The History of Us

by Leah Stewart

  He was pleased. He was gratified. “Thanks,” he said. “But you’re not sleeping.”

  “I wanted to listen,” she said. “Were you ever in a band?”

  He opened his mouth to tell her, and then he thought of Sabrina, and on the heels of that thought came the impulse to lie. “No,” he said. “Never was.”

  “That’s too bad,” she said. “You should start one.”

  “Thanks,” he said, “but I don’t think I’m good enough for that.”

  She fell asleep, at last, not long afterward, and he lay awake and wondered why, exactly, he’d lied. Well, why tell her? So that she could be briefly impressed, and then begin to see him as a failure? The last thing on earth he wanted was to repeat history.

  Josh met Sabrina when he took his friend’s cat to the vet hospital in the middle of the night. The cat was staying with him for two weeks while his friend was away, and on the second day he’d come home to find the cat gone. It had been like a locked-room mystery until he’d realized the screen on one of the windows was torn. Two hours later he found the cat crouched in the courtyard under a fire escape, wearing a hunted expression.

  She was a vet student. She’d been wearing blue scrubs, with her blond hair up in a ponytail. She’d seemed suspicious of him—he fought the urge to explain that he hadn’t encouraged the cat to jump—but with the cat she was all soothing voice and gentle hands. “How old is she?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Josh said. “She’s not mine.”

  “You don’t like cats?”

  “No, that’s not what I meant.”

  “You just said that so emphatically.” She imitated him, putting her free hand up in the sign for stop. “ ‘She’s not mine!’ Like you wouldn’t want anyone thinking you had a cat.”

  “No. No! I love cats. I always had cats growing up.”

  “Mmmm,” she said. She seemed to have lost interest in him entirely, her focus returned to the animal on the table.

  “I can’t have a pet these days,” Josh said. “I’m always on tour.”

  She didn’t respond. Either her concentration was so intense she hadn’t heard him, or she’d decided to pretend he wasn’t there. He was guessing the latter, and he felt unsteady, a landlubber on a rocking boat. She seemed to dislike him, and he wasn’t accustomed to being disliked. She cooed at the cat, whispering that she was a good girl, that everything would be all right. Then suddenly she looked up, her fingers gently palpating the cat’s belly. “On tour?” she said. “What does that mean? You’re military?”

  He laughed, and then saw she wasn’t kidding. Clearly she wasn’t clued in by what he considered pretty good rocker hair. “I’m in a band.”

  “Like a rock band?”

  “Well, we’re not straight-up rock, but, yeah, basically.”

  She straightened, keeping a soothing hand on the cat, who closed her eyes as if in exhausted relief at receiving care from someone competent to give it. “Are you any good?”

  He blew out air. “No,” he said. “We suck. We suck and we blow. Someone should really put a stop to us.”

  She didn’t laugh. She eased the cat back into the carrier and closed the door. She said, “We should take X-rays, but I think your cat’s front paws are broken.”

  Not my cat, he wanted to say. “So now what?”

  She paused with her hand on the doorknob. “I’ll have one of the techs come take her for X-rays, and then we’ll see.”

  “Okay, thanks,” he said, but she was already out the door. He paced the length of the room, trying to shake the unsettled feeling she’d given him. Honestly she’d managed to make him feel as if he’d personally thrown the goddamn cat out the window. He felt guilty about the whole situation, and craved an impartial jury to confirm for him that what had happened to the cat was not his fault. But all he had was the cat, and who knew what she thought? He stuck his fingers through the squares in the door of her cage, and she sniffed them, then rubbed the side of her face against them. “Poor, poor kitty,” he said, and she mewed as if to say no shit.

  The cat’s paws were indeed broken. Sabrina—Dr. Wells, she was then—showed him the fracture lines on the X-ray, on each side a semicircle traced from toe to toe. “You could operate,” she said. “But I’m not sure it’s worthwhile.”

  “Especially not if I do it,” he said.

  She looked at him. They were standing awfully close, looking at those X-rays. He could smell her fruity shampoo. He could see the odd color of her eyes, green ringed by gray. “You keep trying to make me laugh,” she said, in a tone that suggested there wasn’t much hope of his succeeding.

  “It’s a reflex,” he said.

  “I won’t take it personally, then.” She took a step back and faced him. “Cats are amazing healers,” she said. “Really what you want to do is make sure she doesn’t jump.”

  “How do you keep a cat from jumping?”

  “You could buy a rabbit run to keep her in or build a cage out of chicken wire.”

  Josh lived in a small apartment with a living room barely big enough for his coffee table. He had little money. He didn’t want to buy a rabbit run or build a cage. She must have read this in his face, because she said, “Or you could just keep letting her injure herself,” and her tone suggested he must have the morals of a serial killer. She bent over the cat again, murmuring more sweet nothings into her ear. Was that the moment? Was that the moment when he resolved to win her? In retrospect he thought so. It was the combination of her crisp, dismissive authority and her capacity for tenderness that attracted him to her. He saw how loving she could be, if he could just persuade her he was worthy. If people could be divided into cats and dogs, he was the latter, pliable and obvious in his affections. People who saw him as a rock star failed to realize it, but winning him over was no big deal. Sabrina, though, she was a cat, and not just any cat but the kind who hides beneath chairs and swipes at the ankles of passersby. A cat like that loves only one person. One person who has risked injury. One person who has tried really hard.

  “Do you want to come see me play?” he asked. “I—we—have a gig tomorrow night. I could put you on the guest list.” He was all-in. If she said no to this, he had nothing left to bet.

  She straightened up to look at him, and then for the first time she smiled. All at once she was the one who seemed excitable as a puppy. “Sure,” she said. “Yeah, that sounds like fun.”

  He’d stopped getting nervous before gigs some time before, but goddamn was he nervous before this one. He sat in the dressing room jiggling his leg and ripping tiny pieces from the label on a bottle of water, rolling those tiny pieces into balls. “What’s up?” asked the bass player, and Josh just shook his head, because the bass player was the kind of guy who’d give him endless shit if he explained. See, I met this girl, and I didn’t even exactly like her, but for some reason I want her to like me, it’s very important that she like me, and as stupid as it sounds I have to impress her. I can’t talk myself out of it, and I know because I’ve tried.

  The process of walking out onstage and strapping on his guitar and making sure everything was a go seemed even longer and more excruciating than usual. He always hated this part, where everybody watched and waited. He felt the audience’s collective impatience, the collective desire for the band to be awesome, to give them something they could take home and keep, rushing toward him like a tidal wave. But tonight all he felt was that she was out there somewhere, watching, waiting, judging. He was about to take a test that he might fail. He didn’t look for her, not that he could have found her if he tried. It was a big crowd, a sold-out show. Maybe that in itself would impress her.

  He skipped his usual greeting to the audience, his usual joking around, and just launched right into the first song. He closed his eyes and sang like it was the last song, like he wasn’t saving anything for the encore, and as always once the music was under way, he was fine, he knew what he did and who he was, and everything was as it should be. He was sw
eating under the lights and everything was fine.

  His preshow nerves must have spiked the punch, because everybody in the band insisted with a wild-eyed conviction that they’d played one of their best ever shows. And the audience had been right there with them—he’d seen that looking out during the encore, the way they jumped and danced and pumped their fists in the air. What could be better than this? Was there anything in the world better than this?

  “Hey, Josh,” the club manager said to him. “The girl you put on the guest list is asking if she can come backstage.”

  “Oh.” He was crouched down, putting his guitar in its case. “Yeah,” he said. And then he listened as the footsteps retreated and others approached. He took a long time to settle the guitar, close the lid, snap the locks into place, so that he was still down there when she reached him, when she said, “Hi.” That was all she said, but as he rose to meet her he absorbed the sweetness, the tenderness that had been in that hi, and when he met her eyes and saw the look on her face, the admiration on her face, he knew that what he wanted could be his, that the best thing in the world wasn’t just to do what you loved but to be admired for it, by someone whose admiration you really, deeply wanted.

  Her admiration hadn’t lasted. The thing that first won her heart became the very thing she hated. There were other problems of course. Not long into the relationship she began to test him, trying to find his limits. The first Thanksgiving they were together she announced plans to drive to Philadelphia, where her parents lived, and said nothing about his accompanying her. When he asked if he could come, she said, “No, I really don’t want you to meet my family,” and she stuck to this until the day before she was to leave, when she suddenly begged him to come. He canceled the plans he’d made with his friends and went. He had a million of these stories, of the hurtful things she said and did, of the many times those things failed to make him leave. Once right after sex she said, “I’ve done stuff with other guys I’d never do with you. You’re not the right type.” When pressed about this “stuff” she refused to say what it was, leaving him to imagine scenes far more dangerous and erotic then anything she’d probably done. That was probably the point. But he couldn’t be sure, so the torture worked anyway.

  She was a troubled person, he could see that now. She was so full of self-loathing she wanted him to loathe her, too, and when she couldn’t make him hate her she hated him instead. She didn’t think she was worthy of his devotion, so she saw it as an unforgivable weakness in him. Or maybe, he could hear Theo saying, she’s just a cruel bitch who tormented you for sport.

  He thought he could see, now, with the distance of a year and three hundred miles, why he’d stayed with her. As the band’s big break turned out to be more of a medium one, she’d shored up his confidence, and at some point she’d become the source of his confidence. So when she was cruel to him—and he could admit, now, that she’d been cruel—there was no cure for his misery but her affection.

  And her affection had come at a price. Once, hoping for comfort, he’d made some self-pitying remark about their latest single’s failure to move past college radio, and she’d said, “Well, what do you really expect? That you’re going to be a rock star?” She managed to inject a bottomless contempt into the last two words.

  “No,” he said, defensively, in a state of confusion about what exactly he was defending against. He did want to be a rock star. In a way he was one. So why had he just said no? Because she made it sound like such a ridiculous, adolescent, self-aggrandizing thing to want.

  This was around the time she began to complain about the band and everything that had to do with it. She didn’t want him out late at night, gone on weekends, let alone for weeks at a time. “If you loved me you wouldn’t be gone so much,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly marry a man like you,” she said, and why oh why did this make him determined to prove her wrong? “You’re not an adult,” she said. “You’re an overgrown kid playing with toys. What, are you going to be playing in a bar band when you’re fifty?”

  He was hardly in a bar band. Right? Right? Late at night, sweaty and weary in the flickering lights of some club, the floor sticky with spilled beer, he heard her words in his head. Once, in college, he’d tried cocaine, and for a while he’d been in love with his small version of the world, the dancing people, the cold, crisp beer, the raucous band. And then the drug had worn off, and he’d hated himself and everyone there. What a cavalcade of losers. What an array of what was wrong with America. He felt something akin to this now, after gigs, when the buzz of the music wore off, and he began to slide into a depression that he didn’t recognize as such, with Sabrina’s voice telling him his unhappiness was inevitable, and only what he deserved.

  When he told the others he was quitting, the drummer threw his sticks at him. Josh made no effort to defend himself. Whatever anger they felt he certainly deserved, but nothing they could say would make him change his mind.

  Only after all that was over, the last outstanding gig canceled, the last plea from the bass player turned down, did it really hit him what he’d done. He’d gotten a part-time job right away, but suddenly there was so much more time. He’d stretched time and stretched it, filling every minute with his single-minded passion, and now it sagged back, oversize and deflated. He began to play a lot of video games, and Sabrina, instead of seeming happier, grew more and more annoyed. “I thought you wanted me around more,” he said.

  “I wanted you around more,” she said. “Not all the time.”

  This was two months after he’d quit. She began to upbraid him, and all of a sudden, to his amazement, he registered that he didn’t care. She yelled, and he ignored her, playing the best Super Mario of his life. Once again she slammed out of the apartment. He finished his game, marveling over his own indifference, and then beginning to relish it. He put his controller down, stood up and looked around the apartment. The couch was orange, a color he never would have chosen. What the hell was he doing there? He seemed to have woken from a dream of absurd events and bizarre but urgent concerns. At the time it had all seemed so real.

  What Theo couldn’t understand was that he hadn’t been capable of ending the relationship any sooner than he had. He’d been chasing victory, and only once he stopped caring whether he got it did it come, in the form of drunken late-night phone calls begging him to come back. But he couldn’t make himself stop caring. He just, miraculously, had. After that he’d gone around for weeks in a bliss of nothingness.

  Maybe he could have called the guys, when his love for Sabrina finally released him. He could have spent days or weeks apologizing, promising never, ever to abandon them again. But all of that would have required emotions, and, man, did this indifference feel good. He took it home with him from Chicago to Cincinnati, determined to cultivate it as long as he could. Eloise seemed glad to see him. Ben seemed delighted to hire him. Nobody troubled his calm waters but Theo. “How are you?” she asked, in that voice people use when they really want to know. They sat on the couch where they’d wrestled over the remote as teenagers, now polite adults, perched on the edges of the cushions with their hands folded on their knees.

  “Great,” he said.

  “Really? I’m so glad.” She did seem genuinely glad. Her gladness was annoying. “How long are you here for?”

  He shrugged. “Indefinitely.”

  She cocked her head. “Eloise said you were just back for a while.”

  “Sure, if by for a while you mean forever.”

  “What about the band?”

  “What do you mean? The band is over.”

  “But I thought maybe now that you and Sabrina . . . I thought you might start it up again.”

  “Why? What does Sabrina have to do with anything?”

  “Well, I mean . . . ” Theo hesitated. “I just thought—I thought you quit for her. Didn’t you quit for her?”

  “No,” he said. “I was just done with it. I’d gone as far as I could.” She didn’t argue, but he
could tell by her face that she knew he was lying. Why did her face have to be a mirror in which he saw his own regret and shame and confusion? It was so hard not to hate her for that.

  12

  What about this?” Wes asked, putting one of Theo’s fingers into his mouth.

  “Yes, that’s good,” Theo said. “I hope you’re taking notes.”

  He pulled that finger out. “I’m making a map,” he said. He touched the next finger. “What about this one?”

  “I think you’ll find you get the same reaction with all of them.” He didn’t answer, his tongue busy curling around her finger. She closed her eyes and sighed. “Except the ring finger on my left hand,” she said. “That one’s kind of standoffish.”

  He released her hand, moving his mouth to the hollow of her collarbone. “Is that your way of saying you don’t want to get married?”

  “Ooh,” she said, as his breath hit that spot and a shiver went through her. “I didn’t even know about that one.”

  He kissed her there, then made his way up her neck. “Oh, I’ll find them all.”

  “I bet you will,” she said. She closed her eyes and waited. It was wonderful to surrender. Theo had forgotten that, or perhaps never known it.

  “Do you know you didn’t answer my question?” Wes asked.

  “What question?” She was concentrating on the sensation of his teeth against her earlobe, weighing her response as if there were going to be a test. “That’s good, too, but so far the collarbone is winning.”

  “About your ring finger.”

  “Huh?” she said, in feigned confusion. Despite her efforts not to comprehend, she knew exactly what he’d asked her. She just didn’t know how to answer. Since Francine’s announcement—the bizarre competition that she seemed to think solved everything—marriage had been on Theo’s mind. Thoughts of who she might marry, if she could snap her fingers and have husband and house in one fell swoop, led to thoughts of Noah, which led to confusion about what exactly she was doing with Wes, and then circled back to the self-defeating nonsense of imagining how she could get the house, even though it was early August and she knew damn well that fall and a job search were fast approaching. Several times in the last couple weeks she’d sworn to herself that she wouldn’t engage in a destructive competition for the house. She was depressed and exhausted by the tension, the way she and Eloise were avoiding one another, speaking only when necessary, with the razor-blade politeness of a couple sharing custody, or British people. But every time she gave in to the longing for peace and made the resolution to surrender, her indignation surged forth again, and she went back to thinking about how she could win. “So,” she’d said to Josh that morning, joining him at the coffeepot, “are you going to get married?”