Douglas Kennedy - Five Days

‘And if you don’t want to go home, the garage apartment is yours,’ she said.

‘I’m going home,’ I said.

‘I hope that’s the right decision.’

‘Whether it’s right or wrongheadedly wrong, it’s the decision I’m making.’

‘Fine,’ Lucy said, her tone lightly hinting at a disapproval she would never actually articulate, but which she clearly felt.

Lucy’s guest room had a double bed with the sort of ancient mattress that seemed to have caved in around the time of the first Kennedy assassination.

At three-thirty in the morning I admitted defeat when it came to surrendering to sleep. Getting up, getting dressed, I left a note on Lucy’s kitchen counter:

Going home. To what? Well, there’s the rub. Thank you for being, as always, the best friend imaginable. And please know that you too are not alone.

Ten minutes later, I pulled up in front of our house. Dan was sitting on the swing bench on our front porch, smoking a cigarette. As soon as I pulled up he tossed the cigarette away, his face all schoolboy guilt.

‘Hey,’ I said, getting out of the car.

‘Hey,’ he said back. ‘Weren’t you supposed to be staying in Boston tonight?’

‘Couldn’t sleep. Decided I should come home and be in time to see you off on your new job.’

He looked at me carefully.

‘You really drove all the way back here in the middle of the night just to do that?’

There wasn’t suspicion in his voice, just the usual quiet, world-weary disdain.

‘How long have you been awake?’ I asked.

‘All night. You weren’t the only person who couldn’t sleep.’

‘Dan, you don’t have to do this job.’

‘Yes, I do. And we both know why. But thank you for coming back in time to see me off to my new role as stockroom clerk.’

I blinked and felt tears.

‘You’re crying,’ he said.

‘Yes. You’ve made me cry.’

‘And now I feel like an asshole.’

‘I don’t want an apology. I want love.’

Silence. He stood up, reaching for his car keys, clearly thrown by what I had just said.

‘See you tonight,’ he said.

Silence.

He headed off. Then, with a quick about-face, he turned back to me and gave me a fast kiss on the lips.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry for so much.’

I searched high and low within me for a retort. But all that came to me was the loneliest of replies:

‘Aren’t we all.’

Dan got into his car and drove off to his new job. I sat rooted to the garden chair, staring up at that big black infinite sky, the limitless possibilities of the cosmos. Thinking one thought:

The death of hope.

SUNRISE. I USED to get up after it. Now I wake well before the dawn. A readjustment of my body clock that also arrived with my ability to again sleep through the night. Sunrise. I usually have had the second cup of coffee by the time those initial tentative shafts of light have found their way into my kitchen. On fine clear mornings — and there have been a string of them this week — the early-morning light, especially at this time of year, can be like copper filament; a luminous braiding that always seems to target the little counter where I sip the Italian roast that I make in a cafetiиre, and which I now get specially ground for me.

The interplay of the light, the heavy aromatics of the coffee, the fact that I have just woken up from a reasonable night’s sleep without (for the past six weeks) the aid of medication. Significant small details to celebrate at the beginning of another day of life.

I have become a runner. Every morning, after a sunup breakfast, I put on a very lightweight pair of track shoes that Ben convinced me to buy (he too has gotten the running bug) and go out for a five-mile jog to the water. My route rarely changes. Houses, avenues, road, more houses (the initial stretch of neighborhood modest, the next expansive and expensive), a bridge, trees, open spaces, rolling green lawns, then that telltale white marine light announcing that I am close to the water’s edge.

Running suits me. Solitary, singular, very much bound up in a daily negotiation with how far you’re willing to push yourself; the frontiers of your endurance. At first, when I decided that, yes, I would force myself out for a daily run, I was a mess. I could not get myself further than a half-a-mile, and I would frequently find myself winded, or suffering the sort of physical agonies that beset neophytes to the jogging world. Then Ben — who’d become so smitten with the sport that he ended up on the university’s cross-country team — told me I should come spend a Saturday with him at Farmington, during which he’d take his mother out and teach her a few tricks of the running trade. Actually my son bettered that promise, as he convinced his coach — a very nice young guy named Clancy Brown (very thoughtful and cool in his non rah-rah way, and clearly pleased to have a talented young painter as one of his star runners) — to spend an hour looking over my form. He helped me rid myself of all sorts of bad habits I had already picked up.

Since then, Ben and I run together whenever we see each other (which is about once a month — not bad considering that, when I was in college, I only went home at Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter). My form has considerably improved. Five miles is now the quotidian target — but, as Clancy recommended, I do take one day off a week. I also pace myself with care, as I don’t want to court serious injury or the sort of burnout I read about all the time in the running magazines to which I now subscribe. Now I can do the five-mile jog in around an hour — and I’m pleased with that. Like Ben, it is the ability to lose myself in the tangible physicality of running — coupled with the rising endorphins which brighten life’s darker contours — that has made me such a convert.

And this morning — given the meeting I must attend in a few hours’ time — an endorphin rush will be most welcome. The fact that the daybreak sunlight is so radiant certainly helps. So too does the fact that, at six-twelve a.m., which is when I started my run this morning (I now always regard the digital readout on the watch on my wrist before starting), the city of Portland is only just waking up. As such I can make it to and from my apartment on Park Street to the lighthouse in Cape Elizabeth before the bridge traffic begins to build up.

My apartment: a two-bedroom place in a reasonably well-preserved Federalist building on what I think is the city’s nicest street. When I came to look at it around some months ago, my first thought was that the houses here are very like the sort you find on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. Immediately I found myself having one of those moments of encroaching melancholy that became so predominant after that weekend, and which I finally took steps to curb (the jogging being one of the ways out of the darkness into which I fell for a time). But I still adored the street — and the apartment was, at $1,150 per month, not exactly a bargain. Just under one thousand square feet. A little homey, a little old-fashioned, a little bit scuffed up. But the owner told me (via the realtor) that he knew it needed a paint job and sanded floors and revarnished kitchen cabinets and a bunch of other home improvement details. So he was willing to knock off two-fifty per month from the rent for the first two years if I would undertake it. Again it was Ben who stepped in. We set a parts and labor budget of around $4,000 — absolutely all I could afford. In August he and two college friends literally moved in with air mattresses and sleeping bags. They did all the work in three weeks, pocketing $1,000 each. They left me a very clean and airy place of white walls and varnished floorboards. I then worked twenty hours a week overtime for the next two months — and through judicious shopping at several of the quirky secondhand stores around town, I managed to furnish it in a style that is largely rooted in mid-fifties Americana, and which Lucy deemed ‘retro cool’ when she first saw the apartment put together. Frankly that’s a little generous on her part. It still feels very much as if it is a work in progress, just one step above basic. But there’s a room for Ben or Sally when they come visit. And Ben surprised me with a gift of an original painting of his: a blurred series of blue geometric shapes, on a grayish-white background; very Maine marine light in its sensibility, very much using that Tetron Azure Blue I scored for him. I had to hold back my tears when my son showed up with the painting, telling me: ‘Let this be your water view.’