by Leah Stewart
“What were they fighting about?”
Josh found that he didn’t want to answer this question. If he explained about the house, and Eloise’s and Theo’s positions on it, then Adelaide would probably ask about his, which had been complicated lately, truth be told, by Noah’s suggestion that he could record a solo album there. Josh had been unable to stop himself from trying out the acoustics of various rooms. While he was making up his mind what to say, Adelaide was distracted by the insides of her wineglasses. She blew into them, then glanced at him as if to see if he’d noticed. “Maybe I should rinse these,” she said.
“Why?” He grinned. “What’s in them?”
“Just dust,” she said. For some reason she was blushing. He felt much better himself, seeing that she was nervous, too. “I guess I don’t entertain a lot.”
“If you point me toward your corkscrew, I’ll open a bottle. White or red?”
“Oh, either’s fine,” she said. She opened a drawer and made a little racket shifting everything in it around. “It’s in here somewhere.”
“If you don’t find it I’ll just use my teeth.”
“Oh!” she said, missing his joke. “Here it is.” She straightened with the corkscrew in her hand, triumphant, and thrust it, point forward, in his direction.
“Whoa.” He jumped back, playacting that she’d been trying to attack him. And then wished he hadn’t. She didn’t seem amused. Her blush deepened. She looked like she wanted to flee the room. “Thanks.” He took the corkscrew and opened both bottles without saying another word.
The doorbell rang then, and Adelaide said, “Pizza!” like she was saying, “We’re saved!” Food and wine in front of them, they sat at the table and talked about food and wine.
“Have you been to Boca?” he asked her.
“Once.” She pulled pepperoni off the slice on her plate, and he wondered why, if she didn’t like pepperoni, she’d ordered it. “I don’t get out much anymore.”
“Really?”
“My life is kind of boring,” she said.
“How is that possible?” he asked.
“All I do is dance.”
“All day long? All night long? Like in The Red Shoes?”
She seemed, finally, to find something he’d said amusing. “I hope not. That girl dies.”
“That’s true. Don’t dance until you die.”
“I won’t.” Her mouth turned down. What had he said? Why was it wrong to ask her not to die? Take a deep breath, he told himself. You can do this. This is nothing you haven’t done before. “I admire your discipline,” Josh said. “Now, me. I don’t even exercise.”
“Not at all?”
He grinned. “I’m supremely unathletic. And I’m a whiner, too. I get sweaty, I get tired, I want to quit.”
“Really?”
“When I was in college one of my friends took me to her tae kwon do class. I had to go sit down in the corner and put my head between my knees. She was really embarrassed. She went around making sure everybody knew I was not her boyfriend.” Adelaide laughed and he said, “In my defense, I’d gone out to dinner beforehand and had two beers. Also I wore jeans. Although come to think of it, telling you I went to tae kwon do drunk and wearing jeans might not be much of a defense.”
“No, it is,” she said. “You weren’t a wimp, you were just—”
“A dumbass?”
“I didn’t say dumbass.”
“You were going to say dumbass. Weren’t you? You were thinking dumbass.”
“Oh,” she said. “You don’t know what I’m thinking.”
“Well, that’s true,” he said, suddenly thoughtful. “That’s definitely true.”
He picked up his wineglass, and she picked up hers, and for a moment they drank in silence. Now what? Would she just wait for him to start talking again, ask her a question, tell another story? He knew he had a knack for filling silence, but even he got tired, sometimes, of talking. Usually he was good at finding out what was on people’s minds. It was part of his drawing-people-out skill, asking them questions that led gradually, imperceptibly to the information he wanted. He’d been the one to figure out, year after year, what Eloise wanted for her birthday. He’d been the one to talk to the bass player when he fell into a sulk. He’d even been able to use this skill on Sabrina, ferreting out the reason for one of her moods even as she denied being moody. Why had he kept up this sleuthing, almost to the end of their relationship? The big reveal had always been the same: She was brooding over some inadequacy of his.
“What do you want to know?” Adelaide asked.
“About what?”
“About what I’m thinking.” She narrowed her eyes in challenge. “I’ll tell you one thing.”
“Okay.” He stalled a moment, feeling suddenly wary. Then his eyes lighted on her feet. “Why are you wearing athletic socks?”
“Oh.” She twirled her glass by the stem, keeping her eyes on it. “You picked one I don’t really want to answer.”
“Should I try again?”
“No.” She shot a look at him. “I’ll answer. My shoes were hurting, but I like to wait awhile to let a man see my feet.”
“Really?”
“But you’ve probably seen Claire’s, right? So you might be the exception.”
“I guess I’ve seen Claire’s. I haven’t really paid attention.”
“Plus hers have gotten ten less years of use.”
“Okay, I’m both curious and terrified. Are they, like, little monsters, your feet?”
“Kind of. They’re so callused, it’s like I’m always wearing shoes. I could walk down a hot street barefoot and not feel a thing. When I get a pedicure they always want to take the calluses off, and I have to stop them. Dancers need their calluses. But it’s kind of gross.”
“So I’ll know you trust me when you let me see your feet.”
She nodded, meeting his eyes. “In the meantime I’ll let you ask me one more question. Because you didn’t really ask what I was thinking.”
What the hell, he thought, and asked what he actually wanted to know. “What do you think of me?”
“I think—” she said and hesitated. “You are really normal,” she said.
He laughed. “You are really, really wrong,” he said.
“Prove it,” she said.
He pursed his lips, narrowed his eyes, made a show of considering. Now was the moment to tell her about the band. She’d asked! It wouldn’t be an obvious play for her respect. But he wasn’t going to tell her. He had the sense that doing so would be cheating, would give him an unfair advantage, and at the same time he had a contradictory but equally strong sense that there was a weird power in knowing this one thing she didn’t know, that to tell her would be to give her power over him. So he shook his head. “You’ll just have to find out,” he said.
“Come on,” she said. “Give me one thing. I can’t stand the suspense.”
“Let’s see,” he said. “So many to choose from.” He grinned at her. “I lived in Chicago, during college and for years after. And I came back to Cincinnati. Voluntarily. For no reason.”
She laughed. “And that’s not normal?”
He shook his head. “Not at all.”
“Are you glad you came back?” she asked. “Do you ever want to be somewhere else?”
“Not anymore,” he said. “I’m really comfortable here. It’s a very livable city. Plus in Cincinnati you don’t have to work too hard to be stylish.”
Adelaide laughed. “That’s true.”
“Whenever I’m in L.A. or New York I feel broke and underdressed,” he said. “Everybody in those places is just trying so hard. It’s exhausting.”
She nodded, looking thoughtful.
“Why?” he asked. “Do you ever want to be somewhere else?”
“Sometimes,” she said.
“Now?”
“No,” she said, smiling. “Not now.”
After that it seemed to Josh that the evening was going
reasonably well. They sat on the couch with their wine and he interviewed her about her life before this moment. She was from Virginia. She’d started dancing at three. She kept insisting her life had been boring. Aside from the earlier talk about her feet, their exchanges were so entirely unphysical that he was surprised when she leaned over and kissed him. She kissed him fiercely, as though this passion had been anticipated, as though they’d spent the evening playing footsie under the table. He wasn’t complaining. He wasn’t thinking she should stop. After a moment he wasn’t doing any thinking at all. He did notice, through everything that transpired afterward, that she kept her socks on.
Later, in her bed, she traced her fingers down the middle of his thigh. “I love this muscle,” she said.
“Really? You have specific muscle preferences?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “And don’t make a dirty joke.” She sighed and smiled at once. “The body is such a beautiful thing.”
He kissed her for the sincerity in her voice. “You are a beautiful thing,” he said.
“Thing?” she repeated.
“Oh, wait,” he said. “This is real? You’re not a blow-up doll?”
“I’d never be a blow-up doll,” she said. “I’d be a tiny ballerina in a jewelry box.”
He laughed. “I guess you would be,” he said. He thought of other things to say—You belong in a jewelry box, for instance—and was both amused and horrified by his own sentimentality. Was this a symptom of lovesickness? When was the last time he’d succumbed to that disease? Not with Sabrina, not in that puppyish way, because he knew she would have hated it. High school, probably, and Jen Lovelace. Lovely Lovelace, he’d called her, in a note he’d left on her porch, under a single red rose. He’d nearly forgotten he was capable of such romantic idiocy.
Adelaide yawned. He watched her snuggle into the pillow. Her eyes were closed, her face relaxed, her hair a lovely, dark chaos against the white pillowcase, everything about her the opposite of the upright elegance she usually projected. “What would you be if you weren’t a ballet dancer?” he asked, so quietly he wasn’t sure she’d hear.
She opened her eyes. “You mean for real?”
He nodded.
“I am one,” she said.
“But if you weren’t.”
She yawned again. “I wouldn’t exist,” she said.
That stung for some reason. She’d spoken so definitively, as though it should be obvious that her art was her vocation, her identity, her all. “I exist,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I exist, and I’m nothing special.” He heard the edge in his voice, the way the comment practically begged to be contradicted. He was sure she heard it, too, and he cringed.
“Oh, don’t say that,” she said. “When I said you were normal earlier, I hope you didn’t think it was an insult. I’m happy you have a stable life and an office job. I’ve dated my fill of temperamental artist types. Plus I have to live with myself, and that’s enough drama for anyone.” She yawned again, stroked his arm, and then patted it, as if she were soothing him. “Normal is good.”
Earlier, when he’d told her about his job, she’d asked, “So what do you do all day?”
“I think about where to go for lunch,” he’d said.
“But that’s just in the morning.”
“In the afternoon I think about what to have for dinner.”
She’d laughed, which was what he’d wanted, but she hadn’t said, “No, really, tell me what you do,” which was also, it occurred to him now, what he’d wanted. Maybe she really didn’t care. Maybe she was one of those artists who imagined anyone with an office job must have a conventional, pedestrian mind to match his conventional and pedestrian life.
Maybe he did have a conventional, pedestrian mind. Not long ago he’d been trying his broken French on Parisian hipsters, smoking one of their pot-and-tobacco cigarettes in their apartment above a rock club, while girls milled in the street below with throats sore from screaming his name. Maybe even then some part of him had been longing for an office with a desk. Even the way he was thinking about that time was conventional and pedestrian—rock ’n’ roll, cigarettes, girls. Why didn’t he just picture himself in a black leather jacket, throwing his leg over a motorcycle? When he was in the band he’d supported himself with freelance Web design—that was how Ben had justified hiring him—and it was true he’d enjoyed those times when he spent the day in some office or another. He’d always found a certain novelty in getting up before ten, putting on professional clothes, making trips to the coffee cart. But back then he’d felt like a spy from Bohemia, traveling incognito, wearing his khaki disguise. Even after he started working in an office permanently, he’d felt like that for a while. When, and why, had that feeling gone away? Maybe learning that he was capable of making that transition would make Adelaide like him less instead of more. Instead of a stable, steady guy, she’d see him as a loser, a failure by his own design, a crass abandoner of dreams.
She was so warm next to him in the bed, her hand on his arm, her hair tickling his cheek when he turned to look at her, her legs pressed against his own. He’d been lonely, he realized. He’d been lonely even when he was with Sabrina, which meant he’d been lonely for years. He said, “I guess I’ll be normal, then.”
9
The email was there when Eloise turned on her computer in the morning. She came into the office as usual, put down her coffee, pressed the button on the back of the monitor, and then stacked papers on her desk while the computer sang itself awake. She opened her email, drumming her fingers on the keyboard tray as she waited for the in-box to load. All this was normal, and then there it was, this one unusual thing, a note from a woman who worked for the library downtown and had once been married to one of Eloise’s colleagues.
I’m sorry this is so last minute. Jason Bamber is speaking here tonight, and then we’re taking him out to dinner, and when I picked him up from the airport we put together that you two know each other. I said I’d invite you to the talk, and he asked me to ask you if you would join us at dinner. I’m afraid we can’t pay your way (strict budget rules these days!) but we’d love to have you there. Marianne.
Eloise took her hands off the keyboard and rolled her chair back from the desk. She sat with her hands braced on her thighs and read the email again. Jason Bamber. She couldn’t go to a talk that night. Tonight was dinner party night at Heather’s house. Once a month Heather and her friends gathered for an elaborate dinner, taking turns playing host, which meant spending hours in the kitchen preparing a feast for the others. At least once a week Heather could be counted on to ask what Eloise thought she should cook when it was her turn, and then in the month leading up to the dinner the frequency of these questions intensified, until Heather finally came to Eloise, the wild light of inspiration in her eyes, and announced what she’d decided on. Tonight it was Thai food, and Heather had spent days researching recipes as she planned the menu. She’d had to go to three stores to find lemongrass.
But, see, the thing was, they weren’t really Eloise’s friends. The other women. She liked them and everything, and certainly it was nice to have a social group where she and Heather were recognized as a couple, but they were really Heather’s friends. They were all midwives, or mostly—two were nurses and one was a physical therapist—and when the conversation drifted, as it always did, toward work, the topics were dilation, and preterm labor, and unnecessary C-sections. About these things Eloise had nothing to say. Never given birth, never would. Never seen birth, probably never would. She’d been born, okay, but that wasn’t much to contribute to the conversation. Sometimes after a while she picked up a magazine and flipped through it, but Heather was always put out with her after that, partly because Heather’s ex, Suzanne, a member of the group, was always on the lookout for disharmony in their relationship, and was one of those people who would make a joke that managed to point out that disharmony to everyone else in the room. Doubtless
Heather would have been equally bored during equivalent conversations at a party with Eloise’s colleagues, but there was no way to prove this, since Eloise never took Heather to those parties, and so the comparison wasn’t one she liked to evoke.
Jason Bamber. They’d gone to graduate school together in Chicago. He’d been a year behind Eloise in the program. Back then he’d been a nervous guy, and then at parties he’d drink too much, probably to calm those nerves, and start to exude jealousy and adoration, mostly at Eloise. When she’d found out her book was coming out, he’d said to her, “I don’t know if I want to kiss you or be you.” In the last few years, though, he himself had become a star in the field, thanks to the publication of his own much-heralded book, and now he taught at their alma mater.
She scooted back up to the desk and positioned her hands over the keyboard, her mind running along the tracks of polite regret. Alas, she wrote, but did that sound sarcastic? Marianne was a pathologically earnest woman who always suspected other people were being sarcastic at her expense but could never quite be sure. This was one of the reasons Eloise had failed to keep up with her after the divorce. She put her finger on the Delete key. One, two, three, four. She reached over and picked up the phone.
“What are you talking about?” Heather said. “Are you talking about tonight?”
“I’ll come over afterward,” Eloise said. “I’ll still get to try all the food.”
“You’ll still get to try all the food?”
“If I’m not there, you guys can talk freely about all your work stuff. I won’t be a drag on the conversation.”
“No, you’re not canceling on me, not tonight. That’s bullshit.”
Eloise wavered. She swayed from side to side in her chair. Then she said, “But I’m going to take Theo. I want to introduce her to him—I mean, Heather, this is a guy I actually know who’s actually in a position to help her. She needs to meet people like him.” This all made sense. This sounded like an idea she’d had all along.
A long, fraught silence. “Fine,” Heather said. “I guess I’ll see you after.”