The History of Us (19 page)

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 jump 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.”

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.”