In fact, getting back to my own habits has been one major benefit of The Aftermath. I may have been free to run around with C., but I never felt free to sit at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a novel. To do that I needed to be freed from freedom, so to speak, and now, up here, I have been. Plus Ian provides a different sort of freedom, the freedom to be sensible and content. No danger of getting arrested in his company.
C. and I were not arrested either, in the end, though it was touch and go for a while. We broke the law and we got caught. Instead of raising his hands and saying you got me, C. insisted it was a bad law and that bad laws must be broken. “Think Nazis,” he instructed the poor red-faced boy policeman. It was not that cute argument that got us off the hook. Nor was it his next sally, that “even if it were a reasonable statute in its way,” it was clearly one that called for a wink at the point of enforcement.
The arresting officer did not wink, or Think Nazis. What won the day for us, I am pretty sure, was his embarrassment. He had never liked telling people they couldn’t swim here, he confided. As a lad he had jumped into many a pond, not to mention (he confessed) the bottomless Quincy quarry. But to swim naked, in broad daylight, on the campus of a girls’ college, simply had to be forbidden.
“Why?” said C., instead of thanking the guy for his consideration and honesty.
“Well, it’s obvious why,” said the poor blushing soul.
“Not to me,” said C., adding “with all due respect, officer.”
Meanwhile there I stood, shivering in the heat, towel pressed inadequately to my front. The officer turned toward me, blushing the more, and apologized for the inadvertence of my ongoing nudity. “I’ll look away, if you would like to get some clothes on now,” he said. I stood behind a tree with the towel clamped in my teeth like a flimsy curtain, and tried to pull my jeans up over my wet legs.
“You’re peeking,” said C.
“I am not,” said the officer, emphatically.
They sounded like a couple of eight-year-olds. But by then Officer Tim Sheehan (stenciled on his shirt) was prepared to cut us a deal. If we would leave immediately and promise never to come back, he would let us off the hook, even though his boss insisted on strict enforcement. It was a warm day. The water was inviting. He understood all this.
Please for once keep your mouth shut, I implored C. with my most potent gaze, and miraculously he did. He gave Officer Sheehan his word of honor and a handshake that may have even been sincere. I know he felt badly once he had stepped out of character. “The kid was pretty nice, really,” he said in the car.
“The ‘kid’ was probably your age exactly.”
“Yeah, too bad. A sheriff should be old, bald, fat, and mean. But that’s not to say it wasn’t a good bust. The kid did his job.”
“And you still couldn’t get arrested.”
“I could have, if it wasn’t for you and your wiles.”
“Me? I was just cringing the whole time. And concealing myself as well as I could.”
“That was the one questionable aspect of the bust, when he ordered us out of the water and you said We have no clothes on and he said Out, Right Now.”
“What was he supposed to say? He handed you the towel, to hand to me.”
“He should have leaned out the window and said, I’ll be back around to this spit in fifteen minutes, folks, and if you aren’t gone by then I am going to have to charge you with trespassing, indecent exposure, and murder most foul. And then in his best southern sheriff voice, You hear me now, boy?”
“Maybe he didn’t think of all that.”
“Maybe he wanted to get an eyeful instead. You made his day.”
“I guarantee he was far more embarrassed than aroused.”
“We won’t know that until he makes confession.”
“You’re so sure he’s Catholic?”
“Officer Tim Sheehan? The only question is how we get the priest to spill. He may invoke the sanctity of the confessional just to stonewall our investigation.”
We found a lunchroom at one of those crossroad villages along Route 16, and collapsed into a comfortable red leather booth. Good thing it was comfortable, too, because we might have got the 24-hour Peking duck faster than we got our grilledcheese-and-tomato sandwiches. It was four o’clock when we ordered, yet we were still waiting as five o’clock approached—and we were the only customers they had. At one point, we got a friendly wave from the cook, through his cutout window; later a visit from the waitress to say our order was “coming right up.” Not in this century, that’s all.
Most inexplicably, the food was cold when it finally arrived. “We’ll think twice,” said C., “before we get hungry again.”
We had joined the delightful rush-hour traffic jam when I announced it would be safe to get hungry that night, if we ever made it back to Cambridge. “I’ll cook dinner. I’ll shop and cook. Real food.”
“Like a real person?” said C.
That was part of it, admittedly. The rest was that I like to shop for dinner and cook it. The same way I like to read. If we weren’t going to end after twelve days, we might have to do a bit more normalizing.
“I’ll drop you off, to be safe, and then shop at Savenor’s.”
“Savenor’s? To ensure that cooking at home costs as much as eating out?”
“To ensure the food is good. I’ll get some chicken, and potatoes, and broccoli, and just do what I normally do at seven o’clock.”
“Play the part of yourself.”
“If you say so.”
“Which you are dying to do after having played some other role for the past twelve days?”
“No, I’ve been myself. It’s just I haven’t been doing what I usually do; what I like to do. Why can’t I cook dinner? Cooking dinner doesn’t fit your definition of the proper exercise of freedom?”
“Whoa. Suddenly this just turned into an attack on me, of all people. I have no objection to the shop/cook/eat option, Lara. None at all. As long as we have enough beer.”
“I’ll pick some up when I get the groceries.”
“Let me get it. Drop me in Central Square and I’ll grab a six-pack at Libby’s. That way I can be normal too.”
That’s when I stopped the car. Turned to face him. Was crying, I am sure, by the time I found any words.
“Are we crashing to earth, Cal? Are you tired of this? Of me? You could go home right now, you know. We don’t have to stick it out.”
“Lara?”
“Think how happy they would be if you walked in with an armload of presents and just said, Honey I’m home, or whatever.”
“Are you saying I need presents to get a proper reception?”
It was a laugh line at a non-laugh line moment. It was not an answer, it was not a help. Definitely I was crying by then.
“Lara, I have no idea where this is coming from. Unless it’s you who wants to quit?”
“Not exactly. No.”
“Well, me neither. More than two weeks has certainly crossed my mind. Less has not.”
“Just checking,” I said, willing to grope my way back toward whatever lightness we could find. Mainly I felt exhausted. Worn down. I knew it was my absolute last chance to change the rules of the game, but I just couldn’t summon the strength.
I got some of my energy back at Savenor’s. The guys were flirty, the old lady was evil, and the bill was absurdly high. This was all so familiar that it lifted my spirits right up. I was excited to stop Having Fun, stop bearing down on when to end the damned fun, and simply cook a nice dinner in my crummy apartment. Putter around my kitchen for one blessed hour.
C. was sitting on the front stoop when I drove up. He stood and bowed and I saw he had flowers in shiny red florist’s foil in one hand, a beribboned box of chocolates in the other. Ah yes: the joke about showing up with presents.
“You misunderstood,” I said. “As usual.”
“No, I didn’t. I know you weren’t demanding tribute, for goodness’ sake, Lara
. You reminded me one could bring presents, that’s all. So then, of course, I wanted to. I wanted to shower you with gifts.”
“Well, thank you.”
“We’ve been together almost every second, you know. How could I walk in with flowers, when I was already there?”
“Where?”
“Wherever you were, my wild Irish rose. At all the beginnings, middles, and ends of the earth.”
I could not quite resist feeling flattered and pleased by this silly stagecraft he trotted out. C. is an actor, hence in one sense a practiced professional fraud. But I do believe he sometimes uses those patently artificial sallies as a way of saying something genuine. He can’t allow himself to go sloppy on me without underscoring it as a joke; yet he is, at bottom, inside the wildly overblown parodies of sincerity, sincere.
In other words, he did reciprocate. My folly was his folly too. There was no chaser and chased, no stronger no weaker. Nor would there be a winner and a loser. We were both going to lose the game.
The radio was always playing those manipulative false-yettrue Kristofferson ballads, the ones that glorify seized opportunities. “For the Good Times” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night” came on constantly. And, no doubt like all other illicit lovers out there in radioland, we couldn’t help buying into the illusion that surely this was “our song.”
Plus, that was a Sunday, so we could hardly be surprised when Johnny Cash came on to serenade us with “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” Kristofferson’s most brilliant and depressing song. There’s something in a Sunday that makes a body feel alone? That night, as I cheerfully roasted my overpriced chicken, I suspected a couple of bodies were going to feel radically, dangerously alone by the time another Sunday morning rolled around.
“I THINK you were a bit unfair to me about the little cop. Did you really believe I wanted to be dragged into court on swimming charges?”
“What I believed was that you couldn’t help bristling. That you were young and male and so was he.”
“Is it really that simple? All young men are idiots?”
“Yes. And I know precisely when I learned there were absolutely no exceptions to the rule. It was when Sid Lathrop joined the battle.”
“Sid, the funny gay guy at Allison’s.”
“Funny, but also seriously laid-back. The veneer of uncaring, and then the casual poison dart.”
“He did tell me Oscar Wilde was his hero.”
“Allison had this big buyer. A player in the city. Owned a big construction company, had a direct pipeline to the mayor, that sort. And he would buy paintings to prove he was civilized.”
“An art lover.”
“The guy was about to hand Allison three thousand dollars for a Rizzi. Then, Nick—that was his name, Nick—notices an Erlanger and starts giving it the once over.”
“Kiki Erlanger.”
“Yes, and now Allison dares to hope he will buy two paintings. In her mind she’s already paying down the mortgage on the Nantucket cottage when Nick says, I like it but it’s a little too faggy, don’t you think?”
“Yikes.”
“And before Allison can agree—which she might have, God forgive her—Sid Lathrop is at her side. Materializes there. I saw the consternation in Allison’s eyes, saw her mouthing ‘Don’t you blow this sale’ to Sid. Which Sid does not see at all. He is telling Nick, ‘Oh no, not a bit faggoty, sir, oodles of blood and thunder here, sir, always with an Erlanger one gets the subtext of blood and thunder and the truly high-test testosterone, why just look at those rich running reds—’
“And Nick looks him over, sizes him up, pegs Sid for a queer making sport of him—and spits on the floor.”
“There goes the veneer of civilization.”
“Gone. Allison’s face is white as King Arthur Flour, Sid’s face is the cat bringing you a mouse in his mouth, and I’m wondering, okay what comes next. The answer is Sid dropping all irony, all pretense of cool detachment, and saying, ‘Is that your notion of masculinity, sir? A gob on someone’s carpet?’ ”
“Allison must have been reaching for her pearl-handled derringer.”
“Allison was paralyzed. Nick’s witty comeback was a second gob, this one aimed at Sid’s shoes. At which point Sid takes one step forward and smacks the brute across the face. Open hand but hard, a real shot across the bow, and within seconds the two of them are wrestling on the carpet, flailing and kicking while Allison yells for help.”
“You didn’t help?”
“I didn’t see any need to. Sid was holding his own. And it all worked out in the end. The next day Nick sent his cleaners over, sent Allison flowers along with a note of apology and a check for the Rizzi. He bought that one after all. Though we never saw him again.”
“Well, good for Sid.”
“In that case, yes. Nonetheless, I was forced to conclude that if Sid Lathrop would behave that way, any person burdened with a Y chromosome would.”
“Did she fire his ass?”
“She might have, absent the check from Nick the Brute, but she didn’t. In fact, Sid was still working at the gallery when he got sick.”
“He got the invoice.”
“Almost everyone did. Jared lucked out, but Sid, Barry, Rennie, Hal, both Georges—pretty much every gay man I knew. Though all that was years later. You do remember we were discussing Day 12.”
“I do. The digression was yours, my flower. I was about to address your misrepresentation of that moment in the car. The moment when completely out of the blue you asked if I wanted to throw in the towel ahead of schedule.”
“I was just asking. You seemed out of sorts. We seemed out of synch.”
“When you came out with that—said we could just let it go, end it early—I was stunned. I was tuned in completely to your happy dinner idea: cooking together, going to bed together, waking up together. And here you were saying you couldn’t care less.”
“I didn’t want to be pressuring you, that’s all. I wanted you to be able to be honest with me.”
“All the same to you, couple of days more, couple of days less. Whereas in my mind we were in it together and every second was precious. And who knows, maybe the days would keep coming, like the loaves and the fishes, where you have a short supply that expands indefinitely.”
“How typically realistic of you, Calvert.”
“Call it romantic, if you like, I’m okay with that. Call it irrational. But I hated hearing you be so unromantic. So horribly realistic.”
“Womens learn to protect theyselves.”
“Oh, so now we are back around to men are simpletons and brutes.”
“Shortsighted might be a nicer way to put it. They see what they want and they do not see the consequences of taking it.”
“I saw the fucking consequences, believe me. I didn’t like them, so I was hoping time would stop for us. What’s wrong with that?”
“Apart from it’s being impossible? Nothing at all.”
“So there you are.”
“Put it this way. You wanted two contradictory outcomes and, because you are a male person, you managed to believe you could somehow have both.”
“Which makes me a fool, not a brute.”
“We were both fools, Cal. There’s no getting around that one.”
ON DAY 13, C. woke from a dark dream, mumbling that it was Friday the 13th, bad luck and trouble. Somehow his subconscious had registered that it was the 13th day? It was a Monday, and we were willfully averting our gaze from the trouble to come. We talked, made love, dressed (always so simple in the summertime), made toast and coffee.
“We could go back to bed if you want,” said C., though we had only been in the kitchen five minutes.
“Are you tired?”
“Not a bit,” said C., sliding his hands under my shirt as I stood at the sink.
“Tell me how you and Winnie met,” I said, and the hands were swiftly retracted.
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m curious.”
“Friends of friends,” he said warily. “We met at a poker game.”
“You won big that night, fella.”
“We both felt set up. There were three couples invited that night, plus the two of us. They had all conspired against us, a blind date in disguise.”
“I’d say they were pretty fair matchmakers.”
“What is this, Lara?”
“I mean it. You and Winnie?”
“All right then, your turn. Tell me how you met Ian.”
“We met on a bus. A chartered bus, to a peace rally. Ian hates Nixon just as much as you do, you know. I did hate the War, of course, and I hated the sleazy way Nixon and Kissinger decided to bomb half of southeast Asia more or less for the merry hell of it. So I was on the bus.”
“As in you’re on the bus or off it.”
“Different bus, but yeah. I was willing to march and sing, if it helped.”
“So you found yourselves holding hands and swaying to ‘Kumbaya’?”
“We found ourselves assigned arbitrarily to get coffee and hot dogs for ten, from a food cart. On the way back, we managed to fumble the food.”
“Uh oh.”
“We laughed and started rearranging the hot dogs—composing them to look right—and never mentioned the mishap. We figured they were already poison, so what the hell.”
“Were there casualties?”
“No one even got a tummy ache. Then we swayed to ‘Kumbaya,’ or more likely ‘We Shall Overcome,’ and the bombing campaign went on undisturbed. About a year later we were married.”
“At Nathan’s Famous?”
“At my parents’ house. A sit-down dinner, with hot dogs for two hundred.”
“Ours was a bit smaller than that—we had four in all. We dragged Fitz and Winnie’s friend Gail along to the City Hall as our witnesses, so they also shared in the wedding feast at Cronin’s afterward.”
“Winnie was okay with it?”
The Twoweeks Page 13