The Myth of You and Me: A Novel

by Leah Stewart

  I asked, in my most business-like manner, if Avery was at home.

  Without a word, she stepped back and waved me inside. There was a wide entryway with a red tiled floor, an enormous vase full of white flowers on a table. I stopped and waited for the woman to shut the door. She mopped at her forehead again, although I saw no sweat on her face. She gave me a once-over, a kind of territorial assessment that suggested—not jealousy, exactly, because she seemed too confident for that. Her manner suggested that she still saw Avery as a sexually viable man, even for someone my age. “Do you know Sonia Gray?” I asked her, just to see what effect Sonia’s name would have.

  “Of course,” she said. There was no change in her expression. She walked past me, saying over her shoulder that Avery was out by the pool. Although she wore shorts and a jogging bra, she had an arrogant sashay to her walk. I followed her down a long hall lined with shelves, on which framed photographs leaned against the wall under art lighting. She led me through glass doors out to a patio. Beyond that, surrounded by ceramic tiles, was the pool—they even had a pool house—and beyond the pool was a rolling green lawn. The sun was bright, bouncing off the artificial blue water, and the woman shaded her eyes and pointed at a shadowy figure under a beach umbrella. “There he is,” she said. Then she raised her voice. “Avery.” The figure looked up. “There’s a girl here to see you. I think she’s from the magazine.” She turned and went back inside.

  I stood there a moment, looking out on this scene of man-made beauty, the blue water, the white tile, the green grass. I gathered my forces—purpose, pride—and then with my spine erect I crossed the patio and walked along the pool toward the man who watched me approach without a word.

  He was sitting in a lawn chair beside a glass-topped table, his legs extended, his bare feet crossed at the ankles. Beside him on the table was a heavy square-cut glass of grapefruit juice with ice. He had what looked like a manuscript in his lap, a pen in the hand that rested atop the pages. He wore swimming trunks, though he looked dry, and a short-sleeve linen shirt that opened at the collar to reveal a white pelt of chest hair. Even in that outfit he managed to look imposing. It was something about the largeness of his head, the gravity with which he turned it to regard me. I stood over him so that he had to look up at me, but he wore sunglasses, so he didn’t have to squint, and I couldn’t see his eyes.

  “Are you having an affair with Sonia Gray?” I said.

  He laughed. “That’s not what I expected you to say.”

  “Are you?”

  He shook his head. “Sadly, no,” he said.

  I dropped into the chair across the table from him and pressed my fingertips so hard against my eyelids that when I opened my eyes I saw spots. “I believe you,” I said.

  “I’m so pleased,” he said. “Do you want to tell me who you are? Or what you’re doing here?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you work for me?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you want to?” He asked this with mild curiosity. “Because this is a strange way to go about it.”

  “I work for Oliver Doucet,” I said.

  “Oh?” He took off his sunglasses. His eyes were a pale, sharp blue. “That’s hard to believe.”

  “Why?”

  “Oliver’s dead.” He said this like it had been a fact for years, like Oliver was a figure out of history instead of a man who’d been alive less than two weeks ago. It was an insult to Oliver to sound so calm. I wanted to shout at him.

  “I thought you were friends,” I said.

  “We were.” He put his sunglasses back on.

  “How did you know him?”

  “He taught at Harvard one year, when I was a graduate student. And you?” He picked up his glass and swirled it, ice clinking.

  “I was his assistant. I was supposed to help him write his memoirs.”

  “That must have been fascinating work.”

  “It was hard,” I said. “It was hard to get him to talk about himself.”

  “Even so. Just to be in his presence was an education. How did you get that job?”

  “Luck,” I said. “And a referral from an English professor.”

  “You must have been qualified. Oliver didn’t suffer fools.”

  A single leaf floated in the pool. “No,” I said. I watched the leaf turn in a slow circle, violating the careful order of the backyard.

  Avery talked for a while about Oliver, and I heard again and again, like a bass beat, the word was. When I couldn’t bear it anymore I interrupted him. “I’m looking for Sonia,” I said. I explained about the package. “I thought you might know where she is.”

  “I didn’t know she was missing.” He shook his head. “Daisy hides things from me.”

  “Maybe she assumes you’re not interested.”

  He looked at me like he was trying to decide whether to be amused or annoyed. “Perhaps,” he said finally. “But I am interested in Sonia, whatever Daisy assumes.”

  “Then you’ll want to know that no one knows where she is, not even her fiancé. In fact, she lied to him, told him the magazine had sent her to a conference in New York.”

  “Really. That doesn’t bode well for her marriage.”

  “I have no idea where to look next,” I said.

  “Well, my dear, perhaps she went to New York, after all. Just not for a conference.”

  “Oh. I didn’t think of that,” I said, and then I remembered the question mark she’d written on the birth announcement from Owen. The time she’d disappeared, only to turn up in New York. Could she have gone to ask Owen for some kind of forgiveness when she couldn’t get it from me? Might she even still be sleeping with him, now, when he had a wife and a new baby? “Maybe she went to see Owen,” I said.

  “Possibly,” Avery said. “I don’t know who that is.”

  I’d neither seen nor spoken to Owen since the day I packed my things to leave Tennessee. The first few months I was in Ann Arbor he wrote me countless letters and called many, many times. I never called him back, never replied. I lay in bed listening to his voice on the answering machine, and sometimes I thought about the first time we had sex, both of us virgins, how I’d reached up, touched his closed eyelid with one finger, and felt the delicate trembling. I’d wondered if Sonia had watched his face the way I did, if she waited with anticipation for the instant when he closed his eyes and his whole body tensed. Maybe she had. Maybe she still did. Funny that now that knowledge would come as a relief.

  “I’m curious,” Avery said. “What made you think we were lovers?”

  “Her friend thought maybe she’d had an affair,” I said. “And she’d taken pictures of you.”

  “Well,” he said. “She’s a lovely young woman. I’m flattered that another lovely young woman would imagine she might want to sleep with me.” He raised his glass to me. “Unfortunately, I’m at the age when I’m more of a father figure than a romantic one.”

  “Oliver used to say he was my beau. He was much older than you.”

  “Was he your beau?”

  I thought of Oliver pressing my hand to his cheek, kissing me goodnight. “In the most innocent possible way.”

  “Well, then. In that way I am Sonia’s beau.”

  I felt a pang of longing. I wanted, just once more, to hear Oliver say, “That’s my girl, all right.”

  In the car, I put the key in the ignition and then left it there to pick up the magazine Daisy had given me. I flipped it open to the interview with Oliver and read the first quote I saw: “Faulkner wrote, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ I interpret that to mean that the past is memory, which of course is a living thing. This is difficult to explain, but when I’m writing a book I come to feel not that I’m repeating the events I’m describing, as one repeats a story told by someone else, but that I’m remembering them. So I don’t consider any of my books the definitive work on a subject. A history, like a life, is just what one person chooses to remember.”
/>   I knew this was not a message for me. Oliver had left no message for me, except the letter that had sent me here, which I’d read so many times, looking for it to say more than it did, that it didn’t seem to mean anything anymore. But whatever I knew, I believed something else—I believed it was a message for me, just as some people believe that when lost you can open the Bible at random and find a passage that points the way.

  One night, our junior year, Sonia and Owen and I abandoned studying for a History of Jazz exam to drive from Nashville to St. Louis at midnight. On the way there, whenever we crossed into a new state, we stopped to take pictures under the welcome sign, the three of us posing in combinations of two, Owen with his arm around Sonia, the bright camera flash. We weren’t even sure how to get to St. Louis. We just followed the signs as they appeared out of the darkness. We arrived at six in the morning and circled the city until we found the arch. The sky behind it was a brilliant, overwhelming blue. I felt like Dorothy must have when she finally saw the Emerald City.

  On the way back Owen slept with his arms folded across his chest, his head against the window. Sonia was curled up in the backseat. I was so tired the only way I could keep the car straight was to stare at the broken white line that divided the lanes. No one but me noticed when we crossed into a new state. An hour from Nashville they woke up and we took turns quizzing one another on Charlie Parker and bebop, all of us grumpy and sleepy and irritable, blaming each other for not putting a stop to this. Sonia said grimly, “We’re going to fail this test.”

  Why was this what I chose to remember? We saw a sapphire city together, the three of us, a wash of brilliant blue. Why couldn’t I believe it didn’t matter what happened after that?

  I opened the door to Sonia’s building and stopped dead. Not three feet in front of me was Will. My heart leapt up like a puppy. I was so nervous I couldn’t speak. He turned to me, apparently unsurprised, one hand bracing a piece of paper against the apartment door. “I was writing you a note.” He seemed sorry that I’d interrupted him. He crumpled the piece of paper and shoved it into his pocket. He looked at the package in my hand. “No luck?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m not going to attack you,” he said. I stepped inside the foyer. The door shut behind me with a definitive click. Now we were trapped together in a space too small to contain us. “Do you know you haven’t said a word?” Will said.

  I stepped forward and kissed him fiercely. I felt him grip the back of my shirt, and I thought, It can’t be him. It can’t be.

  I pulled away. He reached for me, but I moved around him to unlock the door. I gave him a look, then stepped inside. I thought of Avery’s wife and walked with an arrogant sashay. In the living room I turned to see him hesitating, looking around Sonia’s empty apartment, and so I went back to him, grabbed the waistband of his jeans, and tugged him over to the couch. I wanted to claim him, to brand him, so that every place I touched him I’d see not Sonia’s imprint, but mine.

  Afterward we went to the North End, which, Will explained in the car, was Boston’s Little Italy. He was in a good mood. He told me the note he’d been writing had said, Check this box if you like me. At stoplights he leaned over to kiss me. As he drove he kept his hand on my thigh. It seemed funny to me now that I’d been so paranoid as to imagine he was sleeping with Sonia. I almost wanted to share the joke.

  Will wanted to walk around the North End before dinner, so we went up the street to the Old North Church, and he told me that this was where Paul Revere hung his famous lantern. “One if by land, two if by sea,” he said. “Only it wasn’t really Paul Revere.” He gazed up at the belfry like he was waiting for the signal. “It was some other guy.” He shook his head. “That poor guy. Why did he get ignored?”

  “Maybe his name didn’t have a good rhyme,” I said.

  Will laughed. It gave me a little thrill of pleasure every time I made him laugh. “Lost to history for want of a rhyme,” he said.

  Strolling back down the street to his favorite restaurant, we came up with rhymes for our own names. “Poor Will Barrett,” I said. “Lived in a garret.”

  “Leading a solitary life,” he said.

  “Along came a . . .” I stopped.

  He waited. “What?”

  “I don’t know. Parrot? Carrot?”

  He grinned. “Along came a you.”

  I said, “That doesn’t rhyme.”

  The restaurant was hot and crowded, redolent with tomato sauce and garlic, and we had to wait so long for a table, drinking red wine at the bar, that I was drunk by the time the hostess called Will’s name. Walking to the table, I held on to him to steady myself. When we reached our seats it was hard to make myself let go. During dinner I found myself thinking of Sonia again, as much as I wanted to banish her from my mind. I kept lapsing into silences. I’d look up to find Will watching me, a worried look on his face, and I’d try to smile. He kept asking me what was wrong. Again and again I said it was nothing, and each time I said it I was less sure it was true.

  Over dessert, Will said, “What’s going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something’s on your mind.”

  I ate the last bite of tiramisu. “I’ve got a new theory about Sonia. I think she’s in New York.”

  “Doing what?”

  I told him how she’d lied to Martin about going there, about the birth announcement and the question mark that Sonia had written on it. “So maybe she’s gone there to ask for forgiveness or something.”

  He frowned. “I don’t get it. Forgiveness for what?”

  “Oh.” I stared at him. “You don’t know?”

  “Doesn’t seem like it.”

  “She slept with Owen. In college. That’s why we broke up, he and I. That’s why Sonia and I aren’t friends anymore.” It struck me, as I told him this, that for the first time it meant nothing to me. For the first time since Sonia told me what she’d done, I really didn’t care. But Will looked like he cared. He sat back in his chair.

  “I can’t believe that,” he said.

  “Well, it’s true.” I waved my fork in the air.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I just can’t believe it.”

  I was starting to get annoyed. I let my fork drop with a clatter onto the plate. “Why?” I said. “Because she’s such a precious little angel?”

  He ignored this. “I still don’t see why she’d want his forgiveness.”

  “Well, she fucked up his life, too, didn’t she? I mean, he and I were going to move in together.”

  “But why now? Why not eight years ago?”

  “Who knows? She’s having a crisis?” I shrugged, pretending nonchalance. “Anyway, that might not be why she went. Suzette said she thought she’d been seeing someone else. Maybe she’s fucking Owen again.”

  “I doubt it,” he said.

  My stomach twisted. “Why would you doubt it?”

  He looked at me.

  “You would doubt it,” I said slowly, “because you’re the one fucking her. Of course. How stupid of me.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “Not anymore.”

  I stood. I hardly knew what I was doing. I felt the chair wobble and right itself behind me. My eyes filled with tears. Show no weakness, I thought. I will kill you if you cry. A waitress passed by with a steaming plate of mussels. A man at the table next to ours ordered another bottle of wine. Talk and laughter swelled and receded, swelled again. For a moment Will and I stared at each other in a pocket of silence. Then he said, “Cameron. Please, let me explain. Please sit down.”

  I turned and walked out of the restaurant, and when I reached the sidewalk I ran.

  It took me an hour to get back to Sonia’s on the train, and by then I thought I was sober enough to drive. I got on the Mass. Pike, headed west, and drove fast, like speed could erase what Will had told me. I felt like I was twenty-one again, racing back to Nashville from the gas station where I’d left
Sonia, wanting her to cease to exist, wanting the moment when I hit the gas to be the end. It had seemed to me then that if I got back to Owen fast enough it’d be like I had never gone, and nothing Sonia had said would be true. Outside Owen’s house that day I’d sat in the car with both hands still on the wheel, staring out the windshield. The front door slammed and I turned to see Owen looking at the car as he walked down the steps. He approached cautiously, his hands out in front of him as if to show he was unarmed. I saw his face, the look of fear and guilt, and I knew Sonia had called to warn him. They were co-conspirators, unified against me, sharing secrets, sharing the memory of each other’s touch. I had driven back to him as fast as my car would go, but still I couldn’t outrun her. I turned to stare out the windshield again and, gripping the wheel so tightly it hurt, began to cry. Owen knocked on the window. He went around to the front of the car and put his hands flat on the windshield, begging me to open the door. His voice was muffled and meaningless. Didn’t he understand? He was just scenery outside the window. I was already gone.

  Now I drove for an hour or so before I caught myself letting the car wander into the next lane. I was still tipsy. In a motel room in Sturbridge, Connecticut, I sat in the middle of the king-size bed and started to open the package. I had the yarn off and one flap pulled up when I stopped. I couldn’t do it, even though I hated Oliver for giving me this errand, for being so difficult to live with in the beginning, for making me love him and then leaving me. I put the package back together.

  I was alone, and it was better that way, because this time I had chosen it. One way or another everybody left, and so life presented two options: You could be the one who got back on the road, or you could be the one left behind.