The History of Us (18 page)

“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.

J
osh 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 claimed 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.

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 those 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 surren
dered 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.”