Forever is the Worst Long Time: A Novel Read online

  “Like you’re not used to this kind of stuff,” I said.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it. It all seems so over the top sometimes.”

  I eyed her twinkling diamond studs. “Over the top, huh?”

  “You know what I mean,” she said, swatting me. “My mom used to have a saying: ‘If you don’t remember what’s not yours, life will remind you right quick.’” She laughed into her drink. “Then again, she used to beat the crap out of me. So screw her Podunk idioms.”

  She was tipsy. Maybe even on her way to being blitzed. But I had never before heard her speak at length about her childhood, and I lapped it up like a man who just went days without water. “My God, Lou. That’s terrible.”

  “So says my therapist. But a bad childhood beats a rotten adulthood. Ha, beats.”

  We both snorted.

  “Do you ever wonder how you ended up—well, you know.” I gestured around us. “Here?”

  “One tiny stroke of kindness after another, I guess.” She drained her drink and gave me a sad smile. “When I was really little, the family next door basically took care of me. In middle school, I had a teacher who helped me see that I wasn’t as stupid as my mother and her roving troupe of boyfriends claimed I was. At sixteen, I moved in with a friend whose parents had both gone to college. They encouraged me to go to school and make something of myself. The rest is ancient history.”

  “You ever write about this?” I had a hard time keeping up with the poems Lou published. Most literary magazines were print-only then, and personal websites weren’t the norm among the poetry crowd.

  “No, I don’t like to look back in that direction if I don’t have to. Maybe you can write about it, though.” She laughed again. “Put it in one of your novels and call me Lorraine.”

  “Putting you in one of my novels would require me to write said novel.”

  “You stalled?”

  “Not so much stalled as in need of a new transmission.”

  She touched my arm. “I know the feeling. Why not go back to that novel about the spy wife? That was a great idea, and you could pull it off.”

  Elyse, who had just finished talking to Lubna, leaned toward us. “What are you two yapping about? Sounds juicy!”

  I was not about to brief Elyse on our actual conversation. “Very,” I said, wiggling my eyebrows. “I was just telling Lou here how I recently began performing with the Cirque du Soleil.”

  “Really?” she said, eyes wide.

  “Alas, no.”

  Both Lou and Elyse laughed, and I found myself laughing, too. If Lou was polished, Elyse was coated in varnish: her skin was bronzed, her bob was cut just so at the chin, and there was not a single thing about her that had not been preconsidered. She was not at all my type. But there she was, giving me an interested look.

  “She likes you,” said Lou when Elyse went to the restroom. We had almost finished the succession of artful, tiny plates that comprised our dinner, and she seemed to have sobered up a bit. “And she could use a distraction. She just went through an awful breakup.”

  “I’m nothing if not distracting.”

  She looked wounded. “Don’t be like that, Jim.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m trying to be helpful.”

  “So am I.”

  She frowned at me, and even though I knew I had upset her, I said nothing in response.

  After dinner, we went down the street for drinks. Aidan and his girlfriend left first; then Max and Lubna departed. Around midnight, Elyse put a long, thin hand on my arm. “Want to split a cab back?” she asked.

  Lou was huddled against Rob, their bickering from earlier in the evening already in the distant past. Now they looked like a perfume ad: the newly graying, suit-clad hunk; the wispy, slightly disheveled beauty on his arm. They kissed, then turned toward me and smiled.

  “Will we see you tomorrow, Jim?” said Lou.

  “Sure.” My response came out cold and flat, and yet I did not apologize or smooth it over by saying more. No, I’m sorry to report that I actually felt a little pleased when Lou frowned at me.

  “Shall we?” I said to Elyse.

  “We shall.” She laughed and slipped her arm around my waist.

  And off into the night we went, two people doing our damnedest to move forward with what we had.

  SEVEN

  Winter 2004–Summer 2005

  Wisnewski got sick at the end of 2004. He was still living in Oakwood, the suburb where we had grown up, and was working in sales at Chrysler. He had inherited his parents’ brick ranch and married a woman named Jen, who had been a few years behind us in school. They had two kids and a nice life.

  Wisnewski and I were lazy in that way people who know they’ll always be friends can be. Even though it was all of forty minutes away, he didn’t like coming out to Ann Arbor—too little parking, too many liberals—and I didn’t drive to Oakwood all that often, either. When I did, I felt like I had to stop by my father’s, and I didn’t really want to do that. But when I skipped it, I felt guilty, which was just as bad. So Wisnewski and I mostly saw each other around the holidays and in the fall, when he was willing to momentarily cast aside his feelings about the hippie socialists I lived among while we went to see the Wolverines play football.

  Anyway, he called me that December and said, “Well, Hernandez, the bad news is I have cancer. The good news is it’s the kind that’s curable.”

  It was lymphoma, which has a high survival rate. But by the following spring, it was clear that Wisnewski was on the wrong side of statistics; one treatment had failed, and the next one wasn’t working a whole lot better. This was made known to me when Jen called me one morning and said, “Listen, James, Jason’s doing badly. I think you and Rob should come see him.”

  A few days later, I picked Rob up from the airport, and we headed straight to Oakwood. I had been hoping to catch up with him—maybe have him help me shore up my courage before we arrived—but he spent the ride sending missives from his cell phone.

  “Sorry,” he said when he caught me scowling in his direction. “Work’s nuts and I wasn’t exactly planning on this trip.”

  “No worries,” I said, even though I was, in fact, annoyed. I hadn’t heard from him all that much lately, and when I called or emailed him, it was often a week or more before he finally got back to me. “At least you came.”

  I had been to Wisnewski’s several times since he and Jen had moved in, but it was still strange to walk into his childhood home and find it nothing like I remembered it. His dad had been a hoarder, back before there was a term for that, and there used to be piles of stuff—newspapers, plastic tubs, you name it—everywhere. But after Wisnewski’s dad died and his mom moved to Florida, Jen emptied the place out. The dirty walls had been painted in autumnal colors, and the musty odor had been replaced with the scent of overbaked pumpkin pie. Everything was tidy and matching and suburban.

  “Hey, assholes,” said Wisnewski, who was waiting for us at the door. He had always been a big guy—not especially tall, but well over two hundred pounds. Now his skin hung on him like a costume meant for someone larger, and he hobbled into the living room and kind of threw himself down on the sofa.

  “I bet it’s good to be out of the hospital, right?” I said, settling into a deep leather recliner.

  “Yeah, I’m taking a break.” He grimaced. “It’s—it’s in my liver.”

  “Shit,” said Rob, who was next to Wisnewski.

  “Shit,” I echoed.

  “Yeah,” said Wisnewski. He put up his hands. “What can you do?”

  “Hey, guys,” said Jen, sticking her head into the room. “Can I get you anything? How about a beer?” She had gotten heavier, like she was absorbing Wisnewski’s loss.

  Rob looked at Wisnewski. “You gonna have one?”

  “Always. Three brewskis, hon,” he said to Jen.

  “You got it.”

  “Man, I love you,” said Wisnewski to Jen when she retu
rned with an uncapped beer for each of us. He turned to us. “It’s good of you guys to come.”

  “I’m only sorry it’s been so long,” said Rob.

  “Don’t even mention it. I know you’re busy, businessman. How’s Lou?”

  “She’s good. She’s in Tucson right now. Where are your kids, anyway?”

  “They’re at Jen’s mom’s for the afternoon. I didn’t want them running in circles around you.”

  Rob smiled. “I don’t mind that. I’d love to see them the next time I’m here.”

  “Sure, sure.” Wisnewski’s eyes were somewhere far off. Then he grinned. “Hey, you remember when we left Helmer’s car in the middle of the football field?”

  I hadn’t thought about Barry Helmer in a while, let alone spoken with him. Last I had heard, he was still in the navy and stationed in Spain.

  Rob laughed. “Oh man, he was so pissed. That was the best.”

  “And remember how James lost the bet about Helmer and had to write our English papers for us?”

  “And then you got caught!” said Rob to me, laughing even harder.

  “Almost caught,” I corrected. “I just about wet myself when I had to convince Mrs. Lafferty that I had only coached you guys through them. I was sure I was a second away from getting my college admission revoked and ruining my entire future.”

  “Man, you were always a tool,” said Wisnewski affectionately. He had yet to take a sip of his beer.

  “Remember that time we stripped your clothes off and kicked you out of my house?” Rob said to Wisnewski. “We were expecting you to wig out, but there you were, sitting on the deck as calm as can be. Nothing gets to you.”

  “Except cancer,” said Wisnewski, and we were all quiet for a minute.

  Then we went back to talking about the past. High school was fifteen years behind us—a lifetime ago, but like yesterday, too. That’s how it goes; so much disappears, but the memories that remain are often so vivid they might as well have just happened.

  Eventually, Wisnewski started to fade, so we clapped him on the back, but not too hard, and promised to come again soon.

  “Well, that was terrifying,” said Rob once we were back in my car. “He doesn’t look good.”

  “No,” I said. “But it’s not over just yet.”

  Regret ran through my mind like an old film reel as we pulled away from Wisnewski’s house. Why hadn’t I made more of an effort to see him? And what about our other friends—Helmer, Carl White, Joe Phelps? What about Heather Ballard, or Carrie Krefbaum, whom I had taken to prom—or her best friend, Tiffany, whom I had made out with instead of Carrie? Had these people fallen out of my life for good reason?

  I turned to Rob, who was already retethered to his phone. “You have anywhere to be?”

  He looked up. “Yeah, I have a hot date at the Olive Garden.”

  “Well, I don’t know. Maybe you wanted to see your folks.”

  “Not this time, unless I want to extend my stay by three weeks.”

  “So can we swing by my dad’s?”

  “Of course. Do you need to let him know we’re coming?”

  “No,” I said, turning onto the street where I had spent the first eighteen years of my life. “He’ll be there.”

  And he was. We found him in the garage, puttering beneath the hood of a circa ’70s Mustang. He looked irritated to see me, but then he spotted Rob and perked up. He didn’t ask why were there. Like us appearing on a random Saturday afternoon was what he had been expecting all along.

  “Whose car is that, Pops?” I asked.

  “A neighbor’s. I’m fixing up cars in my spare time.” He scowled at my Toyota, which was in the driveway. “Not the commie kind.”

  “You are aware that Japan is a constitutional monarchy, yes?”

  He ignored me. “Rob, how are you?”

  “Not too bad. You look good, Javier. How’s life been treating you?”

  “Eh,” said my father, sounding exactly like my grandfather. “I go to the bar to watch fights, I work on cars.” He paused. “I made a new friend.”

  “A friend, huh?” I said.

  “If it’s something to tell you about, I’ll tell you.” He wiped his brow with his forearm. “I’m taking it slow.”

  When my mother died, I half expected my father to, too. The man had not known how to make a doctor’s appointment or locate his own socks and underwear, let alone feed himself. But life had marched on, and he with it. And now he had a girlfriend.

  “Can’t you find James a nice woman to settle down with?” said my father to Rob. “I’m waiting for grandkids.”

  “You have two,” I reminded him.

  “I want some that have my last name. Can’t Rob here get you a good job in finance? Rob, couldn’t James take a few courses, switch gears?”

  Of course he had used an auto metaphor. And of course I did not remind him that most of the time he told people I already worked in finance. “Pops. I’m happy doing what I do.”

  This was mostly true. I continued to excel at my job; as it happens, a basic proficiency in the English language holds actual value outside of the field of literature. There were times when I contemplated driving a pair of scissors directly into my skull, sure. But I liked being good at something, and as I was discovering, the better I was, the more effort I wanted to put into my work.

  “Javier, a chimp could do what I do,” Rob told my father. “Run the numbers, move the numbers, figure out what works, press the same button over and over, inform people you have pressed that button. James here has actual talent.”

  Like Kathryn’s praise, Rob’s statement was based in faith, not fact; he had not read my work since I was in graduate school.

  “I don’t know about that,” I said.

  “If you didn’t, why would you still be doing it? I’m not saying someone should hand you a Pulitzer for your unfinished novel. But there’s a reason you haven’t quit yet.”

  “Just talk to him,” my father said to Rob, like I wasn’t standing right next to him. The minute we got back in the car, Rob was on his phone, muttering as his thumbs tapped out one email after the next.

  “This bad, even on a Saturday?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He sighed deeply. “Clients want to know what I’m going to do with their millions before Monday comes, even though they know the market’s closed. My boss wants to know what I’m going to do about my clients. My team wants to know what I’m going to do about the boss.” He dropped the phone into his lap and looked out the window. Past him, the trees and grass along the highway formed a long green blur. “Sometimes I wonder what it’s all about. I wish I had something like you and Lou have.”

  For a split second I thought he was implying that Lou and I had a romantic connection, and my heart immediately began to pound against my rib cage. Then it occurred to me that he was talking about writing. “No, you don’t,” I finally said. “Trust me. Like every writer knows, if there were anything else we could do, that’s what we would be doing.”

  In fact, my very first creative writing professor had used a variation on this line—If there’s anything you can do other than write, save yourself the heartbreak and go do that—and I remember thinking it was arrogant, and maybe even intended to preemptively eliminate his competition. I had never repeated it when I was an instructor, so I wasn’t sure why I had just used it on Rob.

  “How is Lou, anyway?” I asked. “Are you guys still having trouble?”

  “Not as much. She seems better lately; she’s really wrapped up in her writing. She’s at a poetry retreat right now, actually. And she found a literary agent last month.”

  “That’s great. And you?”

  “I’m good,” he said, and picked up his phone again.

  It’s funny—an incident that feels like a massive misstep as it’s happening often ends up as a footnote in your personal history, if you remember it at all. But a seemingly insignificant “should have” can turn out to be one of your biggest regrets.
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  Rob did not volunteer any additional information about his career or how his marriage was faring. But I suppose I understood—in the way that humans who have spent large, formative chunks of their life together can—that he was unhappy, and he and Lou weren’t doing so well, either. Yet I said nothing; I did nothing. The next morning, he was on a plane back to New York.

  EIGHT

  Winter 2006

  Lou published her first book of poetry, You Are Here, when she was thirty-one. I was thrilled for her, even if her success was a fresh reminder of my own failure. I had not finished the so-I-married-a-spy novel, even though Pascal had encouraging things to say about the first half. For all my quoting Didion, I knew how the story would end (sorry to spoil it for you, but everyone dies) yet could not figure out what to do with the middle. Right after the average man learns the terrible truth, my motivation disappeared along with the protagonist’s mole of a wife. One day of not writing became two, then twenty, and before long I only looked at my draft when the mood struck, which was less often than a full moon rising in the sky.

  There is something about leaving things undone that wears away your confidence, and when I arrived in New York on the evening of Lou’s book launch, I felt bared to the bone, all my live wires exposed.

  Who goes to poetry readings? I wondered as I walked into the bookstore. Half the city, by the look of the crowd that had gathered. I didn’t see Rob but quickly located Lou, who was standing in the center of the room. She was wearing an ivory wool dress and a huge smile.

  Lou’s editor introduced her, and then she took the stage. She was nervous at first, and her voice broke several times. But poem by poem she unwound, until she was expansive and at ease, delivering each verse with emotion. She was on one of the last poems when she spotted me. She leaned into the microphone. “Hi, Jim,” she murmured, then smiled at the crowd. “Jim’s an old friend of mine.”

  I don’t remember much about what happened after that. She read again, there was applause, then a brief question and answer, and more clapping.

  She called me out, I thought, an electric current shooting through my body. Me, me, me.