Hold Still (27 page)

“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.

“You know my life is those useless papers, right?” she says.

“Oh. No,” he says. “You're not like that. You're not one of those teachers who's just here to publish and get some useless appointment.”

“Some would consider that one of my problems.”

“But it's so absurd,” he says. “To want these accolades that mean nothing to the world.”

“And Hunts Point? Means something more?”

“Yeah,” he says. “It's actual engagement. I can see it, you know? What I'm giving every day.”

She stares at him: of course, she knows. Her students, reading; it's the one thing she's felt capable of giving properly.

“Well, I guess then you should do that.”

He nods. “But I have to finish, you know. It's been too many years of my parents patiently awaiting my arrival at an
Actual Career
.”

“Where are you from?” she asks and can't believe she doesn't already know the answer. She has an image of a pear-shaped mother somewhere in Ohio. She angles her knees farther from him in her chair.

“The Bay Area,” he says.

“Far,” she says. “They must be proud.”

“Maybe,” he says. “They like to say
Columbia
. They like to say
PhD
. The fact that it's in literature, I think, they keep to themselves.”

Maya laughs. “I'm sure they're proud.”

He's so close; she could reach her hand out and rub it slowly back and forth over his head.

“Maybe,” he says.

“I tell them about you,” he says.

Both of them look straight ahead.

“How much your help has meant to me.”

He turns toward her. She can't look at him. If she looks at him, she'll cry. “Thanks,” she says.

His hands hold tight to his knees.

“You should be easier on your parents.”

“Maybe,” he says. “They're just not very interesting.”

“Interesting or not. They must have done some good things, making you.”

“You say it like I'm a loaf of bread.”

“Of all the analogies.”

“I like to bake.”

“You bake,” she says. She laughs, holds up her hands, acknowledging defeat.

“We make ourselves,” he says.

“And some of us make bread.”

He smiles. “They loved me as well as they could.”

“And it wasn't enough for you.”

“It was fine.”

“I wonder if there's ever more than that.”

They're quiet a long time and she looks out the window. She watches the cars out on the street, people walking, talking on their phones. His eyes are full of too much expectation. He leans toward her, but she stays far enough away that they're touching only at the knees.

Fall 2011

T
he television plays on low and Jeffrey leans in toward Ellie, who holds Jack. He loops his arms around Jack's waist, the back of his hand and then his forearm brushing Ellie's waist. He smells like the wine they've shared throughout the evening. The second bottle he opened silently, refilling the round thin globe of Ellie's glass each time it got below half full. Besides a lamp lit in the far corner of the room, the lights are off. They've been watching a movie, a movie Jack chose and to which Ellie has stopped paying attention. Jeffrey leaves the room, carrying his son and smiling at Ellie, smiling at her in a way that she thinks might be different than each time he's smiled at her in the past.

She should leave, she knows, sitting here alone, no matter the sort of smile he just gave her, no matter what she might do once she gets to her room. Whether the smile was meant to be more intimate, or meant to simply thank her for being so in love with Jack, she should get up, walk out to her slatted door, and close it.
If she turns her head in just this instant, she could see the door, and that might be enough to get her to get up.

She wonders if he's ever wondered what she does when she leaves them.

When she leaves them, the three of them are nearly all she thinks about.

He's slow returning. Waiting, she thinks, hoping she'll be the one to decide to keep things as they are. Let it stay just a thing that happens, moments that pass between them, that they can keep without losing anything of what they already have. Him: the family, the whole grown-up life he's built with Annie. Her: the pieces that she gets when one or more of them is somewhere else.

She doesn't leave, though. She's too young to walk to her room and close the door behind her. She's too desperate to be touched. She's too hungry for the looks he gives her—the looks that have become more and more frequent, have begun lasting longer, that she thinks about when she can't sleep at night—to be made manifest across her skin.

Perhaps, though, she thinks, he'll simply sit and ask her what's happened in the movie since he left. And she won't know and she'll have to mutter something about nodding off or she'll just pretend to know and make it up. And he'll give her an easy out. He'll say,
You must be exhausted, Nor
. And then, chastely, she will leave him, unfolding her legs from beneath her and folding the blanket that now sits atop her and placing it back on the couch. She'll walk toward the door that now she cannot bring herself to look at. They'll nod at one another. She'll say,
Good night, Jeffrey
. She'll go to bed with one of her mom's books.

Spring 2013

W
hat happens next: They're sitting, both of them facing the window, and then he turns toward her. His hands, which up till now have sat chastely at his sides, reach around her waist; they're both lying on top of the covers, their legs still hanging awkwardly over the edge. He's slow and careful, silent. His size seems to disallow him the use of all his strength.

She wishes she were slightly less sentient as it happens. She wishes she were able not to notice the way he fumbles too long with the condom, the way he squints as he comes close to her, his glasses set on the table by the bed. She wants to stop him to ask him what he's gaining from this. If he could teach her something. If he could promise her when this is over something fundamental will have shifted from either him to her or her to him.

Fall 2011

W
hat happens next is far less formal, far messier, far more terrifying, and the whole time she wishes she didn't already know that only bad things will come in the end. Because even during and then after, even when the first intimations of what must be pre- and then present and then postcoital bliss settle in to dull the sharp edges of her brain, she still knows what she's done.

They fall slowly into one another. He slips underneath the blanket with her. He—by more degrees than her, with more deliberate force, though she also comes toward him—reaches up to touch her face. His hands aren't as warm as they've been in all the moments leading up to this one. They create in her a sharp intake of breath; her limbs loosen. His hands climb up under her shirt and she gasps as they reach under her bra and latch onto her breasts.

The whole thing happens in the same room where they've just sat with Jack, where they've been eating, where soon Annie will
sit when she comes home. All the windows are still open and the rain pounds on the roof, the AC pumps. Outside, a palm frond cracks free of its tree and slaps hard against the window, and Ellie startles underneath him and Jeffrey doesn't stop to ask if she's all right.

He's less gentle than she expected. He's quick and as he comes she wonders if he hasn't timed the whole thing perfectly, to be sure his wife doesn't walk in, to be sure he still has time to shower. To be sure that he has Ellie fucked and safely put to bed before his wife comes home.

Spring 2013

S
he brings her face up close to his, hoping he'll wake up and also grateful for his sleeping. She gets up quietly and pulls her pants back on. She puts on her bra and shirt and coat. She lets herself out of the apartment with one more glance at Charles naked, half of him under the covers, half of him twisted on top of them.

She goes straight down Amsterdam, block after block. At some point, she crosses through the park. She heads east, not thinking where she's going. She has on boots, her too-big bag slung over her shoulder; her feet start to ache from the pounding, one foot, then the other, the whole right side of her body stiffening with the extra weight of all her books. She stands on Broadway and watches the rows of lights change from green to yellow to red, then back again. Around Twentieth Street she decides that she needs water, more air. She covers the last few avenues to get to the river and finds a bench. She watches the water move and the moon bounce off it in bright patches. She's close to Caitlin's, thinks of calling her, realizes she can't.

Fall 2011

“I
don't want to hurt anyone.”She winces as she says it. She sounds like a little girl.

He stops smiling. He turns his legs off the couch and reaches for his boxers. Her hand slips from his. The weight of the cushion shifts up on her side as he stands.

She stands up, but she's not sure where to go. She pulls her clothes on. Her sweater reaches down to the middle of her thighs and she stands on tiptoes, wanting to seem larger than she is. She shakes her head and her hair's a mess around her shoulders. She gathers it with her free hand and ties it on top of her head.

She looks at him once more before she escapes to her bedroom. There's something cruel and a bit sad that she hasn't seen before in the way his eyes are set. That's where Jack is different: he has something better in him. That's where Annie is.

Spring 2013

“I
got an apartment,” says Stephen. Maya's been walking around all night. This is the second morning in a row that she's come home after sunrise.

She wants to ask how long he's been looking. Where else her husband's been while she's been with Charles. She feels comfortable and calm next to him for the first time since long before their daughter left.

He tried at first, right after, when she hardly spoke, when she took leave from work, only answered when Ben called. Stephen would come and bring her back to bed with him when she'd wandered into Ellie's room; he'd wake her carefully, knowing that she startled easily, rubbing a foot or shoulder while whispering to her that it was him, that he'd just come to bring her back to bed. He would take her hand and lead her back under the covers. Sometimes he would even hold her briefly, staying silent as he did. Other times
he sat and talked, his body very close to hers, about nothing, really, just to keep her from brooding. But in the weeks or maybe months that he kept trying, Maya simply refused to listen, to feel better, to feel anything at all.

He'd made her laugh once, too early. They'd just had sex. She hadn't meant for it to happen. It was two months after Jack died. Stephen had reached for her and they'd both undressed. She'd felt him moving, slow and careful, the familiarity: his face, his hands, his mouth. She'd been relieved by how untouched she remained even as she felt herself start coming: her underwear still hanging on an ankle, her camisole still covering her chest. He'd slipped it up and kissed her stomach. She'd reached her hands up to his face and held it still. He came quickly. It had been so long. He'd dipped his forehead into her chest, still inside of her, “Like a fucking teenager,” he'd said.

And the way he'd said it: like he was sorry, embarrassed. Before she realized it, she'd laughed. And she'd been terrified by this, this moment. By feeling like all that had happened hadn't happened after all. She'd been terrified by the implication that they might somehow have moments when they didn't remember, that they might still get to live. She'd slipped out from underneath him, quickly, not willing to look at him. She'd pulled her clothes on, gone into Ellie's room. It would be months before she allowed herself to lose control like that again, to laugh, to smile accidentally. She wouldn't, in all the months that followed, let him reach for her like this again.

“Where?” she says now. They are New Yorkers. All that's happened, and she's curious about his choice of real estate.