Douglas Kennedy - Five Days

‘But then a small bit of drama landed in our laps when I discovered I was pregnant. I knew how and why it had happened. While in Costa Rica, I forgot to take the pill two days in a row. Bingo. Back in our apartment in Orono I started getting sick every morning for five straight days. I told Eric my suspicions and how guilty I felt about missing those two doses of the pill, though he already knew that because I told him immediately about it when I realized that all the mezcal we’d drunk one weekend with that crazed artist friend of the family — a real Bukowski type — had led me to slip up on the contraception front. Eric and I had that kind of relationship where we promised to tell each other everything. And did. So when one of those home pregnancy tests confirmed what was readily apparent — I was going to have a baby — Eric being Eric he told me: “Hey, we’ll keep it. Bring him or her to Paris. Raise this baby to be the coolest citizen imaginable and just carry on with our lives.” His exact words. That also was pure Eric — the art of the possible. Nothing too arduous that couldn’t be countered with wild enthusiasm and work. Of course the guy had his dark moments like anyone — and could get into these occasional black funks where he sometimes refused to get out of bed for two days. But that’s what came with living life at such a manic, exalted level. Those episodes. they were maybe a quarterly event. He always pulled himself out of them. And he always joked afterwards that it was his body’s way of telling him to stop trying to be endlessly brilliant — as the guy was a straight A student in English and philosophy, on top of everything else. But outside of those occasional moments it was always “the art of the possible”. And part of the “everything is possible” was this baby. Our baby.

‘As upbeat and persuasive as Eric was it was me who said: ‘Not now.’ I was still very young, after all. Even though I was living with a man, and very much in love, and knew that Eric was the person I would travel through life with, I was also very cognizant of what having a child would mean. How it was a non-stop responsibility. How it would limit so much at a time in our lives when we should really be unencumbered. And how Paris would not be Paris with a baby.

‘So, very rationally and with, I must admit, little guilt whatsoever, I told Eric that it was best for us if we waited a few years — frankly, after I finished medical school — before starting a family. He was cool with that. I sense he was privately relieved — but also would have gone along with it all had I insisted on keeping it. Eric being Eric he took charge of everything. Found me a really lovely, sympathetic clinic in Boston where the termination took place. Booked us into a nice hotel for the weekend, so I could recover after the procedure. Was so supportive and loving throughout. Honestly, I got through that all so easily because, of course, Eric and I loved each other, and we were going to be together for all the decades to come. So, of course, I’d be pregnant again in a few years with Eric’s baby. Only this time the moment would be right.

‘Just thinking about that — only this time the moment would be right — when you’re young you are never really conscious of the way time will later on accelerate at such a ferocious speed. Just as you also think that you are invulnerable to that terrible underside of life which is dictated by the random, the happenstantial.

‘Anyway, the pregnancy was terminated in mid-September. Our sophomore year was another golden period — where we both continued to surpass ourselves academically, where Eric became fiction editor of The Open Field and I was promoted to poetry editor, where we both got into the Sorbonne on that junior year exchange program for the following September, and both did accelerated French to the point where we agreed to spend two hours a day talking with each other dans la langue de Moliиre — one of the few phrases I remember from back then.

‘Life was, in a word, splendid. Yes, Eric still had those “black dog” moments — and they had started creeping up on him every other week. But he always shook them off. Always kept going. Always amazed me with his resilience and his ability to constantly embrace life with both hands.

‘That Easter we were thinking of heading down to see some friends in Cambridge. At the last minute I got a bad stomach bug, and was up sick the night before we were due to leave. So we stayed put at our place in Orono. I started getting ill again and Eric said he’d run up to the pharmacy and get me something to curb the vomiting. We both had bicycles. Eric took his. Before he left he gave me a kiss and told me he loved me. Then he headed out — and never came back. After an hour I was panicked, but was so weak from being sick that I couldn’t get out of bed and go searching for him. Around two that afternoon the police came to my door. A woman social worker was with them. That’s when I knew. They told me that Eric had run a red light on his bicycle a block away from the pharmacy and had been knocked down by an oncoming truck. He’d been thrown clear of his bicycle and slammed into a lamppost. Death, they told me, was instantaneous. He probably felt and knew nothing. That’s when I started to collapse, to weep uncontrollably. Eric dead. It was beyond unthinkable. It was as if my entire future — all possibility of happiness — had just been permanently decimated.

‘The next eighteen months were a depressed blur. My father was never good at emotional ballast. And my mother — though initially sympathetic — essentially told me to snap out of it, that I was young and had my whole life ahead of me, and what I needed to do now was look forward. My college friends were nice. I did talk for a bit to a psychologist on campus. But he wasn’t making me feel better, so I stopped the sessions, which I now realize was a bad idea. Back then, I didn’t want to feel better. I was so consumed with grief. So profoundly devastated. Everything just started to come asunder. Though my professors were, at first, kind to me, my grades really started to slip, as I no longer cared whether I did well or not. I cancelled the year abroad in Paris because I thought it would be unbearable without Eric. I kept largely to myself. I did middling class work, and my straight A average slipped into the Cs. But so what? I no longer had a purpose. The love of my life had been snatched from me. Though several professors and friends really did try to get me to start some serious therapy I refused. I was wildly depressed, but still functional enough to get through the day, to keep my apartment clean, to do just enough course work to pass my exams and not flunk out. What I realize now is that I was on a self-destructive kick — and really needed to punish myself. I went about it with profound determination.

‘Somehow I made it through junior year. My mother looked at my grades and shook her head and said: “There goes your medical career.” I didn’t care. My dad — when I had his attention — told me I should really think about doing something outside the box for a couple of years, like maybe joining the Peace Corps. But when I started to cry and ask him where and when I would meet another Eric, he just put a hand on my shoulder and told me that life would go on and — if I allowed it — it would get better.

‘Actually that was smart advice — especially about joining the Peace Corps and taking myself off to some extreme Third World country where I could maybe get a great deal of distance and emotional perspective. But did I follow it? I was so bent on hurting myself — something that I only understood rather recently — that, in the final trimester of my junior year, I managed to allow myself to be asked out by a guy named Dan Warren. A computer science major from way up north in Aroostook County. A nice enough fellow — whom I met when I got talked into joining an outdoor club by a friend who thought that getting me hiking might improve my mental state. Dan came from a different planet than Eric. Though intelligent he wasn’t an intellectual, had no imaginative flights of fancy, preferred the concrete to the realm of ideas, and his basic philosophy could be summed up as: Feet firmly on the ground is the only way to travel. Still, he was kind. And he really seemed to get me and couldn’t have been more sympathetic and canny when it came to dealing with all the deep, residual grief I still felt for Eric. We were friends for a month before we became romantically involved. Though there was none of the passion I felt for Eric it was an antidote to the past months of agony. Dan himself couldn’t have been more thrilled. He thought I was a catch. My friends found him “nice”, “straightforward ”, “uncomplicated ” — all those euphemisms for dull and less than animated. My parents met him. “Decent enough guy” was my dad’s rather flat verdict. Mom was more direct. “I hope he gets you out of your dark wood and then you move on to someone with a little more depth in the outfield.”