Forever is the Worst Long Time: A Novel Read online

  She laughed. (Was there a better sound? I thought not.)

  But the relief was short-lived because my thoughts immediately returned to Rob. He was probably two-thirds of the way through his twelve-hour workday, stressing about a market shift that meant nothing to the majority of the world, even though it would later have at least an indirect effect on their bank accounts. I prayed to God that the economy would remain the worst of his worries for a very long time.

  “I should probably go,” said Lou as she sat up. “I’ll miss you terribly, Jim.”

  I pushed myself into a sitting position and looked at her. “I already miss you. You know I’m in love with you.” The minute I said this, I wanted to pull the words out of the air and shove them back in my mouth. It was true, but my confession did nothing but add another tangle to our mess. After all, we had already learned that you should not do at night what you cannot manage in the bright, revealing light of day.

  Lou leaned forward and hugged me tight. “Do your best not to be, okay? Not just for yourself . . .”

  But also for Rob. We both knew what she meant. “I’ll try,” I told her. There was a small scar just above her eyebrow. I ran my finger over it. “There’s so much I still don’t know about you.”

  “The less we know about each other, the better. But before I go, what’s your middle name?”

  My eyes smarted.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Too much? You don’t have to tell me.”

  I blinked hard. “My middle name is Javier, for my father.”

  “James Javier Hernandez,” she said quietly. “That’s very nice. But you know, I think I prefer Jim.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  She kissed me lightly, then took her purse and slipped out the door. I lay back on the bed, thinking about how, save for a few letters, the difference between love and loss was so slight it was almost impossible to perceive.

  THIRTEEN

  June–August 2008

  “You have gone and lost your mind!” Pascal stared at me, his eyes bulging. Then he stabbed his falafel with his knife, raised it, and took a bite, still looking at me as though I had sprouted a horn in the center of my forehead.

  Several weeks had passed since I returned from New York, and I had not heard from Lou. I don’t know what I had been expecting—after all, we had agreed that it was over for us, almost as fast as it began—but it wasn’t radio silence.

  I craved her. Not just physically. Even to hear her voice, to have her reassure me that what we had done was necessary and inevitable, would have been almost enough.

  Yet the emails I wrote her sat unsent in my draft folder. My finger hovered over her number on my cell phone, but I never pressed “Dial.”

  It was remorse that kept me away. Rob’s shadow followed me throughout the day; his ghost haunted me at night. As often as I thought about Lou, I thought about Rob even more, and how he, like an invisible hand, had guided me through some of the most pivotal points of my life.

  Like our freshman year of high school, when he had gone up to a beefy senior who had been taunting me, said a few words, and I was never again jeered—by anyone. Or just before my sophomore year of college, when Rob filched my university password, logged into my account, and changed my major from engineering to English literature. “Someone had to,” he said, ignoring my protests after he smugly informed me of what he had done. “Your father can’t take calculus for you. Start making yourself happy before your grades plummet and you flunk out.”

  My oldest and closest friend. And here I had gone and pulled a Brutus to his Caesar.

  The consequence of this was that I was losing my mind, and not in a leisurely fashion. I forgot to pay my electricity bill. I blanked on an interview with a celebrated professor whom I was supposed to profile for the school’s website; I realized this only when she contacted me to say her next availability was approximately never. Sometimes I pretended to forget meetings because I couldn’t bring myself to show up and act normal. Each time the phone rang or someone knocked on the door to the broom closet I called my office, I jumped, as though it might be Rob. Deep sleep, appetite, pleasure in mundane things like showering and sunshine: these were all distant memories.

  Talking about it was the only way out of my mental straitjacket. But Wisnewski was no longer available to chat, and even if he were, we had never been in the habit of discussing emotional issues the way Rob and I had always been able to.

  Obviously, Rob was out of the question—not that he had been calling or emailing me. Over the past few years I had accepted his long hours as the cause of the growing hole in our friendship; I had grown used to hearing from him infrequently, and largely at his convenience. After I slept with Lou, though, his being out of touch no longer seemed work related. No, it felt like a sign that he had sensed a shift in the universe and was hiding from the flaming comet heading his way.

  Desperate to talk through my distress, or at least distill part of my paranoia, I asked Pascal to lunch.

  “I know I’m a fool,” I told him. “If Rob ever finds out . . .”

  Pascal shook his head. “Rob. Rob. Now you think of Rob! And what will Kathryn say?”

  I looked down at my plate. “Right, since she and Lou are still friends.”

  “Yes,” he said dryly. “Or they were. I mean, of all the women.”

  “Listen, you can’t tell anyone. Ever. Especially not Kathryn, but . . . no one.”

  “Who would I tell?” Pascal leaned back in his chair, looking at me with bewilderment. “My God, if you aren’t the human condition in a nutshell I don’t know who is. You’ve likely read a library’s worth of novels illustrating why affairs are a terrible idea, and then you go and pull an Anna Karenina.”

  “An affair.” Up until that point, I had not used that term, let alone considered it, and it sounded like Farsi on my tongue. Not only had I had an affair, but I had done so with my best friend’s wife. It was the stuff of soap operas. It was a plotline I would never have used in my own fiction. Yet there I was, living it out.

  Pascal sighed from low in his chest. “You’ve got to pull yourself together. Do you want to end up like me?”

  “Last I checked, you were doing okay.”

  “Eh,” he said with that melodic lilt of his. “It is my experience that by and large, women undervalue being alone, and men overvalue it. I’m lonely, and the future’s not looking so bright for me. Ladies aren’t so interested in a fellow with a potbelly who’s recently joined the AARP.”

  I took a bite of rice, but it stuck to the roof of my mouth, so I washed it down with a swig of tepid, bitter tea. “Who’s to say I’ll end up alone?”

  “You think there’s no cost for giving your heart to someone who can’t really take it? But who knows,” he added. “The wonder of life is that almost anything can happen.”

  Back at my desk, I stared at my computer screen as one asinine message after another rose to the top of my inbox. What was the cost of giving my heart to Lou, anyway? Would I end up alone, as Pascal implied? I checked my voicemail, but the only call I had received that wasn’t from Pascal, Victoria, or my father was from a woman named Jessica, with whom I had gone on a date several months earlier; she had apparently decided to scrape the bottom of her barrel.

  I redirected my attention to work. I was supposed to draft a press release announcing a major educational collaboration with a university in India. The Spice Is Nice, I had written on the top of my document. I shook my head in disgust and erased the text, grateful that none of my coworkers had a chance to witness my culturally insensitive stupidity.

  What was happening to me? The sunlight streaming through my office window stung my eyes, but when I squeezed my lids closed, there was Lou, her head resting on her pillow as she looked up at me tenderly. I would have given anything to go back to that exact moment in time.

  In an instant, Rob’s face replaced Lou’s. Acid burned my throat as I thought about how my fling—my affair—would raze him. Even if
he never learned about it, how could I ever resume our relationship? Every sentence that came before my confession would be a lie of omission.

  Yes, after years of self-deception, my culpability was suddenly screamingly obvious. The minute I realized I had feelings for Lou, I should have made every attempt to not be close to her. We should not have struck up a friendship; we should not have had conversations as intimate as we did. And we never, ever, should have had dinner alone.

  In my own half-assed fashion, I had orchestrated this, I realized with horror. And like the drafts I abandoned before writing the end, I had not been able to see past the middle of my own story. Why had I not had the foresight to see the ruin on the other side of this affair?

  As I forced my eyes open, it occurred to me that what I should really be wishing for was not to go back to that moment with Lou, but for it to never have happened at all. Because I was not sure a short stay in paradise had been worth an extended stint in purgatory.

  The longer I went without hearing from Lou, the more I felt that there was no doubt she regretted everything and never wanted to speak with me again. We were not going to be together—but could we not still be friends? Or had I now lost two of the people most important to me in one fell swoop?

  In response, I doubled down on my reclusiveness. “Why don’t you take some time off?” said Craig, who had surmised that I was on the verge of a breakdown. “Go hiking, go to the beach, whatever you need. We can function without you for a week.”

  I thanked him and promptly returned to work. At another point in life I would have used such an opportunity to write fiction. But I could barely manage to put together an email, and the evenings and weekends stretched endlessly. My usual nightcap had turned into two, sometimes three, which would facilitate sleep only to wake me several hours later. My requisite morning cup of coffee had become a full pot, and I was constantly wired and tired. A full week without supervisor-dictated, deadline-enforced aim wasn’t a vacation. It was a prison sentence.

  One night in July, I was sitting on the deck, staring up at the glittering sky and contemplating the position I was in—not specific to Lou and Rob, for a change, but in a more global sense.

  Most of the people I knew in their mid and late thirties had lives, capital L: committed relationships, children, careers that they truly cared about. At nearly thirty-six, I was batting zero on almost all of these counts. It was true that my career was going well, but it was not at all the career I had dreamed of. And yes, I had not wanted children up until that point; but even that I wasn’t so sure about anymore. I again thought of Wisnewski. What fatal flaw did I possess that kept me from embracing his good-enough approach to living?

  Such was the potholed mental road I was moseying down when my phone rang. It was probably Victoria, who had deduced that something was not right and had been calling every few days to check on me. I sighed, pushed myself up onto my feet, and let myself in through the sliding doors. But when I looked at the caller ID, it was not my sister, but Lou. She had finally reached out. Was this good? Bad? Did it even matter?

  “Lou, hello!” I said, entirely too chipper. “How are you?”

  “I’m okay. You?”

  “I—you—it’s really good to hear from you.”

  I was sort of hoping she would respond, “It’s so good to hear from you, too!” Instead, she said, “I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch sooner; I needed time to think. I feel pretty terrible, Jim.”

  “About what we’ve done.”

  “Yes.”

  “Me, too,” I admitted.

  “I’d like to see you,” she said, which I immediately interpreted as “Us being together is still the worst idea, but I would like at least another night or seven with you.” Yes, I could find a way to spend a week together, I thought, like I hadn’t just spent weeks drowning in remorse. A day, even, would do just fine.

  “Great. But when?”

  “I thought I might fly in to Detroit tomorrow. Would that be okay?”

  I was so excited by this turn of events that it didn’t occur to me to question her haste. “Yes, sure, absolutely.” It was hovering around ninety degrees, even at nine at night, and a trickle of sweat slid down the side of my face. I wiped it on the arm of my t-shirt. “Do you want to stay with me?”

  She hesitated. “If it’s all right with you.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m looking at a flight that gets in at eleven in the morning. Would that work?”

  I did not ask how long she would be staying. Instead, I looked at the glass doors, which were smudged with hundreds of fingerprints, all of them mine. Behind me, the plates piled in the sink might as well have been petri dishes; I would have to start cleaning immediately. “Absolutely,” I said.

  “Thanks, Jim. It’ll be good to . . . talk through everything.”

  Yes, I thought with relief. It would be good to talk through it with the only person who might actually have some idea what I was going through, since she was in a near-identical position. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Me, too,” she said, more brightly this time. “I’ll see you soon.”

  Lou broke into a smile when she saw me pull up outside arrivals at the airport.

  “How was your flight?” I said as she hugged me. She smelled like she was wearing a new perfume, or maybe she had changed her shampoo.

  “Fine,” she said. She was pulling a small suitcase behind her, which I took from her.

  “You staying awhile?” I asked.

  “Maybe I will,” she said, hoisting her leather tote up on her shoulder. I gestured that I could take that, too, but she shook her head and climbed into the front seat.

  As I looked at her again as I got in the car, I realized she was, well, kind of gray. Not that she was any less beautiful; when someone is significant to you in the way Lou was to me, a change in their appearance just doesn’t matter that much because they are already imprinted on your brain in such a way that automatically triggers affection and attraction.

  Even so, I was a little rattled, both by her appearance and by how quiet she was being. I reacted by prattling about Neruda’s Memoirs, which I had just finished reading. I was merging onto the highway when she interrupted me: “Jim.”

  “Yes?” I said, my head still halfway in Chile.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  On instinct, my foot pressed on the brake, and I jerked the wheel to the right as I looked at her with disbelief. Behind us, a driver laid on his horn.

  “Please don’t kill us,” she said calmly, and placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “Oh my God. Oh my God,” I said because it was basically the only thing I was able to manage. “Is it—”

  “It’s yours.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Good Lord, Jim. Of course I’m sure.”

  “Oh my.” My throat was closing in, and my hands were shaking so hard it was difficult to grip the steering wheel. “How is that even possible? I thought you were—”

  “I was on birth control, yes. Unfortunately, it seems the pill’s not quite as effective if you take antibiotics, and I was just finishing a course when you and I slept together.” She peered at me. “Are you sure you can drive?”

  “Yes,” I squeaked. “Though maybe the next time you have big news, maybe don’t tell me in the car, okay?”

  She squeezed my shoulder lightly. “I’m really sorry. I just couldn’t wait another second.”

  “So you’re—it’s what—two months? Three?”

  “Nine weeks.”

  “When did you figure it out?”

  “About three or four weeks ago.”

  “What!” I hollered. “No wonder you couldn’t wait. Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

  “Well, I had to go to the doctor to be certain, and to find out how far along I was.” She took her hand off my shoulder and added quietly, “I really am sorry. I haven’t been in a very good place since you were in New York, and this was—well—unexpe
cted. It was almost like I was waiting for it to go away. It’s going to kill Rob.”

  Would it ever. Lou had refused to have a child with him. I had refused to have one with Kathryn. But in a single night, the two of us had unknowingly secured one tie, and in doing so, completely severed several others. I felt sick. I had damaged my friendship with Rob in an irreparable way, even if he was still blissfully ignorant of this fact. “Have you told him about us?” I asked.

  She shook her head vigorously. “We’ve talked a little bit, but only about the divorce. That’s part of why I’m here. I wanted to tell you in person, and I was hoping we could decide together. About the baby . . . and what to do about Rob.”

  I had no idea if I was ready to be a father—is anyone ever, really? But could I say no to a life that already existed, when that life was half of Lou?

  “You’re going to keep it?” It sounded wrong. “The baby,” I corrected myself.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You know, most of my friends have been pregnant before. Some wanted to, obviously, but for a lot of them it just happened. Rob and I—we’ve had accidents, but I never got pregnant. Not once. I don’t know, Jim. I feel so awful about Rob finding out that I want to vomit every other minute, and that has nothing to do with morning sickness. But I wonder, too, if this isn’t meant to be. If it isn’t, why did I get pregnant now? This has to be for a reason, right?”

  My mind hadn’t gotten as far as reasons; I was still more or less at the we are having a child part of it all. But I nodded because her words seemed to make some sense.

  “You know,” Lou continued, “my mother used to tell me she almost got rid of me when she was pregnant. That’s how she put it, if you can believe it. I don’t know, as insane as this is, I don’t want to have an abortion. It affects both of us, though. What do you think?”

  Outside, cars whizzed past us, and we past them; seedy motels and office buildings and trees blurred together. “I think that it would probably be best to move forward. To not terminate the pregnancy right now.”