The History of Us (3 page)

“Rebecca,”
Marisa said.

“What?” Eloise asked.

“I bet it was
Rebecca,
” Marisa said. “That’s a big scene in that movie.”

“Marisa knows everything about every movie ever,” Noah said.

“Well, you work in Hollywood, right?” Eloise asked.

“I do,” Marisa said. She hesitated and said nothing more, probably, Eloise deduced with a glance at Noah’s resolutely neutral expression, because her job and the separation it required was a source of conflict between them. Eloise knew from comments Noah had made that he’d tried and failed to get Marisa to move to Cincinnati with him a year ago, when he’d taken the job at Wyett College, where Eloise was the chair of the History Department. The subject needed changing, because Eloise sympathized with Marisa but couldn’t say so, because she wanted Marisa to lose this fight. If Noah moved to be with her it would leave Eloise’s department without a specialist in Latin America and her with one less colleague who wasn’t certifiably insane.

“Do you like that beer?” she asked Noah, and he said he did and asked where she’d gotten it, so, glad of the excuse, she called Josh’s name and waved him over. Josh, her sweet-natured, reliable nephew, ever ready to deploy his endless resources of charm. He walked up wearing a smile. He said, “Hi, Josh Clarke,” and shook their hands, and Eloise watched Noah and Marisa lift their heads to meet his eyes, wondering if she’d ever get used to how tall he was, when once upon a time he had been so small. She said, “Noah wants to know where you got the beer.”

“Jungle Jim’s,” Josh said. “Have you been there?”

Noah shook his head.

“You have to go,” Josh said. “It’s this huge grocery store about a half hour north of us. But
grocery store
doesn’t even begin to describe it. It’s a grocery amusement park. It’s an acre and a half of everything from Amish butter to candies from Thailand. They have this international section along one wall that’s made to look
like shops in different countries—England, Italy, France. They have every kind of beer you could possibly imagine, and lots you’ve probably never heard of. Plus animatronic animals.”

Marisa looked at Noah. “How come you’ve never taken me there?”

Noah looked back in some surprise. “(A) You never want to go anywhere, and (B) I didn’t realize it was so awesome,” he said. He raised his beer to Josh. “Tell her more good things about Cincinnati,” he said.

Josh laughed. “Well,” he said. “We have a good ballet.”

“Oh, right,” Noah said. “Your sister.”

“His sister?” Marisa asked.

“Claire,” Eloise said. “She’s a ballerina. She started her training with the academy here. She’s actually about to leave for New York to dance in a company there. Her flight’s on Monday.”

“Wow,” Marisa said.

“I know, right?” Noah said. “There are a lot of artists here.”

“I meant, wow, she’s leaving for New York on Monday,” Marisa said. “Because that’s where you want to go if you’re a ballerina.”

“I guess they do think of New York as the big time,” Josh said, “but the company here is really good. One of the principal dancers is coming tonight. Claire’s former teacher. Or maybe she’s already here.”

“I don’t think so,” Eloise said. “But we’ll introduce you when she gets here. There’s also the symphony, and a good regional theater, and opera in the summer. Art-house theaters. Good music venues. Lots of bands come through.”

“You know the band the National?” Noah asked. “They’re from here.”

“That’s right,” Josh said.

“Have you been to Music Now?” Noah asked Josh. To Marisa he said, “That’s the festival the National guitarist curates. I told you about it.”

“I’ve been, but not to the last one,” Josh said.

“It was awesome, man, totally awesome. Joanna Newsom is a fucking angel. What kind of music are you into?”

“Oh, mostly that kind of stuff,” Josh said. He had reasons for changing the subject now, Eloise knew, but she wished she could have stopped him before he changed it back to Marisa’s job. She was, Eloise remembered as soon as Marisa said it, the assistant to a film producer—and though she answered Josh’s first few questions briefly and warily, with occasional glances at Noah, as soon as she got going on a script she’d just read it was all smooth sailing. The script had come in from a college friend of Anita—that was the producer-boss—and Anita had asked Marisa to read it and write a nice note, pretending to be her. Anita couldn’t bear to be the one to crush her old friend’s dreams, even if the note would be in her name, which was a point neither Eloise nor Josh understood but didn’t press. Anyway the script had turned out to be good! And now Anita was letting Marisa make notes on it. She was going to let Marisa talk to the writer. Maybe, maybe this would be the first film Marisa actually had a hand in getting made.

“You didn’t tell me any of this,” Noah said. He was obviously a little aggrieved but working at not sounding like it.

“Well,” Marisa said. “It just happened, you know.” She gave Noah a quick look and then turned back to Josh and smiled. How sad, Eloise thought, to be afraid to share good news with your partner because he’d just take it as one more win for your side. Josh wore a worried expression. He hated tension, confrontation,
bad feelings of any kind. Eloise could see that he wanted to rescue them all.

“Here’s an idea,” he said to Noah. “Maybe she can get Joanna Newsom to play on the soundtrack and you can meet her.”

“That
is
an idea,” Noah said.

Marisa laughed. “Don’t even think it. I don’t want to compete with an angel.”

“You know you’d win,” Noah said, putting his arm around her, and Josh turned to Eloise with a smile of complicit pleasure.

She smiled back, if a little weakly. This party was taking so much effort. Other people wore her out, because—as her friend Heather was fond of pointing out—she felt compelled to entertain them. Well, she was used to everybody looking at her when she talked, wasn’t she? The older she got the clearer it became to her that she liked other people best when they were contained by the seats in her classroom. These days she had parties out of a sense of obligation more than an anticipation of pleasure. This particular party—a celebration of the house’s one hundred and twentieth birthday—she hadn’t wanted to have at all. It had been Theo’s idea. “Why?” Eloise had said. “Houses don’t have birthdays. People will think they have to bring gifts.”

“For the house?” Theo asked. “What do you give a house?”

“Furnace,” Eloise said. “Roof.” She ticked off the items on her fingers. “Water heater. New wiring. Paint. New pipes.”

“You’re afraid the guests will show up with new pipes?”

“I hope they do,” Eloise said. “We haven’t done any plumbing in a while.”

“It’s not just a birthday party for the house,” Theo said. “It’s a going-away party for Claire, since she won’t let us throw her one. We just won’t tell her that.”

Eloise still shook her head. “I think it’s weird to throw a going-away party for a house.”

“For
Claire,
” Theo corrected. “The house isn’t going anywhere, is it?” Eloise, startled to realize her slip of the tongue, agreed to the party rather than answer that question.

“Hey,” Josh said now, spotting something past Eloise. “Isn’t that Adelaide now?”

Eloise followed his gaze to see a dark-haired, long-necked woman being ushered inside by one of Eloise’s friends from book club. “I think so,” she said.

“Got to be,” Josh said. “Look at her. That woman is definitely a ballet dancer.”

“Will you go talk to her?” Eloise asked. “I’ll see if I can find Claire.”

Eloise moved through the crowd across the foyer to look into the dining room, where people gathered around the hors d’oeuvres laid out on the table. No Claire, but she did see Theo, talking to Josh’s boss, Ben. He was looking through the photo album Theo had made when she was supposed to be working on her dissertation, filled with every picture of the house she could locate, arranged in her best guess at chronological order. Now she was pointing out photos and narrating like a tour guide. Theo, with her mobile, expressive features, her tendency to gesture expansively, was the sort of person whose appearance seems to change with her mood. Happy and animated, as she was now, she was lovely. “This is about the time my grandparents bought the house, in 1958. Some of the woodwork had been painted”—she said this with a shudder—“but they restored it to how it would have looked when it was built.”

“When was it built?” Ben asked.

“Eighteen ninety,” she said. “It’s in the Colonial Revival style, although it has three stories instead of the usual two. Do you know how we came to call the floors of a building
stories
? Because of the murals on the different floors. So if you were on the third floor you were on the third story.”

“That’s a good fact,” Ben said.

“I know,” Theo said. “I like that one. It’s good to know where things come from.”

“Do you write about houses? Like, architectural history?”

“No,” Theo said. “Not at all. I’ve just researched this house, and the city, too, because I’m interested. I could tell you where the oldest house is, or where there used to be water—”

“Where there used to be water?”

“Yeah, like in Northside—one of the streets has newer houses than the others, because that area was water. Or, Over-the-Rhine used to be separated from downtown by a canal. Did you know that? That’s how it got that name, because German immigrants called the canal the Rhine. When they were taking the canal out, that’s when they got the idea to build a subway. But of course they never finished it.”

Listening to her niece, the pleasure in her voice as she imparted these facts, Eloise winced. She’d tried without success to break Theo of her fondness for their hometown. Theo had come back for graduate school four years before despite offers from more prestigious schools, and moved back into the room she shared with Claire as though she’d never left. She put an
I LOVE CINCINNATI
bumper sticker on her car and wore T-shirts that said
MADE IN OHIO
or showed photos of local landmarks under the words THIS IS WHERE I’M FROM. Local landmarks, plus a shot of police in riot gear and one of Pete Rose grabbing his balls
with a fuck-you expression on his face. “It’s the complete picture,” Theo had said in answer to whatever wry comment Eloise had made. “Cincinnati’s gritty.”

In Cincinnati you could make a virtue of grittiness, take pride in not living in some cleaner, wealthier, wussier city, though that was a problematic stance if you lived in a house like theirs. Even if it was a six-minute walk from a hot spot of crime, even if a friend who lived two streets over once had to dive under a car to avoid getting caught in cross fire. Did Theo’s civic pride extend to the high crime rate? The conservative provinciality of the population, the intractable problems of the urban poor, the low self-esteem? To identify so strongly with a city like this—what did that say about you? In Cincinnati when locals asked where you went to school they meant what high school. In Cincinnati when locals met a newcomer they asked, “Why’d you move
here
?” It was a dying city, no matter how Theo winced and protested when Eloise used that term. One day the electricity would blink off, the shops would close their doors, the people would get in their cars and drive away. Abrupt as a cardiac arrest.

A hand slipped into Eloise’s and squeezed. She looked over to see Heather, who released her hand before Eloise could pull away. So careful of Eloise’s desire for secrecy, even as it clearly hurt and sometimes angered her, even as Eloise went on spending nights in Heather’s bed and then introducing her as her “friend.” Eloise wanted to reach out and push Heather’s dark hair back behind her ear, smooth it where the humid weather was starting to make it frizz, but she didn’t. Heather wore the necklace Eloise had bought her the week before at an art fair, a sparkly glass pendant on a black cord. The gold in the glass
seemed to call forth gold in her brown eyes. “I really like how that looks on you,” Eloise said.

“Thanks,” Heather said, her fingers going to the pendant. “How are you doing?”

“I’m feeling guilty.” Eloise pointed her chin at Theo. “She loves this house.”

“I know, but she can’t stay here forever whether you sell it or not.”

Eloise sighed. She didn’t know how to make Theo understand that the house was, like many family legacies, as much a burden as a gift. Francine might have hung on to ownership of the house even after she moved to Tennessee, but she’d handed over its upkeep as if she were breaking a curse, or passing it on. Theo would say the place was more gift than burden, but she wasn’t the one who had to offer up a four-figure sum to Duke Energy every month. She could complain about the cold (because winters in Cincinnati were quite cold) or the heat (because summers in Cincinnati were quite hot) without immediately thinking of how much these vagaries of temperature would cost her. Cold winters
and
hot summers—this unfair combination was another of the grievances against Cincinnati on Eloise’s very long list.

“She’s twenty-eight years old,” Eloise said. “Why does she have to be told to move out? Why doesn’t she want to do it on her own? And Josh. He’s been back a year. He’s still not even talking about getting his own place.” She looked at Heather. “I stunted them somehow.”

“Don’t start that again,” Heather said. “You always encouraged them. They’re just broke. Times like this make you hesitate to spend money. And the house is really big.”

“I hope someone won’t hesitate to spend money on this place,” Eloise said. “Or I’ll never get rid of it.”

“Have you talked to your mother?”

“Not yet. I thought I’d call once Claire is gone.”

“You think she’ll actually do it this time?”

“That’s what she said, the last time I asked. She’d sign it over once Claire was grown.” Eloise made a face. “But who the hell knows. She lives to torment me.”

“You can just walk away,” Heather said. “Move in with me. You know I won’t charge you rent.”

“But then I have no savings. I have nothing to show for everything I’ve put into this place.” Eloise gave her a rueful smile. “I’m tiresome, I know. I repeat myself. Are you sure you want me in your house, saying the same things over and over?”