Stay Up With Me (11 page)

I went after work to the Museum of Natural History, and I coursed around my favorite spots, the whale and the dinosaurs, and the Pygmies. I tried to make it fun, so that it would be a story I'd tell my friends—
You know what I did?
I went to a museum by myself and you know what? I had a blast
. And they'd think—She's going to be just fine. I've always liked seeing people alone in museums, jotting down notes, lingering at a painting or a piece of Mayan pottery. I liked the idea that I could be like that. But I began to feel very self-conscious, and I wanted to get to a phone so I could call Mitchell. I had left my cell phone at home so I wouldn't be tempted.

 

I hightailed it through
the park.
It was November and fairly cold, and you could see smoke emerging from the mouths of the bundled-up joggers and shoppers who passed by. I began to think that going out without a phone had been a mistake. I wondered,
What if he calls?

He called,
I thought. Or stopped by to make up and I wasn't there. Convinced that this would happen, I stayed in the next few nights watching DVDs. I chose ones I thought would distract me, like
The Matrix,
which with my diminished concentration I couldn't really follow—people in pods, and a world that might or might not exist, and Keanu Reeves in a black coat taking pills and shooting people up in what looked like the entrance to a bank.

At eleven the following Sunday night, I called Mitchell and told him that if he came over and we slept together it didn't have to mean anything.

Brilliant move.

It was two weeks before I heard from him. And over those nights it was like I imagine life must be in a methadone clinic—cold sweats and a soul-shriveling restlessness—but this is nothing new. Everyone in every country of the world has bushwhacked through this. It probably didn't help that we slept together twice more. I have no explanation other than that both times I believed we were back together, though he explicitly told me (“Are we
clear
on this, Jen?”) we weren't. When I left at three and searched for a cab, I did this thing where I dug my fingernails, and one time a pencil, into my arms, the way I would as a little girl when the doctor gave me a shot and I wanted to divert the pain. I saw my reflection once in the wide-angle mirror of my apartment building's lobby. My hair was squashed and matted and my arms were blotched with little red cuts. I looked like a junkie with shitty aim.

 

Under the silky light
of a storybook moon, the four of us walked back through the cold to the B and B. The proprietress was at her desk when we arrived and she asked us for our breakfast preferences. She handed us sheets of pale green paper with an impressive list of food and beverage selections. I circled grapefruit juice and pancakes, and bacon, and then thought better of it and crossed out the bacon, and then wrote out the word
bacon,
and then wrote the word
Yes
next to bacon, so they would know I wanted it. What the fuck. I asked for a pot of coffee—it said a cup or a pot, and I liked the idea of someone brewing a whole pot just for me.

 

We turned in our
lists
and then we lingered in front of our room. A dog barked from downstairs. I thought Amanda might ask the men in and I would have gone along with it, but it was better we went our separate ways. The rooms were small and one of us might have felt trapped. We could hear their voices through the walls though we couldn't make out what they were saying, even when we listened through the water glasses.

 

At the mountain
the next morning I was the lone member of our foursome who had to rent equipment. In the rental shop I began to feel jittery. I was a car ride away from my phone. I saw a couple getting their skis fitted, and it occurred to me that Mitchell might have a new girlfriend by now. And then I thought,
What if they're here?
Or
What if I run into them?

When I returned outside, Roland was waiting for me. He said Kevin and Amanda hadn't wanted to wait but that they'd meet up with us at lunch.

“You'll be bored to tears,” I said.

“I won't in the slightest,” he said, and then I remembered this was a
singles
trip. It now felt awkward, the idea of skiing all morning with Roland the racer, who'd start guiding me through my intermediate turns like I was twelve. But there was no other choice really, so I decided to make the best of it.

We began one of those personal résumé conversations, and for the first trip up it went well enough. But on the second ride I drew back, like I was spoken for, which, of course, was absurd. I encouraged him to tell more stories of ski accidents he'd witnessed or heard about. By our third run I was convinced I would die on the mountain—that I would hit a tree, or land on a jagged rock formation, or fall a few thousand yards head over heels until my lifeless body came to rest in a pile of white.

I fell five times before lunch, twice face-first because I'd crossed my tips, and in each instant Roland was there to carry my lost ski to me and say encouraging things like, “You were really
feeling
it there.”

I couldn't have been much fun, as I drifted more than once on our chairlift rides into a private theater wherein I was screening a movie of me and Mitchell in Cape May, when we stared at the sky until five and then slept together in our bathing suits on a lounge chair on our hotel room deck, next to a pitcher of daiquiris. We barely moved the whole day and in those hot dreamy hours something in me altered. Mitchell slipped out that evening and didn't come back for two hours. I remember heading out in my bare feet searching for him down side streets and through shop windows. I had a panic attack, sweats and heart palpitations, until I saw him again two blocks from the hotel in his tight black T-shirt and jeans, carrying two clear plastic boxes with steaks and mashed potatoes from a restaurant. He was perplexed by the sight of me out on the sidewalk, with no shoes, in just a T-shirt and my bikini bottom.

“Where were you going?” he asked.

“I thought you weren't coming back.”

He stared in disbelief.

“Do you have any idea how twisted that is?” he said.

 

Toward the top of
the lift
we saw Amanda and Kevin on the slope below us. Roland yelled out, “Yo,
Devil Dog
!” and Kevin looked up. I decided to yell “Yo,
DeManding
!” but Amanda kept carefully carving out her Jacqueline Kennedy turns, for our benefit. Roland pointed to his watch, which meant we'd meet in the lodge. Kevin nodded and then flew across the hill, with his arms gracefully spread out like some sort of snowboarding angel.

 

That night we planned
to hit the heated pool and Jacuzzi at a newly remodeled resort. All the single young professionals would be there and there were supposed to be drinks and a DJ. Amanda, who spent an hour every afternoon at the gym working on her quads and glutes, was excited. I really didn't feel like getting into a pool with strangers and drinking, and hanging about in a bikini.

I checked my cell phone when I got back: another message from my mother and one from 24-Hour Fitness asking me if I'd dropped my membership.

 

Amanda was upset
that I was going to miss the pool party and she said it would throw off the chemistry of the whole weekend. And wasn't I interested in Roland?

“He's about a billion times smarter and handsomer than
what's-his-name
.”

She said she really liked this guy Kevin. They'd talked the whole day about his wife's death, and they'd broken through some barriers. She said he was a pretty remarkable and resilient guy. And I thought there was something pathetic and even ghoulish about using a conversation about a man's dead wife's brain aneurysm as a way to get him to like her, though I stayed silent because over the years I'd used my own methods to get people to like me.

I said I was getting dinner alone, and that I might watch a pay-per-view movie on television.

“There are no pay-per-view movies,” she said testily. “It isn't a Holiday Inn.”

“Then I'll read,” I said.

“That sounds really fun.”

“If it isn't, I'll know where to find you.”

“Oh, come do this with us, Jen. It's going to be such a blast. It'll be
good
for you. You're not going to have a lot of chances like this.”

I nearly said something very unkind to Amanda, but I knew she just wanted us to be better friends and that I was letting her down.

“Maybe I'll come by later,” I said.

 

I went out
to a nearby restaurant by myself and ate a bad Cajun chicken sandwich and a Caesar salad with around a half gallon of dressing on it. The TV that hung over the bar played sports, college basketball from some place in the Midwest. Lots of corn-fed white boys. The waiter asked me where I was from and I lied and told him “the Hawaiian Islands.” I have no idea why I said that. And why not Hawaii? Why
the Hawaiian Islands
? He told another waiter who came by and said he was planning his honeymoon and wanted to know where in Hawaii to go. The Big Island, I said, because I'd heard it was the nicest and he seemed nice and I wanted to give him the best information I had. I tipped my waiter twenty dollars because I'd lied to him. At this rate I was likely to be broke by the time I got to lunch the next day.

I thought about heading over to the party at the hot pool. I really did. And maybe it would have been fun but I kept running the wrong film in my mind, of us all in the water, Amanda on someone's shoulders trying to pull another woman off some guy. And me feeling tired, and unhappy, and fat, and wet.

The TV didn't really work. And reading felt too lonely. The longer the night went on, the more I dreaded skiing again with Roland, and the more I thought it was likely he'd take me on a run beyond my ability. It had turned much colder since it rained earlier in the evening and I knew that meant ice. The whole thing felt wrong to me anyway—Amanda and her widower; Roland the ski instructor, sweet as he was, and so dauntingly beautiful on the slopes, either getting me killed, or following after me all day long like a doting dad. I could insist on skiing alone, but that would be the most depressing, I thought, and so I decided to leave.

 

I wrote a note
to Amanda and told her to apologize to the men, and to the trip organizers—I could hear her lecture—
These trips are important to me,
and
Everything was going so well. When are you going to start acting like a member of the human race,
or whatever.

I didn't have a ride, so I took a taxi to the bus station. There was a nine o'clock bus that would get me in at 4:30 in the morning.

Odd choice to be making, I suppose.

I bought the ticket, and I got onto the bus. A couple of other skiers followed, but mostly the bus was empty, and it smelled like spilled beer. A man in a camouflage army jacket was sleeping in the front seat, and a mother and daughter were holding a very intense conversation in the middle of the bus. I sat in the back. I had two books with me, but I was far too distracted to read. I tried to go to sleep but mostly I just stared out of the window feeling sorry for myself and making new blotches on my arms. At one point I said loudly, “Get
the fuck
over it,” and the mother turned around, and glared at me.

“What the hell do you know?” she said.

 

I made it to
my apartment
without further incident at 5:15
A.M.
There were no messages on either the home phone or my cell, which I'd turned off, and then on, and then off again, all night.

I slept until two. I had terrible dreams. Keanu Reeves was in one. He was standing atop a cliff and held his arm out to save me, and instead I pulled him down and we both went tumbling until we dropped into a freezing lake.

When I checked my cell, there was a message from Amanda. Her tone had the crisp exasperation of someone lodging a complaint with an airline. I had left my skis and boots in the closet—and she was going to have to return them and retrieve my credit card.

 

A week went by
and then the new intern at work told me there was a man on the phone asking for me. It was Roland, calling to check in. Hearing his voice made me feel happy. I apologized for leaving the ski trip so abruptly, and he said, “You can make amends by going to dinner with me.”

I surprised myself by saying that I'd like that.

 

That Friday we went
to dinner at a Peruvian place in the Village. I barely recognized him outside the entrance to the restaurant. He had on a woolen blazer over a black, collared shirt. His hair was thick and brushed back from his face, which was clean-shaven. He started to apologize for his accident stories and I wouldn't let him. I wanted to talk about other things.

He walked me all the way uptown to my apartment building afterward and hugged me good night. He might have been hoping for more, or maybe I was. I felt like a different and improved person, at the awkward end of a good first date.

“I'm sorry I got into all that at dinner,” I said. I told him a little about Mitchell. Maybe more than a little.

“Don't sweat it,” he said. He said it was normal to go through what I was going through, that he read once that an abandoned rhesus monkey will sleep sporadically, drink sparsely, and lose all interest in food.

“Their immune system breaks down,” he said. “They get sick easily; and they die in great numbers.”

“I bet you use that line on all the girls,” I said.

“Only the bookish ones,” he said.