Dan Wakefield - Starting Over - A Novel

“Send out Don Hutson for a long one!” the octogenarian urged, thus plunging back another decade.

Potter edged his way from the room and into the kitchen for a stiffer drink.

By the time the party was seated around the groaning holiday table, Potter and Marilyn were well-sloshed, but the booze had not made them any merrier. Marilyn reported privately to Potter she was suffering a pounding headache over her left eye. Potter, wishing he had had toast instead of martinis for breakfast, felt an overall nausea, and had passed from human hunger to a savage starvation.

Just when the assembled revelers were about to dig in, little Daphne Bertelsen banged her fork on her plate and cried, “No, nobody can eat yet!”

“What’s the matter, dear?” Marva asked.

“It’s Thanksgiving.”

“Yes?”

“So we have to go around the table and everybody tell what they’re thankful for.”

“Oh, no,” Marilyn whispered, pressing a hand to her left temple.

“We’ve never done that before, dear,” Max said.

“But we’re sposed to,” little George said.

“Who said so?” Max asked.

“Miss Mallory told us at school.”

“Yeah! We learned it in our room too,” shouted Daphne.

“Well, we don’t observe that custom at our house,” Max explained firmly.

“Then it’s not Thanksgiving!” Little Daphne began to sob.

“All right, all right,” Marva said. “I’m thankful for having such a fine young son and daughter.”

She looked to her right, where Phyllis Merton gulped from her wineglass, forced a smile, and said, “Well, let me see—I’m thankful that, in spite of everything, in spite of all that’s happened this past year, I’m thankful that even though—even though Roger left me for that—that scrawny little nitwit—”

But before she could finish, her face melted, like a wax figure in a furnace room, and she burst into tortured tears.

Little Daphne, evidently pleased that ritual was being observed, pointed a fork toward Marilyn and said, “Now you! ”

Potter quickly said, “Marilyn and I are thankful we didn’t have to eat at the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria today.”

Max, in one of his rare shows of force, told the kids in a tone not open to dispute that “We are going to eat now, and we’ll have no more questions or you go straight to bed.”

Lucille Merton stared straight ahead, seemingly oblivious to her mother’s tears diluting the gravy, and said, “This is a crime. Eating all this food. There’s Vietnam, and the ghettos, and we all sit here stuffing ourselves.”

No one replied, or acknowledged the statement. Somehow the meal was got through.

Later, while Potter and Marilyn were sprawled across her bed in their underwear, drinking double Alka-Seltzers, Marilyn said, “Well, anyway, it’s over. We survived it.”

“Yeah,” Potter said. “One down. Two to go.”

December, with its long, slate-colored days and sudden snowfalls, brought a more secret and somber tone to the city. Muffled and bundled, heads bent forward, citizens seemed like spies, moving back and forth on appointed missions, possible and private. Codes, in colored Christmas lights, blinked from windows of stores and homes. Shadows fell, cathedral-length.

Potter took to hanging around school longer, postponing the trip back to Cambridge and his still unfinished apartment with its liquor boxes full of books, its accumulating piles of magazines and papers, laundry and dishes. Like his life, his apartment seemed to be in a perpetual state of disarray.

Even though he and Marilyn were friends, and saw one another quite often, Potter felt essentially alone again, having no lover. He found it harder to activate himself out of apathy the way that Marilyn did with her therapy and evening classes, her tutoring of ghetto children, her initiative in getting tickets to plays and concerts and going with one of the girls from the office, “making an evening of it,” as she said.

Potter decided he should have more friends. He enjoyed drinking with Gafferty, but that always had to end early so Gafferty could get back home to his wife and baseball team of a family. He didn’t want to go alone to the Bertelsens’ at this stage, knowing Marva would try to pry out new information about him and Marilyn that he didn’t feel like discussing now.

Dean Hardy had asked Potter to look up a fellow Communications instructor named Ed Shell, whom he felt he would have much in common with, Shell being a “promising young film writer” and Potter a former man of the theatre. Though the Dean assured Potter he and Shell were sure to “hit it off,” Potter was not so confident of that when someone first pointed out Gilpen’s promising young film writer. Shell was wearing bell-bottom trousers, cowboy boots, a button-down shirt with a rep tie, and a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, giving him the incongruous look of a man who dressed the top part of himself for the Fifties, and the bottom half for the Seventies. Besides that, Shell had a dour, frowning kind of seriousness about him that Potter found unattractive. He reasoned, though, that he was committing the sin of snobbery, of judging by appearances, and he ought to give the guy a chance. Besides, he had nothing better to do.

Potter agreed to go have a drink at Shell’s place, even though he lived in Somerville, which was unfamiliar territory. Somerville began at the edge of Cambridge—the poor, un-Harvardy edge. It had a large contingent of Portuguese and Italians, interspersed with students, hippies, teachers, dropouts, the underground Bohemian set who had come to the area because of low rents and proximity to Cambridge.

“Welcome to the pad,” Shell said when he opened the door.

It reminded Potter of the temporary living quarters of his own starving-artist days in New York. It was one small room, with a kitchenette and bath. The room had peeling flowered wallpaper, and a large poster of Orson Welles. There was a mattress on the floor with grubby striped sheets flung over it, and scattered debris—a partially empty cup of yogurt, an overflowing ashtray, one dirty sock, a tattered copy of an old Esquire , an empty pack of True Menthols, and a can of Colt 45, tipped over and leaking the last of its contents.

“Get you a beer, man?”

“Sure,” said Potter.

He picked his way over scattered and piled pages of what must be movie scripts, and sat down cross-legged on one of the pillows that evidently served as chairs.

Dedication , Potter thought; Dreams .

It made him feel very old.

“It looks like you’re very productive,” he said when Shell brought him a Colt 45.

Shell sat down on a pillow across the small room, and said, “Seventeen scripts. So far. Working on the eighteenth.”

“Jesus. That’s a lot.”

“When one hits, a lot of ’em will hit. Ones that’ve been turned down’ll get done.”

“I guess that’s the way it works.”

“It’s a matter of time. You have to wait it out, and keep working.”

“I know.”

Till you can’t wait any longer, till it’s gone and drained out of you , Potter thought.

Shell assured Potter that he wasn’t just daydreaming, having acquired an M.A. in Film at Boston University, and written-directed-produced a four-minute film on a waitress at a hamburger drive-in that won honorable mention in a national contest for film students sponsored by a nationwide motel chain. The award had brought him fifty dollars, a free night with meal of his choice at any of the chain’s motels throughout the land, and a confidence that he had what it takes to make it big in film.

“My last script,” Shell said, “this director who’s very hot now was dying to do, but he couldn’t get a producer. One before that, this very highly regarded producer was hot about, but he’s committed to a three-picture deal with a particular studio, and they just had a big turnover in management, and so the whole project got fouled up.”