When I reached her, the nurse had upped her morphine, and from then on she was gone.
When my story ended, Sylvie closed her eyes. “You know, I said everything I wanted to say to my father, and he made his peace with me. But I never played opera for him while he was in bed,” she said. “That is such a fucking cool thing to do.”
Outside her building Sylvie declared, “It’s been a while since I slept with anyone.”
I just smiled stupidly.
“You’re quite adorable,” she said.
Her roommate was away for the weekend. It was a pretty standard grad school apartment, two tiny bedrooms, a kitchenette, a narrow hallway, and a sunken living room decorated with a nice plush armchair and couch that must have come from someone’s family. We passed out in our clothes for an hour or two. Then we slept together with them off. Undressed she was far sexier than her boyish clothes and awkward eagerness had forecast, and when she pulled me inside her, I felt irrationally as though I might have fallen in love. At around 4:00 A.M. I woke up sweating and startled from a nightmare. My mother wasn’t in this one. My father had died and I was sorting through his papers and clothes, and I was showing our apartment to a series of Realtors. I asked them each, Have you seen the view over Central Park? It took some effort to determine that my father was snoring in his bed a dozen blocks away, and my relief at this understanding was so overwhelming I wept uncontrollably. In the morning I was curious to find myself in a strange apartment and not in my childhood room. I heard car horns and voices outside, a doorman’s whistle. I felt tired still, but in a different way, as though I’d been drugged. I noticed then what wasn’t there. The buzzing. I stumbled over to the clock on her desk—9:34.
“You can go if you want,” she said from the bed.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I sort of trapped you here last night.”
There was something fragile in her eyes I hadn’t yet seen.
“I’d much rather stay,” I said.
She smiled and curled into her pillow. Her feet dangled from beneath the covers.
I slipped back into bed and drew her to me so that her warm back rested against my chest. I closed my eyes, and in seconds I was out. I slept as I hadn’t in years, through that whole snowy day, and when I awoke again, it was night. I threw on my pants and padded down the hallway, where I came across her reading a book on the living room sofa, legs curled beneath her. She glanced up at me. “It stopped snowing,” she said. “Shall we go get a bite?”
“Yes,” I said.
I grabbed the rest of my clothes from the bedroom. We bundled up and headed into the freezing night. On Broadway I felt the wind rip through my peacoat, all the way to my skin, and I was aware then that I had left the first stage of my life and was out in the world in a way I was never before.
Acknowledgments
There a lot of people I want to thank for their help during the writing of this book. The editors who published these stories and offered their sage advice: Jordan Bass, Hannah Tinti, Carol Edgarian, Dave Eggers, Kaui Hemming, Ed Schwarzchild, Evelyn Somers, and Michael Nye. My mentors and fellow writers inspired me and kept me on course: Tobias Wolff, Doug Unger, John L’Heureux, Nancy Packer, Frank Conroy, James McPherson, and Marilynne Robinson. I also want to thank Dan Chaon, Justin Cronin, and Jim Sullivan for their long and ever inspiring friendship. Jason Roberts, Ryan Harty, Eric Puchner, Peter Orner, Keith Scribner, Akhil Sharma, and Ray Isle have been trusted members of the inner circle. Great thanks to Anika Streitfeld, Laura Fraser, Elizabeth Bernstein, and Po Bronson for their close reads and their fellowship. David Berman, John Swomley, and Mark Weiner read countless drafts and offered brotherly love and advice. With great appreciation I want to thank the National Endowment for the Arts, the great women and men at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and my colleagues and inspiring students at California College of the Arts. David Dodson, Sandra Murray, and Shaye Hester lent me beautiful and quiet places to work. Lisa Barbash, Joy Gould Boyum, and Carol Lamberg gave their love and belief. The tireless and generous Ellen Levine was there from the start. I also want to thank the brilliant and warm-spirited folks at Ecco, especially Dan Halpern, Karen Maine, Michael McKenzie, and the remarkable Lee Boudreaux. Thanks to my parents, Joe and Heather Barbash, and to Hilary, for all and everything.
About the Author
TOM BARBASH is the author of the award-winning novel The Last Good Chance and the nonfiction book On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11; A Story of Loss and Renewal, which was a New York Times bestseller. His stories and articles have been published in Tin House, McSweeney’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other publications, and have been performed on National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts series. He currently teaches in the MFA program at California College of the Arts. He grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and now lives in Marin County, California.
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Also by Tom Barbash
Fiction
The Last Good Chance
Nonfiction
On Top of the World
Credits
Cover design by Steve Attardo
Cover photograph © by Joe Garrad
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publications in which the following stories first appeared: “The Break” in Tin House and Distinguished Story—Best American Stories; “Balloon Night” in One Story and on Selected Shorts; “Her Words” in StoryQuarterly; “Howling at the Moon” in Chicago Tribune (Nelson Algren Award Winner); “Somebody’s Son” in Press; “How to Fall” in Zyzzyva; “Letters from the Academy” in McSweeney’s; “January” in Greensboro Review; “Stay Up with Me” in Missouri Review; “Paris” in South Carolina Review; “Spectator” in Virginia Quarterly Review; “Birthday Girl” in McSweeney’s; “The Women” in Narrative, Best American Non-Required Reading.
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
STAY UP WITH ME. Copyright © 2013 by Tom Barbash. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-225812-0
EPUB Edition SEPTEMBER 2013 ISBN 9780062258366
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Tom Barbash, Stay Up With Me