Tom Barbash: Stay Up With Me

We walked uptown along the park. I didn’t know where we were headed, only that Sylvie appeared to have a plan.

We sat on a bench on the path at Eighty-First Street and sipped from a pint bottle of Knob Creek we’d bought at the corner liquor store, assessing the few passersby who’d braved the weather. A young guy, two or three years older than me, hobbled across on crutches.

“He’s faking,” Sylvie said. “Grab one of his crutches.”

“What would I do with just one?”

“You could sell it back to him,” she said. “Or you could beat him with it.”

We traveled then to the benches near the Bandshell, where Sylvie said she used to roller-skate. I used to ride my skateboard over to watch people like her, I said.

“I was the one in the hot pants.”

“Really. I think I kissed you once.”

We were at the center of Central Park in the middle of the night. I thought, This is what unbalanced people do . Snow dropped down on us. My feet felt cold and wet, and I took another slug of whiskey. I was getting drunk. She rested her legs over mine, and I warmed them with my hands. It all felt forced, and then it didn’t.

As though she’d been working up to the question, she asked me, “What’s the weirdest thing you can do with your body?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I mean, can you do this?”

She touched her elbows together behind her head. “Or this?” She bent her hand back so that her fingertips touched the back of her forearm.

“No,” I said. “Nor would I want to.”

She looked so distraught that I went ahead and wiggled my left ear, something I hadn’t done since grade school.

“I knew there was greatness in you,” she said.

At some point, because it was on my mind, I told her about walking in the park with my mother, a week after we’d found out she was sick. I’d been away for the summer and I’d flown back to the city the day before. My mother was critiquing my wardrobe, the holes in my T-shirts and jeans.

“I’m buying you some pants,” she said. “Don’t be embarrassed.”

“I won’t,” I said.

We went to some stores on Columbus Avenue, and I felt like I was eleven.

She bought me four pairs of pants, two pairs of dress socks, three shirts, and a navy peacoat. It was as though she were outfitting me for a trip. It was the first time I understood there were a finite number of afternoons we’d have together. A hundred. Ninety-nine. The next day it would be ninety-eight.

We never talked about the fact that she was dying, or what she was heading into. I think we both believed there’d be time. But it all went so quickly. The night I came to her with all the questions and thoughts I’d been saving up, her painkillers had made her so dopey she thought I was taking her to the opera. I actually played Carmen for her, and she said, head pressed into her pillow, that it was unbearably beautiful. She knew that she was sick, and in bed, but she thought she was young and in bed with the flu. And she asked me on one of her last days if I could make sure her tennis racket was strung, because she’d broken a string the summer before. I took it into a shop, and when they’d finished, I brought it back to show her.

When I reached her, the nurse had upped her morphine, and from then on she was gone.

When my story ended, Sylvie closed her eyes. “You know, I said everything I wanted to say to my father, and he made his peace with me. But I never played opera for him while he was in bed,” she said. “That is such a fucking cool thing to do.”

Outside her building Sylvie declared, “It’s been a while since I slept with anyone.”

I just smiled stupidly.

“You’re quite adorable,” she said.

Her roommate was away for the weekend. It was a pretty standard grad school apartment, two tiny bedrooms, a kitchenette, a narrow hallway, and a sunken living room decorated with a nice plush armchair and couch that must have come from someone’s family. We passed out in our clothes for an hour or two. Then we slept together with them off. Undressed she was far sexier than her boyish clothes and awkward eagerness had forecast, and when she pulled me inside her, I felt irrationally as though I might have fallen in love. At around 4:00 A.M. I woke up sweating and startled from a nightmare. My mother wasn’t in this one. My father had died and I was sorting through his papers and clothes, and I was showing our apartment to a series of Realtors. I asked them each, Have you seen the view over Central Park? It took some effort to determine that my father was snoring in his bed a dozen blocks away, and my relief at this understanding was so overwhelming I wept uncontrollably. In the morning I was curious to find myself in a strange apartment and not in my childhood room. I heard car horns and voices outside, a doorman’s whistle. I felt tired still, but in a different way, as though I’d been drugged. I noticed then what wasn’t there. The buzzing. I stumbled over to the clock on her desk—9:34.

“You can go if you want,” she said from the bed.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I sort of trapped you here last night.”

There was something fragile in her eyes I hadn’t yet seen.

“I’d much rather stay,” I said.

She smiled and curled into her pillow. Her feet dangled from beneath the covers.

I slipped back into bed and drew her to me so that her warm back rested against my chest. I closed my eyes, and in seconds I was out. I slept as I hadn’t in years, through that whole snowy day, and when I awoke again, it was night. I threw on my pants and padded down the hallway, where I came across her reading a book on the living room sofa, legs curled beneath her. She glanced up at me. “It stopped snowing,” she said. “Shall we go get a bite?”

“Yes,” I said.

I grabbed the rest of my clothes from the bedroom. We bundled up and headed into the freezing night. On Broadway I felt the wind rip through my peacoat, all the way to my skin, and I was aware then that I had left the first stage of my life and was out in the world in a way I was never before.

There a lot of people I want to thank for their help during the writing of this book. The editors who published these stories and offered their sage advice: Jordan Bass, Hannah Tinti, Carol Edgarian, Dave Eggers, Kaui Hemming, Ed Schwarzchild, Evelyn Somers, and Michael Nye. My mentors and fellow writers inspired me and kept me on course: Tobias Wolff, Doug Unger, John L’Heureux, Nancy Packer, Frank Conroy, James McPherson, and Marilynne Robinson. I also want to thank Dan Chaon, Justin Cronin, and Jim Sullivan for their long and ever inspiring friendship. Jason Roberts, Ryan Harty, Eric Puchner, Peter Orner, Keith Scribner, Akhil Sharma, and Ray Isle have been trusted members of the inner circle. Great thanks to Anika Streitfeld, Laura Fraser, Elizabeth Bernstein, and Po Bronson for their close reads and their fellowship. David Berman, John Swomley, and Mark Weiner read countless drafts and offered brotherly love and advice. With great appreciation I want to thank the National Endowment for the Arts, the great women and men at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and my colleagues and inspiring students at California College of the Arts. David Dodson, Sandra Murray, and Shaye Hester lent me beautiful and quiet places to work. Lisa Barbash, Joy Gould Boyum, and Carol Lamberg gave their love and belief. The tireless and generous Ellen Levine was there from the start. I also want to thank the brilliant and warm-spirited folks at Ecco, especially Dan Halpern, Karen Maine, Michael McKenzie, and the remarkable Lee Boudreaux. Thanks to my parents, Joe and Heather Barbash, and to Hilary, for all and everything.