After the Moment (15 page)

Still, it was one thing to know you
could
be a jerk and another to
be
one. To
willingly
be one.

After making up his mind that Oliver was on the wrong side of that distinction, Leigh ignored him. Occasionally, if only because Preston hung out with Oliver, Leigh thought he should come up with a way to make peace with the guy. But he never did, and they continued to pass through the same school as if in separate worlds.

During the fall term, Leigh took a studio arts class, but he could never quite remember how he came to sign up for it. It was an elective and met after school, three afternoons a week, cutting into time for homework, soccer, and Maia. Perhaps it was that Maia was in a poetry class during those same afternoons, but Leigh thought that what had made him put his name on the list were the words
collage
and
multimedia.
They reminded him of the way he thought; in fragments that he gathered over time and slowly put together to form a complete picture.

He didn't think this was a good or a bad thing. Mostly, he was glad that he knew it about himself. Maybe if he gathered enough fragments about careers, jobs, and colleges, a picture would emerge about what he wanted to do with his life. Or just where he wanted to spend the next four years.

Ms. Kestell, who taught the class, told all the students that their projects were great, making Leigh wonder if she was teaching or cheerleading. Preston Gavenlock was in the class, along with Oliver Lexham's sweet, blonde girlfriend, Diana Jane Gilbor.

Preston was making water containers that leaked and were held together by silver wire. He was going to use wind and water to make the containers move and then record the sound. Diana Jane's project was assembling parts from a broken wheelchair. She wanted to frame her finished project with wood and rubber from old crutches. She was writing her college essay on her work with handicapped children and planned for her art project to reflect the way society treated, as she put it,
the differently abled.

Leigh, who pretty much hated the obviousness of Diana Jane's project, still really liked the way she was working with her pieces and the paints she had chosen. He was making a collage of the video he had of Maia and Millie from the summer, mixed with still photos he was taking of plants, leaves, and front porches. Although he was pretty sure that the parts weren't going to add up to anything, he enjoyed hunting for good images to capture.

When Columbus Day weekend rolled around, he knew he should go to New York and break up with Astra (in person), but Maia thought they should go up to New England and look at the foliage.

"The foliage?" he asked her.

"Yeah, you know, the leaves, when they turn colors," she said. "It used to be Josh's favorite thing to do. He'd make a reservation at this place he loved in Massachusetts, and we'd drive all over. It made my mother nuts."

Which was how he decided breaking up with Astra could wait; instead, he would take Maia to Maine. He spent some of the money from bussing tables on plane tickets, because although he could do the drive, it would be endless.

~~~

Leigh took pictures of ducks, Lillian's hands, the back of Pete's head, and Maia's covered-up arms as she was helping Pete in the garden. Maia made dinner one night, cooking fish out on the grill and wrapping bacon around mushrooms stuffed with cheese.

She told Pete about building a latrine when she was eleven and spending a week with Josh in a tent up in the mountains.

"No running water, no people, no showers, just us getting as gross as possible," Maia said, helping herself to more mushrooms.

"Where was your mother?" Lillian asked.

"Are you kidding? She was home."

"You must have been some great eleven-year-old," Pete said. "I don't know many girls who would skip a shower for that long."

"I was like a boy when I was eleven," Maia said. "Totally fearless, happy to run around in the dirt, but, you know, a girl."

Leigh didn't particularly like the expression on his mother's face. He wasn't sure what it meant, and he didn't want to know, so he told Maia to tell Lillian about the poetry club.

"It's more a reading club," Maia said. "It's to learn how a poem isn't only about expressing your feelings."

Lillian, who reread certain poems every year, asked, "What else is a poem about?"

"The rhythm and the images buried in the language," Maia said. "All the ways you can build an emotion with words, but you can't just write 'I feel sad.' I mean, you can, but it's not poetry."

Lillian asked what the club was reading, and Maia told her Paul Celan because some girl had heard one of his poems read aloud on the radio and wanted to know more about him.

"Paul Celan?" Pete asked. "That's kind of dark for teenagers, no?"

"You think grownups have a monopoly on dark?" Maia asked.

"I think teenagers think they do," Lillian said, before asking Maia who her favorite poet was, and off they went talking about Polish poets, a dead Polish filmmaker, and whether or not John Donne could be taught.

"I think he has to be experienced instead of studied," Maia said. "You step inside it."

"You know, that is why some poets translate other poems," Lillian said. "So that they can step inside their own language, but from the outside."

"That makes so much sense," Maia said. "Like, I should totally learn Italian so I can read the
Inferno,
you know?"

Leigh and Pete did the dishes and tried not to display obvious signs of boredom. Maia had been great about tromping around Pete's land, and helping Leigh look for the best type of plants to photograph. Without her thinking that his video was going to be "great" and "interesting," Leigh knew he would have abandoned the project. Of course, it was the footage he had of her from the summer that made him at all willing to do it. Her hair, her hands, her back, and her plants. All things he'd filmed before knowing he was making a record of the girl he loved.

~~~

Pete's house had three guest rooms. One had become Lillian's study and one was full of Leigh's boxes. Maia slept in the available guest room and Leigh bunked down on the couch in his mother's study. Lillian came in on the second night of his visit under the guise of looking for some papers, but Leigh was not very surprised when she sat on an arm of the couch and said she needed to talk to him about colleges.

Janet had told her that Leigh had had a meeting with the advisor at Calvert Park Prep but that she and Clayton had no idea how it had gone or what had been discussed.

"They have no idea because they didn't ask me."

"Janet is being very careful not to act like your mother for fear of offending me," Lillian said, which Leigh already knew and appreciated.

"Well, I didn't think Dad cared," Leigh said. "He just wants to know that I'll wind up somewhere not too expensive."

This was unfair of Leigh and he knew it. Clayton had, against his lawyer's advice, put into the divorce agreement a condition that he and Lillian would split high school tuition but that Clayton would assume the entire cost of college.

"Your father doesn't like to pry," Lillian said, "but I don't mind doing so at all. Where are you thinking of going?"

Leigh did have a list: three small places in Pennsylvania, a small one in Ohio, and two huge ones in California and Michigan. He'd picked them based on general academic excellence, soccer teams, and good military history programs. He thought maybe the reason the war in Iraq was so hard to understand was that he knew next to nothing about any wars.

Leigh had done a draft of his college essay and gotten copies of all six applications. He knew what he needed to do and thought that he liked the way the one in Ohio sounded the best. But he felt paralyzed about finishing anything. He had this idea that he should ask Maia where she was hoping to wind up in another year. He remembered Astra saying that falling in love was only for people who weren't serious about the future. He wanted to find a way to discover his own serious plans but to have room for Maia in them.

So he had this list, this desire to run it by her, and no hope of knowing how to do that.

"I like Maia," his mother said.

"Uhh-hmm," Leigh said, meaning, perhaps,
Me too
or
Thanks
or
Good.

"But listen: You have got to break up with Astra," Lillian said.

"I know, God, I know," he said.

Their e-mailing had become less frequent since school started. The last time he'd spoken to her on the phone, Astra had said she was so busy with swimming and her AP courses that she barely had time to breathe, let alone talk a lot. She wanted to keep on e-mailing. So he sent her partially accurate accounts of how he was spending his time. Leigh missed the part of him that had been Astra's friend. If you took away the sex, hanging out with Astra was one of the easiest things he'd ever done.

"It's just, if I call her to say I want to come to the city because we have to talk, she'll guess," Leigh said. "And then we'll wind up breaking up over the phone, which is totally wrong."

"Well, call and tell her you're coming because you miss her."

Leigh wondered if his mother had become deranged or cruel.

"And then show up and break up with her?" he asked, really not wanting to have this conversation with anyone, least of all his mother.

"No, of course not, good point," Lillian said.

Leigh felt he was failing to do something—something important. Maia never mentioned Astra but knew he hadn't done anything about his old girlfriend. Like, actually tell her she was no longer his girlfriend. His continued inability to figure out how to do this showed him that while he might have a list of colleges where he wanted to apply, he wasn't yet well enough equipped to sail unsupervised into the world.

"Take the train to New York next weekend. I'll call Pete's sister. You can stay with her," Lillian said. "Then just find Astra and do the right thing."

Leigh nodded. Jesus, here he was, seventeen years old—seventeen, a year away from being able to both vote and enlist in the army—and his mother had to help him with girls. It was a good thing there wasn't a draft. Leigh didn't think he'd be a huge asset in the war, and not only because he was afraid of dying. If it weren't for the way Maia thought of him—the way he existed in her mind as someone of value—he'd want to stay in bed for the rest of his life.

~~~

On their last morning in Maine, early, when the mist was rolling off the river, Leigh found Maia outside on the same porch where he and Pete had talked about
girl trouble.
Maia was now standing exactly where she had been discussed. It was colder than it had been on Labor Day, and Leigh took off his sweater to give her.

"I'm okay," she said. "Really, you're sweet."

"Sleep all right?" he asked, wanting to bat the word
sweet
out of the known universe.

"Yeah," she said, her face being overtaken by a shy, sly smile. "It's hard with you down the hall. It's weird to have you so close but so off-limits."

Leigh looked away from her, down at the ground. It's true they were keeping to the contract by not having sex. And though he had, many times, held her naked body, she always hid her feet. So there were certain barriers they could not cross. But what they did with their mouths and hands gave him more power and pleasure than he had known to want.

He wanted to tell her that it was out here, almost at this very spot, that he had discovered he loved her. That he would always love her, that even though it was very likely they would break up as soon as college became a reality, he would go on loving her. That while he knew he had no idea how to live up to what it meant to love someone, she lived inside the very word.

But, instead, he slipped his hand through hers and stood there until she pulled away, saying that she was, after all, a little cold.

~~~

After, when he found her at the party in New York, he wanted to take her back to that moment on Pete's porch. It wasn't that he needed a chance to say what he hadn't, for his gush of
love forever
was probably best not shared. It was that if he could only grab her back through time, away from the apartment and his uncomfortable suit, he would stand there again with her on Pete's porch, and this time he would pay better attention. This time, she would never leave his sight, no harm would befall her, and no blood would touch them. Leigh would have the chance to memorize what it was like to love her.

The Friday night after they had been in Maine, he took a train up to New York.

"What do you think she'll say?" Maia asked him.

"I don't know," Leigh said. "She might be relieved. It's not like we were ever in love, you know."

"But you wouldn't have slept with her if you didn't love her," Maia said, and for an instant it sounded like a compliment instead of a statement that he needed to explain. Or contradict.

And, in an instant, he answered, saying, to his everlasting regret, "Well, right."

~~~

Kathleen Tahoe let Leigh have his choice between a wide pullout sofa in the living room and a narrow bed in a tiny room behind the kitchen, saying he could have comfort or privacy. He picked the tiny room, figuring he wouldn't sleep well no matter what.

On Saturday, Leigh stood outside Astra's apartment building, hoping that when she came out she wouldn't be rushing off to a swim meet or the library. And, indeed, she had both swim and book bags, and seemed in full rush mode, but stopped when she saw him.

"Leigh," she said. "My God, hi. Hi."

"Hi," he said, hating himself, and wishing he had loved her.

Or simply liked her enough to leave her alone. Neither of them seemed able to figure out if they should hug.

"Can we go somewhere?" he asked her, and she nodded.

~~~

Leigh could never remember what he said, or how he said it. Although she said
Oh
and
This was not what I was expecting
before bursting into tears, he had the feeling that she had been expecting it.