Dan Wakefield - Starting Over - A Novel

She was a model. Tall, of course, and tawny, sharp bones and big eyes; small chest, long slim legs that he recognized from his fantasies, from TV bath oil commercials, from New York Times Sunday Magazine hosiery ads. She seemed very bright and very vulnerable, unsure beneath the cool gloss of her beauty. He met her at a cocktail party and after two drinks, he mentioned, off-hand, as if it were something quite natural and matter-of-course, that he intended to marry her.

“Oh?” she asked; lashes lifted in an interested, inquisitive way.

They went to bed together later that evening, and didn’t really get up again for three days, except to make forays into Jessica’s kitchen for booze or yogurt or frozen steaks. The attraction was of a kind that is sometimes described as electric.

“Something must be wrong,” she kept saying.

“Why?” he asked.

“It always is.”

“But this,” he assured her, “is different.”

She cried a great deal, especially when, a year after meeting, they were married. Because, she said, of being so happy. He asked, with increasing irritation, why being happy made her cry, and she said because it couldn’t last.

Time proved her right: a little over four years, in which they moved here and there around Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights, tried her working and her staying home, tried shrinks and booze and pot and pets, second and third and forty-second honeymoons, summer houses and winter vacations, infidelity and urban renewal; tried everything but Children. And both of them despite benevolent advice from friends, balked at that—until they had worked things out for themselves they vowed not to bring any innocent parties into the act.

On their fourth Christmas Potter insisted that they refuse the invitations of family and friends and just be together, the two of them; he had some Dickensian fantasy of the holiday bringing them together. Tight-lipped, she agreed, after making it clear how nice it would be to see her sister in Moline and her sister’s children and her alcoholic brother-in-law who sold for John Deere in the Quad Cities area. Potter mused on the warmth and comfort to be found in a big old-fashioned Christmas dinner at home, with the phone off the hook and carols on the hi-fi.

Jessica was busy in the kitchen most of that Christmas morning; busy but silent When she served the dinner, Potter thought it would never end; she bore in the bird, then the trimmings—cranberries and sweet potatoes and creamed onions and succotash and homemade bread and buttered carrots and hominy grits—each dish laid down like an indictment against him. When the table was laid, laden, loaded down, she sat, primly, her face drained of color, her eyes alarmingly wide and calm, and said smoothly, “You wanted a Christmas dinner—here it is.”

Potter had several creamed onions and then ran to the bathroom and vomited.

“No appetite?” she asked, solicitously.

They made up, then and many more times, but it was then, over the groaning holiday table, that he knew, for certain, it was over.

But whatever criticism he could make of the time with Jessica, he could never complain that it was dull, and during it he worked with her in mind, with the two of them in mind, with the prospect of all that they might do and have, to urge him on, and he knew if it had not been for her his career in public relations would not have been as long or as productive or as lucrative.

But that would have been—to say the least—as difficult to explain to a college seminar as it would have been inappropriate. So Potter kept his private life to himself and managed to get through the hour tossing out generalizations that he hoped were not too namby-pamby and anecdotes he hoped were not too irrelevant. When the time was up, though the day was unseasonably cool for September in Boston, Potter’s shirt was soaking wet.

Potter discovered that teaching a class was in a way like making love. Sometimes he did it with great enthusiasm, artfully building up interest and getting a rising response of excitement that peaked with a mutual rapport between himself and the students. Sometimes he did it because it was expected of him, and he forced himself to go through the motions, mechanically, ending sooner than he should have, leaving both himself and the class feeling grouchy, disgruntled, unsatisfied.

He felt pretty sure of himself in the PR seminar, and after his beers with Gafferty, he devised his own way of teaching the Communications sections. It was required that the classes read and study current periodicals—newspapers, magazines, the underground press, trade publications—and Potter picked a selection he felt comfortable with and interested in. It was also required that McLuhan’s book Understanding Media be read, and after that the individual instructor was allowed to “build up and out.” Gafferty did it with the Irish poets, and Potter struck on the notion of doing it with Shakespeare. He even got the idea from McLuhan, who wrote in Understanding Media that one could create “a fairly complete handbook for studying the extensions of man” by reading Shakespeare; he pointed out that in Othello Shakespeare was concerned with “the transforming powers of new media,” and that Troilus and Cressida is “almost completely devoted to both a psychic and social study of communication.”

Eureka! Under the approving mantle of McLuhan himself, Potter devised a Communications course that included Othello, Troilus and Cressida, King Henry V . A production of Lear that he saw as a kid at the Booth in Washington had originally turned him on to the theatre, and after the performance, thrilled, he went to his father’s library and one by one took down the little blue volumes of the complete set of Shakespeare, devouring each with wonder and excitement. Reading the plays again, discussing them, reciting in class those lines, those rolling cadences, inspired his teaching and gave him new energy. He wanted to convey this richness to his students, to make them see, hear, and feel what was there; he wanted, indeed, to communicate.

He liked the students. None were especially brilliant, or militant, and that was fine with Potter. For the most part they seemed pleasant, and bright enough. He enjoyed the realization that he was being paid to help them, to tell them what he knew and what understanding he had of the books and subjects they discussed; and, in such discussions, he found that he made new discoveries himself, that sometimes a student’s question or comment would open up an unexpected angle of viewing a thought or situation, and he found that such occasions brought him a quiet kind of pleasure.

He soon learned that his office hours, his consultations with students, were not strictly limited to matters academic. Halligan, a tall, serious Vietnam veteran, invited Potter to have a beer with him, and with the second glass, confided that his girl was pressing pretty hard to get married.

“She’s bought these dishes,” Halligan said.

“Dishes?”

“A whole set of this very expensive kind. More than regular people would ever use. You know, the kind that break easy.”

“I think I know the kind.”

“So before, we’d just been talking about getting married, but now that she’s got these dishes, she says we have to really get going on it, that’s what they’re for. To start your marriage.”

“I take it you’re not so anxious to get married.”

“Well, I think I love her, you know, and I know that we should probably—well, we’ll eventually have to get married, I guess, but—Jesus. I don’t know. The idea of having to cart all those dishes around, it makes me feel sort of closed in. Like you start accumulating all that stuff, and you can’t just take off or anything.”