Dan Wakefield - Starting Over - A Novel

Marilyn called around ten-thirty.

“What happened?” Potter asked.

“It was awful,” she said. “You’ll never believe it.”

“I’ll believe it,” Potter assured her.

He went to her place to hear all about it, sorry her latest hope had been blitzed, but glad he had somewhere to go and someone to talk to.

Marilyn was huddled up on the couch with a drink.

“Is that a martini you’re having?” Potter asked.

“Just gin.”

“Oh. What happened?”

“He wanted to dress up.”

“Dress up? You mean in a tux or something.”

“No. In my clothes.”

“Oh.”

“And I thought he was a regular guy.”

“Well, it takes all kinds.”

“Yeah. And I find ’em.”

“Well, buddy, maybe a class in Existentialism isn’t the best place to look. Maybe you should switch to American Government. Or Business Administration. Something solid.”

“Fuck.”

Potter told her about the woman who wished her husband was dead.

“We’re just not meeting the right people,” Marilyn said.

“Yeah. But maybe it’ll change. Maybe we’ll meet a whole new group of terrific people.”

They both started laughing. It wasn’t a light or happy sound. It was the laughter of comrades who are fighting together in a long and wearing campaign that has come to seem hopeless, like a misguided medieval crusade that has gone too far to turn back.

Despite the way things had been going, Marilyn had high hopes for the party she and Potter went to that Saturday night out in one of the Boston suburbs. Potter couldn’t keep the goddamn suburbs straight, either by name or geography. There was Lincoln and Sudbury, Lexington and Concord, Newton and Weston and Marlboro. Potter had no idea of the relative position of any of them to Boston or to one another. He was accustomed to the basic grid of Manhattan, and was utterly confused by the complex sworls of roads and streets, expressways and turnpikes, routes and highways and bypasses that twisted and curled out of Boston in all directions.

Marilyn drove.

“Why is it you think this one’s going to be so good?” Potter asked as Marilyn gunned his car along the twisting country roads.

“Well, I only know the hostess, I don’t know any of her friends. Or her husband’s. She just got married a few months ago, so they must still know a lot of single people. Since I don’t know any of the people, the odds are better, that’s all. You know. It might be a whole new group of terrific people.”

“It’s possible, I guess.”

The people at the party were “new” but not different. Potter and Marilyn agreed about that when they got back to her place.

“Driving all that way for nothing,” Potter said.

He had loosened his tie, unbuttoned his collar, and was sprawled on the couch with a drink and a cigarette. Marilyn had kicked off her shoes, and was rolling down her pantyhose. “What about that redhead you had in a corner?” she asked.

“Oh. Her.”

“What was wrong with her?”

“Nothing, I guess. She’s a nurse at Mass General. She wishes they would bring back Dr. Zhivago . She thinks it’s the most beautiful movie she ever saw.”

“So?”

“So nothing. I got her number, just in case.”

“In case you feel like fucking her.”

“In case they bring back Dr. Zhivago . Shit. I don’t know.”

“You bastards.”

“What?”

Marilyn picked up her shoes and pantyhose, went into the bedroom and came back wrapped in her old blue terry-cloth bathrobe and a pair of red wool socks. When they were lovers, she wore a Japanese mini-kimono. Potter belched, and rubbed his stomach. He felt as if he and Marilyn had been married twenty years.

“What’s this ‘bastard’ shit?” he asked.

“You guys. You can always get laid.”

“ What? You mean you can’t—as easy as I can?”

“Yeah, sure. To some married man.”

“So?”

“So what’s in it for me?”

“So what’s in it for me fucking that redhead to the theme music of Dr. Zhivago? ”

“Fuck. At least you can take her out in public, go to a restaurant, have a good time. You don’t have to sneak around like a fucking criminal.”

“Shit, Marilyn, every man in the world isn’t married.”

“Every good one is.”

“Thanks a lot, buddy.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that. I don’t mean you. I mean every good one’s married, or divorced and bitter, or divorced and looking for some fucking nymphet teen-age bride.”

“Not every man is.”

“Yeah? Well tell me how many are looking for someone their own age when they’re thirty-five or so. Huh?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Don’t know, my ass. You and Dr. Shamleigh.”

“What have I got to do with your goddamn shrink?”

“I’ll tell you what. You’re both men, that’s what, and you won’t admit the truth. And I’m not talking any Women’s Lib bullshit, either, the stuff about who opens the door for who and whether you wear a bra and how you should light your own cigarette. I don’t want to run for President, either. All that’s very well and good, but it’s not the part where we really get screwed.”

“What part is that?”

“You guys can keep getting older, and keep getting younger women. But we can’t keep getting younger men, or even men our own age after a while. We’re like cars—we go out of style. The year of our make becomes obsolete, outdated, undesirable. And it’s even worse than cars, because there’s more new women coming onto the market every year than there are new cars.”

“Maybe—uh—you have a point.”

“You’re goddamn right I have a point. And that goddamn Dr. Shamleigh keeps asking me why I keep messing around with married men, like it’s some neurotic, sick compulsion or something, when the fact is I rarely meet any others. And when I do rarely meet them, either they have a twenty-year-old girlie, or they—well—they—”

“They turn out like me,” Potter offered.

“They don’t last, is all. Mostly they don’t even start.”

“Yeah. Well, shit. What can I say?”

“Nothing.”

They both sat for a while in silence, drinking and smoking.

“I’ve got to get some sleep,” said Marilyn. “I’m going to take a Phenobarb.”

“When did you start on those?”

“Week or so ago. At least the shrink’s good for that. Prescriptions.”

“Yeah.”

“Listen, are you going to stay tonight?”

“Well, I’d like to, but I know I can’t go to sleep for a while.”

“Well, OK. But listen, it’s hard enough getting to sleep—will you try not to wake me up when you get in bed?”

“Sure, but—you know, I can’t help it if I toss and turn.”

“Well—maybe if you concentrate—”

“No, hey, why don’t I just sleep on the couch? I don’t want to wake you or anything. But I hate to drive back home. I don’t much want to be alone tonight.”

“I know.”

Marilyn got sheets and a blanket and pillow, and made up the couch.

“Thanks,” Potter said.

She gave him a good night kiss on the forehead. Potter stayed up drinking, chainsmoking, and flipping through old magazines whose articles and stories failed to hold his attention very long. When the windows began to fade from black into grey, he slipped out of his trousers, folded them over the back of a chair, hung his jacket over it, and shoved himself into the bedding, still wearing his shirt and shorts and socks. He mashed the pillow over his head, hoping to muffle light, and noise, and memory.

Potter sat in his office hoping no students would come. He’d drunk himself to sleep again the night before, and he felt as if he’d been stomped by a street gang. He sipped at a cup of coffee and tried to immerse himself in the box score of a Celtics game. Concentrating on the details, the names and numbers, helped him forget about the ache in his back, the throbbing in his forehead.