Hold Still

by Lynn Steger Strong

  But she listened to the first part of the story. The whole of it unfurled over her like a cold wet stretch of cotton wool, and she thought briefly she was about to vomit in the sink. She looked out onto Stephen’s garden. It was fall and the leaves on the maple tree were just turning, half green still, with reds and yellows creeping in. She felt Stephen come up behind her, and Maya handed the phone to him without saying anything to either him or Ellie. She walked slowly to her office. She closed the door, and turned the old heavy bolt into its place. She sat up on the couch with her legs pulled in until she was as small as she thought she could be. She rocked slowly back and forth and tried not to breathe or think.

  The lawyer Stephen called said to get her into rehab. They needed to show that she was sorry. That she was ill and working to be cured. She wasn’t reckless: she was sick. But Maya didn’t know, she wasn’t sure, what was the difference, and what was sick and what wasn’t, and what did calling her daughter sick do but make her something that needed to be fixed? And even if there was a sort of comfort in imagining that fixing her was an option, it also felt as if it was all too fundamentally a part of her to not have consequences beyond getting well. But they would do things; they would listen to the lawyers and they wouldn’t go to her. Maya wasn’t sure she could. Every time she thought of her daughter those first few weeks, she thought just after that of Annie. She thought of the little girl, sitting at her desk and looking small and sad. She thought of the woman who’d done her this great favor. The woman to whom she’d not told the whole truth about her girl.

  The snow melts between Maya’s fingers. She lays her coat on her lap, places her palms on her thighs. She looks past him at the lines of books along each wall, the spines solid, darkly colored, mostly hardbacks. “I talked to Annie,” she says to him.

  Stephen stiffens, sits up straight. “You can’t talk to her, Maya. The lawyer was very clear,” he says.

  “I will absolutely talk to her if she’ll talk to me.”

  Stephen shakes his head. “Maya, this isn’t negotiable.”

  “She’s not contesting the release, Stephen. She’s not going to press charges …”

  Stephen’s silent a long time and Maya stands, not sure where she’s going. She walks over to the window, fixes her eyes on a single snowflake, and watches as it falls.

  She feels his body tense, then slowly loosen.

  “We can request another doctor,” he says. “If she’s released we’ll have to find her someone new up here.” He sets the book down on her desk and stands and walks toward the coat rack. “If she’s released.” He comes closer to her. He looks past her shoulder, his chin almost at the middle of her head. “If she’s released, we’ll find a way to help her here.”

  He’s not terrible, her husband, Maya thinks. She burrows each of her hands beneath her thighs. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

  Outside, a couple walks by under an umbrella. It’s too small to share, but they try valiantly. Maya watches as one of the spokes gets caught in the boy’s hair. Maya thinks of all the different ways they’ve failed to help their daughter until now.

  “You think you’ll always hate me?” asks her husband.

  This is the last thing she expected. She keeps her eyes fixed on the snow. “Oh, Stephen. I don’t. You know I don’t.”

  “But you’re angry.”

  She thinks how to answer this honestly. She is angry, but it’s no longer so specific an anger as to be directed just at him.

  “I’m angry at everything, maybe,” she says. “Mostly myself.”

  She reaches over the desk and closes the books, shuffles the papers into a pile. He hates disorder. She’s never sure what she might uncover when she clears her desk.

  “Maya.” He stands and steps closer to her. He holds her wrist, halts her rearranging. He stays hovered over her, and she can almost taste his breath.

  She stiffens underneath his grasp, those nerves, the shoulders, then the clavicle. She can’t remember the last time that they touched. They’ve brushed past one another. They’ve accidentally fallen close to one another when Maya’s managed to sleep the night through in their bed, but this is only the second time she can recall, since before they sent Ellie down to Florida, when her husband’s purposefully reached for her.

  “You’re so thin,” he says. His voice is soft now, quiet; the taste of him so close to her is the same as it was twenty years before.

  She could have been better for him. She has, also, not reached for him in all these months. She’s thought of it. Sometimes the impulse almost blinds her, the need to touch him, grab hold of his face, but she is a master of tempering these impulses. The more she’s felt the need to touch some part of him, the farther she has stayed away.

  “Why don’t we get something to eat?” he says. He lets go of her, steps back. Maya almost asks him to stay put.

  She’s still holding her coat and slips it on and buttons it. Stephen takes his from the rack and does the same. The snow’s still falling on the cobbled concrete, then through the gates and, cars speeding past, honking, wipers running, on Broadway, so close to one another as they walk that Maya’s shoulder almost touches Stephen’s upper arm.

  “So, Ben,” her husband says. “You think he’ll be okay?” It seems they’re done with Ellie for the day.

  Twice, she almost takes his hand—Maya crosses her arms over her chest.

  “It must be so much for him,” she says. “I think he needs a break.”

  “I guess it won’t …” He grabs her elbow to stop her from stepping into the crosswalk. An SUV speeds past.

  “It’s nothing that he can’t undo,” she says. They wait for the walk signal, Stephen’s hand still on her arm. “He can try out other things …”

  They go into a diner, some self-conscious attempt at a Manhattan college hangout. Maya orders a plate of french fries and a glass of wine. They’re silent till the food comes. Maya tries a single fry, then pushes her plate toward her husband, sips her wine. Stephen takes large bites of a chicken sandwich and picks at Maya’s fries.

  “I’ve been rereading Zarathustra,” he says.

  Of course, she thinks, we’re returning to these things.

  “You know the part with the dwarf?”

  Maya nods, though she barely remembers. She read it years ago, lugging around the portable Nietzsche just after she met Stephen. She’d slogged her way through the lot of it, Beyond Good and Evil, The Anti-Christ, even some of the letters to Wagner. She and Stephen had had some interesting, what felt then like life-changing, conversations and she’d thought, Yes. This. But, really, she had hardly made sense of most of Zarathustra. She remembers something jarring about the part with the dwarf. He jumped on Zarathustra’s shoulder and poured lead in his ear.

  “I’ve always hated that part,” Stephen says. “I always thought it couldn’t be as straightforward as it felt. Even with the aphorisms, maybe because I’ve built my life on asking questions.” He shakes his head. “We have this need to make everything mean five or six different things.”

  He passes her plate back toward her and nods toward the french fries. He pours ketchup on the side of the plate and hands her a freshly dipped fry as he speaks.

  She eats, chewing slowly, her husband watching, the salt and grease mixed with the ketchup almost pleasurable along her tongue.

  “I think part of the reason I focused on the Germans is because it all seemed so endless, every word they said had been driven all these different ways.

  “Martin,” he says. He smiles at her.

  She shakes her head to make clear she doesn’t know which Martin.

  “Heidegger,” he says. “God bless him, I don’t think he knew what he meant half the time. Sometimes I think that’s his whole point.”

  He hasn’t even meant to, but she watches him turning back into the man she knew. The man with whom she chose to build a life.

  “But I’ve decided to fall in love with the dwarf now. I want it to be that simple. I nee
d something that just means what it says. I think it was the moment, maybe Friedrich was tired, but he was just playing straight for once. Things jump on our backs and overwhelm us, they pour into us and drown everything else out. For him it was this idea of the eternal recurrence, which, though you mustn’t ever tell anyone, I really never understood. I mean, yes, things repeat, time is crooked, I think that makes sense, but the idea that it’s a circle seems to me not quite accurate, and part of me wishes it was, because …”

  He stops. She stares at him. He holds his sandwich in midair but doesn’t move to put it down. Because then maybe they could do it all again.

  She loves him, she thinks. She was right to marry him.

  Maya—twenty-three—she sat outside Avery Library with her book. The weather had fallen into biting early winter cold, but she was desperate for the air and bundled up.

  “He’d be proud,” said Stephen, nodding toward her.

  Maya jumped at the sound of him. He seemed grown-up, confident. He wore glasses with thick rims, a thin dark blue wool coat that looked smooth and costly. He wore a bag slung across his chest and had dark hair cut close to his head.

  “Fyodor,” said Stephen. “Dostoyevsky. He’d love you out here, suffering for your work.” He said the last bit in a deeper voice than he’d said the first, scowling, then raising the corners of his lips.

  Maya laughed at him, and shrugged. “I love him,” she said. She hadn’t meant to sound as emphatic as she did.

  “Well, he’d love you too, on sight,” said Stephen. “The bluster of you.”

  “Bluster?” said Maya. “Are you British?”

  Stephen laughed. “Just stuck up.”

  He was a scholar of Nietzsche, all the Germans, political philosophy. He stood up very straight and once he smiled he looked much younger than he was. She felt her body leaning toward him. She smiled back at him, and when he asked her out for drinks she said yes and it felt good.

  They had drinks and dinner. They had breakfast. Two weeks passed and then a month. He read the final draft of her dissertation over a single weekend. She made him stay at his apartment and she at hers while he read. “So serious,” he said when she decreed this. And she could tell, and she was grateful: he appreciated gravity.

  They met for breakfast that Monday morning. He hadn’t slept, she thought. It was the first time she’d seen him with stubble and wanted to touch it, to ask him to run it slowly, a little forcefully, down her length. They were at a diner on Waverly near his apartment. They both lived downtown, separate from school. She was half an hour early, but Stephen was already there. He had his hands, one on top of the other, set atop the stack of now-worn white paper. His back was tall against the booth. The whole time he spoke she was incapable of holding still. She’d ordered water, orange juice, and coffee and kept fingering one glass and then the mug and then the other glass, sipping, cupping, lining rims.

  It was better than him loving it. He had notes for her and more in the margins. They sat for hours with their half-filled plates and endless cups of coffee. He talked and talked and she thought yes.

  “I love you,” she said when they were done and back at her apartment. When they had discussed it all and she’d called her advisor and asked for one more month. After she’d led him to the shower, both of them drained and greasy from the diner—he’d had her up against the grimy black-and-white tiles, his hand cupping her left thigh, her right leg held up by the tips of her toes, almost slipping, grabbing tight to the shower rod.

  There were water spots on Maya’s pillows from their still-wet hair. She ran her hands along the dry and then the wet. It was the first time she’d said “I love you” to him, to anyone besides her dad. He laughed.

  “I wonder if you don’t just love my notes,” he said.

  They read out loud to one another things that they were working on, passages they hadn’t quite made sense of yet. He liked to garden, would spend hours outside in ratty shorts and moccasins, looking exactly like the privileged boy from Collegiate that he’d always been. And sometimes he would yell things, stinging low-slung vitriol that he would later say he didn’t mean, but that hung over them and threatened, long after the hurt had been repaired.

  He traveled often and missed birthdays, holidays, trips to Florida that he would lament afterward, but when he left again he often seemed relieved. He took her out to the Cape to spend weekends with his parents—they’d relocated permanently once Stephen started grad school. His mother spent her days walking along the water every morning no matter the weather, cultivating a modest art collection that she didn’t seem to have much interest in once the work had been acquired. His father spent his days reading, the newspaper in the morning, large nonfiction in the afternoons, then quizzing Stephen, Maya, and his wife over dinner about topics so obscure that he was almost certain to be the only one of the four of them to have the answers to.

  They doted on her, loved her. She was smarter, they said, than Stephen’s usual choices. They were wealthy liberal intellectuals, she was the exact sort of uncertain background, innate brilliance, acceptable attractive that they would have chosen for their son. Maya walked the water with his mother in the mornings and discussed de Kooning, Balthus, Rothko, Dubuffet, the colors of the Dutch. She knew hardly anything about visual art, but she was a quick study and paid close attention. She spent some of the afternoons she wasn’t teaching at the MoMA, Met, Frick or Guggenheim, cultivating enough of an opinion to have more of her own ideas to offer on these walks.

  As much as Maya loved and admired them, there was something constantly off-putting about the ease with which her in-laws existed in the world. They’d both come from a long line of money, perfectly educated, consistently loved. They, like Stephen, seemed to feel as if they had a right to all the pleasures they’d been given, while Maya sat most days waiting to be punished for all that she had somehow managed to acquire. Sometimes it scared her how much Stephen trusted the world. But mostly, especially early, she found it astonishing, lovely, in the way that one can see something from far away and appreciate its beauty, but never quite make sense of what it is.

  “Why do you think you picked me?” he says to her. He’s finished his sandwich. His plate sits bare in front of him and he reaches again for one of Maya’s fries.

  “You make it sound like you had no say,” she says.

  “Please,” he says. “I was old already. I was a curmudgeon.”

  She eats two french fries dry, swallowing slowly. She hasn’t eaten in days, it seems, weeks. “You were thirty-four,” she says.

  A smear of ketchup lingers on the left side of his lip.

  “I loved you,” Maya says.

  “But why?”

  “Jesus, Stephen.”

  She picks a napkin up to wipe his lip for him, then hands it off for him to wipe instead.

  “I loved your brain,” she says.

  This is the answer he expected. She wonders how to make it something else. How to maybe give him something more.

  “Your humor?” she says.

  He laughs. “But I’m not funny.”

  She laughs too. “You made me laugh,” she says.

  “Everybody says that.”

  She smiles at him. “No one says that about you.”

  And he laughs then in the exact way that is maybe more than any other reason why she loves him: like he’s ten years old and doesn’t care who’s watching, loudly. His large body unfurls. His head tilts back.

  It’s the sheer dissonance between this and every other aspect of the man she married that is the most charming. It still surprises her when he laughs, when he is dry, quiet, and biting, usually at his own expense. And she’s so very grateful to him for this; she’s more than grateful—these moments have always made her think there could be more surprise to come. Surprise for both of them, in what they might give to one another, in all, together, they might be capable of.

  He waits for more.

  “I thought … I think I thought
the way you trusted the world. I wanted to be as certain as you were.”

  He laughs again. “Now you know better,” he says.

  Ten years before: “Christ, Maya!”

  “If you use the word reputation I’ll jump out of the car.” There had been a party for the faculty in Stephen’s department. He was angling for department chair.

  He stared at her. He had only one hand on the wheel.

  “Look at the road,” she said.

  He fiddled with his glasses, loosened up his tie. “It was two hours. Two hours when you could have just smiled and nodded and played the game a little bit.”

  “The game, Stephen? Seriously?” She had her foot up on her knee and was slowly peeling off her shoes.

  “This is not a vocabulary thing.”

  “It is exactly. Since when do you care about a game?”

  He waited, and she knew the answer before she’d even asked the question. He always had. She rolled her window down and rested her hand along the outside of the car.

  She’d done nothing. She’d drunk more gin than she’d intended. She’d been asked about her specialty and had gone on a bit too long about Virginia Woolf and death.

  She kept her eyes fixed on the trees along the West Side Highway, the stretch of cobbled concrete, and then the water just beyond. She wished that she were running. That she were all alone, feet pounding, and Stephen were safe and quiet in their bed. Her voice got quieter as she spoke. “I was explaining what I do,” she said.

  He’d called it proselytizing. “You were freaking people out.”

  “They’re academics Stephen. They don’t freak out that easily.”

  “You were too drunk to see.”

  “I wasn’t drunk.” She hardly ever drank and could not hold her liquor. Probably she had been a little drunk. “Would you rather I just talk about the children?” El was ten, Ben was eight.

  He turned to her again. “Would that have been so hard?”

  It would have been. Even when she wanted to just sit and gush about her children, take out pictures, tell stories of all the ways in which they astounded her each day, she was too terrified of losing hold of all she was outside of them. She was adamant in her need to be someone separate from their mom.