Sleepwalking

by Meg Wolitzer

  He sat in his austere college room instead, facing a death girl. She was all in black, a midnight visitor, like death itself. “That is the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said in a quiet voice. “I don’t know how I get myself into these things.”

  “That’s not the whole story,” Naomi said. “That’s not even the weird part. I know it doesn’t sound like the healthiest situation to you, but I still thought that Claire would be okay. I still thought that she’d be thinking clearly. When she called me tonight, I didn’t know what to do. She started telling me about what’s been going on, but it sounded as if it wasn’t even her own life she was talking about. She told me that they really like her, that she fits in. First she was staying in the guest room, but a couple of days ago Mrs. Ascher had her clean out Lucy’s old room, and then she told Claire that she could move her things in there if she wanted, that the bed was probably more comfortable than the one in the guest room. So now Claire is sleeping in Lucy’s old room. It’s as if she thinks she’s turning into Lucy or something. I don’t know what to do. She kept saying, ‘Naomi, are you there?’ over the telephone, because I couldn’t speak—I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to her. The whole thing sounded so off to me.” She paused. “Do you think I’m overreacting?” she asked him.

  Julian shook his head. “No,” he said. He was so stunned that he had to wait a few seconds before he said anything else. Naomi seemed to understand. She didn’t rush him but just let him take his time. Claire had gone too far; that was what all of this was about. While everyone else worried about her and practically ruined their lives over her, she was just doing as she pleased, he reflected. Claire was completely in charge of her life, as always. Julian suddenly felt hopeless about the whole thing.

  “I think we’d better forget it,” he said softly. “I don’t know what else we can do.”

  Naomi lowered her head to her hands. “God,” she said. “I feel completely alone in all of this.”

  Julian saw that she was about to cry. He didn’t think he could bear that. “Well, look,” he said quickly, “what about your friend Laura? You still have her, don’t you? Why don’t you talk about it with her?”

  “No,” said Naomi, shaking her head. “She’s been really out of it these days. I don’t know what’s wrong with her. She’s been seeing the shrink over at Health Services, and he gave her some Valium because she can’t sleep at night. She’s barely doing anything. She just lies around all day, depressed. I’ve tried to talk to her about Claire, but she’s not interested. I’m really alone. I’ve been abandoned by my two best friends, and I don’t even know why.”

  “I’ve been abandoned, too,” Julian said. “I know that doesn’t make you feel any better, but it isn’t just you. Some people get wrapped up in themselves, and they forget about everyone else.”

  Naomi stood up. She looked taller than ever, with her head tilted slightly downward on her long, Mannerist neck. “I should let you go to sleep,” she said. “This is really imposing on you.”

  “No,” Julian said, “it’s not.” He suddenly didn’t want her to leave; he wanted to reach out and touch her white blond hair. “Stay,” he said. “Keep me company.” He tried to smile, his old crooked smile. “I’m lonely too,” he said.

  They spent the whole night together, talking. He held her briefly in the beginning, and she put her hand on his head, then they both pulled away. It was too painful.

  “Everything is so solemn in my life,” Naomi said. “No matter what I do, it always ends up serious and really gloomy. I’m starting to hate that about myself. I just want to be able to actually enjoy something.” She shook her head sadly. “I don’t know that I ever will.”

  “I think you will,” said Julian. “Things have already begun to change. The death girls have split up. How do you feel about it?”

  “Very strange,” she said, then smiled. “I can’t believe it. I thought the three of us were going to grow old together—Claire, Laura and I. I thought we’d end up as a group of old crones living in the Barbizon Hotel for Women and carrying our life belongings in shopping bags.” She paused. “Did you know that Sylvia stayed at the Barbizon when she was a guest editor at Mademoiselle?”

  “No,” Julian said. “I don’t know much about Sylvia Plath.”

  She told him Sylvia had gone to New York and worked for the magazine. She told him that that was the summer the Rosenbergs were electrocuted. “It’s in the first line of the book.”

  “What book?” he asked.

  “The book,” she said impatiently, “The Bell Jar.”

  He confessed that he had never read it. She talked about the book, about how reading it had changed her view of the world forever. “Even now,” she said, “when I find myself moving farther away from the whole death-girl thing, The Bell Jar still makes me look at life differently. When I was in high school, I read the book and it really shook me up. I was valedictorian of my class and a National Merit Scholar, and I suddenly realized that all the awards and prizes I’d been racking up meant absolutely nothing. Zilch. I’d been pushing ahead of everybody for years, like Plath, and I saw that none of it would mean anything in the long run, that I would die like everyone else.”

  He had not even asked her, and here she was talking about it, talking about her death-girl beginnings. Julian remembered the night in the library when Claire did the same thing. It was he who brought up the subject that time, but she had willingly taken over. The death girls seemed to need to talk about it. It was something intensely private, and yet it had to be released.

  “Go on,” he said to Naomi. “What happened then?”

  “I was very alone for the whole summer,” she said. “I just sat in the cabin my family had rented and read books. I couldn’t wait until college began. I was very tempted to go to Smith—that’s where Sylvia went—but part of me was scared. I thought if I went there, I might be following in her footsteps or something.” She paused and said shyly, “I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Ever since I was very young. I’ve been keeping a journal for years. I look back over the pages of it, and I can even see how my handwriting has changed. If I went to Smith, I thought I might go off the deep end. Sylvia had a nervous breakdown after her junior year. She tried to kill herself when she came back from working at the magazine that summer. I can’t believe you don’t know this already—I thought everybody our age did. Maybe it’s a universal female thing.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” Julian said. He knew many women who didn’t reserve special places in their hearts for a favorite doomed poet. He didn’t think it had to do solely with being female; he thought it had to do with being alone. Maybe women felt alone more often than men, or maybe women just let it show more often. Julian had always liked to be by himself, but he had never felt isolated. There was something wonderful about sitting by yourself and just being able to think—not having to explain yourself to anyone. He used to ride the bus all the way up to the Cloisters when he was in high school. He would cut classes and bring along a sandwich and a piece of fruit and eat his lunch sitting on the stone wall that overlooked the quiet courtyard. He would sit there for much of the afternoon, feeling perfectly content. Now he thought about this, and for the first time he wondered if people who saw him there assumed that he was lonely. Did they shake their heads after they walked by and whisper to each other, “Poor kid”? There was something inherently lonely about a person alone in a public place, although he had never thought to apply this to himself before.

  “What happened when you came to college?” Julian asked Naomi. “Did you feel less alone then?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I met Claire and Laura right away, and we hit it off. Soon we became a threesome—the chemistry was incredible. It was just what each of us needed to get through the year. Those early days . . . I still think about them sometimes and feel nostalgic and weepy.”

  “So where do you go from here
?” Julian asked.

  There was a pause. “I don’t really know,” Naomi said. “I’m at a loss.” She shrugged. “How about you? What do you think about Claire? I assume you love her, or else you wouldn’t be going through all this, but besides that, what do you really think of her? Why have we let her become so incredibly important to us? Sometimes I think there’s something wrong with me, that I let myself get so attached to certain people.”

  “Yeah,” Julian said. “I know what you mean. I’ve had that problem before, but it’s worse now. Claire and I are so different. We have such different outlooks and everything. She thinks about death all the time, I just can’t relate to it.”

  Naomi looked at him. “I wonder,” she said, “if you’d be so crazy about Claire if she wasn’t a death girl. I have a feeling that that’s one of the things that draws you to her. I may be wrong—I can’t read your mind.”

  He thought about it for a little while. Once again, Naomi did not rush him. It was already so late that they were beyond the point of caring.

  “I don’t know if it’s that she’s a death girl,” Julian said. “Death girls have to be kind of secretive—at least the three of you come across that way—and I think it’s the secretive part that interested me about Claire. Any time I see something I don’t understand, I want to sit and work on it. It’s like that man Levin Lucy Ascher wrote about in Sleepwalking—the mathematician she met at the mental hospital when she was twelve. When he had his nervous breakdown, he stayed up all night, working on math problems. He couldn’t leave his desk, he just had to stay there and solve them. That scene really affected me. I never got to tell Claire that, because she hung up on me before I had the chance. I sort of related to it; I mean, I have the same kind of concentration that lets me just sit still for a really long time.”

  Suddenly he started talking about Claire in earnest. He told Naomi how intrigued he had always been by Claire. She was restless all the time. She always had to get up and move around in the middle of a conversation. She had to have a cigarette between her fingers, letting it burn down to a tiny stub. He once asked her why she liked to smoke, and she replied that she didn’t like the act of smoking so much as she liked having something constantly burning in her hand, something to watch out for. “It keeps me attentive,” she said.

  Julian tried to calm her, to make her sit still. It was his project. Once he suggested that they meditate together. He didn’t know much about meditation, but he figured he could fake his way through it. They sat down on the floor of her room, and he made her close her eyes. “Pretend that your body is a giant wind tunnel,” he said. “When you breathe in, feel the air going softly down. When you breathe out, feel the air sliding from your body in a cool blue stream. Now inhale . . . slo-o-o-wly.”

  It had not worked. She had cracked open one eye within a few minutes and said, “God, I need to stretch.” He had not given up, though. He tried to calm her, to soften her, by just being there. One night while he was reading in bed, she drowsed off next to him, her head on his hip. Soon she jerked from her sleep and moved over to her side of the bed. “I’m sorry,” she said, turning away from him. He reached out to stroke her hair, to tell her he liked having her head there on his hip, that she could have kept it there all night—he wasn’t uncomfortable in the least. She could not seem to understand that it was okay just to lie close and be still. She was tense all the time. He could feel it when he held her, the way her back was rigid when he looped his arms all the way around her.

  “Claire’s a true eccentric,” he said to Naomi.

  “What do you mean by that?” she asked.

  He looked for words. “She’s like a living paradox or something. I mean, she’s so stiff, and still she manages to be overpowering. She always knows exactly what she’s doing; she seems so self-contained, but at the same time it’s like she’s spilling out all over the place. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

  But he didn’t need to. Naomi nodded in a way that made him think she understood what he was saying. They were sitting very close to each other now, cross-legged, on the bed. She no longer seemed to him like death itself. She seemed overtired. The sky was getting light, and his next-door neighbor, who worked longer and harder than anyone Julian knew, had stopped typing and gone to sleep. Julian didn’t look at the clock, but he knew it was very late. All of this over Claire Danziger. All of this worrying and missing sleep, and Claire wasn’t even aware of it.

  “Julian,” said Naomi, “I don’t think I can just forget it, like you said when I asked what we should do. It would make life simpler, I guess, but I just don’t think I can do it. God knows what will happen. If she’s really slipping into this Lucy Ascher life, she might never come out of it. I can’t leave Claire like that.”

  “Neither can I,” he admitted.

  It was the Amish people who believed that when someone took your photograph, part of your soul was stolen away. He remembered the time his class at Dalton had taken a trip down to Pennsylvania Dutch Country and three young women in long skirts and huge bonnets had skittered off in a flock when someone in his class started to unscrew the lens cap from his camera. Julian understood how the Amish felt; he felt similarly about making love. After you slept with someone, she took away with her a small hunk of you. It wasn’t bad, as long as the relationship went on. It was something you didn’t mind giving up, because it would always be close by. It was only when things ended that you really felt the loss.

  Julian had run into his old girlfriend Cathy in the city when he was home for Columbus Day weekend. She was a junior at Princeton and was walking down Central Park West arm in arm with a very tall blond man. “Julian, this is Kirk,” she said.

  Julian had muttered something about being glad to meet him and about how he hoped the rest of their year went well, and then he had pretended to be in a rush and hurried off down the street. It had embarrassed him to see Cathy. The first thing that had come to mind was their early, fumbling attempts at lovemaking. They had seen each other naked, exposed. They had told each other so many things—God, it embarrassed him even to think about it. Cathy had taken away with her a good many of his secrets, his most vulnerable moments. She had taken away a hunk of his soul.

  He could picture her lying in Kirk’s bed at college, telling him everything about the relationship that she had had with Julian. “He was so young and so well-meaning,” she would say in that delicate voice of hers. “I was wide-eyed, too, I’ll admit, but Julian was much worse. He always insisted on helping me put in my diaphragm, as if he thought I couldn’t manage myself.”

  Julian could hear Kirk’s deep, throaty, Princeton laugh. “Oh, that’s priceless,” Kirk would say.

  Cathy had taken something of Julian away with her, and now, so had Claire. He knew that this would probably happen with all of the women he was ever involved with in his lifetime, but for some reason he felt that this time would probably be the most painful. He wanted it back—he wanted Claire back.

  “We have to do something,” he said to Naomi, and she quickly agreed. “It’s really stupid to go on like this,” he told her. “There has to be something else we can do.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I know. We’ll really have to work on it. Hard.”

  They sat in silence for a long time. He was remembering the way Claire had felt close up against him, a confusion of balances, with her arms lightly touching his shoulders and her tongue resting heavy in his mouth.

  “Listen, you should go get some sleep,” he said to Naomi.

  “I guess you’re right,” she said. “I am starting to fall on my face.”

  They sat quietly for a few more minutes, and it struck him that this had been like one of the death girls’ marathon sessions. Now he had some idea of what it really felt like, of where the joy and pain was in spending a whole night thinking and talking about someone you love, someone who is absent. It had been a full night. It h
ad exhausted him.

  Naomi stood up and got into her coat. Julian opened the door and ushered her out into the morning.

  chapter thirteen

  She could tell the thaw was somewhere in the distance. There were signs of it every year at this time. It was still cold but the water had somehow changed, smoothed itself out. “You know, I actually feel better,” Helen said to Ray. It was odd to speak it, to acknowledge it. She had long ago given up the possibility of real change, and when it did come, it took her by surprise.

  “I’m glad,” he answered. “We should celebrate or something.”

  They were picking their way along the beach among snail skeletons, pebbles and worn-down shells. The water looked lighter than it had.

  She turned and saw that Claire had lagged way behind them. Claire had opened and shut several times during the week. It was as though she wasn’t sure how to act. She would relax for a moment, would comment on something, and then when Helen or Ray encouraged her to go on, she would catch herself and stop everything. It was as though she had to remind herself to keep a distance from them.

  “Just leave her,” Ray said, guessing Helen’s thoughts.

  “You can still read my mind,” she said. They smiled at each other, and he reached for her hand. They walked along like that for another ten minutes. Helen didn’t turn around, but even so, she could sense how listless Claire was. Every so often she could hear the plopping of small rocks that Claire was tossing into the water.