Michelle Herman, Telling the Story

We had talked only a few times in the years since we’d split—the last time almost nine years ago when I called him one night on impulse, the night before my daughter turned three. He was taken aback by my timing: it was the day after the birth of his daughter, his first child. We talked for a little while, in a friendly way, but he didn’t encourage me to call again. In fact, he came out and said please don’t. “It doesn’t feel right,” he said. “You’ll think that’s stupid. But it just doesn’t seem right. My wife and I have started our family. It seems…disrespectful. You know how I am.” I knew how he was. And so I didn’t call again, even though I am the sort of person who tries to stay in touch with everyone I have ever known. I didn’t call again until this past spring, when I found myself in the place where I knew he had settled—knew, at any rate, that he had settled soon after we broke up, and knew that once he’d settled somewhere he wasn’t likely to leave. Because I knew how he was. All those years ago, when he joined a practice there, he had told me the name of the hospital where he would be an attending physician—Mercy—and because I couldn’t imagine not letting him know I was here, in his town, in this part of the country for the first time in so many years, I called and asked for him; I’d been right: he was still there. I left a message, telling him I was in town until the next morning, knowing that he might very well not call me back. But he did call back, two hours later, and he sounded happy to be talking to me. He told me that he’d already known I was in town: he’d heard on the local NPR station about the reading I was giving at the university that night. It had come as such a shock to hear my name over the radio that morning as he drove into work, he said, that he’d nearly driven off the side of the road. He said this cheerfully, so I laughed, because it seemed I was supposed to. *** I had driven us off the road once, twenty years ago. He had just taught me to drive—a birthday gift, when I turned thirty. He’d never met anyone before who didn’t know how to drive, he had told me when we met, and I told him plenty of New Yorkers didn’t. “But you don’t live in New York anymore,” he pointed out, gently. And when I wrecked his car, flipping it over into a ditch when we were on a camping trip—another first for me—he calmed me down, saying over and over, “It’s okay, it’s just a thing, it doesn’t matter,” and then he made me get behind the wheel again (“Otherwise you never will”), this time in a rental car. And we had our camping trip anyway. He got me to quit smoking, after I’d tried and failed for years. He taught me how to make Cuban black beans, his mother’s way, with lots of red wine and a whole head of garlic and a handful of green olives. He was the best boyfriend I’d ever had—but then, I’d had a lot of very bad boyfriends. It would be easy, too easy, to damn him with faint praise. The fact was he was an excellent boyfriend, by almost any measure: he was kind, he was generous, he admired and appreciated me, he was smart, he was responsible, he was honest, he was sane. He was even handsome. He even knew how to dance. And compared to most of the men I’d dated before him—narcissists, drunks, liars, two-timers, jerks, plus a bunch of emotionally crippled although otherwise delightful (which sounds like a joke, but I don’t mean it to be: they were otherwise delightful: funny, brilliant, charming, interesting) men—he seemed pretty much too good to be true. But for four years he proved himself to be quite true. *** Now we sat across the table from each other. I hadn’t seen him in sixteen years, but we sat in the booth at the diner talking as companionably as if we were in the habit of meeting for breakfast once a week. His pager kept going off, just the way it used to. He’d glance at it, shake his head, sigh, and keep talking. When we met I was in graduate school; he was in medical school. He was, in fact, my student: I had been sent, like a missionary, by the MFA program in creative writing to the medical school at the university to teach a fiction-writing class. Others had gone similarly to the law school, the business school. I volunteered for the medical school—I was thinking of Chekhov, of William Carlos Williams. J. was in the first class I taught at the med school. He was a fourth-year student. Like everyone else in the class, he had no time for this—I would find out later that he had less time than anyone else, that it was remarkable, really, that he had registered for the course, which didn’t count for anything and would be (he understood even before he got into it) enormously time-consuming. But he was a reader, a serious reader, and he cared passionately about writing. All my students did; I don’t remember a single one of them who didn’t throw himself into the course as if it were…well, a matter of life and death. I should be ashamed to confess that J. and I started dating two weeks before the end of the semester. But we were both students, he was only a few years younger than I, and the power relationship that usually makes a mess or a mockery of student-teacher romances didn’t seem to apply here. I wasn’t assigning grades to my students other than pass/fail, and in truth I didn’t feel like their teacher so much as their guide, as in a safari or a hike up a dangerous mountain. Or an LSD trip.