Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

“Who all’s coming?” the city boy asks.

“Oh, it’s just going to be you and me.”

I’m not sure why I told that one, or why I thought it was so funny. But the men laughed and Amanda didn’t.

“So the first guy gets raped,” she said.

“No,” I said. “That’s not it at all.”

“So then what is it?”

“It’s about false advertising,” I said.

Roland raised his glass. “And that underneath it all we just want to drink, fuck, fight, and dance.”

The night he broke up with me, Mitchell and I decided to sleep together one final time, and when he slipped out the front door in the morning, I felt surprisingly intact. I had the typical what-did-you-do-over-the-weekend conversations at the media distribution company where I work, accomplished a few basic tasks, and I thought, Maybe this’ll be easy . And then I thought, What does it mean if it’s easy? And then I started to call Mitchell to ask him what it meant. But I remembered the rule we made about not calling and so I hung up.

I went after work to the Museum of Natural History, and I coursed around my favorite spots, the whale and the dinosaurs, and the Pygmies. I tried to make it fun, so that it would be a story I’d tell my friends— You know what I did? I went to a museum by myself and you know what? I had a blast . And they’d think — She’s going to be just fine. I’ve always liked seeing people alone in museums, jotting down notes, lingering at a painting or a piece of Mayan pottery. I liked the idea that I could be like that. But I began to feel very self-conscious, and I wanted to get to a phone so I could call Mitchell. I had left my cell phone at home so I wouldn’t be tempted.

I hightailed it through the park. It was November and fairly cold, and you could see smoke emerging from the mouths of the bundled-up joggers and shoppers who passed by. I began to think that going out without a phone had been a mistake. I wondered, What if he calls?

He called, I thought. Or stopped by to make up and I wasn’t there. Convinced that this would happen, I stayed in the next few nights watching DVDs. I chose ones I thought would distract me, like The Matrix, which with my diminished concentration I couldn’t really follow — people in pods, and a world that might or might not exist, and Keanu Reeves in a black coat taking pills and shooting people up in what looked like the entrance to a bank.

At eleven the following Sunday night, I called Mitchell and told him that if he came over and we slept together it didn’t have to mean anything.

Brilliant move.

It was two weeks before I heard from him. And over those nights it was like I imagine life must be in a methadone clinic — cold sweats and a soul-shriveling restlessness — but this is nothing new. Everyone in every country of the world has bushwhacked through this. It probably didn’t help that we slept together twice more. I have no explanation other than that both times I believed we were back together, though he explicitly told me (“Are we clear on this, Jen?”) we weren’t. When I left at three and searched for a cab, I did this thing where I dug my fingernails, and one time a pencil, into my arms, the way I would as a little girl when the doctor gave me a shot and I wanted to divert the pain. I saw my reflection once in the wide-angle mirror of my apartment building’s lobby. My hair was squashed and matted and my arms were blotched with little red cuts. I looked like a junkie with shitty aim.

Under the silky light of a storybook moon, the four of us walked back through the cold to the B and B. The proprietress was at her desk when we arrived and she asked us for our breakfast preferences. She handed us sheets of pale green paper with an impressive list of food and beverage selections. I circled grapefruit juice and pancakes, and bacon, and then thought better of it and crossed out the bacon, and then wrote out the word bacon, and then wrote the word Yes next to bacon, so they would know I wanted it. What the fuck. I asked for a pot of coffee — it said a cup or a pot, and I liked the idea of someone brewing a whole pot just for me.

We turned in our lists and then we lingered in front of our room. A dog barked from downstairs. I thought Amanda might ask the men in and I would have gone along with it, but it was better we went our separate ways. The rooms were small and one of us might have felt trapped. We could hear their voices through the walls though we couldn’t make out what they were saying, even when we listened through the water glasses.

At the mountain the next morning I was the lone member of our foursome who had to rent equipment. In the rental shop I began to feel jittery. I was a car ride away from my phone. I saw a couple getting their skis fitted, and it occurred to me that Mitchell might have a new girlfriend by now. And then I thought, What if they’re here? Or What if I run into them?

When I returned outside, Roland was waiting for me. He said Kevin and Amanda hadn’t wanted to wait but that they’d meet up with us at lunch.

“You’ll be bored to tears,” I said.

“I won’t in the slightest,” he said, and then I remembered this was a singles trip. It now felt awkward, the idea of skiing all morning with Roland the racer, who’d start guiding me through my intermediate turns like I was twelve. But there was no other choice really, so I decided to make the best of it.

We began one of those personal résumé conversations, and for the first trip up it went well enough. But on the second ride I drew back, like I was spoken for, which, of course, was absurd. I encouraged him to tell more stories of ski accidents he’d witnessed or heard about. By our third run I was convinced I would die on the mountain — that I would hit a tree, or land on a jagged rock formation, or fall a few thousand yards head over heels until my lifeless body came to rest in a pile of white.

I fell five times before lunch, twice face-first because I’d crossed my tips, and in each instant Roland was there to carry my lost ski to me and say encouraging things like, “You were really feeling it there.”

I couldn’t have been much fun, as I drifted more than once on our chairlift rides into a private theater wherein I was screening a movie of me and Mitchell in Cape May, when we stared at the sky until five and then slept together in our bathing suits on a lounge chair on our hotel room deck, next to a pitcher of daiquiris. We barely moved the whole day and in those hot dreamy hours something in me altered. Mitchell slipped out that evening and didn’t come back for two hours. I remember heading out in my bare feet searching for him down side streets and through shop windows. I had a panic attack, sweats and heart palpitations, until I saw him again two blocks from the hotel in his tight black T-shirt and jeans, carrying two clear plastic boxes with steaks and mashed potatoes from a restaurant. He was perplexed by the sight of me out on the sidewalk, with no shoes, in just a T-shirt and my bikini bottom.

“Where were you going?” he asked.

“I thought you weren’t coming back.”

He stared in disbelief.

“Do you have any idea how twisted that is?” he said.

Toward the top of the lift we saw Amanda and Kevin on the slope below us. Roland yelled out, “Yo, Devil Dog !” and Kevin looked up. I decided to yell “Yo, DeManding !” but Amanda kept carefully carving out her Jacqueline Kennedy turns, for our benefit. Roland pointed to his watch, which meant we’d meet in the lodge. Kevin nodded and then flew across the hill, with his arms gracefully spread out like some sort of snowboarding angel.