Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

Still, if he ends up in Portland. well, of course, I’ll love the fact that he’s just an hour down the road. And it will give me an excuse to drop down here more often — because this is a city I should be using frequently. And maybe now that Dan is bringing in a salary again.

No, let’s not think about any of that this weekend. Let’s call a moratorium on all domestic thoughts for the next forty-eight hours.

As if.

Kennebunkport. Summer home of the Bush family. I voted for Bush Senior, but couldn’t give my support to Junior — as he reminded me of a richer, more vindictive version of the frat boys I always seemed to dodge at college. I’ve always loved the beach at Kennebunkport — a curiously rugged stretch of the Atlantic and a wondrously savage contrast to the well-heeled, upscale community that fronts it. I would love to somehow, sometime, live directly by the sea. Just to be able to wake up every day and immediately look out at the water. No matter what was going on around me there would be the immense consolation of water.

I glanced at my watch. I was making good time, listening to a Mozart symphony on Maine Public Radio. The 36th, subtitled the Linz. The announcer explained how Mozart showed up, in 1781, on a Monday at the home of the Count of Linz, wife in tow, and the Count, knowing Mozart’s habit of running up debts, offered him a nice sum of money if he could write a symphony for the court orchestra by Friday. Four days to write and orchestrate a symphony! And one that is still being played over two centuries later. Is genius, among other things, the appearance of effortlessness when it comes to great work? Or is there some sort of mystique hovering around the notion that all truly serious art must have a long gestation period; that it must be the result of a profound and torturous struggle? Even as the reception began to crackle, once I crossed the bridge that links Maine to New Hampshire, I couldn’t help but be carried along by the immense lyricism of the symphony — and the way Mozart seemed able to reflect the lightness and darkness lurking behind all things in the course of a single musical phrase.

New Hampshire — just a stretch of highway here on this corner of I-95. Then Massachusetts — and suburban Boston announced itself with billboards and shopping malls and fast food and strip bars and places to buy lawn furniture and endless car dealerships and cheap motels. The conference was being held in a Fairfield Inn along Route 1, just a few miles from Logan Airport. I’d Googled the place in advance — so I knew it was a large airport hotel with a conference centre attached to it. Up close it was a concrete block. Inconsequential. Uninteresting. A place you would never notice unless you were stopping by. But I didn’t care if it was big and squat and all reinforced concrete and this side of ugly. It was an escape hatch for a couple of days. Even the unappealing can look pretty good when it represents a break from routine.

Two

FLORAL CARPET. FLUORESCENT lights. Concrete walls painted industrial cream. And a big reception desk made from cheaply veneered wood, over which were clocks that showed the time in London, Chicago, San Francisco and (of course) here in Boston. This was the reception area of the Fairfield Inn, Logan Airport. It did not look promising, especially since there was already a huge line in front of the desk.

‘Must be all the X-ray people,’ said the man who had just joined behind me.

I smiled.

‘Yes, must be,’ I said.

‘“X-ray people”,’ the man said again, shaking his head at this comment. ‘Makes it sound like 1950s sci-fi. Not that you were around in the 1950s. ’

‘Glad you think so.’

‘I would say you were born in 1980.’

‘Now that is flattery.’

‘You mean, I got it wrong?’ he asked.

‘By about eleven years, yes.’

‘I’m disappointed.’

‘By my age?’

‘By my inability to guess your age,’ he said.

‘That’s a major personal fault?’

‘In my game it is.’

‘And your game is.?’

‘Nothing terribly interesting.’

‘That’s quite an admission,’ I said.

‘It’s the truth.’

‘And the truth is.?’

‘I sell insurance.’

I now stepped back and got a proper look at this insurance man.

Mid-height — maybe five foot nine. Reasonably trim figure — with the slightest hint of a paunch around his stomach. Graying hair, but not thinning hair. Steel-rimmed glasses in a rectangular frame. A dark blue suit — not particularly expensive, not particularly cheap. A mid-blue dress shirt. A rep tie. A wedding ring on his left index finger. He had a Samsonite roll-on bag in one hand, and a very large black briefcase on the floor next to it — no doubt filled with policy forms just waiting to be filled in as soon as he landed the necessary clients. I judged him to be somewhere in his mid-fifties. Not particularly handsome. Outside of the gray hair, not looking bloated or too weathered by life.

‘Insurance is one of life’s necessities,’ I said.

‘You should write my sales pitch.’

‘I’m certain you’ve got a better one than that.’

‘Now it’s you who’s flattering me.’

‘And where do you sell insurance?’

‘Maine.’

I brightened.

‘My home state,’ I said.

Now he brightened.

‘Born and bred?’ he asked.

‘Absolutely. Heard of Damariscotta?’

‘I live about twenty miles away in Bath. ’

I then told him where I’d grown up, also mentioning my years at U Maine.

‘I’m a U Maine grad as well,’ he said — and we quickly discovered which dorms we lived in during our respective freshman years and that he was a business studies major at the college.

‘I did biology and chemistry,’ I said.

‘Far more brainy than me. So you’re a doctor?’

‘What makes you guess that?’

‘The two science majors, and the fact that there is a radiography convention this weekend at this hotel — and all you X-ray people are delaying my check-in.’

That last comment came out with a smile. But I took his point, as there were fifteen people ahead of us and only two receptionists at work. We were going to be here awhile.

‘So you’ve decided I’m an X-ray person,’ I said.

‘That’s just deduction.’

‘You mean, I don’t look like an X-ray person?’

‘Well, I know I look like the sort of man who sells insurance.’

I said nothing.

‘See,’ he said, ‘guilty as charged.’

‘Do you like selling insurance?’

‘It has its moments. Do you like being a radiographer?’

‘I’m just a technologist, nothing more.’

‘If you’re a radiographic technologist, that’s a pretty important job.’

I just shrugged. The man smiled at me again.

‘Which hospital?’

‘Maine Regional.’

‘No kidding. Were you working there when Dr Potholm ran the department?’

‘Dr Potholm hired me.’

The man smiled and stuck out his hand.

‘I’m Richard Copeland.’ He simultaneously handed me his business card.

I took his hand. A firm grip. A salesman’s grip. I pocketed the card. I told him my name.

‘My first grade teacher was named Laura,’ he said, ‘though we called her Miss Wigglesworth.’

‘Well, my mother told me that, after much debate, the name choice came down to Laura or Sandra. My father preferred the latter, but my mother was certain I’d end up being called Sandy.’

‘Sandy’s a little bit Californian, isn’t it?’

Now it was my turn to giggle. Richard Copeland certainly had an easy conversational style. But he was also somewhat cautious with his body language, as if he was always fighting a certain physical shyness. I could see him looking me over and then trying to mask the fact that he was looking me over. The banter between us was simultaneously breezy and guarded. I characterized him as a flirt who was not totally at ease with being a flirt. But this was, without question, a flirtation — of the sort that two strangers have when caught together in a long line and they know that, in fifteen minutes, they’ll never be seeing each other again.