The History of Us

by Leah Stewart

  The trouble was that the sense of freedom quitting music had given him was gone. He missed that feeling. He’d counted on it for a long time and wondered when and why it had disappeared. Times like this, he didn’t know what to do with himself. When his phone rang, and he saw it was Noah, he felt an immense relief, as if Noah had called to save him from himself.

  As he stood in the crowd waiting for a band to go on, Josh did not always think about his own days as a musician. He didn’t always picture the odd back rooms where you waited, some of them small concrete-walled cells painted gray or army green, some of them spacious labyrinths with cozy chairs and riders laid out on counters in front of mirrors large enough to be featured in the dressing room of a Broadway star. It didn’t usually feel strange to him—hadn’t for six months or more—that he was out here instead of back there. Now he waited for Noah to come back from the bar with a growing embarrassment. As though everybody was thinking, Why is that loser just standing there? As though everybody here knew that he was no longer the person he was supposed to be. But he’d quit music to quit that version of himself. This is who you’re supposed to be, he told himself. Just a guy who needs another beer.

  He was relieved when Noah reappeared. Noah handed him a pint glass, then clinked his own against it. “Can I ask you something?” Noah asked.

  “Sure,” Josh said, braced for the criticism-as-question he sometimes got from fans, like “Do you know you used the same chord progression in two different songs?”

  “Your sister. Theo,” Noah said. “Is she kind of a jokester?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She said something to me the other day—I wasn’t sure whether to take her seriously or not.”

  Was Theo a jokester? From adolescence on, and before Sabrina, they’d communicated largely through affectionate banter, a mode they could still enter from time to time now, reminders of how natural and easy they used to be with each other. “She likes to joke around, definitely,” he said. “But she can be serious. She can be intensely serious. I guess that doesn’t really help you. Do you want to tell me what she said?”

  “She said if I were single she could go out with me.” Josh must have looked startled at this, because Noah said, “I shouldn’t have told you that. That was weird.”

  “No, it’s okay,” Josh said. “I’m just absorbing the information.” So Theo had a thing for Noah. She had the hots for him. She was in love with him? None of those descriptions seemed the right one. This must be one reason why she’d been so moody and strange lately. Josh had always thought of his big sister as practical above all, so resolutely had she insisted on practicality from him during the Sabrina years, and this made it hard to imagine her caught in the grip of an unrequited longing. He would have imagined, if he’d thought about it at all, that even if she found Noah attractive she would have dismissed him immediately as a romantic prospect as soon as she discovered he had a girlfriend. At this news of her weakness, he felt a mixture of triumph and disappointment.

  “I just couldn’t tell if she was serious,” Noah said. “So I think I handled it really badly.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I pretty much pretended that I hadn’t heard her.”

  Josh nodded slowly. “How should you have handled it? I mean, what do you wish you had said?”

  “Good question.”

  “Do you . . . I mean, would you . . . ”

  Noah spread his arms, palms to the ceiling, in the universal symbol for who knows? “There’s Marisa,” he said. “But if there wasn’t, I probably would. I mean, that’s what I keep thinking, ever since Theo said that. That I would.”

  “But you couldn’t have said that to her.”

  “No. Right? Because that would be like I was saying I would cheat. Or maybe it would have seemed I was being patronizing, you know, lying to not make her feel bad. I don’t know. I just feel like an ass.”

  Josh nodded, then realized how that might seem. “I’m sympathizing with you,” he said. “Not agreeing.”

  “I’m sorry to dump all this on you, man, especially about your own sister. I haven’t had anybody else to tell.”

  “No, you haven’t dumped anything. I’m surprised, that’s all. I had no idea.”

  “Me neither.” Noah frowned. “But you think she was serious?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like the kind of joke she’d make.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway, right?”

  It matters to her, Josh thought. And it seems to matter to you. But this was the moment to drop the subject, before they both grew uncomfortable and Noah began to feel stupid for bringing it up. Josh took a sip of his beer, waited a few beats for the conversation to dissipate. Then he said, “Can I ask you something now?”

  “Yeah, man,” Noah said. “Ask me anything.”

  “Do you feel like if you gave up your research you wouldn’t exist?”

  Noah looked surprised. All at once his jocular, easygoing social self fell away, and Josh thought he got a glimpse of what Noah must be like in the classroom: intense, often serious, maybe even a little stern. “That’s a very pressing question,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “Because of Marisa.”

  “She wants you to give up your research?”

  Noah shook his head. “She wants me to move to New York or L.A. But I can’t get a job in those places—I tried. She wants me to go on the market and try again, but I’m no more marketable now than I was a year ago. In fact, I’m marginally less, because I haven’t published anything in the meantime, I’m not shiny and new anymore, and they’d wonder why I was leaving my first job after only a year.”

  “So if you moved . . . ”

  “I’d have to get some other kind of job, probably teaching high school. But I love research. Research is what led me to teaching, because nowhere but academia are people interested in the things I’m interested in. But you think I’m going to teach the American Revolution all day in a high school and then come home and write about nineteenth-century Mexico? Nah, man. I’m going to be exhausted. I’m going to come home and watch TV.”

  “But you’ve thought about it anyway.”

  “Sure, I’ve thought about it.” There was an edge to his voice, as if Josh had accused him of something. Did Noah feel defensive about considering abandoning his work? Or about the suggestion that he might not have considered it? “I love her, man. I want to marry her.” He took a big swig of his beer. “Plus to tell you the truth I’ve been hating what I’ve been writing lately. And then I think, How can I look her in the eye and say this shit is worth it?”

  Josh was ready to let the subject drop, feeling he’d trampled delicate ground. But after a moment Noah said, “I’d still exist. I’d still feel like myself. But I think I’d feel like a lesser version of myself, you know? Like, you remember The Dark Crystal? You remember what those little Muppet people looked like after the Skeksis drained their blood?”

  “You’d be a pale Muppet person,” Josh said.

  “Exactly. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  Do you think I’m a pale Muppet person? That was what Josh wanted to ask. But that wasn’t the kind of thing you asked, even if the conversation bordered on the confessional. Asking that was like wearing a big sign that said HI, I’M PATHETIC. Instead he said, “Adelaide said if she wasn’t a ballet dancer she wouldn’t exist.”

  “Wow. Well, I guess her whole life’s been about that, right? Where are you with that, anyway?”

  “Good, I think,” Josh said, even though good wasn’t an answer to where?

  “I’m a little jealous. Being at the beginning, when things aren’t so complicated.” Noah sighed. “I feel like Marisa and I are in a standoff. Somebody’s got to drop their guns. I’m seriously considering proposing.”

  Noah didn’t seem to be considering the possibility that she might say no, or that a yes would make no difference. But Josh didn’t point that out. Noah would encounter th
ose possibilities soon enough without Josh’s saying so. The band came on and they stood there and listened, bobbing their heads along, drinking their beers. Josh did not want to think about how bland these songs were, despite the self-consciously clever lyrics, really just the same chords over and over, and why in hell this band had been getting such good buzz. He did not want to watch the guitarist’s hands and feel the way the strings pressed against your fingers, leaving calluses that were, after these many months, nearly gone. They were entertaining, man. They put on a good show. The singer had moves. They were fun, and that was what mattered. That was all he needed to think about.

  He dropped Noah off and drove all the way home before he surrendered to the urge to contact Adelaide. It was too late to call, so he sat in the car and sent her a text: You still up?

  She replied with gratifying immediacy. Yes. Can’t sleep. Come over?

  When he got there she threw her arms around him like he’d done something far more heroic than drive across town. “I’m going nuts,” she said, releasing him. “Did you know I’m an insomniac?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think you told me.”

  “All my life. It comes and goes, though.” She took his hand and led him farther into the apartment. She seemed wired, wild-eyed. “I knew tonight would be bad as soon as I turned out the light. I was so sleepy, but my head hit the pillow and I startled awake, thinking about this one move I’m having trouble with. And when that happens, that’s it. I’m through. It’s over.”

  This was the longest she’d talked about herself without being asked. “And then do you get up?”

  “Sometimes I do,” she said. “Sometimes like tonight I just lie there and keep trying to sleep, which is stupid, the worst thing you can do. You’d think I’d have learned by now how stupid that is.”

  “Why? What happens?”

  Her whole body shivered. “Well, I’m not distracting myself, so all I can do is think about how I can’t sleep, or maybe about the thing that woke me up in the first place, which is usually whatever I’m working on. Usually some mistake I’ve made. Sometimes the music plays over and over in my head. Just a snippet, over and over, and I can’t turn it off. After a while of that I panic, and the panic is worse than the sleep loss.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said, as though he’d experienced nothing like that.

  “Yeah, it’s like it gives me a hangover. There must be some kind of hormone that gets released or something when you freak out. The whole next day I just feel headachy and tense and awful.” She groaned. “I have rehearsal all day tomorrow. All day! And if I don’t sleep I’m going to be disastrous.”

  “So what helps?”

  “Music, sometimes. Really different music, that can stop whatever’s playing in my head. TV, sometimes, if it’s absorbing enough that I can turn off my mind. The trouble with getting up to watch TV, though, is that the place is dark and still and the TV sounds really loud when you turn it on, and it’s just all so lonely. Knowing everyone else in the world is sleeping.”

  “I’ll stay up with you,” Josh said.

  “You will?”

  “Can we stay up lying down, though? I feel a need to be prone.”

  They got ready for bed—Josh had to brush his teeth with his finger, as it still seemed too early to suggest he leave a toothbrush there. And besides, he wanted her to be the one to suggest it. They got into bed at the same moment, lifting the covers and climbing in with a determinedly matter-of-fact air, as if in a scene from a movie about awkward adolescent sex. This was the first time they’d gotten into bed together like longtime couples did, with sleep the primary thought in their minds. Funny that it should seem more awkward to climb into a bed together for sleep than to tumble onto it for sex. He lay on his back, and after a moment she slid over to rest her head on his shoulder. She was so tense he could feel it, like a reverberating sound. He picked up a piece of her long hair, running his fingers through it until they snagged on a tangle. “Ouch,” she said, but mildly.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Or is pain a good distraction?” She didn’t answer right away and he felt instantly sick with nerves. He’d been joking, of course, but what if he’d sounded like he was proposing something kinky? Would she even ask if that’s what he meant, or would she just never call him again? “That was a joke.”

  “Hey, I have a sense of humor,” she said.

  “I know,” he said, although he didn’t, really.

  “You’re always telling me what was a joke.”

  “Not because I think you don’t have a sense of humor. Because I worry my joke was so not funny you wouldn’t recognize it as one.”

  “You should wear socks on your jokes.”

  “Okay, I don’t know if you’re funny, but you definitely qualify as weird.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said. He was struck by the confidence with which she said it. He did, more or less, know what she meant. She was linking his insecurity to her own.

  “I still haven’t seen your feet,” he said. “The rest of you. All the rest of you. But not your feet.”

  “Now there’s too much buildup,” she said. “I shouldn’t have told you. Now I’ll be too self-conscious to ever show you. Or when I do you’ll be unimpressed. Or you’ll assume I’m exaggerating and then when you finally see them you’ll pass out from the shock.”

  “Once I saw photos of a bound foot. My sister was writing a paper about China in high school, and she showed me.”

  “Just picture that then, and mine won’t seem so bad.” She snuggled deeper into his chest. He could feel her body relaxing and was pleased. She sighed. “I have nine hours of rehearsal tomorrow.”

  “Don’t think about that.”

  “I can’t stop.”

  “Okay, then, think about it without thinking about it. Tell me about your day. How does it go?”

  “We start at nine-thirty with company class.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s everybody working for an hour and a half with the ballet master and the director. It’s a warm-up for the day.”

  “Is it all really formal? I picture the master yelling at you. Master. That’s a scary word.”

  “It’s rigorous,” she said. “The vibe depends on who’s running things. And there are plenty of breaks throughout the day when we just hang out and talk. Or show off, in the case of the guys.”

  “Show off?”

  “Oh, they have a lot of testosterone,” she said. “They’ve been teased about being dancers, so they have to be that much manlier. They have something to prove. Max and Carlos especially. They’re always flying across the room during breaks, doing all their tricks, leaping and spinning. We call it ‘testosterone time.’”

  “Carlos—is that the guy you danced with when I saw you?”

  “I get partnered with him a lot. We dance well together.”

  “Yeah, you do.” Josh was thinking about the way the male dancer had held her with the length of her body pressed to his, and the uneasy feeling the memory gave him got worse when she said, “He’s my ex-boyfriend.”

  “Oh, crap,” he said. “That’s bad news.”

  She laughed. “It was a bad breakup, but it was also a long time ago.”

  “How long of a long time?”

  “It’s been, let’s see, it’s been five years. Wow.”

  He didn’t like that wow. He wanted it to have been ten years, and to seem like twenty. “And how long did you date before that?”

  “Five years.”

  “That’s a serious relationship.”

  “We were kids. We’re just like old friends now.”

  “Now you’re just really good friends. Really good half-naked friends rolling all over each other.”

  She laughed again, but he could feel the tension returning to her body. She’d probably had guys act jealous about this before. He needed to be less predictable. He needed to keep it light. “I hope you’re not going to hold me to his standard. I can’t possibly jum
p that high.”

  “Not a requirement,” she said.

  What was a requirement? Why was this girl with him at all? He felt an intense need to do something impressive. “So music helps you sleep?”

  “Sometimes,” she said.

  “I could sing,” he offered. Did he imagine that she sounded a little wary when she said okay? “Name a song you find relaxing.”

  “Um. There’s a Simon and Garfunkel song. My parents used to play it. ‘I am just a poor boy.’” She spoke the line rather than singing it, though she inflected the words as if she was singing. He assumed she must be self-conscious about her voice. She was so careful about what she revealed.

  “‘The Boxer,’” he said.

  “‘The Boxer,’” she repeated. “Okay. There was another one I liked, too. With the line ‘all come to look for America.’”

  “Okay. Which?”

  “You know them both?”

  “I know a lot of songs.”

  “You’re like a jukebox.”

  “Exactly like one.”

  She laughed. “‘The Boxer,’ then.”

  He tried to sing it as a lullaby, sweet and soothing, although some of the lyrics—like “whores on Seventh Avenue”—challenged that interpretation.

  “You have a really nice voice,” she said when he was done.

  “Hmmm,” he said. “Is it helping?”

  “Lots.” He felt her yawn against his chest. “Will you do the other one?”

  Toward the end of the song he forgot himself a little. He didn’t just croon the ending but full-out sang it, emoting like mad: “Empty and aching and I . . . don’t . . . know . . . why . . . ”

  “That was beautiful, Josh,” she said. “You should be a singer.”