The History of Us

by Leah Stewart

  “I was sitting around feeling sorry for myself. This is a huge improvement.”

  “Were you trying to work?”

  “No, I was thinking about Marisa.”

  Theo took a breath. “What about her?”

  He shifted in his seat, looking out the windows as if at scenery. “She found a script that her boss wants her to work on. Like, if all goes well it could actually get made. She’s so excited. This is what she’s been working toward for years. I should be nothing but happy for her, right? But all I could think was, If this happens, she’ll never move here. It just made me realize that some part of me has been waiting for her to give up on the whole film thing, and then I wonder if she’s just waiting for me to give up on my own ambitions. Like we’re playing a game of chicken, and even though that desire comes from wanting to be together, in the end what it means is neither of us is wishing the other well.” He glanced at Theo. “That has to be bad, right?”

  “It’s . . . ” She winced. “It’s hard.”

  “It is hard,” he said. “I don’t know what to do. How do you decide whose career is more important?”

  Theo shrugged. “I had a boyfriend when I was in my second year. We’d been dating maybe six months, and then we were out to dinner and suddenly he said, ‘If I got a job, would you move for me?’ I said it depended on the job, and whether I had an offer of my own, which he didn’t really like hearing, so I asked him the same question, and he said, ‘No.’ Just no. Maybe because he was already pissed at me, I don’t know. Either way, it seemed like he meant it.”

  “What happened?”

  “We broke up,” Theo said.

  “Right then?”

  “Yes,” Theo said. She thought of the challenging way Eric had looked at her after he voiced that no. She’d had to call his bluff, and saying, “Then I don’t think this will work out” was the only way she could think of to do it. She’d stuck to her guns even when he called her in tears a week later, even though she missed him. She couldn’t get past the look on his face, how pleased, how satisfied he’d seemed to be able to tell her no. I could live without you, that look had said, so there was no recourse but to decide she could live without him, too.

  “Wow. I can’t decide whether to admire you or be a little scared.”

  “Both,” she said, though scared was the last thing she wanted him to feel. Or maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe it would be nice if she made him as nervous as he made her.

  “I guess Marisa and I could have figured out earlier that our careers weren’t compatible. But by the time we had to face that fact we were in too deep.” He sighed, turning to look out the window again. “Sometimes I think it would be simpler to be single.”

  Theo looked at him. Suddenly she felt very tired. She wanted an end to all this pointless and exhausting emotion: the worry and resentment, the guilt, the desire and the anger and the fear, everything other people made her feel. Why, then, if she wanted peace, did her heart begin to beat so rapidly in her throat? Why did it speed her off a ledge, make her speak the next words out of her mouth? “If you were single,” she said, “you could go out with me.” She braced herself, feeling like she’d pulled a pin from a grenade, but as her heart rocketed on, it became clear there would be no explosion. Noah didn’t move his gaze from the window. It was possible he hadn’t heard her, mesmerized by the unchanging scenery, but Theo knew in her gut he was just pretending he hadn’t. So it was to be an implosion, then.

  “Why does Cincinnati have so many nicknames?” he asked. “Queen City. City of the Seven Hills.”

  Theo ordered herself to speak. “Don’t forget the Paris of the United States.”

  “Paris,” Noah repeated. He still wasn’t looking at her. “I came home the other day and there was a potato chip bag on the sidewalk in front of my building, one of those oversize, extracalorie snack ones. So I went to pick it up, like the good citizen I am. It was weirdly heavy. And then I realized it was full of liquid. And then I realized that liquid was urine.”

  “That’s disgusting,” she said, with more than the necessary vehemence.

  “Thank you, Cincinnati,” he said. “I couldn’t figure out if it was a prank, or if somebody just really had to pee and thought a bag made more sense than the bushes.”

  “I don’t know why people do what they do,” Theo said. “Although I propose all kinds of theories.”

  He said, almost under his breath, “I couldn’t tell Marisa that story.”

  “Mmm,” she said, because it was all she could manage. She felt shaky and uncertain. Why had he said that? As if he were inviting her to comment on Marisa’s unsuitability. Maybe he really hadn’t heard what she said. Or maybe, it occurred to her, he was telling her he had. Were those words his way of saying he was interested? Or of reminding her he had a girlfriend? Were they a way of making her feel nearly sick to her stomach with the weirdness of it all? Was she being encouraged, repelled, or just ignored?

  And why—oh, God, why?—had she given rise to a moment when she had to feel like this? Awash in self-loathing at the pathetic exposure of all she should have kept hidden. People who keep their guard up, it suddenly struck her, are hiding a giant mess. “That could happen in Paris,” she said. “Parisians have chip bags, don’t they? They have urine.”

  He laughed as if the awkwardness in the air was entirely of her imagining, but their easy rhythm was gone. She wasn’t wrong that his attempts at conversation seemed effortful after that, that he avoided meeting her eye. Their goodbye at the parking lot consisted of her saying, “Well,” and then turning abruptly in the direction of her car. For someone who spent so much time priding herself on her resourcefulness and responsibility, she sure knew how to fuck things up. She needed to purge herself of what had just happened, find somebody to make her feel better about making an ass of herself. But who? She’d told no one about her crush, so she had no one instantly available as a sympathetic confidant.

  She fished her cell phone out of her bag. Her fingers were trembling, and the memory returned, as it sometimes did, of how her hands had shaken as she dialed the phone to call Eloise after her parents died, trying first the home number and then the office, pressing each button firmly, one by one, carefully checking the numbers in her grandmother’s address book. How the last thought she had before someone answered was, strangely, Be polite. Now she tried Claire, who’d so recently been available, but the phone rang and rang, then went to voicemail. Theo had been ready, at this desperate juncture, to confess the whole sad story to her sister, and now she felt thwarted, stoppered, uncomforted, bereft. She paged up and down through her list of contacts. “Wes,” she saw at the bottom of the list, and for just a second couldn’t remember who that was. “Oh, God,” she said out loud when she realized. Oh, God, that night. She’d spent the whole next day in bed with a hangover made worse by worry and shock and embarrassment and shame. Had she really kissed a student in a public place? Had she really cried? Before Josh had arrived to pick her up Wes had taken her phone and programmed his number into it. “In case of emergencies,” he’d said.

  She pressed the Call button. He answered on the second ring. She might have hung up then, because he wouldn’t recognize her number. There was a moment of possibility when he didn’t yet know who she was. “It’s Theo,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said, the word long and drawn-out and undeniably pleased. “What’s up?”

  “I’m having a really bad day.” She wasn’t sure what she’d meant to say, but that was not it. There was no reason to think he would care. How pathetic that she was calling a near stranger—a former student!—for comfort. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m telling you that.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Maybe you think I can make it better. Which would be, you know, flattering.”

  Man, this guy. What was it about him that pushed the button for tears? She swallowed hard. “You know how to look at things,” she managed to say.

  He talked her into meeting hi
m for an early dinner, which, he insisted, would be his treat. He wanted to pick her up, too, but she wouldn’t let him. She was only ready to rely on him so far. He chose a funky but expensive restaurant in Northside that had a menu of elaborate cocktails and a reputation for fantastic french fries. As the hostess led her to a table in the back, Theo could see him there, frowning at the menu, and she hoped he wasn’t regretting insisting that he’d pay. He’d dressed up for her. She caught herself—why for her? Maybe for himself. Maybe for the restaurant. Whatever his reasons, he looked nice in his purple button-down shirt. Purple! She wondered if he still had the cap. He looked up and saw her, and immediately got to his feet, sitting only when she did. “My goodness, the manners,” she said as soon as the hostess left them.

  He smiled. “If you’d let me pick you up I would have opened your car door.”

  She smiled back, but could think of no response.

  “Did you just say my goodness?” he asked suddenly.

  “I think so.”

  “Wow. So we’re both old-fashioned.”

  “I’ve been known to say Lordy, Lordy,” she said. “Maybe I’m not old-fashioned so much as elderly.”

  “It’s all okay with me, as long as you lay off gee whiz.”

  She laughed. “You draw the line there? Can I say gee or is that verboten, too?”

  “I draw the line at gee and everything that comes after.”

  “Noted,” she said. They smiled at each other, and then entered a space where it was clear neither of them knew what to say next, both of them longing for the easy banter of moments before. Theo picked up her menu, but before she could open it he said, “I’m glad you called. I’m glad we’re on a real date. This is more like I imagined it.”

  “I still find it hard to believe that you imagined it at all.”

  “Why?”

  “What was sexy—or, if you prefer, romantic—about an American history survey?”

  “It wasn’t the subject. It was you. You were so excited to be talking about, like, nineteenth-century beauty standards. You made me feel interested even though on my own I wasn’t. I always felt jazzed after your class. Inspired.”

  All of this sounded uncomfortably close to what she’d first liked about Noah. “And what if I’m boring when I’m not talking history?”

  He grinned at her. “You weren’t boring the other night.”

  Theo cringed. “Oh, don’t bring that up.”

  “I don’t know why you’re so embarrassed,” he said. “You were just drunk.”

  “Don’t judge me based on that behavior.”

  “If I judged you, would I have asked you out?”

  She fiddled with her silverware, straightening the already straight fork and spoon. “I can’t really date you, you know.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re my student.”

  “Were.”

  “Huh?”

  “Were. Was. I was your student.”

  “Right. You’re right. I don’t know why I’m acting this way.”

  “What way?”

  “Going on a date with you to tell you I can’t date you. It’s bizarre.”

  “I think I can explain it.”

  “Do I want you to?”

  “You want to go on a date with me, but you feel like you shouldn’t. So you let yourself do it but say that you can’t, like somebody’s watching you.”

  “Like who’s watching me?”

  “Whoever you think would disapprove.”

  She made a face. “Are you studying to be a psychiatrist?”

  “Designer.”

  “Fashion?”

  “Industrial. Like doorknobs and stuff. I’m getting a master’s degree.”

  “It never occurred to me anyone had to design doorknobs.”

  “Someone has to design everything. This chair, this glass, this vase, this table.”

  This situation, she thought, without being quite sure what she meant.

  “This table started with an idea,” he said. “And then a drawing.” He pushed back his chair to look under the table. “Somebody had to decide on the shape of the legs, and where they’d attach, and how to attach them. How big to make the tabletop. What material to use.” He put his palms flat on the table and smiled at her. “I could tell you a lot about the pros and cons of different materials, if that was something you wanted to know.”

  “And that’s what you learn in your classes?”

  “Yup.”

  “So you are still a student.”

  “But not yours.”

  “And not in psychiatry.”

  “I’m sorry.” He let out a breath. “Maybe you don’t want to be analyzed. I think I’m still trying to impress you.”

  She looked at him. His honesty seemed to call for equivalent honesty. “I’m attracted to you,” she said slowly. “I feel weird about being attracted to you because you were my student. But the main reason I’m hesitating is because I have a crush of my own. It’s unrequited. But I still feel like I’m cheating on this imaginary relationship, being here with you.” She smiled grimly. “I know that’s stupid.”

  He shrugged, trying, she thought, to conceal disappointment. “You’re loyal to your ideas.”

  She laughed. “I’m a doctoral student,” she said. “I’m all about ideas.”

  “But you’re attracted to me?”

  She nodded, and then went ahead and said, “Yes.”

  “That’s not an idea.”

  “Well. It could be.”

  He shook his head. “No—attraction, that’s the farthest thing from an idea. That’s an urge, an impulse, a force. It’s subconscious, physical. You can’t make everything cerebral.”

  “Oh really?” she said. “Watch me.”

  “Love can be an idea,” he said.

  “That’s true.”

  “But attraction. We can work with that.”

  She was finding it increasingly difficult to believe she’d ever been this guy’s teacher. She had a powerful urge to put her hands on him, swept away by a vision of herself unbuttoning his shirt to examine that meaningful tattoo. She wanted to touch his hand where it rested on the table but stopped herself, and then she wondered why she was stopping herself when all he’d done, again and again, was invite her to believe in his interest. So she stretched her hand across the table, slowly, as if she were participating in the joke, and then reached out a finger and touched one of his. He flipped his hand over and caught hers, running his thumb across her palm, which confirmed for her both his desire and her own. She exhaled, with the feeling that she’d been holding her breath too long. “Okay,” she said.

  He didn’t ask what she meant. She was pretty sure he knew.

  11

  Josh was alone in the house. This almost never happened, especially in the summer with both Theo and Eloise off from school. Sometimes he got an evening to himself, but that was increasingly rare. Theo’s two closest friends from her program had finished their degrees, gotten jobs, and left town, and she didn’t seemed to have replaced them, so most of the time she was home. But tonight he was alone. Eloise had left a note that she wouldn’t be home until late, and at the bottom Theo had written I won’t either. She hadn’t signed her name. That was what living with someone was: leaving a note and neglecting, or not needing, to sign your name.

  Truth be told, he didn’t really like to be alone. He wandered from room to room in the empty house, thinking about the party they’d had last month, all those people clustered where now there was no one. He couldn’t call Adelaide—after two weeks and most nights spent together she’d gone out with her dancer friends, saying that if he came he’d be bored. As bored as this? He doubted it.

  On the third floor he went into the room they’d always called the “art room,” because Francine had kept collage materials and canvases and yarn there, detritus of her various abandoned hobbies. This was where he stored his heavy equipment, the amps and the microphones and the microphone stands. He’d c
laimed to be finished with music, but even he had to admit that the fact he’d kept this stuff gave the lie to the claim. He’d lugged all this weight upstairs rather than put the things in the basement, where they might get damp. He had a funny definition for finished. He pulled a mic stand into the center of the room, raised it high, and clipped in the mic. Should he try recording something? Despite his efforts to repress them, there were a number of songs in his head. But at the thought of singing his throat closed. He stood there for a second as though he was going to sing, back to pretending to be a rock star in an empty room in his house, back to some facsimile of youth.

  He should get his own place. He should buy a couch. He should get a cat. Eloise had let them keep their cat after their parents died, even though she was so allergic she’d had to start regular use of an asthma inhaler. When that cat died, she’d let them get two kittens. For a time she’d denied them nothing. She’d taken such good care of them. Who had taken care of her, in her loss and grief? No one. He’d tried, on more than one occasion, to say something about this, express some sort of retrospective sympathy and gratitude. She never let him get very far. What he could do for her now was take her side about the house, try to reason with Theo, try to talk Francine into signing the place over to Eloise. But he hadn’t done any of that. He’d called Claire a few days ago thinking maybe she’d galvanize him into taking action. Maybe she’d suggest that between the two of them they could persuade Francine to do the right thing. But when he told Claire that the house would go to whoever married first or needed it most, she’d just said, “Really,” in a strange, considering tone that he did his best to ignore. If she wanted the house, too, if she was another potential antagonist, he’d just as soon not know about it.

  The truth was that he had wondered what Francine would say if he told her he wanted the house for a studio. The truth was when Francine asked, “Do you want the house? Or is this just between Eloise and Theo?” he’d answered, “I want it.” At that moment, despite everything he owed his aunt, he did want the house, he wanted it fiercely. It wasn’t just Theo who had the right to that desire. But since then certainty had eluded him. His own desires were slippery and vague. He tried to pin one down so he could examine it, at last understand what he himself wanted, but it flicked away like a fish. He knew he wanted Adelaide, and that was about it. The thoughts about how he should marry her and get the house and turn it into a studio were jump-the-gun ridiculous.