The History of Us Read Online Free

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