Stay Up With Me Read online

  Sunday the sun comes out strong. The ground begins to thaw. I eat turkey at the Berners’. Mr. Berner eats a few bites of dinner with us and then heads back to bed.

  “I guess we’ve been pressing our good luck,” Mrs. Berner says. “He’s getting worse living here. He’s going downhill.”

  After dinner I bring out the papers. Mrs. Berner looks them over closely. She shuts me out for a while and I think for a moment she might lose her nerve and decide to stay. But then she looks up at me and smiles.

  “You might want to think about this awhile.”

  “I have,” she says. “Where do I sign?”

  I show her.

  “Now I give you this check for ninety thousand. You fill out a check for two thousand and make it out to me. That’s a transaction fee.”

  “Transaction fee. Okay.”

  “That leaves you with eighty-eight thousand.”

  “That’s plenty.”

  And then we have nothing to say to each other. I drink my hot chocolate and she drinks hers.

  Half an hour later I pull my coat on to leave.

  “Randall,” she says before I’m out the door.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “We want you to have those things. I wanted you to know that.”

  “What?”

  “The things you’ve been taking. We want you to enjoy them.”

  I feel dizzy suddenly. I can hear Mr. Berner coughing.

  “You’re welcome to have anything of ours you want. We don’t have anyone to give things to anymore. You know what that’s like?”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “I picture our things in your little apartment over the general store. I picture you taking them into your home when you buy one. You’ll have a nice home, one day. Maybe you’ll choose to stay around here. We’d like you to. We’d like you to think of us as your family.”

  “Thank you,” I say. I tell her I’ll help her move.

  “You’re not who you think you are,” she says before I can get away. “Give it time. I know. You’ll find your peace.”

  The door is open, but I stand still and seen before her, unable to move, overcome with a feeling I cannot name—the sense of being followed.

  “You think you’re stealing, but it’s yours, don’t you see? Always was. You’re forgiven, Randall. Money shouldn’t divide. The past is over and done.”

  It’s clear from her eyes she’s talking about someone else, someone she blames herself for losing years ago, but I pretend she’s talking to me.

  “We love you very much,” she says.

  “I know that,” I say.

  How to Fall

  I rode up to the snow-blessed hills of Vermont on a ski trip for singles. I did. Two overheated buses full of women and men between the ages of twenty-two and thirty drinking flavored vodka from plastic martini glasses, and trying to mask their awkwardness. My college roommate, Amanda, dragged me along, in part for company, but mostly to extract me from the ditch I’d dropped into since things ended with Mitchell. I was permitted to mention Mitchell once—for under ten minutes—Amanda said. The subject was otherwise off-limits.

  “Deal,” I said.

  “Let’s see,” Amanda said.

  There were a few more women on the trip than men, not by design, but two of the men had called in sick at the last moment and another—the one I decided I would have hooked up with—was in Florida arranging his grandfather’s funeral.

  A broadsheet was circulating with miniprofiles of all of us, and pictures of everyone but me (I’d signed on too late). Amanda quickly sized up the talent—dentist, doctor, actor, shrink . . . software engineer, sports agent, magazine editor . . . and she picked out two lawyers, Kevin and Roland, who worked for the same public interest firm and were sitting two rows back from us. Kevin’s hair was thinning and his gray eyes were slightly amused. Roland, who wore a pale blue ski cap, had a wide smile, the patchy beginnings of a beard, and attractive lines around his mouth. They seemed charming enough in our initial conversation, and if I pretended I was someone else, I could get through this, I thought.

  We were booked into a fairly large bed-and-breakfast—eight rooms, and Amanda arranged it so our room was next to the lawyers. It was around nine when we arrived. Killington, Vermont. We went straight out for dinner. There were other singles at our table, all perfectly harmless, but after they cleared the salads, we confined our conversation to the four of us. The lawyers were telling stories of spectacular ski accidents from their childhoods. Roland used to race. He’d had a nearly fatal collision with a tree when he was seventeen and lay in a coma for a week. They were certain he would die or end up a vegetable. “I think my brother had already made plans to move into my room.”

  He closed and opened his eyes as though reenacting it for us.

  “Then one day I just woke up.”

  “He transmogrified,” Kevin said.

  We waited for an explanation.

  For around half a year—while he convalesced from his broken leg and two broken ribs—all the murkiness and “fuckedupness” in his adolescent life disappeared, he said. His grades improved. He wrote a play (loosely based on his hospital stay) that earned him raves in the school newspaper, and he learned how to play the French horn. He read War and Peace.

  “It was as though I’d cleared out all the clutter in my brain and I suddenly had room for everything I’d wanted to do. It lasted until the summer after graduation.”

  Kevin refilled everyone’s wineglasses. We looked at Roland now, who seemed uncomfortable with the attention he’d drawn.

  “Then I went back to ripping off convenience stores,” he said. I believed him until the corner of his mouth turned up in a smile.

  “He was a God as a racer,” Kevin said.

  “I’m far more restrained these days,” he said.

  “His restraint would make your hair stand on end,” Kevin said. “I’m Mister Leisure out there. I snowboard with the high-school dudes.”

  “How old are you?” Amanda asked him.

  “Thirty.”

  “Have you ever been married?”

  Amanda was a financial analyst and accustomed to gathering information before committing her clients’ resources. I shot her a look.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Somehow I knew it,” Amanda said.

  “She died,” Kevin said. “Not from skiing.”

  “I’m so sorry. How did she die?” Amanda asked.

  “She had an aneurysm,” he said. “Listen, I don’t want to depress everyone. It was a while ago.”

  “Two years,” Roland said.

  “You poor, poor thing.” Amanda leaned toward Kevin with increased interest. “My uncle had cancer. He’s better now. They got to him early, I guess. How old was she?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “My God, that’s so young.”

  “It is.” He fidgeted with the clasp on his leather watchband. “Anyway, how long have you guys lived in the city?”

  “My whole life,” I said.

  “Five years,” Amanda said, about herself. Then she told them about my childhood. It was a sweet gesture, I suppose, though she mangled several details and made me sound fairly disturbed (and my father sound like a polygamist). While she was talking, I started to picture Kevin’s young wife a day before her death, booking a vacation she’d never take, or buying groceries she’d never eat, and then I remembered Mitchell and I realized he was at a secure distance now, and I felt calm, because when you got right down to it, what had happened to me? Nothing life-threatening. No coma, no aneurysm.

  I poured myself another glass of wine. Then two more, and we had shots of vodka after that, which Amanda said should be our last.

  We started telling jokes. Or maybe I just did. I told them the one about the city boy moving upstate. He gets invited to a party by his downstairs neighbor.

  “What’ll it be like?”

  “Oh, it’s going to be wild,” the guy says. “There’s
going to be some drinking, there’s gonna be some fuckin’; they’ll be some fightin’, and maybe a little dancin’.”

  “Who all’s coming?” the city boy asks.

  “Oh, it’s just going to be you and me.”

  I’m not sure why I told that one, or why I thought it was so funny. But the men laughed and Amanda didn’t.

  “So the first guy gets raped,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “That’s not it at all.”

  “So then what is it?”

  “It’s about false advertising,” I said.

  Roland raised his glass. “And that underneath it all we just want to drink, fuck, fight, and dance.”

  The night he broke up with me, Mitchell and I decided to sleep together one final time, and when he slipped out the front door in the morning, I felt surprisingly intact. I had the typical what-did-you-do-over-the-weekend conversations at the media distribution company where I work, accomplished a few basic tasks, and I thought, Maybe this’ll be easy. And then I thought, What does it mean if it’s easy? And then I started to call Mitchell to ask him what it meant. But I remembered the rule we made about not calling and so I hung up.

  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.