by Leah Stewart
“What?” He reached up to get her a mug. “Oh, you mean Francine’s race to the altar?”
Theo nodded.
“First prize, one enormous house,” Josh said. “Lots of property taxes.” The coffeepot gurgled one last time and then subsided, and he poured them each a cup and added cream. He knew exactly how she liked her coffee. Sometimes she felt like they were strangers to each other, but that was just not true. And if it was true—if it was true right now—whose fault was that?
“I’d get married if I had someone to marry,” she said.
“You really want the house, don’t you?” Josh said.
“You do, too.”
“Why do you say that? I never said I wanted it.”
“No,” Theo said. “But I’ve noticed that you’ve also never said you don’t.”
“I hate it when you act like you can read my mind,” Josh said. “You have no idea what I’m thinking.”
“You’re still not saying you don’t want it.”
“Why do you assume you should get it? Because you’re the oldest child? You’re less likely to stay here than I am.”
“How do you know? You don’t know what I’m thinking either.”
“Great,” Josh said, picking up his coffee and turning to go. “So let’s just plan on a battle to the death, okay?”
I’d get married if I had someone to marry. Would she really? What about her research and her teaching, both of which, despite her recent fretfulness, she really loved? How badly did she want the house? What kind of desperate was she?
Wes had returned to his original line of questioning. “What about this?” His tongue flicked the inside of her ear.
“You know, I’ve never liked that one,” she said. “I had a boyfriend in high school who used to jam his tongue in my ear, and it was disgusting. I couldn’t see the difference between that and a wet Willie.”
“Okay,” he said, pulling back.
“But wait,” she said. “Now I’m thinking he just wasn’t doing it right.”
“And I’m doing it right?”
“You get an A,” she said. She giggled. “You get lots of A’s. All the A’s at my disposal.”
“That’s a lot of A’s.”
“Now I’m all out. I’ll have to restock.”
“You can do that while I’m gone.”
“While you’re gone?” Her eyes flew open. Had that been panic in her voice?
“Didn’t I tell you? I’m going home for three days to see my parents.”
Of course he had parents. Of course. He wasn’t just a character in her story, but she felt as surprised as if someone in a book had said “Enough” and walked off the page.
“Oh, don’t go see your mommy,” she said. “Stay with me.”
“I have to go,” he said, with a surprising sharpness in his voice. Then he softened, so quickly she thought maybe she’d imagined that tone. “I get the feeling you’re going to miss me.”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“Indeed,” she said. She thought of the great gift this year of free time had seemed to her at the beginning. Now she couldn’t think how to fill three days. She’d always marveled at the calm with which characters in Jane Austen novels pursued their cloistered lives, filling up hours with visiting and stitchery, passing the time, just passing the time. Now it seemed to her she’d expended a lot of energy inventing purposes to disguise the fact that she was doing the same thing. That everyone was doing the same thing, just passing the time, blog posts and emails and Twitter feeds instead of stitchery and whist.
Wes moved to kiss her, but she was a little angry at him for being about to leave her alone with her thoughts. A rogue impulse made her say, “Oh, Mommy,” in a voice that was breathy and childlike, just as his lips met hers.
He pulled back and looked at her a moment, as though trying to recognize her. Then he pushed himself to sitting. He stood. “Theo,” he said, picking up his jeans. “I want to explain why that’s not funny.” He pulled the jeans on and stood with his hands on his hips. He was still shirtless. She still had an urge to misbehave. It was strange that she could see how wrong things were going and yet want to make them worse.
“You don’t look very stern like that,” she said, and he, unsmiling, worked himself into his T-shirt. She sat up, and pulled up the sheet. She wished now that she had not draped her clothes neatly on the chair across the room, as if this had been not a passionate rendezvous but a doctor’s appointment.
Now his arms were folded across his chest, and she could still see most of his tattoo. She’d had plenty of opportunity to study it—it was all black, an intricate design that looked rather like a star, or like several stars arranged into one star, except instead of lines or triangles the stars were made of script that maybe was, or at least looked like, Arabic. She hadn’t yet asked him what it meant, because she feared the answer would make her roll her eyes, or at least repress the urge to do so. He’s a boy, she thought. An angry boy. “My mother’s depressive,” he said. “Two years ago she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital because she was afraid she might take her own life.”
Take her own life—why did he use that phrase? So oddly formal, not just for the conversation but for him. She had time to think that before her sense of mischief vaporized, and she was left with nothing to protect her from feeling like the terrible, careless person she was.
“I go see her as often as I can,” he said. “It’s important that she see us—me and my brothers—as often as possible.”
“Of course,” Theo said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t know,” he said. “What do you know about me? Do you know where I’m from? Do you know what my politics are? Whether I go to church? What my childhood was like? Do you know my last name?”
“Bryant,” she said quickly, but the way she jumped on that answer only proved his larger point.
“Bet you wouldn’t even know that if I hadn’t taken your class,” he said.
“I’m sorry I was insensitive,” she said.
“I know you are.” As she watched, his expression softened from anger into something that looked more like pain. “Do you know in all the time we’ve been doing this, you haven’t asked me a single question about myself?”
“That can’t be true. How can that be true?”
“Can you think of one?”
“Well, not right now. But that doesn’t mean . . . ”
“Look, I’m glad you want to have sex with me. I’m not complaining about that. But I feel like you’re treating me like a distraction. Like a drug. And I want to be more than that to you.”
“You think I’m using you?”
He shrugged. “Are you?”
She blinked. “I don’t know how to answer that. I think you have to define your terms.”
“Let me put it this way. When the fever burns off, will you want to go to the movies with me?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“You don’t see why not,” he repeated. He turned and sat heavily on the edge of the bed. “That’s not really the answer I was looking for.”
“Please don’t be mad at me, Wes,” she said.
He shook his head. “I’m not mad.”
She moved to put her hands on his back, and then stopped. But she was allowed to touch him—that was the point and the meaning of this. What she thought of when she thought of him was the pleasure of contact. She was set to his frequency. She vibrated at his touch. “How many brothers do you have?” she asked.
“Two.”
“Will they be there this weekend?” She realized as she spoke she didn’t know where there was. Was that even possible? How could she not know where he was from?
“The middle one will be. He lives in Columbus. My oldest brother lives in Chicago. He could drive in, but it didn’t sound like he was going to.”
“You’re the youngest?”
“That’s right.”
“W
hat are their names?”
“Alex and Anders.” He turned to look at her. “You can stop now.”
“Anders,” she said. “That’s an unusual name.”
“My mother was learning Swedish,” he said. “It’s a Swedish name.”
“How’d you get to be Wesley?” she asked. “She was learning British English?”
But it was too soon to make a joke. Or maybe his mother was just off-limits. He said flatly, “It’s her maiden name.”
“So which one is older? Alex or Anders?”
“Anders is the oldest,” he said. “He resents being born in her Swedish phase.”
“What’s he like?”
“He’s . . . ” He shook his head. “Really, you don’t have to ask me all these questions.”
“Can I ask you questions later?”
He took a moment to consider. “Sure. But you’ll have to make an appointment with my secretary.”
“That seems fair,” she said.
“You worry a lot about what’s fair, don’t you? Anders does that, too. I think it’s a firstborn thing. I don’t worry so much about fair.”
“What do you worry about?”
“Getting what I want,” he said, but not like he thought such a thing was possible.
She took a breath and finally put her hand on his back. “I’m asking questions because I’m interested. I’m sorry I didn’t ask before. I didn’t mean to be . . . ”
“I know. You can stop.”
“But I really . . . ”
“It’s okay. Seriously.”
It didn’t seem okay. She’d had no idea he was capable of looking so resigned, so downcast. She felt like she’d broken him. She’d been handed a rubber ball and thrown it, and instead of bouncing it cracked. But it had looked like a rubber ball! Surely it wasn’t her fault for failing to realize the truth. “Wes . . . ”
“I really, really, really don’t want to have a talk right now.” He turned fully toward her, put his hands on either side of her face, and looked her in the eye. “Really.”
“Okay,” she said. “I believe you.”
He pressed her cheeks together gently so that her lips pursed out and then he kissed them with a theatrical smack.
“Sexy,” she said.
“I’ll show you sexy,” he said. “I’ll show you enough sexy to last you for days.”
She was relieved. She was annoyed. She was confused. Aroused. Uneasy. Lonely in advance. “Just enough for three days, right?” she said.
“That’s all you’ll need,” he said.
Three days was too long. Without Wes, she couldn’t ignore the rest of her life, which included self-loathing over how long she’d been ignoring it. The next morning she emailed her professors about letters of recommendation. That task accomplished, she still felt restless, adrift, unsatisfied. She called up the file labeled “intro. doc” and read over the first few paragraphs. They didn’t seem so bad. She even had an idea for what might come next, though it dissipated halfway through her third sentence and left her staring at her computer screen, at a thought that went nowhere. She shook her head and put her fingers on the keyboard, looked alertly at the sentence as though she were going to finish it. But she wasn’t going to finish it. Why should she? This whole project was futile and idiotic, writing some ridiculous, arcane book for a tiny group of people to read and criticize. Conceptions of distance among nineteenth-century immigrant midwesterners—who cared! Footnoting and footnoting so no one could call her out on any failures in her research. There was no good reason to have devoted her life to this. And yet, she had, dammit. This was all there was. If she couldn’t finish this sentence, she didn’t deserve to live.
“Shit,” she said after a moment and slammed her laptop shut. The problem wasn’t just the sentence. Maybe it was the environment—not just the room but the house, maybe even the neighborhood. She needed a radical change of scene. Cincinnatians swore by the distinctions between neighborhoods. It meant something to say whether someone was from the east or west side, Clifton or Cheviot or Hyde Park. Hyde Park—that’s where she would go, to hide among the conservative and the monied. She’d be a visitor to a foreign country there.
In the car, to her great relief, she thought of an end to her sentence, and once settled in a coffee shop on Hyde Park Square, she typed that sentence and wrote a few more until she had an actual paragraph. She got up to get a refill on her coffee. She thought about this later. If I hadn’t wanted a refill. If I hadn’t happened to notice the poster on the front window. If I hadn’t walked over for a closer look. If I hadn’t glanced outside. Because when she did glance outside, she saw Claire.
She saw Claire, her gone-to-New-York sister. Claire, who’d been calling regularly and saying things were fine, that rehearsals were hard but things were fine, they shouldn’t come see a performance yet, not until she had a bigger part. Not really wanting to talk about herself, Theo had noticed but hadn’t worried much about because it wasn’t as if Claire had ever been particularly chatty. That Claire, Theo’s Claire, was standing across the street with her hands on her hips and her feet in fourth position, looking in the window of a boutique. But that wasn’t possible, because Claire was in New York. And Claire didn’t have that haircut. Claire’s hair was long, and suitable for pulling back into a ballet bun. This girl’s hair was in a jagged bob. It was cute, but it wasn’t Claire. This must be a girl who looked like Claire. A girl who looked exactly like Claire and owned Claire’s favorite dress, a pale blue sleeveless one belted at the waist. Not-Claire turned, and Theo instinctively stepped away from the window. She went back to the table for her phone, her heart careening, and when she found it she scrolled to her sister’s name and pressed it to call her. Claire, she thought, and then returned to the window where she could see the girl, who was walking now, up the street away from Theo. Her mind hollowed out while she listened to the ringing of the phone. It rang twice and the girl didn’t stop walking, but just as Theo’s throat unclenched, the girl stopped and slipped her hand, with a dancer’s graceful movements, into her bag. “Hey, T,” her sister’s voice said into her ear as the girl spoke into her own phone, and yet Theo stayed frozen in disbelief. “Theo?” Claire said again. “You there?”
Theo opened her mouth but made no sound.
“Theo?” The girl took the phone away from her ear, looked at it, put it back again.
“Claire?” Theo said.
“Hey,” Claire said. “Where’d you go?”
“Where did I go?” Theo repeated. “I don’t understand.”
“I couldn’t hear you for a second.”
“Oh. Oh. Really?” Theo glanced around as if looking for company in her confusion. “I don’t know. I’ve been here.”
Across the street the girl—Claire, it was Claire—tilted her head. “Are you okay?”
“I guess so,” Theo said. “I was wondering how you are.”
“You sound really strange, Theo. Please tell me if something’s wrong.”
“No.” Theo took a deep breath. “No, it’s nothing like that. Really, everything’s fine. I just . . . miss you. I miss you.”
“I miss you, too, T,” Claire said. She sounded like she meant it. Across the street she brought one foot up and rested it on her other leg. “Stork pose,” the rest of them had always called it. She’d done it since she was a little girl. In someone so preternaturally self-contained, it was a rare visible sign of discomfort.
“I love you,” Theo said.
“I love you, too,” Claire said, and then, when Theo didn’t speak again, she said, “You still there?”
“I’m here,” Theo said. “You still there?”
Claire laughed. “Obviously,” she said.
“Yes,” Theo said. “Obviously.” Claire brought her lifted leg around front and lifted it higher, looked down at her pointed toe. Was she aware of what she was doing? There was no way to tell. “I have to go,” Theo said, and then there were goodbyes, and she hung up the phone. From h
er hiding place she watched as Claire replaced her phone in her bag, and then as soon as her sister moved Theo followed, trying to remember what she’d learned from Hollywood about tailing a suspect on foot. Stay on the other side of the street? Hang back, but how far? It was certainly too late for any kind of disguise. She hadn’t come prepared. She was radically unprepared.
They didn’t go far, certainly less than a mile. Crossing a tree-lined street Claire dug in her bag again—watch for cars! Theo thought—and this time she pulled out keys. She walked up a flight of concrete stairs that led to a house, and when she reached the door she unlocked it. The house looked ordinary, or at least ordinary for Cincinnati, where many houses were a hundred years old and three stories tall. This house didn’t even have the flourishes of their house—no columns or stained-glass windows. It was a skinny white house with a brown front door. Ordinary. But how could it be? None of this was ordinary. Claire had closed the door behind her. After standing there for a long, uncertain moment, Theo climbed the stairs, too. They were steep. She stood panting at the front door, which was half window. She was going to rap on the glass, as soon as she caught her breath. In the meantime she cupped her hands around her eyes and peered through it.
The foyer was much smaller than in their house, just a space big enough for the door, the bottom of the staircase, the cabinet Theo recognized as being from IKEA. Claire’s bag was on top of it. As Theo stared, looking for some explanatory detail, Claire suddenly appeared through one of the two doorways off the foyer. She didn’t notice Theo, engaged in flipping through the mail in her hand. It was all so normal, and that normality was utterly unnerving. Theo might have been less surprised to see cages full of imprisoned girls. If there had been any sign that Claire didn’t want to be where she was, that Theo could have handled. She could have charged in, demanded explanations, rescued or scolded or comforted, whatever it was that needed to be done. Her sister had unlocked the door of this house, gone inside, put down her bag, looked through the mail. What rescue or remonstrance or comfort could Theo offer against the ordinariness of that?