The History of Us (9 page)

“We say ‘congratulations.’ We say ‘beautiful job.’ We hug.”

“You hug,” he repeated.

“We say ‘congratulations,’” she said again, sounding wary.

“We should have brought a bouquet,” he said.

“Oh no,” she said. “If everybody brought bouquets we’d have way too many bouquets.”

Over Adelaide’s shoulder Josh saw an older woman approaching, her eyes glued to Adelaide. Just before she reached them, he leaned in and said, “Can I call you?”

Adelaide glanced at the woman, now standing inches away, and nodded. “Here,” Noah said, handing Josh a pen. While the woman waited, beaming, to congratulate Adelaide, she wrote her number on his program, both of them brisk and businesslike. She handed him the program without looking at him, and then disappeared into the woman’s arms. Josh listened for a moment to Adelaide being told she was beautiful, she was fabulous, she’d been the best one out there. Then he and Noah walked
away, and pushed out the glass doors into the hot, humid downtown.

“Well done,” Noah said, but Josh wasn’t so sure. He had no idea if she’d given him her number because she was interested, or because the woman bearing down on them had left her no time to think. She’d seemed a little guarded, a little suspicious of him, and he thought back to the days when girls came up to him after shows, and how he sometimes wondered what they would say if he asked just what it was about him that they liked. He remembered those early days with Sabrina, when everything had been so good, so charged with pleasure, and how he’d wondered what would happen when the novelty of dating a musician wore off, if they’d be left staring at each other blankly, with nothing to talk about once
rock star
fell away and left her alone with Josh.

As if Noah could read his mind, he said, “I bet it’s been a while since you had to make the first move.”

Josh shot him a look. “Are you picturing groupies?”

Noah laughed. “Not groupies, exactly. Just hipster girls in cute outfits.”

“I guess there were a few of those,” Josh said. He was walking, without thinking about it, toward Fountain Square, where a very loud band was playing, and Noah walked alongside him. Neither of them spoke again until they reached the square, where teenagers danced with ecstatic violence between the stage and the hundred-and-forty-year-old fountain that gave the square its name, bronze and majestically tall and flowing with water that was totally inaudible beneath the raucous music.

“These guys suck,” Noah yelled at Josh, who nodded. Then Noah said, “You know what I keep thinking? Why don’t you record
a solo album, just you, Justin Vernon–style? I bet a lot of people would be psyched to hear it.”

“I don’t know,” Josh said. “Where would I do that?”

“Your house, of course,” Noah said. “The acoustics are awesome. Man, the first time I walked in that place I thought, This would make a perfect studio.”

Josh looked at Noah. “My house,” he said.

Noah grinned. “And if you feel like making my dreams come true, I play a mean piano.”

Josh looked away from Noah and back to the fountain, the metal woman atop it, shimmering in the artificial light, her arms outstretched and water pouring from her hands onto the creatures below. What was she thinking up there, way above the crowd? “My house,” Josh said again. “I never thought of that.”

E
loise could tell, when Heather called to invite her to lunch, that
Heather had in mind a serious talk, probably about the house. Eloise wanted out of the house. Eloise wanted to be unburdened. No one knew that better than Heather. But Eloise wasn’t unburdening herself on Heather’s timetable, even though she’d promised—so long ago she didn’t exactly remember promising, though she’d been reminded of it often enough—that once Claire moved out she’d force the issue of ownership with Francine. She’d insist on knowing whether her mother was ever going to sign the place over, as
she
had long ago promised. And then, one way or another, Eloise would be rid of it—that gorgeous monstrosity, with its ten-thousand-dollar box-gutter repairs, its room upon rooms, dusty and waiting, impossible to keep clean. Rid of it, she’d move in with Heather, and everyone would know about them. That was the prize. That was the brass ring, the golden egg, the finish line. So why—Heather undoubtedly wanted to know—wasn’t Eloise sprinting toward it?

Eloise arrived at the sandwich shop in Northside feeling braced and wary, but when she walked in and saw Heather already in line at the counter, for a moment she forgot her wariness
and just studied her. Her dark hair was pulled back into one of those stylishly messy buns Eloise could never achieve, her compact body both muscular and curvy. Heather was a devotee of Pilates. She had a truly enviable behind. Heather laughed at Eloise for using the word
behind,
but Eloise, though not usually prudish, did like elegance, and neither the humorous word
butt
nor the crass word
ass
captured the lovely curve of Heather’s backside. Heather claimed that if Eloise would exercise with her she, too, would possess such an attribute, but Eloise didn’t believe it. In Eloise’s mind Heather was much younger than she, though in fact the difference between them was only six years. “Once I turn forty, you’re going to have to stop talking about how young I am,” Heather had said the other day.

“Only until I’m fifty and you’re still in your forties,” Eloise had said. “Then I can start it up again.” From the way Heather had smiled, Eloise could tell that the implication they’d still be together in five years had gratified her. More and more lately, Heather wanted some kind of public confirmation of commitment, which so far Eloise had been unable to provide.

As she watched Heather checked the time on her cell phone, then glanced back at the door and spotted Eloise, who walked up to join her. “What were you doing back there?” Heather asked.

“Checking you out,” Eloise said.

Heather grinned and leaned over to kiss her, but Eloise moved her head so that the kiss hit the corner of her mouth. The place was crowded, and for all Eloise knew there was a former student in here, or a friend of one of the kids. Heather was not Eloise’s first girlfriend. There had been one woman before her, a brief and passionate fling that had taken Eloise completely by surprise. She and Heather had met about six months after
it ended, when a grad school friend of Eloise’s came to town to do research on the birthing center where Heather worked as a midwife. When Eloise met Heather she’d recognized the other woman’s interest for what it was. Even if she hadn’t, Heather wasn’t one to leave her intentions unclear. “Do you date women?” she’d asked, and Eloise had said, “I’d date you.” Heather had been delighted, her face breaking into a broad grin that somehow managed to be both friendly and full of desire. Eloise had later regretted her own frankness, not because of what it had led to but because she’d given Heather the impression that she was open and forthright about her romantic life. She’d proceeded to be anything but.

“Relax, sweetie,” Heather said now. “It’s Northside.” Heather only called her sweetie when she was put out with her. Lately Eloise was getting called sweetie a lot.

“Is it Northside?” Eloise asked. “Is that where we are?” Eloise liked the neighborhood—gay-friendly and overrun with academics and artists and relatively diverse. The population was largely a mix of middle-class white and poor black people, everybody united in voting Democrat. On the business strip were stylishly funky restaurants and tattoo parlors and a yoga studio and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance. The convenience store near Heather’s house sold microbrew six-packs and XXXL white T-shirts. Though the different populations passed each other on the street more than they mingled in the establishments, every year there were events with a palpable community spirit. At Halloween the residents sat on their porches handing out candy, elaborate cotton spiderwebs and dismembered baby dolls decorating the houses, the sidewalks a crush of princesses and superheroes. On the Fourth of July they turned out for the parade, sitting on
the sidewalk to cheer not only the standard marching bands but the twenty-somethings dressed in Victorian wigs and elaborate costumes, the plumbers’ floats featuring giant toilet bowls and plungers, the drag queens on stilts, the Lawn Chair Ladies, who danced with their titular lawn chairs, and the Men’s Drill Team, who danced with their toy drills. This was where Eloise would have chosen to live if she hadn’t been saddled with her parents’ house. Still she’d built up some resistance to the place as a result of Heather’s living-together campaign, and she was a little annoyed at the inevitability of Heather’s suggestions that they meet there.

As was so often the case, Heather ignored her sarcasm. “What are you going to eat?”

Eloise started to name the sandwich she always ordered, and then stopped. “You pick something for me,” she said.

“You don’t have a preference?”

“It’s a trust exercise,” she said. “My adventure for the day. I’ll go claim a table.” She felt Heather watching her as she walked down the long, narrow hall toward the back of the restaurant. Three years together and still she felt Heather’s desire, her persistent longing. While she hated that it hurt Heather that she kept their relationship from the kids, that she hadn’t yet moved in with her, she wondered from time to time if there wasn’t some advantage to postponing the moment when Heather got what she wanted. Of course there was the danger of postponing it so long that Heather’s frustration overrode her desire. But why was Eloise thinking this way? She hadn’t made any of her choices in an effort to manipulate Heather. She’d just been thinking about what was best for the kids. Sometimes it seemed like that was all she thought about.

“So what did you get me?” she asked when Heather joined her at the table.

“The Yeehaw Barbecue.”

“I’ve never had that.”

“You’ll like it. I know you will.”

Eloise smiled at her. “I’m glad you suggested this. I was having a crappy day.”

“The book?”

Eloise nodded. Eloise’s first book, about the history of marriage, had been published when she was only twenty-seven, and made her a star in the field. Unlike most first books by historians, Eloise’s was not a hairsplitting examination of a small sub-subject—divorce in 1950s Mississippi, say—but a book lauded for its ability to be both general and enormously detailed, its ability to appeal to both experts and undergrads. On the strength of it she’d been hired at Harvard. A few times, when a famous marriage went awry or divorce statistics were released, she was interviewed on morning talk shows. She could very easily picture the words
prominent historian
beside her name in
The New York Times
. Now, seventeen years later, she was a department chair at a small school with only a few more articles to her name and fifty-seven bureaucratic emails to answer. She’d taught at a midrung school without producing a second book for so long that her chances at ever moving to a better school were minuscule. She was trying to write a second book now, about location and identity, even though she’d have better luck publishing something else on her original topic. But what did she care, anymore, about marriage? Unless a number of things changed, that particular event was never going to happen to her. “I was just starting to write,” she said, “when Noah came by.”

“What did he want?”

“Oh, he was having a crisis of confidence and he wanted a pep talk. He’s doubting the whole research-and-writing process, feeling like it’s presumptuous to guess what people felt or thought a hundred and fifty years ago. He said what you’re writing is a historical artifact that may be more useful for understanding your own moment than the moment before you, because you probably, in his words, fucking got it all wrong. He feels dishonest.” She smiled. “
Super
dishonest.”

“Do you ever feel like that?”

“I don’t know. Not exactly. Maybe I worried about that in the past, but all I could think today was that he seemed so young, like I had Holden Caulfield in my office complaining about the world being full of phonies. I didn’t say that, of course. I said it was natural to have doubts, he had to trust himself, I knew a good person at Duke University Press to pass his manuscript to.” She spun the saltshaker around on the table. “I did my whole mommy-slash-coach thing. But then I was totally derailed from my own work. I started watching videos of flash mobs.”

Heather laughed. “You need to go to rehab for those.”

“But first I’d have to admit I have a problem,” Eloise said. She had lately developed a bit of an addiction to YouTube. She watched staged public outbreaks of dance and cried. She sat in her office with the door closed, smiling and weeping, while Belgians danced in a train station to “Do-Re-Mi,” Austenites zombie-stomped to “Thriller,” or Cincinnatians shimmied in the rain. What was it about these events that created this particular sensation of overwrought pleasure? The communion of the dancers, the gentle conspiracy. The expressions of the baffled witnesses, whose faces morphed from openmouthed surprise to
childlike delight. The pure satisfaction of watching multiple bodies move as one through time. Because there was no reason for the dance! No tickets sold, no careers at stake. No reason beyond the aesthetic. It was a purposeless, beautiful thing.

“Did I tell you Josh and Noah have been hanging out?” Eloise said. “I’m glad. Noah needs more friends here. I don’t want him to leave.”

“Okay, but I think you’re worrying a little too much about Noah. I feel like he enters into every conversation we have.”

“Really?”

“Since Claire left anyway. If we’re not talking about whether Josh is stuck because he hasn’t really dealt with what happened with Sabrina, or whether Theo will ever live up to her potential, we’re talking about Noah.”

Eloise spun the saltshaker again. “It hasn’t been that long since Claire left.”

“So?”

“So I feel like you’re like, Claire’s gone! Forget the kids! Change your whole life!”

Heather sighed. “But that’s what you said you were going to do.”