Forever is the Worst Long Time: A Novel

by Camille Pagán

  Glass clinked against glass. Rob nodded at me, his eyes wet; I had made him cry a second time. This was not nothing. I myself wasn’t fond of crying, which seemed to conjure up funerals and the worst parts of childhood. And yet I remember the rare feeling of triumph I experienced when one of the short stories I workshopped during my graduate program—a fictionalized piece about my mother’s death—had half my cohort in tears. It is not easy to make people feel something beyond the state to which they are predisposed at any given moment, and here I had managed it with a few words about Rob and Lou and love. (In retrospect, it occurs to me that this had as much to do with the two of them as it did with my speech.) I raised my glass to Rob and nodded back, satisfied that I had gotten it right.

  As soon as the other speeches were given and the band started back up, I escaped to the restroom, desperate for even a moment to myself. I sat in a stall for a while, listening to my pulse in my ears and waiting for my heart, which was still racing, to resume a normal beat. After a few minutes, I reluctantly left the bathroom and headed down the hall toward the ballroom.

  As I turned the corner, I nearly ran into Lou, who had just stepped out of the women’s restroom. Her gown was a simple silk sheath. It suited her. She was smiling, but like Rob, tears were swimming along the rims of her eyes.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “That was beautiful, Jim. Thank you. It’s just all so wonderful that it’s a little overwhelming.” She gestured toward the ballroom. “Come dance with me?”

  There was no amount of alcohol or encouragement that could make me attempt to move my body to a rhythm in front of other people. “Okay,” I said.

  “You look nice,” I said as we made our way to the dance floor. She put her arm on mine, and we began to sway. “Is that strange to say?”

  “It’s my wedding day. If I don’t look nice, then there’s no hope for me.”

  “Your wedding day,” I repeated. Yes, I understood she had just gotten married. But up until that point, I had mostly questioned Rob’s motivation rather than consider why a woman like Lou would wed at twenty-three. Love is the obvious answer, but I knew at least a handful of people around our age who loved each other deeply and had no immediate plans for matrimony. My parents had married in their early twenties, but the result of this was that they spent the next three decades acting like they regretted it; my mother had barely mustered a smile at their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party. When she died of a massive heart attack a year later, I half assumed it was a broken heart that had really killed her. “What’s next for you and Rob?” I asked Lou.

  She held up her left hand, which sported an engagement ring with a diamond nearly as wide as her finger. Beneath that was a thin white-gold band, which would be the only ring I would see her wear after that day. “Well, I left the literary agency last week. So I’m going to write more. And there’s talk of Rob going to Hong Kong, so of course I would go with him.”

  I spun her around, trying not to step on the edge of her dress. “Really?” This was the first I was hearing of their plans. “What will you do there? Won’t you be lonely?”

  “You know what Chekhov said, right?”

  “Ca-caw, ca-caw?” I said, doing my best seagull impression.

  She grinned. “No, you lunatic. What he said about marriage.”

  “I’m less familiar with Chekhov’s thoughts on human coupling.”

  “Prepare to be enlightened. He said, ‘If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.’”

  “I’ll be sure to use that one on my future wife.”

  “Where’s the woman you’re dating?”

  “Pardon?” I said, losing my footing for a split second.

  “You know,” said Lou, guiding me back into step. “Rob said you were dating Kathryn Pierce. I loved her last book. Why didn’t you bring her?”

  “I thought it would be rotten to bring her if she had to sit alone during the ceremony and most of the dinner.”

  “You’re not in love, then.”

  “Not so sure.”

  “Rob desperately wants you to be as happy as he is, you know.”

  “What about you? Are you happy?”

  “Of course. I love Rob, and he’s so good to me. He—”

  Lou was interrupted by one of her bridesmaids, who was suddenly standing next to us with an expectant expression across her face. “Louisa!” she cried out. “When are you going to let me have a dance with this cutie?”

  Lou turned to her friend. “Jennifer, love, would you mind giving us one more minute? I promise I’ll hand Jim over to you as soon as we’re done.”

  “You’d better! There’s a line of men waiting to dance with you! And you!” Jennifer said. “Come find me and we’ll boogie!”

  “She might be good for you,” Lou said.

  I watched Jennifer clodhop across the dance floor. “Think I’ll have to pass.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to try to make it work with Kathryn?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You know, the two of you could come stay with us for a week. We’d have a blast.”

  “That does sound fun,” I said. As I looked at the couples twirling across the dance floor to a song I hadn’t heard since high school, I was hit with a pang of homesickness—not for my actual home, but for Kathryn. The creamy pillow of her stomach; the way she ran her fingers through my hair while I read beside her on the sofa. If her familiarity was a trap, then her desire was the bait that lured me. Because what I was really longing for at that moment was for someone to long for me. As much of myself as I gave, Kathryn wanted more, and that in and of itself was addictive. (Not that this was fair in any way; I know that. But we so rarely hear the truth because it is unfair, and even so ugly that we can barely admit it to ourselves, let alone another person.) Maybe that spark of longing, I thought, could kindle a fire.

  “Come on!” It was Jennifer again. She pointed at me, made a lassoing motion, and pretended to pull me toward her with an invisible rope.

  “Yee-haw,” I said, letting Lou go. “Guess that’s my cue.”

  Her eyes were sparkling as she laughed. “I’m so glad you’re Rob’s best friend, Jim. You wouldn’t believe just how highly he speaks of you.”

  I just barely managed not to wince. “Feeling’s mutual,” I mumbled.

  Jennifer seized me around the neck and began wiggling her hips in what appeared to be a drunken samba. I sighed and made a halfhearted attempt to match her moves. Over Jennifer’s shoulder, I saw that Rob and Lou had begun to dance. As I watched the two of them glide across the dance floor, her head resting on his chest, I was surprised to realize that of the many things I was feeling, envy wasn’t one of them. My oldest friend had made his vows before God and man, and now he and Lou were embarking on a life together. And of course, I wanted them to be happy.

  I wanted to be happy, too, so I made a vow of my own. I would forget about Lou and throw myself wholeheartedly into my relationship with Kathryn, toward whom I was feeling more and more warmly as the night wore on. And if for some reason committing to Kathryn proved to be impossible, I decided, I could, and would, make a concerted effort to find a partner who made the rest of the world disappear when she was near.

  THREE

  Spring 1999

  “Joan Didion said it’s harder to see the ends of things than the beginnings,” I said, regarding the two dozen undergraduates who were in various stages of slouch around the table.

  It was my last class of the semester, and what a relief to have made it through. My father liked to say that if something was worth doing, it was worth doing well, and I spent hours preparing for any given lesson. Maybe, just maybe, it had begun to pay off. While I had not quite figured out what worked, I had begun to establish certain patterns. I had started to determine what didn’t work.

  “Who’s Joan Didion?” called a male student from the back of the classroom.

  I glared at him. “She’s the writer whose essay was par
t of your last assignment.” (Okay, so I had more determining to do.) I paused, then addressed the rest of the group in a more neutral tone. “Do you think that’s true when it comes to writing? Do you begin your story with the end in mind?”

  “It’s impossible not to, right?” said one student, flicking her glossy hair over her shoulder. Sorority girl, East Coast accent, dressed in head-to-toe black. The car she drove around campus probably cost twice as much as mine.

  “No, writing should be an adventure,” said another student. He was beige—skin, hair, opinions. He would go far in life.

  “You’re both correct, at least when it comes to your own work,” I said. “There’s no one right way to approach a story.” I tapped the stack of papers on the table in front of me. “Before I return your finals, let’s talk about process. Did you begin with the end in mind?”

  After what I hoped was a decent discussion, I passed their assignments back. I had graded kindly, maybe too much so—rookie mistake, owing to my nervousness about how they would fill out my teaching evaluation. After all, I had not yet been officially hired for the following year, and I needed the work.

  At least most of the class would be happy about their marks. But my heart was pounding as I reached the last student, whose paper I had deliberately placed at the bottom of the pile. Nora Roderick. She had deep copper skin and short hair and favored oversize cashmere sweaters and tall leather boots.

  “Can you please see me after class, Nora?” I said, raising my eyebrows in what I hoped was a semiauthoritative yet nonthreatening way.

  She cocked her head and looked at me. Her voice was low and relaxed as she responded. “Sorry. I have another class to be at.”

  “All right.” Amateur, I chided myself. Grow a pair. “Then come see me during office hours. Three to four today.”

  She looked down at her paper, which lacked the red scribbled grade I’d given the other students. I saw it click for her: she had been caught. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll see you then.”

  A few hours later, she knocked on the door of the small office I shared with another adjunct instructor.

  “Come in,” I said, gesturing to the cheap bucket chair in front of me. I was jittery. As mentioned, I was no stranger to plagiarism. But usually it was blatant—some glittering piece of writing that could not possibly have been written by an undergraduate who slept through most classes. Nora, on the other hand, had stolen a story, only to go through the trouble of rewriting almost every line. And why? She had written a few pieces before, and they had been fine. Good, even.

  “So?” she said.

  “Well. Nora. Here’s the thing.”

  “What’s your deal, Professor Hernandez?”

  I sat up straighter. “My deal?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You’re acting like you drank a pot of coffee for lunch.”

  “Don’t change the subject,” I said sternly. Spit it out already, Professor Hernandez. “When I said steal, I didn’t mean it literally. Remember my caveat? Steal if you must, but make sure you make it your own?”

  In fact, I had stolen this bit of wisdom from Pascal, my onetime instructor turned mentor and friend. “Since there is nothing new under the sun, steal everything!” he declared in his melodic French Guinea accent. “Every single thing you love! Then make it your own!” (No doubt, Pascal did not have my best friend’s wife in mind when he dispensed this advice.)

  “I know the better part of your story came from the Kenyon Review,” I told her. “So I ask, why?”

  Nora crossed one long leg over the other and leaned back. “Are you going flunk me?”

  I stared at her, then felt self-conscious about doing so and glanced away. “Should I?”

  “No.”

  “And why’s that?”

  She eyed me warily. “If this is the part where I’m supposed to give you a sob story, you’ve got the wrong woman. I grew up in an enormous house in Bloomfield Hills and attended one of the best prep schools in the country.”

  I frowned; this conversation was not going the way I had planned. “It has nothing to do with where you grew up, Nora, or where you went to school. It has to do with you cheating. I know you can write. So why didn’t you?”

  For a moment it seemed she was going to protest, but she just shook her head. “I don’t know. I started something that seemed good, and—I just couldn’t finish it.”

  This I understood; I had not written a single paragraph in my dystopian novel in more than two months. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to figure out who the hero was, and while this doesn’t have to be a plot problem, it was for my book. “That happens. But why not ask for an extension?”

  “Because I assumed you’d say no.”

  “You know what they say about assuming, right?”

  “That it leads to a clichéd saying about asses?”

  “Nora.”

  As she tried to repress a smile, I sighed. “It’s fine. And yes, I might have told you no. But wouldn’t you rather miss one assignment than risk flunking a class or being placed on academic probation?”

  “I guess. How’d you figure it out, anyway? I chose an obscure story on purpose.”

  “Fate, maybe, or bad luck on your part.” I shrugged. “I read that piece as a graduate student. Didn’t really like it, and what you don’t like often stays with you even more than what you enjoy. Anyway, if you’re going to rewrite, you might want to choose a piece that sounds more like your own voice.”

  She smoothed the front of her skirt. “Sorry. It was really lame of me to do that. May I have another chance?”

  I stood, indicating we were nearly done. “You already know the answer’s yes, though your final grade will have to take a hit. Have a new paper to me in forty-eight hours. I don’t care how long it is, just make it your own.”

  “I will. Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me just yet. Do the work, then we’ll talk.”

  Nora stood and extended a slender hand to me. Her handshake was firm. “I’ll have a new story in your box right away. Oh, and Professor Hernandez?”

  “Yes?”

  She released my hand and grimaced as she glanced at my pants. “Your fly’s down. Might want to deal with that before you leave your office.”

  I blushed and turned toward the wall to yank my zipper up. “Um. Yes, it is. Thanks,” I said.

  When I turned back, she was gone.

  Two days later, I was en route to California with Nora’s new story tucked in my carry-on and Kathryn beside me.

  “You’re going to adore Napa,” she said, squeezing my arm.

  Through the dome window of the airplane, San Francisco began to come into focus. “I bet I will. Our first vacation.”

  “May it be our first of many.” She rested her head on my shoulder. “It’ll be good for us.”

  We were on our way to meet Rob and Lou, with whom we’d had dinner in Ann Arbor a few months earlier. Lou and Kathryn were similar in many ways, but since Kathryn was nearly a decade older than Lou, I hadn’t anticipated that they would become fast friends. Of course, they’d taken to each other immediately, and by the end of our meal they had planned an entire vacation for the four of us.

  Hong Kong was out, as Rob had deferred his transfer a year. Instead, Kathryn and Lou proposed California’s wine country. Given my anemic adjunct salary, I would have preferred something less expensive—say, a nice trip to a bedbug-free motel on the Jersey Shore, or even a stay at Lou and Rob’s place in New York. But Kathryn was from the Bay Area and knew all the best places to see, and Rob and Lou had always wanted to visit. Napa it was.

  We rented a car, and Kathryn drove—no map needed, she cheerfully informed the man who assisted us. I hunkered down in my seat and watched brightly colored buildings give way to brown earth, then the green canopied spread of grapevines. We pulled off the highway and onto a dirt road, where the inn we were staying at was located. It was a rambling Victorian nestled between vineyards, with steep hills visible in the dist
ance.

  Our room was cozy, if a bit fussy for my taste. The bed whined loudly as Kathryn and I sat on its edge, and we looked at each other and laughed.

  “Should we go find them?” I asked.

  “No, let the newlyweds spend some time alone. Why don’t we explore a bit?” said Kathryn. She was wearing a loose blue dress, and her lips were stained a raspberry color. She was beautiful, and I said so. We had been together about a year and a half at that point, and though I still did not think I was in love with her, I had grown to love her, which was a confusing state—sometimes I thought they might be the same thing.

  “You think?”

  “Should I say it again?” I teased.

  “Yes,” she said, dead serious. “You don’t compliment me all that often, and it makes me wonder sometimes.”

  “You’re beautiful, and I’m sorry. I’ll do better,” I told her, making the same promise to myself.

  We wandered around the inn, which was charming in a musty sort of way, then took a stroll down a dirt path between two vineyards. Though Kathryn attempted to explain the difference between grape varietals to me, I quickly decided that if you had seen one trellised grapevine, you had seen them all.

  When we returned to the inn, the sound of familiar laughter rang out from the lobby. We found Rob and Lou nestled together on one of the upholstered sofas.

  “You two!” said Lou, jumping up to hug us.

  She squeezed me so hard my stomach hurt, then pummeled Kathryn. The two of them immediately jumped into the gratuitous ritual of burgeoning female friendship.

  “Look at you,” Kathryn said, holding Lou at arm’s length. “Sickeningly gorgeous, as ever.”

  “Says the woman whose bone structure sends other women straight to a plastic surgeon.”

  “Bones don’t matter when you write like you do. I adored Scenes From a Wedding.”

  Lou pretended to clutch her heart. “You don’t know how much that means to me, coming from you. I actually think it’s my favorite of the bunch—but if I could write novels like yours, I’d never attempt a poem again.”