Forever is the Worst Long Time: A Novel

by Camille Pagán

  “Hey, man,” I said to Rob, who shook my hand.

  “Is it ever good to see you,” he said. He was freshly showered and shaved, but his eyes were bloodshot. “It’s been a crazy couple of months.”

  “That bad?”

  “I’m working my way up the food chain, to be sure. But I slept at the office twice last week.”

  Lou slid her arm around his side. “This poor man is so stressed that he refused to bring a single book to read!”

  “Not even The Grapes of Wrath?” I deadpanned.

  Lou laughed lightly, and Kathryn groaned.

  “I don’t want to read a single word,” said Rob. “I don’t want to do a damn thing but hang out with you three and sip the sweet nectar of fermented grapes.”

  “That’s the plan,” said Kathryn amiably. Dating someone involves becoming a part of their ecosystem, and I could see she was pleased that she so effortlessly blended into mine.

  “Sounds like a good plan to me,” said Lou.

  “Where to first?” said Rob. Even in his exhausted state, he was already running down his mental checklist. When we backpacked on part of the Appalachian Trail one summer during college, I had barely been able to keep up with him—not just because he was athletic, but also because he had been so eager to reach each marker on our trail map. I, on the other hand, would have happily spent an hour examining a dappled cluster of mushrooms.

  “Let’s set off down Route 29 and see what we’re in the mood for,” suggested Kathryn.

  Rob had rented a shiny silver convertible, and he drove while Kathryn navigated from the passenger seat. Lou and I sat in the back, the wind pulling our smiles taut and drowning out the sound of everything but air whooshing past us.

  “Are you having fun?” I asked Kathryn later. We were at our second vineyard and I was feeling comfortable, if mildly marinated. For all my anxiety about the trip—I had not been confident that the agreeable dining experience the four of us had shared would translate into us vacationing well together—it was going swimmingly.

  “I’m having the best time,” she said, practically beatific. “Aren’t you?”

  Before I could answer, Lou called out to Kathryn and motioned for her to join her up ahead on the dusty pebbled path in the garden we were strolling through. Kathryn kissed me on the cheek and ran off to Lou.

  I suppose it could have been strange being around Kathryn and Lou at the same time, but it was easier in a way. Kathryn’s presence was neutralizing; she was a constant, comforting reminder that both Lou and I were otherwise occupied.

  Not that Lou was concerned about whether I was occupied. If she was in love with anyone on this trip, it was Kathryn. The two of them walked with their heads bent toward each other, arms linked like schoolgirls and deep in conversation about God only knows what. (In a moment of unbridled narcissism, I found myself hoping Kathryn would tell Lou I was a literary genius, a generous lover, and any number of things that cast a flattering light on me.)

  “How’s the old ball and chain?” I asked Rob. Lou and Kathryn were out of earshot.

  He kicked the pebbled path with his loafer. “Lou? She’s amazing. She’s so committed to her writing, and yet she always has some side project going on. Last month it was pottery, and now she’s been bird-watching in Central Park. But . . .”

  I looked ahead at Lou, whose hair glinted gold in the sunlight. “But?”

  He shrugged. “We fight a lot.”

  “Seriously? You guys seem so solid,” I said. And they did. In addition to the couch canoodling Kathryn and I had come upon earlier, Lou had been stroking the back of his head—as if he were her pet Labrador, I thought at the time—on the drive to the vineyard. He put his hand on her whenever she was within a few feet of him, like there was a magnetic charge pulling them together. It was true that Rob hadn’t been emailing me about Lou so much lately, but I assumed that had more to do with his job than the state of their union.

  “We are . . . I think.”

  Because it was Rob, and I was curious, I pried. “You think?”

  “I mean, you know I’m working a lot. More than I even thought I would have to. Lou hates it, and she’s not quiet about it. Says we need to work on our marriage, too.”

  I looked up ahead at Lou, who was laughing at whatever Kathryn had just said.

  Rob continued. “She likes the stability of my job, but not the reality of it. I get the impression she would prefer if I were more like the last guy she dated, who was an ‘artist,’” he said, using air quotes. “She says my working all the time makes her feel abandoned.”

  I thought of the Chekhov quote Lou had shared with me at their wedding. She probably had not anticipated how quickly it would become true. “You think this has anything to do with her childhood?” At this point, I had begun to pick up the bread crumbs of Lou’s early years—how her mother had never been around and had pushed Lou to move in with a friend while she was still in high school.

  “Probably.” He rubbed his forehead. “Still, you think she’d understand, given how important her work is to her. Right before we left, she was freaking out about being unable to complete the poem she’s been working on for three weeks. As if she actually thought she would finish it while we were in the middle of Napa.”

  I stuck my nose into my goblet. Kathryn had instructed me to try to detect the wine’s aromas, but all I could smell was alcohol-infused cat urine. I pulled my nose back out of my glass and addressed Rob. “Well, writers are all crazy. You know that.”

  His expression was one of pure skepticism. “Really? Because you seem pretty sane to me.”

  I tried not to let my face betray how insulted I was by being called the literary equivalent of a saltine cracker. I mean, sure, sanity has its perks. But at the time, I thought inspiration went hand in hand with being unhinged. Didn’t you have to be a little nuts to sit at a computer day after day, struggling to wrangle sentences that may only ever reach an audience of one?

  “We’ll make it work,” said Rob resolutely, unaware that I was still thinking about myself. He held his glass up to the sun, and a ray shot through the straw-colored liquid and hit me in the eye. “I just wish it were a little more straightforward. My parents make it look so easy.”

  Maybe things will improve as his job gets better, I thought as I fell back onto the feather-stuffed duvet that night and waited for Kathryn to lie beside me. I wouldn’t want to be married to a workaholic, either, even if Rob’s workaholism was a job requirement.

  A vision of Lou, smiling at me over a glass of wine as I told her about the books I had assigned that semester, flitted through my head as the weight of Kathryn’s body sent me rolling toward the center of the mattress. I pushed it aside as Kathryn’s lips brushed against mine and told myself, Give this a real chance.

  The following night, the four of us dined at an absurdly upscale restaurant, the kind where the meal takes hours because you can’t bring yourself to rush it. After dessert, Lou told us that one of her poems had been accepted by American Poetry Review, and Rob ordered a bottle of champagne to celebrate, even though we were already good and toasted. Then he slipped his credit card to the waiter and told Kathryn and me that it was their treat.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Absolutely. In celebration of Lou’s success.”

  Lou beamed at him. Beside me, Kathryn squeezed my thigh, then leaned in close to me. “You’re next, Jim,” she whispered. “Big things are going to happen for you, too.”

  Her words fed my hungry ego. Writing had been my lifelong dream. My grandfather had come to the United States from Puerto Rico shortly before my father was born, and he, and later my father, had found steady work and some semblance of financial stability by working at an automotive plant. Even as a child, I understood that I was expected to follow their lead.

  When I was thirteen or so, I found a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in my basement—I think it was my father’s, though I can’t recall ever seeing him re
ad anything but the newspaper—and I stayed up most of that night reading it, and then did the same the following night. I had already been an avid reader, but by the time I turned the last page of that book, I understood that I did not want to meander down the path that the men before me had traveled.

  “You think?” I asked Kathryn. She had yet to read a single page of the novel I was working on. Her proclamation was really a bet—the kind we make on people we love.

  “I know,” she said.

  I kissed her tenderly, even though I wasn’t one for public affection, especially not in the middle of a fancy restaurant. Kathryn was good for me; I would fall in love with her. I was even falling a little bit right then.

  Still, my gaze had lingered too long on Lou’s candlelit face across the table at various points that evening. And when we all turned in for the night, I could not help but watch Lou disappear into the room she and Rob were sharing and wish that I were the one joining her.

  As I stood beside Kathryn in the bathroom, each of us undertaking our various prebed grooming rituals, I found myself thinking of my mother. “You do what you can with whatever you get,” she used to say, shaking her finger at me and my sister, Victoria, if we had been complaining about what we didn’t have. We would run off to the other room and mimic her, our hands waving wildly, until the two of us bent over crying with laughter.

  My mother had died suddenly during my first year of graduate school. We had not been close, but I had foolishly believed our relationship would unfold like a novel: discord, yes, but then reconnection, followed by a satisfying conclusion. Instead, our story ended in the middle, and that was that.

  Still, a parent’s words have a way of leaving an indelible mark. Maybe my mother was right, I told myself. I could remain in my staid studio apartment, pining for a woman who was not mine, and never would be. Or I could move forward with what I had.

  “I think,” I said to Kathryn after she had removed her contacts and slipped on her glasses, “we should live together. Does that sound like a good idea to you?”

  Her face was serious—though maybe it was just her horn-rims. “Yes, I want to, you know that,” she told me. “I think we’re perfectly suited for each other. But are you sure? Will you still think it’s a good idea in a year? In a month?”

  A year from then seemed like a distant planet, visible only on rare occasions and in the right light. But next month? It would be June, and my plans were few and clear. I was teaching one course that summer and hoped to spend the rest of my time working on the novel I had decided was deeply flawed, but which was perhaps fixable.

  And yes, I could imagine Kathryn there through all of it. Waking up beside me, us having breakfast together before retreating to our separate spaces—her to her office, me at the kitchen table, tapping away on the used laptop I had recently purchased. We could shop for groceries together, and I would cook, because Kathryn all but swooned when I fed her. Her apartment was spacious; we could host parties and have Lou and Rob over when they were in town.

  “I’m positive,” I told her, and wrapped my arms around her. I marveled at our reflection in the mirror: the way she fit perfectly against my body, and how right we looked together. Yes—positive, I told myself.

  But at two in the morning, I found myself wide awake, wondering why Kathryn had never recoded my mental data in such a way that being with her was my primary ambition. And so as I listened to her breathe deeply as she slept beside me, I wondered if I was really so positive, or if I was merely talking myself into settling.

  FOUR

  Fall 2000

  “What’s the next step for you, my friend?” Pascal observed me with a casual intensity from his office chair.

  It was the last week of September, and I had again been hired as an adjunct, though my reviews from the previous semester were mixed. Some students said I was too hard, one said too easy, and many suggested that I was—to paraphrase—stunningly incompetent.

  These comments cut me to the bone. I was struggling to make progress on my novel, but at least I was making strides as an instructor, or so I thought before receiving my reviews. Pascal had called me in to discuss how I could manage to not get fired, though he phrased it more delicately than that.

  “I’d like to see you work at getting a short story published,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest.

  I frowned at him from the other side of his desk. “I’m no good at short fiction.”

  “So hack down some of your long fiction. If you want a real career here, or anywhere, you have to publish. And maybe take a teaching course over at Eastern.”

  The thought of spending even more money on schooling sounded about as appealing as taking a leisurely jog through my neighborhood sans clothing. I could ask my father for a loan, but he would cite this request as further evidence that I had chosen the wrong career and launch into yet another speech about how it was not too late to pursue an engineering degree.

  At the same time, I didn’t want to stop teaching—or at the very least, I didn’t want to fail at it. And since I could not publish a novel or story I had not written, I would need to put even more effort into my vocation.

  “Sit in on some classes with really good teachers like Lefete, or maybe Barker,” Pascal said, referring to some of the professors in our department. “Go in and observe as a teacher rather than a student. See how they inspire wonder.”

  I laughed. “I like that you’re so humble you don’t mention yourself.” Pascal regularly ranked as one of the university’s best instructors. “But all right. I’ll do that.”

  “Good. You have anywhere to be right now?”

  I glanced at my watch; it was just after five. Kathryn was meeting a colleague after work, so I had at least an hour to kill before I needed to start on dinner. “Quick drink?”

  “Just what I was thinking.”

  We went to a bar a block from the English building, where we wedged ourselves into a narrow, high-backed booth.

  “How are things with Kathryn?” Pascal asked. Just above his head, someone had carved Kev + Melissa 4eva into the wood.

  “Pretty good,” I said. Kathryn was right: we were well suited for each other. We agreed on most things and spent long hours in each other’s company without becoming claustrophobic. I was content, but as Kathryn and I read on opposite ends of the sofa or lingered over lunch on a lazy Saturday, I sometimes wondered, Is this all there is?

  “Does she want children?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. Not yet, at least.”

  He nodded. “That’s a plus. They get in the way, so you should be certain before you have one. But settling down, letting someone love you—that foundation makes for a healthy career.”

  “You say this, but you’re single.” Pascal had gone through a bitter divorce several years earlier.

  “You’ll notice I haven’t published anything since.”

  “But you only do a book every decade,” I pointed out. Unlike Kathryn, who had put out two books in four years, Pascal was slow and steady.

  “Trust me, let that woman love you. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”

  I sipped my beer and said nothing.

  “I would do anything to have Winnie back,” he added, a faraway look in his eyes. “That woman’s curry is everything.”

  “Do you miss your ex-wife, or her cooking?”

  “One and the same.” He examined me for a moment. “Do you have a plan B, James?”

  “Yeah,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure if he was asking about my romantic life or my career. Did it matter? My whole life was a plan B. “Doesn’t everyone?”

  Pascal raised an eyebrow but did not respond, leaving me to wonder if I had given the wrong answer.

  Later that evening, I stood at the stove sautéing onions for lemon chicken. I had learned to cook from my mother. This had not involved actual teaching so much as getting as close to her as possible without having my hand smacked by her wooden spoon.

 
There were many dishes I had not learned in time: her grandmother’s pierogies, her own savory beef stew, the macaroni casserole Victoria and I begged her to make, a wish she granted every few months. Over the years, I had filled in the gaps with bastardized Julia Child recipes (so many steps, all easily reduced to a lot of butter, a little flour, and medium-low heat).

  I had just topped the chicken thighs with a layer of onion and lemon when the door slammed shut. “I’m home!” called Kathryn.

  “Welcome,” I said as she walked into the kitchen. She was wearing a silk blouse and tailored wool pants that made her look even longer and leaner than usual. “I feel like I should have an apron on and a cocktail to hand you.”

  “No need.” She inhaled deeply. “You don’t know how good it is to come home to a house that smells like this.” She wrapped her arms around my waist, put her face against my neck, and breathed in again. “And you—you smell delicious, too.”

  “Amazing what a shower can do for a person.”

  “I love it. And you.”

  “I love you, too.” We had started saying this to each other just after Napa; I still marveled at how easily the words rolled off my tongue. I kissed the tip of her nose. “You know, Pascal says I should settle down and let you love me.”

  She rolled her eyes. “How is that different from now? Anyway, I’ve heard his theories before. You are aware he believes that the United States should split into three separate countries, and that children are the death of one’s writing career?”

  “And you don’t?”

  “No on both counts,” she said, laughing. “Unless he’s telling you how to construct a story, don’t listen to the man. Speaking of which, how’s the book coming along?”

  “Oh, you know. It’s coming.”

  Kathryn ran her hand up and down my arm. “If you’re not into it, it’s okay to move on to another one.”