by Leah Stewart
“Oh,” Theo said.
“I don’t have one,” Claire said.
“We should have gotten you one before you left,” Theo said.
Claire shrugged. “I can take care of it.”
“Right,” Theo said and tried to sound like she meant it. It was hard to imagine Claire taking care of practical matters, without her or Eloise to guide her. That morning she’d repacked Claire’s bag, which had been a chaos of balled-up T-shirts, single socks, hair elastics thrown in loose, and not nearly enough pairs of leggings for a girl who wore them almost every day and would for the first time have to do her own laundry. Theo sighed. “I’ll miss you,” she said.
Claire frowned a little, as though this were an accusation. “You’ll still have Josh.”
“Not really,” Theo said. “He’s always mad at me. I can’t say anything without him getting his back up.”
“That’s because he thinks you’re disappointed in him for giving up his music.”
“Really?”
Claire nodded. She was watching Theo with a weird intensity. “Are you?” she asked.
Theo looked past her, up at the screen and its long, long list of where people went, and where they came back from. “Am I? I guess maybe. I guess so.”
“But why?”
“It was his purpose. I feel like he sacrificed his purpose in life to that fucked-up relationship. He just quit. You don’t just quit. How could you even think about quitting?” Theo shook her head. “I guess I understand why he came back here, but I don’t understand why he stayed. He should be in a bigger city. He should be leading a bigger life.”
“But you came back here. You could have gone somewhere else for graduate school.”
“As Eloise is so fond of pointing out,” Theo said with a rueful smile. “And the chances that I’ll get a job here are slim. The chances that I’ll get a job at all are slim, but if I do I won’t be able to stay.”
“Do you wish you could stay?”
Theo shrugged. “Eloise would kill me.”
“Eloise wants us all to go,” Claire said. “Everybody wants me to go.”
“But not because we don’t want you with us.”
“Because you want me to be all I can be.”
“It’s not our fault you’re a star.”
“Maybe I’m not a star,” Claire said, looking at the floor. “Maybe I’m a member of the corps and always will be, and I could be just as happy doing that here as anywhere else.”
“Maybe,” Theo said. She reached out to smooth her sister’s already smooth hair. “But I doubt it. You should be where the action is.”
“There’s action here,” Claire said.
Theo frowned. “Claire, what are you getting at?”
“Nothing.” She bit her lip and released it. “Nothing. Just . . . don’t be too hard on Josh.”
“I’m not. He just thinks I am.”
Josh was headed back to them now, Claire’s boarding pass in his hand, just as Eloise came through the doors. They gathered in a circle, the four of them, their makeshift family. And then Theo, who couldn’t bear her own sadness any longer, said, “Let’s get this over with.”
Obediently her family fell in step, trudging toward security. But a few feet from the end of the line Claire hesitated. She turned to Eloise and said, “Do you remember those bedtime stories you used to tell me?”
“Huh?” Eloise said. “Oh—about Elsewhere?”
Claire nodded. “Where anything you imagine comes true.”
“Some prince was always rushing up to ask you to dance.”
“I used to say, ‘Where is Elsewhere?’ And you’d say, ‘As far as you can get from here.’”
“I don’t remember that,” Eloise said. “But I don’t dispute you.”
Claire dove, suddenly, into Eloise’s arms, but almost as soon as Eloise tightened them around her, Claire pulled away. She turned—she pirouetted—and joined the line of travelers. This time she didn’t look back, but they stood there anyway, watching until they couldn’t see her anymore, watching an extra few minutes, as though she might change her mind.
“Well, that’s that,” Eloise said finally. Theo and Josh made noises of assent, all of them doing their best to affirm that it was good Claire was gone. They’d all worked for this—the endless chauffeuring, the hours of waiting in the lobby of the ballet academy. The thousands of dollars that had gone into classes and summer programs, fund-raisers and season tickets, uniforms and shoes and pair after pair of tights. The performances, the bouquets, the bobby pins, the trouble both Eloise and Theo had taken to learn how to make a proper bun, the bloody Band-Aids on the bathroom floor (Theo yelling, “Claire, that’s disgusting! Throw them away!”). The encouragement, the praise, the stinging in their palms after all that applause. They’d all wanted her to go. But now each of them had an unnerving, weightless feeling, like they’d never realized before that they were balloons, and that Claire—Claire with her need for them, her exacting schedule, her purposeful and organized life—had anchored them to the ground. They could have comforted one another, if any of them had been brave enough to utter this nonsense aloud.
5
Josh was on the office phone with potential clients when his cell rang. He picked it up, saw Claire’s number on the screen, and nearly succumbed to a powerful urge to hang up on the clients and answer her call. He’d been playing phone tag with her in the week since she’d left, and he wanted to know how she was. But more than that he wanted to get off this call. There were times in the course of fulfilling his duties when he became afflicted with an impostor’s anxiety. He saw clearly that he got away with not really knowing what he was doing via the skillful deployment of jokes and personal charm. But when the charm didn’t work—and when he was on speakerphone, with no idea how many people were listening on the other end and no ability to gauge their responses, it was really fucking hard to make it work—he was left spouting stock corporate phrases, checking his crib sheet for lines about Ben’s development philosophy. He grew painfully aware of how often he used the word approach, or said he looked forward to future interactions, or referred to the listeners’ content as beautiful. He felt like a salesman, like a bullshitter, and he hated feeling like that. The people today had made an appointment, asked him to call. You’d think they could have made an eensy bit more effort, could have laughed at at least one of his jokes. Instead they were mostly silent. He pictured a roomful of people rolling their eyes at one another, mouthing, “What an idiot.”
“Excuse me one moment,” he said. He pressed the Hold button carefully. His cell had stopped ringing. He pushed back from his desk, gripping the edge, dropped his head between his arms, and hyperventilated. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be doing this. Then what should he be doing? His mind obediently offered up a memory of the stage, the guitar strap on his shoulder, the sweat-soaked shirt clinging to his back, the crowd just handing him love: the energy, the adrenaline, the purity of doing only this, caring only about this. Life comes alive. That was all gone now. His only option was to finish this call.
When it was over, he put his cell and his keys in his pockets, called out to the office at large that he’d be right back without making eye contact with anyone who might ask to come with him, and went outside. He took long, purposeful strides toward the coffee shop, like any businessman out for a casual stroll. He’d forgotten Claire’s call until the phone in his pocket rang, at which point he remembered it, and took the phone out to see that it was her again. “How’s New York?” he asked. “Because I might be looking to run away.”
“Really?” She sounded worried, so he hastened to say, “No, not really. I just had a rough time with my last call.”
“Well, I have a present for you,” she said. “Are you free tonight?”
“Why?” he asked. “You’re not here, are you?”
“What? No. Of course not. But I got you tickets to a modern dance performance tonight.”
“You did?�
� He groaned inwardly. He wasn’t a huge fan of dance, modern or otherwise. He’d spent much of his life in the pop-culture trenches, but he’d mostly given high culture a pass. If it hadn’t been for Claire’s performances he’d never have gone to the ballet. He wanted the music to have words. He wanted the dancers to stop gesturing so dramatically. He could have watched more readily if it had been all leaps and spins, but as it was his attention wandered. “How come?”
“Because Adelaide’s in it.”
He could hear her mischievous smile through the phone. “Is that right,” he said. “And why would that matter?”
“Oh,” she said. “I just thought you might be interested in her quality of movement.”
“I thought she was a ballet dancer.”
“She is. But when the company’s off for the summer sometimes the dancers do other stuff. Her piece is probably a contemporary ballet. She’s so good, Josh. I think you’ll enjoy seeing her.”
“And that’s your only motivation?”
“That’s it.”
“If I go, you won’t be waiting to hear if I talked to her?”
“I won’t ask. I won’t even ask you how it was. You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”
There was a little too much emotion in her tone. “Everything okay?” he asked.
“Everything is good,” she said. “I wish I could tell you about it.”
“Why can’t you?”
“You know what I thought about today for some reason?” she said, not answering his question. “How you used to take me on the carousel at the zoo.”
When she said that Josh could remember it, too, her hand in his as she tugged him toward the animal she wanted to ride, his hands on her waist as he lifted her, her little kicking legs, her serious, intense expression as she held on tight and waited for the ride to start. “You always wanted to ride the zebras.”
“Zebras are cool. They have an excellent sense of style. But I guess you know that.”
“Claire,” he said. “You are weird.”
“No, seriously,” she said. “When you lived in Chicago all you ever wore was black and white.”
“That’s totally untrue. I had at least one red T-shirt.”
“Well, I picture you in black and white.” She laughed. “Like a zebra.”
“Or a Pilgrim.”
“Like a zebra in a Pilgrim hat.”
“This conversation has taken a strange turn,” he said. “Are you in a surreal mood?”
“Kind of,” she said. “Yes. Kind of all the time.”
“Sometimes it’s like that after a big move. Like, whose life is this?” She made a noncommittal sound in response, and he waited for something more. Theo was right—there was something Claire wasn’t telling them. “Hello out there?” he said.
“I have to go,” she said. “Two tickets at Will Call under your name. Give Adelaide a kiss for me.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Did I say a kiss?” she asked, mischievously. “I just meant tell her hello.”
He didn’t even consider inviting Theo to the performance, and though he did think of Eloise, taking his aunt would mean Theo knew he was going. He didn’t want to invite commentary. He felt self-conscious enough already. Ben’s wife was hugely pregnant and didn’t like her husband going out at night, so Josh called Noah, who’d said at the party that he wanted to hang out sometime, and who agreed to go on the condition that beforehand they go to Grammer’s, Noah’s favorite bar, the virtues of which occupied much of their preshow conversation. Before they went inside, Noah made Josh pause to admire the huge, lit-up leaded-glass window—imported from Germany in 1911, Noah said—and Josh realized how strongly the other man reminded him of Theo. It took him a few minutes to shake off the association, to relax in Noah’s company again. And, then, at the theater, almost as soon as they were settled in their seats, Noah unsettled him a second time.
“I have a confession to make,” he said. “I’ve been debating whether to tell you, but what the hell.” He smiled. “I know who you are.”
“Well, I hope so,” Josh said, though of course he knew exactly what Noah meant. “We’ve been hanging out all night.”
Noah, rightly, ignored this. “You were in Blind Robots! Man, I loved that band.”
“Yup,” Josh said.
“You guys were awesome!”
“Thanks,” he said. He was flattered. He would have admitted, under interrogation, that he enjoyed being recognized. But he didn’t want to rehash old triumphs tonight. Or maybe he did. The day at work had left him feeling decidedly unawesome. He might benefit from a little ego boost.
“Can I ask you something?”
Josh braced himself and said a wary okay.
“What made you quit?”
Josh shrugged. “You know.”
Noah shook his head. “I really don’t. I really, really don’t.”
Josh trotted out his usual explanation, listening to himself inflect the words as though they’d just occurred to him, as though he hadn’t arranged them in just this way a million times before. “We got to a certain level,” he said, “and we weren’t going to go any higher. I mean, we came close. We had the meetings with the majors and we made a video that would air at, like, two in the morning. But at some point I realized that was going to be it. And there was nothing wrong with that. We had a good thing going. It was just, to maintain it, I had to spend most of my life in vans and bars. For the other guys it was worth it, but for me after a while it just wasn’t. You either want to be in a band more than anything else, or you don’t.”
“You think you would’ve stuck with it if you’d hit that next level?”
“I mean, maybe. Because we might’ve toured less. We might’ve gotten more songs in movies and commercials. We might’ve had more money, and not had to live with each other anymore. They’re all still working musicians, you know. The other guys.”
“Yeah, I read that,” Noah said.
“They were not super psyched when I quit,” Josh said. He looked at the black, empty stage in front of them and said to it, “An understatement.”
“I have an aesthetic theory to explain why you never got bigger. Do you want to hear it?”
“I don’t know. Do I?”
“Don’t worry, it’s not bad. When you’re trying to figure out why, say, lots of people like Avatar, and a much smaller number of people like Bottle Rocket, you have to look at the emotional delivery system. Because it’s all about that.”
“The emotional delivery system.”
“Right. Because all art is about emotion, right? I mean, not that it doesn’t have an intellectual component, but in essence, at base, it’s about emotion. Some people just like their emotion delivered straight up. I’d say most people. So that’s why they like James Cameron films. But a smaller number of people, because of personality or training or both, need there to be something smart about the way the emotion is delivered, or they can’t feel it. Sometimes that’s irony or self-awareness or just quirkiness. Like Wes Anderson films. Those movies are actually really emotional, but there’s this quirkiness and this irony, and if you’re somebody who needs those things first, so you can let your guard down and allow yourself to feel, then you’re going to love those movies.” Noah looked around the theater, as if searching for the raised hand of someone who agreed with him.
Josh waited, still feeling wary. Was he about to be cheerfully offered unsolicited criticism? He’d never understood why people did that, or why they took for granted your polite response. What if he walked up to a stranger in a bar and said, “That shirt’s a nice color but it makes you look fat”? Would he expect the person to thank him?
“Your music is really emotional and earnest but also ironic and smart,” Noah said. “Some people don’t see the sincerity because of the irony, and some people don’t see the intelligence because of the sincerity. The people who loved you really, really loved you—because you gave them exactly the right emotional delivery sy
stem for their natures. But you were never going to get mainstream.”
“So we were doomed from the start.”
“No, man, no. You guys were awesome. You just were what you were, you know? I was one of the people who really, really loved you. I saw you guys play, like, ten or eleven times.”
Noah’s confidence and ease were impressive. In Josh’s experience most people couldn’t make a declaration like that without self-consciousness or excessive excitement, or this shyly hopeful quality, like they’d just proposed to him. But Noah didn’t seem to feel that his onetime fanboy status put them on different planes. It was Josh, instead, who felt self-conscious. He made a show of opening his program. “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” he said and hunted for Adelaide’s name. Her piece was in the second half of the program. The lights began to dim, the warning bell chimed, and he sighed and settled in, slouching lower in his seat so the people behind him could see.
Onstage five men threw five women in the air in perfect sync and Josh caught himself wondering if Adelaide was dating, or had dated, or wanted to date one of the male dancers. They were some very fit men. He hadn’t said to himself that he planned to look for Adelaide after the show, but now he realized that he had, nevertheless, been planning to, and felt nervous about the prospect. But he didn’t have to talk to her, he reminded himself. Not if he didn’t want to. Not if he was happy with his life as it was now—steady, consistent. It had been a relief, when he quit music, to stop living like a gambler, riding waves of giddiness and disappointment. But, man. He hadn’t felt something big in a long, long time. Despite himself, he hoped that when Adelaide came onstage she would mesmerize him. He hoped that she would stop his heart.
For the rest of the first half Josh managed to focus on the dancing, though he wasn’t entirely sure what he was supposed to focus on. Was he meant to be piecing together the story? Or admiring the length and flexibility of the dancers’ legs? When you started using words like length and flexibility, it seemed like you were being pervy, but you weren’t supposed to be pervy at a dance performance, you were supposed to be aesthetically high-minded, verging on philosophical. Right? Or maybe he was overintellectualizing, and you were just supposed to feel something—the kind of emotional transport he was used to getting from music. He needed some training for watching dance. At Claire’s performances he’d always kept his eyes on her when she was onstage, tuned out when she wasn’t. At intermission, as he and Noah downed beers in the lobby, he noticed that some of the other people had bouquets with them. Damn. He should have brought a bouquet. Next time. If there was a next time. How much longer, anyway, until Adelaide’s turn? Why was he so anxious and scattered? What was wrong with him?