Very Nice

by Marcy Dermansky

  I had paused there. It felt wrong, somehow, giving him a sexual disease. I had hesitated at the keyboard, unsure. I had actually laughed out loud, at myself, as if I were God, as if what I wrote actually mattered. I could punish him if I wanted to. I wanted to.

  “I shouldn’t,” Zahir says.

  And then he does.

  I ended it there. The reader would know what was coming.

  “No,” my dad said. “The markets aren’t falling. Honestly, Trump has been good for business.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said.

  “I didn’t say I like him,” my dad said. “My politics have not changed. Not to worry.”

  “You’re a Democrat?” Khloe asked.

  “Of course I am a Democrat. What did you think?” my dad said. “Jesus. What do you think of me?”

  “I assume nothing,” Khloe said.

  “This firm gave a buttload of cash to Hillary Clinton and she pissed it away,” my dad said, as if it had happened yesterday. “The election was hers to lose and she lost it.”

  His face had turned red.

  The subject always upset him.

  I looked at Khloe and smiled.

  “Honestly,” Khloe said, “I could finish this up on my own. I can handle it. You go have dinner with your daughter.”

  “I can’t let you do that,” he said.

  I didn’t know why, but it occurred to me that my dad was lying. Maybe he had changed his mind about wanting to see me. It was fine. Dinner had clearly been a mistake. He could give me money, I thought for the second time that night. My movie started in half an hour. I could still make it.

  “Forget it,” he said. “The client can wait. We are going to take Khloe to dinner with us.”

  “We are?” Khloe said.

  “Absolutely,” my father said. “I want you and Rachel to spend some time together. You are a good role model for my daughter. This couldn’t be better.”

  “Dad,” I said.

  The look on Khloe’s face was apologetic.

  “Are you interested in finance?” she asked me.

  “This girl,” my father said, “doesn’t know what she wants to do.”

  “Dad,” I repeated.

  And then I hated myself, sounding the way I did. Like a petulant child. Let him be sad and lonely. What did I care? He was an idiot, leaving my mother. She might not be there for him when he changed his mind.

  “Forget it,” I said. “You have work to do.”

  “I told you it’s fine. Let’s go get a burger.”

  “I’m a vegetarian,” I said.

  “Since when?” My dad looked up at me.

  I’d had dinner with him and Mandy at the beginning of the summer. I had gotten the chicken tacos.

  “Since last week,” I said. Why not? “I saw a documentary on Netflix about meat production and I am done.”

  “I think I saw that one,” Khloe said. There was always some kind of environmental documentary on Netflix. “It was disgusting, right?”

  “Are you a vegetarian?” my father asked Khloe.

  She nodded.

  “Vegan,” she said.

  For some reason, I was sure that she was full of shit.

  She winked at me. She was. And that was when I figured out who she looked like. A writer. Kristi Taylor. She looked just like her, only with short hair. It was weird, how much she looked like her.

  “Whatever,” my father said. “This is New York City. You can eat a veggie burger. There is salad.”

  I shook my head. The only thing I could do was tell him the truth. “I don’t want to eat dinner with you. I changed my mind.”

  “Are you serious?” my father said.

  And all of a sudden, he looked nervous. He looked frail. Jesus. The next thing I knew he was going to tell me he had cancer.

  “You came all this way, Rachel,” he said. “We can go to dinner.”

  I shrugged.

  “Are you mad at me?”

  I nodded.

  “Why?”

  I shrugged.

  “You want to talk about it?” he said.

  “Not really.”

  And there really was a movie I wanted to see. Greta Gerwig had directed her first film. Now, she was a role model to me, not some overdressed woman working in finance. Like I would ever dress like that. I would rather be shot than wear the kind of shoes she was wearing. It was fine. I would go see the movie. It was good that I’d said no to Ian Thornton. I was waiting for my professor. I would kiss him first. No big deal. I had done it before. I would do it again.

  My father sighed.

  “You are so inflexible,” he said. “Just like your mother.”

  This, of course, was not fair. I was not like my mother.

  We stared at each other.

  “There is this movie I want to see,” I said. “Do you want to see the movie with me?”

  “No,” my father said. “I don’t want to see a movie.”

  “Well, then,” I said. “I have to go. It starts soon.”

  “You’ll still join me?” my father asked Khloe. “For dinner. We have to eat.”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “What movie are you going to see?”

  “A Greta Gerwig movie.”

  “Who?” my father said.

  Khloe nodded. “The woman I am seeing wants to see it,” Khloe said. “I’ll go. I gotta keep up.”

  “Woman?” my father said.

  Khloe shrugged. She was a lesbian. Never, ever, would I have guessed that this woman was gay. Now I found myself blushing again.

  “You are full of surprises,” my dad said.

  “I have a life,” she said. “Outside of the office. I keep it private.”

  “As you should,” my dad said.

  “I’ll go to the movie with you, Rachel,” she said. She looked over to my dad. “If you think the situation is under control.”

  “Seriously?” my father said.

  Khloe shrugged. “Jane loves Greta Gerwig.”

  “Who?” my father said. “Who the fuck is Greta Gerwig?”

  The three of us stood there, in my father’s office on the eighty-sixth floor, a work crisis that seemed to have been fabricated coming to an end.

  “Let’s go to the Greta Gerwig movie,” my father said.

  “You said you didn’t want to go.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “I’ll get my bag,” Khloe said.

  “I never go to the movies,” my father said. “This will be good for me.”

  It was true. He had no patience for movies. He only liked documentaries, because he felt like he was learning something. I felt a perverse sort of pleasure, taking him to see a film he wouldn’t like.

  We rode down the elevator together and then took a taxi to the movie theater. My father ordered a large popcorn and sodas for all of us. He got a bag of dark chocolate almonds with virgin sea salt. It was as if Khloe were my friend, not his employee, and he was taking us to the movies. We found three seats together in the middle of the theater.

  “How is your mother?” my father asked.

  I was surprised. Maybe he had wanted to ask me this all along. The trailers had just begun. He had waited until now. I shrugged. A movie about Tonya Harding, a figure skater. I had never heard of her.

  “Tonya Harding,” Khloe said, taking a handful of popcorn. “Seriously? She and her husband paid someone to smash Nancy Kerrigan’s knees.”

  Khloe seemed into it. It was weird that she worked for my father. In a million years, I would not want to do what my father did, though I didn’t know what he actually did. I just didn’t want to do it. My father said that I did not care about money because I’d always had it.

  “I was in town the other day,” m
y dad said.

  “You were?”

  “I had a doctor’s appointment.”

  A woman behind us sssshed us.

  “It’s a trailer,” my father said. “Get a grip.”

  I had forgotten this. This was one of the things my father hated about the movies. He hated other people.

  “I saw your mother on the beach. She was with a man,” he said. “An Indian guy.”

  I nodded. I’d had no idea they went to the beach together. It was worse than I’d thought.

  “Do you know who he could be?” My father looked nervous.

  “My writing professor,” I said. My mother was taking walks on the beach with my writing professor. He actually liked her. He had no idea that he was leading her on. “Zahid Azzam.”

  There. I’d said his name out loud.

  Khloe burst out laughing. She spit up chewed-up popcorn.

  “Jesus,” my dad said. “Get a grip.”

  Was that his new phrase? Was that something Mandy said?

  “Zahid Azzam,” she said, laughing, laughing too hard. “He is everywhere.”

  “Who the hell is Zahid Azzam?” my dad said.

  I didn’t know how to begin. Clearly he did not know we had a houseguest. The movie started. I wanted to see this movie. I really did.

  “Who is he?” my dad repeated.

  “The movie,” I said.

  “Shhh,” the woman behind us said.

  I would not talk to my father about my writing professor.

  “Who is he?”

  “The movie,” I said.

  “Are you okay?” he asked Khloe. She had cleaned up the popcorn from her lap. She had stopped laughing. She had reached for her soda.

  Khloe nodded.

  She was okay.

  The beach.

  They were taking walks together on the beach.

  Becca

  Jonathan called in the middle of the night.

  “Who is Zahid Azzam?” he wanted to know.

  It was my mistake, of course, answering the phone. I had been fast asleep. I thought it was going to be Zahid, though he didn’t have this phone number. Not to the landline. The only people who used the landline were Jonathan and telemarketers.

  “Jonathan?” I said. “What time is it?”

  “I saw you with him,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  I sat up in bed. Saw me? Saw me when? How? Where? I felt caught, but I wasn’t guilty of doing anything wrong. He had left me. He had seen me? Seen me? At the pool? My heart was racing.

  Posey was looking at me, concern in her eyes. She knew this phone call was a disruption in our life, our routine. She was my dog now. I reached out and stroked her head.

  What a strange day it had been. With Zahid gone, I had cried on and off all day long. I knew I was ridiculous but that was how I felt, and so I let myself cry. It was almost one hundred degrees out, but I made a tray of baked macaroni and cheese. It was one of Rachel’s favorite meals, what she used to ask for on her birthday, three kinds of cheese and bread crumbs. But she had not come home from day camp. I had eaten more than half of the tray all by myself. It tasted so good. I opened a bottle of red wine and I drank too much of that, too.

  I had waited for Rachel at the café, but she didn’t walk by, and after an hour, I walked home by myself. I texted her and she did not respond. I wondered if I was supposed to worry. I had gotten used to having company for dinner, Rachel and Zahid, and suddenly I was alone again. Rachel was supposed to eat the macaroni and cheese with me. She let herself into the house around midnight, gently shutting the door behind herself, quietly going up the stairs. I knocked on her bedroom door.

  “Are you okay?” I said. “I was worried about you.”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “You didn’t answer my texts.”

  “I am fine,” she said. “I’m home.”

  She did not invite me in and so I did not actually see my daughter. It did not feel good. Rachel was mad at me and I didn’t know why. I had been careful. There was no way she could know. Zahid and I had only been together when she was at day camp.

  But then again, I also did not know what she did see, what she observed when we were all together, what I was like during our dinners together. It took all the strength in me not to touch Zahid’s hair, to touch his arm when I passed him a plate of food.

  Now Jonathan was on the phone, asking me about Zahid.

  “I saw you on the beach with him,” Jonathan said.

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. He saw us? And then, I remembered, we had gone to the beach, just once, walking Posey. Weeks ago. That was before, before we had begun.

  “Are you spying on me?”

  “You did not answer the question.”

  “Jonathan. It is the middle of the night.”

  “Rachel says he is staying at the house. This writer.”

  “You saw Rachel?”

  “You seem surprised. She is my daughter.”

  “I didn’t know you saw her.”

  “Yes,” Jonathan said. “Tonight. We went to the movies.”

  The movies. Jonathan never went to the movies. He hated the movies, he hated everything about going to a movie theater. He complained about the price of the popcorn. Whereas I had been home all alone. I would have gone to the movies with Rachel. I loved the movies. Why did I feel so betrayed? I wanted to ask what movie.

  All day, I had had a bad feeling. Something would happen. To Zahid. To us. I didn’t want to let him leave. It was only a job interview. But it was for a job far away. There was no reason for him to go, not if he didn’t want the job. He’d told me he didn’t want this job. So why did he go? Not only would this mean Zahid leaving me, he would take his dog with him.

  I blamed Rachel for all of this.

  She had brought this trouble into my life.

  The standard poodle. Her writing professor.

  I looked at the cordless phone I was holding in my hand, wondering why I was holding it. It was ugly. Jonathan had bought it at Costco, strangely pleased because it was so cheap. He had wanted this phone in the bedroom. I never talked on the phone. I should just cancel the line, there was no reason to pay for it anymore. I was about to hang up, but then I heard Jonathan, saying my name.

  “Look, Becca,” Jonathan said.

  “What?”

  “I did some research on him.”

  “What?”

  “I Googled him,” Jonathan said. “There is a strange man living in my house. I am going to find out what I can.”

  “This is crazy.”

  “Look, Becca. He is not a good guy. He has a reputation. He got dumped at the altar.”

  What? What was he saying? How was it that he knew more about my lover than I did? Zahid had almost gotten married? I had Googled him, too, but somehow missed this piece of information. I had reviews of his book. I wondered if Jonathan had read Zahid’s book. What a funny book club we would make. The Klein family.

  I did not know where to begin.

  “Your house.” That is what I landed on.

  “My name is on the title, still,” he said. “Yes, it is my house.”

  “Are you kidding me? You want to talk about this now? You seriously don’t want to do this.”

  It was 2:06 in the morning; there was the time illuminated on the red lights of the digital clock. Jonathan was reminding me of all the shit that lay ahead of us. I had contacted my lawyer, of course, months ago, when Jonathan first told me about the pilot, but I had not acted on any of his suggestions. It did not seem as if there was any hurry. Rachel was at college. Jonathan had gone off to Tribeca. My lawyer had suggested mediation. As custody was not an issue, this lawyer had said, if we were willing to be amicable, a divorce would be simple e
nough.

  “Half of the house is mine,” Jonathan told me now. This had not been part of his leaving speech.

  “No,” I said. “It is my house. Every single part of this house is a reflection of me. My taste. It’s my house.”

  “Legally, half of it is mine.”

  Now it seemed like I was going to have to go ahead and divorce him. He wouldn’t just leave things be. He had everything he wanted and that wasn’t enough. If he wanted a fight, I would give him a fight.

  “It is the middle of the fucking night, Jonathan.”

  For some reason, I couldn’t get past that.

  I should have hung up right then, but I held off. Did I owe him something? Did I have to explain myself? We had never talked about it. About why. Why he was leaving. He’d told me he was leaving and he’d left. Just like that. I had cried for my dog.

  “That man should not be in the house,” Jonathan said. “Rachel is young. She is impressionable. He is a good-looking man. This has to be confusing for her. Hell, it must be confusing for you.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said.

  I was not confused about Zahid. I had made the first move. The first time, and then again, the next time. I had had to let Zahid know that it was okay. He was not going to get into trouble. We were almost there, I thought. Soon, it would be a month together. What we did not need was interference.

  “Rachel seems moody and aloof,” Jonathan said. “I am worried about her.”

  “That isn’t why you are calling me in the middle of the night. Rachel is always moody and aloof.”

  “Why, Rebecca, are you spending time with him?”

  “You saw us walking the dog,” I said.

  I did not know why I was defending myself.

  “You were laughing.”

  “Do you hear yourself?” I said. “I am not supposed to laugh? You are living in Tribeca with your airline hostess.”

  “She is a pilot.”

  “A pilot. Whatever.”

  “Where is he sleeping, Becca?” Jonathan said. “Tell me.”