“Are you kidding me?” I said. “Are you serious?”
“I am coming over tomorrow.”
“No,” I said. “You’re not invited.”
“I don’t care.”
“Don’t come,” I said. “You are not welcome here.”
“Becca,” Jonathan said. “I want to see you.”
That, that surprised me.
“I want to see you,” he repeated. His voice cracked.
“What about your pilot?” I asked him.
“This has nothing to do with Mandy,” he said. “I just want to see you.”
“I don’t want to see you,” I said.
This, I realized, was the truth.
“You’re angry.”
“That has nothing to do with it.”
“You have every reason to be angry,” Jonathan said.
“How is Mandy?” I asked him. “How is your pilot?”
“Did you hear me, Becca?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Which question?”
“How is Mandy?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Which question?”
This was getting ridiculous. There was no chance of my going back to sleep.
“Where does he sleep, Becca?”
“It’s none of your business.”
“Where does he sleep?”
It didn’t matter. I wanted to get Jonathan off the phone. I told him the truth. “He sleeps in your office.”
This was an acceptable answer, apparently. Jonathan did not explode. It did not tell the whole story, of course, but Jonathan had left me. My life was my own.
“Mandy is very young,” Jonathan said. “There is a lot I didn’t know about her, it turns out.”
There it was. Of course. Trouble in paradise. What did he think would happen?
And then I wondered: How old exactly was Zahid? Was he older than Mandy? I was wide awake. My day tomorrow was ruined. I was angry. I was furious.
“How did this happen?” Jonathan asked.
“You are asking me this now? Shouldn’t you find a therapist?”
I looked at Posey. Her tail thumped on the bed. I was so glad to have this poodle. Your husband could leave you for a younger pilot. Your lover could leave you for a job interview. But a poodle was loyal. This dog was my poodle.
“I wish you had gone to Paris with me,” Jonathan said.
He always came back to that trip to Paris. That trip to Paris I’d never wanted to take. And if I had gone, would that have saved our marriage? Though I did not know it at the time, there was already a Mandy. If anything, I’d wanted to go to Iceland. There had been a picture of a swimming pool in front of a snow-covered mountain in The New York Times that I had never forgotten. I had told Jonathan I wanted to swim in that pool, but he hadn’t taken me seriously.
“Do you know what I wish?” I said.
“What?”
“I wish that Posey hadn’t died. I wish that you had been with me when I took her to the vet to have her put to sleep.”
“She was just a dog, Becca,” Jonathan said.
“Just a dog?”
I was out of bed. On my feet. I wanted to throw something. I almost threw the phone. Posey jumped off the bed, too, wagging her tail. She thought I was taking her out for a walk. Fine. I would take her on a walk.
“What if I wanted to come home?” Jonathan asked. “Becca? I am being serious. I want to come home.”
And then I did throw the phone.
It smashed the TV, a big spiderweb crack along the black screen, but that was fine. It was just a TV and I had never watched the TV in the bedroom anyway. It was Jonathan’s TV. I had been meaning to get rid of it. It was Jonathan who liked to watch the news before bed. It was the least healthy thing a person could do, especially during primary season, the debates, and then the goddamn election, and ever since. Poison on the television. For months, Jonathan ranted about Hillary Clinton. And then Donald Trump. He ranted and he raved. Though I had not realized it until this moment, I was glad to get all of them out of my house.
“Good riddance,” I said.
Posey was still wagging her tail.
It made me sad. She loved me, but she wasn’t my dog. She wasn’t the real Posey. Everything had been fine, I thought, until the election.
Zahid
I understood why Kristi had made the choice she’d made: going back to school, the academic life. It was so bloody safe. She rented her cute little house. Her rent was ridiculously low. She used her fellowship money to pay for groceries and secondhand cardigan sweaters. She worked on her novel. She wrote papers about literature and she went to classes where people very much like her argued passionately about literature as if what they said and thought about books actually mattered. At night, they went to French movies and local bars. They also got plastered. Professors fucked their students. Grad students fucked other grad students. Some of this fucking led to marriage. There was accompanying heartbreak and scandal. There was a whole lot of fucking going on at writers’ programs. Sometimes, there was writing. Strangely enough, I used to love this: the writer’s life. Until I started to hate it.
I was as surprised as Kristi that I had started writing again. I was elated and exhilarated. I was not a has-been. I was not ready to be flushed down the toilet. Fame, I was beginning to understand, hadn’t been good for me. I had liked it too much. I had loved all of the attention and the interviews and the parties and the panels and being asked my opinion—about the best books, my favorite restaurants. I had a favorite pen to recommend, a favorite Moleskine journal. I had once been asked about the best bath products for writers and I had opinions about that, too.
I also loved the women who came with this life. It had come easy, starting with the story in The Best American Short Stories. My first published story. I was also lucky in my eyelashes, Kristi often said, as if that explained it.
In high school and college, too, the white girls wanted to fuck me. They wanted me to be their chem partners and debate partners, but they did not want to date me. I wasn’t considered boyfriend material and I understood this was because of the color of my skin and I should have been profoundly upset, I recognized the inherent racism at play, but strangely, I didn’t care. I did not want a girlfriend. I got what I wanted, sex and help with my homework, help that was invaluable, help that got me through my required courses. It was somehow assumed that I was good at math and science and I just wasn’t. It was English where I excelled, writing that came easy.
“Because you are full of shit,” Kristi liked to say.
I could wax poetic.
Suddenly, the girls had become women, and these women wanted real grown-up relationships. There was talk about the families they envisioned having. It seemed inevitable. I did not meet a single woman who did not want monogamy, kids, and so when I realized I had hit that turning point, I figured I would settle down with the most famous writer I fucked.
Emily was beautiful. Like me. She was rich, too. She came from family money and I very much liked that. After getting engaged, I realized that I had the life I wanted. I was like that writer on the TV series people were so nuts about. Her parents had a big house in East Hampton, a gorgeous swimming pool, a trail through the dunes that led right to the ocean. My fiancée wanted only one child. I could do that.
Of course, the rules changed with a relationship. With the engagement, even more so. We had a fancy party and that was fun. Our picture appeared in the Sunday Styles section of The New York Times, with a little article, too. Emily loved that. She had it framed and hung it in the bathroom, which was supposed to be ironic, but it wasn’t.
I was supposed to stop fucking other women. More important, I was supposed to care about someone other than myself. The truth was, I didn�
��t love her. I thought I put on a good show of it. For instance, in the time we were together, I never got caught cheating on her.
In the end, I confessed. I had been forced to confess, because of the health issue, but I had confessed nonetheless. What if she had forgiven me? It seemed conceivable at the time. My fiancée knew who I was. It was not as if I hadn’t come with a reputation, a user history.
“No one forgives a venereal disease,” Kristi told me.
Was that true? Somewhere in the history of time, this transgression must have been forgiven. Maybe if we had been properly in love. I hadn’t been the same since Emily called off the wedding. It was not that I lost the family beach house. Or that after she moved out, my rent doubled. It was not that she had been sending out my laundry for me and I had never appreciated that fact. Or the house cleaner that came once a week. Or the spot-on editing help.
It seemed that my ex had blacklisted me.
My bad behavior cost me speaking engagements. My bad behavior was the reason a short story was rejected from The New Yorker and The Paris Review. My ex, it turned out, was vengeful. She wanted to destroy me. She wrote angry posts about me on social media, leaving out my name, but people knew. She had fucked over my life, but I was the bad guy. I had no right to complain.
“She had every right to be angry,” Kristi said.
Kristi also posited that it might be my attitude that had contributed to my undoing. My general lack of gratitude. My lack of modesty. My enormous ego. She thought I had work to do. She thought I had to earn my redemption.
“Most writers work really, really hard,” she said.
My six-hundred-page novel had not been difficult to write. I was so stoned, in fact, that I barely remembered writing it. I was a complete unknown when it came out. No one expected anything from me. It felt impossible to get back to that place.
That working-really-hard bullshit. Fuck that, really. I was not a construction worker. I was not on an assembly line. I honestly believed that the rules could and should be different for me. Why not? Why was everyone required to work so hard? In the end, we all died. I had an advance from my publisher, and then a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim, and all of this allowed me to coast for quite some time.
“You became complacent,” Kristi said. “That is what happened to you.”
And so what? It was when I realized that I was out of money that I took that job at the college on the Hudson. It was an okay gig, a couple of years, and then that contract ended, and they didn’t rehire me, they hired a new young superstar writer, and fuck. Now I was supposed to move to the Midwest? Was that really my fate? Had it come to that? How had it come to that? I was getting e-mail after e-mail from my new editor, some Jane So-and-so, asking me to lunch, asking about my ideas for the new book, inviting me to a party, asking again to meet her for lunch, asking if I would like to discuss my book, if I would like to brainstorm new ideas. They were friendly e-mails, growing possibly less friendly over time.
“You don’t need a lawyer,” Kristi assured me.
I was afraid the publisher would want the money back. But it would cost them more to get the money back, the lawyers and the bad publicity, than to let me rot. Better, Kristi said, would be to write the book. Everything Kristi said was maddening, but I felt like after losing my fiancée, I could not afford to cut her loose. I needed this annoying voice in my ear.
My beloved Amma was the only person in this world who had understood that I was different. That I was, in fact, truly special. Of all the grandchildren, and there were a lot us, twelve in fact, she had chosen me. I had been her favorite. She had told me that I wasn’t suited for this world. I had always found this troubling. If not Earth, where? I was not a cat. I also didn’t completely understand her. Her English was broken. My Urdu was broken. She called me her little kitty. I adored that. I adored her.
* * *
—
Becca seemed to understand me. She was eighteen years older than I was, and this felt right to me. Our bodies felt right. She had a terrific body. She swam laps. She did yoga in front of her large-screen television. Once, we did yoga in front of the television together and ended up with tangled limbs, making love on the living room floor. It was the only time we had sex inside the house. We had not made love in a bed. We did not talk about why. We did not have to. I understood. Her daughter. Rachel. Rachel was the biggest mistake I had ever made. I was afraid to look at her daughter. Becca was beautiful without her clothes, naked in the sun, unapologetic. I felt lucky.
I was afraid that I might tell Kristi everything. I could imagine how it would sound to my friend who did everything the way one was supposed to. She would think me ridiculous, falling in love with a fifty-four-year-old woman, not even divorced, with a big house and a swimming pool.
I would drink a few drinks with Kristi and she would inform me of the error of my ways. She would say that I had just been stroking my vanity but it was time to grow up, enter the real world. Up until now, that was what Kristi was for. Bringing me back to the real world.
But I had no interest in the real world. The real world was a miserable place. The real world was a shit show. America was a fucking laughingstock, worse than the third world, fascist, racist, classist. Home. My fellow writers, every day, were writing brilliant tweets and Facebook posts, protesting intolerance, sexual harassment, and every single thing that was important, that needed saying, and they were somehow also changing the literary landscape and gaining enormous numbers of followers. It was cool to be a person of color. Oppressed. This was not said, but understood. This, at least, I had going for me.
My new editor had begun following me on Instagram. I had an account but had never once posted on Instagram. I did not see the use of it. Kristi told me that it had been so many years since my book, that I needed to get more active on social media. Twitter was not enough.
“Your poodle,” Kristi told me. “You post pictures of your dog. Easy. Everyone loves dog and cat pictures.”
Instead, I reviewed my neglected Twitter account. I looked at all of my old posts, stunned at what I had revealed over time. I had laid my life bare. I went and deleted it all. Not my actual account, but two years’ worth of tweets. I would return to Becca, cleansed, an open book.
From that day forward.
“Impossible.” I could hear Kristi laughing. “Just Google yourself.”
* * *
—
In Iowa, I was on my best behavior. I gave a reading on campus even though Kristi had not informed me there would be a reading. I read the first chapter of my new book and I was praised and patted on the back and it didn’t even surprise me. I had been reborn. I was back, I was Zahid Azzam, once again.
I went to a party and I drank only four glasses of wine. I did not behave inappropriately. Tempted as I was, I did not touch Kristi’s bare arm and shoulders, tantalizingly close. She could feel me pulling away and this was working. Had I made a move this time, she might have succumbed. I did not make a pass at my short-haired, tattooed driver, who had a strange kind of charm of her own.
Most important, I did not tell Kristi anything about Becca. Not a thing.
“Come on,” she said. “You know you tell me everything. It’s going to happen. Talk.”
She tried to tickle me. This was a victory, of course. Kristi touching me. I did not respond. I told her nothing.
I taught my class. I made intelligent comments about the students’ stories, stories I had quickly scanned on the airplane before falling asleep. I gave a short defense of adverbs, currently a part of speech non grata in the writing world. In the past, the one criticism of my work had been overwriting, which was ridiculous. Nothing was worse than those minimalist writers and their short, lean sentences. I was contradictory, I knew, rallying against just and really and very but fine with leisurely. I had an aesthetic. It had been called the Azzam factor.
“Use adverbs,” I told a classroom full of earnest grad students, and I shook my fist, causing the students to laugh.
I went to lunch with the dean, a famous writer whose work I had never made the effort to read. I never saw the need to read everything out there. Basically, I was very pleasant. I wore nice clothes that I had made sure to iron and hang properly.
For once, Kristi was pleased with me. She thought I had gotten my shit together.
“You pulled it off, Z,” she said.
She thought she was saving my life, that I was well on the road to being saved, and I was, but not in the way she thought.
“Tell me the truth,” she said. “What is going on in Connecticut?”
“Kristi,” I said. “I can’t.”
“You can’t,” she said. “Or you won’t?”
“I won’t.”
She knew that I was staying with the lovestruck student and her mother. I had confessed, earlier, to a small crush on Becca, but that was all she knew. All I had told her. It was so hard not to tell her everything.
“Rich white people, Zahid,” she said with a dramatic sigh. “You know how that goes.”
My fiancée had been a rich white person but Kristi had liked her. Kristi was still friends with my former fiancée. Kristi’s circle of friends were an exotic bunch, a literary Benetton commercial, but she exclusively dated white men. Kristi Taylor was full of shit. I had nominated her novel for the award she’d won and it was full of shit. She stole the life of her twin sister. I was surprised that Khloe had not killed her. I was afraid of Khloe. I realized that I should be grateful to her. She had sent me on my true path. Connecticut, she had said, is supposed to be beautiful. She had no idea.
“Do you know how racist you sound?” I told Kristi.
“I worry about you,” she said.
“I know you do,” I said. “You can stop already.”
“Seriously,” she said.
“Seriously,” I said. “It’s emasculating.”
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