Stay Up With Me (16 page)

She said a few more nice things about his father, about his sense of humor and the first-edition books she'd found on his shelves, but Henry wasn't listening.

“I think we should move in together,” he said.

She ran her finger down his sideburn as though he were an injured pet.

“There's an idea,” she said.

 

Alice heads up
to the counter now and orders a glass of wine and an espresso for Henry, so that he will stay awake with her. It is in this café that the two of them first met. It was after they'd both attended a screening at NYU, where Henry once taught a class for a former teacher of his who had pneumonia. Alice and a friend were talking about films in general and Henry offered them a few well-honed observations about Otto Preminger and John Cassavetes. Alice had long legs, ringlets of brown hair, and alabaster skin, with six small earrings circling one ear, and a little too much mascara around her large brown eyes. She seemed quite interested in Henry's opinions and countered with a few provoking ones of her own. She was slightly younger than him, twenty-five or so, and she had seen most of the movies Henry cherished and had read many of his favorite books. Before long they were spending entire weekends at Alice's place, staying up until four watching underground films Henry brought home from his part-time job at the film archive, or just messing around, and waking at noon. Some nights they'd hit a party thrown by one of Alice's friends, but they rarely stayed long and sometimes, after a cocktail or two, they'd sneak off to a back bedroom, or a bathroom or a stairwell. They learned how to keep their voices down and their eyes open, and were caught only once, by someone who was too high to care.

One night, as they entered a restaurant for a late-night supper, Alice in a tight satin T-shirt and narrow black skirt, hair pulled back in a spiky bun, Henry lazily self-assured in the tan suede shirt Alice picked out for him, Alice's hand in his rear jeans pocket, he paused to imagine what they must look like in their just-fucked bliss: like the kind of people you'd die to be.

 

Henry's thoughts are floating
in that time as he leaves the coffee shop with Alice and heads with her toward the blue-lit bar where they used to get tipsy together and make out. Henry hates the moment in which he wants her all over again, because it feels like regression, and so he treats her with a forged indifference, which he hopes will realign the balance of desire between them. They have far too much history to ever make this work, he thinks, but in certain moments, moments like this one, or on the occasional nights Alice decides to sleep over, he wonders. They are fluent in each other's faults and wounds and hypocrisies, and so sleeping together has the feel of sleeping with a failed part of themselves, like pornography with familiar dialogue.

He could teach a course on their maneuverings, he thinks, and yet he'd always get half of it wrong.

“There's no one I'm closer to in the whole world than you, Henry.”

“I feel the same,” he says breezily, before realizing it might be true.

He wants to tell her his theory—that the night at his father's had pushed them off course. Alice had witnessed Henry's future, or so he imagined, and so to alter that trajectory, she began needling him about finding a full-time job or selling one of the dozen screenplays he'd finished.

And she took heed of his subpar housekeeping, and his smoking, which Henry said he'd stop, but never did. He rebelled by smoking more, and allowing the plates to pile up. The question of their living together was never brought up again.

She asked him at a Burger King one night about his family when he was a kid, a softball tossed so he could give her something positive to hook into. He refused to describe aloud any of the happy scenes that he'd been playing over in his mind in order to get to sleep: the surf and turf barbecues, the Florida vacations, weekend parties on the Cape, rides in his father's white Mustang convertible, his mother reading him
Watership Down
when he was eight and to his thrill changing one of the rabbits' names to Henry. They felt too much like the right answers to an admissions interview.

“Like everyone else's,” he said.

And then a more unsettling memory came to him, of when he'd actually last spoken to his mother. She'd called from Albuquerque, New Mexico, from the house where she was raising two other children with a different husband, to tell Henry she loved him, and always would. It was late Thanksgiving night. Her voice felt so close, he was certain she was just down the block. “
Henry,
” she said, as though it hadn't been five years, as though they'd just been speaking. “
Are you awake?
”

Alice waited for him to say something, anything, but he only glared at her and lit another cigarette, staring at the match like he wanted to set the place on fire.

 

They're drinking whiskeys now,
seated across from each other in a booth. Alice smiles fondly. “It's so easy, isn't it?” she says.

“In some ways.”

“Remember the things we did in that bathroom?”

“That wasn't me,” Henry says.

“Funny. Well, he kind of looked like you. I was pretty hammered,” she says.

To be truthful, Alice was never as drunk as she pretended to be, was always in control, and always looking, watching, grading Henry, or so he believed.

“Remember when we sat on opposite sides of the bar and pretended we didn't know each other?”

“That I remember.”

“I kept sending you drinks.”

“And then you made me pay you back.”

“I guess I did.”

Henry sifts his drink and watches how the ice cubes catch the light from the bar.

“I was such an asshole to you, Henry.”

“Oh, I don't know. Who can tell about these things?”

“This was our place, and I shouldn't have come here with someone else.”

It takes him a moment to realize what she's talking about. He'd managed to put from his mind the afternoon she'd brought the ass-faced music executive here, and Henry had seen them through the side window.

“By then it didn't matter,” Henry says, but it had made him crazy seeing them flirting (and ear nibbling) like a scene from early Alice and Henry. He got wasted at a dive down the block and then shattered the window of a black Saab 93, the model of car he'd seen the date and Alice riding in the weekend before. He used a rusted metal folding chair someone had left on the street. Utterly senseless, especially since the car Alice's guy owned was blue.

Alice leans toward Henry now and runs her hand from his temple across the back of his head. Her index finger brushes a lock of hair behind his ear. He feels very sleepy. She pulls his face to her and kisses his cheek.

“Let's go back to your place,” she says.

On their walk to Henry's apartment, he thinks again of his father, and how rather than dismissing Alice's concern about his father, it might be better to tell her the chronology of events since that awkward visit, how Henry had put him in a managed-care facility, and how his father had become paranoid and frightened, but how for five full hours on his sixty-fifth birthday, his father had been himself at forty, and how he and Henry had laughed and reminisced together like lost best friends.

Alice and Henry hold hands up the stairs and as they enter Henry's clean apartment, it crosses his mind that maybe they could try things again, because it
was
easy in a way.

They sit on his bed and kiss, and then slip beneath the white down quilt. Alice asks him, “You don't think he's a lost cause, do you?”

“I haven't given up on him,” he says.

From her confused silence, he realizes she isn't asking about his father. It stumps him for a moment, and then he remembers.

“Oh, right,” Henry says. “He'll come back.”

“Weird place to bring it up, I know. But I kind of like him. I didn't mean to be rude to him.”

And then neither of them says anything for a while.

She places her arm across his chest. “You're so
good
for me, Henry,” she says. “You really are.”

He feels very tired, and then very cynical, like someone who buys a car and then learns the engine is dead. He turns into his pillow then and lets his eyes close.

After a while, he hears her softly whispering his name, “Henry . . . Henry?”

“What?”

She moves his hand between her legs.

“Do you want to?” she says.

“Let's go to sleep,” he says, and turns away from her.

“I want to,” she says, spooning him. “No one gets me like you do.”

He thinks of booting her out, though he has neither the energy nor the inclination. The heat kicks on again with a clank and hiss.

He will move from New York, he thinks. There is nothing to keep him here other than his father, and he can come back to visit, and monitor his care by phone, from a distance—but he will not stagnate here another year. His father will be happy for him. He thinks of places he can go, Boston, or Los Angeles where he has contacts, and the sort of man he would like to be when he gets there.

“It's all for the best,” he says to Alice, and tries to explain why, but in his sleepiness he loses the strand, nods off in midsentence, and drifts back to the dream:
A sand dune and the smell of seaweed. His tanned and healthy father carrying a bucket of mussels his mother would use for bouillabaisse. The cousins are over and in the back of the house Henry has built a fort out of milk crates.

“Henry,” the voice says again. “
Henry
.”

But he won't come back for her this time.

She keeps speaking, or maybe she's only speaking in his dream, but likes that he can leave her like this, that he can find a place away from her.

“I'm
sorry,
” the voice says now. It isn't Alice anymore.

“Say it again,” he says.

“I'm so sorry, sweet Henry.”

“Of course you are.”

Paris

K
istler's second winter
in upstate New York was a season of fires, snowstorms, and deaths. There was a killing down in Granby where two boys, barely eighteen and flying on acid, shot an old man in the head. There were three stabbings—husbands and wives having problems—and a fire at Bodley High School that put seventeen children in the hospital. The gusts outside were so strong one of the firefighters was blown fifty yards through the air from a ladder. A priest in Albion was charged with molesting four altar boys, a seven-year-old was knocked flat between the frosted wheels of a '78 Cadillac, and an old woman threw herself off a bridge into Onondaga Creek.

Kistler covered the stories closely; he talked to the families and tried to stay clear when people asked him to, when they wanted to be left alone. But more times than not they told him what they were feeling and what they thought of a world that had come down so hard on them. They read his pieces at wakes, asked him to calling hours, seated him with grieving cousins and siblings. It was the poorest county in upstate New York, rural to the core, and still they made him feel like family. He was not a religious man, but there were times when his job felt like a calling.

 

In March, during a
news lull
on the cops beat, Kistler was moved to night meetings and features. They buried his work on the regional page and his mind started to drift. He'd begin an interview and then daydream. He'd be miles away and the person would be talking and then Kistler would see a hand waving in front of his face—“Hello,” they'd say, “anybody home?” or “Have you heard enough?” He'd look at his pad and he wouldn't have a single quote. He might not have turned on his digital recorder. It was even worse at the meetings they asked him to cover. He knew what happened at these things was important, that a shift in zoning laws or problems at a sewage treatment plant were matters people cared about, but it felt too much like taking dictation.

In the office, when he was bored, he'd pore through a book that had been left by his predecessor in the bureau, a photo-diary by a Danish journalist with a long braided beard who spent five years in American slums with junkies, prostitutes, and transvestites. There were dark shadowy photos of couples shooting up in stairwells, two boys beating an old man in an alleyway, a sharecropping family with torn, soiled clothing squatting in the corner of a sloping shack. The book had a far-reaching arc to it, a design and scheme, and a beating heart, Kistler thought. It made his work seem trivial and pointless. This was the world the politicians had forgotten about. Kistler could not shake the feeling that he too was letting someone down.

 

The week after
the county's budget talks—an edge-of-the-seat affair—Kistler got the idea to write town profiles, to roam the back roads of moribund hamlets no one ever bothered to explore. Most of the county was agricultural, but not everyone farmed. Migrants turned profits for a few wealthy landowners, but the smaller granges had foreclosed. The major industry had revolved around the rail lines, which died sixty years ago. In hamlets like Williamstown, Paris, and Albion, more than half the people were unemployed. Kistler wanted to shake things up, to depict a way of life few people ever saw. There was an important story in rural poverty, one the big media outlets never covered, one of neglect, isolation, and domestic violence.

He could see the harbingers when he pulled through town to the Paris diner: scarred paths overgrown with honeysuckle thickets, a rimless backboard in a weed-filled playground, two children hurling a ball where a hoop should be.

Inside the diner, four men in flannel shirts sat at a table in the corner, under a shelf of mildewed trophies. Northern European faces, Kistler guessed. High cheekbones, sturdy jaws. Kistler ordered a beer and walked with it over to their table.