Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

I say, “I know. We’re living together now,” and Abby turns her head away, declining her role in this. I say “This is what I wanted” or something like that, and Lynn’s kid starts untying my shoe. I’m telling him to stop and Abby starts walking away. I run after her, diving on her eventually, and when I wake up I’m kissing Abby and holding her tight, though she’s still snoring and smelling like sleep.

When I shift on top of her, legs around her stomach, she whispers, “ Easy, cowboy . I’m not going anywhere.”

I’m thinking of Daniel when Abby tells me her friend Carl is having a breakdown, and she’s thinking of spending the weekend at his house, do I mind?

“What’s the problem?” I ask, trying to sound trusting. I can’t imagine that analyzing Carl is what she’s longing to do.

“He’s just got a lot of pressures. Too much to live up to. He’s got no one else to talk to.”

I know Carl. Carl was in the painting class I taught last fall at the college, the one where I met Abby. He is stick thin and pockmarked, and he drew ghetto scenes of New York, where he grew up, long-bodied men and women with exaggerated features. He is someone who I imagine has crises all the time.

“Well, why don’t you ask him to come here,” I say.

“Sure, if that’s okay with you,” she says.

“Let me think about it,” I say, but there’s no way I’d let that fuckup in my house.

“I’m losing my friends,” she says. “I’m losing them because I’m not ever seeing them. It’s starting to get to me — being here all the time.”

“Let me think,” I say. “Sure. Do what you want.” I’m pouting.

I’ll be thirty-seven in less than a month.

I go back to work on the rocker, and I listen as Abby talks on her cell phone.

“Hi, Carl,” she says, and she tells him she doesn’t know about the weekend. She laughs a lot and tells him to eat well and take care of his body and she gives him a list of breathing and relaxation methods to work on, rib cage out, shoulders back, and some yoga chants that she’d taught me. “Rama, Rama, Rama,” and then, I couldn’t believe this, she starts singing to him on the phone. The voice is like a ten-year-old’s, singing high-pitched, third-grade songs: “The Muffin Man,” “Frère Jacques,” the Brady Bunch theme, and I feel like I’ve caught her in bed with someone.

Last summer I saw Lynn’s wedding announcement in the Sunday Ithaca Journal . There was a photograph of my ex in a white gown, looking very pretty, like it was her first wedding, and next to her was a stout, long-haired man in a morning coat, a real estate broker from Syracuse named Evan. I was amazed at how little I felt. It was as if I’d barely known her, as though she were some girl I’d hung out with a half-dozen times.

If pushed, I can remember her being high-strung, doting, and as determined to talk through our issues as I was committed to avoiding them. We stayed together four years, two of which I stayed true and never went out much and the others where I rarely came home before 2 A.M., and I’d sleep on the living room sofa. It was the period after we lost our baby and everything shut in on us. She got pregnant in our second year, and for a while it brought us close; it really did. I built a crib and a high chair in my workroom, and I thought about ways in which we could make more money as she got bigger and went to sleep earlier than me every night. Things weren’t perfect between us, but I thought being parents would ground us in a good way — rid us of the threat of possibility; I am not good when I have too many options.

I read in a book that only 2 percent of pregnancies that make it past the sixteenth week end in miscarriages. Lynn’s happened in the twenty-third. The doctor at University Hospital said our baby just died, “aborted” was his word. He spoke like a man who has had children, and he said there would be nothing to keep us from having one “down the road.”

Then he put his arm around me and told me Lynn would be fine, we would have each other and that’s what was important, which is what people always feel the need to say.

It was the start of a period in my life in which I stopped paying attention and walked around dreamy and not in myself. I thought about trying again, about talking about things other than our pregnancy, which had so dominated our life. I grew quiet and I found ways to get out of the house. I did this, although I never blamed Lynn for anything.

When I stopped sleeping with her, she left me notes and a DVD, which I was supposed to watch, and she asked me to go with her to see a counselor she’d been seeing at the college.

I went once. He said it seemed like Lynn and I wanted different things out of life, and I agreed. He scheduled us for a Flexibility Workshop he was holding that weekend, and I drove instead to Albany, where I stayed with my friend Neil for a week. Neil has never married.

When I came home again, Lynn had moved out. It took about two months to set up our wedding and four years to work out a divorce. We argued a lot but I think we ended well, no hate or anything — just piles of paper to sort through.

I thought of calling to surprise her and congratulate her, and I thought, No, that’s going backward, move ahead; concentrate on what you have.

I tell part of that story to Abby — the part about not moving backward — by saying I want her to spend the weekend with me and not Carl. We’ll book a cheap flight and head off to the Yucatán. It isn’t her fault, I tell her, but Carl should know not to call her like that.

She says he’s my friend that’s all, he needs me like you need me. I say I’m sorry but that’s how I feel. She says she can’t go to Mexico, she’s failing school. She says she’s spent so much time at my house she’s failing three out of four classes, do I care?

“More than you could ever imagine,” I say.

“No, really. I’m losing myself with you. I’m giving so much and I’m not getting anything back. I look at someone or I talk to someone on the phone and you freak. You change, just like that, and you don’t talk about it. We talk about me and all my problems but I feel like I don’t know you.”

And while she speaks I watch her hands move and her eyes flare and her chest push forward in breath. I can see her knees and part of her thigh beneath her ripped jeans. I imagine us in fifteen years. I’ll be fifty-two and she’ll be my age now, teaching at a junior college or a high school, somewhere like California. I’ll have gray hair and an old-man paunch, and Abby will look like an adolescent boy’s fantasy of a hot professor, a copy of Proust or Emily Dickinson tucked under her arm.

“Really,” she says, and steps back from me. “Tell me something. Tell me something you never told anyone.”

So I tell her a story about stealing money from my dad because I wanted to go to New York and how he found out and decided to take me down there himself on a Greyhound bus, which makes her happy and soft again, though it isn’t true; I never stole a thing.

Before I take Abby to Carl’s house, I take her to a thrift store on Buffalo Street to buy a pendulum rod and bob I saw there. If she’s going away for a couple of days, I tell her, I am going to finish a grandfather clock, something I want to do before I’m forty.

“I’m not going for a month or anything,” she says. “I’ll probably be back Sunday night.”

She has my motorcycle jacket on, my sunglasses, and a pair of my sweatpants, and I’m thinking of what my house has become. We haven’t done a dish in two weeks and the sheets are thick with dust and sex, and it occurs to me I could whip the whole house into shape over the next few days. It might improve my state of mind.