Simona

Short Stories

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a short story.

Best,

Sam

SIMONA

They had been a good couple, Ben and Rebecca, and when they broke up there wasn’t any of the usual Monday morning quarterbacking in their friend group. People seemed genuinely disappointed and perplexed. They asked Rebecca and she said something complicated about needing to be independent, about how she and Ben had become symbiotic and they were covering for each other, keeping one another from advancing in the world. They asked Ben and he got a faraway look and told them to ask Rebecca.

The other thing that surprised everybody was that Rebecca made a clean break of it, and not just with Ben. Ben kept trying to meet her for coffee or sending her long e-mails, sometimes even in bullet points that itinerized his grievances. She seemed very annoyed that he was wasting her time in this way. “I already told you everything,” she might say to him. Or: “this is incredibly painful for me too.” Even odder was that she put her friends at arms-length. They were expecting the sort of group hug that always followed a breakup — they would take her out for beer, or bring in pastries, and confide in her all the small little things that had secretly annoyed them about Ben over the years; she was much more outgoing and friendly and it was taken for granted that she would keep all the mutual friends. But she went through a private grieving process, cut her hair short, tried some questionable outfits — all of which was par for the course — and then said she was busy or just ignored the message whenever anybody tried to reach out to her. The word was that she was dating frenetically.

It took Ben a long time to ‘process’ — which was what, everybody assured him, he was supposed to do. Like every other man who’s ever  been in a long-term relationship, he’d had a secret desire to be free, to sleep around, to not have Rebecca constantly assessing him, but that didn’t console him now. He felt that he had lost a whole set of habits — he couldn’t watch a movie anymore, it was like he didn’t know how to do it, he kept neurotically checking his phone, playing games on it, to the point where he lost all track of the plot. Same went for eating, actually. He found it depressing to cook for himself, that made him feel like he was some sort of lonely handyman in a folk song, and it was more wretched to order delivery for one, and he had to choose carefully the places he went out to, kept himself to diners and fast food and certain bars and counter-service cafes that emphasized anonymity, didn’t know what to do with himself while he waited for the food or while he ate it, worked out whole systems of reading different types of articles and playing different types of games on his phone, being careful not to touch the phone too often, and soil the screen, while he actually had food in front of him. He drank of course, although he didn’t think he really was at risk of turning into an alcoholic: he was just being melodramatic, put on his jacket and beanie, made his way to the corner deli, assembled what he thought of as his sad man’s entertainment, beer in thick cans, a lot of Steel Reserve, and packets of energy bars and maybe a sandwich from the deli.

It was during one of these evenings, when he was pretty deep into the Steel Reserve and trying to watch a TV show, that he texted Simona. “I just want you to know that whatever’s happened, I think well of you and always will,” he wrote. “Happy holidays!” He was in that frantic mood when you check your cell phone for messages and e-mails even if you haven’t heard a tone, as if the phone might have somehow decided to mute itself. It was a way of checking if he still had a place in the world, if the world still thought of him. Simona didn’t let too much time go by before putting him out of his misery. While he was holding the phone in front of him, she wrote back, “Thank you for this! Think well of you too. Hope you’re holding up ok!”

He was crossing something of a barrier just in texting her and her reply was firm and polite in the method that women preferred for dismissing men. It was a good moment to stop, but for some reason Ben found himself unable to stop. “Wish I was,” he wrote. “To be honest, it’s been a really challenging period. Not sure how exactly it ends. I feel like I’ve lost all the moorings in my life.”

That was the kind of thing that couldn’t be ignored, and she wrote back, in a firm but polite way, “Do you have people who can help you?”

He wrote, “To be honest, not really. It would be nice to meet sometime, if you’re up for it. It’s good to talk to people who knew both of us together.”

Vividly, he could sense her hesitation, how she was running different scenarios, trying to get herself out of it. She texted back, “Sure! That would be fine.”

“Maybe right after the holidays?” he wrote.

***

God, the holidays were miserable. He felt like he was a soldier returning from a lost war. His parents had been skeptical of Rebecca, but they were very conscientious, very willing to swallow their own opinion and defer to Ben’s, and they had worked so hard to connect with Rebecca’s family, to invite Rebecca to endless events at their house, the vast majority of which Rebecca had disdained to attend. What they wanted to articulate the entire time — and had tried, with varying success, to hold back — was that they felt Rebecca was cold and imperious, that, fundamentally, she was out for herself, she wasn’t someone that could be relied on. And now, supportive and saintly though they were, they had been proved so obviously right that they couldn’t help but gloat in subtle ways. “Just walked off on you,” his mother said, shaking her head. “And every decision you made factored her in in some way.”

It wasn’t what he wanted to hear — this public acknowledgment of how much he’d ceded power in the relationship, until he was stripped of it completely — but it was very hard to argue with any of that. He probably would have gone to graduate school if she hadn’t broken down crying and said, “You’ll abandon me?” — and who knows how different his life would have looked now if he’d accepted his spot, if he hadn’t let that opportunity slip, if he hadn’t — and this was the deal that, to his shame, he’d made with himself — decided that he would make her the center of his life, that his own success, his own ambition was less important to him than her happiness. It wasn’t his parents’ pragmatic sensibility, and it wasn’t, he felt, quite how a man should behave, but he had done it — he had done it by passing up on grad school, he had done it by signing leases for the apartments she wanted, even though he couldn’t really afford them, he had done it by transitioning into a more corporate position, which he hated, as a way of raising his salary and covering the apartments as well as all of her expensive tastes. And then she had decided that she was running her whole life in the wrong way, that she was being suffocated by the beautiful apartment, and by his affection, and by the orderly, solvent life that he had worked so hard to build for her. It really was like he was returning from a horrible defeat and couldn’t even explain what had happened.

Simona really was a very kind person, just as he’d written in his message to her. He reached out to her when he returned to New York after the new year and she kept her word and agreed to meet him for a drink. He wanted to make things easy for her and suggested a bar around the corner from where she lived. He got there early, ordered a stout, watched an English soccer match on TV. When he’d finished that, and she still hadn’t arrived, he tried to not get annoyed, he ordered another stout and tried not to check his phone every second. She texted that she was really sorry, but she had a friend over and was having a hard time getting rid of him. She was really sorry but would it be alright with him if he just came up?

This was what life seemed to be like for Simona, she was constantly falling into traps set by her own gentleness. She had a string of admirers she kept at a distance — this had been the main content of her friendship with Rebecca, Rebecca accusing her of being a prude and running through the roster, suggesting that she choose one or another, and Simona laughingly tearing apart each of them, and then Rebecca accusing her of being a tease and telling her that she needed to cut some of them loose, and Simona, shaking with laughter by now, would explain that she just couldn’t do that, tell nice boys that they couldn’t hang out with her. There had been many nights when Ben had tried to fall asleep and couldn’t do it with the shrieking voices in the other room — as often as not, they would continue reviewing the merits and demerits of Simona’s suitors until they collapsed out from tiredness and Ben would come across them in the morning, wrapped tightly around each other on the living room couch.

The friend who was over in Simona’s apartment seemed exactly to fit the bill. Ben had probably heard him being run down at some point in the past but wasn’t close to matching names to faces or keeping them all straight. He was very earnest, had good posture, was wearing a thick dress shirt, pumped Ben’s hand when he introduced himself. It turned out that he was from Brighton Beach and Ben felt that he could fill in the rest, working as an analyst in some third-tier bank, taking the work very seriously, amassing bling to go with it, experimenting with bottle-service, with full nights out in Meatpacking, but really in pursuit of a wife. Simona would be absolutely perfect for him, as she would for the eight or ten others who were after her. It was really a problem that she didn’t have it in her to shed any one of them. She was very cute, bangs, hair curling and scraping her cheeks. She was constantly brushing her hair back, constantly a bit distracted, always fussing — she had several beers out for her friend Michael that he was systematically working his way through and she was pouring out chips and salsa and hummus to accommodate Ben. She was so homey, so tangled up in politenesses, in trying to make sure everybody was taken care of, that it was hard to remember — this being the secret information Ben was privy to — that she was cunning enough to manage her half-dozen or dozen simultaneous affairs.

She went into the other room to over-manage some housekeeping detail — she was concerned about the temperature, wanted to play around with the thermostat. Ben suspected that her very fussiness was actually how she covered her affairs, it was probably while she was preparing dips or adjusting thermostats or baking brownies for her guests that she had her opportunity to text with all her other suitors. Grandly, as if he lived there, as if it were his beer, Michael offered Ben a drink. He performed a complicated trick with his teeth to get the cap off. He said he’d heard about Rebecca, heard that she was a wonderful girl, ‘very pretty,’ he said generously, imagined that Ben must be ‘devastated’ about the breakup. He clearly felt that he had the upper hand here. “When I lose a girl,” he said, “I am a madman for a month, maybe more. Everybody I meet, I bore them to tears about it. I fight tooth-and-nail to get her back. I believe in this expression, ‘don’t stop punching until you hear the bell.’ I think women sometimes test you by breaking up. Really, what they want is to see how hard you will fight for them.” He was speaking from a place of ease and plenty, it sounded like he was remembering some distant affair from his youth. Ben asked him to do the same trick with another beer, to which he obliged. He spat the cap out onto the coffee table. The apartment’s walls were covered in reproductions from the Met. There were plants hanging in all the windows. Michael explained his theory of love, which he described as being something he’d developed from his experience. It turned out to be that everybody had a life partner that they were assigned to at birth, life would conspire in different ways to bring you to that person, that was the thing that life did for you, but once it did, then life would sort of tip its hat and take off and it was up to you to nourish the relationship and to fight for it. “Like ‘the one,’” Ben said heavily from the couch. “It’s like meeting ‘the one.’” Michael conceded that that was a similar concept as his personal theory.

Simona reappeared as he was explaining some nuance in his theory of love. Simona explained to him that Ben was heartbroken. “We’ve got that covered,” Michael said. It would be good if he could leave them alone so that she could help Ben talk through his options. Michael said that they’d had plans to meet friends uptown. Simona gave him a brittle guarded look, which Ben knew from experience meant that she had no idea what the other person was talking about. Michael reminded her peevishly that his friends had come in from out-of-town and were especially excited about meeting her. Ben, watching her closely, was impressed at the plasticity of her expressions, the way that she instantly summoned up the memory of this appointment, said that she thought it wasn’t for a few hours. “We have to get all the way uptown — and crosstown,” Michael said authoritatively. “We need to go in just a few minutes.”

Simona wandered over to where Ben was sitting. She tried to cradle his hands between hers, which was one of these geisha-ish, personalizing gestures that she practiced so well. Ben anticipated what she was going to say and told her he would get going. She looked relieved. She saw that Michael was focused on his phone. She rolled her eyes in his direction. She said sotto voce that it would be good if Ben came back later in the week — she’d give him her full attention then.

Ben, on the street, had that odd, lightening sensation you get when an appointment is cancelled. He had time, unaccounted-for time, there was no one waiting for him at home nor would there be in the foreseeable future. His job wasn’t the kind of job where you ever had to take work home. He went straight back to the bar downstairs, caught the last few minutes of the soccer match.

He had been dubious, but Simona did make time for him at the end of the week. She asked if he could just come to her apartment, if that was alright for him. She was in the middle of sewing new curtains for her bedroom — it was obvious why everybody saw wife-material in her. He drank beer and watched her concentrate. It was the kind of conversation that he was used to, that the whole world had gotten used to, that were verboten with Rebecca but that he secretly somewhat enjoyed. She had her eyes down on her fabric and she moved her lips from time to time, cursing at it and arguing with it. Her phone was out next to her and every time a notification came through — there must have been a dozen of them in the couple of hours he spent there — she gave him a complicit, apologetic smile, shook her head at the message as if to dismiss it summarily, but then got more involved than she meant to in responding to each one. There was a small subplot in the conversation where she tried to silence her phone but discovered that she didn’t know how to do it. It made Ben feel like he was the radio. “You have to tell me how you’re doing,” she’d said when he walked in. “You have to tell me everything.” Her eyes got very large and cow-like and nurturing, and, facing him in her vestibule, she grabbed his hands with hers. Ben obliged, he went through the litany of his heartbreak, not stinting on his drinking or the sheer discomfort, the unwieldiness and lack of teamwork in going through life alone, the implausible awfulness of his first Tinder dates. “It’s a mess a minute out there,” he said, quoting some street guy who’d chatted to him on the subway. There were, he was discovering, benefits to being like the radio. It felt like he was getting her in her organic state, as lovely and unaffected as if she were in a Vermeer painting, and, like the tall-hatted travelers in a Vermeer, he narrated his life and he had the gratification from time to time of her reaction, how she stared up at him and fixed him with her smile, which an earlier era would have described as high-wattage, or, even better, when she kept looking at her sewing but chuckled privately into it. She was very contained, a small-boned, quiet person, her features like a series of puckered dots, the way a child might draw a pretty face. She was enigmatic and other-worldly, she had this very flirtatious habit of always seeming to be somewhere else. Only Rebecca, in his experience, had been able to draw a different side out of her — Rebecca absolutely forbidding distractions when they were together, the two of them facing one another on the couch, legs curled under them, and at these times, these private conversations, with Ben in his bedroom or passing through the kitchen on some errand, Simona’s eyes would blaze, or tear up at some cutting thing that Rebecca had said, or a laugh would come out of her that was harsh and masculine and triumphant, like a barkeep’s, and that was very different from anything Ben heard from her at any other time.

 She had left a case of beer on the table — more than had been there last time, maybe Michael had replenished her stash — and Ben worked his way steadily, expertly through it. “I mean, look,” he was saying, “in every relationship there’s a part of you that’s trying the whole time to get out of it. It’s like, I don’t know, like some sort of planned obsolescence, or a gadget with a self-destruct mechanism built in. The problem with a relationship is that, once you’re in it, and you’ve gone through the early kissing stage and the getting-to-know-everything-about-the-other one stage – ”

“That’s the best,” Simona concurred.

“And the moving-in together stage, and the building-a-life stage, the only place you can go from there is the breakup. It’s like you’ve run out of other ideas. That’s the wisdom of all these arranged marriages, probably, these cultures with no divorce, there’s something to keep you in it — this gladiator fight, the two of you in it until the bitter end. Without that, it’s just you’re either this like boring family type who’s trying to keep everything just as it is or you’re the cool, active one who’s willing to move forward and break it off.”

He was rewarded for this little stock theory with a bright smile and a vigorous nod of agreement. He opened a beer with a variant of Michael’s trick. He offered it to Simona, who surprised him by accepting and by drinking straight from the bottle. It spoiled the Vermeer aesthetic, the bottle of Heineken by her side, but it had its own charm. He opened one for himself.

“I can’t believe you wanted to get out of it,” she said. This was a habit of hers, to remember and to thread back to points in conversations, sometimes from weeks or months earlier, when you hadn’t realized she was paying attention at all. He made a waving gesture that meant she hadn’t understood him.

“It’s an impulse that you have in every relationship,” he said, “but it’s purely an impulse from inside the relationship. It’s like if you were acting, or doing an improv, it’s the natural progression of the scene. But that’s all it is, an impulse to escalate, to go there. The second it happens you regret it. At least that’s what’s it been for me, a moment of excitement, of relief –”

“You felt relief?” she said.

“And then a second after that regret. It felt like we’d made our point, we’d articulated everything that we found impossible in each other, if we were acting we would have been like, ‘that was a really good scene,’ and I kind of wanted to go off to dinner and discuss it all with her. Except that it was real, and she meant it, and it actually wasn’t a scene at all, it was a permanent change, like a whole new state of being.”

Simona nodded. They were at the best part of drinking, the part that, for Ben, made drinking worthwhile — he had achieved a sort of Irish lucidity, when he no longer composed sentences or even words in his head in advance, when he spoke and the words surprised him and seemed to belong to some higher truth, like he was watching them being carved on some plaque.

“I mean, there was a way she would rip me apart, like I was a misbehaving kid, where she’d see that I was checked out when I was talking to someone, or I was repeating the same jokes to too many people, and she would really come after me about it, I’d deny it or argue my way out of it, and she’d break through those defenses. And I think more than anything else, more than all the time curled up together or the private language — ”

“You had a private language?” Simona said.

Ben nodded sagely. This was a secret he was letting her in on. “More than any of that, there was the feeling of somebody who knows you, who sees right through you, and is forgiving of what she sees. No matter how lousy you are — and she sees all of the lousiness — she really is on your side, she really wants the best for you. At core, that’s what I miss the most.”

Ben scratched the back of his neck. He was talking too much. It was the kind of thing he was normally hyper-sensitive about. In any case, Rebecca usually handled the conversation for both of them. Now, words were tumbling out of him, and they seemed to follow each other in good order, he felt that Simona was right with him, that this was only a fraction of everything he had to say.

“That’s the thing,” he said, “the turning to — and the not being there. The loss of the girlfriend — the wife-to-be — that’s all one thing, that’s all sort of ok somehow. It’s the loss of the friend that really hurts. You — ” he said tentatively and reformatted himself, returned cloudily to his usual mode of polite inquiry when speaking to someone else. “Have you been in touch with her?” he said. “Have you heard anything from her? Has she reached out?”

“Nothing,” said Simona, and her bright eyes were, on a dime, filled with tears. “I’ve talked to her but it’s like another person. It’s very — ” she ran her fingers across the air as she searched for the word. “It’s very civil, very business-like. She’ll get coffee, she’s ‘looking forward’ to getting coffee. But she — ” Again, Simona embroidered the air. Her way of speaking was slow and specific, she spent a lot of time choosing words, and fussing over them. Sometimes it maddened Ben since the final product didn’t always match the effort put in; sometimes he felt it showed a great integrity.

“She deserted me,” Simona said, and the eyes were brimming. “To tell you the truth, I thought it was all about you and we would curl up on the couch and we’d talk like sisters and she’d tell me everything. And then it wasn’t that, she really was getting rid of her life, like she was throwing out all her things.”

There was a long pause. They had reached the end of a phase of a conversation, they had achieved a certain intimacy. Ben had a good sense of dramatic structure. He tilted his head reluctantly towards the door. He made the sleeping-on-pillow gesture with his head and hands. He went to the bathroom, stared at himself dolefully in the mirror as the water fell on his hands. When he came out Simona was standing near the front door with his jacket. She had the same expression as before — she was normally so elusive and now her eyes were open wide and the tears were openly falling down her cheeks.

Ben took his jacket and leaned in to kiss her. She twisted her head to the side and there was a miserable second while he stood over her like a large bird, his lips resting against her cheek, while she bowed her head like a madonna. Instead, he rubbed his hands over her biceps, he hugged her, he rested his chin on her shoulder. He felt her wrap her arms against his back, succumbing to him.

He smiled at her, as brotherly as possible, let himself out. His shoes were on the doormat outside — part of Simona’s policy of house cleanliness. He laced up both of the shoes carefully, even remembering to double-knot them. He shifted his weight to stand, just as he’d been doing all his life and then — it was difficult to explain what happened — he stumbled, keeled over. Mortifyingly, there was a crash and Simona was standing over him.

She lifted him up, led him to the couch. The pace, the texture of the evening had changed completely. He had brave notions about ordering an Uber, about needing only a moment to recover. She gave him large glasses of water and a compress for his head. She was skilled and efficient in her nursemaiding — this was something she’d done before and excelled at. As she leaned over him, he muttered, one of these stage whispers designed to reach only as far as her, “I’m so sorry about earlier.” She was absorbed in adjusting blankets and turning off lights. “I wasn’t really —” he continued thoughtfully, as if he were speaking to himself. He was no longer too worried about coherence. “I just don’t want to be around strangers,” he said. “Don’t like strangers. Just want to be around people that remind me of her.” In the darkness of the room, he could sense her features softening — a bit less of the hauteur, the disdain she’d had when he tried to kiss her. She stood over him affectionately, checking on his pillow, on the room’s temperature, very small details of his comfort. The funny thing about what he was saying was that it was actually true — Simona wasn’t for him, he knew that. But it had been so long since he’d felt any kind of warmth, since he’d been around somebody he really knew, since he’d felt taken care of.