Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

‘Saying all that now, part of me thinks, how wondrously naive, how innocent. But the truth is — and this is the middle-aged woman talking — the love I felt, the love given, the love shared. it was nothing less than matchless. Yes, we were kids. Yes, we were living in that bubble which was college. And yes, we knew nothing of the larger world and its infernal compromises. But here was a man I could talk to about anything. Here was a man who was so original, so curious, so thoughtful, so vital. and who made me feel capable of everything. After the first semester we shocked everybody by finding an apartment off campus and moving in together. When my parents met Eric they were completely charmed. Of course they both found him a little over the top. But they also saw his love for me — and the way he was, in his own determined way, pushing me to do my very best. And Eric’s parents — very formal, very stiff, very much in despair over what they saw to be their wayward son — simply adored me. Because I was the small-town Maine girl who clearly loved their son and also seemed to keep him grounded, within the earth’s gravity.

‘It was love. Absolute extraordinary love. We were both so profoundly happy. Because it was also so easy together. My grades that first year skyrocketed. I made Dean’s List. I was asked to join the Honors Program. Eric, meanwhile, was establishing his hegemony — yes, that is the correct word — over the literary magazine, the film society, and even managed to talk his way into staging a radical reworking of Twelfth Night set in a suburban high school. The guy was just bursting with talent. Hearing me say all this now. I know it all sounds so romanticized, so quixotic, too good to be true. I know it was all twenty-two years ago, and time has a habit of soft-focussing so much, especially when it comes to first love. But. but. I think I see life with a certain clarity. My work forces me to do that all the time — because being a radiographic technologist is all about being able to view the most elemental cellular forces within us with absolute pellucidity. But one’s emotional life is always more murky, isn’t it? There’s no clarity when it comes to matters of the heart. Except one thing about which I am still absolutely clear — Eric Lachtmann was the love of my life. I had never been happier, more productive, more fulfilled. Everyone who knew us back then saw that we were, in a word, golden.

‘Of course we had plans. So many plans. The summer after our freshman year we both got teaching jobs at a rich kids’ prep school in New Hampshire, tutoring the far too well off and stupid who weren’t going to get into college if they didn’t bump up their grades. The money was pretty good. Good enough for us to head to Costa Rica on the cheap for the last two weeks of the summer vacation. Eric had an artist friend of the family there with a place on the Pacific coast. Even though it was the rainy season, the sun still came out six hours of the day and, hey, we were in Central America, how cool was that? While in Costa Rica we agreed to go to Paris for our junior year, and spend the next twelve months doing intensive French. Eric was pretty certain there was an exchange program for pre-med students at the Fac du Mйdecine at the Sorbonne. There was, and I got in.

‘But then a small bit of drama landed in our laps when I discovered I was pregnant. I knew how and why it had happened. While in Costa Rica, I forgot to take the pill two days in a row. Bingo. Back in our apartment in Orono I started getting sick every morning for five straight days. I told Eric my suspicions and how guilty I felt about missing those two doses of the pill, though he already knew that because I told him immediately about it when I realized that all the mezcal we’d drunk one weekend with that crazed artist friend of the family — a real Bukowski type — had led me to slip up on the contraception front. Eric and I had that kind of relationship where we promised to tell each other everything. And did. So when one of those home pregnancy tests confirmed what was readily apparent — I was going to have a baby — Eric being Eric he told me: “Hey, we’ll keep it. Bring him or her to Paris. Raise this baby to be the coolest citizen imaginable and just carry on with our lives.” His exact words. That also was pure Eric — the art of the possible. Nothing too arduous that couldn’t be countered with wild enthusiasm and work. Of course the guy had his dark moments like anyone — and could get into these occasional black funks where he sometimes refused to get out of bed for two days. But that’s what came with living life at such a manic, exalted level. Those episodes. they were maybe a quarterly event. He always pulled himself out of them. And he always joked afterwards that it was his body’s way of telling him to stop trying to be endlessly brilliant — as the guy was a straight A student in English and philosophy, on top of everything else. But outside of those occasional moments it was always “the art of the possible”. And part of the “everything is possible” was this baby. Our baby.

‘As upbeat and persuasive as Eric was it was me who said: ‘Not now.’ I was still very young, after all. Even though I was living with a man, and very much in love, and knew that Eric was the person I would travel through life with, I was also very cognizant of what having a child would mean. How it was a non-stop responsibility. How it would limit so much at a time in our lives when we should really be unencumbered. And how Paris would not be Paris with a baby.

‘So, very rationally and with, I must admit, little guilt whatsoever, I told Eric that it was best for us if we waited a few years — frankly, after I finished medical school — before starting a family. He was cool with that. I sense he was privately relieved — but also would have gone along with it all had I insisted on keeping it. Eric being Eric he took charge of everything. Found me a really lovely, sympathetic clinic in Boston where the termination took place. Booked us into a nice hotel for the weekend, so I could recover after the procedure. Was so supportive and loving throughout. Honestly, I got through that all so easily because, of course, Eric and I loved each other, and we were going to be together for all the decades to come. So, of course, I’d be pregnant again in a few years with Eric’s baby. Only this time the moment would be right.

‘Just thinking about that — only this time the moment would be right — when you’re young you are never really conscious of the way time will later on accelerate at such a ferocious speed. Just as you also think that you are invulnerable to that terrible underside of life which is dictated by the random, the happenstantial.

‘Anyway, the pregnancy was terminated in mid-September. Our sophomore year was another golden period — where we both continued to surpass ourselves academically, where Eric became fiction editor of The Open Field and I was promoted to poetry editor, where we both got into the Sorbonne on that junior year exchange program for the following September, and both did accelerated French to the point where we agreed to spend two hours a day talking with each other dans la langue de Moliиre — one of the few phrases I remember from back then.

‘Life was, in a word, splendid. Yes, Eric still had those “black dog” moments — and they had started creeping up on him every other week. But he always shook them off. Always kept going. Always amazed me with his resilience and his ability to constantly embrace life with both hands.

‘That Easter we were thinking of heading down to see some friends in Cambridge. At the last minute I got a bad stomach bug, and was up sick the night before we were due to leave. So we stayed put at our place in Orono. I started getting ill again and Eric said he’d run up to the pharmacy and get me something to curb the vomiting. We both had bicycles. Eric took his. Before he left he gave me a kiss and told me he loved me. Then he headed out — and never came back. After an hour I was panicked, but was so weak from being sick that I couldn’t get out of bed and go searching for him. Around two that afternoon the police came to my door. A woman social worker was with them. That’s when I knew. They told me that Eric had run a red light on his bicycle a block away from the pharmacy and had been knocked down by an oncoming truck. He’d been thrown clear of his bicycle and slammed into a lamppost. Death, they told me, was instantaneous. He probably felt and knew nothing. That’s when I started to collapse, to weep uncontrollably. Eric dead. It was beyond unthinkable. It was as if my entire future — all possibility of happiness — had just been permanently decimated.