Very Nice

by Marcy Dermansky

  Women, I thought contemptuously.

  * * *

  —

  I called a car to take me to Connecticut.

  My doctor would see me. I had been seeing him for twenty years. Michael was also my closest and perhaps only friend. I was not much for having friends.

  * * *

  —

  Mandy returned my text.

  Poor sweetie. Get a therm at Duane Reade. XOXOXOXO

  Feel better! No reception. Will call from Cali.

  Therm. Cali. I hated her insipid abbreviations. Emojis. What was I doing with this woman? Was it that I could walk to my office from her apartment? I marveled at her proximity to my office. Why did I get such a kick out of that? I had always liked my commute. The quiet on the train. I would stare out the window and look at the landscape passing by.

  * * *

  —

  Michael took my temperature. It was 101. Not too high, but definitely a fever. “You are not dying,” he said with a laugh.

  And then I told him about the sore on my penis. He took a swab test, which was uncomfortable, to say the least.

  I wondered if my tennis partner would be able to treat me without judgment. Becca and I had shared so many enjoyable dinners at his home, Michael and Trudy, and I had gone and ruined all that. His son, Aaron, was the same age as Rachel. He was close by, studying at Yale. I used to have this fantasy Aaron would marry Rachel. They had gone on a date once, but apparently it had not gone well. I could not get details from my daughter. For now, the wedding was on hold. I had not given up hope.

  “Diagnosis?” I asked Michael.

  “I’ll need to get this back from the lab to confirm, but what it is, I can tell you right now.”

  It was going to be herpes or prostate cancer. Left and right, all around me, men my age were getting prostate cancer. I was too old to get a venereal disease. I was a married man. Except I wasn’t married. I wasn’t divorced yet, either. I was a married man. “Please don’t tell me I have cancer.”

  Michael laughed. “Nope, nothing that bad. You’re not going to like it, but it’s nothing. A classic case of good old herpes. I’ll prescribe you some antivirals, give you some literature to read. You’ll feel better in a couple of days. You might have future outbreaks, and then, you know, you have to refrain from sexual activity. This might be a one-and-only case. You absolutely must not have sex during an outbreak, but I don’t need to tell you that.”

  “Herpes,” I said. I couldn’t say that I felt good about this.

  “What can I tell you?” he said. “You old dog. You’ll have to tell Rebecca, you know that?”

  “I left Rebecca,” I said. “You didn’t know.”

  I had wondered what the local gossip was. It didn’t seem like Rebecca would smear my name, but I had never thought that I would leave her.

  Michael sighed. “I had heard something to that effect, but I had hoped it wasn’t true.”

  “True story,” I said.

  “For the woman who did this to you,” Michael asked.

  “Indeed.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “So am I.”

  * * *

  —

  I had my driver take me to the Sound. I wasn’t in any condition to be out in the world, but I wanted to look at the water. I just wanted to sit on the bench in the parking lot, looking out at the sand and the water. I wanted to breathe in the salty air and feel sorry for myself.

  Instead, there was my wife. She was walking a dog, a standard poodle I had never seen before, and she was with a man, a man I had never seen before, either, an Indian man, significantly younger, with ridiculous hair. My wife said something and the man leaned back and laughed.

  Zahid

  “Don’t even think about it,” Kristi said.

  Of course, I was thinking about it.

  “I will kill you,” Kristi said. “I will get on an airplane and then drive to the front door and kill you. You shouldn’t be in that house to begin with.”

  “Can you imagine the fallout?” I asked with a laugh.

  “When the daughter you slept with finds out you are sleeping with her mother?”

  “Correction. I am not sleeping with her,” I said. “Nothing like that. I just like her. That is not a crime.”

  I had this strange compulsion to tell Kristi Taylor everything and then regretted it, immediately. Nothing ever happened in Kristi’s life. She was writing, always writing, but she lived in a completely imaginary world. Nothing was from her experience, because she never went out. Yet she had written a novel, published by an indie press, about a little girl and her babysitter, molestation and regret and had even managed to throw September 11 in there, and while not many people had read it, she’d won a major literary prize. She had also been put on a list, writers under thirty-five to watch out for. Like me, she had been anointed.

  We would have been a perfect literary couple, we would have been gorgeous together, and I had let her know, years ago, after my breakup, that I could be interested, but Kristi said I was full of shit. She said she pitied any woman who got involved with me. She had actually written to my fiancée to tell her she had done the right thing in breaking it off with me. I should have ended our friendship then, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was more than interested. I was a little bit in love, but was smart enough, at least, not to let her know.

  Last year, Kristi had left New York and gone back to school for a degree she did not need. She said it was too distracting and too expensive to be a writer in New York, that she was always going to an event, shopping for clothes to wear to events, going out for drinks. Her dissertation, she said, would be her next novel. She would not tell me what it was about. I was afraid that she was writing about me. According to her twin sister, Kristi’s first novel had been about her. I had had no idea. The girl in the book was a twin whose sister had died.

  There was something horrible about that.

  I had vowed to stop calling her, giving her new material, but Kristi was always happy to hear from me. Every time I called, she answered the phone, saying my name with unmistakable delight. It was intoxicating. Somehow, Kristi never got tired of me.

  “I can write here,” I told her now. Kristi, for a change, had called me. “For the first time in a long time.”

  “In some rich white woman’s house in Connecticut?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”

  “How long do you think this situation can last?”

  “Obviously, it can’t. I am writing against the clock. I think that helps. All the pressure.”

  It did. I woke up, I told her, and I started writing like I was on fire. It had been six days in a row. It felt like I was on speed. In fact, I was on speed, though only for the last couple of days. I had found some diet pills, pills prescribed eighteen years ago, all the way in the back of a drawer in the bathroom. There weren’t many left, but clearly they still had kick. I worried what would happen when I ran out—there were only eight more. Obviously, I would be fine when I ran out. You could not get addicted on just a handful of pills. For now, they gave me the jolt that I needed. A good old-fashioned jump start. I had begun something new, that was what mattered, and I could keep going when I was out of pills. I had written my first novel flying on cocaine. I was not a cocaine addict, either. It was another skill I had, recreational drug use.

  “Can you let me talk?” Kristi said.

  “Of course,” I said. “I always let you talk.”

  I wondered if that was true. Sometimes, my mind would wander when Kristi told me about the details of her life. What I liked was that she was such a good listener.

  “The reason I called,” Kristi said, “was not to hear about your love life.”

  It had been a surprise, Kristi calling me. I had felt good about that, a li
ttle bit triumphant.

  “I don’t have a love life,” I said. “It’s just a tiny crush. It’s nothing.”

  I had told Kristi about Princess and Becca and our walk on the beach, about throwing the tennis ball, the breeze in the late afternoon, how sometimes we even picked Rachel up from day camp, how pleasant it all was. Kristi had turned it into something tawdry. I was glad I hadn’t told her about my purple bathing trunks. I’d been surprised when Becca had taken my money. Even the quarters.

  “The reason I called,” Kristi repeated, “is because a position is opening up in the fall. A one-year visiting writer. One of the professors here is pregnant and she just got put on bed rest. They need to hire someone fast.”

  “Seriously?”

  “They’re looking to fill their diversity slot,” Kristi said.

  “They always are.”

  “I already told them about you. They seem keen.”

  “Starting this fall?”

  “This fall.”

  “They are interested in me?”

  It always happened. Whenever the bottom dropped out, something new came along. It was enough to almost make me believe. My mother, of course, would love for me to believe, but this was not what she meant. Religion was not meant to be self-serving. She had given up on certain things a long time ago, and that was a relief. I just did not want her to give up on me.

  “Honestly, the job is yours. E-mail me your CV and your teaching-philosophy statement. I can proofread it for you if you need me to. It’s fantastic you are working on a new book. Write a few lines about that. They will love that. I think they might want to fly you out for an interview in the next couple of days.”

  “I have to interview?”

  “Zahid,” Kristi said. “It’s a great job. I can think of six other writers off the top of my head who would take it. You might have to do a little tap dance, okay?”

  This pissed me off for some reason. Kristi thought I didn’t work. I had just spent two years at that overrated liberal arts school on the Hudson. I’d taught a class at the New School. Had written book reviews for The New York Times and the L.A. Times. I worked hard. The things that came to me, I deserved them. I had earned them. I had written a great book, an important book.

  “You sister is a bitch,” I said. I wondered why I was switching the subject. It felt necessary, somehow, to get that out there, even if it wasn’t entirely fair. Honestly, I understood how Khloe felt. She had paid for my apartment. Why would she want me on her couch? I had liked her up until then.

  “I know. I know she is.” Kristi sighed. “I think Khloe was born without a heart. Or I got her heart and she got a piece of my brain, the part that can do math.”

  “The part that handles finances.”

  “That part.”

  “I don’t think she will ever let me back into my apartment. She scares me.”

  “Perfect,” Kristi said. “She can keep your sublet when you come to Iowa. We will have the best time, Zahid. I can’t wait. It is so milk-toast white here. It is so boring. I need you.”

  I felt sad. Iowa. I would have to go there and put my teaching face back on. Kristi loved her students. I was bored by them. They tried so hard, they had so little talent, they wanted so much praise. I had only had one good student during my last semester. It was Rachel. I had put some edits on her work, and she’d shut down completely. She did not submit her final story, like the child that she was. And what did I do? I fucked her. I had not meant to. I had never considered her that way; she was my student. It was just that day, something was off in me, the semester was over and I slipped. I knew that it was wrong. She was just so pretty. So pretty and so very willing. She had made it so easy.

  And now, now I preferred her mother. A grown woman with a big house. There was something wrong with me. I would go to Iowa. It made me sad to know that I would have to leave Connecticut one day soon. To me, this place was like paradise.

  I would be leaving paradise.

  Paradise Lost.

  Now, that was a famous book. I had to go to Iowa. Just the thought of it made me want to cry.

  Becca

  We started swimming laps in the afternoon. After Zahid wrote. After I painted. After lunch. Most of the time, I made us turkey sandwiches with avocado. The pool looked better than it ever had. The water sparkled, rays of light rippling across the sparkling blue water. We swam for half an hour. I swam without stopping, crawl, breaststroke, backstroke, the occasional butterfly to show off. Zahid took a lot of breaks. Zahid was thin but not muscular. He did not have any kind of regular exercise in his life. I gave him a hard time about that.

  “How do you stay so thin?”

  “Smoking,” he said.

  Fortunately, Zahid was not a regular smoker. I had only seen him smoke a few times, usually after getting off the phone.

  “Sometimes I forget to eat,” Zahid said.

  That made more sense to me. Not forgetting to eat, because I never forgot to eat, but that Zahid did. Zahid Azzam was absentminded. He would come out to the pool and realize that he hadn’t changed into his bathing suit. Then he would go back inside. He would forget his goggles. He would go inside to get his goggles and check his e-mail and come back outside to swim and realize that, yes, he had forgotten once again to bring his goggles. He would come back out with a book to read instead. I would tell him we had to do laps first.

  I did not feel comfortable having him watch me swim laps. It was better to also have him in the pool. The pool was such a gift. And now, I had rediscovered swimming, as if it was brand-new.

  I had been a yoga person during the rest of the year, but I had gotten burned out. Too much stretching, tranquillity, peace of mind. Several classes a week. Hot yoga, regular yoga. I had perfected my handstand. It was easy enough to do.

  I was on autopilot when it came to teaching. It was not that I was a bad teacher, but I had been doing it for so long that I had five different years’ worth of lesson plans to rotate, and I would throw in a new book, of course, or make the kids do a project on current events when it occurred to me. I had my third graders free-writing about the election. The girls had wanted a woman president. I educated the pink-cheeked boys who said they were happy about Trump. I had to set them straight, as carefully as possible, to avoid confrontations with parents. Children, for the most part, are good. They repeat back what is taught to them, and I was grateful for the chance to reprogram young minds.

  I was not a bad teacher. I was a good one, but not a great one. It was a small school, a small town, easy kids, except for the Republicans, their entitled offspring. There was nothing to remark about until the Theo Thornton incident.

  “All in a day’s work,” I had joked on the Today show.

  I wonder that I’d had the presence of mind to make a joke. It was live TV. But I wasn’t a hero, whatever that was. No one had died. No one had even gotten hurt. It was real, of course. Theo Thornton threatened to kill me and my classroom full of third graders. I had all of my kids hide in the supply closet while I talked him down, a very large gun pointing at me the entire time, but he wanted to be talked down. He lay the gun on a desk. He said that he was sorry.

  I ended up hugging the boy. I did not want to let him go. He was never going to be all right. Theo had been a terrible student, unable to concentrate, always interrupting me, hitting other kids, kissing the girls and literally making them cry. He was terrible at math and reading and spelling and basically every subject. I was the one who had figured out that he was dyslexic, got him into a special education program. Obviously, he had only gotten worse in the years out of my classroom. Had turned into a public menace. A potential killer of children. Still, that day, when he put down the gun, I hugged him and held him tight. The police had to break us apart.

  I wasn’t surprised when his parents sent the boy away, a boarding school for troubled
children in New Hampshire, and I found that I increased my yoga dramatically after that. I started taking four classes a week. Five. Six. Yoga was like a drug. Empty your mind, improve your body. It is amazing how strong you can become in just a couple of months. Sometimes, demons would sneak in during relaxation: a memory of Posey lying at my feet, the joy I felt, scratching her beneath her chin; Theo telling me that only killing people would make him happy; Jonathan calmly explaining to me that everything was my fault. All I had to do was go to Paris. How hard was that? An entire yoga class would be ruined by the thoughts in my head. Still, I went to yoga. As if it were my job.

  Then, this June, the school year over, the manager at my yoga studio asked me if I wanted to teach a class for elders during the summer.

  For elders.

  I politely declined.

  I pretended to have forgotten something and left. I did not even take a class that day.

  Something in me snapped.

  My obsession with yoga. I was fifty-four. I could do a terrific handstand. I looked great, better than I ever had. I was certainly not an elder. I did not need dark thoughts let out when I wanted my mind to be empty and clean. I did not renew my monthly pass. I stopped going, cold turkey. I got e-mails and then phone calls, asking what had happened, begging me to come back. I could be petty.

  It was the only yoga studio in our town. I could drive to the next town, ten minutes away. Instead, I found a young and pretty yoga teacher on the Internet. She was the first person who came up on my Google search. She was popular. Her name was Adriene, and I gathered from her videos that she lived in Austin, Texas. She had had a small part in a Richard Linklater movie. I liked her. She made a pot joke by mistake while doing a crow pose and laughed at herself. I did Yoga with Adriene every day, and then Zahid opened the pool and we started swimming.

  “I want you to teach me how to do one of those flip turns,” he said on the fourth day of our private swim club. We were wearing our purple J.Crew bathing suits. I was the faster swimmer. After the humiliation of the yoga studio, the humiliation of Jonathan leaving me for a much younger woman, after the loss of my dog, the best dog I had ever had, it seemed like this was what I needed. I needed a younger man. I needed this even more than another poodle.