Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

‘Want a drink?’ To which I immediately replied:

‘That sounds like a very good idea.’

Six

RICHARD WORKED HIS phone and discovered two salient pieces of local information: the gallery was open until nine o’clock this evening (if we did want to head there eventually), and there was a cocktail bar in the same vicinity with the straightforward name of Drink.

‘Sounds like it will do the job,’ I said, impressed with Richard’s ability to glean all this information in under a minute on his phone. I am still such a Luddite when it comes to most things technological. Just as I so appreciated the way he said nothing about my crying fit and didn’t even gently enquire why I had broken down. And when, in the wake of him telling me about the late museum hours, I said: ‘You know, I might head back to the hotel after a drink,’ he worked hard at disguising his disappointment, telling me:

‘Whatever works best for you, Laura. There’s no pressure whatsoever.’

Again I found myself thinking: He is such a truly gentle man. And so much in the ‘kindred spirit’ realm. No wonder you’re pushing him away.

Drink turned out to be an uber-stylish lounge, filled with uber-stylish types drinking uber-stylish cocktails.

‘Glad I changed my clothes,’ Richard said as the hostess on the door seated us in a rear booth.

‘You fit in perfectly here. But the thing is, even if you were dressed as before it wouldn’t have mattered one bit to me.’

‘Even though I bet you initially characterized me as a gray little man.’

‘All right, truth be told, I did consider you, when I first saw you at the hotel, somewhat traditional.’

‘Which is a euphemism for “dull”.’

‘You are anything but dull.’

He touched my arm with his hand.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘The thing is, I have deliberately allowed myself to be perceived as dull. Outside of Dwight — who actually is quite the reader — I never allowed myself to appear too informed or interesting in public. When I’d tried that as a younger man — with my writing, my editorship of the U Maine literary magazine—’

‘You edited The Open Field?’

‘You remember its name!’

‘Of course I remember its name. I was on the editorial staff during my time in Orono.’

‘Doing what exactly?’

‘The poetry editor.’

‘That’s extraordinary.’

‘Not as extraordinary as being the editor-in-chief, especially as I presume you weren’t an English major.’

‘Wanted to do English, but my dad put his foot down. So it was economics and business administration. But I still managed to end up as the first non-English major to edit The Open Field. That was a real source of pride for me. I spent my first three years at the college working my way up the editorial ranks. Of course, when Dad also found out that I had been named editor-in-chief — and he gleaned that little detail when it accompanied the short biographical note that appeared alongside the short story in the Bangor Daily News — he was even more livid. Told me I had to resign the editorship immediately.’

‘Did you?’

‘I did.’

‘That’s terrible.’

‘Indeed it is. The thing is, though I always hated him for making me give it up — and I only had one more issue to put to bed — the person I really hated was myself. Because I had given in to his limiting meanness. Because I allowed myself to be intimidated by him. Because I was always so desperate to please a father who could not be pleased. And how did we get on this subject?’

‘It’s all right to be on this subject,’ I said. ‘That man—’

‘—was a bastard. Excuse my language. But it’s the only word to describe him. Small, mean, petty, angry at the world, and determined to keep me confined to the limited horizons within which his own life had been lived. The truth of the matter is that I accepted those limitations. I resigned the editorship of the magazine. I followed him into the family business. I never wrote a word again for almost thirty years. I married a woman who matched him for coldness and thrift. On his deathbed, when we were alone together in his hospital room and the colon cancer that was killing him had spread everywhere, and he had maybe forty-eight hours to live, he took my hand and told me: “You were always something of a disappointment to me.”’

I reached over and threaded my hand into his.

‘I hope you told him what a monster he was.’

‘That would have been the good Eugene O’Neill ending, wouldn’t it? “May you go to your grave knowing your only son despises you. and he’s now selling off your nasty little insurance company and is setting sail for the Far East as a crewman on a tramp steamer.”’

‘Did that thought cross your mind?’

‘Variations on that theme.’

‘Like me with the French Foreign Legion when I was a teenager.’

‘Even though their all-male rule might have put a dent in your plans?’

‘Like you, it was all about dreams of leaving. But even my rather cool, distant mother at her chilliest couldn’t match your father. He was clearly beyond contemptible.’

The waiter arrived, asking us what we’d like to drink.

‘I’m not too knowledgeable about cocktails,’ I told Richard, ‘but I remember once drinking a very good manhattan on my one visit to New York.’

‘Then two manhattans,’ he said.

The waiter asked us if we preferred ours with bourbon or rye. We both professed ignorance. The waiter recommended Sazerac rye — ‘for a manhattan with a slightly more syrupy texture, but with a complex smoothness’. I could see Richard trying to keep a straight face.

‘“Complex smoothness” sounds fine to me,’ he said.

‘Me too,’ I added.

As soon as the waiter was out of earshot, Richard said:

‘It’s one of the more curious things about modern life: the amount of choice on offer. Back twenty years ago, rye was that cheap Canadian Club stuff my dad used to drink. Now there are probably two dozen different ryes on offer. Just as Scotch was always J&B, and wine was Gallo red or white. We don’t just live in a consumerist culture. We live in a wildly consumerist culture.’

‘But there are benefits to all that — like the fact that good coffee is a given just about everywhere. ’

‘Even in Lewiston?’

‘Poor Lewiston — the butt of all in-state Maine jokes. But I’m sure you can still find a decent cappuccino even there.’

‘And a decent rye manhattan?’

‘That might be a stretch. Maybe I’ll give up radiography to open a cocktail bar in Lewiston.’

‘And I know a good bankruptcy lawyer you can talk to when it all goes south.’

‘“O ye of little faith.”’

‘Matthew eight, twenty-six.’

‘That’s impressive,’ I said.

‘Another legacy from my father. A real Presbyterian. Scots-Irish — the most dour Celtic combination imaginable. No joie de vivre. A real Hobbesian view of the human condition.’

‘And I bet this is the first time that Thomas Hobbes was ever mentioned in this cocktail lounge.’

‘Let alone Matthew eight, twenty-six.’

‘Well, there’s a first for everything.’

‘And thanks to dear old Dad — who made me go to Sunday school for fifteen years — my brain is crammed with far too many scriptural references.’

‘Can you do The Book of Mormon as well?’

‘That’s a little beyond my realm of knowledge.’

I found myself laughing — and quietly realized that Richard, in his own canny, quiet way, had just managed to talk me out of the sadness that had overcome me in the taxi, simply by being smart and funny and interesting. And by sharing all that terrible stuff about his father.