Dan Wakefield - Starting Over - A Novel

He threw a comradely arm around Gafferty and said, “Hey, I mean it’s on me .”

“Oh, no, that’s a nice thought, but—”

“Listen, I got myself into a little poker game over the weekend, won a few. It’s bad luck to save that kind of money—got to spend it right away.”

“Well then,” Gafferty brightened, “if I didn’t come to help ya, I’d be letting down a friend.”

Buoyed, buoyant, loving the little lie because it produced the right effect, Potter took Gafferty to lunch as if he were an important client and Potter was able to write it all off to Olney and Sheperdson. It added to his good feelings, making him in fact think back with fondness to his hard-drinking hard-dealing PR life in New York; not with regrets, but a certain nostalgia. He regaled Gafferty with tales of those days, intrigues and deals, promotional schemes that earned him raises and others that backfired, and when at 3:15 he met his public relations seminar he simply carried on, knowing, as one always knew when it happened on stage, that he had them in his pocket.

He went home and had a long singing shower before his date, bellowing to himself, arrogantly off key:

I want to hold your ha-aa-and,

I want to hold your hand …

When Potter picked up Marilyn after her class, she seemed somewhat distraught, as she had on the phone. At first Potter wondered if it meant anything, was some sort of bad response to him, but before going off on that tack it occurred to him that just about anyone would be a little harried after working all day in an insurance office and spending an hour and a half attending a class on Existentialism. He had arrived early and paced around outside the building. It was one of those old Boston buildings that seemed like a combination Church and Armory, with a large lecture hall on the ground floor. Potter peeked in the door, and that peculiar color and odor of Night School seeped out; a dim sort of yellowish, faded light, and the smell of chalk and musty, much-used books. Potter glanced briefly at the backs of the students; some slumped, some with their coats draped over their shoulders, some shifting restlessly, some leaning forward, intent upon the learned drone that might, magically, reveal some secret, open some door, release something inside the mind or soul. Existentialism. It was one of those subjects that somehow held out the promise of easing the pain, or explaining a better way to deal with it. It supposedly dealt with Despair, and yet there was about the word a taunting aura of Hope.

Potter learned over dinner that Marilyn’s nights were not all filled with dates, though indeed she had dates, but the interior part of her week was filled with activities. Monday night was pottery class. Tuesday after work she saw her shrink. Wednesday was Existentialism. Thursday she took an advanced psychology course in deviant behavior, which could count toward an advanced degree if she ever decided to go for one. She might sometime, since you couldn’t do much with only a B.A. But she really hadn’t figured out what she really wanted to do yet. She was groping. She admitted that. She had only been divorced for six months, around the same time as Potter.

All this was difficult to absorb, because Marilyn was still very nervous, and the restaurant was so loud it was difficult to hear anything. Potter had taken her to Jimmy’s Harborside, wanting to do something special. The food was good, but it was so large and crowded, Potter felt as if he were in a Greyhound Bus Station. In the middle of sentences, the loudspeaker would blare out, but instead of calling destinations of buses the voice called out names of parties to be seated—“Mr. Gill, party of four—Barron, party of two—”

Potter drove badly on the way home, taking a couple of wrong turns, and once bursting into a torrent of obscene curses at a car honking behind him when he was a split second late in taking off at a traffic light. He apologized to Marilyn.

“Boston drivers are the worst,” she said. “They’re crazy.”

She sounded tired. Potter wondered if he had blown the whole thing. It wasn’t going like the smooth, intimate evening he had imagined. It occurred to him that maybe he was trying too hard. He had put so much expectation into their date; it was like a football player getting too “up” for the big game, and fumbling it away. He wondered if Marilyn was doing the same thing.

It was better when they got to her place. She lived in The River House, a large, modern-style building on the flat part of Beacon Hill, and her living room window provided a slanting view of the Drive and the River. You could hear the steady hum of traffic.

Marilyn had done a lot with her apartment. As in most modern buildings the rooms were just boxes, blank and anonymous, defying any effort of an occupant to make it seem particular or personal.

Marilyn had helped to humanize it with a lot of plants, large plants, that defied and contradicted the nature of the building; they were alive. And individual. Some bushy, some slender, some heavy and formidable.

The furniture wasn’t schlock modern or slick Scandinavian, but had the character of age, though it wasn’t precious antique stuff that you had to be fearful of sitting on. Marilyn had collected the pieces from secondhand furniture barns in New Hampshire and Vermont. Potter admired the effort, and the energy that had to go into it, the determination to make a human, comfortable haven in a barren place.

“This is really nice,” he said. “Your apartment.”

She had given him a Scotch on the rocks, which added, as always, to his sense of security. She had a brandy in a large snifter, which she cradled in her hand, tilting back and forth.

“It gave me something to do, when I really needed it. Suddenly being alone, after—seven years.”

“Yeah, I know. No matter how bad the marriage was, and how much you think you’d give anything to be free, it hits you like a ton of bricks. Being alone again.”

“Yes. It isn’t that I wanted to go back to my husband. I had no regrets. It was just the—emptiness.”

“Yeah, exactly. I felt the same way.”

“How long were you married?”

“Well, about four years, officially. But we lived together off and on for more than five. It was one of those—uh—” Potter grinned, “dramatic sort of relationships.”

“The Real Thing,” Marilyn said, smiling.

“Yeah.”

“I know. I mean I know because mine wasn’t like that. My marriage. I had an affair like that before, and I was convinced I wanted a nice, quiet, stable relationship.”

“What happened?”

“I got bored. I thought I was going to die of boredom.”

Potter sighed. “Well, it’s one thing or the other.”

Marilyn got them another drink.

They exchanged the stories of their marriages. They were both very benevolent to their former partners, giving them the benefit of every doubt, stressing how much was their own fault. And yet, each told some plain facts, that made the other understand.

“Of course, she was under great pressure at the time, with her modeling,” Potter explained after telling of the night his wife, dead drunk, set the curtains on fire in their apartment.

After Marilyn told of the occasion she discovered her former husband, Hank, at a neighborhood Christmas party fucking a divorcée under the ping-pong table in the basement, she quickly added that “Of course, that’s a way of getting attention, and the poor guy wasn’t getting much attention from me. I was really a bitch, I guess. I didn’t mean to be. I was just so bored. And I couldn’t hide it.”

Potter understood.

Marilyn understood. She slipped off her boots, and tucked her feet up under her ass. Her sheer knees blinked at him.