Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

She had been outspent again, but she didn’t mind.

She had given him something better.

They saw each other the next three evenings, and they were planning on going to a New Year’s Eve party at a SoHo restaurant that the girl’s high school friends had rented out. The mother got them theater tickets for a show on December 29, and this time she resisted going with them. She would go to a late movie by herself so that they could get settled in the apartment after the show. Part of this, she knew, was an attempt to make up for getting in his way with the hostess, but he’d someday understand, or maybe he already did.

It had turned out so well, she thought. He seemed happier. The girl could visit him at school. And the mother thought there were advantages to having a girlfriend at another college. First of all, long-distance relationships were often the most romantic. Second of all, they left you more time for your friends and your schoolwork. Relationships in college were difficult to maintain. There were so many distractions, and those distractions were healthy. The boy was on an intramural basketball team and played bass guitar in a band. It didn’t matter that by his own admission the team wasn’t very good and neither was the band. She didn’t want him to have to give up anything.

The night they went to the theater, the mother went to a late showing of a trite Tom Hanks movie that was set in her neighborhood and made it look like a decent place to fall in love. When she returned, she was pleased to hear the sound of the stereo, of the two of them staying up late. She peered in before she went to sleep at midnight, and they were together on the couch looking at an atlas. The boy was showing her where he planned to travel over the summer. The mother pictured them in a curtained train compartment, rolling through the Romanian countryside, poring over a guidebook.

“Good night, you two,” she said.

And her son blew her a kiss.

When she woke again, it was two thirty or maybe three and the music was playing still, or again. She went to get herself a glass of water. They were talking, and though she still felt hazy and half asleep, she realized it wasn’t the girl’s voice she was hearing. The girl was gone, and somehow he’d managed to get the hostess to come over for a nightcap. Tag team. Here come the reinforcements. It gave her a terrible sinking feeling. She retreated into her room and tried to remind herself that it was his life and that he was over eighteen and could do what he wanted. But the more time passed and the more she thought of the two of them in there, the angrier she got. Not merely on her own behalf, but on behalf of the girl. It was so ugly and pointless what the boy was doing, so soulless. She tried to go to sleep again and forget it all but she couldn’t help placing herself in the girl’s shoes. She might be thinking of the boy right now, and of the countries they’d visit together. And tomorrow when they went out again, the boy would tell her nothing of what he’d done with the hostess, nor would he seem different.

She wouldn’t abide this. Not in her house, and not with a woman she’d come to blows with, no matter whose fault it had been. She walked to the study and threw the doors open.

“I want you to get the fuck out of here,” she said.

But there was no one in the room except the boy. He was alone watching TV. There was a bowl of ice cream before him and a can of 7UP.

He seemed not angry then but frightened, the way one might feel while watching a spouse put her hand through a glass door panel, which her husband had watched her do. It happened in the period when she’d thought he’d been screwing around. He hadn’t, though he admitted he’d come close once. The boy never knew anything of this.

Now he was walking toward the mother. She was crying soundlessly, and she felt as though she might never stop.

“My God, Mom, what’s going on? What’s this about?”

On the TV the woman, Barbara Stanwyck, was running her fingers through Henry Fonda’s hair. The mother had seen the movie a half-dozen times, but she’d managed not to recognize the dialogue.

“I thought…”

“I know… I know,” he said. He said it as one might say it to a child who’d thought she heard a ghost.

She didn’t have to explain anything, she realized; he knew her better than she did right then and maybe he had for a while. Her son. It was as though her irrational behavior had promoted him to the role of the wise and clement adult. And while she felt significant pride in this, she feared now that he’d plan to spend his coming vacations in Seattle, or Europe, or Colorado. He was unlikely to spend another Christmas in New York with her.

“Come on,” he said, as though reading her thoughts. “Let’s watch the rest of this.”

“All right,” she said, and she let him fill her in on what she’d missed.

Before the end of the movie, he fell asleep. She turned the TV off and threw a blanket over him.

It was four now, one o’clock in Seattle. There was an off chance he could still be up, but of course there was no guarantee he would be alone. She imagined calling him, and him consoling her with his new girlfriend in bed next to him, and afterward, he’d say, “She’s still having a rough time of it.” And it would even score points with the woman who would see how gracious and tolerant he was. She thought then about the hostess, because it was she who had started all this. What was it the mother had hated so much? She was no criminal, and she hadn’t treated the boy badly as far as the mother knew.

She had simply seemed too desperate, too lonely, too hungry. Her needs were too naked. The mother could imagine someone like that consuming her boy, swallowing him up, before he had the chance to see the world and become the person she knew he could be. He snored softly now, with the beginnings of a cold, she knew, because when he was a child it would begin that way: a mild sawing sound, a sniffle the next morning, and a temperature the following night. She would douse it with soups and juices, and she would secretly enjoy the days he was too sick to go to school and had to stay home with her. It was in the time they’d first moved to the Village, in that odd little apartment on Tenth Street with the stained-glass window and the false fireplace they bottom-lit to resemble embers, and the acres of built-in bookshelves, and the café down the street where they’d listen to bad poetry, and the tiny crowded market where she’d buy bread and fish. Her husband would be reading in bed, waiting for her. She would watch her sleeping son for ten minutes or twenty, and marvel at all his possibilities, a life that young, so full of wonder and unstained hope.

T imkin’s wife left him during a blisteringly cold Thanksgiving week, two nights before their annual Balloon Night party. There was no time for Timkin to call their guests and cancel; nor would he know where to call in many cases. It was the sort of event attended by people from all corners of their lives whether or not they could produce a fresh invite. Once invited always invited, he and Amy had said.

The Timkins had a three-bedroom eighth-floor apartment, on West Seventy-Seventh Street between Central Park West and Columbus, the balloon block. It was where those cloud-size cartoon characters for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade were inflated, the night before Thanksgiving, and nearly all the residents would open their apartment doors to anyone and everyone they knew. Timkin grew up in the apartment (which his parents had ceded to him six years earlier when they moved to Naples, Florida) and had attended his first balloon party at age six. Now he was thirty-four.