Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

Dr. Helendoerf said I was repressing my reactions to my mother’s illness and “obfuscating” my emotional responses. And she said that was a big reason why I stayed in the house all the time now; I was trying to keep my family intact by staying at home. I told her that was bullshit, if not in those words.

I called my father to see if I should pick up dinner, and a woman answered the phone. “ Aw, fuck, ” I said, and hung up.

On my way into the building, I was spotted again by Mrs. Wiederman, a gaunt red-haired woman who, like four or five others whose names I forgot, invited me to dinner every time she saw me.

“I made a pot of stew you can keep in the freezer and heat up for your suppers,” she said, whispering to protect my pride.

“We’re eating out mostly,” I said.

“Well, I’ll just leave it outside your door, then,” she said. Dishes in sealed Tupperware, aluminum pans, and plastic Baggies had been dropped off on our doorstep ever since my mother died.

“You know your mother would be so proud of you,” she said as we rode the cramped and ancient elevator together.

I thought about the arguments my mother and I’d been having over my lack of direction.

“Why?” I asked.

She seemed confused by the question.

“Because you’re a lovely young man,” she said. She stepped toward me then, held my face in her cold damp hands. I smelled mouthwash and old-lady perfume. Then I felt the walls of the elevator shiver. She was actually going to kiss my face.

“Get away,” I said, pulling back. “Did you even know my mother?”

She gasped, and then stared at me with her mouth open, as if I was dissolving before her eyes. “Oh…” she said. “Oh, dear.” When we got to her floor, she stumbled out of the elevator.

“And we don’t need any more of your shitty dinners,” I yelled.

I felt pretty bad about this later.

As we made our way across the park on a Saturday to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my father told me I hadn’t been myself lately. We were walking through the Seventy-Ninth Street fields, by Belvedere Castle, and in the cold our voices came out in vapor. “I’m fine,” I said. “And you?”

“I know you’re not sleeping,” he said. A man in a gray Columbia sweatshirt jogged by, with a black Labrador keeping pace.

“It’s getting better,” I said, though it wasn’t. Whenever I dropped off, I kept having a dream in which my mother was alive and the two of us had to go around convincing everyone we knew that she hadn’t died. “Prove it’s you,” they’d say. She’d tell them their middle name or their birthday, and they’d tell her she had gotten them wrong.

“It’s a strange time for everyone,” my father said.

We stopped on the path, facing each other. I smoothed a patch of dirt and stones with my foot. The buzzing in my ears was constant now, like the static on a radio station that only partially comes in, or a wiring defect on a speaker you might eventually get used to.

“It isn’t my business,” I said, “but it might be easier if there weren’t so many of them.”

“You’re right,” he said, and sighed. “I need to slow down.”

“What the hell, you’re living,” I said.

He considered this for a moment. Then he put his arm around me like I was twelve again.

In the track-lit lunchroom of the museum, my father was his old self again. He told me how he chased my mother to Europe. He talked while a waiter with a white shirt and black bow tie poured us Heinekens, tipping the glass to keep down the foam. He met her on a Memorial Day weekend when she was a waitress on Martha’s Vineyard, then met her again when she was checking coats at a party in New York.

I’d heard this story so often I used to groan when he started, but not this time.

I wanted him to slow down and tell every detail.

“She’d rented a house with your godmother in Nice, a two-story cottage with a yard and a view of two churches and a bakery. I couldn’t stand being apart from her,” he said. “I took my three weeks of vacation and flew to France. She didn’t know what to make of me. We barely knew each other, and there I was, on her doorstep in my shorts and T-shirt with the Michelin guide to Italy and Greece under my arm, like a college kid.”

He took a sip of beer and cleared his throat.

“Two weeks later, in Venice, I proposed. She was probably the most beautiful woman I’d ever met,” he said. “And far and away the most perceptive. It’s like she’d lived a thousand lives because of all the books she read. It sometimes made me uneasy.”

“How come?”

“Because I couldn’t hide the way I could with other women.” I could hear him breathing, heavy and slow.

He held my glance, then put on his glasses and studied the check.

“You remind me of her sometimes,” he said without looking up.

That night, for a few hours, my father appeared genuinely haunted, and I was heartened. He sat in his study looking out the window for a while, and then he took out some files from the cabinets in there. He was flipping through my mother’s notes and preliminary pages for her book on Paul and Jane Bowles.

For all my father’s achievements, my mother was always a step or two ahead of him. She was the one who’d finish the Sunday crossword puzzle, who knew word derivations, who could speak three languages, who had more persuasive things to say about the films and plays we went to. She feared alternately that I would pursue success single-mindedly like my father or that I’d inherit her impractical intelligence, the kind that ensured the vibrancy of their social life but that only recently had earned her — in the form of the Bowles advance — even a modest income. When she was on her deathbed, I was still deciding who to be like, and who to rebel against, though I still had time to fail them both.

I watched him from the doorway. I felt a bit guilty for forcing him into my mood, but it was a mission I’d undertaken.

“Someone should follow up on this,” he said. “All this good work shouldn’t just go to waste.”

“Maybe I will,” I said.

His eyes lit up. “Oh, I’d love that. I really would.”

Then he gathered up the pages, put them away, and got dressed to go out.

The radio station was on the fifth floor of an old warehouse building on the Lower West Side. I had to call from a pay phone to get someone to open the padlocks on the back door and bring me up in a rusted elevator. I assistant-produced for a phone-in issues show (the insurgency in Iraq, corruption in the Justice Department), screening callers and gauging people’s on-air skills. Their politics didn’t matter to me, so long as they had something to say. The most intense conversation I had was with a man whose wife had Alzheimer’s who’d called to talk about stem cell research. After forty-five years of marriage, his wife barely recognized him, and once, after a meal, she tried to tip him.

I listened to his stories, and then I told him about my mother. Nothing planned. He spoke and then I did, back and forth, a game of catch. I told him about lying to everyone, making excuses for her thinness. That was her rule. She thought her publisher would cancel her contract if it got out that she was sick. I told him about Thanksgiving, how I kept pushing her to eat. She said politely she didn’t want any more, but I insisted. She couldn’t hold it down.

She covered her face and ran to the kitchen, my father and me hovering as she leaned over the sink. My God, I can’t do this. I just can’t do anything . She was so terribly sorry, she said, that she’d ruined our Thanksgiving. “It was the last time we ate a meal together, and I screwed it up,” I said.