by Leah Stewart
She stopped walking and turned to him. “I want to buy you a treat,” she said.
“What?”
“Something you loved as a kid. A hot chocolate with whipped cream. Or a hot fudge sundae. A Happy Meal?”
He considered her, his expression serious. Did he see the offer for the apology it was? Did he understand she appreciated the happiness he gave her? “I’d take a hot fudge sundae,” he said.
They were the only people inside Graeter’s, and he got not just a sundae but an übersundae, complete with a brownie, multiple flavors of ice cream, and a name: the 1803. They sat at one of the little tables, in the old-fashioned ice cream parlor chairs, white, with curlicue backs. “I got this for its historical value,” he said.
“I see. I thought maybe it was because you admired the design,” she said.
“That, too,” he said. “My reasons can be complicated.”
“Most reasons are,” she said. The words felt overly significant, and after she said them she couldn’t meet his eye. She busied herself wiping a drop of chocolate ice cream from the table. When she looked up he was watching her.
“Do you want a bite?” he asked. He held up a spoonful.
She nodded, relieved he hadn’t taken the opportunity to delve into her reasons, because she’d have been hard-pressed to explain what they were. As he slipped the spoon inside her mouth she closed her eyes. The ice cream felt good against the roof of her mouth, smooth, cold, sweet. He said, “You like being in love with someone who’s not going to love you back.”
She opened her eyes. He looked at her. “Why would I like that?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He plunged his spoon back into the sundae, put a big bite in his mouth. That mouth had been all over her body, those hands, too. And he was kind, and funny, and smart, and everything she might have said she wanted in a man, if she were inventing one, and what’s more he seemed to understand her, and want her anyway. He was a little too young, perhaps, but as he kept saying he was not her student anymore. She wasn’t even currently a teacher. Did she not want him more because she already had him? Was that the problem? Was he right about her? How sad to imagine that what she desired most was to live with desire unfulfilled. He swallowed his bite, scooped out another, and offered her the spoon. “Have another,” he said. “It’s pretty fucking good.”
16
Adelaide was finally taking Josh to meet her friends, or in other words, the rest of the company. The party was in an apartment downtown. He was driving, and she was in the passenger seat of his car, sitting upright, wearing a small, inward frown. He knew her well enough now to know what the expression meant. She was debating something, and after a while, when she was sure she knew what she wanted to say, she’d tell him what it was. In the meantime he changed the music on the car stereo, then changed it back again. He couldn’t find something to suit his mood, a phenomenon that always left him in a mildly agitated state. Sometimes he’d just barely register the tension in his body and mind, and then realize, with some relief, what was causing it—the wrong music. Tonight he was fully aware of the problem, but couldn’t fix it anyway. Maybe he couldn’t match his mood because he couldn’t decide what his mood was. So many things in his life were unsettling: camping out on the futon in Noah’s study, feeling cut off from his family, dating a girl who was still able to make him nervous, nervous enough that when Eloise had exiled them he’d quickly discarded the idea of going to her.
Adelaide turned her head to him. “When I introduce you,” she said, “how do I say your job?”
“How do you say my job?” He said it like he was more baffled than he was.
“You know what I mean. Do I say ‘Josh works for a company that makes apps,’ or ‘Josh is in business development,’ or ‘Josh works with computers’? Or what?”
“How about ‘Josh does something so mind-blowingly awesome I can’t tell you about it because your mind would be blown’?”
She laughed. “I knew I was setting you up.”
“Just keep pitching me those slow, easy ones.” He changed the music again. “How about ‘Josh is the John Lennon of iPhone software’?”
“I hope not.”
“ ‘Josh is a rock star,’ ” he said, then registered her last response. “Why don’t you want me to be John Lennon?”
“He was mean and he died young.”
“Mean? I guess he could be kind of mean.”
“I saw a documentary,” she said. “He was mean to his first wife.”
“But not to his second,” he said. “That’s the important thing. Plus, he was troubled in an interesting way, right?”
“I don’t want troubled in an interesting way.”
“What do you want?”
“You.”
“Is that your way of saying I’m boring?”
“It’s my way of saying you’re untroubled in an interesting way.”
“Ah. I’m Paul McCartney.”
“Okay,” she said. “So I should say, ‘This is Josh. He’s Paul McCartney’?”
“Yes. I knew we’d figure it out eventually.”
She stretched elaborately, even her fingers splayed, and yawned. “I’m nervous,” she said.
“Afraid they won’t like me?”
“No! Afraid you won’t like them.”
Josh wanted to believe her, but he wondered.
After all that, once they arrived and the introductions began, she made no effort to explain what he did. She just said, “This is Josh.” They reacted like they knew what that meant. This was a small kind of fame, but gratifying anyway. The apartment building was very cool—a days-of-yore type of place with wrought iron curling lavishly around the jerky, dignified elevator and great acoustics in the marble stairwells. The apartment belonged to Adelaide’s ex, Carlos, a fact which Josh had known all along, and which was, now that he was here, making him unaccountably tense. He did his best to relax. He made dumb jokes, and the dancers laughed at them. They smiled at him in a friendly way.
“He’s funny,” one of the girls said to Adelaide, and Adelaide said, with a comfortable pleasure, “I know.” Even meeting Carlos was not so bad. Josh was taller, so he had that going for him, and Carlos shook his hand without squeezing extra-hard or looking him in the eye too long or any other displays of manly challenge.
“This is a great place,” Josh said.
“Thanks,” Carlos said.
“It’s like an old apartment building in New York. The marble stairwell, and the elevator.”
“I know,” Carlos said. “It’s pretty cool.”
After that they ran out of things to talk about, both of them looking away, nodding to some inaudible beat. “Josh . . . ” Adelaide began just as Carlos said, “I . . . ” They both said, “What?” and “Go ahead.” And then finally Carlos said, “I should probably check on the ice,” and everyone smiled and made noises of humorous agreement, and he was gone.
“So,” Josh said to Adelaide, turning to face her.
“So,” she said. She raised her eyebrows.
So that’s your ex was what he’d been thinking, but he said, “I think he really likes me.”
She laughed. “They all like you.”
“Yeah, but he, he really likes me.”
“You think so, huh?” She reached up and joined her hands around the back of his neck, like they were at a high school dance.
“It was in his eyes.”
She lifted up on her toes—a ballet dancer!—and kissed him. “Aw,” someone said, and they broke apart and smiled, as if at applause.
That was the end of their moment in the spotlight, Josh’s big debut. That had been the wedding; the rest was the marriage. Everybody went about their business.
They talked about teaching, rehearsals, company class. They talked about performances they’d seen. They gossiped about other dancers. They talked about promotions. They all touched each other, all the time. As Josh watched, one of the women pushed another’s mouth
up into a smile. Another was grooming her friend’s hair. He thought of a book he’d read about bonobos: the grooming, the bisexuality, the peaceful, indiscriminate fucking.
“Teri Metzger’s a principal now,” a woman named Nicole told Adelaide.
“They did it in midseason?” Adelaide said, surprised. “I wonder why.”
Josh didn’t wonder why. Josh didn’t know what they were talking about. He asked Adelaide if she wanted another drink—she didn’t, she’d barely touched the one she had—and slipped off to the kitchen.
Carlos was at the fridge, selecting a beer. He straightened, stood there with a bottle in his hand, frowning at the label, and then, decision made, pivoted and saw Josh.
“Hey, man,” he said, in an extra-friendly voice. “You need something?”
“Ballet lessons, I think,” Josh said and smiled to show he was joking.
“You want one?”
For a moment Josh thought Carlos meant a lesson. But he meant a beer. “Sure.”
Carlos handed him a bottle and looked around for the opener. It was on the counter behind Josh. They reached for it at the same time, pulled their hands back, and reached again—oh, we’re dancing now, Josh thought—but Josh got it first, and handed it over. Carlos smiled his thanks. Even the way he pried off the bottle caps was graceful, graceful and authoritative. “Yeah,” he said, “it can be tough to hang out with dancers. We try, you know. We say, ‘No more ballet talk,’ but then we backslide. Everybody’s always nervous the first time they bring somebody else around.”
“Because you’re worried the date won’t like the dancers, or the dancers won’t like the date?”
He shrugged. “Both. We’re a tight-knit group, and also the opposite sex thing can be weird. If you were a regular girl, would you want your boyfriend’s friends to be ballerinas?”
Josh shook his head.
“And Addy always says the guy thing is weird, too. Like some guys are weird because they think we’re all gay, and some guys are weird because they’d be happier if we were gay, you know, especially once they see where we put our hands.” He caught himself. “I mean, you know, it’s a weird thing.”
Josh made a face of mock confusion. “No idea what you’re talking about,” he said.
Carlos laughed, and then suddenly wore an earnest expression. “Nice to see Addy happy.”
“She’s great,” Josh said. Addy.
“She is, yeah.” Carlos winced as if he’d said something inappropriate, as if he’d loaded those words with desire. “Oh, sorry, man,” he said. “She told you we went out, right?”
“Yup,” Josh said.
“I’m drunk. Just tell me to shut the fuck up.”
“No worries,” Josh said. He leaned back against the counter, crossed one ankle over the other, and tried, with this relaxed and casual pose, to counteract how he felt, which was like punching the guy in the face. That whole elaborate display of apology had been just a segue into saying this fact aloud, making sure Josh knew. Maybe not because Carlos still wanted Adelaide. Maybe just because he didn’t want Josh to think he was special. “I guess you understood each other, both being dancers,” Josh said. If they were going to out-nice each other, Josh was going to win.
“That’s true,” Carlos said. “But sometimes you understand too much, you know?”
Josh didn’t. He’d never dated a musician. Why the hell hadn’t he? What kind of life would he now be leading if he’d fallen for a girl in a band?
“You spend a lot of time together,” Carlos said. “Either that’s awesome or it splits you up.”
“Have you ever dated someone who wasn’t a dancer?”
Carlos thought about it, then nodded. “Not for long, though. My girlfriend now is in the San Francisco Ballet.”
“That’s far.”
“Yeah, too far.” He shook his head. “Too close, too far,” he said.
“That’s love for you.”
Carlos laughed, a surprised, appreciative sound. Josh killed it with ballet dancers. He was going to state for the record, based on his limited but profound experience, that ballet dancers were not themselves that funny. Thus their outsize appreciation of his moderate wit. He could make a new life as a stand-up comedian, if ballet dancers could make up the entire crowd.
“We almost broke up a couple months ago,” Carlos said. “Over the distance.”
Josh was a little surprised to be told this. Not that he wasn’t accustomed to unsolicited confidences. Sabrina used to say he should have been a spy or a reporter, the way people told him things. “I don’t ask them to,” he’d say, because she said this like an accusation. She’d roll her eyes and say, “Everything about you asks them to.”
Still, your ex-girlfriend’s date seemed an unlikely confidant. “I’m sorry,” Josh said.
“Yeah.” Carlos looked down at his beer. “I don’t know what will happen.”
“It’s tough,” Josh said. They contemplated uncertainty for a melancholy and weirdly intimate moment. To escape it, Josh lied about having to deliver a drink to Adelaide and left the kitchen with a beer and a glass of wine in his hands.
He turned the wrong way out of the kitchen, maybe on purpose, and instead of correcting himself kept going into Carlos’s study, where all the coats groped each other in a pile on the futon. He took a breath, gulped back some beer, pretended to be checking out the dance magazines on Carlos’s desk. He was about to go back to the party when he heard two voices passing by in the hall. One said, “What will happen if they want you? Will you go?”
The other said, “I don’t know. I’d have to think about it. It would be an amazing opportunity. I can’t not go because of some guy I just met, right?”
That voice was unmistakably Adelaide’s.
He sat on the futon, sinking down into the coats. He took a sip of the beer and then—because why not?—of the wine. It was a weird combination. Some guy I just met.
Will you go?
Some guy I just met.
Eloise had always called a melancholy mood the Slough of Despond, and not until he had to read Pilgrim’s Progress in a British Lit survey did he realize she hadn’t made that up. It had always seemed such a perfect description, capturing the sludgy, degrading self-pity of those moods. He could see such a slough up ahead, murky and deep. He’d been telling himself that he was unsure of his feelings for Adelaide, but reviewing the situation from among the coats he feared he was very nearly in love. He loved the way her serious aspect could be disrupted by her happy, goofy smile, as if an early Beach Boys song suddenly started playing in the middle of Mozart’s Requiem.
At Adelaide’s last performance, he’d finally articulated to himself the quality of movement Claire had described. Where Claire was all precise, exacting elegance, Adelaide had an emotive looseness, a melting quality that was at once moving and seductive. She gave the impression of a wildness barely contained. Her body was an expression of joy. Later he’d be unable to stop thinking about the way she moved. In the moment it brought tears to his eyes. This happened to him on occasion with live music, and from time to time he’d tried to pinpoint why beauty without sadness could summon tears. When Adelaide’s piece was over, and he was pressing on his eyelids, pretending he merely had an itch, he imagined asking his sisters why he wanted to cry. Theo would use the word ephemeral and probably quote a poet. Claire would say, “You just do.”
That kind of beauty—it was desire and desire fulfilled all at once. He’d had no idea how much he could want to see her leap until she did. And then it was all he’d wanted.
But forget all that—this was the first time he’d used the word love, and he’d used it right after hearing her call him “some guy I just met.” Was that a coincidence? Maybe he thought love as soon as he saw a challenge to overcome, or a cause for which to martyr himself.
Adelaide was ambitious and independent. They hadn’t been dating that long. Okay, he was hurt, but could he really be surprised? What had she ever done to suggest she n
eeded him, besides falling asleep while he sang? She’d told him—she’d told him—that ballet trumped all. Without ballet she wouldn’t exist. But he was still surprised at the idea that she might leave him behind. Maybe he was surprised by how surprised he was, since he’d understood exactly what she’d meant by wouldn’t exist even though he’d pretended not to understand. He’d been telling himself it was only a fact or two about his past he was keeping from her, but sitting there, alternating beer and wine, he had a feeling it was more than that he’d held back. He and she understood each other, but she didn’t know that. Maybe she never would know. She’d disappear in pursuit of her amazing opportunity, without the slightest glimmer of how completely he understood.
17
What should we do in here?” Eloise said to Heather, standing with her hands on her hips in Heather’s living room. She’d spent the last two weeks at Heather’s house, which felt rather like traveling, being in a hotel or more accurately a bed-and-breakfast, carefully cluttered with objects and throw pillows to make it look like home. She might have been happy to live that way indefinitely, pretending she didn’t really live anywhere. But that morning, as they were drinking their coffee in the kitchen, Heather had suggested they consider what things of Eloise’s they should bring over, how to combine their stuff and their lives, and then she’d quoted George Carlin on the meaning of life being about finding a place to put your stuff. Eloise could see that Heather meant this joke not only as truth but as message: Eloise needed to really, truly, finally move in, so Heather could really, truly, finally be happy. So Eloise had agreed immediately, because hesitation about this project might have suggested hesitation about Heather, and she was not going to suggest that now, not now or ever again.
She looked over the two couches—one large, one small, both extremely poofy—and the blocky coffee table and the enormous painting of overlapping circles made by one of Heather’s artist friends. She’d just as soon leave it be. It was hard to see how her stuff was going to mix with this stuff. “Hmmm,” she said. She tried to say it enthusiastically.