Stay Up With Me by Tom Barbash Read Free Book Online

down to Rajiv.
    â€œIf you miss many more, I’ll have no choice,” I said.
    â€œI won’t miss one,” she said.
    â€œTough guy,” my son said, when Rachel carried their dishes into the kitchen.
    Every once in a while we have these cowboy confrontations.
    â€œTry me,” I said.
    â€œI just might,” he said.
    â€œWhat’s this about?” Rachel said as she walked back in the room.
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    Rajiv apologized to me later that night. He said he agreed it was unorthodox. He hadn’t planned on dating one of my students, but then I was the one who’d invited them all over. And he had been lonely before that. I told him that surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. Away from view, Rajiv could be introverted and remote, as I too had been at twenty-three, though he masks this publicly with his brash defiance.
    There was a chance down the line he and Rachel Weisman might want to get an apartment together, he said, and “give this thing a try.”
    I think he imagined that would comfort me, but it had the opposite effect. Now in class I was having trouble concentrating on anything other than Rachel Weisman. The other students must have picked this up. I rarely made eye contact with Rachel and hardly ever called on her even though she raised her hand more than anyone else. When she spoke I addressed my response to the class as a whole. In retrospect this was both unkind and stupid because it didn’t hide anything and rather made our relationship seem like something it wasn’t.
    One day after class I saw her walk off into the woods behind school with another boy from my class. I became jealous on behalf of Rajiv.
    The next class I asked both of them many questions to see if she’d done the reading. She had, but not carefully. I exposed the gaps in her knowledge, and each time I could see her growing angrier, and I thought my son would probably hear about this.
    I chose not to care. But I did begin to feel as though I were in the middle of a complicated love affair, and indeed one night I dreamt that she was sleeping in my bed and that my son was teaching and that I was another student in my son’s class. I began to have other erotic dreams about Rachel Weisman, and I stopped calling on her altogether, or even acknowledging her existence. At home I mostly ignored her as well and this made her visibly upset. One day as I walked to my car I was aware of her watching me, following me, though I never turned to look. As I drove off I thought I heard someone say, “ Dick, ” though it might have been my imagination.
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    During these weeks I felt volatile in the manner of a hormonally ravaged adolescent. I became acutely aware of every action that occurred in my house, all the arrivals and departures, movie rentals, and book borrowing from my library, the extra garments in Rajiv’s closet and the hair and makeup items in the bathroom that made me unbearably nostalgic for the presence of a woman, the hushed and cheerless late-night phone conversations to a female voice in a distant time zone (805 area code), the in-room meals and showers and lovemaking, of which there was decidedly less these days. I wondered whether Rachel had a house key and so to test that fact I double bolted the pantry door—Rachel’s entryway of choice—one night when she was studying late at the library, then an hour later unbolted it to avoid seeming childish.
    I sensed (or was I hoping?) there was some friction between Rachel and Rajiv, though I never observed any cross words between them, and twice heard them talk about wanting to get their own apartment where they could have some privacy.
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    On the day before spring break, she handed me a paper on Canto 5 of The Inferno . I had taken a stack of papers over to the dark and woody café a block north of the campus where I like to go to hide away from the world. The first seven or eight essays I read were indistinguishable,