Forever is the Worst Long Time: A Novel Page 8

  Lou was surrounded by people afterward. I was too jittery to talk to her, anyway, so I went to find Rob. I found him chatting with a couple in the corner. As the three of them turned to greet me, I realized the couple was Kathryn and the man I sometimes saw her around campus with. I suppose I knew in a roundabout way that Lou and Kathryn had kept in touch. Still, seeing her there was a knee to the nuts.

  “Hello, James,” she said pleasantly. “You flew in, too?”

  “Yes, just tonight,” I said, as though the ratty college-era duffel I was toting around hadn’t indicated as much. Work had been hectic for weeks as the business school prepared for the end-of-year fund drive, and I had taken a late-afternoon flight and cabbed from the airport directly to the bookstore.

  Kathryn gestured to the man beside her. “James, this is Christopher Bucknell.”

  “James Hernandez,” I said.

  “Christopher is a physicist,” said Kathryn as Christopher nodded in the smug way that someone who has put in the time to become a physicist has earned the right to do. “And my husband,” she added, as if the previous title had not been enough rope to hang me.

  “How lovely,” I said as Rob stuck his elbow into my side. “I am a hack at the business school, and Kathryn’s ex.”

  Kathryn glowered, and for good reason; I had no cause to be a prick, particularly to a person with whom I had once occasionally shared a toothbrush.

  Then I noticed it. The dress she was wearing, which dropped like a curtain from her bust, made it hard to tell. She was glowing a bit, but she had always been radiant. But as Kathryn shifted toward Christopher, I saw the unmistakable swell of new life.

  “Oh,” I said.

  Kathryn’s eyes met mine. “I’m due in May.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said, and mostly meant it, but I also sort of wanted to crawl into a deep hole, or maybe even a cave with a bear who had just awoken after a very long winter.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Well,” I said, and cleared my throat. “Lou was great, wasn’t she?”

  “Yeah, she was,” said Rob. “You’re coming over tonight, right?”

  “Definitely,” I said. I was hit with a sudden urge to flee, which I opted to heed. “You know, I should really get going if I’m going to make it to the after-party. I need to drop my bag at the hotel, and then I’ll see you guys back at your place.”

  “Great. So we’ll see you soon,” said Rob.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Kathryn, Christopher Bucknell, so long.”

  Rob and Lou lived in a brownstone apartment in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. It was a movie set of a place, narrow but well lit and decorated with Swedish furniture and Moroccan rugs. When I arrived, the party was already in full swing, so I grabbed a glass of champagne from a table and jammed my way through well-dressed revelers, feeling every bit the unsophisticated Midwesterner that I was. I was working on my second glass when I found Lou in the dining room.

  She gave me a sideways hug. “It is so good of you to come.”

  “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Congrats, Lou. I’m thrilled for you. The poems are great, and”—I grabbed a copy of her book from the credenza—“I mean, you have a book! And you’re practically a teenager!”

  She scrunched up her nose. “Thank God I’m not; those were the worst years of my life. But thank you, Jim. I’m really thrilled. Honestly, I’m still pinching myself.”

  “Lou!” said a leather-skinned man dressed in jeans and a Rolling Stones t-shirt.

  “My publisher,” she whispered. “Come find me later,” she called over her shoulder as the man whisked her off into another conversation.

  Kathryn and Christopher were on the other side of the apartment. Attempting to maintain that distance between us landed me directly in front of Elyse, whom I had not spoken with since that one night in 2003. She and I made small talk, but I couldn’t stop staring at the man she had come with, who was wearing a gold-buttoned blazer and was so high I was sure he was going to float off right in front of me.

  Eventually Elyse and Captain Coke-face headed elsewhere, but in the interim Kathryn and Christopher had drifted closer to where I was standing. I fled to the kitchen, but they continued their oblivious trek toward me, so I quietly let myself out onto the patio.

  It was cold, and two smokers huddled together, puffing with fervor. They crushed the last of their cigarettes beneath their heels, nodded at me, then hustled back inside.

  The sky was lit with industry and overpopulation, and it was hard to see the stars. I was counting airplanes when Lou came up behind me.

  “What are you doing out here?” she asked.

  I made a face. “Oh, you know. Crowd control for introverts. But what about you? Why are you not enjoying your own party?”

  “I needed a second to collect my thoughts.”

  “I can go,” I said, already starting for the door.

  “Don’t you dare,” she scolded, and I returned to my place beside her. “I can think just fine with you here. Though brrr! It’s freezing.”

  I handed her my sport coat. “Here. I hope it doesn’t reek of social anxiety.”

  She laughed and slipped the jacket over her shoulders. “Thank you. So was it okay, seeing Kathryn? I couldn’t not invite her.”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted you not to. And yeah, it was fine.” I considered it for a moment, then added, “It was tough. She’s probably a lot happier and better off now. But I . . .” Eh, I thought. What’s the point in not telling Lou what’s on my mind? “I miss her a little, you know?”

  “Oh, Jim,” she said wistfully. “Things between you two didn’t work out for a reason, don’t you think?”

  “Sure,” I said, though I was beginning to suspect that the reason was, in fact, me.

  The second floor of the brownstone behind Lou and Rob’s was dimly lit. Through the windows, I watched a man take an infant from a woman’s arms and begin to pace back and forth.

  “So has Rob told you?” said Lou after a moment.

  “Told me what?” I had been thinking about the baby across the way, and probably about Kathryn’s pregnancy, too. As such, my immediate assumption was that Lou was going to tell me she and Rob were planning to have a child. My next thought was less a coherent idea than a flash of jealousy. When two people become three, they stop being fellow citizens and form their own nation, one that is largely impervious to foreigners.

  Lou was gnawing on her lower lip, which was threatening to bleed. “We . . . we’re having trouble.”

  “That’s normal, right? You’ve been married eight years,” I said, like I knew a damn thing about marriage.

  “I think there’s someone else.”

  A storm of emotions tore through me. Repulsion and anger, yes. But curiosity, too, and if I’m totally honest, the smallest bit of excitement. “That can’t possibly be true,” I said at last. “He works too much.”

  “Yes, he does. And so does his supervisor. Andrea,” she said, like a curse. “I used to call her his work wife, but it’s not so funny these days.”

  For all of Rob’s girlfriends and one-nighters before Lou, I had never known him to be unfaithful. Maybe he was getting his midlife crisis out of the way early—though that didn’t seem right, either. “Are you sure? That’s out of character for him.”

  “I’m not sure, actually,” she admitted, pulling my jacket tighter around her. “But whether or not he’s actually cheating isn’t the point, is it? Doubt’s a symptom, not the disease. Something’s broken between us.”

  I hesitated. Was I being disloyal to Rob by talking to Lou about this? Probably. As pleased as I was that Lou was confiding in me, I was disappointed that Rob hadn’t come to me first.

  Then again, perhaps he had tried to, and I had been so busy registering his small complaints about Lou that I had ignored the bigger picture. And why? Because I hadn’t wanted to hear anything negative about her? Or because I had wanted them to fall apart?

  I settled on a
feeble statement that allowed Lou and me both to opt out of the conversation: “You don’t have to tell me about it if you don’t want to.”

  “I do want to. Who else understands?” Lou’s eyes were moonlit as she looked at me—or maybe that’s just my memory making too much of the incandescent bulbs over the back door. “Rob thinks we should have a baby. Like that will fix everything.”

  So I hadn’t been completely off base about them procreating. My breath formed tiny clouds in front of my face. “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s lousy timing. He’s spent years on his career, and instead of putting equal time into our relationship, he wants to plow forward and have a kid.” She shook her head, sending her hair bouncing off her shoulders. “I mean, we’re talking about adding a whole other human being to the planet!”

  “And everyone knows humans are the worst,” I said gravely. “You’d be way better off getting a dog.”

  She broke into a smile. As we looked at each other, there it was again—that terrible, wonderful feeling, pulling me under.

  “You’re great, Jim,” she said after a moment. “Maybe I should have married someone like you.”

  I froze, trying to figure out how to respond, but it didn’t matter; the back door opened and out popped another smoker, who immediately began chatting with Lou. By that point, I had lost circulation in my digits and was fairly certain my nose was frostbitten. Also, there was the issue of my attempting to get over Lou having just been undone with one offhand comment. “I’m going to head in,” I told her.

  “I’ll be right behind you. Do you want your jacket?”

  “No, you keep it.”

  Maybe I should have married someone like you, I heard her say at two in the morning, and at four. Those ruinous words rattled around in my mind again at six when the cabs on Seventh Avenue began to bleat below my hotel window, and I gave up and got out of bed.

  She couldn’t have meant it, I decided as I showered. It’s not that I thought I had no merit as a potential partner. Yes, I was occasionally introverted and often awkward. But I was usually kind and typically competent, and my life was humming along. I was soon to receive a third promotion at work and had even saved up a down payment for a house.

  Still. What would Lou ever see in a man like me? For all my longing, my actual appeal was not something I had put much thought into. (When you’re wondering what you’d do with the megamillions jackpot, you try not to ruin the fantasy by calculating your odds of winning.) That morning, though, I considered the possibility that maybe—just maybe—she had said that about marrying me because she, too, felt that same strike of lightning when we were together.

  I took a brief nap, then rode the train into Brooklyn. I had more than an hour to kill before I was supposed to be at Rob and Lou’s, so I stopped at a bistro for a bite.

  Back then, Brooklyn wasn’t quite the breeder Mecca it has since become. But there was a tiny, dimple-faced child at the table to my right who looked a lot like you (or at least that’s how I remember her). She was giving me a gummy smile, so I smiled back and wondered what it would be like to have a child of my own and whether I had made a mistake in ending things with Kathryn. She had not been making that terrible pitying face at me, but seeing her had stung all the same. When we mutually decided to end our relationship, I was certain we had made the right decision. The last thing I had expected to feel all these years later was regret.

  I pulled Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help out of my backpack. My coworker Nessa—herself an academic expat, and my closest friend at the office—had pressed it into my hands like a door-to-door missionary with free copies of the Bible. As I began to read, I understood why. Moore’s stories were sharp, concise portraits of everyday life. I had always found the old adage “Write what you know” to be rather ridiculous. Then again, spinning tales about apocalyptic doom and gloom and married folks wasn’t working out so well for me. Perhaps I would be wise to rip a page from Moore and begin to chronicle something that looked more like my own existence.

  Halfway through my meal, the sweet baby at the table next to me began bawling. Then the table to my left was seated with two children, who started banging fork upon spoon upon table, and screeching in response to what I gathered was the wrong kind of bread in the wire basket that the waitress had placed before them. Their mother had the terse smile of someone running on goodwill and caffeine, while their father looked like he would rather be, say, face-to-face with a gladiator in a colosseum in ancient Rome. I wolfed down my food, paid my bill, and headed to Rob and Lou’s.

  “Want a cup of coffee, Jim?” Lou asked as she let me in. Their apartment was littered with the remnants of the previous evening—lipstick-smudged glasses on the credenza, appetizer plates piled high in the sink.

  “Sounds great,” I told her. “Thanks.”

  Rob was at the dining room table. “Hey, douche nozzle,” he said, stretching his long legs onto a second dining chair.

  “Hey yourself, dong nugget. That was some party. What time did everyone leave?”

  “The last of the stragglers took off around one.”

  My whistle echoed off the tin ceiling. “Lou,” I called, “did you have a good time?”

  “Of course,” she called back from the kitchen. “But did you?”

  “I wouldn’t call concurrent encounters with past partners fun. But the reading and party were great,” I said as she walked back into the dining room. “And like I said, I’m really happy for you.”

  She handed me a mug of coffee, and I thanked her. Then she handed Rob a mug, and he said, “Do we have anything to eat?”

  “No, because you didn’t go out for pastries like I asked you to,” Lou said in a voice that had nothing to do with croissants. She walked to the credenza and began gathering wineglasses, while Rob remained at the table, sipping his coffee.

  “How’s work going, Rob?” I asked, hoping to lighten the mood. “Greenspan’s departure still denting the market?”

  He grunted. “How could it not? You can’t expect Oz to keep humming along after the little man disappears from behind the curtain.”

  “Fair enough.” I thought about what Lou had said about Rob working all the time. Maybe they were overdue for a getaway. “You two have any vacations planned?”

  “Yeah, I have a trip to London coming up.”

  “That’s a work trip,” said Lou, gathering another round of glasses from the credenza. “Not a vacation.”

  “I’m sorry my company doesn’t meet shareholders in Bora Bora,” he said without turning to her.

  “Forget it.”

  “Happy to.”

  As embarrassed as I was to find myself in the middle of Rob and Lou’s spat, the insults they were lobbing at each other only solidified my suspicion that perhaps they were not so well suited for each other, after all. Yes, they loved each other—or so they said—but was this ugly fight not evidence that their love was not as deep as they claimed, or even the wrong sort of love? I again thought of Kathryn, who had never spoken to me that way, nor I to her. If we had stayed together, maybe we, too, would have succumbed to the same fate.

  Lou sighed in defeat. “Fine. Why don’t you two go out? Go get a bite to eat, then walk to the Promenade or something.” She turned to address me. “He’ll spend all of Sunday at the office, and probably tonight, too. Might as well enjoy him while you can.”

  “A bite to eat sounds good,” I said. Yes, I had just come from lunch, but did it matter? Their sparring made Lou’s comment about marrying someone like me that much worse. I was ready to get out of there.

  “Agreed,” said Rob. “When do you take off again, James?”

  “I fly out tomorrow at one,” I said. And not a moment too soon.

  “Boo, that was too short,” said Lou. “Have you ever thought about moving here? You’d love it. A single successful guy like you in the city—you’d have your pick of the litter.”

  I laughed. “Successful? You must have me confused with someone e
lse.”

  “Do I?” She was standing behind Rob and winked at me over his head.

  And I thought, No, I can’t move to New York. In fact, by the time Rob and I set out, I had decided it would probably be best if I did not visit again for quite some time.

  NINE

  November 2007

  Wisnewski died, as I had known he would from the moment I got that first call from Jen. What I didn’t know was how awful it would feel to lose him. After all, my own mother had died. What could be worse?

  But here, I thought as I looked into the open casket—here was the deflated shell of the boy with whom I had biked through our neighborhood, summer after summer. Here was the middle schooler who had howled with laughter when I began to go through puberty, then primed me on birth control in a way my father and health teacher had failed to. Here was the teen who, after I downed vodka like it was water (never do that—never drink alcohol faster or in larger quantities than you would a piping hot espresso), pried the cup from my hand and made sure I didn’t drown in my own vomit. Here was the man who had been my lifelong friend.

  And now he was dead.

  I began to cry as soon as I saw him laid out at the front of the funeral home, then transitioned to what I hoped was a more subdued form of weeping as the funeral service began.

  By the time Wisnewski’s nine-year-old daughter stood before his casket and sang the first few lines of “Amazing Grace,” I was back to blubbering and no longer cared what Rob thought, or Lou, or anyone.

  No, the only person I cared about was Wisnewski—man, Wisnewski, how could he possibly be gone? All the tears I had not shed for my own mother came pouring out of me that morning. But that’s a funeral for you; every lost life of your brief existence washes over you anew, with a fresh wave of loss added to that terrible sea of grief.

  After the funeral, Lou, Rob, and I drove to Wisnewski’s house, which was no longer actually his, I realized as we pulled up. The place was packed with relatives, coworkers, and dozens of high school classmates Wisnewski had kept up with over the years. I had mostly avoided everyone at the funeral home, but now I found myself in the unfortunate position of having to chitchat over plates of crusted deviled eggs and tiny ham sandwiches slathered with ungodly amounts of mayonnaise. I had just finished catching up with Helmer, who was back in the States for a stint and thinking about leaving the navy for good, when Lou sidled up next to me at the buffet.