Dan Wakefield - Starting Over - A Novel

“Over a month.”

“What do you advise? A two-year engagement?”

“I don’t advise anything. You’re the one who said you didn’t want to get married again. Unless you were absolutely sure.”

“But I am.”

“OK, fine. Congratulations.”

“Fuck you.”

Marilyn made a new batch of martinis. They drank for some time in silence.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I just hope it isn’t a mistake. I mean that really.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“But if you’re sure—”

“Hell, Marilyn, who’s sure about anything ever? If you waited till you were sure you wouldn’t do anything.”

“OK.”

“A month isn’t long, but it’s enough to really know how you feel. About someone.”

“You thought you loved me for almost a month.”

“Well—uh—that was—”

“That was different, I suppose.”

“Yes, it was different.”

“How?”

“We never talked about getting married.”

“That was my fault,” Marilyn said.

“It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It just didn’t come up.”

“I didn’t bring it up. But from now on, brother—the next time I get into it with an available man, I’m going to play it just like little Miss Molasses.”

“Shit, Marilyn, you didn’t want to marry me. That would have been—awful.”

“Maybe, but here I am again, goddamned alone, and that sugary little Peach is getting married.”

“Come on, Marilyn. We’re buddies.”

“Yeah. Well—do I get to be Best Man at the wedding?”

“Jesus, you ought to be. You’re sure as hell my best friend.”

“I’ll buy a tux and a top hat.”

“God, wouldn’t it be great? If we could pull it off?”

They got to giggling, and started on a third batch of martinis. Marilyn became a little more mellow about the whole thing.

“I do hope it works,” she said. “I honestly hope it’s not a mistake.”

“Well, who knows. It may turn out to be. But at least she’s different than Jessica. I mean, at least if this doesn’t work it’ll be a different kind of mistake.”

Marilyn nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess that’s progress.”

The Tuesday evening after the fateful farm weekend Amelia came over to Potter’s and fixed a fantastic meal that featured a cherry pie she had baked the night before. In the living room after dinner she made him close his eyes, and stuck a fine Corona in his mouth. She lit it for him, poured him a brandy, and nestled beside him on the couch. “Darlin’, have you decided yet whether you plan to go on teachin’?”

“Why?” he asked. “What’s wrong with teaching?”

“Wha nothing, Phil, it’s one of the noblest professions a man can have.”

“Well?”

“Well,” she said, playing her fingers along his lapel, “you’ve said you weren’t sure about it, about goin’ back to get another degree and all—and, well, a girl wants to know what her future husband wants to do, so she can help him.”

It was, in essence, the old “what are your plans?” routine, but stated so sweetly, and in such conditions of comfort and well-being, that Potter hardly experienced a shudder. A man who has a great meal in his stomach, a fine cigar in his mouth, a glass of brandy in his hand, and an adoring woman on his shoulder is likely to look on the future with a certain cool confidence. Plans? Fine. Why not have plans?

“Well, if I decide not to go on with teaching, there’s this guy Charlie Bray I told you about, the big PR man here who as much as told me I could write my own ticket if I wanted to come with his firm.”

“That’s mah-velous.”

“On the other hand,” Potter said, grandly flicking an ash from his cigar, “I might well go in some other direction.”

“Of course, darlin’, ah know you could do just any thing.”

“Well, not any thing,” Potter said modestly.

Nor was it just “anything” that Amelia had in mind. Amelia had a plan. A very specific one. All she wanted Potter to do was have lunch with this marvelous man she knew, Dick Dalton, who was high up in one of the best Boston advertising firms, but was restless and wanted to strike out on his own. When she first came to Boston she had worked for six months in the accounting office of Dalton’s firm, became friends with him and his wife and two children, and still kept in touch with them. She had lunched with Dick only yesterday—a happy coincidence!—and told him all about Potter, whose background seemed to interest him a whole lot. Amelia only asked that Potter meet him; she was sure they would hit it off.

Much to Potter’s surprise, they did.

Dick Dalton was a sharp, wiry little guy, with quick thoughts and movements, full of restless energy. Potter was relieved that he spoke without jargon, and soon sized him up as a no-bullshit kind of guy. Dalton said he had faith in himself as a copy writer, he had a good friend who was tops in layout and graphic design, and they needed a man with something like Potter’s background to start a nice little operation—a man who could deal with the press, make presentations to clients, stage the right sort of publicity parties. Dalton explained that he was almost forty and he figured if he was going to strike out on his own, it was now or never.

“You know,” Dalton said with intense sincerity, “I’d like to be on my own now, I’d like to—well, have fun at what I do.”

He paused. “Fun,” he said reflectively; then he smiled, and waved toward the window, the street, the world beyond: “I know it’s out there. Somewhere. It must be!”

Potter and Dalton both laughed, together, feeling an immediate trust and kinship. They would work something out, they would work together, and, in the pursuit of mutual profit they would try along the way to find that elusive, alluring promise that some men are said to discover in their work: fun.

They shook on it.

As Amelia had seemed to produce Dick Dalton, genie-like, she also quickly and efficiently came up with marriage plans, arrangements, details, schedules, participants, principals. It turned out she had a cousin who owned a lovely home on Cape Cod, in Wellfleet, right on the ocean, and the cousin was delighted to offer the house for the wedding. This took care of Potter’s qualms about a Church wedding for a man who was on his second time around and had never been religiously committed anyway. Through her Methodist minister in Boston she was able to drum up a local Cape Cod Methodist to perform the service, an ocean-side, unorthodox kind of ceremony keyed to God’s natural wonders. Her cousin arranged for a caterer, and her mother handled flight plans for a small delegation of Southern relatives.

The plans moved swiftly and inexorably forward, like a powerful freight train that has gathered steam and now possesses a force and direction of its own beyond the control of any individual to change its course or slow its momentum. As he watched this Marriage Express hurtle onward, Potter’s mood varied from joyous giddiness to sudden, stark terror. But when the doubts and fears assailed him, like a stone-throwing mob, he would make the chamber music come into his mind, the music he had heard when he took Amelia to the Gardner concert. He told her how much the music meant to him, and she bought him a record of the principal piece that was performed. He played it countless times, at home on his stereo, and away from home, in his head, letting it fill his mind, dispelling all the dark questions and doubts, soothing him into a wordless rhythm, a suspended state of calm.

“ Tootly-tweetly-too-ta-tee-toot …”

Potter’s first lie to Amelia was about his Bachelor Dinner. It wasn’t exactly a lie, it was more of an omission. He told her that Gafferty and Ed Shell were going to take him to Stella’s for the ritual celebration, and that was true. But he didn’t mention that Marilyn was coming too. Women weren’t supposed to come to a bachelor dinner, a rule that would no doubt apply even more strongly if the woman was a former girlfriend.