Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

‘Well, look at you, sir,’ Gary the ‘spectician’ said as Richard approached the counter. ‘Clothes make the man — and you are evidently in re-fit mode this afternoon. Bravo.’

Richard accepted this comment with a nervous smile.

‘And to complete the new you. ’

Now Richard’s discomfort was manifest again as he looked down at the tray on which his new glasses were displayed. I put my hand on his shoulder.

‘You OK?’ I asked.

‘Fine, fine,’ he said, not succeeding at masking his unease. Gary noted this as well.

‘If I may, sir,’ he said, reaching out to remove Richard’s old frames. Richard initially took a step backwards, as if he was trying to dodge the idea of giving up this last vestige of his old look. But Gary — almost anticipating this — put a steadying hand on his shoulder and quickly pulled the frames off. Then he proffered the tray to him.

‘Try them on, sir.’

Richard reached for the new glasses, then slowly raised them onto his face. Was his anxiety due to the fact that, with these glasses, his outward transformation would be complete? Or because, like me, he too felt we were veering far too close to a frontier he had never been within the proximity of during all the years of his own sad marriage?

Sad marriage. Now I could stand guilty of presumptuousness. Just as I knew I was talking about the domestic life I’d been leading for so many years.

Glasses on, he didn’t look at the mirror in front of him. Rather he turned directly towards me. As before — when he first tried these frames — I couldn’t help but think just how perfectly they suited him, giving him a canny, worldly, academic mien. Seen now with his leather jacket, his black jeans and black work shirt.

‘You look amazing,’ I said.

‘Really?’ Richard said.

‘Madame is speaking the truth,’ Gary said. With a gentle hand on his shoulder he turned Richard around to face the floor-length mirror nearby. Watching Richard now take himself in I couldn’t help but remind myself of the way I stared at myself in the hotel mirror this morning: the fear of casting off my everyday image; the unspoken pleasure in seeing myself transformed into the person I always imagined myself being. Richard was engaged in the same process right now. The old identity, the new identity. I knew just how painful and arduous it was to actually shake off everything you have told yourself you have to be. You can dress up differently. You can change all the externals. But there are still all those ties that bind.

Richard must have regarded himself for a good minute in the mirror — and I instinctually knew it was best not to say anything right now. Gary also was astute here — as he too was watching Richard talk himself out of the anxiety that had overtaken him again as soon as we stepped back into the boutique. And during that very long sixty seconds, I watched as his face divested itself of its dread, his shoulders lost their taut hunch, and a small smile crossed his lips.

‘Thank you,’ he finally said to me.

At that moment I caught Gary out of the corner of my eye. I could register him working out that we were, in no way, husband and wife, and that what had just transpired was, in its own unspoken personal way, rather huge. His only comment was a most appropriate one:

‘Congratulations, sir.’

A few minutes later we were back on Newbury Street.

‘Ready to blend in with the fellow hipsters at the ICA?’ I asked.

‘I feel somewhere between an imposter and—’

‘Trust me, you’re far smarter and more learned than the hip brigade.’

A smile between us.

‘It’s a bit of a walk from here, I think,’ he said.

‘Down in South Boston on the bay. And it probably closes at six.’

We both glanced at our watches. It was now almost four-thirty.

‘A taxi then.’

As luck would have it one was cruising right by. Richard hailed it. Within moments we were being driven down Boylston Street, passing by several upscale hotels, and a long cliff of tall nineteenth-century office buildings and a theater that Richard said now all belonged to a performing arts college. He started explaining how, just down the street twenty years ago, the remnants of Boston’s red light district — better known as ‘the Combat Zone’ — was still in full ‘drug-dealing, porno-cinema, working-girls-on-the-street splendor’. Now it was just a cleaned-up theater district. Though it was a more pleasant environment, ‘there’s part of me that thinks we’ve sanitized everything nowadays, to the point where cities have lost an essential raffishness. not that I am the biggest expert on things metropolitan’.

‘Still,’ I said, ‘you have a point. I made a couple of trips during college to New York with my then-boyfriend. Even in the late 1980s, Forty-second Street and Hell’s Kitchen and the East Village were still the wrong side of sleazy, and we loved it. Because it was so not what we knew in Maine. Then, the one time I’ve been back since. well, Forty-second Street now looked like an outdoor shopping mall in any major city in the country. And the city — though still amazing — struck me as having lost an essential edgy vitality. But hey, having never lived there, having never lived anywhere but Maine. ’

‘That door isn’t shut, is it?’

‘As you said earlier, you have to travel hopefully. And believe that you can reinvent yourself anew.’

‘Isn’t that the real American dream? The illusion of liberty. Hitting the road and all that? If it doesn’t work out for you in Maine, get in your car, burn up the highway for a couple of nights, find yourself in New Orleans, start all over again.’

‘You ever do anything like that?’ I asked.

‘In my dreams. And you?’

‘A cross-country trip once with Dan. And before that I did end up in Central America for a few weeks with someone.’

‘Was that somebody Eric?’

‘And here we are in Chinatown,’ I said, changing the subject quickly, while also thinking of a moment years ago in a restaurant somewhere near here when Eric told me he loved me, that he was mine forever. A summer night it was. The mercury nearly hitting three figures. The restaurant wonderfully dingy and very authentic and badly air-conditioned. And the two of us holding hands so tightly, as if we were each other’s ballast. Though we were kids at the time, we just knew.

‘You OK?’ Richard asked.

‘Fine, fine,’ I lied.

Richard touched my arm in a reassuring way, but I shrugged him off. Not forcibly, but with enough clarity to let it be known that I had just decided not to initiate any further contact with him. I’d go around the gallery with him, maybe agree to a coffee in the cafй there, then make my excuses and head back to the hotel. Why was I suddenly walling myself up? Because he had mentioned Eric. And because any mention of Eric threw into sharp silhouette all that my life had not been since those extraordinary two years towards the end of the eighties. And because I had padlocked that part of my past so thoroughly that even the slightest reference to it threw me into freefall.

Will you listen to yourself, trying to push this man away.

I just can’t cope with the jumble of things that are playing havoc with my psyche right now.

You want directness? Here’s directness: you can’t cope with the fact that he is so right for you. And you are so right for him.

And I am married. And I have made a commitment. And I cannot.

Change.

I put my face in my hands. I stifled a sob. Richard put his hand on my shoulder. I shrugged him off. But as soon as that happened the sobs started again. This time, I turned and buried my head in his shoulder. He held me tight until I brought the sobs under control. When they subsided he did something very smart. He said nothing except: