Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

‘What? That I was a coward? That I allowed myself to be blackmailed into a life I didn’t want by a man who always needed to hobble me? That not a day goes by when I don’t think about Sarah and what should have been? That only now, all these years after the event, I’m finally getting back to writing, and only because my damnable father finally died a year ago? That I feel I’ve wasted so much of this opportunity that is life? Especially as, four years after Sarah, a young, quiet woman named Muriel came to work for us in the firm. I knew from the start that she was somewhat reserved and certainly didn’t share much of my bookish interests. But still she was relatively attractive and seemingly kind and genuinely interested in me. “Good wife material,” as my father put it. I think I married Muriel to please the bastard. But there was never any way I could actually please the bastard. The tragedy is, I secretly knew this truth about my father from the age of thirteen onwards. And now listen to me, sounding like a self-pitying—’

‘You are hardly self-pitying. You just made choices that were fueled by guilt and a sense of obligation. Just as I did.’

He looked directly at me.

‘I don’t have a marriage,’ he said. ‘I haven’t had one for years.’

He didn’t have to tell me more — or to underscore the subtext of that comment. I too was so conversant with this territory: the slow, quiet death of passion; the complete loss of urgency and desire; the sense of distance that accompanied occasional moments of intimacy; the intense loneliness that had installed itself on my side of the bed. and, no doubt, on his as well.

‘I know all about that,’ I heard myself telling Richard, realizing that another forbidden frontier had just been traversed.

Silence.

‘May I ask you something?’ I said.

‘Anything.’

‘Sarah. What happened to her?’

‘Within a week of me receiving that letter from her she was gone out of Brunswick. Off to Ann Arbor — as her friend did find her a job in the university library there. Divorced her husband who did get tenure at the college and is still with — in fact, married to — the Harvard professor. Around two years after she left I got a letter from her — formal, polite, somewhat friendly — telling me that she had met an academic at Michigan. He was a doctoral candidate in astrophysics, of all things. And she was seven months’ pregnant. So she did decide to take the risk again. As desperate as this news made me feel, another part of me was genuinely pleased for her. I didn’t hear from her again for another five years — when her first volume of published poetry arrived in the mail. No letter this time. Just the book from her publishers — New Directions, a very reputable house. On the dust jacket there was a biographical blurb, saying she lived in Ann Arbor with her husband and two children. So she’d become a mother twice over again.

‘Since then. we’ve dropped out of each other’s lives. But that’s not totally the truth, as I have bought her five subsequent books of poetry. I also know that she has had a professorship in the English department at Michigan for the past twenty years, and that her last volume was a finalist for the Pulitzer. She’s done remarkably well.’

Silence.

‘And she did love you,’ I said, ensuring that this statement didn’t sound like a question.

‘Yes, she did.’

I touched his hand, threading my fingers in his.

‘You’re loved now,’ I said.

Silence. He finally looked back up at me.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

Eight

NIGHT HAD SERIOUSLY fallen. It was cold outside. Cold and dark, with a low mist coming in off the nearby bay. As we stepped out onto the street I felt another jolt of doubt course through me: that reproaching voice telling me I was entering a true danger zone. Make that move and all will change. Change utterly.

What melodrama. What a good child I had always been. What a responsible young woman, an intensely responsible adult. Faithful, loyal, always there. And though I doubt that Dan has ever cheated on me, I’d come to see his isolation as a form of betrayal.

Will you listen to yourself. The ongoing endless, sad negotiation you conduct all the time. The blockades you are putting up now in the nanoseconds after you’ve just declared love for this man. A man who also knows a thing or two about lost love and self-entrapment. A man who is telling you what you are telling him: we are so right for each other. There is a chance here, if only we can both keep our nerve and.

‘Shall we head over to the water?’ he asked me. ‘Unless you want to try for the gallery?’

‘I want—’ I said.

In an instant we were in each other’s arms. Kissing passionately, wildly, grasping each other with such desire, such need. It was as if there had been, between us, a mutual detonation. A sudden eradication of all those years of longing and inhibition and frustration and emotional washout. How wonderful to feel a man’s hands on me again; a man who so clearly wanted me. As I so wanted him.

He broke away from our mad embrace for a moment, took my face in his hands, and whispered:

‘I’ve found you. I’ve actually found you.’

I felt myself tighten. But this tightness wasn’t due to any reticence or fear or some sort of ‘I wish he hadn’t said that’ reaction to what he had told me. On the contrary, that moment of internal tautness was just a direct, instantaneous confirmation of everything I was sensing; everything that was overwhelming me right now.

‘And I’ve found you,’ I whispered back, and we began to kiss again like a couple who’d been separated for an age — and had been envisaging this moment of passionate reunion for weeks, months, years.

‘We should go somewhere,’ I finally whispered.

‘Let’s get a room.’

‘Not the rooms we have at that hideous hotel.’

‘My thought entirely.’

‘Glad you’re a fellow romantic.’

‘A fellow romantic who has looked for you his entire life.’

Another long, wild kiss.

Then:

‘A cab is necessary, I think,’ he said.

Still holding me tightly with one arm he put up his hand and a taxi stopped. We climbed in the back.

‘Ninety Tremont,’ Richard told the driver. As soon as the cab took off we were kissing again wildly.

Richard’s hand had slid up the back of my turtleneck. His skin against my bare skin. I stifled a little groan of pleasure; the same pleasure that shot through me as I felt his hardness against my thigh, and the way he was grasping me with such barely controlled ardor. I wanted him in a way I had wanted nobody since.

The taxi pulled up in front of an entrance to a hotel. Within moments we were in a lobby. Chic. Modernist. Executive. Cool. My hand in his, Richard led me to the front desk. The clerk was a woman in her twenties — and studiously blasй.

‘We’d like a room,’ Richard said.

She gave us the once-over and I saw her take in the wedding rings on both our hands. Just as the way we were holding hands — and the way we had arrived off the street, without baggage, clearly in a hurry to get upstairs and slam the door on the world — must have told her: They may be married, but not to each other.

‘Do you have a reservation? she asked, all disinterested.

‘Nope,’ Richard said.

‘Then I’m afraid the only thing I can offer you is our King Executive Suite. But it’s seven hundred and ninety-nine dollars per night.’

I could see Richard try not to blanch at the price. Certainly I was appalled at the cost. It was almost one week’s salary for me.

‘We can go elsewhere. or even back to the airport hotel,’ I whispered in his ear.

Richard just kissed me, then reached into his pocket and brought out his wallet.