Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

That night we planned to hit the heated pool and Jacuzzi at a newly remodeled resort. All the single young professionals would be there and there were supposed to be drinks and a DJ. Amanda, who spent an hour every afternoon at the gym working on her quads and glutes, was excited. I really didn’t feel like getting into a pool with strangers and drinking, and hanging about in a bikini.

I checked my cell phone when I got back: another message from my mother and one from 24-Hour Fitness asking me if I’d dropped my membership.

Amanda was upset that I was going to miss the pool party and she said it would throw off the chemistry of the whole weekend. And wasn’t I interested in Roland?

“He’s about a billion times smarter and handsomer than what’s-his-name .”

She said she really liked this guy Kevin. They’d talked the whole day about his wife’s death, and they’d broken through some barriers. She said he was a pretty remarkable and resilient guy. And I thought there was something pathetic and even ghoulish about using a conversation about a man’s dead wife’s brain aneurysm as a way to get him to like her, though I stayed silent because over the years I’d used my own methods to get people to like me.

I said I was getting dinner alone, and that I might watch a pay-per-view movie on television.

“There are no pay-per-view movies,” she said testily. “It isn’t a Holiday Inn.”

“Then I’ll read,” I said.

“That sounds really fun.”

“If it isn’t, I’ll know where to find you.”

“Oh, come do this with us, Jen. It’s going to be such a blast. It’ll be good for you. You’re not going to have a lot of chances like this.”

I nearly said something very unkind to Amanda, but I knew she just wanted us to be better friends and that I was letting her down.

“Maybe I’ll come by later,” I said.

I went out to a nearby restaurant by myself and ate a bad Cajun chicken sandwich and a Caesar salad with around a half gallon of dressing on it. The TV that hung over the bar played sports, college basketball from some place in the Midwest. Lots of corn-fed white boys. The waiter asked me where I was from and I lied and told him “the Hawaiian Islands.” I have no idea why I said that. And why not Hawaii? Why the Hawaiian Islands ? He told another waiter who came by and said he was planning his honeymoon and wanted to know where in Hawaii to go. The Big Island, I said, because I’d heard it was the nicest and he seemed nice and I wanted to give him the best information I had. I tipped my waiter twenty dollars because I’d lied to him. At this rate I was likely to be broke by the time I got to lunch the next day.

I thought about heading over to the party at the hot pool. I really did. And maybe it would have been fun but I kept running the wrong film in my mind, of us all in the water, Amanda on someone’s shoulders trying to pull another woman off some guy. And me feeling tired, and unhappy, and fat, and wet.

The TV didn’t really work. And reading felt too lonely. The longer the night went on, the more I dreaded skiing again with Roland, and the more I thought it was likely he’d take me on a run beyond my ability. It had turned much colder since it rained earlier in the evening and I knew that meant ice. The whole thing felt wrong to me anyway — Amanda and her widower; Roland the ski instructor, sweet as he was, and so dauntingly beautiful on the slopes, either getting me killed, or following after me all day long like a doting dad. I could insist on skiing alone, but that would be the most depressing, I thought, and so I decided to leave.

I wrote a note to Amanda and told her to apologize to the men, and to the trip organizers — I could hear her lecture— These trips are important to me, and Everything was going so well. When are you going to start acting like a member of the human race, or whatever.

I didn’t have a ride, so I took a taxi to the bus station. There was a nine o’clock bus that would get me in at 4:30 in the morning.

Odd choice to be making, I suppose.

I bought the ticket, and I got onto the bus. A couple of other skiers followed, but mostly the bus was empty, and it smelled like spilled beer. A man in a camouflage army jacket was sleeping in the front seat, and a mother and daughter were holding a very intense conversation in the middle of the bus. I sat in the back. I had two books with me, but I was far too distracted to read. I tried to go to sleep but mostly I just stared out of the window feeling sorry for myself and making new blotches on my arms. At one point I said loudly, “Get the fuck over it,” and the mother turned around, and glared at me.

“What the hell do you know?” she said.

I made it to my apartment without further incident at 5:15 A.M. There were no messages on either the home phone or my cell, which I’d turned off, and then on, and then off again, all night.

I slept until two. I had terrible dreams. Keanu Reeves was in one. He was standing atop a cliff and held his arm out to save me, and instead I pulled him down and we both went tumbling until we dropped into a freezing lake.

When I checked my cell, there was a message from Amanda. Her tone had the crisp exasperation of someone lodging a complaint with an airline. I had left my skis and boots in the closet — and she was going to have to return them and retrieve my credit card.

A week went by and then the new intern at work told me there was a man on the phone asking for me. It was Roland, calling to check in. Hearing his voice made me feel happy. I apologized for leaving the ski trip so abruptly, and he said, “You can make amends by going to dinner with me.”

I surprised myself by saying that I’d like that.

That Friday we went to dinner at a Peruvian place in the Village. I barely recognized him outside the entrance to the restaurant. He had on a woolen blazer over a black, collared shirt. His hair was thick and brushed back from his face, which was clean-shaven. He started to apologize for his accident stories and I wouldn’t let him. I wanted to talk about other things.

He walked me all the way uptown to my apartment building afterward and hugged me good night. He might have been hoping for more, or maybe I was. I felt like a different and improved person, at the awkward end of a good first date.

“I’m sorry I got into all that at dinner,” I said. I told him a little about Mitchell. Maybe more than a little.

“Don’t sweat it,” he said. He said it was normal to go through what I was going through, that he read once that an abandoned rhesus monkey will sleep sporadically, drink sparsely, and lose all interest in food.

“Their immune system breaks down,” he said. “They get sick easily; and they die in great numbers.”

“I bet you use that line on all the girls,” I said.

“Only the bookish ones,” he said.

In the middle of the night I grabbed the phone and hit redial, because I’d tried to call Mitchell after work; but I must have called Roland’s number after that because he answered. I was pretty out of it and I said, “Can you please come over?” believing it was Mitchell, and Roland said, “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

When he came over, I said something very stupid. I said maybe I’d become a better person if I fell in and out of a coma the way he had.

“It’s never that black-and-white,” he said, and gave me a test-smile to see if I’d been kidding.

I asked him about when he was out, what that was like.

“It was like dying… and dreaming at the same time — there are specific things I remember about it, the shape of a sound; time skipping backward and forward. A conversation about blood types.”