Dan Wakefield - Starting Over - A Novel

“Nice,” Potter commented, “very nice.”

Bud Olney, the firm’s senior partner, was passing out paperbound copies of the Bhagavad-Gita. “Here you go, Heskel,” he said, winking, “this’ll elevate that mind of yours.”

“My mind is elevated just to the level of all these twitchy little asses.”

“Seriously,” Olney said, his voice lowering a register, “you ought to talk to some of these kids. This isn’t just a hype, you know—every member of the cast has studied meditation in India for at least three months as a prerequisite for joining the production. Tell him about it, Potter.”

“That’s right,” Potter said. “Three months.”

Olney moved on, and the Billboard man shook his head at Potter with an envious grin. “You lucky bastard.”

“Huh?”

“Heard you got divorced. Got nothin’ to tie ya down.”

“Oh—yeah.”

“Me with a family at the wrong fuckin’ time in history. Hey—look at that one.”

“Nice,” Potter nodded.

He didn’t want to disillusion anyone by mentioning that even though divorced he felt generally miserable, and the prospect of screwing a Serenity! singer didn’t do much to dispel the gloom. No matter what went on in his head, though, Potter looked the part of a guy for whom things came easily, and that aura was good for his business. He moved with a casual grace and style, and his curly black hair invited the fingers of girls who liked to tousle it. He had a charm that was partly Irish, from his father’s side, and a tinge of southern from his mother and from growing up in Washington, D.C., and going to college at Vanderbilt. His father was a career man in the State Department, and it might be said that Potter inherited or assimilated traits of “diplomacy,” though he never thought of his old man’s stern demeanor as being “diplomatic” in the ameliorative sense of the word. Unlike his father, Potter talked glibly, and had a knack for tuning into other people’s feelings and outlooks. Businessmen trusted him instinctively, and the far-out clients he handled from the world of Rock soon came to accept him in spite of his consistent Brooks Brothers dress. Everyone thought him pretty dashing.

It occurred to Potter—as a man who dealt in images—that perhaps he’d feel better if he tried a little harder right now to behave according to his own image, and so he stoked up his charm, and asked a Serenity! singer to lunch.

Her name was Cressy, and she had big, dewy eyes. “Are you sure you’re not married?” she asked.

He assured her he in fact was officially divorced (he had the postcard to prove it), and she seemed to relax.

“It’s not a moral thing with me,” she explained. “It’s just bad karma to make it with a married man.”

Potter assured her he understood, and things went pleasantly enough for a while. Then Cressy began picking at her chicken salad in a laconic manner. Something else was on her mind.

“Why do people get divorced?” she asked, her eyes large and vacant.

“Why—uh—it’s different,” Potter said sweetly. “Every case is different. You know—like Tolstoy’s ‘unhappy families.’”

The literary allusion was lost on Cressy; Potter stared intently at a tiny dab of mayonnaise on her lower lip, which was pouting slightly outward. He imagined leaning over to lick it off, but only smiled, patiently.

“Why did you though? Do it?”

“Simple,” Potter said, lifting his palms upward. “My wife and I couldn’t live together.”

“Didn’t you love each other?”

“Madly and passionately.”

“Well—what was the problem, then?”

“I just told you.”

“ Loving each other?”

“It’s a hard thing to live with, day in and day out.”

“I guess I don’t understand,” she said.

“Maybe you will. Sometime.”

Cressy grew despondent and grumpy, refusing dessert and monkeying with the strap on her watch. Potter called for the check.

The next morning he woke around ten with a specially bad hangover. He was not in the small, cluttered apartment on Christopher Street he had sublet from a girl at his office who had moved in with an electric guitarist on the Lower East Side. But he knew from the noise he was still in Manhattan. The garbage trucks were gorging themselves in the street below, making that high metallic groan as they swallowed the muck that the city had prepared for their morning feast. Potter thought of them as a herd of mechanical dinosaurs that would someday take over and rule the whole island. And, just down the block, came the headsplitting rapidfire bursts of a pneumatic drill that was ripping up the street again. Potter turned and looked beside him in bed, groggily expecting he might see his wife—now former wife—but saw instead a stranger he had picked up the night before at Julius’s. She was a secretary somewhere or other. She was not especially pretty, and had vomited on the stairs. The girl moved toward him under the sheet, yawning. He put his hand gently on her shoulder. “I’m going,” he said.

“Hmmm? For breakfast?”

“No, for good.”

She jerked up, as if slapped, blinked her eyes, and pulled the sheet around her shoulders, protectively. “Well thanks one hell of a lot.”

“I’m sorry. It’s not you. I mean I’ve got to get out of this whole damn thing.”

He flung himself out of the bed and started pulling his clothes on, frantically, as if he were leaving a burning building.

“ What whole damn thing?” the girl demanded.

Potter waved his arms, wildly, trying to encompass what he meant. All he could say in explanation was: “New York.”

Instead of going to work that day, Potter went to Boston. He often fled there when things seemed to be closing in on him, took a train or a shuttle flight and holed up at Max and Marva Bertelsen’s fine old brownstone in Louisburg Square, the ritziest part of Beacon Hill. It was a haven, a place to unwind and calm down from the jangle and rush of New York.

He caught a one o’clock train from Penn. Station. It was New York spring and the day was warm and drizzly, the tops of the taller buildings shrouded in smog. Potter didn’t like to fly in that weather—but even more important, he wanted the luxury of slow, suspended time that the train would afford. He went to the snack car—a compromise combination of diner and club car, and ordered a club sandwich and a beer. He finished quickly, then settled back to enjoy a series of slowly-sipped Scotch and sodas. He was calmed by the rocking motion of the train, the rain slurring the windows, and the wet towns and cities he could watch from the safety and warmth of the car, isolated. He had bought no papers or magazines, but chainsmoked and sipped his drinks, not exactly trying to “think things out,” but hoping something would come to him, some new idea or answer.

Around New London, Connecticut, he recalled a magazine article he had read a month or so before in his dentist’s waiting room. At the time it meant little to him, but now seemed extremely significant. It told how different guys in middle age had completely changed their lives, had left lucrative but unsatisfying jobs and careers and even professions and set out to find true fulfillment, even though it meant less money and prestige and more hardships. A veterinarian who had built up a terrific practice in Beverly Hills had thrown it all up, including his house with kidney-shaped swimming pool and Jaguar XKE, and gone to Oregon to work in a lumber camp. An auto executive who was rising up the corporate ladder and leading the good life in fashionable Grosse Point, Michigan, had chucked everything to become a male nurse. The owner of a textile mill in West Virginia had sold out to some conglomerate and taken his wife and children to live on a commune outside Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where they learned to make pottery and tie-dyed bedspreads.