Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

Then, perhaps losing his spot in time again, he apologized to them both about the fire and showed Alice the burn marks on his forearm and shin.

“How often do you see him?” Alice asked, when they were outside again on the street.

“Once a month maybe.” The truth was closer to once a week.

“I really like him,” she said, then added, “He’s different from what I expected.”

“How so?” Henry asked, but he knew. Henry had gone to blue-blazer private schools and his father lived on a nice Upper East Side block. She’d been imagining luxury, or at least a semblance of order.

“You look like him, you know.”

Henry peered at his reflection in a shop window. He looked much more like his mother, he thought.

She said a few more nice things about his father, about his sense of humor and the first-edition books she’d found on his shelves, but Henry wasn’t listening.

“I think we should move in together,” he said.

She ran her finger down his sideburn as though he were an injured pet.

“There’s an idea,” she said.

Alice heads up to the counter now and orders a glass of wine and an espresso for Henry, so that he will stay awake with her. It is in this café that the two of them first met. It was after they’d both attended a screening at NYU, where Henry once taught a class for a former teacher of his who had pneumonia. Alice and a friend were talking about films in general and Henry offered them a few well-honed observations about Otto Preminger and John Cassavetes. Alice had long legs, ringlets of brown hair, and alabaster skin, with six small earrings circling one ear, and a little too much mascara around her large brown eyes. She seemed quite interested in Henry’s opinions and countered with a few provoking ones of her own. She was slightly younger than him, twenty-five or so, and she had seen most of the movies Henry cherished and had read many of his favorite books. Before long they were spending entire weekends at Alice’s place, staying up until four watching underground films Henry brought home from his part-time job at the film archive, or just messing around, and waking at noon. Some nights they’d hit a party thrown by one of Alice’s friends, but they rarely stayed long and sometimes, after a cocktail or two, they’d sneak off to a back bedroom, or a bathroom or a stairwell. They learned how to keep their voices down and their eyes open, and were caught only once, by someone who was too high to care.

One night, as they entered a restaurant for a late-night supper, Alice in a tight satin T-shirt and narrow black skirt, hair pulled back in a spiky bun, Henry lazily self-assured in the tan suede shirt Alice picked out for him, Alice’s hand in his rear jeans pocket, he paused to imagine what they must look like in their just-fucked bliss: like the kind of people you’d die to be.

Henry’s thoughts are floating in that time as he leaves the coffee shop with Alice and heads with her toward the blue-lit bar where they used to get tipsy together and make out. Henry hates the moment in which he wants her all over again, because it feels like regression, and so he treats her with a forged indifference, which he hopes will realign the balance of desire between them. They have far too much history to ever make this work, he thinks, but in certain moments, moments like this one, or on the occasional nights Alice decides to sleep over, he wonders. They are fluent in each other’s faults and wounds and hypocrisies, and so sleeping together has the feel of sleeping with a failed part of themselves, like pornography with familiar dialogue.

He could teach a course on their maneuverings, he thinks, and yet he’d always get half of it wrong.

“There’s no one I’m closer to in the whole world than you, Henry.”

“I feel the same,” he says breezily, before realizing it might be true.

He wants to tell her his theory — that the night at his father’s had pushed them off course. Alice had witnessed Henry’s future, or so he imagined, and so to alter that trajectory, she began needling him about finding a full-time job or selling one of the dozen screenplays he’d finished.

And she took heed of his subpar housekeeping, and his smoking, which Henry said he’d stop, but never did. He rebelled by smoking more, and allowing the plates to pile up. The question of their living together was never brought up again.

She asked him at a Burger King one night about his family when he was a kid, a softball tossed so he could give her something positive to hook into. He refused to describe aloud any of the happy scenes that he’d been playing over in his mind in order to get to sleep: the surf and turf barbecues, the Florida vacations, weekend parties on the Cape, rides in his father’s white Mustang convertible, his mother reading him Watership Down when he was eight and to his thrill changing one of the rabbits’ names to Henry. They felt too much like the right answers to an admissions interview.

“Like everyone else’s,” he said.

And then a more unsettling memory came to him, of when he’d actually last spoken to his mother. She’d called from Albuquerque, New Mexico, from the house where she was raising two other children with a different husband, to tell Henry she loved him, and always would. It was late Thanksgiving night. Her voice felt so close, he was certain she was just down the block. “ Henry, ” she said, as though it hadn’t been five years, as though they’d just been speaking. “ Are you awake? ”

Alice waited for him to say something, anything, but he only glared at her and lit another cigarette, staring at the match like he wanted to set the place on fire.

They’re drinking whiskeys now, seated across from each other in a booth. Alice smiles fondly. “It’s so easy, isn’t it?” she says.

“In some ways.”

“Remember the things we did in that bathroom?”

“That wasn’t me,” Henry says.

“Funny. Well, he kind of looked like you. I was pretty hammered,” she says.

To be truthful, Alice was never as drunk as she pretended to be, was always in control, and always looking, watching, grading Henry, or so he believed.

“Remember when we sat on opposite sides of the bar and pretended we didn’t know each other?”

“That I remember.”

“I kept sending you drinks.”

“And then you made me pay you back.”

“I guess I did.”

Henry sifts his drink and watches how the ice cubes catch the light from the bar.

“I was such an asshole to you, Henry.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Who can tell about these things?”

“This was our place, and I shouldn’t have come here with someone else.”

It takes him a moment to realize what she’s talking about. He’d managed to put from his mind the afternoon she’d brought the ass-faced music executive here, and Henry had seen them through the side window.

“By then it didn’t matter,” Henry says, but it had made him crazy seeing them flirting (and ear nibbling) like a scene from early Alice and Henry. He got wasted at a dive down the block and then shattered the window of a black Saab 93, the model of car he’d seen the date and Alice riding in the weekend before. He used a rusted metal folding chair someone had left on the street. Utterly senseless, especially since the car Alice’s guy owned was blue.

Alice leans toward Henry now and runs her hand from his temple across the back of his head. Her index finger brushes a lock of hair behind his ear. He feels very sleepy. She pulls his face to her and kisses his cheek.

“Let’s go back to your place,” she says.

On their walk to Henry’s apartment, he thinks again of his father, and how rather than dismissing Alice’s concern about his father, it might be better to tell her the chronology of events since that awkward visit, how Henry had put him in a managed-care facility, and how his father had become paranoid and frightened, but how for five full hours on his sixty-fifth birthday, his father had been himself at forty, and how he and Henry had laughed and reminisced together like lost best friends.