Douglas Kennedy - Five Days

‘Still,’ I said, ‘you have a point. I made a couple of trips during college to New York with my then-boyfriend. Even in the late 1980s, Forty-second Street and Hell’s Kitchen and the East Village were still the wrong side of sleazy, and we loved it. Because it was so not what we knew in Maine. Then, the one time I’ve been back since. well, Forty-second Street now looked like an outdoor shopping mall in any major city in the country. And the city — though still amazing — struck me as having lost an essential edgy vitality. But hey, having never lived there, having never lived anywhere but Maine. ’

‘That door isn’t shut, is it?’

‘As you said earlier, you have to travel hopefully. And believe that you can reinvent yourself anew.’

‘Isn’t that the real American dream? The illusion of liberty. Hitting the road and all that? If it doesn’t work out for you in Maine, get in your car, burn up the highway for a couple of nights, find yourself in New Orleans, start all over again.’

‘You ever do anything like that?’ I asked.

‘In my dreams. And you?’

‘A cross-country trip once with Dan. And before that I did end up in Central America for a few weeks with someone.’

‘Was that somebody Eric?’

‘And here we are in Chinatown,’ I said, changing the subject quickly, while also thinking of a moment years ago in a restaurant somewhere near here when Eric told me he loved me, that he was mine forever. A summer night it was. The mercury nearly hitting three figures. The restaurant wonderfully dingy and very authentic and badly air-conditioned. And the two of us holding hands so tightly, as if we were each other’s ballast. Though we were kids at the time, we just knew.

‘You OK?’ Richard asked.

‘Fine, fine,’ I lied.

Richard touched my arm in a reassuring way, but I shrugged him off. Not forcibly, but with enough clarity to let it be known that I had just decided not to initiate any further contact with him. I’d go around the gallery with him, maybe agree to a coffee in the cafй there, then make my excuses and head back to the hotel. Why was I suddenly walling myself up? Because he had mentioned Eric. And because any mention of Eric threw into sharp silhouette all that my life had not been since those extraordinary two years towards the end of the eighties. And because I had padlocked that part of my past so thoroughly that even the slightest reference to it threw me into freefall.

Will you listen to yourself, trying to push this man away.

I just can’t cope with the jumble of things that are playing havoc with my psyche right now.

You want directness? Here’s directness: you can’t cope with the fact that he is so right for you. And you are so right for him.

And I am married. And I have made a commitment. And I cannot.

Change.

I put my face in my hands. I stifled a sob. Richard put his hand on my shoulder. I shrugged him off. But as soon as that happened the sobs started again. This time, I turned and buried my head in his shoulder. He held me tight until I brought the sobs under control. When they subsided he did something very smart. He said nothing except:

‘Want a drink?’ To which I immediately replied:

‘That sounds like a very good idea.’

RICHARD WORKED HIS phone and discovered two salient pieces of local information: the gallery was open until nine o’clock this evening (if we did want to head there eventually), and there was a cocktail bar in the same vicinity with the straightforward name of Drink.

‘Sounds like it will do the job,’ I said, impressed with Richard’s ability to glean all this information in under a minute on his phone. I am still such a Luddite when it comes to most things technological. Just as I so appreciated the way he said nothing about my crying fit and didn’t even gently enquire why I had broken down. And when, in the wake of him telling me about the late museum hours, I said: ‘You know, I might head back to the hotel after a drink,’ he worked hard at disguising his disappointment, telling me:

‘Whatever works best for you, Laura. There’s no pressure whatsoever.’

Again I found myself thinking: He is such a truly gentle man. And so much in the ‘kindred spirit’ realm. No wonder you’re pushing him away.

Drink turned out to be an uber-stylish lounge, filled with uber-stylish types drinking uber-stylish cocktails.

‘Glad I changed my clothes,’ Richard said as the hostess on the door seated us in a rear booth.

‘You fit in perfectly here. But the thing is, even if you were dressed as before it wouldn’t have mattered one bit to me.’

‘Even though I bet you initially characterized me as a gray little man.’

‘All right, truth be told, I did consider you, when I first saw you at the hotel, somewhat traditional.’

‘Which is a euphemism for “dull”.’

‘You are anything but dull.’

He touched my arm with his hand.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘The thing is, I have deliberately allowed myself to be perceived as dull. Outside of Dwight — who actually is quite the reader — I never allowed myself to appear too informed or interesting in public. When I’d tried that as a younger man — with my writing, my editorship of the U Maine literary magazine—’

‘You edited The Open Field?’

‘You remember its name!’

‘Of course I remember its name. I was on the editorial staff during my time in Orono.’

‘Doing what exactly?’

‘The poetry editor.’

‘That’s extraordinary.’

‘Not as extraordinary as being the editor-in-chief, especially as I presume you weren’t an English major.’

‘Wanted to do English, but my dad put his foot down. So it was economics and business administration. But I still managed to end up as the first non-English major to edit The Open Field. That was a real source of pride for me. I spent my first three years at the college working my way up the editorial ranks. Of course, when Dad also found out that I had been named editor-in-chief — and he gleaned that little detail when it accompanied the short biographical note that appeared alongside the short story in the Bangor Daily News — he was even more livid. Told me I had to resign the editorship immediately.’

‘Did you?’

‘I did.’

‘That’s terrible.’

‘Indeed it is. The thing is, though I always hated him for making me give it up — and I only had one more issue to put to bed — the person I really hated was myself. Because I had given in to his limiting meanness. Because I allowed myself to be intimidated by him. Because I was always so desperate to please a father who could not be pleased. And how did we get on this subject?’

‘It’s all right to be on this subject,’ I said. ‘That man—’

‘—was a bastard. Excuse my language. But it’s the only word to describe him. Small, mean, petty, angry at the world, and determined to keep me confined to the limited horizons within which his own life had been lived. The truth of the matter is that I accepted those limitations. I resigned the editorship of the magazine. I followed him into the family business. I never wrote a word again for almost thirty years. I married a woman who matched him for coldness and thrift. On his deathbed, when we were alone together in his hospital room and the colon cancer that was killing him had spread everywhere, and he had maybe forty-eight hours to live, he took my hand and told me: “You were always something of a disappointment to me.”’

I reached over and threaded my hand into his.

‘I hope you told him what a monster he was.’

‘That would have been the good Eugene O’Neill ending, wouldn’t it? “May you go to your grave knowing your only son despises you. and he’s now selling off your nasty little insurance company and is setting sail for the Far East as a crewman on a tramp steamer.”’