Stay Up With Me (3 page)

The night they went
to the theater,
the mother went to a late showing of a trite Tom Hanks movie that was set in her neighborhood and made it look like a decent place to fall in love. When she returned, she was pleased to hear the sound of the stereo, of the two of them staying up late. She peered in before she went to sleep at midnight, and they were together on the couch looking at an atlas. The boy was showing her where he planned to travel over the summer. The mother pictured them in a curtained train compartment, rolling through the Romanian countryside, poring over a guidebook.

“Good night, you two,” she said.

And her son blew her a kiss.

When she woke again, it was two thirty or maybe three and the music was playing still, or again. She went to get herself a glass of water. They were talking, and though she still felt hazy and half asleep, she realized it wasn't the girl's voice she was hearing. The girl was gone, and somehow he'd managed to get the hostess to come over for a nightcap. Tag team.
Here come the reinforcements.
It gave her a terrible sinking feeling. She retreated into her room and tried to remind herself that it was his life and that he was over eighteen and could do what he wanted. But the more time passed and the more she thought of the two of them in there, the angrier she got. Not merely on her own behalf, but on behalf of the girl. It was so ugly and pointless what the boy was doing, so soulless. She tried to go to sleep again and forget it all but she couldn't help placing herself in the girl's shoes. She might be thinking of the boy right now, and of the countries they'd visit together. And tomorrow when they went out again, the boy would tell her nothing of what he'd done with the hostess, nor would he seem different.

She wouldn't abide this. Not in her house, and not with a woman she'd come to blows with, no matter whose fault it had been. She walked to the study and threw the doors open.

“I want you to get
the fuck
out of here,” she said.

But there was no one in the room except the boy. He was alone watching TV. There was a bowl of ice cream before him and a can of 7UP.

He seemed not angry then but frightened, the way one might feel while watching a spouse put her hand through a glass door panel, which her husband had watched her do. It happened in the period when she'd thought he'd been screwing around. He hadn't, though he admitted he'd come close once. The boy never knew anything of this.

Now he was walking toward the mother. She was crying soundlessly, and she felt as though she might never stop.

“My God, Mom, what's going on? What's this about?”

On the TV the woman, Barbara Stanwyck, was running her fingers through Henry Fonda's hair. The mother had seen the movie a half-dozen times, but she'd managed not to recognize the dialogue.

“I thought . . .”

“I know . . . I know,” he said. He said it as one might say it to a child who'd thought she heard a ghost.

She didn't have to explain anything, she realized; he knew her better than she did right then and maybe he had for a while. Her son. It was as though her irrational behavior had promoted him to the role of the wise and clement adult. And while she felt significant pride in this, she feared now that he'd plan to spend his coming vacations in Seattle, or Europe, or Colorado. He was unlikely to spend another Christmas in New York with her.

“Come on,” he said, as though reading her thoughts. “Let's watch the rest of this.”

“All right,” she said, and she let him fill her in on what she'd missed.

Before the end of the movie, he fell asleep. She turned the TV off and threw a blanket over him.

It was four now, one o'clock in Seattle. There was an off chance he could still be up, but of course there was no guarantee he would be alone. She imagined calling him, and him consoling her with his new girlfriend in bed next to him, and afterward, he'd say, “She's still having a rough time of it.” And it would even score points with the woman who would see how gracious and tolerant he was. She thought then about the hostess, because it was she who had started all this. What was it the mother had hated so much? She was no criminal, and she hadn't treated the boy badly as far as the mother knew.

She had simply seemed too desperate, too lonely, too hungry. Her needs were too naked. The mother could imagine someone like that consuming her boy, swallowing him up, before he had the chance to see the world and become the person she knew he could be. He snored softly now, with the beginnings of a cold, she knew, because when he was a child it would begin that way: a mild sawing sound, a sniffle the next morning, and a temperature the following night. She would douse it with soups and juices, and she would secretly enjoy the days he was too sick to go to school and had to stay home with her. It was in the time they'd first moved to the Village, in that odd little apartment on Tenth Street with the stained-glass window and the false fireplace they bottom-lit to resemble embers, and the acres of built-in bookshelves, and the café down the street where they'd listen to bad poetry, and the tiny crowded market where she'd buy bread and fish. Her husband would be reading in bed, waiting for her. She would watch her sleeping son for ten minutes or twenty, and marvel at all his possibilities, a life that young, so full of wonder and unstained hope.

Balloon Night

T
imkin's wife left him
during a blisteringly cold Thanksgiving week, two nights before their annual Balloon Night party. There was no time for Timkin to call their guests and cancel; nor would he know where to call in many cases. It was the sort of event attended by people from all corners of their lives whether or not they could produce a fresh invite. Once invited always invited, he and Amy had said.

The Timkins had a three-bedroom eighth-floor apartment, on West Seventy-Seventh Street between Central Park West and Columbus, the balloon block. It was where those cloud-size cartoon characters for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade were inflated, the night before Thanksgiving, and nearly all the residents would open their apartment doors to anyone and everyone they knew. Timkin grew up in the apartment (which his parents had ceded to him six years earlier when they moved to Naples, Florida) and had attended his first balloon party at age six. Now he was thirty-four.

Timkin had been too depressed to tell anyone the dismal news, and in truth he had convinced himself that Amy would return, apologetic, or demanding an apology, which he would provide, and they would make up at dinner and in bed that night, and it would all blow over. He couldn't even remember what they'd fought about, only that it was insignificant and he had been right.

The first two days after Amy had walked out Timkin rode his bike around the island of Manhattan in a fog, dodging trucks and taxis, heading down to Battery Park, through Chinatown and the Village, and then up Sixth Avenue. He was at least in part on the lookout for Amy, but he did not go by the building where she worked. On day three he went in to his office and tried to keep busy, but mostly just stared at the phone, and composed on his computer the germs of letters to Amy, alternating fragments of forgiveness and bitterness.

 

The guests would begin
arriving at nine,
and so at six Timkin went by himself to the Pioneer grocery on Columbus to get Coke and Sprite and scotch and beer and wine, then over to Citarella for assorted cheeses and pâtés, a few flat bread pizzas, caviar, salmon, the oilier dill-covered kind they called
Grav Lox,
dips, crackers, bread and carpaccio, and pumpkin and pecan pie. Spent a fortune. But he could pull this off. He would make the best of a terrible situation, and he could tell them
something,
that he'd get through this, though he wasn't convinced he would. The balloons and the alcohol might be a distraction, no? Could you stay depressed with a decent scotch in your paper cup, and Underdog smiling overhead?

You could of course. And then he wondered: Did he have to tell them?

Eventually he'd need to, if the break were real. But telling everyone now was a bit like telling people you were pregnant one week after reading the home pregnancy test. So many things could change. And anyhow, would it harm anything, for the purposes of the party, to say his wife was away for a few days on business? Amy worked in advertising, on the account side, and was quite often away.

But away for Thanksgiving?

She'd be back on Thursday evening at around 6:30, Timkin decided, and they'd have dinner with Amy's parents on the East Side. She was heartbroken that she couldn't be there, he'd tell his guests, and they would all drink a toast to her.

It could work, Timkin thought. He pictured Amy arriving at Kennedy in her red wool jacket and then cabbing back to East Eighty-Fourth Street, and then he suddenly felt a warm surge of relief settle over him, which was very much like having her back. He could postpone his suffering for a night, why the heck not? He suddenly felt good, better than he had in weeks. And he went back to his bathroom to shave and dress, and put on his best game face.

First arriving were the Willises, a sportswriter for the
New York Times
and his wife, Sabrina, who owned a small absurdly expensive beauty salon in the East Twenties. They'd been better friends with Amy, so there was the risk they'd know. But the leaving had only just happened on Monday, and besides, Timkin and Amy had been notoriously out of touch with their friends lately, perhaps as a result of their feuding, or because their jobs had been so exhausting.

Jonah Willis covered college football, which meant he traveled a lot on weekends.

“The bad news is that Amy can't be here tonight. She's heartbroken,” Timkin said. “She's staying in a little Marriott in Cincinnati of all places.”

“Oh God,” Sabrina said. “They're really cutting back. I bet I know what she's doing there. She's making a P&G stop, isn't she?”

“You might know her better than I do,” Timkin said, smiling and fearing it might be true.

The apartment was immaculate. Timkin, after all, was the clean one of the two. Amy's untidiness had been an issue, but not a particularly significant one. Timkin liked finding the occasional book left out, or magazine article; he liked seeing where Amy had left off, and when they were first dating, he often tried to guess the last sentence she'd read before she put the book down. He'd tell her sometimes which one he thought and more often than not he'd get it right.

At some point she started telling him it was a different line or a different page altogether. And then she stopped leaving her books open just to avoid the conversation.

But the place was neat now. And there were still some of her things around, though she'd taken most of her clothes. Only one or two of her old coats remained in the closet, and Timkin wondered if the closet's relative emptiness would clue anyone in to what had transpired. He could say she'd taken a few coats with her on her trip . . . but that was a bit ridiculous, wasn't it? It wasn't a crime scene after all.

In truth, Amy had been happy lately, or happier than a lot of other times in the years Timkin had known her. She was taking classes after work, dance and French, painting and Pilates. And she was more confident and self-willed, Timkin thought. He encouraged her to follow her interests. She had taken him twice to her wine tasting class and on their way home the second time he had poked fun at the comically pretentious instructor. She appeared hurt by his comments, as though he'd insulted her and not the silly wine guy. “How about
you
take the class and when we go to restaurants, you can pick the wine. I won't mind,” he said.

“But I'll want you to know the difference,” she said.

Once he suggested she was pretending to like movies that secretly bored her and for two days she was notably distant from him. He'd only meant to tease her. Eventually she told him—in the morning as she left for work—“I respond to things that aren't obvious, and that doesn't make me fake or a bad person. I can't change what I like to suit you.”

But he did that
all the time,
he could have said. It was part of being a successful couple, he believed: the capacity to adapt.

 

“Can I open this
one?”
Willis asked. It was a bottle of eighteen-year-old Laphroaig Timkin had been saving for tonight, and he smiled.

“Dig in,” he said, happy for the chance to feel generous.

He had a nice-size scotch and the warmth of it—and the prospect of seeing all his friends and Amy's friends and their families tonight—made Timkin feel loved, and he allowed himself to believe that Amy might actually return tonight, that it wasn't out of the question. She understood the spirit of this event; she'd know how much it would mean to Timkin if she suddenly turned up. Just last year a former colleague of Amy's had done exactly that. She and Amy had a falling-out before the woman left the agency, but when they saw each other at the party, all was forgiven.

They embraced for several seconds. Timkin had watched this.

It could happen just like that, he thought.

“How's work?” Willis asked, and Timkin, who taught history at City College and wrote biographies, told him his prepared answer, that he was around halfway through the book, that the research was mostly done and now he had follow-up interviews and a good chunk of writing ahead. He might try to get out of the city to do it, upstate somewhere.

“Amy's going to let you get away?”

“What's good for the goose,” he said.

“I suppose,” Sabrina said. “You guys must go crazy spending that much time apart.”

“I don't like it,” Timkin said. “It's just a fact of life.”

He took another belt of scotch and then the doorbell rang. It was the Schwabackers from the fourth floor, Eric and Dana, sporty and blond. He was a lawyer and she was a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience, something with fruit flies. Every time she explained her work to Timkin his mind drifted out the window and across the park where it sat down at a restaurant somewhere on the East Side. A lot of people's stories about their work bored him, but he always asked about it anyway—better to never ask, no?