Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

‘Or Park Avenue.’

‘Still, that big place they have on the coast by Pemaquid Point—’

‘—is my dream location,’ I said. ‘And I now feel so tacky for being so catty about Julie.’

‘But she is one of those people who invites cattiness.’

‘I’m afraid I know all about that. Sally actually once heard Julie on the phone with a friend, telling her: “Now I think Brad’s girlfriend is a cutey. but it’s a shame her parents are struggling.”’

‘And you worry about being catty about her. Sometimes people deserve cattiness. Especially when they look down their long noses at everyone else. And I’m certain that your daughter saw right through Julie’s noblesse oblige act.’

‘If only Sally understood what noblesse oblige was. She’s so bright and so intuitively smart. But she underestimates her own intelligence, and is so bound up in the superficial. even though I’m sure that, privately, she sees that this pursuit of the shallow is an empty one.’

‘Then she’ll hopefully move away from it all once Young Mr Bingham goes off to his Ivy League college.’

‘That is my great hope. But as you well know, when it comes to children, you can never really shield them from danger or themselves.’

‘That still doesn’t lessen the sense of guilt that accompanies being a parent. ’

‘True. But even if I keep telling you that Billy’s bipolar condition has no connection whatsoever to anything you’ve done as a father — and, in fact, from what you’ve reported, you’ve been the parent who has always been there for him. ’

‘Yes, I will still feel guilty about this until the day he’s allowed out of that hell hole. Even then I’ll still remain guilty about the horror he’s been through.’

‘Does parental guilt ever cease?’

‘Do you really want me to answer that question?’

‘Hardly. Because after all that happened with my son Ben. ’

That’s when I told him about my son’s amazing promise as a painter, the subsequent breakdown after that spoiled little rich girl dropped him, and how he’d already been in one major exhibition and.

‘So Ben’s going to be the next Cy Twombly.’

Again I found myself looking at Richard with considerable surprise.

‘You know your modern painters,’ I said.

‘I saw that big 2009 retrospective of his at the Art Institute of Chicago. Actually invented a reason to go to Chicago on business in order to catch the exhibition. Funny thing is — my dad, conservative ex-Marine that he was — still had a thing about art. Only his taste ran towards Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, which is still pretty good taste. Dad always had a secret hankering to be a painter. Had a little studio in his garage. Tried his hand at seascapes. He wasn’t bad. Gave a few away to some family members. Even had a gallery in Boston take a few of the Maine coastal studies he did. But they never sold. Dad being Dad he decided that this was a sign they were no damn good. Even though my mother — who was some class of a saint — and his brother Roy told him otherwise. One night, after another of his big bouts of drinking — the guy could really put away cheap Scotch — he staggered out to the garage and burned all his paintings. Just like that. Dumped around two dozen canvases outside on the lawn, doused them with kerosene, lit a match. Whoosh. My mother found him sitting by the fire, looking sloshed, tears running down his face, so sad and furious with the world. but especially with himself. Because he knew he was burning all sense of hope and possibility, and a life beyond the one he had created for himself. There I was — a child of fourteen — watching this all from my bedroom window, telling myself I’d never live a life I disliked. ’

‘And your father never painted again?’

Richard shook his head.

‘And yet he then ripped several strips off you when you dared to publish a short story.’

‘Well, the guy was such a total hard case.’

‘Or just jealous. My dad had a father like that. He saw that his son was a brilliant mathematician — and had teachers and college guidance counselors encouraging him to apply to everywhere from Harvard to MIT, just like your Billy. Only my dad’s father was not a good father like you. Instead he was quietly enraged by his son’s brilliance and worked assiduously at subverting his progress. Insisted he turn down a full scholarship at MIT because he needed him to work in the family hardware store every weekend. Dad went along with this — agreeing to U Maine and returning every weekend to Waterville to put in a full Saturday at my grandfather’s shop. Can you imagine forcing a gifted young man to do that. ’

‘Actually I can.’

‘Oh God, listen to me talking before thinking. I am so, so sorry.’

‘Don’t be. The truth doesn’t hurt anymore. It’s just there. Right in my face. And the thing is, even though my father also played undermining games with me — and I was no way as brilliant as your father. ’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Why not? It’s the truth.’

‘But that short story. ’

‘A short story, written thirty years ago. ’

‘And one published a few months ago.’

‘You remembered that?’

‘Well, you did tell me about it yesterday.’

‘It’s just a small thing. ’

‘I actually Googled it this morning. And read it. And guess what? It’s very good.’

‘Seriously?’

‘A man looks back on a childhood friend who was allegedly swept off the rocks at Prout’s Neck. but who the friend knows was being investigated for fraud at the accountancy firm where he’s a partner. Very Anthony Trollope.’

‘Now you’re being far too extravagant.’

‘But you must have read The Way We Live Now — because the whole theme of personal and social corruption is—’

‘I am hardly an Anthony Trollope. And a small Portland accountancy firm isn’t exactly a great City brokerage house in London.’

‘Does that matter?’

‘Trollope was looking at the way money is the ongoing human obsession. And the fact that he used the grand canvas of London at the height of Victorian power—’

‘And you use a small New England city in the middle of a recession to highlight the same concerns about the way we all are in thrall to money, and how, like it or not, it always defines us.’

Richard looked at me with something approaching bemusement — and clearly found himself incapable of articulating anything.

‘You seem speechless,’ I said.

‘Well, it’s not every day I get compared to one of the great masters of the nineteenth-century novel. And though I’m flattered. ’

‘I know, I know — you don’t deserve it. It’s just a two-thousand-word scribble in a minor magazine. And your father was right about your writing all along. Happy now?’

He reached for his drink and finished it.

‘No one has ever been so encouraging about my writing before.’

‘Did your wife read the story?’

‘She said it was “readable, but depressing”.’

‘Well, the story really grabs you from the outset. But the apparent suicide at the end is incredibly disturbing. Still, I loved the moral ambiguity behind all that. It’s like that line from Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” — “Between the motion and the act. ”’

‘“. falls the shadow”.’

As he finished my sentence, finished the quote that I was quoting, I found myself looking up at Richard and thinking: This man is full of surprises. Perhaps the most surprising thing is the fact that I find him so. ‘compelling’ is the right word. And when he took those rather shapeless steel-rimmed spectacles off for a moment to rub his eyes I suddenly saw that, if you took away the dull golfing clothes and the actuarial inspector eyewear, there was a not unattractive man seated opposite me, and one whose initial grayness had now shaded into something warmer. I could also see, as he finished that T.S. Eliot quote, that he was regarding me in a different way now; that he too had discerned that the landscape between us was changing. Part of me was trying to tell myself: This is a pleasant, interesting lunch, no more. The other part of me — the person who always wondered why she imposed so many frontiers on her life — knew otherwise.