Forever is the Worst Long Time: A Novel

by Camille Pagán

  Her nose was red and her eyes were swollen. “How’s the punch?” she asked.

  “If you like extra-strength cough syrup, then you’ll love this,” I said, ladling dayglow liquid into a plastic cup for her.

  She took the cup from me. “This is hard on you.”

  “The funeral was a good hard. This,” I said, motioning around, “is unearthing my latent agoraphobia at a frightening speed. I can’t think of a worse time to discuss life’s minutiae.”

  “You getting the old ‘What do you do?’ Or worse, the dreaded empty question ‘How are you?’”

  “How are you, anyway?” I said.

  She socked me in the bicep with surprising strength. “Not so hot, Jim. Not so hot at all. The funeral was a little too close for comfort.”

  My expression must have indicated I had no idea what she was talking about, because she said, “My mother?” When I gave her another blank look, she shook her head in frustration. “Let me guess: Rob didn’t tell you that my mom died.”

  “What? No. I’m so sorry.” I had not seen Lou since a few months after her book party, when she and Rob had come in for Nancy’s birthday. I hadn’t heard from Rob that much lately, either, and when I did, all he talked about was his career. Not that I was doing such a bang-up job of reaching out to him. It wasn’t intentional, necessarily, but I had grown tired of his never-changing narrative of how he was working too much yet was allegedly unable to do anything about it. The last time I had spoken to him, he had not asked me a single question—not one!—about my life. And so I mimicked him and put our friendship on the back burner.

  “Thanks,” said Lou. “It was about four months ago. There wasn’t much to it. She had a stroke, and my uncle had her cremated before he even called to tell me she was dead. End of story.”

  “I am so sorry,” I said again. “I know how terrible it is to lose your mother.”

  “I suppose. I’ve more or less been motherless as long as I can remember.”

  “And yet.”

  “And yet.” She stuck a finger in her mouth to gnaw on a nail, then yanked it out self-consciously. “I always hoped she would become someone else—someone who loved me more, I guess. Now that she’s gone, that hope is, too. It’s stupid, but it’s still what hurts the most.”

  I nodded. Part of me despaired that my mother and I had never mended our relationship. But as I recalled Wisnewski’s sunken face, I found myself wondering if maybe it wasn’t for the best. If we had been closer, it only would have hurt more to lose her.

  It was good to catch up with Lou, especially since enough time had passed that I no longer felt quite so awkward about her comment at the book party. Still, the afternoon was slow. As I watched Jen press yet another plate of food into someone’s hands, I thought about what would follow for her. My father had been stoic at my mother’s funeral—quiet, occasionally weepy, but mostly unemotional. But for months afterward, he drank too much, ate too little, and holed up in his house. If you didn’t know better, you would have thought my mother was the love of his life.

  Jen would probably react differently; after all, she had loved Wisnewski deeply, and moreover, she had two kids to care for. But the day might still be one of the best she would have for a long time. And the one person who could help her through it now happened to be unavailable for the rest of time.

  I was just coming back from a trip to the bathroom when I ran into Rob in the hallway. He was talking low on his phone. “Yeah,” he said into the receiver. “Call you later . . . You, too.”

  There’s a cadence to conversations you have with your significant other, a tone that you don’t use with anyone, no matter how familiar, but a person you have known in the biblical sense. As such, I instantly assumed Rob was talking to Lou, even though I hadn’t seen her leave the house.

  Then she walked up behind him. “Let me guess,” she said sharply.

  He slipped the phone into his pants pocket. “Don’t, Lou. Just—don’t.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t intend to do whatever you’re referring to, since that would involve staying here. I’m going to your parents’.”

  I had already started walking in the opposite direction when Lou called after me. “Jim? Will you please give Rob a ride? I’m going to head out.”

  Rob’s parents lived half a mile away; he was perfectly capable of walking himself home. “Of course,” I said.

  “Thank you. I’ll see you soon.”

  “Dude, what’s going on?” I asked Rob as I watched Lou hug Jen good-bye.

  He kicked at the ground with his loafer. “What’s going on is that Wisnewski was too young.”

  “I’d argue that anyone under ninety-eight is too young to die, no?”

  “But thirty-five?” he said. “People in the 1800s could reasonably expect to live longer than that.”

  “I see your point. What is going on with you and Lou, though?”

  He shrugged. “We’re not okay.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “No, I want to go get drunk. You up for a trip to the bar?”

  It was not so much a question as a declaration of intent. If Rob wanted me to go to the bar with him to deal with whatever it was he had going on, then it was my obligation to take him. “Sure,” I said.

  We said good-bye to Jen and the rest of Wisnewski’s family, then headed to O’Grady’s, a place Wisnewski had loved. The air was thick with smoke—perhaps impossible to believe, but it was once legal to boost everyone else’s odds of lung cancer as well as your own—and I sat there gasping and thinking that I was too old for smoky bars. As if Wisnewski’s death had not been enough to remind me that we humans would inevitably deteriorate at a rapid rate, I had found several gray hairs a few days earlier.

  “Work still bad?” I asked Rob after a waiter had brought us two tumblers of scotch.

  “As usual. There’s some bad stuff going down that I’m supposed to keep from getting worse.”

  “That mean you’re sleeping at the office again?”

  He looked sheepish. “Sometimes. And Lou . . . I mean, she just doesn’t get it.”

  “How so?”

  “This is the life I signed up for. And she signed up for it with me when we got married.”

  “You guys were really young, though,” I argued. “Maybe she didn’t understand.”

  “Still, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. And the more she calls, the more I want to stay at the office. When I come home, all I hear is how I’m making her feel bad. There’s . . . this woman at work.” He said it casually, but I knew—I just knew—that it was his way of easing me in. Testing me, even.

  “Rob. Come on.”

  “It’s—” He downed his drink and motioned for the waiter to bring two more, even though I hadn’t touched mine yet. “We’re close, is all. She knows the pressure I’m under because she’s under it with me. I don’t have to explain everything to her.”

  Given that I knew what it felt like to be shut out when Rob let work swallow him whole, it was hard not to sympathize with Lou. “So she’s a psychic,” I said.

  “You’re going to nag me, too?”

  The plastic back of my chair squeaked as I leaned into it. “This woman—”

  “Andrea Jones.”

  “Fine, Andrea Jones. The reason she doesn’t nag you is because she’s not your wife. Good God, Rob. You got a full ride to undergrad—let’s not pretend you’re stupid. Greener grass, all that glitters. You know the drill.”

  “James Hernandez, walking compendium of clichés. And for the record, your perfectly green grass is now married to another guy.”

  “Damn,” I said, but he just shrugged. “Listen, let’s say you and Andrea get married. You have this big wedding—”

  “I’d elope.”

  I snorted. “It’s like you’ve thought this through.”

  “When you’re married, you run through all the scenarios. Trust me.” He glanced up from his glass, which he had been staring into as if it
were some sort of high-octane wishing well. “Hey, do not look at me that way, okay? You don’t know what marriage is like.”

  I know what loyalty is like, I thought, the irony lost on me. “So let’s say you get married at city hall,” I said. “Then what? Doesn’t Andrea Jones get tired of you working all the time, too?”

  “I doubt it, since she works even more.”

  “What’s her middle name?” I asked. This was a litmus test of mine—a weird one, I’ll admit, but I felt it demonstrated whether you were really nuts about a woman or whether she was just window dressing for your ego. For example, I had not been even the slightest bit curious about Elyse’s middle name. I had been dating Kathryn for six months before I learned that her mother’s maiden name, Salter, was her middle name; I still felt guilty for not asking sooner. Lou told me that her name, Louisa Astrid, means “famous warrior with divine strength” at the bar the first night I met her. If she had not, I probably would have inquired before the weekend was through.

  Rob’s face was wooden. He would probably never learn what went between Andrea and Jones. He had a nickname for her, though: “Andie’s a great woman. If I was single, she’s the kind of woman I would want to marry.”

  Finally, a topic on which I had firsthand knowledge. “That sounds like the words of a man who’s in love with the wrong person,” I said.

  “Who said anything about love? I’m just at a crossroads. Andie makes me feel smart and capable. But Lou . . .” He drained his second drink. “In her eyes, I screw everything up. And now she doesn’t think she wants to have kids. She thinks she’ll end up being the kind of mother her mother was. Who, may she rest in peace, was an awful person. Yet Lou—who puts spiders outside instead of crushing them, and can’t even admit to her narcissistic, energy-sucking friend Jeremy that he is the worst poet that ever picked up a pen—has decided that having children will somehow turn her into someone else.”

  On this count, it was hard not to feel bad for him. Yes, he worked too much, and yes, he could be surprisingly dense for someone who managed other people’s millions. But I could see him teaching a daughter to ride a bike. I could imagine him casting a line off a dock with a son.

  “Kids—that’s a deal breaker for you?” I asked.

  “If it were the only issue? Maybe not. But there are others.” He exhaled. “I know you and Lou are friends, so I don’t want to say too much.”

  Were Lou and I friends to the point that he could not tell me the truth? Regardless, weren’t he and I better friends—or was I officially getting the brush-off? It was impossible to tell whether he was being disingenuous. “I don’t know, man. I think you should find a way to work it out. If it’s important, you can make it work, just like you’ve made everything else work,” I said, even though I was not at all convinced that effort was what was going to solve their relationship woes.

  His phone buzzed on the table. He turned it over to see who was calling, then flipped it again quickly, making me wonder if it had been Andrea Jones.

  “Make it work,” I said again.

  When I got home, I poured myself some whiskey from the bottle my father had brought over after I bought my house. Glass in hand, I wandered over to the bookshelves in the living room and grabbed The Great Gatsby from the top shelf. It’s a dazzling book, to be certain, but I’ve always found it kind of soulless at its core. I had chosen it because I wanted to go back to the place and time when I first read it.

  I had just graduated from high school, and Rob, Wisnewski, Barry Helmer, and I were at Rob’s aunt’s cabin in Grand Marais, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. As I opened the paperback, I could almost hear the guys taunting me about my unrelenting nerdiness and all the fun I was missing out on while they were boating and fishing and four-wheeling.

  Goading aside, it was a good week. Every night, the four of us would go out on the dock with a twelve-pack or three and make blissfully oblivious predictions about our future. Rob had made almost as much money as he said he would, but he hadn’t taken inflation into account, which might explain why he hadn’t yet bedded a swimsuit model or purchased a Lamborghini. I, alas, had not become the next Stephen King. And while Helmer had done well for himself in the navy, he had confessed at the wake that he didn’t like it all that much. Of the four of us, it was really Wisnewski who had come closest to living his dreams, and that’s because all he had wanted was a little more money than he needed, a good woman who loved him, and a couple of kids.

  Maybe that was what it was all about, I thought as my eyes blurred the words on the page. Maybe Wisnewski had figured out the secret to everything.

  I read until I was too drowsy and bereft to stay awake any longer. I must have been in bed for an hour or so when my doorbell rang. I assumed it was a drunken coed; I lived close enough to campus that late-night high jinks had been known to happen in my neighborhood.

  But when I looked through the heavy leaded-glass panels of the front door, Lou was staring back at me.

  I blinked and looked again.

  Still her.

  She was bundled in a coat that made it look as though she had been swallowed by a large animal, and part of her face was hidden behind a cashmere scarf. I threw the door open. Winter had come early that year, and snow circled her on the porch.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “How did you even know where I lived?”

  She yanked the scarf down. “I have your address, so I located a map on this weird thing called the interwebs. Are you going to invite me in?”

  I glanced behind me. The living room wall was coated with various paint swatches I had put up months ago; I had yet to decide which shade of gray was best. I had last vacuumed, oh, approximately never. “Won’t you please be my guest?” I said, pretending to remove a top hat from my head.

  “Ever the smart-ass, huh?”

  “Always,” I said, hoping she didn’t notice that my hands were trembling.

  She slipped off her boots. She wasn’t wearing socks, and her toenails were small pink shells. Her face was blotchy, and somehow this seemed charming. “I know it’s weird that I’m here. I can go if you want,” she said.

  “No,” I said. In Mandarin, the word ma can mean five different things, depending on the tone you use. English isn’t a whole lot better; based on the speed of my one-syllable response, Lou and I both knew she would not be going anywhere, at least not on my account. “Let me take your coat,” I said. “You want a cup of tea, or a drink?”

  “Tea would be nice.”

  I indicated that she should head to the living room, but she padded behind me into the kitchen. “Please don’t look around,” I said, only half joking.

  “I already guessed that you lived in a charming house with a filthy kitchen,” she said, helping herself to a paper towel.

  I laughed, though another part of me was thinking, She thought about what my house looks like? “Well, you were right,” I said, and began to fill the kettle.

  She sat on one of the stools at the small kitchen island and wiped her nose with the paper towel. Then she looked at me and said, “I’m leaving Rob. I didn’t know where else to go.”

  A hotel? I thought, vacillating between horror and elation. I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I pulled out my cliché handbook. “You’re not really leaving him. It’s just the funeral. These things have a way of reopening old wounds. Sleep on it. You’ll be less sad tomorrow.”

  Lou looked at me with enormous, sorrowful eyes. “I’m inherently sad, Jim. I have a feeling you understand that about me.”

  As she said this, it occurred to me that I did, in fact, know this. But how?

  “We can talk more about that some other time,” she said, and I thought, Yes, but how about you tell me right now? Tell me everything and I will bear it with you and make it my own.

  But some other rational part of me—which was, alas, quickly disintegrating—thought, James, you horrible turd, this is the wife of your best friend, and you can no more have her than you can
chip off one of the faces on Mount Rushmore and declare it yours.

  “Rob is my friend,” I said limply.

  She looked at her hands. “I know. This is awkward.”

  “No,” I said, this time with a shred of dignity. “What’s awkward is you and Rob not trying harder to fix things. Don’t you think you can fight your way out of it?”

  “I have been trying to claw my way out of this hole for more than two years, but it wasn’t until today, seeing Jason in the funeral home, that I realized that I can’t keep trying.” She started to cry softly. “Do you know who Rob was on the phone with for half an hour today? It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t you.”

  “Oh no. I’m sorry.” And I was. But I was angry, too. What was wrong with Rob? Had a parasite meandered into his cerebral cortex? Even if he was not having a physical relationship with his supervisor—and based on our conversation at the bar, I was fairly certain that if he wasn’t already, he would be soon—why would he choose her over his wife? I didn’t have to meet Andrea Jones to know that she was no Lou.

  The kettle began to whistle. I poured a cup of tea for Lou, which I set on the island in front of her.

  She curled her hands around the mug and shivered. “I know this makes things hard for you, but I honestly wasn’t sure who else to turn to. We have a connection, don’t we, Jim?”

  Well, yes: if we had not had a connection, this story would end here. But I didn’t want to oversell it or reveal just how dumbly in love with her I was. So I just nodded and asked if she wanted to head to the living room.

  We took opposite ends of the sofa. Lou tucked her feet under her comfortably; I sat too stiffly for a man in his own home.

  “So,” I said.

  “So.”

  I sighed, suddenly feeling the full weight of my shortcomings, and at the same time, acutely aware that I was fortunate to have these shortcomings (see: death of childhood friend). “You can’t really think there’s no hope. Rob’s a good guy. He loves you.” I cringed as I heard how dim I sounded. I mean, someone must have said this same thing to Anne Boleyn at some point.