Dan Wakefield - Starting Over - A Novel

Potter woke groggily, his mind sodden, trying to assemble the needed information. Cambridge. Sunday. He looked at the clock. Shit. It was only a little after nine. He usually tried to sleep till noon on Sundays; it gave him a running leap forward in making it to the end of the day. He turned over, squeezing his eyes shut, trying to blank out his mind, but then he remembered Marilyn Crashaw.

He would get her number from Marva and call her today. He wasn’t going to wait and play coy. He wasn’t going to play any games at all with Marilyn. He had this instinctive sense that he didn’t need to, that she was going to understand him, that he would look openly into those large eyes of hers and all sham would fall away, all pretense become unnecessary. He would take it slow, he would get to know her. He didn’t just want to get laid and go on to something else, in the dulling old routine. She was the first woman he had met since getting divorced whom he felt he might want to have a relationship with, whom he felt it might be possible with. All that hope projected out of such slim evidence, and yet that was all he needed; he always knew, in the first hour or so, whether anything really good could happen with a woman, anything beyond a lay. It might not work out that way, but at least he knew if the chance was there, the possibility.

He rousted himself out of bed and into the shower, soaped himself up a terrific lather, and actually sang, just like men used to do in the movies to show high spirits—bellowing off key, not caring, gurgling, enjoying.

Pack up all my care and woe,

Here I go, singing low,

Byyyyye, Byyyyyye Blackbird …

Instead of going to one of the cafeterias in Harvard Square that served sorry little eggs and mushily congealed potatoes and soggy toast, Potter decided to treat himself, go into Boston, and have a big hotel breakfast at the Statler. Aferward, he would go to the Commons and relax with the Sunday Globe . He would not be drowned by this Sunday, for he had something to hang on to, something to buoy him up, over the emptiness—a hope, a promise, a possibility of fulfillment.

He nurtured the anticipation in himself throughout the day, carefully, gently, protectively, and he felt it grow, a warm secret. In the Commons, an unusual number of passers-by seemed to smile at him, and he smiled back. After a cursory glance at the Sports, he even put aside the paper. He didn’t feel the need as he usually did in a kind of panic, like a starving man gorging on stale bread. Today he wasn’t so empty.

Potter went back home around three, made himself a Scotch and soda, and called Marva Bertelsen.

“Thanks for last night,” he said.

“Glad you could make it. And your friend. What’s her name?”

“Renée.”

“Renée—Gleason?”

“Gillespie.”

“She seemed very sweet.”

“Yes, she is. She’s a very nice person.”

Potter could tell that Marva was going to get her money’s worth out of this call; she knew damn well what Potter wanted.

“Yes, very nice, but frankly—”

“Yeah?”

“Well, she didn’t really seem to be your type.”

Potter took the phone off the table and lay down on the floor with it. “How so? What’s my type?”

“Weeeel. A little more—flamboyant.”

“That’s very interesting.”

“Don’t you agree?”

“Well, maybe so. I never thought about it that way.”

“Oh, definitely. From what I’ve seen, you like them a lot more flamboyant than—what’s her name?”

Potter closed his eyes. “Renée Gillespie.”

“I mean, I liked her, myself. I was just thinking about her in relation to you .”

“That’s very thoughtful of you, Marva.”

“Don’t you think Paul Tuckerman’s terrific? Someday he’s going to be a sort of Kissinger, on the Domestic Scene, I’ll bet anything.”

Potter took a deep breath. “Goddamn it, Marva, will you tell me her phone number?”

“What? Who? You want the Tuckermans’ phone number?”

“No, Love. I want your friend Marilyn’s phone number, as I’m sure you well understand.”

“Oh, Marilyn! Did you like her?”

“Yes, Marva. I liked her.”

“Isn’t that wonderful? So did Hartley. He called up this morning to thank me and—”

“Marva, I don’t want to know about Hartley. I don’t want to know anything about who he likes, or how much he likes Marilyn, or how much she likes him, or what they did, or what they’re going to do. I just want her telephone number.”

“I thought you two would hit it off,” Marva said. “Let me see—I’m flipping through my book—I’m sorry you weren’t free to come for dinner, I mean just with Marilyn, as her date, but oh—here it is. No, that’s her office phone. Oh—OK. 266-1590.”

“Marva, I want to thank you, from the bottom of my heart.”

“Listen, keep me posted, will you? I’m dying to know what—well, I just have this feeling.”

“Don’t worry about a thing, Marva. ’Bye now.”

“’Bye, dear.”

Potter freshened his drink, put on a Judy Collins, and, with the last warm light of afternoon spilling through the front windows, he called Marilyn.

Her voice was kind of husky, in the Lauren Bacall style, and Potter was terribly excited by it. Besides the sexy vocal quality, she sounded very warm, and friendly. Just as Potter had anticipated. But when he asked her out for dinner Wednesday night she seemed to get a little rattled. She explained she was taking a night course in Existentialism, and it met on Wednesday from 7:30 to 9 P.M. He asked if Tuesday or Thursday would be better and she sounded even more nervous and slightly confused, then said that actually Wednesday would be best, if he didn’t mind having a late dinner, and if he was able to pick her up after her class. He said that was perfectly fine, he would be there at nine o’clock.

When he hung up, he couldn’t help wondering if she was all dated up—if that fucking Hartley had already horned in on her, or if she had another guy, or was having a secret mad affair with her boss, who was married, or—

Potter stopped himself. He was going to take it one step at a time. He was going to enjoy the glow of anticipation that had warmed his whole day. He wasn’t going to spoil it He put on more records, which he hadn’t done for some time when he was by himself. If he was alone, and lonely, romantic or pretty or soothing music only made him feel worse. But now, with a possibility of soon having someone to share that music with, someone he really wanted with him, it was all right. It was marvelous. He let Joni Mitchell serenade him with her pretty songs of love.

Potter whistled all the way to school the morning of his date with Marilyn, and breezed through his Communications classes with a verve and energy that surprised even himself. Unlike those days when he had said all he had to say, and saying it seemed to take sodden hours but the clock showed that only eighteen minutes had passed, this was a day when Potter was shocked when the class bell rang, for he felt he had only begun, that he needed much more time to explore all the possibilities he saw in the subject, which flowered beautifully before him. The ham in him was coming to the fore almost shamefully, as he recited passages, strode back and forth in front of his class, a captive audience if there ever was one, performing as if the area he paced between the front row of chairs and the blackboard was a legitimate stage. But what the hell, the students seemed to like it; they were being entertained. And Potter felt like entertaining.

When his second class had its all too brief hour ended at 12:20, Potter went humming out into the halls, ran into Gafferty, and proposed they really live it up and go have lunch at Bachelors Three. Drinks and all. When he saw Gafferty’s hesitant smile, and watched the regular red flush of his face grow even deeper, Potter suddenly realized to his own embarrassment that it was all well and good for an irresponsible bachelor to go around having restaurant lunches with drinks as if still on a fucking expense account, but it was totally out of the question for a guy supporting a wife and kids. And if the number of kids were nine, such a lunch might cast the whole lot of them into a week of eating nothing but small bowls of porridge.