Dan Wakefield - Starting Over - A Novel

Most of the men smoked pipes.

Most of the women had short, frizzy hair.

At least there was plenty of booze. It was some kind of godawful blended whiskey, but at least it was hard stuff, and that was better than fruit-laden punch.

Potter got himself a second drink, and sat by the only girl in the room who was definitely under forty. She was sitting beside a young teacher, all earnest and corduroyed, who was hotly involved in the Death of a Salesman debate.

“Do you teach here, too?” Potter asked the girl.

“I’m a student.”

She looked at him noncommittally, neither friendly nor aloof. She was probably as bored as he was. She wore a flowered dress of miniskirt length that exposed quite hefty thighs. Her hair was the color that once was called dishwater blonde, and pulled to the back. She wore no makeup except for powder that muted but didn’t really hide a semi-bad skin. Her eyes were light brown, and anonymous.

They spoke of innocuous matters. Potter got them both another drink. Stiff ones. She majored in English, and lived in a rooming house. She liked Chinese food, and Cape Cod.

“Do you ever get into Boston?” Potter asked.

“Every week or so,” she said.

“I live in Cambridge, why don’t you come by, the next time you get to Boston?”

“Why?” she asked.

“What do you mean, ‘Why’?”

“I mean—well, what did you have in mind? What—uh—kind of relationship?”

Kind of relationship. What did he have in mind. Oh, God. Potter thought of saying he wanted to communicate with her soul, or take her for a stroll on the Dunes at the Cape, or go to Joyce Chen’s with her for a fine meal, but he couldn’t bring himself to play the game, he couldn’t through his fog of whiskey summon up any pretense of social nicety, or perform any verbal pirouettes.

“I just want to fuck you,” he said. “That’s all I have in mind.”

She lit a cigarette, and Potter closed his eyes, waiting for the putdown, knowing he had blown it. He sighed, opened his eyes, and found that she was looking, blankly, right into them.

In a calm, pleasant tone, she asked, “Would Sunday afternoon be all right?”

Potter didn’t really think she would show, but on Sunday he showered, and sort of half-prepared himself for the possible visit, pushing back the worst of the living room debris. Under the circumstances that shouldn’t matter much, but it was reflex action, he supposed, of what one should do.

She arrived a little after two, the promised time.

He offered her a glass of wine, which she politely accepted.

He had a Scotch, and wondered what to say. “Did you drive in?” he asked.

“Yes. I have a ’67 Galaxie. It’s got almost 80,000 miles but it really holds the road.”

“I have a Mustang,” Potter offered.

“How do you like it?”

“Oh, fine. It does just fine.”

She finished her wine, and looked at him.

“Would you like some more?”

“Oh—no thanks, I don’t think so.”

“Well. Shall we go to bed?”

“OK.”

The sex was as dutiful as their conversation. Afterward she got dressed, and Potter asked for her phone. She wrote it on the inside of a matchbook, along with the name “Donna.” He assumed that was her.

“I’ll call you sometime,” he said.

“If you want.”

That night Potter didn’t want to be alone, and he was thankful Marilyn got back early from her latest New York weekend. He took over some Chicken Delight, and told her the story.

“Well,” said Marilyn, “I guess it’s a dream come true.”

“When you tell it,” Potter said.

“But not really?”

“No. Not really.”

“Didn’t it make you feel—sexy?”

“No.”

“Well—what did it make you feel like?”

Potter thought for a while. “Like death,” he said.

Potter vowed that he would stop his random fucking. He remembered in college reading a definition of morality by Ernest Hemingway that said what was moral was “what you feel good after.” In that case, the kind of fucking he’d been doing of late was indeed immoral. He felt lousy after it. The depression that followed his fucking the Sunday Afternoon Girl was so overwhelming that he pledged he would not go to bed again with a woman until he met one he really cared about.

Potter knew his vow was a good decision, because God interceded to aid him in keeping it. A few days after his encounter with the Sunday Afternoon Girl, he found himself itching a lot, in the area of his groin. He thought it was probably a nervous condition brought on by his decision to stop fucking for a while, and he put a lot of talcum on it. The itching got worse, though, and Potter took long, hot baths, soaking himself for as much as an hour, keeping the water as hot as he could stand it, stopping just short of scalding himself. And the itching grew even worse. It was getting to be an embarrassment. He could hardly get through a class without turning toward the blackboard and giving a quick, furious scratch to the area over his crotch. He woke in the middle of the night, tormented with the itching. He wondered if maybe he was being bitten by cockroaches, or some such thing, and he bought a can of bug spray and fumed up his bedroom with it. Still, the itching increased, to the point that it was becoming unbearable. Marilyn gave him the name of her dermatologist, and Potter made an appointment.

Dr. Garson Simpson was a large, ruddy man who had a muzak-filled office in a posh new building. When Potter described his complaint, Dr. Simpson said gruffly. “Take down your pants.” His fingers probed the hairs on Potter’s groin while his tongue clicked reprovingly.

“Oh, brother,” the doctor said. “You’ve really got ’em. Holy saints alive, you have a case of ’em.”

Potter, growing panicky, was beginning to wonder if whatever the hell he had was fatal, or would require surgery or a trip to the Mayo Clinic, or perhaps mean lifelong hospitalization. Was it treatable at all? Would he die of itching?

“What the hell is it?” he asked. “That I’ve got?”

The doctor stood up, gave Potter a sneering sort of smile, and slowly walked back to his desk, sat down, motioned Potter to a seat, drew out a cigarette, tamped it on the desk, got out a lighter, flipped it several times without results, finally caught a flame, lit the cigarette, took a long drag, exhaled a smoke-ring, lounged back in his comfortable swivel chair, and asked, “Ever hear of The Crabs?”

Potter had heard of The Crabs in high school, he had heard of The Crabs in the Service. Some of his best friends had had The Crabs. It was one of the few miseries you could get without actually fucking someone who had it, but just by sleeping in a bed where a carrier had slept. If you actually slept with someone who had them, you were pretty sure to get them yourself. That pretty much covered Potter’s knowledge of The Crabs, but he saw no reason to recount it.

“Yes,” he said, “I have heard of The Crabs.”

The doctor leaned forward, grinning now.

“Well, brother, you’ve really got ’em. I mean, you are in fest ed with ’em.”

Potter wanted to strangle the sonofabitch. From his luckily sketchy experience with members of the medical profession, he had arrived at a firm theory that most of them were sadists, and had the same psychological makeup as cops, but higher IQs, so they had gone into medicine instead of police work.

“I would appreciate it, Doctor,” he said, in an even tone of pure hatred, “if rather than dwelling with such apparent delight on the extent of my malady, you would simply tell me—that is, if you possess such information—how the fuck I can cure the goddamn thing!”