The History of Us (33 page)

“I get lonely,” Noah said. “Some people insist on living in L.A.”

“You have to go where the work is,” Marisa said. “You came here for a job.” She looked at Adelaide. “You came here for a job, too, right?”

Adelaide nodded. “The director recruited me. I was in the training program at the Boston Ballet, and she saw me dance and asked me to come here. So here I am.”

“What if you, like, got offered a spot at the ballet in New York? Wouldn’t you go there?”

“I don’t know,” Adelaide said. “Not if it was a spot in the corps. I’m twenty-nine, so I couldn’t start over working my way up in a company.”

“But still, it would be New York, right? Isn’t that the place to be for dancers?”

“We have a good company here, and I’m a principal.”

Josh looked at her. “So you’d never leave?”

She met his eyes, then dropped her gaze. “Well, I don’t know. It would depend on what else I was offered.”

“But my point is, you have to go where your work is,” Marisa said. “So that’s here for you, and it’s here for Noah. It’s not here for me.”

“I don’t see how you do the long-distance thing,” Josh said.

“It’s hard,” Marisa said.

“It fucking sucks,” Noah said.

“It seems practically impossible,” Josh said. “You have to choose to be together or not. Don’t you?”

“Josh,” Adelaide said under her breath, putting her hand on his arm.

“Well, don’t you?” he asked, looking at her.

Adelaide turned away, smiling what struck Josh as an onstage smile. “So what good movies have I missed lately?” she asked Marisa. “I don’t think I’ve seen one in months.”

“That shocks me!” Marisa said.

Adelaide laughed. “When’s the last time you went to the ballet?”

“Touché,” Marisa said. She began to list movies Adelaide should see, adding commentary on plot and performances. Josh felt alone, encased in a bubble of drunken misery, even though looking at Noah, who was disconsolately dipping a french fry in ketchup, he could see his friend felt the same. Josh wanted to embrace Adelaide, beg her to stay with him, apologize again and again. He wanted to run.

The car ride back to Adelaide’s apartment was a silent one. He thought of family trips, before his parents died, and how his father would achieve a few moments of peace by offering rewards for whoever could stay quiet the longest. Josh always won, in his memory at least, and so got to choose the next CD, or the place where they’d stop for unhealthy food and crappy toys. He’d always had a knack for silence. Adelaide might challenge him, but he’d win.

When they got inside, Adelaide went immediately to the bedroom. He went to the kitchen, got a beer he didn’t want, and sat on the sofa, drinking it in defiance of himself. She returned in comfortable clothes, her hair pulled back, her feet hidden away in their usual white socks. How many pairs of those socks did she own? She sat far from him on the couch and curled into the arm, tucking her feet under her. He wasn’t going to speak. He seemed to be at the point of drinking where alcohol no longer
had any effect, and as full as he was the beer hitting his stomach was unpleasant. But he kept drinking it.

Adelaide moved, maybe as a precursor to speech, but, no, she was leaning forward to get her laptop off the coffee table. She opened it and waited a moment for the screen to brighten and then he listened to the clicking of keys. She leaned in close, her long neck bent as her eyes scanned the screen. He pretended not to watch her. She seemed oblivious to him anyway, now typing again, now reading something else. What the hell was she doing? When was she going to speak?

“ ‘Where is Josh Clarke?’ ” she said finally, her eyes on the screen.

“What?” he said.

She looked up, at last, and pointed at the computer. “People want to know where you are.”

“Do they?”

“You never Google yourself?” She raised her eyebrows as though she found this hard to believe. She read aloud again. “ ‘I heard he got a regular job. Is this like Moe Tucker working at Wal-Mart? So, so wrong.’ ”

“Huh,” Josh said. He drank more beer. In fact he didn’t Google himself, or at least hadn’t for some time, precisely to avoid commentary like that.

“Who’s Moe Tucker?” Adelaide asked.

“She was the drummer for the Velvet Underground.”

“ ‘What a waste of talent,’ ” she read. “ ‘Any chance of a comeback?’ So Noah’s not the only one waiting.”

“Maybe he wrote that,” Josh said.

“He can’t have written all of them,” Adelaide said. “Your name brings up four million hits.”

“They’re not all me,” he said. “It’s not an unusual name.”

“Blind Robots . . . ” She typed, narrowed her eyes at the screen. “That brings up about two million. I’ve been dating a famous guy, and I’m the only one who doesn’t know it.”

“I’m not famous,” he said.

“You seem pretty famous to me.”

“I guess you’re mad,” he said.

She looked at him now. “I’m embarrassed,” she said. “I feel like an idiot. I can’t believe I didn’t know this huge thing about you. I can’t believe you kept that from me.”

“I’m sorry. I should have told you,” he said, but then, without warning, remorse morphed back into anger. “But what about you? You’re not telling me everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“You had some audition or something. You’re thinking of leaving.”

“How do you know that?”

“I heard you at Carlos’s party. I heard you saying you couldn’t stay here for some guy you just met.”

“Oh,” she said. She leaned forward to return her laptop to the table, close its screen.

“So that’s me,” he said. “Some guy you just met.”

“That’s not true,” she said. “Except it is true, isn’t it? Isn’t that how you’re acting?”

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t tell me about the band!”

“The band is over! The band is done! You didn’t tell me about something that might take you away from here. Something that’s
now
.”

“Because I didn’t know if it would amount to anything. This choreographer, this guy who came in for New Works a couple years ago and set a piece on me, he asked if I’d audition for a company he’s putting together. But I don’t know if he’ll want me, and I don’t even know if I’d want the job. They’ll be based in New York, but they’re going to travel constantly, and they’re all contemporary ballet. I don’t know if I want to do that.”

“So you haven’t auditioned yet?”

“No. It’s next month.”

“Were you going to tell me?”

“I didn’t really know where we stood,” she said. “I didn’t know how you’d react.”

“I don’t understand that at all.”

“You don’t? Then why didn’t you tell me about the band?”

“Because I was tired of people liking me because of that! Do you know how many girls have dated me just because I used to be a musician?”

“No, I don’t,” she said. “And I don’t want to. But I’ll tell you I can get in the door with almost any guy by telling them I’m a dancer. Isn’t that what happened with you?”

“I just liked you,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “there’s no way to prove that.”

“There’s no way to prove that knowing about my band wouldn’t have made you more interested either,” he said.

“I didn’t need to be more interested.”

“Oh, you could have fooled me. You don’t tell me about something that might make you move. You don’t ever ask me about my job.”

“I didn’t think you wanted to talk about it.”

“Really?”

“Every time I brought it up you made a joke or changed the subject. So I quit asking.”

“Oh.” Even with the reason clear, the agitation remained. He cast about for something else to feel upset about. “What about your friends? Why did it take so long to introduce me?”

“I told you. Some people are freaked out by us. One guy I dated said we were all too thin. He said just by myself I seemed fine but when he saw me with all the other girls it was too weird, how alike our bodies were. He said it made him feel like ballet was a cult.”

“Whatever.” Josh stood up, carried his empty bottle to the kitchen, and set it on the counter. She stood, too, waiting with her hands on her hips for him to return. “So,” he said, “had you heard of us? Did you recognize any of our songs?”

“Yeah,” she said. “If I’d known who you were, you’re probably right. I’d have been interested right away. So I guess I don’t pass the test.”

“Well, neither do I, apparently.”

“What should I have said to you about this audition? Should I have asked if you’d date me if I moved? Should I have asked you to go with me? I was afraid to bring it up. You’ve never even called me your girlfriend.”

“Because I couldn’t tell if you wanted me to!”

“Why didn’t you ask?”

“Why didn’t you?”

She pressed her lips together and shook her head.

“If you get that job, are you going?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Then what is the point of this?”

“I guess if you don’t know, then I don’t know,” she said.

“Seems like we understand each other for the first time,” Josh said.

“How could I understand you?” she said. “You didn’t tell me who you
were
.”

“Yes, I did.”

“No,” she said. “You didn’t.”

She was right. He didn’t want to say so. So he said, “You’ve never even let me see your feet.”

She looked away. He saw that she was standing in fourth position, her posture upright as ever, and found that he could no longer bear to look at her. Her loveliness was an affront. He’d left his bag right by the door. It was a matter of only a few steps to reach it, almost no effort to pick it up, to open the door and step outside. He thought he heard her say his name before the door closed behind him, but he couldn’t be sure. She didn’t follow him. If she’d really wanted to, she could have followed him, chased him down the hall in her stupid, hateful socks.

He wanted to be alone, he thought, but he realized when he unlocked the door to his house—his old house—that he’d been hoping someone would be there. But all the lights were out, and though he went from floor to floor and room to room turning them on, he couldn’t find another person inside.

W
hen Theo was small, she’d gone through a phase of being terrified
her parents would abandon her, and her parents, in turn, had been alarmed by the unwavering intensity of her fear. She was young enough—five or six—that she probably wouldn’t have remembered this later, except that this particular phase had made such an impression on her parents that they’d brought it up several times through the years, the same way they’d often told her how she’d once said, after passing her cold on to baby Josh, “Is that very nice to take away a person’s vaporizer and give it to a baby?” and that she’d tormented three-year-old Josh mercilessly by referring to his overalls as “OshJosh.”

The story they most often told was about her falling asleep on the stairs. She’d refused to go to bed before her parents did, afraid they’d sneak out of the house when she wasn’t awake to stop them. If she came downstairs, or they caught her out of bed, they took away her TV time and her desserts and her bedtime stories, so she took to creeping halfway down the stairs and waiting there, running back up to her room when she heard them coming. One night she fell asleep on the stairs and tumbled down them. Her parents heard a terrible thumping and came
running. She lay on her back on the landing looking dazed and hurt, but not making a sound, still trying not to alert them to her misbehavior. They checked her over and made her tell them how many fingers they were holding up, and then they carried her back upstairs, put her in their own bed, and climbed in on either side of her. This part she thought she remembered, her father’s arm around her, her mother’s hand stroking her hair. “Why would you ever think we’d leave you?” her father asked. Her mother said, “Don’t you know that’s the last thing we’d ever do?”

Theo didn’t want to be alone now any more than she had then, but she feared—she knew—that eventually she would be. Sitting on the stairs—an act of hopeful desperation. Trying to stop what couldn’t be stopped. Trying to keep an eye on people, who nevertheless eluded you the moment you dropped your guard. Her parents had left her with Eloise; now Eloise had left her, too, and Claire, and though Josh hadn’t technically left her, he held so many things against her that just being around him exhausted her, struggling to keep all that resentment at bay. She was tired of trying not to fight with him. She had friends, of course, but none of her closest ones were still in Cincinnati, and so here she was lying awake at dawn on a Sunday in bed next to this sleeping boy, which maybe was a cosmic kind of sitting on the stairs, neither here nor there, neither up nor down, waiting for somebody to come along and get her.

Could she maybe, possibly, be over Noah? Was it possible she was falling for Wes? She tried to catch herself off guard with these questions, surprise herself into a definitive answer, but this was difficult. Ha! her mind said. I knew you were going to ask that. And then, smugly, said nothing more. She needed a clarifying moment. She awaited epiphany. In the meantime she had
to act on what she did know, which was that she shouldn’t take indefinite advantage of Wes’s generosity.

But this conviction left her with a dilemma. It made little sense to get her own place here when she didn’t know how long she’d be staying, and had come here to save money in the first place. And had no money in the second place. It was this dilemma that had woken her early. She reviewed its particulars again and again without arriving at any conclusions.

As the room lightened, she got out of bed without waking Wes, and then, without exactly making a decision, she got dressed, found her bag, and went outside. In fall Cincinnati mornings grew darker, headed toward a winter when it would be pitch-dark from 5:00
P.M
. to 8:00
A.M
. Pretty soon it would seem strange to see people on the sidewalks in the morning and the evening. Shouldn’t we all be in bed? She walked to her car, parked three blocks away, and then she got in and started it. She couldn’t think of where to go, so she went home. When you can’t think of anywhere to go . . . Had she seen that stitched on a throw pillow somewhere?