Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [84]
He stayed long enough to inquire after Zoë. He stayed long enough to be polite. And then, as if overcome with a sudden change of emotion, he left abruptly with a hasty “See you.”
His unexpected visit bewildered me. He’d never called. For two weeks I hadn’t seen or heard from him and now he asked me over as casually as if I were one of his dozen studio acquaintances.
“What’s new with our ever-wandering hero?” Everett asked. “He looked almost peevish. The drama unfolds with Jillian?”
“Everett,” I said wearily, “shut up.”
Zoë’s father mailed me a check for two months’ rent.
“He didn’t have to do that,” I told her, having talked her into a phone call. “I’m sending the money back.”
“He wants to give it.” She was breathing hard into the phone. Leg lifts. Her shin splints were worse, and she hadn’t been able to run since returning home. She did hours of calisthenics to de-stress. “It makes him feel useful. He needs something to make him feel useful.”
“If it makes him feel good.” In reality, I’d needed the money. Summer was coming and I’d been trying to save for the long months with no paycheck.
She finished her exercises, greedily drank a glass of water.
“How are Valerie and the baby?”
“They’re fine.”
This was the part of the conversation where Zoë would want Copenhagen news. She would inquire after everyone, indulge a moment in the normalcy of our lives. I provided detailed if not overly enthusiastic updates on Everett, on Lonnie, on the worst sentences from my students’ essays. When she asked about Eli I finally told her he’d moved out.
“What? When?”
I told her.
“Why?”
“He needed more space to work.”
“You didn’t kick him out.” It was more a warning than a question.
“Of course not. It was mutual. It was getting awkward, the two of us alone in the apartment together. I don’t think Jillian would have liked it.”
That last bit about Jillian was particularly deceptive. I’d practiced telling Zoë everything, but I couldn’t bring myself to make an issue of what I was trying so hard to pretend hadn’t happened.
“I guess it’s for the best,” she said.
When I asked how her father was doing she was quiet a moment. “He acts like he’s all right. But I know he’s not. It’s the way he stares sometimes, completely checked out. Hold on, he’s in the room.” She said something to her father. There was a pause. When she returned she spoke louder. “Amy, I found a manuscript. He keeps it in his desk drawer and it’s nearly a foot thick.”
“What’s he working on?”
“The story of his life? I don’t know; I didn’t read it. He usually writes quickly. It’s not like him to hold on to something like this … He hasn’t published for years.”
She’d spent most of college dealing with the idea of losing one parent, a fear she could share with the other; she’d always been close to her father. Over the last three weeks, however, she’d developed a new anxiety, the fear that the cancer would take them both.
When Eli said he was having “a few people” over he meant all of The Brewery staff and half the sculpture class. Kevin had arranged what furniture they had in rows before an old projector screen. People sat wedged hip to hip, girlfriends sat on their boyfriends’ laps. The movie was French and in black-and-white, two things that promised a long and tedious night.
I arrived late and sat in the back. To my right a folding table had been spread with pizza and plastic bowls of Cheez-Its and popcorn, the food men buy for Super Bowls and art openings alike. While Kevin cued the second film, I picked at the food. Beside me an undergraduate wearing a jumper intended for a seven-year-old was trying to impress a fellow artist with a description of her latest installation piece. I felt suddenly tired of the college scene: the same events recycling themselves over again, the flirtation masquerading as professional discourse.
As the lights went out a second time, Eli took the seat beside me. I kept my eyes on the screen.
“I’ll warn you now,” I whispered. “From back here it’s impossible to read the subtitles.”
“Trust me,” he whispered back. “It wouldn