Tom Barbash: Stay Up With Me

“This okay?” he asked.

“Oh, Steve,” Chloe said, “we can do better than that.” She went and turned the tuner to some kind of lame diva dance music. She started grooving on her way back.

She was about forty, I’d say, but she tossed her hair and gyrated like an extra on a music video.

My father glanced at me and raised his eyebrows. I wrote ABSURD on a piece of notepaper and flashed it quickly so she wouldn’t see.

“Both of you come here and dance, ” she said from the dining room.

She looked misplaced vamping next to the long oak dining table and under my grandmother’s crystal chandelier. My father moved his shoulders tentatively to the beat. Chloe yelled, “Show your father how to dance, Andy.”

“He does just fine for himself,” I told her.

I went and hid in my room. When I ventured out an hour later, his door was closed, and I saw her satin jacket and a shiny red purse draped over the reading chair in the living room.

Later that same week, I watched my father pick up the widow of one of his business partners during the intermission of Into the Woods . They were sharing notes about the New York City Ballet, and she said she had no one to go with, did he know anyone with extra tickets? She came back with us for drinks after the show, and my father put on an old Billie Holiday record my mother had loved.

The widow’s name was Patricia Hobson. She was an interior decorator and good-looking in a preppy, older-woman way, with attentive eyes, a long thin nose, and a long wiry neck. I kept staring at the cords on her neck as she spoke.

“New York is a fabulous place to be a boy just out of college,” she said.

“How so?”

“Well, the ratio is entirely in your favor. There are so many gorgeous, stylish women in the city. I see them absolutely everywhere, and they’re all single. My lord, Andrew, they’ll eat you up. What’s your type?”

I shrugged.

“He likes tall ones,” my father said, because my last girlfriend had been my height.

“Well, my daughter is five five, but she can wear heels.”

“I’m pretty sure I’d be a disappointment,” I told her, and she glanced over at my dad and smiled kindly. “I doubt that very much,” she said.

She started to size up our apartment then, commenting on the arrangement of the chairs and sofas and the artwork on our walls. “This apartment has so much potential,” she said. “Give me a few hours some Saturday afternoon, and I’ll show you what we can do.”

“Let me show you something,” my father said. He poured her a scotch, and they stepped out on the terrace to look out at the lights across Central Park.

“Oh, boy,” she said, which is what everyone said when they saw our view.

“This is my favorite spot in the world. If you look through the binoculars, you can see people jogging around the reservoir.”

“I run around that reservoir four days a week,” Mrs. Hobson said.

“Let us know next time so we can watch for you,” my father said. I thought he was joking until I saw his face.

“I will,” she said. “We can wave to each other.”

I slipped out later to get drunk with my high school friend Jonas, but the whole time I was picturing my father and Mrs. Hobson ransacking our underachieving apartment, taking our keepsakes down to the storage lockers in the basement of our building. There were legitimate grounds for my fear: in the last week two framed photographs and four drawers of clothes had vanished. I think my father wanted to disperse my mother’s ghost discreetly and respectfully. But every couple of days something else was missing, most recently a picture of my mother and godmother as teenagers, resting on a hammock like lazy goddesses. In its place now was a blank spot on the wall.

It’s got to stop, I thought.

Jonas tilted his head, puzzled. I guess I’d said it aloud.

“He’s not cheating on her,” he said.

“Because she’s dead, you mean. I suppose that’s technically right.” We chugged our beers, then Jonas went to the bar to refill our empty pitcher.

“I have a friend who wants to meet you,” he said when he returned. “Actually, she’s a little obsessed about it.”

“What did you tell her?”

“This and that. You just come up in conversation, and then it’s all she wants to talk about.”

“She must have an exciting life.”

“She does, actually. She’s really smart.”

“Good-looking?”

Jonas paused, as though I’d asked a trick question.

“Sort of. She kind of hides it. She doesn’t do much for me, but maybe she would if I didn’t know her so well.”

“You told her about my mother dying?”

He nodded. “When I told her, she cried.”

“That’s just too fucking weird,” I said. I reached for my father’s jacket, which was on the floor next to me, and rested it on my lap.

“It wasn’t.” He put his cigarette out and lit another. “Anyhow, get comfortable, brother. You’re not getting anywhere near that apartment for another couple hours, you got me?”

When we finally made it back, we saw her coat on a hanger in the vestibule. Jonas ran his hand across Mrs. Hobson’s scarf and then bent over to smell it.

“Your dad is outstanding,” he said.

I took a tin of sour candies from her coat pocket, just to do it, really, not because I wanted anything of hers.

Both my father and I were in therapy then. He went two mornings a week to an animated man named Bergman who had a book-lined office on the Upper East Side, and on Wednesday nights I saw a woman named Dr. Helendoerf down in the Village. Bergman and my father started meeting shortly after my mother was diagnosed — at my mother’s urging. When my father left therapy, he seemed uplifted, which was far from the case with me. He and his therapist talked about my mother, probably, but they also talked about art and politics, even sports. Bergman was constantly finding his way into our breakfast or dinnertime conversations. “Bergman thinks the Mets should trade Piazza,” he’d say. Or “Bergman gave me a list of Polish films for us to rent.” They were friends. I once saw them walking down our street together, which seemed like a violation of the patient-therapist relationship. I asked Dr. Helendoerf about it. I asked her if she would ever take a walk with a patient.

She tilted her head slightly to the right. She wore a neutral pashmina that resembled the ones my mother wore.

“Is that something you think you would like to do, take a walk with me?”

“No,” I said, too emphatically. “I mean, not especially.”

She allowed a long awkward silence.

“Why do you think you asked, then?”

I didn’t have an answer. I began to hear a buzzing sound like a halogen light turned too high or low.

“Do you think perhaps you’re disappointed sometimes when the world doesn’t respond to you the way it responds to your father?”

“That’s probably true,” I said.

I saw her write something down.

“But I don’t want that kind of attention.”

“Then why do you think it is that you’re so angry?”

“I’m not angry,” I said.

She didn’t respond. She might have raised her eyebrows.

“I just don’t get why he’s so happy all the time.”

She continued to study me. I was fairly used to these standoffs. In the silence, the buzzing started up again.

“Do you hear that sound?” I asked.

She paused for a moment. “What sort of sound?”

It was faint now, and probably from somewhere on the street.

“I guess I don’t either,” I said.

When my mother was sick, I was out of the house a lot. I’d go out to work — an entry-level job I’d talked my way into at a public radio station — and then I’d stay out until everyone was asleep. Once I stayed away for nearly two weeks without telling anyone where I went. I missed her birthday party. When I reached my father on the phone, he was madder than he’d ever been. And then he forgave me, which was even worse. He said I was distraught, which was true, but for the longest time I just felt numb. He said people cope in different ways. He said he thought of leaving all the time, which I believed and didn’t care to hear. I couldn’t really say why I needed to be away, and really I was able to put my mother out of my mind most of the time.