Douglas Kennedy - Five Days

‘OK, I give you that. How about “abrogatory”?’

‘Now you’re getting far too fancy. “Approbative”?’

‘That’s not fancy? Sounds downright florid to me.’

‘Florid isn’t “aureate”.’

‘Or “churrigueresque”?’ he asked.

‘Oh, please! You are beyond flamboyant, baroque or, indeed, churrigueresque.’

‘And I am wildly bedazzled by your vocabulary. Were you in the spelling bee racket as well?’

‘Actually I sidestepped all that, even though I had an English teacher in junior high who was really trying to get me to join the spelling club after school. The thing is, I always had my nose in a thesaurus. ’

‘Just like me.’

‘A geeky habit, as everyone else at school was happy to remind me. But though the teacher who ran the spelling team actually thought I could be the captain. ’

‘So he thought you were that good?’

Before I could reflect on that question I heard myself saying:

‘I’ve never thought myself that good.’

‘At anything?’

Now it was my turn to look away.

‘I suppose so,’ I finally said.

‘Why’s that?’

‘You ask a lot of questions, sir.’

‘My name is Richard, and the reason I ask a lot of questions is part professional habit, part personal interest.’

‘Why should you be interested in me?’

‘Because I am.’

I felt myself blushing. Richard immediately saw that, and it was his turn to get all embarrassed, saying:

‘That really wasn’t supposed to sound so forward. And if it did. ’

‘It didn’t. You were just being nice to me.’

‘Was I?’

‘Oh, please. ’

The drinks arrived. Richard raised his glass. And said:

‘Here’s to Roget, and Webster, and Funk and Wagnalls, and the OED and. ’

‘The Synonym Finder. which was my bedtime companion throughout most of high school.’

‘Well, I suppose your parents didn’t object to that.’

‘My father was a mathematician, and one who really preferred the abstract to the concrete. So he largely stayed charming and affectionate and rather disinterested — in a thoroughly nice way — when it came to anything to do with my life, including my first boyfriend.’

‘And who was the first boyfriend?’

‘Surely that’s not a question you ask on the life insurance form?’

‘I wasn’t aware that we were filling in a policy questionnaire.’

‘The wine is good. Pinot noir. I have to remember that.’

‘Is that a way of telling me you’re not going to say anything about your first boyfriend?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, then I certainly won’t push the point. But when it comes to your love affair with The Synonym Finder. ’

‘I actually saved up two weeks’ babysitting money when I was fourteen to buy it. It was about twenty dollars, a small fortune at the time, but worth every penny.’

‘What made it so valuable?’

‘The fact that I could lose myself in it. Have you ever seen The Synonym Finder?’

‘I actually own two.’

‘You are a fellow geek.’

‘Absolutely. But you are not a geek.’

‘Actually I am. But getting back to The Synonym Finder — you know that the great pleasure of that book is that it’s not as formalized or rigid as a normal thesaurus; that it has real depth and breath when it comes to equivalent words, and that it really is geared towards semantical junkies.’

‘“Semantical junkies”. I like it.’

‘Well, that’s me. In fact, it’s always been me.’

‘Even though the sciences were your real mйtier?’

‘Are sciences a “mйtier”?’

‘Isn’t everything a mйtier?’ he asked.

Again I found myself looking at this man with care — because it was so rare to run into somebody who could utter such an eloquent phrase in the midst of normal conversation. Richard saw me considering him differently, and reacted with a shy smile, then a quick bowing of the head to avoid my gaze. This immediately made me think: Oh God, were you projecting interest or — worse yet — infatuation? I felt myself blushing again. And then — now this was really compounding things — I registered the fact that he was registering the fact that I was blushing. So I tried to mitigate things by saying:

‘You have a nice turn of phrase. ’

‘And I seem to have embarrassed you. ’

‘No, it’s me who’s embarrassed me.’

‘But why?’

‘Because. ’

I couldn’t say what I was thinking: Because you’re clearly smart and I find that attractive and I shouldn’t be finding you attractive for about ten obvious reasons.

‘Well, nobody has ever told me that before,’ Richard said.

‘Told you what?’

‘That I have a nice turn of phrase.’

‘Surely your wife has. ’

As soon as those words were out of my mouth I regretted them. Because I realized I had overstepped a boundary.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said immediately. ‘I shouldn’t have implied that. ’

‘You implied nothing. It’s a reasonable question. I love words. I love using words. I love painting with words — even though I don’t get much of a chance to do so in my normal day-to-day work. And yes, it would be lovely if my partner in life, my wife, appreciated the way I use words. But when does your spouse ever really appreciate you the way you think you should be appreciated? I mean, that’s asking a little much, isn’t it?’

He said this with such lightness, such high irony, that I found myself giggling.

‘I don’t think it is asking much,’ I said. ‘Still, my father used to say that one of the problems of being smart at something is that you unintentionally show the other person up. It really gets under their skin, the fact that you have an ability, a talent, a way of looking at the world, that they so clearly believe they lack.’

‘Having a thing about words is hardly a talent. It’s more of a hobby. Like collecting model trains or stamps or old fountain pens.’

‘It’s a little more cerebral than any of those talents.’

‘So you consider yourself cerebral?’

‘Hardly.’

‘See! We’re cut from exactly the same Maine cloth. We might love things semantical. We might have both spent long involving hours exploring the world of synonyms. We might both have this love affair with language. But that doesn’t make either of us intelligent, now does it?’

Again I found myself smiling and nodding my head.

‘Bull’s-eye,’ I said, raising my glass. He picked his up and clinked it against mine.

‘Here’s to low self-esteem,’ I said.

‘Better known as — the insidious art of undervaluing yourself.’

‘Do you write?’

Richard seemed taken aback by that question.

‘Why do you ask that?’

‘Just a hunch. The way you use language, love language.’

‘I’m hardly a published writer. ’

‘But you have written, do write.?’

Richard lifted his glass and downed the remaining wine.

‘I had a story published four years ago in a little magazine in Portland.’

‘But that’s great. What was the magazine?’

‘Kind of a lifestyle mag. Chic places to eat and shop. Designer apartments. Hotels in which to spend a romantic weekend. That sort of thing.’

‘And was your story about chic places to eat and designer apartments, with a romantic weekend in a coastal bed and breakfast thrown in?’

Richard smiled. ‘I walked into that, didn’t I?’

‘You were apologizing for being in a lifestyle magazine.’

‘Well, it’s not exactly the New Yorker.’

‘That might happen one day.’

‘Wishful thinking.’

‘Positive thinking,’ I said.

‘Very Norman Vincent Peale.’