After the Moment (11 page)

"The guy thinks I have misplaced perfectionism," the boy had told Leigh. "It costs my father a hundred and fifty dollars an hour to know that. I think it makes him feel better to have a name."

"The shrink's how I found out about self-injury," Maia said. "I have SI, anorexia, acute anxiety, and other stuff. Doesn't that fit your vision of me as strange?"

Leigh had already looked up
fear of germs, self-inflected burn marks,
and
anorexia.
He didn't think "strange" quite captured Maia, but, thanks to her, he'd now read more than he'd wanted to about what one website called
pathologies of stress management.

"Lots of people see psychiatrists," he said. "The only strange part is yours telling you to have a garden. I thought they were just supposed to listen to your problems."

Or put you on medication. Pete had been on Paxil for about a year after his wife moved out. Leigh couldn't remember how he knew that; maybe Lillian or Kathleen had mentioned it.

"Well, this one thought a garden would get me out of bed and make me less self-involved," Maia said. "Although, Mom says it's made me a self-involved gardener."

The sight of Maia with the sun glittering against her hair flooded him with familiar yet entirely unwelcome feelings of pleasure. His head ached with trying to figure out how to act on what his body so clearly knew.

~~~

He called Astra that night "to see how she was." In reality, he was hoping that talking to her would knock some sense into him. Astra Grein was the girl everybody wanted. The one who would be done with all her college applications by Thanksgiving. The one who ate when she was hungry and had to see a shrink because her parents got divorced, not because she burned and cut herself.

Maybe Leigh didn't love her, but he liked her. A lot. She mattered to him.

"No, no, everything's fine," Astra said, in response to his repeated
Are you sure you're okay?
questions. "Why do you keep asking me that?"

"Because you sound tired," Leigh said, "and you are never tired."

"You know, I'm swimming every day, swimming a lot," Astra said. "There's a lake here and it's freezing cold. And I swim ... like, I don't know, maybe an hour every day. Just me and the lake. I love it. But it does make me tired."

Leigh thought about telling her of the club pool and what it was like to do laps there. How he had to swim in the same lane as the older women using kickboards and men who got offended as he sped past them. But he'd already mentioned that he was running again, and he didn't want her asking why he was doing both, since he was afraid it might be to make his body stop thinking about Maia Morland.

"Listen, I should go," Astra said. "One of the French daughters needs to use the phone."

She never used the names, referring to them only as
the French daughters.

"Do you want me to call back?" Leigh asked her.

"No," Astra said. "There's like no privacy here. We should e-mail."

"E-mail?" he asked. "What happened to that not being 'an appropriate form of communication for romance'?"

It occurred to him that she might be trying to break up, a thought that brought Leigh so much relief, he was appalled and frightened by how little he understood himself. He could remember with tangible clarity when he'd wanted nothing more than for her to smile at him. When he'd believed that sleeping with her was the only gift the world had to offer. How on earth had he moved so far away from that?

"God, I did say that, didn't I?" she asked, laughing. "Well, I was wrong. E-mail me. Knowing that you want to be in touch is just about the only good thing going on right now."

Okay, so breaking up was out.

"Astra, what's happening up there?"

"It's nothing," she said. "It's just my dad being my dad, except now it's all in French."

Leigh tried to keep Astra on the phone so that he could improve her mood, but she said she really had to go, she missed him, he should have a great day.

And the awful thing was, he probably would. Awful not because there was anything wrong with great days, but because of the thing that would make it great. Namely, picking Maia up at the Metro and spending half an hour with her before he went to work. Although, he couldn't yet admit that that was how he defined great.

What he allowed himself to notice was that he and Millie had finally figured out a way to make Bubbles not only stay but sit up and beg. This was not a trick Janet appreciated, since Bubbles now did it every time anyone in the family sat down to eat, but it made Millie's grin as wide as it had been before her father died.

One night toward the end of August, Leigh found Maia waiting for him in the club parking lot. She looked a little like a ghost, in a long-sleeved white dress, leaning against his car. A pretty ghost, he thought, as he got closer. He almost said it,
You look pretty,
as he had been thinking it enough lately, but he hesitated. It was one thing to call her strange, quite another to say
pretty.

"Hey," she said, interrupting his rather pointless thoughts on appropriate adjectives for a girl he'd rather not like quite this much.

Two of the other guys on the waitstaff said
Night, see you
and
Good shift
before heading off to their cars. Preston, who had worked the same section with Leigh, stopped to say hello to Maia. She asked how his tennis was, and if he had a new car yet.

"No," Preston said. "Still driving my mom's van."

"It's not so bad," Leigh said, hearing the disgust in Preston's voice.

"It'll have to do," he said. "See you guys."

He seemed to take it for granted that Maia was there because of Leigh.

"Did you bike here?" he asked her, watching Preston drive off in his mother's huge van.

"I couldn't sleep," she said. "I walked." "You walked?

That's like five miles."

"I know," she said. "So I'm sort of hoping for a ride home."

"Yeah, no, of course," he said, opening the car door and watching her get in. "It's just, five miles at midnight?"

"Well, it was eleven-ten when I started, and if you take a shortcut through the golf course it's only like three and a quarter miles."

"Maia, something could happen to you," he said, still standing on the passenger side, looking down at her. "You can't go walking by yourself in the middle of the woods."

She laughed, made a comment about how Calvert Park was not New York City, she was perfectly safe here, and was he going to get in?

But he stood there, suddenly aware of what was making him twitchy in spite of all the running and pool time. When he was around her, he had solid proof that she was safe from burns, cuts, and skipped meals. Out of his sight, who knew what was happening? She might, for example, get it into her head to go for a walk in the dark and get hit by a car. Or be attacked by a rapist on his way to the city. It sounded absurd, even to Leigh, but it was possible.

"Yes, I'm getting in," he said, walking around to his side of the car.

For whatever reasons, seeing Maia safe was the one thing that gave him a clear sense of why the world mattered. It was that one thing that brought his body down from Code Orange to normal. He may have, as he was to realize some four years later, already stepped off his road, but he didn't know it yet. Maia's safety, or, if he were honest about it, Maia herself, made Leigh feel normal. The irony of finding this state in the company of a girl who cut and starved herself was not lost on him.

"Just promise me that the next time you can't sleep, you'll call me," he said, looking at her briefly before starting the engine. "I'll come and get you, okay?"

"Okay," she said. "I promise."

"Thank you."

"You're sweet," she said. "I wish I'd known a boy like you years ago."

Astra had once called him
sweet
and been baffled that he didn't take it as a compliment. So he didn't say anything now, and refused to let himself wonder why she'd have wanted to know a boy like him years ago.

"Why do you wear an earring?" Maia asked, leaving the dreaded word behind, her fingers lightly brushing against the small silver hoop in his right ear.

Leigh usually said he'd gotten it to piss off Clayton, and that his father, after taking five months to notice it, had said, only,
Interesting.
The truth was he'd been talked into it by his boss at the gallery where he'd been an intern. Already that summer, two of the women he worked with, Wendy and Alice, had kept him from getting a haircut by telling him it didn't matter that it hung in his face, scratching his eyes—its length made him way cuter. They'd also said that he dressed like a hopeless straight boy, but he just couldn't find that a problem.

His boss, Marcus Fields, and only about ten years older than Leigh, was dating a woman who was heart-stoppingly beautiful in spite of having short, spiky hair and breasts so small that she was almost totally flat-chested. Marcus had once told Leigh that a woman could be like a painting. You didn't want to lose your heart to anything obvious (like a Monet, or a blonde), he said. Instead, you could (and should) take the time to learn what really moved you—it didn't have to be her breasts or the size of her ass.

Leigh thought Marcus was kind of pretentious and probably a jerk, but he appreciated being talked to like someone other than a deranged, sex-obsessed teenaged freak. Alice and Wendy wanted to get his ear pierced as a goodbye present, but Leigh told them no until Marcus said, "You should. It will redeem you from looking like a perpetual jock."

This was pretty funny since it was Marcus who had dragged fifteen-year-old Leigh to a truly disgusting gym with a boxing ring in the middle of it, and weights piled up like so much dirty laundry.

"You've got to be able to support your height," Marcus had said, showing him all of the different ways weights could be used to turn a skinny kid into a kid who might be able to knock someone out.

Still the word
redeem
made getting his ear pierced sound like a bit of vital business, and that was why Leigh allowed himself to be dragged to a tiny shop on West Eighth Street. He watched as Wendy and Alice picked out a silver hoop, and then paid a man with tattoos all over his arms to punch a hole through Leigh's ear.

Oddly, this was the version he gave Maia. The true one, not the one about wanting to annoy Clayton.

"Did you have a crush on them?" Maia asked.

"You mean Wendy or Alice?" Leigh asked. "No, but I had a pretty big crush on Marcus's girlfriend."

"Guys who get their ears pierced are usually the biggest jerks," Maia said.

"Or gay," Leigh said, remembering Marcus's order (which now seemed ridiculous and outdated) to get the left ear pierced, not the right. "I mean, as long as we're dealing in stereotypes."

It occurred to him that he had not asked her why she couldn't sleep, and he turned slowly onto Maia's street, not wanting her to leave the car. When he pulled into the driveway he would kiss her. Leigh had almost done it half a dozen times before but had been unable to get past her claim of having kissed
enough boys.
That and his sense that it was wrong to press an advantage. That you shouldn't kiss a girl you were helping to eat or picking up from the station. That when doing a favor for someone, you shouldn't ask for much in return.

But tonight was different. Tonight she had come looking for him and tonight Leigh would kiss her. He snapped out of this happy conviction in time to hear her say, "No gay man I've ever known has had a pierced ear. And, anyway, I knew you weren't gay even before I'd met you, because Millie never shut up about you and Astra."

And there went his kiss; this time not sucked away by Leigh's appalling lack of nerve but by Astra's long shadow. Maia asked him to park on the street, not the driveway.

"I don't want the car to wake up Charles," Maia said. "He's a light sleeper."

"I have to break up with her," Leigh said, determined to have something happen, even if it wasn't what he would have chosen. "I know that. And I would have—"

"Don't," Maia said. "You don't have to explain. It's none of my—"

"Let me finish," he said. "Please."

"Okay, sorry."

"I don't want to break up with her by e-mail or over the phone," he said. "That's..."

"Rude," Maia said. "Very rude."

He had been thinking
spineless
and
weak,
but
rude
would do.

"I understand," she said. "I really do. But don't do anything on my account."

"It wouldn't be because of—on your account," Leigh said. "I have to break up with her because of her."

That was so far from what he felt or had meant to say that Leigh wondered why he ever bothered to speak. He knew there was more to his reluctance than Astra's having a bad summer and claiming to love his e-mails. Leigh couldn't find words for what that
more
was, although it felt like if he closed something, something else might be forced open.

"Well, it's been helpful that you haven't," Maia said. "I've been waiting for you to get demanding—like I owe you, and so I've been holding what I know about Astra for that moment."

"Owe me what?" Leigh asked, still rattled by the gap between his thoughts and words.

Maia looked at him, her eyes asking,
Do you really need me to spell it out?

Ah, no. He didn't. But he was disgusted she could think such a thing of him. What were all those boys like—the
enough
ones whom she had kissed—that she could believe Leigh would ever suggest she owed him sex in exchange for a car ride?

"Don't get all offended," she said. "In my experience guys want things, and I don't do that now."

He was quiet, trying to decipher what she was really saying without letting his own thoughts, questions, and fears shut down his ability to think.

"Anymore, that is," she said.

She hadn't just
kissed
enough boys. She'd been one of those girls. Those girls who slept with boys just because. There were two or three of them at his school, and until this moment, Leigh had never really thought about them, except to notice they were both popular
and
unpopular. The funny thing about how they were treated was that they gave away the one thing every boy in the school wanted. But no one ever thanked them for it.