The Good Life

by Marian Thurm

  “Don’t worry,” he breathes, but he can’t turn his head even for an instant to look at her as she swallows down those pink caplets with a quiet sip from a bottle of Aquafina.

  Isn’t he supposed to be on vacation? A family vacation, as a matter of fact, all four of them free to savor each other’s company unfettered by the responsibilities of home and work and school.

  It’s going to be a long week, she fears, and though she hates to admit it, even to herself, a small, selfish part of her is already guiltily looking forward to the moment school starts up again a week from next Monday.

  ~ 7 ~

  The night she went over to Rocco’s apartment to have a discussion with him about their future together (or the lack thereof), Stacy slept with him one last time. He had just finished telling her a terribly sad story about a middle-aged patient of his, who, in addition to suffering from deteriorating vision, had recently been given a devastating cancer diagnosis, one that held out little hope for the guy’s future. Stacy’s eyes brimmed as she listened to Rocco talk about his patient; somehow, though she hadn’t meant for it to happen, they ended up in his bedroom, and then onto the bed itself. Rocco was an attending physician at New York Hospital, and had been making a pretty nice salary for a while now, but you’d never know it by the look of his apartment, a one-bedroom co-op in a doorman building near the hospital, on a leafy side street off First Avenue. The apartment had very little furniture in it, as if Rocco had just moved in, though he’d actually been there for several years. There was a big, expensive-looking forest-green leather couch in the living room and also a coffee table, but no chairs or dining table, and neither carpeting nor a rug on the scratched and stain-spotted parquet floor. The bedroom was no better. All four corners of the nearly empty room were occupied by tall, sloppy piles of books and medical journals. Here, too, as in the living room, Rocco hadn’t even bothered to put up new window treatments; the windows were covered by nothing more than dusty, yellowing venetian blinds left behind by the previous owner.

  “What you need, Rocco, is a woman or two in your life,” Stacy told him sternly after he rolled off her and lit up a joint in his bedroom. “Not to mention some nice Levolors.” Both of them were naked, except that Rocco had, in the heat of the moment, neglected to take off one of his socks. “I mean this apartment is ridiculous. How lazy can you get? How much energy does it take to buy a rug, or some carpeting? What’s wrong with you, you lazy bastard?” Stacy took a hit from the joint and smacked him lightly over the head with the current issue of the Journal of Cataract and Refractive Surgery that she’d picked up off the night table.

  “Ow,” said Rocco, pretending she’d hurt him. A line of curly dark-blond hair bisected his stomach and groin; idly, Stacy tugged at it, but so gently that Rocco seemed not to notice. She was going to miss him, she realized—their history went back a long way, all the way to Cambridge, where he had, freshman year, been dating her dearest friend Jefrie- Ann Miller, one of the pals Stacy had gone shopping with at the Harvard Coop in June. Remembering the reunion now, she thought of Roger, and how everything that had passed between the two of them stemmed from the wallet and key ring she’d dropped on the floor of the muffin shop. Or shoppe. What if she’d been paying attention and the wallet and keys hadn’t fallen from her hands? Would she and Rocco be in a different sort of relationship now? They’d been friends first, then live-in lovers for three years, then exes, and then friends again, albeit friends who’d once seriously considered marriage; if not for Rocco’s adamant refusal to even contemplate the possibility of having children someday—he’d sealed the deal with a vasectomy in his final year of med school— Stacy might have married him, she believed. He’d been the very first love of her life, and now she was here to tell him that seeing each other again, even as old friends, just wasn’t a great idea.

  “I’m going to marry Roger,” she heard herself say. She took another hit from the joint before handing it back to Rocco.

  “Whoa! Are you guys engaged or something?”

  On the clock radio next to her side of the bed, Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” was playing now; its extravagant sentimentality was too much for Stacy, and she had to turn it off. “Nope, I just have a feeling—a pretty strong one, actually—that it’s going to happen, that’s all,” she told Rocco. “He’s forty-two, going on forty-three; I think he wants to get moving, you know? And you know what, so do I,” she heard herself say.

  “You wanna marry a guy in his forties?” Rocco said. He offered the joint to Stacy again, but she’d had enough.

  “You sort of sound like an ageist idiot,” she said. “Never mind those Ivy League degrees of yours.”

  “Forty-two, man . . . any way you look at it, it’s not young.”

  “Trust me,” Stacy said, “it’s not a problem. Someday, when Roger’s ninety-five and I’m a mere eighty-six, I may think of him as extremely old, but, until then, I predict it’s all going to be fine. Better than fine. And he’s kind of a great guy, by the way—smart, successful, self-assured, and there’s this generosity I keep seeing in him; he’s someone who really just wants to take care of me . . .”

  Rocco looked at her sadly; or maybe, Stacy thought, he was just goofy and stoned. “I’m never going to meet him, am I?” he said. He pulled off the one sock he was still wearing and pitched it across the room.

  “What? Isn’t it bad enough he had to hear your message on my answering machine?” Stacy said. That look of shock and confusion and melancholy on Roger’s face, the way he’d cringed at the sound of Rocco’s voice; it was almost as if she could feel the muscles in his body contracting in horror. If she’d been just the slightest bit uncertain about whether she loved Roger, she’d known, at that uneasy moment in her apartment the other night, that she could never stand to see him hurt like that. Surely that was love, wasn’t it? Roger was more generous—or at least more open—about his love for her, but she could already feel herself swiftly catching up.

  She untangled her legs from Rocco’s now, more than a little queasy at having allowed herself to fall so effortlessly into his bed.

  “Actually . . . I came over here to break the news to you that we can’t see each other again,” she confessed. She had some trouble finding her bra, which had somehow disappeared behind Rocco’s bed; brushing off a dust bunny or two that clung to it, she got back into the bra and then her jeans.

  “Not even as friends?” Rocco asked, and casually adjusted an errant bra strap for her before she slipped on her sweater.

  “Friends don’t fix friends’ bra straps for them, at least not when one of those friends happens to be a guy.”

  “And whose rule is that?” Rocco said. The joint had burned down to almost nothing, but he took one last hit before putting it out and unwrapping a root beer-colored lollipop that he discovered under his pillow, and which he immediately began to crunch on.

  “You’re going to break a tooth,” Stacy warned him. “It’s my rule, and it’s a sensible one, don’t you think?” She wondered if having lost her parents while she was still in her twenties had somehow made her selfish, more inclined to look out for her own best interests than she might otherwise have been. If so, she regretted it. But listen, you could get behind the wheel of your own life but steer it only so far. Sometimes it happened that you were screwed by forces beyond your control—a force like that reckless fool of a middle-aged guy who insisted on taking your mother flying on an especially windy afternoon.

  “After all these years, we’re going to miss each other too much,” Rocco pointed out. “I can’t agree to this craziness of yours. You’re telling me that we can’t even meet for a coffee every now and then? I mean, where’s the harm in that?”

  Sitting at the edge of Rocco’s bed, Stacy had zipped up her high-heeled boots, and was now out of the room and looking for her leather jacket, which she could have sworn she’d slung over the coat rack. From the foyer, she called out to Rocco to come and help her, and when he appea
red, entirely naked, she made a visor of her hand to shield her eyes. “No more,” she said. “Don’t.”

  “Oh, I know you don’t mean that,” said Rocco, but began heading back toward the bedroom to get dressed after he handed her the leather jacket, which had been hidden directly under his trench coat on the rack.

  “Oh, I do mean that!” yelled Stacy. “You’re no longer the ex-love of my life, buddy. I’m officially not thinking about us ever again. Ever!”

  A jean jacket had fallen to the floor and was stamped with a dusty footprint, Stacy noted. She expected a couple of tears to spring to her eyes as she hugged Rocco one last time, but they didn’t; there was only the sight of his downcast face as he stood in gray-and-black striped pajama bottoms in the open doorway and watched her walk down the hall toward the elevator.

  S

  The kids are asleep at the other end of the apartment, on the corduroy futon that opens up neatly into a double bed in the den. When Stacy tiptoes down the hallway to check on them, she sees that Olivia is flat on her back with a leg hanging off the side of the futon, the heel of one tiny foot nearly touching the carpet; Will is in a fetal position, his thumb stuck comfortingly into his mouth. Stacy considers unplugging it, but doesn’t want to risk waking him. She kisses both of her children on the tops of their slightly sweaty heads, and walks out of the room on her bare toes.

  Roger is waiting for her in his parents’ bed, sitting up in his boxers against the upholstered headboard, his ever-present BlackBerry in hand, inspecting his e-mails with a frown. He is fifty-two years old and looks it; his hair is almost completely gray now, which takes Stacy by surprise from time to time. When she studies photographs from their wedding and honeymoon, or even those taken from her hospital bed in the maternity ward at Mount Sinai, where Will was born three years ago, she sees a different Roger, younger, of course, but also happier, clearly possessing a sheen of confidence and well-being that she hasn’t been aware of for months now.

  She knows exactly how long it’s been since they’ve slept together—thirty-four days—and feels a little sickened by that fact, as if it suggests she and Roger may have lost the easy familiarity with each other’s bodies that they’ve savored for all the years of their marriage.

  Climbing up onto her side of the bed, dressed in her “Some Bunny Loves Me” T-shirt and not much else, she waits for Roger to put down his BlackBerry. She runs her fingertip along the inside of his arm, then down his leg, all the way down to his sturdy ankle.

  “You’re tickling me,” he says. “Please stop.”

  Humiliated, she rolls over onto her other side, facing away from him and his damn BlackBerry.

  “Wait, I’m sorry, just one more e-mail,” he says, but why should she believe him?

  She who can probably count on one hand the number of soulful kisses exchanged between them during those thirty-four days.

  S

  She has no idea what time it is when he wakes her, but it’s still pitch-dark in the room, and he raises her T-shirt up and over her head in a hurry. He’s hard, though not hard enough, and that’s because it’s his parents’ bed they’re sleeping in, and maybe it’s just too creepy, he explains.

  “Just tell me you love me,” he says. He sounds exhausted and his voice is full of all kinds of disappointment.

  “Of course I do,” she says. “Of course I do!” But it’s not enough; he asks her to say the whole thing this time. “I . . . love . . . you,” she says, hoping she sounds as adamant as she means to, and then she hears him weeping, something she has witnessed so painfully more than a couple of times since his poor, poor, deeply unlucky sister died two months ago.

  You can’t listen to a man sobbing in bed beside you and do nothing; you can’t stop the fine hairs at the back of your neck from stiffening, or the muscles in your stomach from contracting in sympathy. You can take all the Pepto-Bismol you want, and kiss your husband’s tears so delicately and lovingly, but, in the end, none of it, Stacy understands, is going to make a bit of difference tonight.

  ~ 8 ~

  On a Sunday afternoon, the day after Halloween, Roger went downtown to the diamond district on Forty-Seventh Street, to shop for a ring for Stacy. He would have preferred to do his shopping at Cartier or Tiffany, but his mother had a cousin named Zlata, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, who was in the diamond business, and this was where everyone in Roger’s family had always gone. He walked past one small jewelry shop after another, many of them owned by Orthodox Jewish guys who spoke Yiddish-accented English and who all looked the same to Roger in their black suits and plain white shirts, their pallor, their near-sighted brown eyes corrected by what appeared to be identical black-framed glasses. Looking through the shop windows at these guys and what he perceived to be their melancholy faces, Roger could swear he saw the tragic history of all of European Jewry reflected in them. Just before entering Zlata’s store, Forever Diamonds, he watched as what looked like gallons of popcorn mysteriously appeared out of nowhere and blew across the sidewalk, scattered by the chilly November wind. It was two o’clock now; he was hungry for lunch, his hands were cold, and the jacket he wore wasn’t heavy enough for the surprisingly brisk weather.

  From behind the counter of Forever Diamonds, a fiftyish man said, “Velcome.” The store was empty of customers, and Zlata wasn’t around; she’d been called away to New Jersey to help take care of her grandchildren, the man said, after Roger explained who he was. There was a color photograph of the beloved leader of the Lubavitch Hasidim, Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, taped to the wall, the same portrait Roger had seen in the window of nearly every shop he’d passed on Forty-Seventh Street today. He stared at the Rebbe’s blue eyes, his gentle, smiling face, this guy who was regarded by many of his followers to be the messiah.

  The man behind the counter, who was named Shmuli, introduced himself as Zlata’s business partner and smiled at Roger agreeably. “You know who the Rebbe is? He vill help you even from beyond the grave,” Shmuli promised.

  Would the Rebbe help him pick out a diamond ring for Stacy? Roger joked, though he knew, even as he said it, that Shmuli might think it was sacrilege to joke about the saintly Rebbe.

  But Shmuli only shrugged. “You’re looking for . . . ? Round-cut? Marquise? Emerald? Princess? Pear? Vat can I help you vit?”

  Vell, let’s see. Beyond the cut of the diamond, there was also clarity and color to consider. So much to worry about: Roger had looked at endless photos of diamonds on the Internet over the past few days but hadn’t been able to make a decision about any of it.

  Shmuli was patient; in addition to his expertise, he offered tea and a small ceramic bowl of shelled walnuts and almonds as Roger examined the stones that had been arranged for him against a piece of maroon velvet spread across the top of the glass counter.

  Did he know vat size finger the bride-to-be had?

  Her fingers were long and thin, Roger said, and blushed, thinking of the smooth, pale slice of knee visible through the rip in Stacy’s favorite jeans, and how the sight of it, just last night, filled him with lust, and also love, as he slid his own finger into the hole in her jeans and stroked her bare knee.

  Vell, long and thin vasn’t a size, Shmuli said, but not to vorry, later they could size the ring for the round-cut diamond Roger had finally chosen—for its brilliance and fire— after Stacy saw the ring. Which, Shmuli promised, would be ready for Roger to pick up by, let’s see, Thursday or Friday.

  Roger forked over his credit card, and gazed directly into the Rebbe’s clear blue eyes, looking for his approval, never mind that the old man had died in 1994 and Roger the faithless had never once made a pilgrimage to his final resting place in Queens—where thousands of the Rebbe’s followers from all around the world, Jew and non-Jew alike, flocked every day of the year, except on the Sabbath, according to Shmuli.

  Shmuli was from Berlin, Roger discovered, though he’d been born in a displaced persons’ camp in Poland directly after the war. And he was certain, h
e told Roger as he handed him his credit card receipt, that the Rebbe was indeed the messiah. “You and your family should come to his grave for blessings and spiritual guidance,” he advised Roger. “Vat can it hurt to go?” He tapped Roger’s wrist lightly with his index finger. “By the vey, that’s a beautiful vatch you got there. Vat you pay for that Rolex?”

  “A lot,” Roger said vaguely. He folded the receipt into a tiny square, and slipped it into the pocket of his khakis. He had just spent more than $8,000 on an engagement ring for Stacy, who, for all he knew, wasn’t quite ready to take the plunge, to upgrade from girlfriend to fiancée. It had been five months since she’d dropped her wallet and keys; wasn’t that enough time? He was eager to get a move on, to settle into a life embellished by a wife and children, that hectic life, filled to the brim, that most of his friends had been living for ten or fifteen years by now. His fortieth birthday was behind him, and he didn’t want to wait any longer, didn’t want to be robbed of the life he’d been patiently waiting to make his own.

  Sauntering along Forty-Seventh Street toward Fifth Avenue now, he saw, the day after Halloween, some nut dressed as the killer in the movie Scream, wearing a black hood and cloak, his white rubber mask mimicking the figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. As they passed each other, the nutjob behind the mask politely put up a hand in greeting.

  S

  He’s been in Florida long enough that his children are now the color of Melba toast. He’s been trying to spend as much time with his family as he can, though sitting around the pool every morning while Stacy plays with Olivia and Will in the shallow end bores him. Roger doesn’t like the water very much, and never has, not since he was a child and his parents belonged to a beach club on the south shore of Long Island; his mother and father had a hard time getting him into the water—chlorinated or salt, he wasn’t fond of either—just as Stacy has a hard time getting him into the pool now. The smell of chlorine is vaguely unpleasant to him, and the stickiness of dried salt water annoying, along with the gritty feel of leftover sand between his toes and his teeth and inside his ears. Stacy insisted that the kids see the ocean, though, and so all four of them spent a couple of hours yesterday at the beach, where they rented striped canvas chairs and Roger and Stacy escorted Will and Olivia to the water’s edge so they could get their tootsies wet.