Starting Over

by Dan Wakefield

  “Well,” he said, trying to smile, “actually, I’m thirty-four.”

  “Thirty-four!”

  She looked as if Potter had just confessed to being a transvestite—Communist—child-molester.

  “What’s so bad about thirty-four?” he asked, more offended than embarrassed now.

  “Well,” she said, “that is—getting on.”

  “Jesus. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” she said.

  “Thanks a lot. That’s very generous of you.”

  “Listen, you don’t have to get mad. It isn’t my fault either. That you’re thirty-four.”

  Potter knew anything he said would only make matters worse, so he drank and said nothing. In a little while the girl said she guessed she’d better go. Potter agreed. He sat by himself, drinking, the phrase “getting on” blinking in his brain.

  The next young girl he met, he lied about his age.

  He said he was thirty-two.

  Later he was angry at himself for lying, and for making it such a useless lie. Thirty-two wasn’t much better than thirty-four. If he was going to lie he might as well have said twenty-nine, but that seemed transparent to him, like Jack Benny’s joke of always saying he was thirty-nine. Besides, he couldn’t have borne the embarrassment of being caught trying to “pass.”

  He began to wonder if he “looked his age.” What did thirty-four look like, anyway? There were a few tell-tale grey hairs in the curly black; circles of dissipation under his eyes, but nothing on his face he would classify as an actual “wrinkle.” His waistline, which had held firmer than most men he knew in their thirties, was only recently beginning to show signs of spreading. Maybe he should diet. Or adopt a program of daily exercise. Shit. It was degrading, getting older, and he figured it could only get worse. He thought of those businessmen in New York who ordered hamburgers without the bun for lunch, trying to stave off the growing flab. He had always smiled to himself about that, thinking condescendingly that it was in some way a humiliating gesture, eating hamburgers without buns—like having a drink of soda without the Scotch. He should no doubt cut down on that, too, but he knew that would be much harder than foregoing hamburger buns. He had heard people talk of a “Drinking Man’s Diet.” Maybe he would look into that. Maybe he would have to.

  The depression about his age goaded him into more fucking, more indiscriminately, as if he had to get all he could while there still was time. The women were of all shapes and sizes and ages. All they had in common was that none of them were more than a one-night stand in Potter’s persistent quest for relief from himself.

  He tried, at least, to please them, since nothing seemed really to please himself, including orgasms. Discussions and stories and articles on Women’s Liberation had made him more conscious of the woman’s right to her own sexual pleasure and, if possible, fulfillment, and with that in mind he attempted to prolong his fucking until there was indication that the woman had come, in some way or other (the great vaginal-clitoral debate, and the widely varying views on it of the women he met, had left him utterly confused on the issue), or until he simply couldn’t continue any longer.

  But even this effort to please was often in vain. While pumping away in a sandy-haired beautician who had one glass eye and teeth that were smoke-stained a dull yellow, he noticed that the sounds coming from her did not seem to be moans of pleasure, but merely discomfort. He hurried himself to a climax, and afterward, the girl asked, “Are you through now?” in the flat, annoyed tone of a waitress who is anxious to clear off a table and get the customer on his way.

  It seemed, during this weird and debilitating period, that whenever Potter fucked he either took too long or he didn’t take long enough. When trying to please, he went down on a woman, she complained he hadn’t shaved close enough and his beard was scratching the sensitive skin of her inner thighs. Sucking a breast, he was told that his teeth hurt. Trying to go in from behind, he got the wrong hole. Trying a sixty-nine, his partner complained she couldn’t breathe. One girl criticized him for being too rough in bed, the next one groused that he was too damn gentle. One lady confided her fantasy was to be fucked by a man with a bag over his head. Potter complied, but he cut out small holes in order to see, and she whined in disappointment that the eye-holes ruined the whole thing.

  He seemed unable to do anything right, in bed or out. At a candlelight dinner with a drama student, he said with conviction that she looked quite beautiful, whereupon she banged down her fork and called him a sexist. He said he did not mean to offend her, and that he would not take it amiss if a woman told him he was handsome, or that he looked nice on a particular occasion. She said that was entirely different. He asked why, and she said he wouldn’t understand because he was a sexist. Another liberated young lady asked if she could take him out to dinner, because she was “into role reversal.” He thought that was swell, but he had expected that being into role reversal meant that after dinner she would take him back to her place and try to seduce him, but the girl explained that she wasn’t “into fucking” anymore. He said in that case she wasn’t really into role reversal, and she said he was a male chauvinist pig.

  He found himself thinking of Jessica again, nostalgically, wondering whether she had found a new love, whether she would ever marry again, whether it would work if she did, whether he had made a mistake after all in breaking with her. Maybe they should have gone to more marriage counselors. Maybe they should have made a real effort to stop drinking so much. Maybe they should have moved to a real house in the suburbs, with a lawn and a fence and a two-car garage. Maybe they should have bought a farm in Vermont, and lived the simple life, healthy and rustic. Maybe it could have been different.

  Maybe. The word buzzed maddeningly around Potter’s mind, an annoying gnat.

  Potter was grateful to Ed Shell for inviting him to a party out in Merrimack, where some friends of his taught in the English Department of a small junior college. It was about forty-five minutes from Boston, and Potter drove while Ed told him of new movie deals hatching, without the slightest hint of suspicion or cynicism. Potter tried to think positively about Ed’s chances; about everything. He wanted to stop thinking about his own problems, wanted to be a regular fellow, have a good time at the party, make new friends, maybe find a really exciting new girl and begin a meaningful relationship.

  The party turned out to be composed entirely of faculty and faculty wives and girlfriends. No extra women. No music. Just serious talk. Ed Shell, all concentration, plunged into a deep discussion of the continuing relevance of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Potter’s own view was that the play was about as relevant now as the foreign policy of John Foster Dulles, the hula hoop craze, and the Single Wing formation. But he didn’t want to put a damper on things, and so kept his peace, trying to entertain himself by sizing up the people in the room.

  Most of the men smoked pipes.

  Most of the women had short, frizzy hair.

  At least there was plenty of booze. It was some kind of godawful blended whiskey, but at least it was hard stuff, and that was better than fruit-laden punch.

  Potter got himself a second drink, and sat by the only girl in the room who was definitely under forty. She was sitting beside a young teacher, all earnest and corduroyed, who was hotly involved in the Death of a Salesman debate.

  “Do you teach here, too?” Potter asked the girl.

  “I’m a student.”

  She looked at him noncommittally, neither friendly nor aloof. She was probably as bored as he was. She wore a flowered dress of miniskirt length that exposed quite hefty thighs. Her hair was the color that once was called dishwater blonde, and pulled to the back. She wore no makeup except for powder that muted but didn’t really hide a semi-bad skin. Her eyes were light brown, and anonymous.

  They spoke of innocuous matters. Potter got them both another drink. Stiff ones. She majored in English, and lived in a rooming house. She liked Chinese food, and Cape Cod.

/>   “Do you ever get into Boston?” Potter asked.

  “Every week or so,” she said.

  “I live in Cambridge, why don’t you come by, the next time you get to Boston?”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘Why’?”

  “I mean—well, what did you have in mind? What—uh—kind of relationship?”

  Kind of relationship. What did he have in mind. Oh, God. Potter thought of saying he wanted to communicate with her soul, or take her for a stroll on the Dunes at the Cape, or go to Joyce Chen’s with her for a fine meal, but he couldn’t bring himself to play the game, he couldn’t through his fog of whiskey summon up any pretense of social nicety, or perform any verbal pirouettes.

  “I just want to fuck you,” he said. “That’s all I have in mind.”

  She lit a cigarette, and Potter closed his eyes, waiting for the putdown, knowing he had blown it. He sighed, opened his eyes, and found that she was looking, blankly, right into them.

  In a calm, pleasant tone, she asked, “Would Sunday afternoon be all right?”

  Potter didn’t really think she would show, but on Sunday he showered, and sort of half-prepared himself for the possible visit, pushing back the worst of the living room debris. Under the circumstances that shouldn’t matter much, but it was reflex action, he supposed, of what one should do.

  She arrived a little after two, the promised time.

  He offered her a glass of wine, which she politely accepted.

  He had a Scotch, and wondered what to say. “Did you drive in?” he asked.

  “Yes. I have a ’67 Galaxie. It’s got almost 80,000 miles but it really holds the road.”

  “I have a Mustang,” Potter offered.

  “How do you like it?”

  “Oh, fine. It does just fine.”

  She finished her wine, and looked at him.

  “Would you like some more?”

  “Oh—no thanks, I don’t think so.”

  “Well. Shall we go to bed?”

  “OK.”

  The sex was as dutiful as their conversation. Afterward she got dressed, and Potter asked for her phone. She wrote it on the inside of a matchbook, along with the name “Donna.” He assumed that was her.

  “I’ll call you sometime,” he said.

  “If you want.”

  That night Potter didn’t want to be alone, and he was thankful Marilyn got back early from her latest New York weekend. He took over some Chicken Delight, and told her the story.

  “Well,” said Marilyn, “I guess it’s a dream come true.”

  “When you tell it,” Potter said.

  “But not really?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Didn’t it make you feel—sexy?”

  “No.”

  “Well—what did it make you feel like?”

  Potter thought for a while. “Like death,” he said.

  Potter vowed that he would stop his random fucking. He remembered in college reading a definition of morality by Ernest Hemingway that said what was moral was “what you feel good after.” In that case, the kind of fucking he’d been doing of late was indeed immoral. He felt lousy after it. The depression that followed his fucking the Sunday Afternoon Girl was so overwhelming that he pledged he would not go to bed again with a woman until he met one he really cared about.

  Potter knew his vow was a good decision, because God interceded to aid him in keeping it. A few days after his encounter with the Sunday Afternoon Girl, he found himself itching a lot, in the area of his groin. He thought it was probably a nervous condition brought on by his decision to stop fucking for a while, and he put a lot of talcum on it. The itching got worse, though, and Potter took long, hot baths, soaking himself for as much as an hour, keeping the water as hot as he could stand it, stopping just short of scalding himself. And the itching grew even worse. It was getting to be an embarrassment. He could hardly get through a class without turning toward the blackboard and giving a quick, furious scratch to the area over his crotch. He woke in the middle of the night, tormented with the itching. He wondered if maybe he was being bitten by cockroaches, or some such thing, and he bought a can of bug spray and fumed up his bedroom with it. Still, the itching increased, to the point that it was becoming unbearable. Marilyn gave him the name of her dermatologist, and Potter made an appointment.

  Dr. Garson Simpson was a large, ruddy man who had a muzak-filled office in a posh new building. When Potter described his complaint, Dr. Simpson said gruffly. “Take down your pants.” His fingers probed the hairs on Potter’s groin while his tongue clicked reprovingly.

  “Oh, brother,” the doctor said. “You’ve really got ’em. Holy saints alive, you have a case of ’em.”

  Potter, growing panicky, was beginning to wonder if whatever the hell he had was fatal, or would require surgery or a trip to the Mayo Clinic, or perhaps mean lifelong hospitalization. Was it treatable at all? Would he die of itching?

  “What the hell is it?” he asked. “That I’ve got?”

  The doctor stood up, gave Potter a sneering sort of smile, and slowly walked back to his desk, sat down, motioned Potter to a seat, drew out a cigarette, tamped it on the desk, got out a lighter, flipped it several times without results, finally caught a flame, lit the cigarette, took a long drag, exhaled a smoke-ring, lounged back in his comfortable swivel chair, and asked, “Ever hear of The Crabs?”

  Potter had heard of The Crabs in high school, he had heard of The Crabs in the Service. Some of his best friends had had The Crabs. It was one of the few miseries you could get without actually fucking someone who had it, but just by sleeping in a bed where a carrier had slept. If you actually slept with someone who had them, you were pretty sure to get them yourself. That pretty much covered Potter’s knowledge of The Crabs, but he saw no reason to recount it.

  “Yes,” he said, “I have heard of The Crabs.”

  The doctor leaned forward, grinning now.

  “Well, brother, you’ve really got ’em. I mean, you are infested with ’em.”

  Potter wanted to strangle the sonofabitch. From his luckily sketchy experience with members of the medical profession, he had arrived at a firm theory that most of them were sadists, and had the same psychological makeup as cops, but higher IQs, so they had gone into medicine instead of police work.

  “I would appreciate it, Doctor,” he said, in an even tone of pure hatred, “if rather than dwelling with such apparent delight on the extent of my malady, you would simply tell me—that is, if you possess such information—how the fuck I can cure the goddamn thing!”

  The doctor, snickering and shaking his head, slowly made out a prescription for some kind of medicine. Obviously unmoved by Potter’s plea to restrict his remarks to medical advice, he muttered loudly, “Never heard of a guy going so long without knowing he had The Crabs. Jesus. Wonder you weren’t eaten up alive.”

  Potter took the prescription and exited without a word, leaving the doctor still shaking his head in joyous wonderment over his plight.

  The medicine was called Kwell. Potter took the prescription to the Medical Arts Pharmacy in Harvard Square, and handed it to a young pharmacist who read it, moving his mouth, broke into a grin, and told Potter it would take about fifteen minutes. Potter had a double dry martini on the rocks at the Wursthaus bar, and returned to pick up the Kwell, which the pharmacist handed him with a wink, and a loud wish of “Good Luck, buddy.”

  In a way, having the goddamn Crabs was a relief. Potter knew he couldn’t, literally, go to bed with anyone while he had them without passing them on. And he would wish that exquisite torture on no one—except Dr. Garson Simpson, who he would gladly have condemned to a regular case of The Crabs throughout the rest of his natural life.

  Much of Potter’s attention now was focussed on the effort to rid himself of his evil itch. The good doctor had said it usually took about four days, but in his case it might be a week or more. If he wanted to hasten the cure, he could sh
ave the hair on his groin before applying the medicine. Potter shaved. It was messy and almost sickening, but the act was a kind of penance, and would prolong the period of his celibacy, since he wouldn’t want to expose his bare groin to a stranger, and have to go into lengthy excuses or explanations. Perhaps in the spirit that a monk shaves his head, Potter shaved his groin. He also had to buy new towels and sheets, and change them every day. Fighting the itch provided a temporary focus to his life, a goal, for which he was grateful.

  It also gave him an excuse for refusing Gafferty the use of his apartment any time that week, any time until he had cleansed himself of The Crabs. When Gafferty suggested that just the two of them go to Jake Wirth’s after classes for a beer, Potter knew what he wanted to ask, but he pretended innocence, and found that he secretly, shamefully got a perverse pleasure out of knowing he would have to refuse—on humanitarian grounds, of course—Gafferty’s request to have another romp with his student lover in Potter’s bed.

  “Ah, that’s a shame, man,” Gafferty said, then reddening, quickly added, “I mean your condition. Doesn’t matter my not getting your place for a while, that’s a luxury.”

  “I guess you’ll just have to rough it this week,” Potter said, grinning in spite of himself. “On the old desk.”

  “Ah, well.”

  “But your girl must be very understanding—I mean to have had to do it that way for so long. Or however long it’s been.”

  “That she is. Oh yes.”

  The bastard wasn’t letting the slightest bit of information eke out. Not even how long his affair had been going.

  Potter began casually speaking of students, tests, grades, class response, and then, after a forced yawn, asked, as if nothing could be less important, “By the way. You ever have any students named Korsky, or Linnett?”

  “Korsky. Linnett. Let me see. There was a Fred Kautsky, I think. I don’t think it was Korsky, though. Why?”