The Good Life

by Marian Thurm

  Dave was looking at her with amusement. “ ‘Promise’? You mean ‘talent,’ doncha?”

  “It’s probably the worst question a student could ever ask you, right?” Stacy said. “I’m aware of that, believe me, it’s just that I’ve been working on this alleged novel of mine for so long now and if you think I should put it aside, or even permanently delete the file from my computer, well, I guess I would probably listen to you.” Her phone was buzzing like an annoying insect, but she ignored it. “I want to accomplish something in my life,” she said. “But if this is the wrong thing for me to pin my hopes on, I want you to tell me.” It wasn’t particularly warm in the room, but she felt a little damp behind her neck. And also dry mouthed. “Please just be honest with me,” she said, and took a fast swig from her sweating Poland Spring bottle. And even though the classroom door was wide open and there was another class across the hall that was still in session, Dave leaned toward her, putting his hands on her shoulders to balance himself as he kissed her, and this time—without a cab waiting impatiently on Broadway for her to hop in—it seemed that she had all the time in the world to kiss him back.

  She recognized that this was Dave’s way of deflecting her question, and also—in the deflection itself—of answering it. It wasn’t the answer she’d been looking for, not after all those endless hours she’d spent writing and rewriting her manuscript over too many years. But what about the encouraging critiques she’d received from Dave and her fellow classmates? They hadn’t been telling her the truth and had only wanted to spare her feelings, was that it? She closed her eyes to all of this and went with what was being offered her, the sexy opportunity that had presented itself here in this empty classroom with its white boards and big, square-faced ticking clock on the scuffed, pale-gray wall.

  There was a walk-in closet in a corner at the back of the room; without speaking, Dave led her there, and they went into it and shut the door. Her eyes adjusted to the semidarkness, and she could see that the shelves in the closet were empty, except for a spray bottle of Lysol and a rag. A bare light bulb hung from the ceiling; Dave yanked on the metal chain suspended from the socket. Stacy wanted the light off, but he wanted it on. To see how beautiful you are, he said. As they tugged their sweaters over their heads, she remembered the silvery nipple ring that was exposed the night he played with his post-punk band in Williamsburg.

  Soon she was licking the metal with the tip of her tongue, surprising herself.

  He slipped a condom from his cracked leather wallet, and ripped it open with his teeth.

  All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand, she thought guiltily as, helping Dave along, she reached down to pull off her underwear. But she was no Lady Macbeth, she told herself; she was only someone who kept waking in the wrong bed in the wrong house, morning after morning, unable to find her old life, the one she would joyfully reclaim in an instant if only she could.

  S

  As she and Dave were getting back into their clothes, Stacy mentioned that she was going to have to miss a class when she went to Florida next month, just for a week, just to get away for a while . . .

  It was flattering to see how deflated Dave looked, as if he might actually miss her.

  “So you’re going with your family?” he said.

  Yes, with my family, she told him as she followed him out of the closet.

  Roger seemed so deeply unnerved and unhappy these days, and it pained her to think that learning—not that he ever would—what she had done tonight would only make him unhappier. But she was startled to discover this thought didn’t do all that much to diminish the substantial pleasures of the evening.

  The piercing spasms of guilt would come later that night as she tried, unsuccessfully, to fall asleep, and she would force herself to deal with them.

  Pointing now to the laces of Dave’s dusty suede Pumas, she said, “Your spaghettis are untied.”

  “What?”

  It was a favorite line from a favorite book of Olivia’s, but how could Stacy tell him that?

  S

  Mrs. Feinsilver, the shrunken old lady from two doors down, is apparently standing outside their door begging for change.

  “Honey, do you have eight quarters for two singles? Mrs. Silverfein has to do a laundry,” Stacy calls out to Roger. Now she’s ushering the old lady into the living room.

  “Feinsilver,” Roger corrects her, and the truth is he doesn’t like the sight of her in his apartment; it makes him uneasy to see anyone except his family here. She’s an old friend of his parents’, originally from Brooklyn, where her wealthy husband owned a couple of nursing homes and was very nearly indicted on various charges having to do with financial shenanigans that attempted to defraud the government of Medicare fees. Her husband is gone now, her son lives in San Diego, and, like a lot of lonely people, she can’t help but talk incessantly about herself. Which is why she’s someone Roger tries to avoid whenever he’s down here in Florida.

  He goes through his pockets and the souvenir ashtray from Las Vegas where he’s been keeping his change, and comes up with seven quarters, one short of a single load of laundry.

  “Here you go,” he tells Mrs. Feinsilver, who, it appears, doesn’t have the two bucks she would very much like to give him.

  Standing in the living room in her flower-print housecoat, pale, bare legs, and satiny scarlet slippers, she says, “Your poor mother. How my heart aches for her!” And goes on to report, in great detail, her own vale of tears, those earthly sorrows which she only wishes her hubby were here to share with her.

  Roger and Stacy nod and say they understand how hard things must be. “Please just take the quarters and never mind about the two singles,” Roger urges her, but Mrs. Feinsilver wants them to know that she feels bad about taking their money. Her apology goes on for too long, and Roger can’t wait for her to leave.

  “It’s just two dollars,” Stacy says. “Honestly, don’t give it another thought, Mrs. Silverfein.”

  “Feinsilver,” Roger says. He hears Will crying from the bedroom because the TV remote is stuck and Will doesn’t want to watch the news, he only wants to watch the Disney Channel, which of course is a premium channel not available in Grandma Beverly’s basic cable package. Roger has explained this to Will several times already, but he’s three and a half years old and tired and cranky, and seems to have forgotten.

  “Excuse me, I’ve got to help my little boy,” he tells Mrs. Feinsilver, and, at last, makes his escape.

  ~ 32 ~

  People—like the guy who cut his hair for fifteen bucks at the unisex place on Third Avenue, and Fernando, the one friendly doorman in his new building, and Marshall, his brother-in-law—kept asking Roger what kind of diet he was on. Nutrisystem? Weight Watchers? Slim Fast? They seemed surprised when he said that no, there was no diet, it was only that he had a lot, too much, as a matter of fact, on his mind lately, and sometimes found himself forgetting to eat lunch. Even though Dr. Avalon suggested the problem was in his head, the doc was still worried enough to insist that Roger see his internist for a check-up—to find out why he’d lost so much weight, nearly twenty-five pounds over the past couple of months. Stacy had urged him to go as well, though it had taken a bit for her to notice how much he’d lost, and to finally say, with teary-eyed concern, God, even your face is too thin. Once his jeans and khakis began to fall past his hips, he’d been forced to put an extra hole in his belts, using an awl from his toolbox.

  But nope, there would be no doctor appointments; who needed a doctor to tell you what you already knew? Which was that it was hard to eat when everything tasted bitter—his favorite cinnamon bagels, Stacy’s homemade lasagna, even a teaspoonful of super-premium chocolate raspberry truffle ice cream. Roger had heard Clare complain about this very problem after one of the many rounds of chemo she’d endured; the worst of its side effects had been that her taste buds were altered in a truly fucked-up way, and there wasn’t really an antidote. It had hurt to hear about
this from her; thinking about it at this moment, only weeks after his sister’s death, made him weep. He went into the kids’ bathroom now, and sat on the edge of the tub and cried into his cupped hands.

  Down the hallway, Stacy was getting the children into their pajamas in their new bedroom where they slept in bunk beds made of shiny, red-painted steel. She called out to Roger; he could hear her even behind the closed door of the bathroom.

  She needed his help, but he needed to sit here and cry for his sister, who had known, as he did, what it was like to taste bitterness in everything.

  ~ 33 ~

  Stacy was enjoying her own version of coffee (aka a well-chilled can of Diet Coke) with Jefrie in a diner of sorts in Union Square, not far from the site of the very first class she’d taken with Dave. This was the week before she was leaving for Florida, and she and Jefrie were meeting in person because phone calls, e-mails, and texts all seemed to Stacy both inadequate and dangerous, given the nature of what it was she felt so desperate to confide in her best friend. And that was: how, precisely, she and Dave had fallen into . . . well, whatever it was they’d fallen into. Perhaps not a full-fledged affair, exactly, since they’d only revisited the walkin closet twice since their first time last month. Perhaps it was more of an intimate friendship of sorts, she mused out loud—a friendship that had, more than once, taken a sharp detour from its expected path.

  “Professor Sarno? Whoa!” Jefrie said. “And by the way, I believe that in common parlance what you’ve described is known as ‘friends with benefits.’ ” Along with her decaf, she’d ordered an enormous, ungainly looking black-and-white cookie on a plate that could barely contain it. She kept breaking off pieces and offering them to Stacy, who shook her head “no” each time.

  Stacy told her that every so often—when she was poised at the bathroom sink, toothbrush in hand, or standing alone over the stove stirring a steamy pot of capellini—she would suddenly feel sick with guilt. And, too, that she couldn’t stop thinking of her sister-in-law and how disappointed in her Clare would be. But Jefrie interrupted and said, “No offense, kiddo, but she’s dead, and can’t be disappointed, horrified, or anything else. And I don’t mean to sound hard-hearted, but we do what we have to do in this world to help us get by . . . Comprende?”

  It had been painful for Stacy to confess what had gone on in the walk-in closet, and it was mortifying to confide that, after all those classes she’d enrolled in, Dave had admitted he wasn’t absolutely certain she had “quite as much talent as it takes . . .”

  “Bummer,” Jefrie said sympathetically. “You’re sure you don’t want any of this cookie?”

  “Huge bummer, yeah, so discouraging, but he did say that my critiques were, um, truly insightful and a big help to my fellow students.”

  “All right, okay, that’s a nice little something,” Jefrie said, snapping off a piece of cookie. “And I take it you have no intention of telling Roger about any of this, right? I mean, some people think that telling your partner—if you still love him, which I’m guessing you do—can actually strengthen the relationship. Like, once the person gets past the hurt of the betrayal, you can focus on whatever else you . . .” Jefrie paused, and waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, forget it.”

  “What, are you kidding?” Stacy said. “Of course I love Roger! And let’s put it this way: I wouldn’t dream of saying a word to him. What he doesn’t know won’t . . .” It was odd, she reflected, that it wasn’t until now that Roger’s name had come up, and she only wished there were something sanguine she could offer. “I think,” she told Jefrie, “that he’s always had a tough time dealing with stress. And failure. He’s utterly disheartened about those business losses, and I mean twenty-four/seven, not just these little moments here and there. He’s been hitting the Xanax a lot, I think.” She was tempted to tell Jefrie about the breakdown Roger had suffered long ago during his freshman year at Michigan, but it seemed disloyal in the extreme, and so she kept quiet.

  But then, even though she felt uneasy as soon as she got started—knowing it would only make her husband look bad—she began to enumerate for Jefrie the ridiculous complaints Roger had about the laundry, of all things, which she’d gotten him to help her with only recently. He couldn’t even stand the tacky notices on the bulletin board in the laundry room of their building when, occasionally, he went down to take their stuff out of the dryer for her late at night: all those ads for SAT tutors; play groups for stay-at-home dads and their toddlers; Sunday services at Saint Stephen of Hungary Church; $10 off your first electrolysis treatment. Stacy could tell he was humiliated by having to do the laundry in a communal space; it brought him back to those days when he was in grad school, the last time he’d ever had to use a public laundry room.

  In his mind, she suspected, it was one more thing that highlighted just how far he’d plummeted.

  “Argh, I can’t stand to listen to this!” Jefrie said. “He sounds like a spoiled baby who needs to grow the fuck up. This minute.”

  “I guess he always thought of himself as terrifically ambitious. And, until recently anyway, a successful businessman. And then there’s his sister . . . It’s been dreadful for him,” Stacy said, and her voice was soft. “Too much.” She didn’t tell Jefrie that often during these past couple of weeks, when she spoke to Roger about anything at all—Marshall’s bereavement group or Olivia’s new teacher or the neighbor down the hall who’d worked for the Secret Service during the Clinton administration—she could see how distracted he was, see in his turquoise eyes that he was beyond distracted. That he was, she feared, lost.

  Then he would snap to attention, and, greatly relieved, she’d realize that she’d been mistaken.

  At the table next to them, a moon-faced woman seated alone was reading My Diet Starts Tomorrow: A Novel. Flipping it over, the woman brutally squashed the open paperback down on the table, picked up her cell phone, tapped a few keys, and said, “Hey, I’ve been thinking a lot about Shawn, and here’s the thing I really admire about him; he’s not dumb, you know?”

  If Stacy had been in better spirits, she would have laughed.

  “Look, you need to tell Roger to get his act together,” Jefrie said. “If you don’t, maybe I will.” She grabbed Stacy’s wrist. “You and I go way, way back, kiddo, and I can’t stand to see you looking so worried.”

  “Do I look worried?”

  “Hell yeah you do!”

  “Well, we’re going on one of those cheap, child-friendly vacations to Florida next week, so that should be nice and relaxing.”

  “You hate Florida,” Jefrie pointed out cheerfully, and Stacy was reminded of what a dear friend she was.

  “Hate Florida? Hell yeah I do!” she agreed.

  ~ 34 ~

  Sometimes, late at night, when he’d been unable to sleep these past few weeks, Roger sat in the living room of his Third Avenue apartment with a black linen-covered photo album in his lap and stared at one picture after another of his wife and beautiful children. Olivia posed in front of a haunted house in Disneyland, eyes squinting into last summer’s sun, her little-girl potbelly protruding beneath her brightly colored psychedelic T-shirt . . . Stacy, with nine-month-old Will held in her arms, Will’s small palms pressed against either side of Stacy’s mouth, his smiling face turned coquettishly toward the camera . . . Olivia, age two, in a pink-and-white striped summer dress and tiny white leather sandals, sporting an enormous, broad-brimmed straw hat that belonged to Roger’s mother.

  With his fingertip now, he stroked Olivia’s shoulder in a photo preserved behind a veneer of the thinnest plastic. And then covered and uncovered her face with his thumb, as if they were playing peek-a-boo.

  It was four thirty in the morning, and he should have been asleep beside his wife. Instead he found himself sobbing over an album full of pictures that so faithfully documented what any fool could see had been their indisputably happy life together.

  S

  Ol
ivia is feeling better, and might even have some Jell-O, a box of which Stacy was lucky enough to score in the pantry, and which she made with boiling water and ice—a secret ingredient that will have that Tropical Fusion-flavor Jell-O set to go in no time. Stacy is busy now giving Will his dinner and Roger is sitting here with Olivia on what was once his parents’ bed, reading aloud from Horton Hatches the Egg, his daughter’s favorite Dr. Seuss.

  “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant,” the two of them recite together, and Roger gives Olivia a little tickle under her arm, even though she’d tossed her cookies only a couple of hours ago.

  “I meant,” he told Dr. Avalon not long before Clare died, “exactly what I said.”

  Dr. Avalon had narrowed his eyes at him in a way Roger didn’t like, and said, “You’re telling me that you went to the grave of a rabbi thought to be the messiah, and asked him to save your sister?”

  Hanging his head slightly, Roger said, “Desperate times call for those proverbial desperate measures, Doc.”

  “Daddy,” Olivia is asking him now, “if I’m still sick tomorrow, will I have to go to school on Monday?”

  “No, baby, nobody has to go to school when they’re sick.”

  “That’s not true,” Olivia says. “Someone in my class had lice in his hair and his mom sent him to school anyway.”

  “Well, that’s a bad mother,” Roger tells her.

  Stacy arrives with a small Pyrex cup of Jell-O, but Olivia declines to taste it. “That’s not strawberry,” she correctly points out.

  “Of course it is,” Roger and Stacy insist, but their daughter, God bless her, is smart enough to distinguish between strawberry and Tropical Fusion, and she’s having none of it.

  “I don’t want any Jell-O, I just want to go home,” Olivia says. “That’s all I want, okay?”

  Okay, sweetie, Roger tells her.