Dan Wakefield - Starting Over - A Novel

He couldn’t get his mind off her dress. It reminded him of Mamie Eisenhower.

When they went to their room, Marilyn sat in the rocking chair and lit a cigarette. Potter filled up one of the water glasses with Scotch, loosened his tie, and flopped down on the bed.

“It’s so quiet,” Marilyn said. “So peaceful.”

“Yeah.”

“No television or anything.”

“Nope. Nothing.”

Marilyn got up and poured herself a glass full of Scotch.

“Why don’t you relax?” Potter suggested. “Take off your dress.”

Marilyn drew on her cigarette. “You really have a thing about this dress, don’t you?”

“What do you mean, ‘a thing about this dress’?”

“You can’t stand it.”

“I never said any such thing.”

“You don’t have to paint a picture.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“Don’t be so fucking crude.”

“Kiss off.”

Marilyn stood up and jerked the dress up over her head, ripping it as she pulled it off. “Now,” she said, “are you satisfied?”

She started bawling.

Potter belted down the rest of his glass of Scotch and got up and put his arms around her. “Come on,” he said. “Please. This is a holiday. A vacation.”

“Not anymore it’s not! You ruined it, you asshole.”

After another ten minutes of sobbing, Marilyn washed her face, put on a nightgown, took two Valium, and went to sleep.

Potter took the bottle of Scotch and sat down in the rocking chair. He felt loggy and his head had begun to ache, but he was wide awake. There was nothing to read, or watch; no place to go. He couldn’t even walk down to the old-fashioned drugstore for a phosphate. It would be closed by now. This was a quaint little town in Vermont. As far as Potter was concerned, it might as well have been San Quentin.

Potter and Marilyn both tried to salvage what they could from their trip to get away from it all.

He took her to see a Buñuel movie at the Orson Welles Cinema, even though he knew in advance it would bore the shit out of him. Because she liked Buñuel he pretended to find it fascinating. Afterward he took her to dinner at Casa Mexico, even though he thought it was a pain in the ass because they didn’t serve cocktails and you had to bring your own wine.

She made him Baked Alaska, and went to a Celtics game with him, cheering whenever he did and trying to learn the names of the players.

He bought her a bottle of Jean Naté bubble bath, and gave her a bath in it.

She bought a copy of The Sensuous Woman , and gave him a treat the author prescribed called “The Sylvan Swirl,” a sort of glorified blow-job. She even tried the whipped cream recipe for sexual excitement, but it only made him giggle.

He bought her a new Miles Davis album.

She bought him a new Carole King album.

One night when he knew she’d be tired after her night class, he brought over a sumptuous take-out meal from Joyce Chen’s.

One night she gulped a lot of brandy after dinner, and asked, “Would you like me to tie you up? To a chair or something?” He thought it over and said, “No, I don’t think so, really. But thanks. Really.”

They watched Johnny Carson instead.

It was almost Thanksgiving.

Potter knew it was over with Marilyn, knew that the short course of his infatuation had run itself out. There was nothing he or she could do to revive it, no amount of whipped cream on the cock or gourmet dinners designed to reach his heart by way of his stomach, no amount of booze he could consume to wash away his indifference. But he hadn’t had the guts to come right out and tell her. It would be a torturous scene. It always was. He had played it out so many times, before meeting Jessica.

For a couple of days he didn’t call her.

One night he just stayed home and watched television. Relentlessly. He settled in the easy chair, put a fifth of Cutty and a glass and a full ice bucket beside him, and just watched, whatever came on, not changing the channels, just letting it come at him, wash over him—the canned laughter, the stupid situations, the news and weather and talk shows. Around eleven he opened a can of vichyssoise, and laced it with Scotch. That was dinner. He fell asleep in his chair watching the late movie, and woke from a nightmare with the test pattern glowing and the static crackling. It was still dark out. He turned off the tube and flopped into bed without taking his clothes off. But he couldn’t sleep. Old mistakes, regrets, embarrassments, crowded his mind.

Maybe he should have gone to Law School.

Ginny deFillippo, a secretary at Olney and Sheperdson, whom he tried to make out with after coming back to the office from a drunken lunch at The Ground Floor. She had spit at him.

The time he went home with Stephanie, a girl in his acting class, and fucked her even after she told him she had the clap.

Maybe he should have married Barbara Brickett, the Tri Delt he was engaged to at Vanderbilt. She probably would have been a good wife and mother. He might have settled down and had children with her. They would be teen-agers now.

Maybe he ought to go to Europe. Live in an old stone farmhouse in the south of France.

On what?

Berries. Nuts and berries. And the local wine.

Shit.

He got up, washed his face with cold water, and made a drink. A cold grey light was oozing into the silent street. He turned on the television, and got Sunrise Semester. A black man with a goatee was lecturing on State and Local Government.

Potter listened.

Marilyn pulled her quilted bathrobe around her, holding onto it at the neck, as if protecting herself against a blast of cold wind. “You don’t want to fuck me anymore. Is that it?”

Potter wished she hadn’t put it so bluntly. He got up and went to the kitchen to put another ice cube in his glass. When he got back he sat down on the far end of the couch from where Marilyn was huddled up, knees drawn to her chin.

“Well?” she asked.

“I wish you wouldn’t put it like that.”

“How would you put it?”

Potter took a drink, and looked down at his knees. His pants needed pressing. “I wouldn’t put it so—harshly,” he said.

“You mean honestly.”

“Goddamn it,” he yelled, “I can’t help it! I wish I still wanted to. I like you. I don’t want to hurt you.”

She spoke in the same calm monotone. “Is it always like this?”

Potter closed his eyes. “Mostly,” he said. “Sooner or later.”

“What happens?”

Potter got up and splashed his glass full of Scotch. He felt she really wanted to know, and he wished he could really explain it—to himself as well as to her. He started walking slowly, aimlessly, around the room.

“It’s hard to explain because it doesn’t make sense. I mean logically. I first saw you, and right away I was attracted. I wanted to fuck you. Then after doing it a couple of weeks, it’s as if the desire drains out. And yet you’re the same person.”

“Maybe it’s the conquest. You just want the conquest.”

“No, I swear. Not anymore. Maybe that was true in college, but not for a long time. I think I would know that, and if it was the thing, I’d tell you.”

“OK.”

“It’s more as if—well, maybe this doesn’t make sense, but let’s say it’s like I see a beautiful photograph that’s all in color. These beautiful colors. And the longer I took at it, admiring it, the more the colors fade away, and then there is no color in it at all. And no matter how much I concentrate, the colors won’t come back into it.”

He sat back down, exhausted.

“And the fading process doesn’t take very long.”

“No. Sometimes just once.”

“You mean after one fuck.”