was an impulse. I was headed to the movies, and then suddenly I didn’t want to go to the movies, I wanted a drink, but I didn’t want to drink by myself, and I thought I’d stop and see if he was home.”

  Theo shook her head. “Still at work,” she said. She didn’t want to look at him, so she turned and headed for the kitchen. “You can have a drink here,” she said over her shoulder. “I also have chips.”

  “I don’t want to interrupt your working,” he said, following her.

  “You already have,” she said, and then, surprised at herself, she turned and flashed him her most brilliant smile, so that he’d think she was joking when she clearly hadn’t been. Why the impulse toward bitchiness? What had he done to her? “I welcome interruptions,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  “So,” she said, opening the fridge. “Beer?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  She handed him one, found the bottle opener, and handed him that. Then she pulled down a big bowl and dumped what was left of the chips into it. Now what? She looked at him, and instead of eating or drinking he was just leaning against the counter looking at her. She gave him a nervous smile and went to get a beer for herself.

  “So you’re back here, too?” he asked.

  “I am,” she said.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “About a week.”

  “Did something go wrong with, um . . . ”

  “Wes,” she said, though it felt strangely disloyal to tell Noah his name.

  “Yeah. Weren’t you staying with him?”

  “I was, but it just started to seem like all that happened too fast.”

  Noah nodded. He drank some of his beer. He nodded, again, as if at something he was thinking, his eyes on the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. He looked up at her. “I mean, if I should be sorry.”

  “I don’t really know,” she said. “I’ve been trying not to think about it.”

  “Here’s to that,” he said.

  “How was your weekend with Marisa? She was here last weekend, right?”

  “It was not so good,” he said. “We broke up.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “Now I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “She was never coming here. No matter what she was never going to come here. I mean she’s waiting tables there. That’s why she has to stay in L.A.”

  “She lost her job?”

  “She’s convinced she’ll get another one.” He sighed. “It was never going to work out. One of us had to see that sooner or later.”

  “So you broke up with her?”

  “No.” He laughed, and then to her alarm she saw that his eyes were filling with tears. He pressed the heel of one hand to one eye, sniffed, gave her an embarrassed, watery smile. “She broke up with me.”

  “Oh, Noah,” she said. When a person is crying, you should go to him, but she couldn’t move. She gazed at him from the other side of the room.

  “It’s okay,” he said. He swiped at his eyes, looking around, and she grabbed the paper towel roll behind her and advanced, holding it out. He thanked her, tore a towel off slowly, wiped his eyes. “I’m embarrassed,” he said.

  “Don’t be,” she said. She was standing much closer to him now, leaning on the island, very near the bowl of chips. She had a strong, nervous urge to eat more, but you can’t cram your mouth with chips in the face of someone’s tears.

  “I’m an idiot,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve been doing this for so long. I’ve been dating her for seven years. What was all that time for?”

  “That happens to everybody. Look at Josh.”

  “Has it happened to you?”

  “No, I’ve never been with anybody that long. Not even close. But maybe something’s wrong with me.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with you,” he said.

  “Hmmmm,” she said. “Depends on who you ask.”

  “Theo,” he said, “I wish . . . that day at the museum . . . ”

  “Oh,” she said. “Speaking of idiocy.”

  “No, no,” he said. “I just wasn’t sure, I didn’t quite understand . . . ”

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “No, listen.” He took a step toward her. “I was the idiot then, too.”

  She dropped her gaze, heat in her cheeks, blood in her ears, her mind a humming blank. What was happening? She couldn’t see his face, her eyes on the floor, and so she just waited for him to move or speak. She’d been such a child in his presence, such a silly, yearning child, Jane Eyre with Mr. Rochester, Emma with Mr. Knightley. Theo with Mr. Garcia. She should have guessed that when, finally, he kissed her it would be in this way—him lifting her chin with his hand so that she had to meet his eyes, leaning in to kiss her as if that kiss was a gift he had to bestow. What she had been asking him for, all girlish and beseeching, he gave her at last.

  Maybe it was because she’d pictured this moment so often and so long that she was having such trouble actually living it. That she seemed to be an actor in a part rather than herself. What had it been like to live in the days before the movies and TV had shown us every moment we could possibly expect to live? What had it been like when your experience actually seemed to belong to you? Noah’s mouth was on her mouth. His hand had slipped from her chin to the side of her neck. Her mind was detached, but her heart was wild. He pulled back and looked at her. She didn’t have to open her eyes, not having closed them. “I’m sorry,” he said. He dropped his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “Did I not kiss you back?” she asked.

  “Um. At first I thought yes. But no, no. I don’t think so.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I went out of body there for a second.”

  “My fault,” he said.

  “No, it’s mine,” she said, and then, to put an end to this conversation, she kissed him. Be quiet, mind. Be quiet, guilty uncertainty. Desire has its own morality. What you want you should have. What you’ve wanted for so long you must have wanted for a reason.

  She kissed him, and then she kissed him harder. She pressed her whole body against him, because why not, why not, why not. He lifted her up and put her on the island—my God, this really was a movie, but no, don’t think about that, be in the moment, he’s kissing you, he’s kissing you. She did her best. She wrapped her legs around him. He slid his hands under her shirt, and then he pushed her shirt up, and then he was kissing her breasts where they emerged from her bra, her fingers buried in his hair. This was what was happening.

  Did she hear the door? She didn’t think so, though how she could have failed to was a question that would puzzle her for quite some time. Maybe she heard it but didn’t register it, concentrating as she was on trying to enjoy kissing and being kissed, on insisting to herself that she didn’t want to stop th
is, there was no reason to stop this, this was what she’d wanted for so goddamn long.

  All she could say for sure was that she was half-naked on the kitchen island, Noah’s mouth on her breasts, when she registered a sound and looked up to find her aunt staring at them. Theo froze, and then Noah jumped back wearing an almost comic expression of horror. Theo yanked down her shirt.

  “I’m going to go back out,” Eloise said. “And pretend that didn’t happen.” She turned on her heel. The front door opened and closed. There was a throbbing silence. Theo didn’t know what to say, or how she felt. The only emotion she could register was embarrassment.

  “Wow,” Noah said. “That was super awkward.”

  “Super awkward?” Theo repeated. There was nothing to do but laugh, so she laughed. “Did you see the look on her face?”

  “Oh my God,” Noah said. “I think maybe she wanted to kill me.”

  “Or me!”

  “Now what do we do? Where did she go?”

  “I don’t ever want to see her again.”

  “No, me neither.” He groaned. “I’m going to have to quit my job.”

  “I’m going to have to quit my family!”

  The front door opened again, and they both froze. “I’m going upstairs,” Eloise called, and then they heard her footsteps as she ascended.

  “Thank God,” Noah said. “I was thinking about running out the back door and abandoning my car.”

  “Where would you run to?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’d just keep running forever.” He looked at her seriously after he said this, and there was some kind of apology in his expression. “Should I go?” he asked.

  “I guess so,” she said. “She’s my aunt.”

  He nodded as if he understood what she meant by this. He hesitated, and then he leaned in and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. “I’ll call you,” he said.

  Maybe he would call her. She went on sitting on the island after he left, unable to choose her next move. Maybe he’d call her, and he’d ask her on a date. They’d go to the movies. They’d go to Graeter’s and get a sundae with two spoons. They’d go back to his place and make out on the couch. At some point she’d be sleeping in his bed, all evidence of Marisa removed from his room, boxed up, sent back, given away. The thought of all this made her very, very tired. It was like reshooting the movie with the lead actor changed. Why was it so hard to tell the difference between what you thought you wanted and what you wanted? Why did people have to be such a danger to themselves?