Starting Over

by Dan Wakefield

  After his initial fumbling with the question, he spoke of the “challenge” of the field, tried honestly to take into account the financial attraction it had for him after years of playing the starving artist, how it was in fact related to his old love, the theatre, not merely, in the case of his own firm, in gross press-agentry for stars, but in the planning of long campaigns for top-notch serious Broadway productions, promotion of meaningful cultural events, fund-raising for a topflight symphony—oh, a rich variety of noble works and deeds. But as he spoke of these things his mind was far away, thinking of how he was able to continue the job as long as he did, after the novelty of new work and a good income had worn off, how he was able to not only keep plugging away but to strive for even greater rewards—and the explanation of that was even more inappropriate for the young ears of the students in his opening seminar, for the answer was inextricably tied to his affair and eventual marriage with Jessica.

  She was a model. Tall, of course, and tawny, sharp bones and big eyes; small chest, long slim legs that he recognized from his fantasies, from TV bath oil commercials, from New York Times Sunday Magazine hosiery ads. She seemed very bright and very vulnerable, unsure beneath the cool gloss of her beauty. He met her at a cocktail party and after two drinks, he mentioned, off-hand, as if it were something quite natural and matter-of-course, that he intended to marry her.

  “Oh?” she asked; lashes lifted in an interested, inquisitive way.

  They went to bed together later that evening, and didn’t really get up again for three days, except to make forays into Jessica’s kitchen for booze or yogurt or frozen steaks. The attraction was of a kind that is sometimes described as electric.

  “Something must be wrong,” she kept saying.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “It always is.”

  “But this,” he assured her, “is different.”

  She cried a great deal, especially when, a year after meeting, they were married. Because, she said, of being so happy. He asked, with increasing irritation, why being happy made her cry, and she said because it couldn’t last.

  Time proved her right: a little over four years, in which they moved here and there around Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights, tried her working and her staying home, tried shrinks and booze and pot and pets, second and third and forty-second honeymoons, summer houses and winter vacations, infidelity and urban renewal; tried everything but Children. And both of them despite benevolent advice from friends, balked at that—until they had worked things out for themselves they vowed not to bring any innocent parties into the act.

  On their fourth Christmas Potter insisted that they refuse the invitations of family and friends and just be together, the two of them; he had some Dickensian fantasy of the holiday bringing them together. Tight-lipped, she agreed, after making it clear how nice it would be to see her sister in Moline and her sister’s children and her alcoholic brother-in-law who sold for John Deere in the Quad Cities area. Potter mused on the warmth and comfort to be found in a big old-fashioned Christmas dinner at home, with the phone off the hook and carols on the hi-fi.

  Jessica was busy in the kitchen most of that Christmas morning; busy but silent When she served the dinner, Potter thought it would never end; she bore in the bird, then the trimmings—cranberries and sweet potatoes and creamed onions and succotash and homemade bread and buttered carrots and hominy grits—each dish laid down like an indictment against him. When the table was laid, laden, loaded down, she sat, primly, her face drained of color, her eyes alarmingly wide and calm, and said smoothly, “You wanted a Christmas dinner—here it is.”

  Potter had several creamed onions and then ran to the bathroom and vomited.

  “No appetite?” she asked, solicitously.

  They made up, then and many more times, but it was then, over the groaning holiday table, that he knew, for certain, it was over.

  But whatever criticism he could make of the time with Jessica, he could never complain that it was dull, and during it he worked with her in mind, with the two of them in mind, with the prospect of all that they might do and have, to urge him on, and he knew if it had not been for her his career in public relations would not have been as long or as productive or as lucrative.

  But that would have been—to say the least—as difficult to explain to a college seminar as it would have been inappropriate. So Potter kept his private life to himself and managed to get through the hour tossing out generalizations that he hoped were not too namby-pamby and anecdotes he hoped were not too irrelevant. When the time was up, though the day was unseasonably cool for September in Boston, Potter’s shirt was soaking wet.

  Potter discovered that teaching a class was in a way like making love. Sometimes he did it with great enthusiasm, artfully building up interest and getting a rising response of excitement that peaked with a mutual rapport between himself and the students. Sometimes he did it because it was expected of him, and he forced himself to go through the motions, mechanically, ending sooner than he should have, leaving both himself and the class feeling grouchy, disgruntled, unsatisfied.

  He felt pretty sure of himself in the PR seminar, and after his beers with Gafferty, he devised his own way of teaching the Communications sections. It was required that the classes read and study current periodicals—newspapers, magazines, the underground press, trade publications—and Potter picked a selection he felt comfortable with and interested in. It was also required that McLuhan’s book Understanding Media be read, and after that the individual instructor was allowed to “build up and out.” Gafferty did it with the Irish poets, and Potter struck on the notion of doing it with Shakespeare. He even got the idea from McLuhan, who wrote in Understanding Media that one could create “a fairly complete handbook for studying the extensions of man” by reading Shakespeare; he pointed out that in Othello Shakespeare was concerned with “the transforming powers of new media,” and that Troilus and Cressida is “almost completely devoted to both a psychic and social study of communication.”

  Eureka! Under the approving mantle of McLuhan himself, Potter devised a Communications course that included Othello, Troilus and Cressida, King Henry V. A production of Lear that he saw as a kid at the Booth in Washington had originally turned him on to the theatre, and after the performance, thrilled, he went to his father’s library and one by one took down the little blue volumes of the complete set of Shakespeare, devouring each with wonder and excitement. Reading the plays again, discussing them, reciting in class those lines, those rolling cadences, inspired his teaching and gave him new energy. He wanted to convey this richness to his students, to make them see, hear, and feel what was there; he wanted, indeed, to communicate.

  He liked the students. None were especially brilliant, or militant, and that was fine with Potter. For the most part they seemed pleasant, and bright enough. He enjoyed the realization that he was being paid to help them, to tell them what he knew and what understanding he had of the books and subjects they discussed; and, in such discussions, he found that he made new discoveries himself, that sometimes a student’s question or comment would open up an unexpected angle of viewing a thought or situation, and he found that such occasions brought him a quiet kind of pleasure.

  He soon learned that his office hours, his consultations with students, were not strictly limited to matters academic. Halligan, a tall, serious Vietnam veteran, invited Potter to have a beer with him, and with the second glass, confided that his girl was pressing pretty hard to get married.

  “She’s bought these dishes,” Halligan said.

  “Dishes?”

  “A whole set of this very expensive kind. More than regular people would ever use. You know, the kind that break easy.”

  “I think I know the kind.”

  “So before, we’d just been talking about getting married, but now that she’s got these dishes, she says we have to really get going on it, that’s what they’re for. To start your marriage.”

  “I take it you�
��re not so anxious to get married.”

  “Well, I think I love her, you know, and I know that we should probably—well, we’ll eventually have to get married, I guess, but—Jesus. I don’t know. The idea of having to cart all those dishes around, it makes me feel sort of closed in. Like you start accumulating all that stuff, and you can’t just take off or anything.”

  “Not easily,” Potter agreed.

  “I guess I hadn’t really thought about marriage. What it would really feel like.”

  “Well, I’m afraid I’m not a very good person to tell about marriage,” Potter said.

  “You’re divorced, you mean.”

  “How did you know?”

  Halligan shrugged. “Things get around. About faculty.”

  “Oh. Well, anyway, my own marriage just didn’t work, but it doesn’t mean it’s not right for other people.”

  “I guess you can’t tell until you do it.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  They didn’t resolve anything, nor did Potter wish to influence Halligan’s decision on matrimony, but it made him feel good, that the guy would want his advice, would regard him as someone to talk things over with.

  Potter felt he was getting along pretty well with the students, felt that in general they liked him, and he was surprised when Lester Harnack said he’d like to give him some advice about “student relations.” Harnack was a part-time instructor in Communications who had published a couple of poems during the Beat era, and was said to have once hitchhiked from New York City to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with Gregory Corso. Harnack had kept pace with the changing styles of the counter culture, and now lived in a communal house in Boston’s South End, a “transitional” neighborhood.

  “At least let your hair grow,” Harnack counselled Potter. “The way you dress—it creates a kind of barrier between you and the kids. I’m not just speaking of academic bullshit—I mean the girls. A lot of these girls really swing, and they’re looking for father figures. If you know what I mean.”

  Potter knew. He thanked Harnack, but said he thought he’d stick to his old-fashioned style, he was pretty much set in his ways. He was well aware that his Brooks Brothers garb was a kind of uniform—just as Harnack’s Wrangler pants and boots and buckskin shirts with fringe was another kind—but it was a matter of pride with Potter to stick to the style he’d grown up with even though it was no longer in fashion, in the spirit in which one might continue to wear the colors of some once-illustrious regiment that had since gone from glory.

  Besides that, Potter wasn’t interested in student seduction. Aside from disliking the cliché nature of it, the prospect of such involvements seemed messy and complicated, and Potter was trying to avoid that. He was waiting for some kind of clear-cut, mutually satisfying relationship.

  But he was getting tired of waiting.

  PART TWO

  1

  A woman friend of Potter in New York called to tell him she heard he had got a divorce and moved to Boston, and she wondered if he’d like to meet a nice available lady who was also recently divorced.

  “I assume,” Potter said, “that this lady is not only divorced, but that she has two children.”

  “How did you know that?” his friend asked.

  “A feeling,” Potter said. “Probably telepathic.”

  Potter knew because he had begun to suspect that in the great IBM machine of life, his mating card had been programmed in such a way that he was only allowed to meet a woman if she was divorced and had two children. He had nothing against divorced women with two children—some of them he had met were admirable human beings, attractive and intelligent, yet the fact that since he had started going out in his new life in Boston, except for the fragile Alison Farr, he had not met women of any other category, had begun to spook him a little.

  Sometimes things go that way. There was another time in Potter’s life, back in his early New York days, when every girl he met was in her third year of analysis. Not her first year or her fourth year, but her third year. During that phase, when he met a new girl and they had had enough drinks to get into the personal shit, he would look at her appraisingly and say, “I bet you’re in your third year of analysis,” and the girl would be amazed by his insight, wonder how she had given herself away, what unconscious clues he had picked up, but Potter would only smile, mysteriously.

  When you got into one of those trends there was no use going against it. Potter assured Marva he would call her friend.

  He nosed his newly bought secondhand Mustang convertible down the dark, winding streets of Cambridge reeking of High Karate cologne and cursing the goddamn thoughtless residents who didn’t have numbers on their houses. It was hard enough to find the right street, there were so many little odd ones that curled around—it was almost as bad as Greenwich Village, but with fewer lights and more trees. Then when you finally got the right street you’d be lucky to find a single visible number on a house, and Potter had to get out and go up to someone’s porch, straining his eyes to make out a faded goldchipped combination of numbers; and all the time worried that someone would think he was a prowler or student revolutionary or Peeping Tom and either call the police or simply shoot him down on the front lawn. Just getting out of New York City wasn’t any guarantee of safety, not anymore. You could just as well be clobbered in a riot in Harvard Square as mugged in Central Park.

  He was supposed to be looking for a green, two-story house, but it was hard to make out even the colors; in the moonless night, most everything looked grey. In the next block he found something faintly greenish, with a bright bulb lit on the porch, and figured that must be it. He cut off the motor and drew in a long, deep breath, bracing himself. He had broken another personal promise, another one of those “last things in the world he would ever do,” and that was go on a blind date. A blind date with a divorcée who had two children.

  But it was better than sitting at home watching television, drinking a continuous series of Scotch and sodas, and, with an incredible exertion of will, making himself put a frozen TV Mexican dinner in the oven, repeating the incantation that If You Drink You Have To Eat. It was one of the thin threads that he felt separated him from being a real alcoholic, and he strove mightily to cling to it. But there were times when, alone with a bottle and a TV movie he had seen six times before and never liked in the first place, it seemed it might be altogether easier and less painful to stick his own head in the oven rather than a frozen TV dinner.

  He got out of the car and looked up at the house. The woman and her children lived on the top of the two stories—they had the upper half of the box to themselves. He wondered what manner of lady he would find inside when he opened the door of this particular box—you could never tell from the advance descriptions. And he knew she was in the same suspension wondering no doubt what sort of character would be emerging from his own little box of a car, into her box of a house, hoping no doubt, against all the odds, he would be just the understanding fellow to want to share a box together with her, even with the two children thrown in. Or maybe she was sour on it all and wanted nothing more than a temporary diversion that would keep her own head out of the oven.

  Potter sighed and shrugged: Well, he told himself, there’s nothing like romance. He had promised himself he would not be disappointed; that he would expect nothing out of the ordinary in the way of looks. She had not after all been touted as Miss Massachusetts, or even a runner-up in the Cambridge preliminaries. And yet, though he had tried to fight down his particular fantasies, her name had conjured up, in spite of his rational protestations, something exotic.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m Renée Gillespie.”

  She was in fact, rather pretty; “striking” even would be an appropriate term. Good bone structure, large green eyes, a pretty mouth. Her fine black hair was pulled discreetly, stylishly back at the back of her head, with a gold clip. She wore a dark, handsomely embroidered blouse, and a long skirt. She was poised, but somewhat withdrawn, not
out of coldness, Potter felt, but a sense of vulnerability. She was, in looks and manner, altogether admirable.

  And Potter was so stricken with disappointment he could barely speak.

  In spite of all his intellectual preparedness, the fantasy that had sprouted out of the name “Renée Gillespie” had flowered in his imagination, blooming into some Alexandrian temptress, a French courtesan who had married an aged wealthy Jewish merchant who was killed in some international arms deal, but who in his will had provided her with the means to achieve her doctorate in Biology at Harvard.

  Though he had known, in fact, that her husband was a professor of mathematics who had left her for a graduate student and taken a position with a Washington think-tank.

  He was disappointed not only in her, the real Renée Gillespie, but even more in himself, for his stupid and adolescent fantasy that came easily from her name. If only her name had been Harriet Smith, or Mary Ellen Klein.

  “Won’t you come in?” she asked.

  “Oh—yes.”

  He smiled, trying to compose himself.

  The baby sitter hadn’t arrived yet, so Potter had to take off his coat and sit down. Renée offered him a glass of Dubonnet, apologizing that she had nothing else in the way of alcohol. Potter accepted; he hated the syrupy sweetish taste of Dubonnet, but he would have taken anything with alcohol in it.

  The children appeared in the hallway, staring at him.

  “Hi,” Potter said. He forced a grin.

  “Say hello to Mr. Potter,” Renée said brightly. “That’s Scott, and Teresa.”

  Scott, a skulking lad of around ten, glared hatefully at Potter. Teresa, a golden-haired little doll in bunny-print pajamas with feet, sucked avidly on her thumb.