Very Nice

by Marcy Dermansky

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  —

  I was sitting outside at my café, drinking an iced coffee, Posey at my feet, waiting for Rachel’s day camp to let out. She was not eight, of course, she could find her way home, but Rachel seemed to like it when I picked her up. Her friend Agatha had not come home for the summer. The friends who had come home she claimed not to like anymore. This came as a surprise to me. Mollie and Bryn. They were very nice girls, all of them. I used to buy them pizza, drive them to the mall. I expected Rachel to moan and complain, but she didn’t. She had perfected, instead, the unhappy “don’t bother me” look. She wanted an audience for her misery and there I was.

  I had my sketch pad open, I was going to draw this summer, I was going to paint, and in fact, I had begun a sketch of Posey when I noticed a young man, a dark-skinned man wearing a long-sleeved shirt and linen shorts, stepping out of a silver car. Clearly he was not from here. It was a sad truth, the lack of diversity in our town, but there it was. You had to be married to a banker to afford a house here. That limited the population. The Armstrongs were African American; Donna and David were both lawyers. Of course, there were always exceptions. The silver car pulled away from the curb, and this young man simply stood there, arms at his sides.

  He reached into his pockets, retrieved a pair of sunglasses, and put them on. He proceeded to make a full circle, not leaving his spot on the sidewalk, and then he scratched his head. He looked rumpled, hungover even. His hair hung in his eyes.

  “Oh, Posey,” I said.

  This, of course, had to be Rachel’s writing professor. It could be no one else. I recognized him from his author photo. He would want his dog back. It hadn’t even been two weeks. Rachel had said we would have her for the summer.

  I felt a panic. I stood up, sat down. Posey stood up, too, but I told her to sit. She hadn’t seen him yet. I could pretend not to have recognized my daughter’s professor. I could walk with Posey in the opposite direction, fast, and hope he did not see us. My daughter’s professor did not know me, but he would know his dog.

  The man obviously didn’t know where Rachel lived or he would have taken the car directly to our house. I tried to imagine what he was thinking. It was a small town. He could talk to some people here on the square and he would find my daughter, just like that. He was not too far off. He had been here for all of a minute and I had found him.

  It was bad luck on my part. The idea of not greeting him was appealing. The man was obviously a mess. And he was attractive, enormously so. There was something lovely and lonely about him and suddenly I understood my daughter’s melancholy. Her writing professor.

  Anyone but him, I thought.

  I could feel other people’s eyes on this man.

  Suddenly, I felt afraid for him. He seemed so ill at ease—there was a way he reached into his pocket, as if he was going to pull out a pack of gum and someone was going to think it was a gun. I was afraid someone would call the police. Like the two old biddies on the park bench across the street who had obviously noticed him and were whispering. Small-town America. Motherfuck.

  “Zahid,” I called out. I was not going to cross the street. I would not make it that easy for him. The least he could do was come to me. “Zahid Azzam.”

  What a funny name it was. Like a comic book character.

  He looked at me, confused.

  “Yes, you.” I gestured for him to come over. I wondered if he thought that there was another Zahid in this nearly all white town. Maybe I looked dangerous to him. I had been doing a lot of yoga over the years.

  Zahid crossed the street, and only then did he notice his dog beneath the table, her front legs crossed.

  “Princess,” he said, delighted. “Baby.”

  He knelt down and petted his dog. He put his face in her poodle hair. Oh gosh, this man was a mess. His eyes were bloodshot. His blue shirt was dirty. He was carrying a leather backpack that looked expensive. He was wearing loafers in the middle of summer. Without socks, at least. I wondered if that was uncomfortable. Posey licked him. Again, I was struck by the unfairness of it all. I felt tears well in my eyes.

  “I don’t know you,” Zahid said. “Do I?”

  “No,” I said with a fast smile. “You don’t.”

  Zahid waited. I could make it easy. I could introduce myself, explain how I’d come into the possession of his poodle. I could ask him to join me.

  “My name is Becca,” I said.

  Zahid’s face was blank. It made me wonder about him, as a writer. He should have been able to make the connection all on his own.

  “I am Rachel’s mother.”

  “Oh.” Zahid laughed, and for a moment he was still at a loss. “Of course. Rachel. Rachel would have a mother.” I nodded. Depending on his relationship with my daughter, this could be problematic for him. “You look too young to be her mother.”

  I would take it. That was one of the ironies about being left for a younger woman. I had come into a style of my own around the time I turned fifty. My arms were toned. I liked all of my clothes, expensive and well made, simple. I had thrown out everything I didn’t wear.

  “I could be her older sister,” I said.

  “Yes, exactly.” Zahid smiled at me. He was still kneeling down, still petting his dog. “Or a cousin, maybe. Her favorite cousin. You are so pretty,” he said, thoughtlessly, maybe because I was older and so my prettiness was a surprise to him.

  “I am Becca,” I said again.

  I did not want to be known to this man as somebody’s mother. I did not want to disappear. I was fifty-four. My life was not over. I held out my hand and Zahid took it. He had soft hands. Long fingers.

  “Zahid,” he said. “But you already know that.”

  His brow was sweaty. It was late afternoon in early July. I should get him something to drink, but that would be something a mother would do. He could figure it out himself, the fact that he was thirsty. We were at an establishment that sold beverages.

  Zahid sat down at my table.

  “I can’t believe how easy it was to find you,” he said.

  “I found you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s true.”

  “Did you come for your dog?”

  “Well.” Zahid paused, and I felt hopeful. He did not know what he had come for. I did not want to let Posey go, and maybe that meant I would have to keep Zahid, too. Two grown-up children for the summer. My own sleepaway camp. That would be fine. I had already begun to clean out Jonathan’s office. It could make a nice bedroom. My mind was going too fast. I had drunk all of that iced coffee, had also had a pot of hot coffee in the morning. But it wasn’t the coffee. I just wanted to blame my thoughts on the caffeine. I did not want to give up my poodle; it did not seem fair.

  Not fair, not fair, I kept thinking. Not fair.

  “Yes,” Zahid said. “I wanted to see how my girl was doing.”

  I breathed out air. He had said nothing about taking her home. It was going to be fine.

  “Oh, Posey is having a great summer.”

  “Posey?” Zahid asked.

  “Oh,” I said, laughing to cover up my mistake. “It’s my pet name for her. Is that okay?”

  “Sure,” he laughed. “That’s okay.”

  Maybe it wasn’t okay, but what was he going to say?

  “I take her for long walks on the Sound.” I felt like there was something else I should say. “She sleeps on my bed,” I added, and then realized that of course I should not have said that. Was this the first time I had talked to a man since Jonathan left me? Was Zahid Azzam even a man? More like a grown-up boy. A Peter Pan. An asshole. An artist. Again, my brain, it had to slow down. Slow down, slow down. My left leg, I realized, was shaking.

  “I think Posey is having a better summer than I am,” Zahid said.

  “She is having a great summ
er,” I said.

  I looked at my daughter’s professor, the sheen of sweat on his brow, and I caved. This mothering instinct of mine. Maybe it was because I was a teacher. Maybe it was just because I was a human being. “Would you like something to drink? A lemonade. An iced coffee. I’m waiting for Rachel, actually. Is she expecting you?”

  I knew she wasn’t expecting him. Or I hoped that she wasn’t expecting him. I hoped that she wouldn’t keep something like that from me.

  “No,” Zahid said. “She isn’t expecting me. I am just back from Pakistan and, well, the trip, it was a lot, and I wanted to see my dog. I didn’t want to wait, to go through the proper chains of communication. I just got on a train and then I took an Uber, which I didn’t need to, the drive was so short, and here I am.”

  “And I found you.”

  “You found me,” Zahid said.

  Zahid Azzam was a writer. He seemed to understand that this was not any old tossed-off phrase. This was meaningful. We looked into each other’s eyes. He had dark brown eyes. My eyes were blue. He had beautiful eyes. Perhaps he thought my eyes were beautiful, too.

  Was I kidding myself? Had I become delusional? Was I in the land of make-believe? How had I dressed this morning? A sundress, my favorite sundress, a dress I wore three times a week. I had gone swimming in the Sound before coming to the café. Had I showered after? Was there still salt water in my hair? I forced myself to remember.

  I had showered. I was clean. Sun-kissed, even. I had brushed mascara onto my lashes for my walk into town. I had read somewhere that this was a good thing to do, all the makeup you ever needed. And moisturizer with a strong SPF.

  I had found him.

  Zahid

  I had not had much experience in the suburbs. My writer friends were uniformly disdainful of American suburbs. I had been told repeatedly that they were not places for dark-skinned people. That the owners of big houses were hypocrites. That the food was bad. That the great American suburb was a place where one could die of loneliness. My student, Rachel Klein, lived in a gorgeous house.

  Her house was like a dream, really. The outside made it look like a barn. The interior could have been in a magazine. High ceilings, wooden beams running through the center, blond wood floors, tall green plants, a perfect ceramic vase on the kitchen table filled with wildflowers, small blue glass bottles on the windowsill. Wicker porch furniture. A hammock in the yard. A yard, a very big yard. A swimming pool, strangely still covered, the only odd spot in a perfect picture. If I’d saved all of the money I had made on my novel, if I saved all the money I would ever make until the day I died, I would never be able to afford a house like this.

  And yet somehow, here I was.

  Connecticut.

  The absent father was a banker. He was a fool, obviously, for leaving these two women. I had had sex with the girl. My student. This was something I should not have done, I did not want to think about it, but it had also led me here, to this house. Artists’ colonies—and I had been to many—had nothing on this house. I made a sudden promise to God that if I was allowed to stay, I would write again: No more excuses. While I had not packed a change of clothes, I had brought my laptop with me.

  To Connecticut.

  The air felt clean and light. I could smell the sea. On the walk back from town with Rachel and her mother, I saw two baby rabbits on the road.

  “Look at the little rabbits!” I exclaimed.

  Becca laughed. Rachel smiled shyly at me, then looked away. She pulled her hair out of its ponytail and then she hid her face behind her hair. I was afraid that she was going to misunderstand, that she was going to think that somehow I was there for her. I had made it clear, I hoped, that I was there to check on my dog. Still, I returned Rachel’s smile. I did not want to be rude, either. I didn’t want to appear as if I was acting strangely. I had seen two old women on the square, looking at me, whispering. I had smiled at them, too.

  Rachel’s mother, Becca, I liked the name Becca, seemed to like me. She grilled chicken for dinner, cooked on an impressive gas grill out back. She made a salad with cucumbers and tomatoes and fresh mozzarella. Good lettuce. We had corn that had been picked from a farm down the road. It was such delicious corn. It was a meal that could be photographed for a magazine, served outside on beautiful plates. Becca made it seem effortless.

  I drank white wine with the meal, even though I had told myself earlier that day, hungover as I had ever been, that I wouldn’t drink for a good long time. The wine was too good to refuse.

  But conversation proved difficult. And because it was difficult, I felt reluctant to try. I felt it would be safer to keep quiet. I didn’t know, really, how Rachel felt about me. What her mother knew. Becca had told me during dinner that she had read Rachel’s story, the one she hadn’t turned in, and I’d noticed that Rachel kicked her mother underneath the table.

  “Ow,” Becca said. “That hurt.”

  There was something about Becca that had appealed to me from the moment I saw her. This was the kind of woman I needed in my life. A beautiful woman with a big, beautiful house. A woman who would walk my dog, who would not want children, who would not expect me to produce another masterpiece. A woman who had been let down by another man. She would not have unrealistic expectations. I could hear Kristi, hissing in my ear, telling me to get off my lazy ass. To get over the self-pity. To get over myself. To find a woman I could treat as an equal. Some feminist nonsense babble. Sometimes, I fucking hated Kristi, always talking into my ear.

  I realized they were both looking at me, mother and daughter. The conversation, it seemed, suddenly required that I participate.

  “Look,” I said. “A firefly.”

  Fireflies are magic. I smiled. It was a real smile. I felt genuine delight, gazing at this firefly, knowing that I wasn’t likely to find one in Brooklyn. It was also a smile that, I knew from experience, could be considered charming. I did not want to upset either of these women. Women, who, as a gender, were so easy to upset. So unforgiving, so much of the time. I was not sure where I was going to sleep that night. When I had boarded a train to Connecticut earlier that day, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Khloe had asked me about my dog and I had taken off, a chicken without a head, to find my dog. Now I had found her.

  I couldn’t take her back to Brooklyn. Khloe had made that clear. And I could not afford to bounce Khloe from my apartment. I would have to start making calls. Or post something on Facebook. Someone would put us up. There was always someone. I figured I must have a friend on social media with a spare room, friends with country houses. Friends who had left the city and moved to scenic towns on the Hudson. I thought of Aimee, who had an empty beach house in Asbury Park. Professor friends in Cambridge who were always traveling.

  And yet, I had never anticipated this house. I had never fallen in love with a house before. The bathroom on the first floor had small green soaps in a crystal bowl, soaps that matched the tiles, small square green tiles. I was a straight man, I was not supposed to care about these things, and yet I did. I had always loved beautiful things.

  After an animated greeting, Princess, renamed Posey, barely registered my presence. At dinner, she lay beneath Becca’s feet. She had clearly fallen in love with Becca, and I could understand why.

  “My dog Posey died in May,” Becca told me, watching me watch her with my dog. “She was also a standard poodle. Somehow, I feel like your dog knows this and she wants to comfort me. What a good girl she is.”

  I loved Princess, even if I did not always seem like the best dog owner. Owning a dog was a bigger commitment than I had anticipated. I had gotten Princess after my fiancée left me. It was an impulsive decision. I must have known, when I left her with my student, a girl who wore such ratty clothes that somehow I knew she was rich, what a good thing I was doing for my dog.

  Look at the yard this dog had. The walks she was tak
en on. Look at Becca. I felt pleased that I could do something good for her, too, by letting her take care of my dog.

  I could be selfish, but I was not a bad person. I worried that my mother thought that I was a bad person, but I had made it in time, I had been with my grandmother when she died.

  “I am so sorry your grandmother died,” Rachel said.

  Like a snap of the fingers, I was back in that room where my Amma died. In her small house, the ceiling fan clicking overhead, making an all-too-insufficient breeze. My grandmother had squeezed my hand so tight that it hurt, and when she let go, she was gone. It was like my mother said: The old woman had waited for me. She had waited for me to die. And what if I had not gone home? Maybe she would still be alive, waiting for me.

  “We cannot live forever,” I said to Rachel, repeating what my mother had said to me, speaking in my professor voice. I annoyed even myself, imagining the way I sounded. And this idea, that we all had to die, it was not a comfort. I really did think Amma would live forever. No one had ever loved me as uncritically as she had. Amma was not the littlest bit surprised when my book received so much acclaim. “You are a bright star,” she had said. She had thought I would train to be a doctor, like so many of the other men in my family. Except I could not pass organic chemistry. I also did not try hard. Writing had come easy to me. And now, that was hard, too.

  “But you are glad you went?” Rachel asked. “To Pakistan? Was it good to go home?”

  This girl, she wanted something from me with these questions. I did not know what. Maybe for me to stop looking at her mother. I thought I had only stolen one look and that was when Rachel had gone to the refrigerator to get more seltzer. What did Rachel think right now? Did she understand I had come for my dog? I had come for my dog. Did she think I wanted her? Rachel Klein was pretty, sure, but I did not want her. She’d been wearing a camp T-shirt and a pair of cutoff shorts when she arrived at the café. She looked like she could be in high school. I felt shame. I had taken candy from the candy jar and I could not put it back.