Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

“What would that prove?”

“That we don’t need it,” she says. “I want to prove to myself I don’t need this.”

“I need this,” I say.

As I said those words I wished I had them back.

Abby sinks under her hair. She stares down. She’s wearing a plain white T-shirt and cutoff army pants, and she is painfully beautiful.

“Maybe that’s not so good,” she says. “Maybe it’s not good that we’re putting everything on this right now. Maybe I should stop missing classes.”

“Let’s not play this,” I say. “I mean, I want to be with you and there’s no reason we need to take a test to find that out.”

“Let’s just go one night, one lousy night without sleeping together and then we can go on every other night doing whatever we want.”

For an instant I’m angry. I’m asking myself why I’m with a teenager; why I’m playing high school games instead of living with an adult.

Something shifts between us, or did a while back. I tell her she can have the bed; I’ll sleep right here.

“It’s just one night, okay?” she says, and she kisses me on the nose like I’m a child. “We’re not going to die or anything. You’ll see.”

From two until dawn, I pace by the loft watching Abby sleep. It is exactly like being dead, being unable to touch her. I watch her knees bend to her chest and her face brush the pillow. Her nose, curved and long, is dormant above her mouth, which is open to let her breathe. Her lips are chapped, and her hair is wild across the top of the bed. She’s wearing the same T-shirt she wore the last three nights, a long College Town Bagel shirt with a picture of a bagel.

I’m thinking of all the places she’s slept in, growing up around California and Boston and upstate New York. Her father died when she was two, and her mother was a little crazy. No one lives on a beach with her kids or moves ten times in four years unless she’s crazy. The time Abby’s mother broke her nose was when Abby moved her stuff to her friend Vicky’s house. Abby said she’d forgotten most of what the fight was about, but it had something to do with her mother’s boyfriend.

When her mother found her, it was ten days later, and her mother was so drunk she embarrassed Abby in front of Vicky’s parents, slurring her words and cursing and then breaking down in tears. She lost all control is what she did, and she knocked Abby straight on with the base of her palm. Abby said it felt like her nose had been pushed back through her head. Blood poured over her T-shirt and her jeans and her bare feet, she said, more blood than she’d ever seen, and she couldn’t breathe.

“Other people’s mothers don’t act like this,” Abby said. “Other people don’t have mothers who break their noses.” She was fourteen when it happened.

I felt so sad and empty when she told me that, though I know if she’d grown up happy, she’d likely be sleeping in a dorm room right now. I wonder what her mother would make of me, closer to her age than Abby’s. She probably wouldn’t care.

I want so badly to climb into the loft with her. But she’s taken control. It’s my house and she’s directing the show. I can’t sleep. I’m watching Abby, and the sky outside is pale with new light.

Saturday, I take her out to see Liz Phair perform at Cornell. We drink a pitcher of margaritas and smoke a joint before leaving and Abby is real physical, running her hand over my leg while I drive. Last night is forgotten. The sidewalks are saffron from the streetlamps and Friday’s snow. Not a star to see, the sky is gray and fierce.

She smiles at me like a little girl, like the girl in the sleeping bag. I can hear her wheezing hard through that broken nose, and I try to get my breath to match hers. For a minute or so it is just the human noise of one imperfect breath, two broken bodies working together. I feel a warmth rush over my head.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks. I stop at a light behind a van filled with kids staring out the window. One presses his nose into the glass and turns his head sideways, which Abby doesn’t see. She is looking at me.

“How good life is,” I say.

At the theater we play the overview game. Abby and I eavesdrop or spy on people and try to size up their lives from their faces, their arguments, their clothes. We sit at diners and watch old couples arguing, or new couples awkwardly ordering breakfast after they wound up somehow in bed together. We lay bets on whether they’d make it to a third date, or a fifth. “I’m betting he blows her off on the fourth date, comes up with a phantom stomach flu,” Abby would say.

We walk along the second-floor railing, looking down on people buying drinks, posturing, talking. People are young here, high school and college, woolen caps and piercings. There are a few older earth types and the teaching crowd but I don’t see anyone I recognize.

“He’s driving her crazy,” Abby says.

“Who?”

“That guy in the gray T-shirt. He’s driving that woman crazy.”

The two are talking to another couple.

“Look where she’s standing. Look at her hands,” she says.

They’re clenched in balls, okay. And the man in the gray T-shirt has his shoulder just past her so he can’t really see her while he speaks. Yes, I can see that. We stand watching. The woman from the other couple touches the man’s shoulder while she speaks to him. He laughs.

“What do you think she’s telling him?”

“She’s complimenting him on something, it looks like,” I say.

The woman, the gray T-shirt’s date, pulls up closer to the other woman, leaning forward like a runner pushing for an inside lane. Then the two guys start talking, as though there’s no one else there.

Abby’s look says Can you believe this? And then I realize I know these people. I don’t say anything. The guy in the brown suede blazer — I think his name is Daniel — says something to the group and then walks over to the line by the bar. Abby takes my hand and squeezes it. And then, this is what amazes me. From the bar, Daniel looks straight up at Abby and grins.

She smiles back and then turns away.

“That was strange,” I say. “You know that guy?”

“I don’t think so,” she says, but a chill runs through my chest. What does that mean: I don’t think so ? Daniel’s look is the kind a guy gives someone he knows, maybe slept with. I glare down and watch him order his drink and rest his elbows on the bar, and when I turn toward Abby, she is walking slowly away.

When Liz Phair, pale and wispy, takes the stage, I drift into a funk — torturing myself about Daniel. I don’t hear the music; I just see him. I remember where I know him from, high school. He was a year behind me, bright, loud, and into politics. He played in a band, I think, and his father taught at one of the universities, which is what I think Daniel is doing now. That and getting a Ph.D. in something. It’s amazing what you can remember when it comes down to it. I don’t know if Abby knows him, but his grinning at her silences me.

I imagine him meeting her at a Cornell party, Abby in ripped jeans and a thin white T-shirt, and this pretentious fuck rattling on about art and music, while people around them hold wineglasses and tilt their heads thoughtfully. Then he takes her to his apartment where as a prelude to hooking up they listen to our music and tell each other our stories. That’s what kills me — they talk in our voices.

Later that night I dream I’m with Abby, and we run into Lynn. Her hair is streaked with blond highlights now, and she’s clearly done time at the gym. She has a child in tow — things have panned out for her — and she looks at Abby and says, “My God, Willie, she’s beautiful. She’s young but she’s absolutely beautiful.”