Starting Over

by Dan Wakefield

  Potter wished she hadn’t put it so bluntly. He got up and went to the kitchen to put another ice cube in his glass. When he got back he sat down on the far end of the couch from where Marilyn was huddled up, knees drawn to her chin.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “I wish you wouldn’t put it like that.”

  “How would you put it?”

  Potter took a drink, and looked down at his knees. His pants needed pressing. “I wouldn’t put it so—harshly,” he said.

  “You mean honestly.”

  “Goddamn it,” he yelled, “I can’t help it! I wish I still wanted to. I like you. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  She spoke in the same calm monotone. “Is it always like this?”

  Potter closed his eyes. “Mostly,” he said. “Sooner or later.”

  “What happens?”

  Potter got up and splashed his glass full of Scotch. He felt she really wanted to know, and he wished he could really explain it—to himself as well as to her. He started walking slowly, aimlessly, around the room.

  “It’s hard to explain because it doesn’t make sense. I mean logically. I first saw you, and right away I was attracted. I wanted to fuck you. Then after doing it a couple of weeks, it’s as if the desire drains out. And yet you’re the same person.”

  “Maybe it’s the conquest. You just want the conquest.”

  “No, I swear. Not anymore. Maybe that was true in college, but not for a long time. I think I would know that, and if it was the thing, I’d tell you.”

  “OK.”

  “It’s more as if—well, maybe this doesn’t make sense, but let’s say it’s like I see a beautiful photograph that’s all in color. These beautiful colors. And the longer I took at it, admiring it, the more the colors fade away, and then there is no color in it at all. And no matter how much I concentrate, the colors won’t come back into it.”

  He sat back down, exhausted.

  “And the fading process doesn’t take very long.”

  “No. Sometimes just once.”

  “You mean after one fuck.”

  “Yes. Other times maybe it lasts a couple months.”

  “What about your wife?”

  “That was different.”

  “How?”

  “Well, the only way I can figure it is that we fought so much and broke up so much and started over so much it was like a new thing all the time. Chaos. Constant chaos.”

  “So why did it end?”

  “I stopped it.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t want to live that way.”

  Marilyn lit a cigarette. “Is this way any better?” she asked.

  “I’m trying to be honest. Don’t get nasty.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m doing the best I can.”

  Marilyn sighed. “We all are,” she said.

  After a while they both felt a kind of calm relief at having openly admitted their love affair was over. They were too exhausted and too experienced for any more anger or recriminations. They agreed they did not just want to walk out of each other’s life, that they did not want to go back to being alone. They agreed that they needed each other, if only for companionship.

  PART THREE

  1

  They became friends.

  “Allies,” Potter liked to put it, “because it’s like we’re in a war. Not against each other, but against the outside world.”

  As Allies, they arrived at certain pacts and understandings for mutual aid and comfort.

  If either of them knew of a party, he or she would invite the other. At the party they would be free to look for new prospective lovers, but they couldn’t just go off and leave with a new person. If they met someone they liked, they could make a date or accept a date for a future time and place. At the parties, and to the outside world, they would not discuss the status of their new personal relationship, but let people assume whatever they wanted. Experience had taught them both that it was better to be with a mate in order to catch or attract another mate than to be alone. Alone was undesirable, vulnerable; alone put you in a weakened position.

  Either of them could call the other at any time of the day or night, and if they were not otherwise occupied with another person, they would, if so desired, come and keep the other one company. It was a hell of a lot better than phoning up Dial-A-Prayer or the Suicide Prevention Bureau.

  They would have dinner together any time they had no other dates or invitations; they would alternate between Marilyn cooking at home and Potter taking them out to a restaurant.

  Marilyn suggested that after a while, if they both felt like it, they might even have a friendly fuck from time to time.

  “Entirely possible,” Potter agreed.

  They had formed their alliance just in time to be of aid to one another during the most prolonged and dangerous siege of all single people’s personal war to survive. The jingly, tinselled specter of it hung just a few days ahead of them, the annual psychic bombardment that every lonely person most feared and dreaded, from the first sign of turkey sales on through the incessant clanging of carols to the last bleary notes of Guy Lombardo playing “Auld Lang Syne”; the trinity of public trials called Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, that annual punishing gauntlet known gaily as—The Holidays.

  Thanksgiving. Silver-bright, and silent. All good citizens were gathered ’round the hearth, ready for the great symbolic bird, trussed and stuffed, to be laid legs up on the family table and ringed with bowls of candied yams, cranberry sauce, thick brown gravy, carrots-n-peas, steaming squash, hot gold rolls, bricks of butter, all of it. The nation was prepared for feasting—or pretending to be.

  Lone men and women—those who were not taken in like charity cases by benevolent families—huddled out of sight in their own apartments, curtains drawn, TVs tuned to anything that moved and made noise. Stealthily they sloshed rye or bourbon or Scotch into tall glasses, punctured cans of butterscotch Metrecal for the quickest necessary nourishment, or slipped frozen Mexican TV dinners into ovens for half-hearted soggy sustenance. All stores were locked and dimmed, and those loners who had not made previous arrangements for provisions of at least some simple snack that would get them through the day were doomed now to run this holiday’s gauntlet with whatever might be found in their cupboards—a long-forgotten tin of sardines, a can of Chef Boy-ar-dee Spanish rice, an abandoned box of stale Cheez-its; or perhaps, rooting in refrigerators, they might seize as gratefully as rats on some spoiled hunk of liederkranz, the carcass of a barbecued chicken not thrown away because of a few edible glimmers of white meat remaining to be gnawed, and for a side order, the limp savings of an oversoaked salad left from a week before. Such scraps now appeared as treasures, as royal fare to starving stomachs, for they could, taken together, provide enough sustenance to keep the lone prisoners of social scorn alive in their isolated cells until the next blessedly non-holyday allowed them to mingle anonymously with the rest of the world, as if they were a rightful part of it.

  But if there were not enough scraps to sustain them inside their own private lair, if their bellies pushed them beyond pride, if their ill-tended systems trembled toward an absolute need for food at any emotional cost, they had no choice but to walk the plank of the empty sidewalks (past the warm lighted windows where the righteous were stuffing themselves with stuffing) to the most degrading and torturous punishment society saved for those who lived alone. Heads bowed in shame and the hope of avoiding recognition, they had to enter one of those plateglass (the better for others to watch them squirm), strobe-lit dungeons of the human heart, whose windows displayed, with a wicked pretense of jollity, cut-rate imitations of the Great Feast: “Special! Turkey Dinner With All The Trimmins! $1.85.”

  The victims carried their plastic trays laden with plastic imitations of food that mocked the real feast—gristly gravy over watered potatoes and razor cuts of some failure of a fowl that seemed to be bleeding the congealed blood of cranberry. The
y carried it alone to a lone table to bolt it down, hoping no one would know they were reduced to this un-holyday indignity. Their eyes were kept glued on the gluey grub before them. There wasn’t even a newspaper for distraction because papers didn’t appear on holidays, leaving the paper-less loner to suspect that all printers and reporters and editors and vendors were safe and happy in their glow of a home, kindled by the warmth of their kin, while only the outcasts, the derelicts, the failed family-less futile loners were condemned to such places on days like this. No wonder there were so many suicides on holidays. Better, they figured, to stick your own head in the oven for roasting than to sit before the world an acknowledged nonentity eating your holiday meal with all the trimmings in the lit fishbowl of social infamy, displayed like a punished pilgrim in the public stocks.

  Potter and Marilyn had been spared the more medieval tortures of the occasion by an invitation to spend Thanksgiving at the Bertelsens’. Marva called Potter to invite him, and she added, “Marilyn, too—that is, if you two are still an item.”

  “Who said we weren’t?” Potter snapped.

  “Why—no one, Phil. No one at all. It’s just that I haven’t heard from either of you in a while, and I didn’t know—how things were.”

  “Well, things are just fine.”

  “Gee, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “You didn’t upset me. I’m not upset in the least.”

  He tried to lower his voice, steady it, not give away any more than he already had. Marva’s sixth sense for sniffing out other people’s personal problems had somehow picked up the scent of some change in his relationship with Marilyn, and he had no doubt helped confirm her suspicions by his irritable reaction.

  “This is very nice of you, Marva. I’m sure we’d both love to come.”

  “Wonderful. We’ll look for you around noon. Dinner will be three or four.”

  “Fine.”

  “It’s just a family thing, mainly—the kids and us, and Max’s father’s coming up. Maybe a few others who don’t have anywhere to go.”

  “Like me and Marilyn?”

  “My, but we’re sensitive today!”

  “Sorry, Marva. Listen, it sounds swell. Be seeing you Thursday.”

  Potter picked up Marilyn a little after eleven. He hadn’t eaten breakfast and thought he might have some toast and coffee at her place, but Marilyn had mixed a batch of martinis, and he didn’t want to turn one down after she’d gone to the trouble. Alcohol, he rationalized, had calories, therefore it must have food value. Martinis were no doubt a nourishing breakfast.

  They each had two, and arrived at the Bertelsens’ with a fine glow.

  The Bertelsen kids, eleven-year-old George and nine-year-old Daphne, rushed to the door and started tugging at Potter and Marilyn’s coats, vying for the honor of carrying them to the bedroom.

  “They’re all wound up,” Marva explained, “because of Thanksgiving.”

  “Of course,” Marilyn smiled.

  Potter nodded his own understanding, as the kids’ yelping pierced to his brain.

  Max, calm and gracious as always, was in the living room pouring champagne for the guests already assembled. There was his aged father, a bony little man who was Harvard Law School, Class of ’13; Phyllis Merton, a fortyish woman who had recently lost her husband to a teenage hair stylist; Phyllis’s daughter Lucille, who was in her freshman year at Goddard and evidently hating every minute of it, to judge by the doomed expression she wore; Seth Ramikanandra, an economist from New Delhi who was studying at the Harvard Business School; and Raymond Cloudweather, a genuine American Indian on scholarship at Brandeis.

  Potter was impressed, as always, by Marva’s ability to assemble just the right crowd for the right occasion. She would never have brought this group together for a cocktail party honoring some literary or academic figure, or to raise support for a political candidate. Yet in an odd way it was just right for Thanksgiving, perfectly fitting that particular holiday’s mystique, which called for a huddling together of stray souls who somehow have survived their circumstances thus far, and need to be stuffed and reassured before being sent on their way again out in the cold. The divorced lady and the Indian-Indian were pretty standard staples at such gatherings, but the American Indian was a real plum, a coup for Marva. You could always dig up sad divorced ladies with depressed daughters, and in the Cambridge-Boston milieu Indians from India were a dime a dozen, almost interchangeable as far as Potter could tell, with their gleaming little teeth and shiny bronze skin, their immaculate Western attire and clipped English accents, speaking inevitably of weighty world matters, as if participating in some endless, marathon version of Meet The Press. But a real American Indian—that was hard to find, and the demand was overwhelming. Now that every serious intellectual household had its copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the trapping of a real Sioux or Pawnee descendant as a dinner guest was a real achievement, especially on Thanksgiving. The irony of it all, the attempt to make social reparation—it was perfect.

  Cloudweather seemed, like the few other American Indians Potter had chanced to meet, more inscrutable than any Oriental. Silent and contained, he answered questions politely, monosyllabically, his expression set and rarely altering. He sat stiff and upright, sipping a glass of apple juice. He had refused champagne, and Potter wondered if he thought of it as “firewater.” Potter was then ashamed of himself, and tried to strike up a conversation with Cloud-weather, hoping to put him at ease.

  “How do you like Brandeis?” Potter asked him.

  “Very well,” he replied.

  Phyllis Merton, grasping at this straw, turned to her glum daughter with feigned brightness and said, “Brandeis. You thought of going there. Didn’t you, Lucille?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Maybe I’m thinking of Barnard. I know there was one that started with a ‘B.’ That you were thinking of applying to.”

  Lucille shrugged.

  “Maybe it was BU,” Marilyn offered.

  “That starts with a ‘B’ all right,” Potter said. He swilled down the remains of his champagne, feeling the need for harder stuff. Marilyn gave him a sharp poke in the ribs with her elbow, a signal to behave.

  “How’s your teaching going, Phil?” Max Bertelsen asked.

  “Oh, just fine,” Potter said.

  Ramikanandra turned toward him with an expression of polite interest, and asked, “At where are you a professor, sir? Harvard or MIT?”

  “I’m not a professor, I’m an instructor,” Potter said. “I teach at Gilpen Junior College.”

  “So? I fear, from my ignorance, it is not an institution with which I am familiar.”

  “It is one of many institutions of higher learning that exist in the greater Boston area besides Harvard and MIT.”

  “Doubtless, I’m sure,” said Ramikanandra with a broad smile of condescension. Potter itched to put the little foreign bastard in his place, but luckily Max’s father cut in. “Anyone mind if I go turn on the game?” he yelled at the room in general.

  “Of course not, Father,” Max said. “Anyone who wants can go watch the game—we won’t be eating for a couple of hours. TV’s in the library.”

  “Oh!” Phyllis Merton said. “Is there a game on? What game is on?”

  Max’s father looked at her as if she were insane. “There’s always a game on Thanksgiving Day,” he said. “The Thanksgiving Day Game.”

  “Of course,” said Phyllis, “the Thanksgiving Day game. I’ve heard of that one.”

  Marilyn finished off her champagne and whispered quietly but fiercely in Potter’s ear, “Get me a real drink, for godsake.”

  Potter got up, excused himself, and went to the kitchen. Marva was fussing around, and, from the looks of things, getting in the way of the cook. The kids were there too, peeking into pans, sticking fingers into pots. Potter poured himself a giant Scotch, and got a glass of gin and ice for Marilyn. He couldn’t find any vermouth, so he just dropped an olive in, to give it the
respectable look of a martini.

  When Potter returned to the living room, Ramikanandra was discoursing on the Gold Standard in his sing-song, bright-toothed monotone, and Potter slipped off to the den to catch a bit of the Thanksgiving Day Game. Max’s ancient father was waving his fist in excitement. He turned to Potter and told him the Packers were leading the Lions 7–3. It turned out Max’s dad was a big Packers fan.

  “That Lombardi, he’s a real man. One of the last real men. Should have gone into politics. But look at that ball-club of his.”

  Potter was somewhat confused, since Lombardi had died the past August, and had left Green Bay to coach at Washington the year before that; but he figured the old man merely meant that the Packer club was still part of Lombardi’s heritage.

  “Look at that Hornung, will ya!” the elder Bertelsen croaked with delight. “Look at ’im go!”

  Potter moved closer to the screen, wondering exactly what the old chap was looking at. Hornung had retired some years ago. Perhaps they were showing a re-run.

  “But they better watch out for the Lions’ Bobby Layne—oh, he’s a sly one!”

  Potter finally realized that Max’s old man was watching the game that was being played live that day, but inserting coaches and players of the past; he had them on the right teams, but in the wrong era. Mr. Bertelsen was about a decade out of synch.

  “Send out Don Hutson for a long one!” the octogenarian urged, thus plunging back another decade.

  Potter edged his way from the room and into the kitchen for a stiffer drink.

  By the time the party was seated around the groaning holiday table, Potter and Marilyn were well-sloshed, but the booze had not made them any merrier. Marilyn reported privately to Potter she was suffering a pounding headache over her left eye. Potter, wishing he had had toast instead of martinis for breakfast, felt an overall nausea, and had passed from human hunger to a savage starvation.

  Just when the assembled revelers were about to dig in, little Daphne Bertelsen banged her fork on her plate and cried, “No, nobody can eat yet!”