Starting Over

by Dan Wakefield

  He got a steak knife to cut the heavy cord of the outer wrappings, and, sitting on the floor, tore open the box and ripped through its contents in a kind of controlled frenzy, wanting to get it over with. There was a wide, striped tie of a style he would never wear. A new Norelco razor with a note that said “Try it.” They knew he always used a double-edged blade razor. A desk set with a barometer inlaid in it. A barometer. Now he could tell if a hurricane was coming.

  He stacked the gifts in a pile, and put them in an empty bureau drawer in his bedroom. He wadded up the bright wrapping paper, stuffed it into the cardboard box, and put the box outside by the garbage can. That part was over.

  He poured a Scotch over ice, lit a cigarette, and made the call.

  Potter thanked his parents for the gifts. They kidded about the electric razor. His father said he shouldn’t be so old-fashioned. Potter promised to try it.

  His father thanked him for the leather comb and brush set.

  His mother thanked him for the elegant cologne, and the handsome appointment calendar.

  They both thanked him for the box of brandied apricots sent from a gourmet store in Cambridge.

  Potter assured them he was having Christmas dinner that afternoon with a nice family.

  His mother said he ought to call his sister, and he assured her he would, as soon as he hung up.

  As soon as he hung up, he made a new drink. He was glad they hadn’t asked about Jessica. He was glad that they weren’t the kind of parents who focussed all their emotions on him, tried to live their lives through him. They had their own lives. His father, a long-time State Department man, was now a Washington consultant to a large manufacturing firm with many overseas outlets. His mother was as socially active as ever, engrossed in benefit balls and worthy causes, garden parties and afternoon teas. When Potter went into the theatre and vowed it would be his career, his father did not protest, but rather lost interest in him. His mother was excited for a while by the possibility of the glamour that might ensue, but when it became obvious that such glory was not to be, she too lost interest. Besides, they both had Sunny, his sister, who had turned out more as they had hoped and expected. Sunny, who was four years younger than Potter but always seemed like his older sister to him, had married a brilliant Philadelphia lawyer and was the mother of three children. That took a lot of the pressure off Potter.

  He loved his sister, but he didn’t want to call her. Her husband thought Potter a ne’er-do-well and Potter in turn thought him an insufferable snob, but that was not the real issue with his sister. Sunny had believed in his theatre dream, and when he gave it up she was disillusioned, disappointed in him, in a way that no amount of pretense could cover over. Seeing one another made both of them sad, and so they rarely did. Each Christmas, she sent the standard picture of the growing kids; he in turn sent them presents and a United Nations Christmas card.

  Those exchanges made, he didn’t see the need to call.

  He had done his Christmas duties. It was almost noon.

  Potter packed a small suitcase with his toilet gear, a bottle of wine, a bottle of Scotch, a fresh shirt, socks and shorts, a brand new crossword puzzle magazine, paperback copies of the three James Bond books he had not yet read, a pack of playing cards, a pair of dice, a pound of corned beef and two dill pickles, a half-dozen onion rolls, a frozen Sara Lee cheesecake, and an LP album of Great Moments in Sports.

  He put on his overcoat and a heavy scarf, tossed the packed suitcase in the back seat of his car, gunned the motor, and set off to spend his Christmas.

  He did not know a soul in Maine, and had no intention of going there. When he faced the dilemma of being alone on the big day, he recalled a friend in New York, a bachelor who proposed that all single people could solve the Christmas dilemma by going to the apartments of other single people in different cities; that way when someone asked what you did for Christmas, you could say “Oh, I went to Denver,” while your friend in Denver could say he went to New York. Once in the apartment in the different city you could simply close the door, watch TV, or do whatever you wanted. No one would know, and it would sound as if you’d had a glamorous out-of-town holiday trip.

  But Potter didn’t want to spend the money to actually leave the city, so he’d asked Marilyn to leave him the key to her apartment.

  There, behind locked doors and closed curtains, he spent the afternoon and evening of Christmas drinking, eating corned beef sandwiches and slices of Sara Lee cheesecake, doing crossword puzzles, playing solitaire, throwing dice, reading James Bond, listening to Great Moments in Sports, and successfully preventing any sight or sound of Christmas from creeping into his consciousness. A little after midnight, stuffed and soused, he sprawled across the bed. Like the marathon runner who falls across the finish line, he was proud of his accomplishment, deeply relieved, and totally exhausted. He would tell everyone he spent Christmas in Maine.

  Potter had a shaker of martinis waiting for Marilyn when she got home from the Christmas visit with her mother, and she bolted the first one down like a soft drink.

  “Trip was that bad, huh?” Potter asked.

  “I don’t even want to talk about it yet. Tell me about yourself, or someone else. Anything else.”

  Potter filled her in on the scene with Marva, saying he was sorry now that it happened and yet in a way he figured it was bound to come, sooner or later, the way Marva kept nosing into everything.

  “She means well,” Marilyn said. “I mean, after all, she’s how we met. She’s always taking in strays and fixing people up.”

  “Yeah, but then she wants to know every intimate detail about their relationship, as if that’s her price for getting them together in the first place.”

  “Listen, there’s worse things.”

  “I guess,” Potter said.

  Marilyn didn’t feel up to cooking so they went to Felicia’s, and after some wine and a soothing lasagna, Marilyn felt more relaxed and was able to talk about her trip.

  “My mother wasn’t so lonely after all,” she reported.

  “Hey, that’s great. Isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. I suppose. It was sort of depressing, though. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She has to be in a wheelchair, but she has this boyfriend, two trailers down from her, and evidently they’re having a torrid love affair.”

  “Well, that’s encouraging. For all of us, I mean. How old is she?”

  “I’m not really sure. She says she’s sixty-three, but I know that’s a lie for the benefit of the boyfriend, I guess, although I’m sure he must be in his seventies. There’s another old gal after him, too—it’s a regular triangle. Mother was all upset because he’d taken the other old lady to church the Sunday before, but she evidently is winning because he took her and me to Christmas dinner.”

  “So, what’s wrong with all that?”

  “Just that it’s the same—like it’s the same crap you and I go through now, except it’s done in wheelchairs in Florida, in trailer camps. I could picture you and me there in thirty years, hobbling and wheeling along in and out of bedrooms, getting pissed off because our lover went to church with a rival Senior Citizen.”

  “Jesus,” Potter said, “I guess it never ends.”

  “Evidently not. As long as you can breathe and propel yourself from one bedroom to another.”

  Potter and Marilyn decided to go formal on New Year’s Eve. He bought a ruffled shirt to go with his old tux, and she revitalized a long, green velvet gown she had worn for somebody’s wedding. Though neither of the places they were invited required formal dress, they both agreed that getting all decked out would help lift their morale. Potter cited the precedent of those nineteenth-century British officers dressing in their finest white uniforms for cocktails in some Godforsaken outpost of empire. Chins up, stiff upper lips, all that sort of thing. Marilyn thought it a fine idea, and added to her outfit a pair of huge, dangling earrings that looked like Christmas tree baubles. Potter bought a bottle of some bargain do
mestic champagne for just him and Marilyn to begin the evening on, and she made up a batch of fancy hors d’oeuvres featuring cream cheese and caviar. Sitting on her couch, they grinned and clicked glasses.

  “Here’s to the New Year,” Marilyn said, “in which both of us will find fulfillment beyond our wildest dreams.”

  “Nothing can go wrong,” Potter said.

  They giggled, and drank.

  To further insure their having a good time while ushering in the New Year, Marilyn brought out a tiny white round pill for each of them.

  “What is it?” Potter asked.

  “It’s the latest thing Dr. Shamleigh prescribed. To make me feel better.”

  “I mean what’s it called?”

  “Ritalin. It’s an upper.”

  “That’s a new one on me. There used to be a lot of Dex around in New York, PR people, show people. But I kind of got off it.”

  “It’s hard to get now. They just passed some kind of law making it harder to get any kind of amphetamine.”

  “What’s in this stuff, then?”

  “God knows. All I know is, it’s supposed to be the latest thing.”

  “The latest thing in uppers.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do they make you feel?”

  “Nervous,” Marilyn said, “but nice.”

  “Anything with ‘nice’ in it, I’ll try.”

  They each took a pill, and washed it down with champagne.

  There was only punch at Dean Hardy’s party. Potter was pissed off that there wasn’t any real, untainted liquor. A hell of a note for New Year’s Eve. Marilyn made him eat a lot of cheese fondue, even though he whispered to her he didn’t like the stuff.

  “It’ll line your stomach,” she hissed back forcefully. “Just eat it.”

  So Potter downed the runny goo trying to think positively: I am lining my stomach.

  The party itself was—desultory. Mostly faculty members who had nowhere else to go. None of the Cambridge-Boston luminaries, not even the grunting Harvard history professor. Guy Hardy kept saying he was sure the Bertelsens would be there later on. Potter wondered if they might stay away to avoid a confrontation with him and Marva.

  Communications Chairman Don R. Sample was there, in his ubiquitous blue serge suit, casting his arid aura over everything. Potter spoke but tried to avoid getting entangled in conversation with him. He chatted for a while with Monica Thistlewaite, a large round lady who worked as a secretary in Admissions. She was of indeterminate age, though surely older than the sort of Alice-in-Wonderland outfits she always wore, with hair ribbons and fuzzy sweaters and plaid jumpers. She was friendly in a desperate sort of way that Potter found both appealing and frightening.

  “The punch doesn’t have much punch,” she said.

  “I’m afraid not. And tonight’s the time it’s most needed.”

  “It’s always needed,” Monica said, then gave a high, wild kind of giggle. Potter smiled. It was New Year’s Eve all right; everyone on the edge of cracking.

  The highlight of the occasion was Harriet Hardy spilling a meticulously arranged bowl of fruit salad. Harriet was obviously smashed, though it couldn’t have been from the innocuous punch, pinkishly sweet and laden with bobbing strawberries.

  Potter joined a few other gentlemen who had fallen to their knees in a gallant attempt to retrieve the pieces of fruit that had flown about the room, splaying over the carpet in what seemed to Potter marvelous abstract designs. He found himself grinning as he pushed himself to and fro on his knees, plucking stray chunks of grapefruit from the rug.

  The Ritalin was working.

  Harriet’s condition made it even more delicate a bit of diplomacy for Potter to explain that they had to leave and go on to the party of a friend of Marilyn’s who lived out in Lexington.

  “It’s not even time to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne,’” Harriet protested when Potter said they had to be getting on, much as they wanted to stay.

  “It’s not New Year’s Eve if you don’t sing it,” Harriet insisted.

  Potter proposed they sing it right then. He could see no other way out.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Marilyn whispered.

  “Should old acquaintance be forgot …”

  Potter started, but no one joined him. Harriet began to cry. “It’s too early,” she sobbed.

  “I’m sorry,” Potter said.

  Guy Hardy came to the rescue with bluff gregariousness, helping lead Potter and Marilyn to their coats, trying to avoid another crisis, holding Potter hard on the elbow, squeezing it in knowing camaraderie, wishing him a fine and prosperous New Year.

  Walking down the block to the car, Potter and Marilyn heard the first isolated blasts of holiday horns.

  “Oh, God,” Marilyn sighed, “it’s beginning.”

  “Courage,” said Potter.

  The car was like a freezing compartment. The fan that would eventually warm them blew arctic air in their faces when Potter turned the engine.

  Marilyn’s teeth started chattering. “Fuck,” she said.

  “Courage.”

  “Where the hell did you get all this sudden courage?”

  “If I had to make a wild guess, I’d say it just might be your Ritalin.”

  “Yeah. That helps.”

  Potter had been determined to drive, in order to practice navigating the Boston suburbs, but he hadn’t yet mastered their intertwining mysteries. He got lost on the way to Lexington, and couldn’t find a gas station open. Finally he came to a streetcorner phonebooth, and Marilyn, shivering and cursing under her breath, called her friend to get further directions.

  They finally got to the party a little past eleven-thirty.

  At least it was warm inside, and there was real booze. There were crêpe paper streamers of many hues, and bright red paper bells. In the living room a monster-sized TV showed Guy Lombardo emanating from his traditional stand at the Waldorf Astoria. The dining room had been cleared of furniture, and darkened for dancing, with Frank Sinatra crooning from a stereo. Potter smiled at everyone, and got a huge tumbler of Scotch for himself, and gin for Marilyn.

  Couples gathered around the television to laugh at the couples shown dancing to Guy Lombardo in the Waldorf ballroom. It seemed to Potter that if the cameras were reversed, the couples at the Waldorf might as justifiably turn and laugh at the couples in this suburban living room who were laughing at them.

  The great moment came. Midnight. The end of the year. Beginning of a new one. Potter looked around for Marilyn, and saw she was being expertly kissed by a tall, balding man of distinction. Potter shrugged, and started to sing, joining his voice with the others who weren’t still kissing.

  “… I’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet, for—”

  He felt a tap on his right shoulder.

  He turned and saw a blonde woman smiling at him. Her eyes were wide and glazed.

  “Happy New Year,” she said.

  Before Potter could return the greeting, the woman reached her hands up and clasped them behind his neck, her eyes closing as she moved her mouth onto his. Her tongue licked out and explored his teeth. After a moment, Potter pulled away and looked at the woman, to make sure whether he had ever seen her before. Maybe she was some long lost girl of his youth whom fate had catapulted into his arms as a special treat for this New Year’s Eve.

  “Hi,” she said.

  He had never seen her in his life.

  “Hello. I’m Phil Potter.”

  She shook his hand. “Let’s dance, Phil.”

  She led him into the darkened dining room. The host had rigged up a kind of homemade light show for the dancing room, and balls of different colors floated across the walls. Potter and the woman clasped one another and began tilting to the music, not really dancing, just swaying in place. Potter had a full-fledged erection. He nibbled at the lady’s ear lobe, and said, “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “I didn’t say it.”

  “Is it a secret?”

  “It’
s Carol.”

  “Carol.”

  She pressed into him harder, swaying, and whisper-singing along with the music, “I get along without you verree well …”

  Potter felt he had been transported back to his college fraternity game room. Dancing to Sinatra and having a hard-on. And he was thirty-four years old. He had thought it would be different. He didn’t know how or why it should be, he had just assumed it. As in so many cases, he was wrong.

  He went to get himself and Carol another drink, and they sat down together on a velvet love seat in the dancing room. Potter noticed Marilyn drift in with the balding man of distinction. He exchanged winks with her, through a green ball of color.

  Carol rubbed her hand along his leg.

  “I like you, Carol.”

  “I can tell,” she said, running her fingers lightly over the top of his taut prick.

  “Where do you live?” he asked her.

  “Where do you live?”

  “I’m not coy,” he said. “I live at Thirty-four Ellery Street, Cambridge. Ground floor, front apartment.”

  “Write it down for me, will you?”

  “Sure. But where do you live?”

  “Out in the sticks,” she said.

  “Which sticks?”

  “Suburban sticks.”

  “There’s a lot of them.”

  “They’re pretty much the same.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that.”

  “You don’t? Well, I’ll tell you sometime, Phil.”

  “When?”

  “Wednesday. Any Wednesday.”

  “Only Wednesday?”

  “What’s wrong with Wednesday?”

  “Nothing. Jesus. Wednesday is a fine time.”

  “Write it down for me. Where you live. Now, before we forget.”

  Potter went to the bathroom, and wrote down his name, address and phone number on the back of an old parking lot stub. He handed it to her and she stuck it down her cleavage, without looking at it. Just like in an old movie.

  They danced again, and she undulated against him. He wondered if he could maneuver her up to some empty bedroom. But he didn’t know the house, or the host and hostess, and he dismissed it as too dangerous. He didn’t want a scene. He wondered how Marilyn was doing with her man of distinction. They weren’t in the dancing room anymore. Potter felt a light tap on his shoulder, like the gesture of someone who wanted to cut in.