Lynn Strong - Hold Still

Maya holds tight to her coffee. “Sorry I’m late,” she says.

“You’re not,” says Charles. He’s wearing slip-on shoes that are lined with fleece, no socks, a dark blue crew-neck shirt under a brown suede blazer, no coat. His hair falls over the tops of his glasses. He’s beautiful, she thinks. He’s beautiful in the way he moves and talks, in the way he has hold of his brain. If there were a way to simply have him always fifty feet away and living his life, that’s what she’d want most. She wants to give him small things and ask for nothing from him. She wonders if it would be possible to make herself so small he doesn’t notice when she’s close.

Jackie enters, and then three other students. Charles sits, and Maya leans back against the desk.

“I. .” he says. “The other night.”

She holds her hand up.

She turns back to the desk and holds her Mrs. Dalloway close to her chest. Woolf today. Clarissa. Septimus. Isabel and Shakespeare. There is still that.

Halfway through class a hand from the back of the room rises: a boy who hardly ever speaks. He wears a black skullcap, pulled back off his forehead so bits of blond hair peek out from underneath.

“Seriously, though, Septimus, dude’s crazy, right?”

Maya stares at him. She’s afraid to look at Charles.

“I mean, what’s he there for? It’s this story about this woman and her party, then all of a sudden, dude kills himself.”

Maya nods. She’s not sure she can answer. She picks up her copy of the novel, the edges furred and softened, the back cover ripped. The students stare at her, the lot of them. She feels Charles’s eyes right through his glasses. She opens the book, close to the end, begins to read.

She can see perfectly, her first, her second, her seventeenth time inside these sentences. The breathlessness with which she’s always read.

There was an embrace in death , she reads.

She thinks maybe she won’t look up at them till they’ve all left.

“I think we’re done today,” she says, still facing the page. She listens to the shuffling of bags and papers. Charles murmurs something to them as they scurry out. She keeps reading through, quietly to herself now, to the end of the novel, ten more pages, before she looks up to see Charles standing there.

“Are you okay, Maya?”

She can’t remember if he’s ever said her name.

“You want to sit down a minute?”

She shakes her head. “I need to get out.”

He tries to help her with her coat as they walk toward the exit. She sloughs him off, walking quickly, clutching the handle of her bag with both hands as he holds the door and she walks through.

Overnight, they’ve hit a warm spell. The sun shines on her face. She wishes it were still cold and cloudy, that she could stay more bundled up. “What happened to winter?” she says. If he hears, he doesn’t answer. He walks with his large bag slung across his torso, the weight of it flapping at his hip.

“I live on 111 and Amsterdam,” he says.

She nods.

They walk briskly down Broadway. They go east at 112th Street, past the bookstore. Across Amsterdam is the huge cathedral Maya’s always loved, the garden in front, the spires, the mounds of steps. He leads her past the Hungarian pastry shop, unlocks a heavy metal door, and heaves it open hard with the side of his shoulder; they’re in a small dark vestibule, six silver mailboxes line the wall. He leads her up the steps and she tries hard not to think.

“Annie’s getting jealous.”

Ellie breathes in one sharp breath. They’re having dinner. Tourist season has swept the town full suddenly, and Annie’s hardly home at night.

The pills are in her drawer. Every night, before she goes to bed, she lays them out on her desk and counts them.

Jeffrey nods toward Jack, who has climbed up onto Ellie’s lap as they eat take-out Indian.

“We finally found someone he loves as much as her,” he says.

Ellie burrows her face into Jack’s hair. Jeff gets plates and forks and spoons and lays them out, and Ellie takes a bite of her biryani, eyes still averted down.

Jeff pours two glasses of wine. “I’m a little jealous too,” he says.

Ellie helps Jack serve himself food, then holds her wine glass. She lets the weight of it settle in her hand

“You two surfing.”

Ellie laughs, turns to Jack. “We’re pretty awesome, aren’t we, Jack?”

“And your boyfriend?” Jeffrey asks.

Ellie stops a minute, wonders what Jack might have said when she wasn’t with them. She looks briefly toward her room.

“So he is, then?”

Ellie looks back toward Jack. “Of course not.” She pulls her cardigan more tightly to her. Rain falls in violent heavy drops and pounds along the roof.

“Didn’t work out?” asks Jeff.

Ellie looks down into her wine and helps Jack cut his lamb into smaller pieces. She takes a long sip of the Syrah before she speaks again.

“It only rains like this here,” she says.

He shrugs. “I wouldn’t know.”

“You. .” She just assumed he’s traveled as much as his wife has, but watching his face now, she thinks, Of course .

“I love it,” she says, her eyes fixed on the rain.

“Of course you do.”

He says it like he knows her, like he knows exactly what she’s always been.

His apartment is a single room with a bed, a desk, two chairs, and two small windows; a galley kitchen runs along the wall. The bed is tightly made, with a dark blue duvet cover with two red-and-white-checked pillows on top.

“Cozy,” she says.

He pulls the larger chair that’s leather and on wheels out for her and sits primly on the bed.

“Septimus,” he says.

She shakes her head, crosses her arms, sits back. “He’s always been my favorite.”

“Of course he has.” Like he knows her.

He looks past her out the window. “Communication,” he says.

“It’s all he wants,” she says.

His back straightens. “Except it’s so much harder than he thinks.”

“Fucking doctors.” She smiles and uncrosses her arms, walking over to his bookshelf. He stays where he is. She fingers a Marguerite Duras, a Nabokov, picks up the Evan S. Connell.

Maya opens the book and keeps her eyes steady on the small, careful paragraphs. She closes the book again, runs her fingers up and down the dark blue cover. “You like the sad ones,” she says.

He shrugs. “I guess.” He pushes his glasses up and pinches his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “I’m not sure I’ve read much that isn’t at least a little sad.”

“At least a little sad,” she says, walking back to the desk, and touching a stack of papers that sit on top of it: his dissertation.

“How is it?” she says.

“Who knows?” he says. His back rounds again. His hands rest on his knees. “It’s almost finished.”

She looks at him, then back down at his work. “You’re sure?”

“It’s as done as I can do.”

“What does that mean?” She’s trying to drag something out of him, something that will show her what he’s capable of.

He eyes the papers, then puts his palms behind him on the bed. “I’m not sure I care if it’s any good. I think I want to teach high school.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve been teaching up in Hunts Point. An after-school program. It’s just so much more active, you know? Instead of all these useless papers no one reads.”

Maya laughs and begins flipping absently through his chapters. She’s a little hurt that he didn’t tell her, that she didn’t already know that he’d been teaching someplace else. She wants to ask if Caitlin knows.