Forever is the Worst Long Time: A Novel Page 5

  “I’m into it.”

  “You do remember I wrote three novels before my debut was published.”

  “You do remember I have written zero novels before this one. It would behoove me to get to the end of this draft before moving on.” It was a shame that getting to the end involved writing the other half of the book. I tugged at the enormous bow hanging from the neck of her blouse, and the two silk ties came apart, revealing her elegant neck. “That’s better.”

  “Are you trying to change the subject?”

  “Me?” I said in a high-pitched voice. “I would never do that. But let me tell you about the chicken I just made for you . . .”

  I was relieved when she didn’t bring it up again. Kathryn wanted so very much for me to succeed. She seemed to view my success as inevitable, really, and most of the time this felt like standing in the sunlight. But every once in a while it seemed that her expectations shone a spotlight on the deficit of my dreams.

  A month or so later, the phone rang, rousing me from a deep sleep. I didn’t have to answer to know it was Rob. It was the end of the workday in Hong Kong, which was usually when he called. I tiptoed out of the bedroom so I would not wake Kathryn. The scrubbed light of morning streamed in through the windows, and I squinted as I made my way to the other side of the apartment. “That you, dong nugget?” I said when I reached the kitchen.

  “Soy yo, ass hat. How’s it goin’?”

  “You blasted?” I rubbed the sleep from my eyes with my knuckles, then reached into the cupboard for a canister of coffee.

  “Little bit. It’s the only way to get through here.” He and Lou had been living abroad for three months. Already, it felt like a year. “Listen, James. You’re an emotionally intelligent person.”

  I laughed and poured ground coffee into a measuring cup, then transferred that into the filter. Kathryn always laughed at me for being so precise about it. “Am I?”

  “You’re a novelist, for cripes’ sake.”

  “Am I?” I said again. At first, I had blown off Kathryn’s suggestion to abandon my work in progress and begin a new draft. But when I still had not returned to my story weeks later, I began spinning a new one in my head about an average man living in an average town who begins to suspect that his beautiful, above-average wife has a secret identity. A cautious optimism had begun to blossom in me: this novel, I felt, had real potential. Now all I had to do was write it.

  “Stop,” said Rob.

  “Fine, fine. So what’s up?” I was guessing what was up was that Lou was miserable; Rob mentioned this every time we chatted. But maybe things had changed.

  Or not. “Lou hates it here,” he said. “She’s lonely and feels cooped up. She’s lost ten pounds, and she didn’t have two to spare. She wants to go home, and when she gets there, she wants to get a job. It helps her think more clearly, she says.”

  “You have to be in Hong Kong until . . . next June. Right?”

  He sighed. “Yeah. But they’re already talking about extending my contract through the following year.”

  “Dude, you can’t.”

  “I know. But it would be such a huge win for me. A career-maker, even. I’m raking in nearly twice as much for the company here as I was in the States.” He paused. “Maybe I can ask them about putting in an extra six months instead of another year.”

  “Is that your only option?”

  “I guess I could wait it out, see if Lou gets better before I commit to anything. But she wants to go back to New York. Now. Without me.”

  “So let her.”

  “Come on, James. I don’t want to be without Lou for a week, let alone six months. You can’t possibly think that’s a good idea.”

  I hadn’t been thinking anything when I said it; it just kind of fell out. But now that I was giving it more than a half second of consideration, I did think it was a good idea. Yes, Rob financed their lives. But Lou didn’t need him, at least not in the short term. “She’s a fully capable adult who has taken care of herself nearly as long as she’s been alive. You have the rest of forever to be together,” I told him.

  “I don’t know. That doesn’t sound so hot for our marriage. I want her here with me. But I also want her to be happy.”

  The coffee had just begun brewing. I pulled a mug from the cupboard and swapped it with the glass carafe. When it was a third of the way full, I put the carafe back. Then I poured cream into the mug and watched it billow from the center of the coffee in white clouds.

  “Well, is she still writing? That makes her happy, doesn’t it?” A horn honked in the distance, and it sounded like Rob was standing in a wind tunnel. “Where are you, anyway?”

  “At a bar in a neighborhood that makes Manhattan look calm. And no, she’s not really writing. She did get a couple of older poems published, though.”

  I took a sip of coffee and sighed: for all Kathryn’s teasing, it came out right every time. “That’s great. You know where?”

  “Um. Blue Press or something like that? And the North American Review.”

  I had never heard of the former, but the latter was a big deal. I felt a swell of pride for Lou and wondered if I should email her a congratulatory note or send my congrats via Kathryn. “So what does she do all day if she’s not writing?”

  “Hell if I know! I keep telling her this is such a great opportunity to take her career to the next level, but I come home and find her scrubbing the grout with a toothbrush, even though we have a cleaning service. I mean, seriously—you could eat raw fish off the floors. But mostly she hates that I’m gone all the time.”

  “So what are you doing at the bar right now?”

  “Networking is half the job! You know that.” He exhaled loudly. “If she’s lonely, she sure as hell doesn’t act like it when I come home at night, if you know what I mean. I have certain . . . needs. That aren’t being met.”

  Thank God we were on the phone, because I actually cringed. It was like hearing someone talk about your sister. Or, you know, the woman you love. “Hang in there,” I said to Rob. “It’s going to get better.”

  “How?” He sounded kind of hopeless, which was not something I was at all used to.

  So I lied. “It just will.”

  I heard him take a sip of something. Then he said, “Well, that’s a relief. You have a sense of these things.”

  “I do,” I said, lying again.

  “Listen, I have to run—my coworker just showed up. But thanks, man. Let’s talk soon, yeah?”

  “Definitely,” I said. “Say hey to Lou for us.”

  “You got it. Tell Kathryn we said hi, too.”

  Our apartment was on the second floor of a large house facing a city park. I poured myself more coffee and stared out the window at the treetops, which had recently turned saffron and umber and cadmium yellow, thinking about what Rob had just told me. When my mug was empty, I returned to bed.

  “Was that Rob?” Kathryn murmured when I slid beside her. She was sprawled out luxuriously; she liked to stay up late and sleep in, as did I. When our schedules allowed, we would remain beneath the sheets until close to noon.

  “Yeah. He and Lou are having a tough time.”

  “I know. Lou emailed.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” said Kathryn, rolling onto her side. She propped herself up on an elbow. “Don’t worry, every couple goes through it. And she’s so young.”

  “She’s only three years younger than me.”

  “You’re so young,” said Kathryn, who was thirty-three at the time—an age that now seems as fresh as spring, but which held a sort of gravitas when I was in my twenties.

  “Do you think they’re doomed?”

  “Doomed? No, I think they’re two humans. Love is hard.”

  “And that is why you’re the successful writer.”

  She didn’t argue. “Come here, you,” she said.

  Not even yet November, it was already frigid. I burrowed beneath the quilt and warmed myself against her and tho
ught about how good we were together. Our life was not perfect, if there’s even a version of existence that remotely fits that definition. My writing was stalled, and teaching felt as though it was getting harder rather than easier. Kathryn’s last book had not sold as well as she and her publisher hoped it would. Though she believed the novel she was currently writing was her best yet, she still fretted about her career. That distress spawned other anxieties. Was she only a so-so novelist? she would wonder aloud. A subpar instructor?

  Her personal worries, which sometimes spilled out after we had split a bottle of wine in the evening, were harder for me to field. Were we serious about each other? Did I really love her? Really really? Kathryn didn’t use the M word, and when we talked about children, it was to comment on how harried our friends with kids seemed to be. Yet I suspected that her desire for a baby would emerge soon, just as a shadow rises on a wall as the sun sets. After all, my sister, Victoria, and her husband went from not wanting children to having two within a span of three years. And Victoria was a year younger than Kathryn.

  As I watched Kathryn’s face twitch as she drifted off, I thought, Yes, this is good, and it is easy. Easier than anything I’d ever known as an adult, and maybe would again. Of course, I didn’t know or appreciate that then because I had no point of reference. In your twenties, it’s easy to think most of your better days are still up ahead. But sometime around the point at which you find yourself in a face-off with forty, time does a peculiar thing and unfolds at once, almost like a map, so that while you can see that you are no longer truly young and you are not yet old, it’s quite clear that you will be very soon—if you’re lucky.

  So, writing this to you from that precipice, I will simply say this: If you find yourself in an effortless position in life, as I did beside Kathryn in bed that fall morning, enjoy it, but don’t stop there. When something comes to you so easily, it may leave that same way, and you’ll be left wondering if it ever was at all.

  FIVE

  2001–2002

  Lou and Rob returned to New York together in the spring of 2001. They had a massive fight about it; in the end, she had been unwilling to stay, and he had been unwilling to let her go home alone. “I love my job, but I love Lou more,” he told me. “What can I do?”

  Worried about the repercussions of leaving Hong Kong before his company wanted him to, Rob began working longer hours than ever and was rewarded with yet another promotion. Lou got a job as a part-time copyeditor at an architectural magazine and went back to writing in coffee shops, as she claimed the loft they had rented in Tribeca was too eerily quiet for her to concentrate.

  Through Rob, I knew that their social life largely centered around his career. They went to dinners with his clients, attended events with his colleagues, and even went on vacation with his supervisor. “Lou got a whole new wardrobe of stuff that she wouldn’t normally wear, and she ends up talking to my colleagues’ wives, half of who are about as interesting as empty cardboard boxes,” Rob confessed. “I worry she feels like she has to play a part for me.”

  I, too, often felt like I was playing a part, at least when it came to being a grown-up. Humdrum acts, like negotiating the rate on my credit card or buying and applying shower caulk, seemed novel—almost as though I was trying them out once, when in fact they were things I would do again and again over the course of my life.

  Then one bright September morning, four planes crashed into two towers, an open field, and the Pentagon, and at once none of us were playing at being adults anymore.

  Kathryn and I were at our offices when the news came through via a university email. I had never received such a message before. Even absent the word terrorism—which, if you can believe it, was not a term most Americans used before that day—the only way to interpret it was seriously.

  I immediately called Rob and Lou’s apartment, which was entirely too close to the World Trade Center. When no one answered, I called Rob’s office in Midtown. Nothing.

  Then Wisnewski called me, and for a moment I thought maybe he had heard from them. But he was only checking to see if I knew whether Rob and Lou were okay.

  “I’m sure they’re fine,” I told him, though I was sure of no such thing. “I’ll let you know the minute I hear more.”

  Classes were cancelled soon after I got the email, and I ran through the halls of the English building to Kathryn’s office. She rushed at me as soon as she saw me. “I can’t believe it,” she said as we clutched each other.

  “Me neither.”

  “Lou—she was probably home. God. This feels like the end of everything.”

  “I know,” I said, because it did. I could not imagine what the next hour would be like, let alone the following day.

  When we got home, there was a voicemail from Lou on our answering machine (for your reference, that was a plastic box that recorded voice messages for one’s home phone, which used to be a stationary device that was typically attached to the wall). “Hi. It’s Lou. We’re okay. We’re at Rob’s coworker’s place on the Upper West Side. People are saying it’s not safe to be in the city, but we don’t have a car and there really isn’t a way out. Phone lines are spotty, but we’ll call you as soon as we have a plan. We—we love you guys.”

  “Thank God,” I said after we had played it twice.

  Kathryn’s eyes were filled with tears. “They could have died,” she whispered.

  “But they didn’t.” Though they still could, I added mentally. It seemed that it was probably only a matter of time before there was another attack, and this fear hung in the air between us. I took Kathryn in my arms. “They’re okay. They’re going to be okay. We all will.”

  “James,” said Kathryn later that evening.

  We had slept through much of the afternoon and had only just woken up. After switching on the radio and hearing the latest, we were on the sofa having dinner for the devastated—chocolate ice cream directly from the tub.

  “Yes, sweetie?” I said, and stuck an enormous spoonful into my mouth. Though I knew what to do with various cutlery and mostly did not chew with my mouth open, I had a pig’s appetite and could not seem to stop myself from shoveling food down my gullet with abandon. It was one of the only things Kathryn nagged me about, and I assumed she was about to tell me that I might consider limiting mouthfuls to half-cup portions.

  Instead she said, “I want to have a baby.”

  My head shot up. “That’s a common response to trauma, isn’t it?”

  She crossed her legs, then uncrossed them and smoothed the front of her shirt. It was like watching a panther cower. Anxious? Often. Fretful? Very. But Kathryn was almost never truly nervous.

  “No, that’s not it,” she said. “This is what I’ve wanted for a while now, and . . . I guess I’ve been waiting to tell you. Now seems like the right time.”

  “Oh. Wow.” I was looking straight at her, but in my mind’s eye I saw myself in up to my elbows in crap, a diaper bag digging into my shoulder. I saw myself trying to write through a colicky clamor in the background. I saw my silver coupe with a For Sale sign on its windshield, and me behind the wheel of a minivan. You’ll notice a theme: I was the infant in these scenarios. I was not at all prepared to have a child.

  “I’m not saying we have to get married,” said Kathryn quickly. “I don’t really care too much about that.”

  “Okay,” I said. While I was not averse to it, marriage was barely north of children on my mental map. Which is to say very, very far away.

  “I know you’re halfway through your book, too, and you’re focused on finishing,” she said.

  The novel I was working on—the one about the man whose wife may or may not be a spy—had been stunted by my self-consciousness over my previous inability to write an entire book. In fact, I was only a quarter of the way through the first draft, though I did not correct Kathryn.

  “And maybe you just aren’t thinking about kids yet. But you just turned twenty-nine, and I’m almost thirty-five, which is sup
posedly when eggs stop being . . . robust. And it’s not going to happen overnight, so . . .”

  “I see,” I said, though I did not, really. “Do you think I might have time to think about it?”

  “Of course. It’s not a decision I expect you to make on the spot.” She sounded relieved, though something in her eyes told me she would have loved nothing more than a resounding yes from me at that exact moment.

  So think I did, though not about having a baby. I didn’t want to think about that, because I already knew my answer: it was no.

  Instead, I thought about Kathryn and how we could continue to be content together, if only she didn’t expect things to change.

  But beyond this—deep in that hidden place that even I was only able to access on occasion—there was another issue. And that was that I craved fireworks, shortness of breath, that whole-body tingle. I wanted to be with a woman whom I loved so much that I was nervous when she was near. If I were to start a family and spend the rest of my life with someone, I wanted her to give me the same feeling I had around Lou.

  Kathryn and I didn’t hear from Rob and Lou again for a few days. When they called, we learned that they couldn’t return to their apartment, which was coated with ash and dust. (In fact, they would not be able to go back for months, and when they did, it was only to collect a few belongings.) They stayed at Rob’s colleague’s pied-à-terre on the Upper West Side for several weeks, then moved into a rental in Brooklyn, where Lou had found them a flat.

  Mid-October, I told Kathryn that I was not ready for a baby, and that I wasn’t sure when I would be. She cried but said she understood. Yet my confession ruptured something between us (as I write this, I find myself thinking that maybe that ruptured thing was hope). By December, I had moved out.

  There’s no such thing as a clean break in a college town, and Kathryn and I ran into each other more frequently than either of us would have preferred. At first, she would glance away when she saw me. But several months passed, and when we crossed paths on campus or on the street, she met my gaze and sometimes even gave a little wave.