Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

From all accounts, he was the worst sort of Little Englander. But as a poet, the gent really knew how to cut to the heart of the matter and address all that big four-in-the-morning stuff we don’t want to contemplate. If you don’t mind a recommendation, start with ‘Going’ on page 28. Always know you have an escape hatch and a friend here. As you wrote me a few days ago, you’re not alone. Courage and all that. Love — Lucy

The book arrived on Thursday. Though hugely touched by the gesture, and the immense kindness of her note, given the nature of the week I didn’t have the reserves of stamina to tackle anything so clearly close to the emotional bone. But I still packed it in my overnight bag before leaving today. Downing my prescribed dose of Mirtazapine I opened the volume. As suggested by Lucy I turned to page 28 and.

GOING

There is an evening coming in

Across the fields, one never seen before

That lights no lamps.

Silken it seems at a distance, yet

When it is drawn up over the knees and breast

It brings no comfort.

Where has the tree gone, that locked

Earth to sky? What is under my hands

That I cannot feel?

What loads my hands down?

I read the poem once. I read it again. I sat even further up in bed and went through it a third time. So that’s where I’ve been for the past few years. The shroud of despair which I mistook for everyday vestments, and which I had pulled over myself, thinking it was my destiny to wear it. I had become convinced that sadness was a condition I simply had to bear. As much as I still ached for Richard — thinking back that, around this time last year, we were making love in that big hotel bed in Boston — I also knew, after reading that extraordinary Larkin poem, that Richard was very much someone who, given the prospect of happiness, decided the hair shirt of ongoing sorrow was one he simply had to wear. He broke both our hearts by making that choice. But what the Larkin poem told me — that the veil of sadness is always there to enshroud us, should we so choose it — was strangely comforting. Because it reminded me that, yes, I wasn’t alone. even if I also knew that the wake of grief trailing me wouldn’t dissipate for some time to come.

Then I felt the ether of grogginess drift over me. I switched off the light. With the blackout came, for the first time in days, that vanishing act from life’s harder realities. Sleep.

The pills worked wonders. They knocked me out every night and ensured that I stayed knocked out for at least seven hours. The ongoing sleep — coupled with (what Dr Bancroft called) the mild anti-depressive properties of Mirtazapine — seemed to let me get through the day without falling victim to the deeper recesses of my sadness.

But I was still sad. I was still not getting over it. Around a week after I’d started taking the pills, Dan surprised me by making an amorous move in bed one night (his pre-dawn schedule and my silent melancholy had, until now, kept us even more on our respective sides of the bed). I didn’t push him away. Pulling up my nightshirt, he began to make gruff, needy love to me. He was inside me within moments. He came around three minutes later. He rolled off me with a groan, then spread my legs and started trying to arouse me with his index finger. I closed my legs. I rolled over. I buried my head in the pillow.

‘You OK?’ he asked.

‘Fine,’ I whispered.

‘We don’t have to stop,’ he said, kissing the back of my neck.

‘I’m tired,’ I said, shifting myself further away from him.

‘OK,’ he said quietly. ‘Goodnight.’

And there we were, alone together again in bed.

The next evening he came on to me again — a little more tenderly this time, but still with that undercurrent of rushed gruffness that had characterized our lovemaking for years. I can’t say that I was attempting to augment things — as I remained quietly detached throughout. I felt bad about my dispassionateness, because my husband was trying to re-establish a connection so long lost. All I could think about was love found, love lost — and how I was back treading domestic water with a man with whom there had been no love for years.

After our ten minutes of sex, Dan kissed me goodnight and promptly fell asleep. It was still early — around eleven p.m. — and tomorrow was Sunday. Sally was out for the evening. The house was quiet. Disquietingly so. This was the future sound of silence that would become quotidian when Sally left for college next year. The deep silence of an uneasy marriage now devoid of the necessary clamor of children, with the left-behind couple wondering how to fill the void between them.

I went down to the living room, poured a glass of red wine, and found myself reaching for The Synonym Finder — omnipresent on the small desk I had set up in a corner of the room. As I sipped the wine, I turned the pages until I came to the word I was looking for: Unhappiness. There were — and I counted them — over one hundred and twenty-two words listed to denote the dissatisfaction that is such an intrinsic part of the human condition. Flipping back to the listings under the letter H I noted that Happiness only contained eighty-one synonyms. Could it be that we search for more words to describe our pain in life rather than the pleasures we can also experience? Would I, a few years from now, on the cusp of my half-century, be sitting here late one Saturday night, flipping through the thesaurus yet again and wondering why I had forced myself to stay put?

I closed my book of synonyms. I opened the front door, I stepped out on the porch. We were now deeper into October. The mercury was on a downward curve. So I could only stand outside, covered just in a robe, for a minute or so. But in that time I resolved to end my marriage just after Sally finished school in June.

I let only two people in on my plan. Lucy knew. And Lisa Schneider knew.

I called Dr Schneider the day after I made my decision to go. She’d already been contacted by Dr Bancroft, so she was expecting my call. Lisa — we were on a first-name basis onwards from our first session — was in her mid-fifties. A tall gangly woman who radiated quiet intelligence and decency. Though she had her clinical side, she was nonetheless always engaged in my story and the way I so wanted to change its depressing narrative. Her office was near the college. I began to see her once a week, every Wednesday at eight a.m., adjusting my work schedule to start at ten that morning in the hospital. As Dan was already at work by the time I drove off to Brunswick he never knew that I was now talking with a therapist about an exit strategy from our marriage — and about everything else that had been unsettling me for years.

‘Why do you think you are one of the underlying reasons for your husband’s emotional detachment?’

‘Because the entire marriage started under the shadow of loss. My loss of Eric. Dan knew how broken I was by his death.’

‘So Dan took on that part of you when he got involved with you. He understood instinctually that you did not have the same love for him that you had for Eric. Yet he wanted to be involved with you. Sounds like he made a decision to engage with your ambivalence towards him — an ambivalence that, as you’ve reported, was clearly there from the start.’

In a later session, when I described my ongoing lack of passion for my husband — and how I was going through the motions — Lisa said:

‘But didn’t you try to be passionate with him for years. despite the fact that you never really felt the love for Dan that you did for Eric?’

‘That still makes me guilty of being with someone for two decades whom I never should have been with, and wasting his time as well.’