Douglas Kennedy - Five Days

‘That was so Eric. Big talk. Big plans. Big brain. Probably the smartest person I’d ever met. But the thing about him was, though he talked in a grandiose way, there was always real substance behind the talk. Even at eighteen he put his money where his mouth was. And he was already, by the time I met him, living a writerly life.

‘He was quite the character at U Maine. You remember how conservative the school was, how State U, how the student body was largely rural and backwater. And how few out-of-staters there were. Here was Eric — this “Manhattanite in waiting” as he called himself — dashing around the campus in a black trenchcoat, sporting a fedora, with these ultra-smelly French cigarettes on the go all the time. He’d found a place in Orono where he could actually buy Gitanes — those cigarettes he so adored — and a daily copy of the New York Times, at a time when that newspaper was something of a cargo cult up in Maine. And he was always talking books, books, books. And foreign movies. Within his first semester at Orono, not only had he taken over the college Film Society and was programming an Ingmar Bergman retrospective, but he was also fiction editor of The Open Field. Which is where I met him. I had talked my way onto the editorial committee of the magazine, even though I was pre-med and clearly not the type the magazine attracted. As you no doubt remember from your own time up there, Orono did boast a small bohemian coterie within their student body — who, like Eric, had ended up there after less-than-brilliant high school careers, but still were very determined to act as if they were all up at Columbia during the era of Ginsberg and Kerouac.’

‘And was that your story?’ Richard asked. ‘Did you end up there because you hadn’t been as rigorous as you should have been during high school?’

‘No — I ended up there courtesy of my own profound need to self-sabotage.’

And I told him all about being accepted at Bowdoin on a partial scholarship, and turning it down because I could go to U Maine for nothing.

‘So that is still a source of immense regret?’

‘Of course it is. Because — and I only realize this now — it was the start of a process in which I began to deliberately sell myself short. Clip my wings. Limit my latitude. Still, had I gone to Bowdoin I would never have met Eric. And had I not met Eric. ’

The second round of drinks arrived. We touched glasses. I took a long sip of the manhattan, part of me telling myself that I should stop talking now.

But the other part of me — fueled, no doubt, by the alcohol, by the low lighting and subdued intimacy of the lounge, and (most of all) by the profound need and desire I felt to impart this story to Richard — forced myself to keep talking.

‘So I walked into an editorial meeting of the magazine, having heard word around campus about this smart-assed New York guy who talked a mile a minute and seemed bent on refashioning everything arts-wise at the university to his own liking. Here I was this bookish, science-oriented girl from a middling Maine town, still a virgin —’ (God, the manhattans really were playing havoc with my sense of propriety) ‘and someone who always felt herself plain, unattractive, especially when compared to all the so-called “popular” girls at school. As I walked into the magazine’s office, Eric looked up at me. In that very instant. well, I just knew. Just as Eric knew. Or so he told me three days later, after we slept together for the first time. That’s right — even though I was just eighteen and completely inexperienced, and Eric, as it turned out, had only had one serious girlfriend before me, and that was just a summer fling — we became lovers in a matter of days. Immediately after that editorial meeting where we first met, he invited me to a local bar — remember when you could drink in Maine at eighteen? — and we must have spent the next six hours there, nursing beers, talking, talking, talking. By the time he walked me home to my dorm that night, I knew I was madly in love. We saw each other the next evening — talking, talking, talking until around three in the morning. Even though we were in his dorm room, he made no move, put me under no pressure whatsoever. Instead he walked me home, kissed me lightly on the lips and told me that I was “nothing less than extraordinary”. No one had ever said that to me before. No one after Eric ever did either. until you said something very similar just a little while ago. The next night — it was a Saturday — when we found ourselves still talking in my room at two, and he wondered out loud if he should go home, I told him I wanted him to stay. It was my choice, my call. When we awoke the next morning, he told me, quite simply, that he loved me — and that we were now inseparable. And I told him I loved him, and would never love anyone else.

‘Saying all that now, part of me thinks, how wondrously naive, how innocent. But the truth is — and this is the middle-aged woman talking — the love I felt, the love given, the love shared. it was nothing less than matchless. Yes, we were kids. Yes, we were living in that bubble which was college. And yes, we knew nothing of the larger world and its infernal compromises. But here was a man I could talk to about anything. Here was a man who was so original, so curious, so thoughtful, so vital. and who made me feel capable of everything. After the first semester we shocked everybody by finding an apartment off campus and moving in together. When my parents met Eric they were completely charmed. Of course they both found him a little over the top. But they also saw his love for me — and the way he was, in his own determined way, pushing me to do my very best. And Eric’s parents — very formal, very stiff, very much in despair over what they saw to be their wayward son — simply adored me. Because I was the small-town Maine girl who clearly loved their son and also seemed to keep him grounded, within the earth’s gravity.

‘It was love. Absolute extraordinary love. We were both so profoundly happy. Because it was also so easy together. My grades that first year skyrocketed. I made Dean’s List. I was asked to join the Honors Program. Eric, meanwhile, was establishing his hegemony — yes, that is the correct word — over the literary magazine, the film society, and even managed to talk his way into staging a radical reworking of Twelfth Night set in a suburban high school. The guy was just bursting with talent. Hearing me say all this now. I know it all sounds so romanticized, so quixotic, too good to be true. I know it was all twenty-two years ago, and time has a habit of soft-focussing so much, especially when it comes to first love. But. but. I think I see life with a certain clarity. My work forces me to do that all the time — because being a radiographic technologist is all about being able to view the most elemental cellular forces within us with absolute pellucidity. But one’s emotional life is always more murky, isn’t it? There’s no clarity when it comes to matters of the heart. Except one thing about which I am still absolutely clear — Eric Lachtmann was the love of my life. I had never been happier, more productive, more fulfilled. Everyone who knew us back then saw that we were, in a word, golden.

‘Of course we had plans. So many plans. The summer after our freshman year we both got teaching jobs at a rich kids’ prep school in New Hampshire, tutoring the far too well off and stupid who weren’t going to get into college if they didn’t bump up their grades. The money was pretty good. Good enough for us to head to Costa Rica on the cheap for the last two weeks of the summer vacation. Eric had an artist friend of the family there with a place on the Pacific coast. Even though it was the rainy season, the sun still came out six hours of the day and, hey, we were in Central America, how cool was that? While in Costa Rica we agreed to go to Paris for our junior year, and spend the next twelve months doing intensive French. Eric was pretty certain there was an exchange program for pre-med students at the Fac du Mйdecine at the Sorbonne. There was, and I got in.