Douglas Kennedy - Five Days

There were sculls on the river, being powered by half a dozen young men, slapping the water with oars, their unified downstrokes a miracle of timed synchronicity. There were the requisite joggers and parents with young children and a couple in their mid-twenties in the midst of a wild embrace on a park bench; an embrace that would have sparked a wave of unsettling jealousy a few days ago.

I stared out at the brownish waters of the Charles, my mind’s eye full of my beloved, and how, in just over ninety minutes, we’d be naked together in bed, and he would, as before, be deep inside me, and we would tell each other again how this was the love of a lifetime, how we were no longer alone in the world.

My thoughts came back to that exchange with Norm. Clearly an interesting man. Clearly a lonely man. Clearly someone who wants to make a connection that might turn into the connection that changes the contours of his life.

He too was grappling with the fact that things had not turned out the way he wanted. Don’t give in to a bleak world view, I felt like telling him. Because life really can change on a dime.

Back at his shop twenty minutes later he handed me a substantial shopping bag with two one-litre tins of the paint. He also had a small sample of the tint in a jar lid. Dipping a thin brush into its bluish hue, he quickly outlined a square on a piece of artist’s paper, then (with several fast further dips of the brush) filled in the white space of the square so it was now all blue.

‘Now there is the standard-issue sky blue you see everywhere. And then there is Tetron Azure Blue — which has such a crystalline density to it, such a pure ultramarine depth. Look deep into that square and what do you see?’

‘Infinity. A very welcoming infinity. One with infinite possibilities.’

‘Nice,’ he said. ‘More than nice. And may I ask you a personal question?’

‘Yes, I’m married.’

‘Happily?’

‘Not at all.’

‘I see.’

‘But I am very much in love with somebody.’

His smile tightened into thin-lipped disappointment.

‘Lucky man,’ he finally said.

Forty minutes later — after deciding to walk all the way down Newbury Street and across the Common — I entered the hotel. My arm was a little stiff after lugging all that paint, but I didn’t care. I was full of rising elation and manic-adjacent physical desire. Taking the elevator up to the top floor I all but bounded down the hallway to the door of our suite, used my key card to pop the door open, and saw my suitcase just inside. Fantastic! He’s here.

‘Hello, my love,’ I shouted, thinking he must be in the bedroom.

But the only reply that came was silence.

‘Richard?’

Silence.

I moved into the bedroom. Empty.

‘Richard?’

Then I saw, on the bed, his new glasses folded atop his new jacket. Against a pillow there was a note. I reached for it. I read:

Dearest Laura,

I love you more than anything. But I can’t do this. I have to go home.

I am so sorry.

HAVE YOU EVER noticed how, when terrible news is landed in front of you, the world suddenly goes so quiet? It’s as if the shock of the unbearable deadens all aural recognition of everything outside the reverberations of your extreme distress. I read the note once. I sat down on the bed. The same bed upon which we had consummated our love. The same bed to which we returned multiple times to lose ourselves in each other; to discover an intimacy that was hitherto a terra incognita for both of us.

‘I have never made love like that before,’ I whispered to him as we clung to each other after that first wondrous time.

‘Nor have I,’ he whispered back.

I read the note a second time. This time I tried to negotiate with it, attempting to unearth some sort of affirmative subtext in its language:

I love you more than anything. But I can’t do this. I have to go home.

The fact that he declared his love for me so absolutely. The fact that this was the first thing he wrote. Surely that was the complete and utter truth; the veritable heart of the matter. All right, something had happened. Maybe he had to call his wife and she played some guilt card, which panicked him into thinking he had to go home. That’s why he wrote: ‘But I can’t do this.’ Because she knew she was about to lose him, and had to reel him in. I wouldn’t be surprised if she used their poor tragic son as a ploy. And my Richard — who’s always been susceptible to familial pressure — felt stricken by this and decided he should simply get home and face the problem. But once he was back with the woman he described as arctic, removed, physically rejecting of him. surely he’d run for his car and find me. All would be restored between us. We’d be us again

I read the note a third time. And started to cry. Because I was replaying the absurd interpretation of his words that had just raced through my head. I realized that I was sounding like one of the many patients I have seen who — knowing that their cancer is probably Stage Four — still try to assure themselves they’re going to beat the terminal diagnosis that is sure to follow.

How can you sugarcoat the unbearable? It’s impossible. Read the note again. It couldn’t be more direct or to the point. Whatever about his declaration of love, the fact is that something has made him run off back home. And he is telling you: This is truly over.

Yet, just three hours ago, in that restaurant on Newbury Street, everything had been so loving, so forward looking, so happy. We’d even agreed how we’d tell our respective spouses, how we’d move to Boston, how we’d spend six weeks in Paris, how we’d go to concerts and interesting plays and.

I started to cry again. The initial shock of it all had kept me muffled, constrained. Perhaps that was my way of not allowing the actual terrible reality of all this to be given credence. But all such efforts at restraint proved futile. The sobs were now something akin to keening. Me the original tight-lipped stoic — who, in recent time, was unnerved by even the slightest choked whimper emerging from my once ruthlessly rational self — was now weeping uncontrollably. I made no effort to bring it under control. Life is littered with disappointments. Life is strewn with setbacks. We all learn how to weather the small defeats, the nagging reversals of fortune, those interregnums where quiet desperation seems to be the ongoing order of the day. But even in these difficult passages, the majority of us still travel hopefully. Because hope is the one true commodity we all desire. But when hope is destroyed in such a way that it is not simply dashed, but actually murdered.

Outside of the death of a child, is there any death more terrible than the death of hope?

I sat on the edge of the bed, crying for a very long time. A moment came when I was so spent I felt like crawling under the covers and shutting out the world and telling myself that when I woke with the dawn this entire nightmarish tribulation would be behind me, and I would stir into consciousness to find Richard beside me and all would be right again with our life, with us.

Us.

I stood up, pacing the room, thinking, thinking. Telling myself that all I had to do was talk with him — a good long loving talk, in which I would reassure him that he could do this, that what we had was magical. As he said to me just a few hours ago: ‘How often does this — us — happen in a lifetime?’

He meant that. I know he meant that. Just as I know he adores me. Love at its most authentic, its most veritable, its most unquestionable.

Richard told me he loved me. That was no projection. That was the truth.

My hands shaking, I dug into my bag and found my phone. The quasi-rational side of my brain proclaimed: