Дуглас Кеннеди: Five Days

‘Fine,’ I said, hearing the enforced crispness in my voice.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least the little girl’s news was good.’

‘Yes, there’s that.’

‘All in a day’s work, eh?’

‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘All in a day’s work.’

Two

PEMAQUID POINT. A short stretch of sand — no more than a quarter-mile long — facing the open waters of the Atlantic. The ‘point’ is more of a cove: rocky, rugged, fringed on either side by vacation homes that are simple, but clearly upscale. Ostentation is never liked in this corner of Maine — so even those ‘from away’ (as anyone not born in the state is called) know better than to throw up the sort of garish shows of money that seem to be accepted elsewhere.

In Maine so much is kept out of sight.

I had the beach to myself. It was three-eighteen in the afternoon. A perfect October day. A hard blue sky. A hint of impending chill in the air. The light — already beginning to decrease wattage at this hour — still luminous. Maine. I’ve lived here all my life. Born here. Raised here. Educated here. Married here. All forty-two years I’ve had to date rooted in this one spot. How did that happen? How did I allow myself to stand so still? And why have so many people I know also talked themselves into limited horizons?

Maine. I come down to this point all the time. It’s a refuge for me. Especially as it reminds me of the fact that I am surrounded by a natural beauty that never ceases to humble me. Then there is the sea. When I was in a book group we worked our way through Moby-Dick two years ago. A retired navy woman named Krystal Orr wondered out loud why so many writers seemed to be drawn to the sea as a metaphor for so much to do with life. I heard myself saying: ‘Maybe it’s because, when you’re by the sea, life doesn’t seem so limited. You’re looking out at infinite possibilities.’ To which Krystal added: ‘And the biggest possibility of them all is the possibility of escape.’

Was that woman reading my mind? Isn’t that what I was always thinking as I came out here and faced the Atlantic — the fact that there is a world beyond the one behind me now? When I looked out at the water my back was turned to all that was my life. I could dwell in the illusion of elsewhere.

But then there was the distinct bing of my cellphone, bringing me back to the here-and-now, telling me that someone had just sent me a text.

Immediately I was scrambling in my bag for my phone, as I was certain that the text was from my son Ben.

Ben is nineteen; a sophomore at the University of Maine in Farmington. He’s majoring in visual art there — a fact that drives my husband Dan just a little crazy. They’ve never been able to share much. We’re all products of the forces that shaped us, aren’t we? Dan was raised poor in Aroostook County; the son of a part-time lumberman who drank too much and never really knew how to spell the word r-e-s-p-o-n-s-i-b-i-l-i-t-y. But he also loved his son, even if he often thought nothing of lashing out at him while tanked. Dan grew up both adoring and fearing his dad — and always trying to be the tough outdoorsman that his father considered himself to be. The fact that Dan himself rarely touches alcohol — and looks askance at me if I dare to have a second glass of wine — speaks volumes about the lasting trauma of his dad’s considerable drink-fueled furies. He privately knows his own father was a weak, cowardly little man who, like all bullies, used brutality to mask his own self-loathing. As such, I’ve tried to talk to Dan on many occasions about the fact that he is a much better person than his father — and that he should extend his innate decency to his son, whatever about their polar differences. It’s not as if Dan is in any way cruel or hostile towards Ben. He shows only nominal interest in him, and refuses to explain to me why he treats his only son as a stranger.

Only recently, after Ben was written up in the Portland Phoenix as a young artist to watch — on the basis of a collage he had exhibited at the Portland Museum of Art, which turned ‘the deconstructed remnants’ of lobster pots into ‘a chilling vision of modern incarceration’ (or, at least, that’s what the critic in the Phoenix called it), Dan asked me if I thought Ben was, in any way, ‘disturbed’? I tried to mask my horror at this question, instead asking: ‘What on earth makes you think that?’

‘Well, just look at that damn collage which all those smarty-pants down in Portland think is so fantastic.’

‘People respond to the piece because it is provocative, and uses something indigenous to Maine — a lobster pot — as a way of—’

‘“Indigenous”,’ Dan said with a decided sneer. ‘You and your big words again.’

‘Why are you being so hurtful?’

‘I’m just voicing an opinion. But go on and tell me I’m shooting my mouth off again. And this is the reason I’m still out of work twenty-one months after—’

‘Unless you were keeping something from me, you didn’t lose your job for saying the sort of inappropriate things you’re saying now.’

‘So I’m also inappropriate, am I? Unlike our “brilliant” son. Maine’s next Picasso.’

Ever since he’d lost his job Dan had begun to increasingly display flashes of unkindness. Though an apology for this last harsh comment was immediately forthcoming (‘There I go again, and I really don’t know why you put up with me’) the effect was, yet again, corrosive. Even if these momentary lapses only arose twice a month, they were coupled with the way Dan was increasingly withdrawing into himself — and refusing to share any of the understandable anger he felt about being laid off. The result was that things just seemed askew at home. I can’t say ours was ever the most romantic or passionate of marriages (not that I had anything since my marriage to compare it to). But we had rubbed along for years in a reasonable, stable way. Until the lay-off that suddenly opened up a dark recess which seemed to grow larger with each ensuing month when Dan was stuck at home, wondering if his career would ever be resuscitated again.

What I sensed most unsettled Dan now about his son was the fact that he was, at the age of nineteen, already getting recognition for his work. To be chosen to exhibit in the Young Maine Artists show at the Portland Museum of Art, to be just one of two college students included in the exhibition, to have a critic call him innovative and a talent to watch. All right, I know my maternal pride is talking here. But still it’s quite an achievement. And Ben is such a thoughtful, considerate, and wonderfully quirky young man — and one who just wants his father’s love and approval. But Dan simply can’t see that. Instead, from hints dropped here and there, it’s clear that he’s quietly uncomfortable with the fact that the boy he always wrote off as different, weird, not the sort of son he expected, is very much coming into his own — and being publicly praised for that. I often tell myself that once Dan finds a good job again, all will be well. Just as I simultaneously think: If only an instant fix could change everything.

Bing.

More pips, informing me that this newly arrived text was demanding my attention. I now had the phone in my hand and was squinting at the screen, the sunlight blurring the message. Cupping my hand around it I could make out the following words:

Please call me now. Ben

Immediately I felt anxiety coursing everywhere within me. The same anxiety that now hits whenever Ben sends me one of these messages. My son is currently in a somewhat dark place. From the outside — if you just look objectively at the facts — it might seem like much ado about a silly romance. Nine months ago Ben met a young woman named Allison Fell. Like him she’s studying visual art at Farmington. Her father is a big-deal lawyer in Portland. They live in one of those big houses that hug the coast in Cape Elizabeth — the most exclusive suburb of the city. I gather that her parents were wildly disappointed when she didn’t get into a variety of ultra-prestigious colleges (‘I was never that into studying,’ she told me) and had to ‘make do’ with U Maine Farmington (which has actually become quite a respected liberal arts college, despite the State U tag). She’s relatively pretty and seriously bohemian; the sort of nineteen-year-old who dresses all the time in black, keeps her long nails also painted black, and wears her elbow-length black hair in an elaborate braid. I often think she targeted Ben because he was the most talented of the small group of young visual artists at Farmington and because he was so ‘cute and vulnerable’. For Ben, the fact that this very outgoing, very confident, very flamboyant, rather rich young woman wanted him. well, considering how in high school he was girlfriend-less and often considered himself ‘something of a freak’, he was just completely overwhelmed by Allison’s desire for him. Just as I’m pretty sure she also introduced him to the pleasures of sex.