Stay With Me (22 page)

We've both been pretending we aren't waiting for exactly this. In spite of my pointing out that I've only ever had sex in a "parental" apartment, Eamon has said he isn't prepared to bring me to his father's for anything beyond my company.

"There's an advantage to not being seventeen," he told me. "You still think about it all the time, but you're more in control of your actions."

And you have your own apartment. Which is about to be empty.

"So," I say.

"So," he says.

Thundering silence. And, then.

"Before we find ourselves there," he says. "If we find ourselves there," he adds. "Is there anything you want to ask me?"

"Urn, no," I say. "Should there be?"

"Well, yes," he says, but doesn't elaborate.

"Oh, I know, what's written on your ring?" I ask, sure this isn't what he means, but still curious.

He takes the ring off and hands it to me, saying, "It's supposedly Tibetan about how everything changes and that our bodies are an illusion, but for all I know it's gibberish."

I look at it, running my finger over the symbols as if they were Braille. Gibberish or no, it makes me think of this one special class we had during tenth grade. It was run by our biology teacher and she started it by talking on and on about how our bodies change and our needs and how to inform ourselves.

"I know what you want me to ask," I say to him. "It's about AIDS."

"That's how it starts," Eamon says.

I wait. He can consider himself asked.

He's not had an AIDS test for three years, he tells me, and I can certainly ask him to.

"You should, in fact, always ask," he says. "If nothing else, it gives you a stalling technique."

"A stalling technique for what?"

"You know, if you want to wait," he says.

"Oh, God, this again," I say. "You want to wait until I'm twenty?"

"Leila, no, not quite," he says. "Not really at all, although, well, of course we can."

He doesn't sound very convinced, which I think is worth noticing.

"We'll wait until we know we want to," he says, adding with a laugh, "until you know. I obviously know."

"I've wanted to since we shook hands at Acca," I say, wondering if he really thinks I don't already know. "I was all,
wow.
"

One look at his face—startled and slightly embarrassed—tells me that this is the sort of information one keeps to oneself. It could be worse. I could have told him that my body is the one thing in life which I completely trust.

It breaks out in hives when unhappy. It demands that I eat food I love on a daily basis. In spite of the needing a bra issue, it looks nice in certain clothes. My body's beating heart and coiled bliss were what told me that being in a dark theater was the closest I would get to heaven. The chronic headache that faded after months with my tutor let me know I might find a way to be dyslexic and live. Out here in the world.

My body gets up every day and falls asleep when it's had it. It's my best self and mine to keep or share. Waiting won't change that.

"You were all, wow?" Eamon asks, looking a bit recovered.

"I think the words I used were zing-zang-zoom," I say, and we are back to flirting, which is nice, as I hadn't known you could do that with your boyfriend.

"My words were please, please help me find a way to ask this girl out," he says. "And all I had to do was read a book."

Right, of course. He read that book so he could date me. It wasn't to be nice or because he was interested. I totally missed that. I wonder what else he's done with a motive I didn't see.

I was badly prepared by that biology class. In theory, it sounded easy. And this is fairly easy because it's with Eamon. But what if it was with someone you didn't know as well? Is that the point? That you only sleep with someone you can have the talk with? That seems reasonable, but only in theory.

"Does everyone have this conversation before?" I ask. "About waiting and stuff?"

For once I'm glad that I don't have the right words, because other than AIDS I'm not sure what I mean by
stuff.

"It's supposed to happen naturally," Eamon says.

Ben insisted on talking about it months before we needed to because his brother told him that if I got pregnant, his life would be over. He made me feel like I was putting him in danger. And then, when it was time, I was the one who had to say,
Wait.

"It's a talk women usually start," Eamon says. "Which explains why I'm doing it badly."

I think of the things I've learned by accident—when to accept jewelry and what to order—and know I'm glad to be learning how to negotiate the where, the when, and the importance of sex.

"You're doing fine," I say.

"Good, thanks," he says. "So are you."

"Will we be graded?" I ask.

"We'll be judged," he says. "That'll be enough."

Clare gives me a new set of rules. I cannot spend the night with him. I need to check in with her more often about where I am. The minute I look unhappy or if, once school starts again, my grades slip, this is over. Also, I do realize, right, that it's not going to last forever. Not because Eamon is a bad person, but that without
a certain commonality
that being
roughly
the same age provides,
the odds are against it.

"I'm not thinking about forever," I tell her. "It's okay to plan for now, right?"

"Of course," Clare says. "And you know, it says a lot of good things about him that he likes you. I just want you to be prepared."

"I have college and work and all of that to prepare for, to last forever," I say.

When it ends, as he says it inevitably will, or if it ends, which is how I prefer to think of it, preparing won't help me.

"Just don't get hurt," she says.

"Not on your watch, huh," I say.

"No, I mean not ever," Clare says. "Love's hard. Be careful."

I hug her because even if I can't follow the advice, it's a long way from the elegant kindness which used to be the only thing she gave me.

I don't know if this counts as preparing, but I find myself forming a new picture of how I'll wind up. No sitting in a café and no eating cake this time, although there are books, but only ones I love. In this new end of my particular story, I have an apartment. It has plants, a well-stocked kitchen, photos of the lost hotels, and a cat. From this place, I go to work, although I can't see yet if it's for movies, TV, or theater. While in the apartment, I conduct my life without grades, judgments, or warnings.

E
AMON'S BODY HAS A TEXTURE
and a quality that is different from any I would have imagined, if I had thought to imagine such a thing. And then, for rather a while, I don't think. Things happen which I had not thought could occur with someone else in the room. It's as if he has been practicing on my body for as long as I have.

When my thoughts finally return, they are of the churches in Poland, with their great, open spaces reserved for those who want a sacred quiet. Of the care taken in everything from the benches to the altar. The oddness and beauty of a hush that almost lets you hear your own blood.

"A cathedral?" Eamon asks.

He is by the end of my description getting me some ice water. I now understand how you know when you want to and with whom. It must be this lack of doubt that's making me think of church.

"Yes," I say, still on the bed.

I can't quite believe all the different ways my body is soaring and humming. In a second I will put on my shirt and underwear and go stand in front of the air conditioner.

"I don't think I've ever been told that," he says, bringing the water and my clothes back to the bed. "Here, let me."

No one has helped me into my clothes with this level of gentle attention since I was five.

"What did they tell you?" I ask him.

He kisses my shoulder. "Church is great, it's definitely the best."

There's such a gap between the images I carry in my mind and what can actually be found in the world. Which is why it takes a few visits for me to see how similar Eamon's apartment is to the one I've been imagining. It's smaller and in a less good neighborhood, but it's clean, full of books and has French movie posters hanging on the walls. In the kitchen, he keeps bottles of water, tuna salad with olives, and plastic containers of sliced cantaloupe, which I eat with my fingers.

"Do you speak French?" I ask, chinking of Paris, where the Abranels first lived after leaving Egypt.

"I've no second language at all," Eamon says. "Mostly this was a cheap and easy way to decorate."

The place in L.A. is nicer, he says. Less crowded, more sun, better view. The reason he keeps this apartment is because while no one would ever choose to live so close to Avenue D, he can't bring himself to let go of the lease. The rent's very low, although more than it was eight years ago when he first moved in.

"You didn't go to L.A. right after school?"

"My first job was running errands for the writing staff on a soap opera," Eamon says. "It was worse than the job you already have for Charlotte. At least you get to answer the phone."

For the soap opera, he researched fatal illnesses, amnesia, adoption laws, and prenuptial agreements. At night, he wrote spec scripts for his favorite shows and sent them out until he got a real job. It sounds like a great time.

"Why television?" I ask.

A direct question about work. Old habits are often the best ones.

"I'm good at it," Eamon says. "I understand what works and what doesn't."

"You didn't want to write short stories?" I ask, thinking of the Fitzgerald stories full of rich and beautiful people losing their precious blonde girls.

It occurs to me that they were the first things I enjoyed reading and that I probably panicked at the novel because my tutor wouldn't shut up about how I wasn't reading
properly.
There were things in
Tender Is the Night
that I did like without understanding fully. Next time, I'm going to like what I like and let understanding fall where it may.

"No short stories," he says, arranging tuna on a cracker and offering it to me. "I do what I do."

"It is what it is," I say.

Of course Rebecca would be here. In some ways, I have him because I lost her. Best not to think about, I know, but hard to ignore.

"That's a little embittered for my taste," he says. "It's more I do what I do because I'm lucky and I like it."

Even if I didn't already have other reasons to like him—to love him, which I have managed to do in spite of its being an
all wrong
relationship—this particular statement would seal the deal.

What's left of the summer melts away so easily that even Rebecca's birthday feels like a bump sailed over instead of a mountain with frightening proportions. The last long weekend at the beginning of September brings the start-over feeling that always comes with packs of paper and three-ring binders. Although school is not where I shine, I like the little rituals it involves. New shoes, sensible skirts, cotton sweaters, and a class schedule.

On walls which are the same but different, posters announce auditions, meetings, practice schedules, and sign-ups for things like the debate team. Ben likes to say that debates are where our school allows the closest thing to fistfights.
Liked
to say it, that is. Once upon a time he said it to me.

Apparently our spat on the phone was not enough. I have, thanks to my best friend and former boyfriend, become a rumor at school. Girls I barely know now approach me as if we've been in the habit of keeping each other updated about all that is important. From things they say about their own experiences with men, dating, and sex, I can tell they think they know something about me. Something which is probably not quite true.

I set out to discover what kind of information Ben has released into the school. He's done it rather well, and if it weren't about me I'd admire the method. It took a few well-chosen words to younger boys with sisters in my grade. It's the boys themselves who bring me up to date. They're the ones from seventh grade who think I'm so fun to look at.

And are now in the eighth grade, which they quickly point out before passing on what they know. I'm the new It Girl of Trash, they tell me, having practically forced myself on Ben only to move on to an
old guy.
Anyone who has met my
elderly
father knows I have issues no
normal guy
could resolve. I'll always want, they tell me, a boyfriend old enough to be my father.

Okay, this is so beyond yuck. It's just nasty enough to make me want a shower. There's no point screaming that Eamon is only fourteen years older than I am. And therefore
not
old enough to be my father. Gross.

"Is your dad really like, you know, your grandfather?" one of the boys asks me.

"No," I say, thinking of
Chinatown,
which Eamon and I watched the other night because this was
a classic I had to see.
"He's my father and my brother."

Draw a family chart explaining
that.
I'm overly pleased to have stunned them into speechlessness.

I decide to make myself too busy to dwell on the implications of what Ben has chosen to stress and immediately find that I'm busy without any effort. For the first time ever, I'm genuinely caught up in my classes. Raphael is thrilled to be helping with precalculus, and I start to see how shapes really do come out of those equations. They're totally connected, the way measurements and building plans are. In English we're finally reading the Chekhov plays, which gives me a chance to test my theory about rereading being more fun than it sounds. School is still hard, but I'm not navigating the fog so much as watching it part.

And, then, almost without warning, the anniversary of the attack on the city is upon us. Raphael decides to go to a church service being offered at St. Patrick's. He says that a lot of the people who died probably did believe in God, so who is he to be an atheist? This was their home too.