The Twoweeks

by Larry Duberstein

  It was easy for me to envision a sedate life of reading and prayer and poetry, walking in the hills, tending to animals. It would be pleasantly lonely, like my real life, which I knew how to enjoy. Meanwhile I would be serving the poor, serving Jesus and the Church. A nunnery was not a bad fit for the old version of me, the girl who could hardly be surprised when no invitation came for the Homecoming Dance.

  I tried researching the sisters of mercy who had written poetry, and when I found none (or none that were known to the world) I turned to monastics and ex-monastics, reverends and near-reverends. Anyone who had set his holy struggles to meter, against a backdrop of natural beauty. Gerard Manley Hopkins became not merely my favorite poet but my absolute polestar. God’s Grandeur was never so grand as it was in his hands.

  But then came the sea change, and the flood of eager young men. It was almost like one of those Hollywood comedies, where a noisy flock of foolish suitors come elbowing past one another, hoping to catch the ingenue’s eye. As soon as I got to college, the past receded and a new world order beckoned. Pretty quickly I started having fun with it, especially once I saw that nothing more was required of the new Lara than that which the old Lara always had to offer, a quirky intelligence and a cheerful disposition.

  I soon suffered an embarrassment of riches. So many of those college boys wanted me; the question became which ones did I want? This was a problem radically unfamiliar to me. Seth wrote poems and had pretty dark brown eyes. Ben wanted to make a film about Sylvia Plath and had pretty pale blue eyes. Enzio’s accent was irresistible, especially when I laughed at it and he protested that no no no, his English was “long ago perfected.”

  There were others as well and my policy, freshly shaped, was to sample them like candies, commit to nothing, refuse to worry. When pressed with buzzwords (steady, exclusive, future, love) I simply backed away. Even Ryan Weissman (to whom I am still attracted, in absentia, a decade later) had to be dismissed. And the amazing aspect is that my arrogance in dismissing them only added to my “mystique.”

  Boys, or men, were supposedly allergic to commitment. Instead, I was hearing (at age nineteen) from each of two accomplished seniors (ripely aged to twenty-two) that I was the chosen one to bear his child. To me this was laughable, for I knew what neither Seth nor Austin knew in proposing marriage and parenthood, namely that a very short time ago I had been a child.

  By junior year the novelty wore thin, the dance of dating lost its savor, and I met Ian, to whom I was neither the princess nor the duckling. I was a friend to have coffee with after our “Revolution and the Age of Reason” seminar, and then, gradually, something more than that (dinners, long walks) as the friendship moved in what I took to be a natural progression toward true love. What else would it be? When we put an end to my unexpected career as a femme fatale, I had no regrets, only a sense of relief.

  Now that he was proposing to throw me back in the ocean, my instinct was to resist. His strategy was not only counterintuitive, it was insulting. To me, and also to Cal. It trivialized our connection. Whatever Ian needed to believe, affairs in the abstract held no appeal for me.

  Traveling did appeal, and getting away did make some sense. Nor did going alone scare me a bit; on the contrary, it excited me. I had always enjoyed my own company and the concomitant freedom to troll for poems. And if there were occasions when that apparent freedom generated unwelcome encounters, I now had a rock-solid fallback position: “Sorry, I am a happily married woman.”

  Moreover, as I began to entertain the possibility of a trip and to imagine the shape it might take, I noticed I had ceased to troll for Cal Byerly. Ceased to anticipate him at every intersection. By pushing me in a new direction, Ian had successfully redirected my gaze, which was fine by me. I had been unable to manage it on my own.

  Even so, as Ian’s suggestion began to morph into a plan of action, I could not quite suppress the urge to communicate the plan to Cal. Whether this was because I wanted him to suffer or wanted to relieve him of suffering, I honestly hadn’t a clue. There was just this nagging sense he should be informed.

  Somewhat ruefully, I recalled a chance encounter with Cal shortly before Ian and I left for Paris that summer. Cal was virtually a stranger to me at the time, yet I couldn’t contain myself and crowed about the fortunate days awaiting me. How joyous I was on the eve of that journey, how joyless on the eve of this one. Maybe I wanted to inform Cal because he was to blame for the change. Because of him, I was being banished. Because of him, Ian was footing the bill—financially and emotionally.

  And what was Cal doing all this while? Reading Estragon’s lines to Winnie in bed at night? Flipping a Frisbee to his son? I could hardly avoid blaming him a little.

  Though maybe I would end up thanking him. To me, after all, Ian’s scheme was another grant, a chance to get some work done. I would go back to Scotland first, hole up in some Highlands coaching hotel where (seated by a peat fire, cold rain battering the glass) I would carve out a dozen new poems. Maybe two dozen. I would work.

  My days would have a shape. Up early and into the hills (or possibly onto the strand at Anstruther, into the stiff spray of the Firth of Forth) and then back to the peat fire and the poems, shepherd’s pie and Scotch ale. Variants on this outline would unfold in London or Paris, places where I would feel almost at home. It was not such a bad assignment.

  Mighty strange, however, in the carrying-out. For we did carry it out, going so far as to plan many of the details together. Ian kept dragging out maps and train schedules, reckoning distances. Overhearing us, you would have guessed we were preparing for a vacation together and I would have been glad if we were. To the end, I remained ambivalent about the wisdom of this enterprise.

  It was comforting that the trip would begin in Scotland, for I had long romanticized that country and in particular the Scottish autumn. My family had lived there during the sunniest three months in their history, a freak happenstance for which my father, teaching that semester at St. Andrews, was given full credit by his colleagues. He was the only variable, they insisted, therefore the only plausible explanation. We arrived and the sun arrived with us; we left and there ensued one hundred consecutive days of rain.

  (“Come back, come back,” one postcard read, with a picture of four sodden golfers huddled under a tree with a flask, waiting out a downpour.)

  But those later rains were unreal to me, the brisk bright days were the ones I had experienced. I was nine at the time, Liam twelve. Each afternoon we would rush home from school and with our little posse ride bicycles over roads with no traffic, through villages with no visible population, to beaches and deserted moors we virtually owned.

  We experimented with lawlessness. Like St. Augustine, we stole pears from a tree near the St. Andrews campus. We removed a man’s hat as he slept on a bench and hid it behind a fountain. Liam and our friend Nigel hatched a plan to commandeer a yawl from the Pittenweem pier and sail it across the Firth to Edinburgh.

  We spent hours plotting covert actions inside Edinburgh Castle. Liam and I had not yet been inside, but Nigel had, and he spoke knowingly of a secret passageway leading to a suite of long-abandoned rooms, with Gothic-arched stained-glass windows overlooking the cobblestone alleys of the Old Town. All this he illustrated lavishly for us. He drew up a floor plan of the concealed apartment, pinpointing locations for the trapdoor and the wall safe.

  It hardly mattered that this was a fantasy or a hoax, not when Nigel wore such nice sweaters and spoke in a dazzling accent that brought me this close to understanding a foreign language, albeit that language was English. Liam wanted to be Nigel and I wanted to marry him, for this was before puberty and long before I considered pledging myself to sisterhood.

  It was the loveliest time, then and ever after, for Scotland had burrowed deep and stayed with me. Scotland always loomed. The notions and images I accumulated there would crop up again and again. The chance to revisit them, to augment and perhaps revise them, comprised the positive side of m
y ambivalence.

  The wild oats part of the package had shrunk from my view entirely. I tended to forget it was the centerpiece of Ian’s scenario, whereas he would keep coming back to it. He is an academic and academics get very attached to their little hypotheses. If I questioned the logic, he would insist that logic did not pertain. Or that the logic was “firmly based in illogic.” How do you argue against that?

  When I said it wouldn’t work, he assured me I would see how it worked as events unfolded. Medicine was one of his cute little analogies: you might hate the taste, yet you needed to take it if you wanted to get better.

  In the end I felt like the skinny girl my parents had packed off to summer camp against her will, in the face of her dread. Not quite kicking and screaming (I was a tad more dignified) and certainly not clinging and crying, I would yet require a final shove onto the plane at Logan.

  I am a crier, though, and did a fair bit of drizzling out over the Atlantic, to the point where a gentleman alongside me surrendered his entire packet of “sneezies” to the cause. He was otherwise reserved and respectful, and for the next four hours maintained a polite silence. Then as we were circling Heathrow, he just as respectfully wondered if I had a place to stay in London.

  I looked at him for the first time. Really, he had been a head perched atop a suit, with British rather than American inflections, nothing more specific. Now I saw the suit was bespoke wool, the briefcase was leather with debossed initials, the ring finger was bare. Was I expected to swing into action this quickly? Had Ian planted this guy?

  “I’m connecting to Edinburgh,” I said, by way of politely declining. “Off again in an hour. You live in London?”

  “More or less. Wimbledon.”

  “The tennis place.”

  “Yes,” he laughed, as though absolutely everyone said this and he didn’t mind in the slightest. “That’s just two weeks out of the year, you know. The tournament.”

  “Two weeks can be a long time,” I said, mostly to myself.

  “Yes, I suppose it can. Well, then. Glad you’ve dried up, in any event. They’ll have a fresh box of sneezies inside the gate.”

  “I’ll get one, as a precaution. I’m fine, really. No one died on me or anything, I’m just a congenital weeper. Tears close to the surface.”

  I noticed myself lapsing into his British cadence, teetering there, you know. Tears close to the surface, you know. Didn’t take me long, now did it?

  “It’s best that way,” he said. “Not keep it bottled up inside.”

  “No chance of that.”

  Standing at the baggage carousel, I reconsidered him as a prospect. Which, to begin with, he was not. But was this how it would go? Men would materialize, my mysterious superpowers would assert, invitations to come away and sport would result (polite ones, as with Sneezie Man, less polite in other instances) and I would fail to see the earthly purpose? Not be attracted in the slightest?

  It was too soon, of course, and Sneezie Man was a dark horse at best, hardly a fair test case. Alternatively, Sneezie Man might prove to be my only offer the entire time. There was no telling how that would go, and I was taking my assignment too literally in any case. It was just that being thrust so suddenly out into the field, so to speak, I was pressed into questioning the premise anew. Here I was emotionally involved with two men; how in the world was I supposed to make room for a third?

  The city of Edinburgh had changed less than I expected. It was recognizable, even familiar. Now, as then, I marveled at the dramatic ravine demarcating the old city from the very old. The contour of that landscape, the deep defile, prepared your eye for rushing water down there, a river making for the sea. Instead, you still looked down on a cavalcade of glowing, glass-gabled train sheds.

  Now, as then, loomed the castle, which presumably would Never Change, not when they could boast of its history on profitable guided tours. Taking one of those tours, early on, I found I still craved to go bounding up the roped-off stairways, stood eager as ever to ferret out Nigel’s secret passageway. I pictured myself dropping back from the small pack of tourists and stowing away past closing time so as to effect my reconnaissance under cover of night.

  While I never believed that Nigel Patrick had glimpsed anything which remained a secret to the wider world, neither could I quite shake the sense there must be something to it. Even as a child I had never understood pure fantasy. Never could make anything up out of whole cloth. Every line I write is drawn from concrete observation.

  When we were a bit older, and Nigel’s transatlantic letters were tapering off, my dear brother began pointing out some of our friend’s more outrageous howlers. Even then, where Liam scoffed at the idea of Nigel horseback-riding with the royals at Balmoral Castle, I quietly calculated the distance between St. Andrews and Balmoral and found it plausible for a weekend visit. Liam wrote me off as a dead loss.

  Meanwhile, our tour guide Robbie was not about to let anyone out of his sight, least of all me. Maybe he read my mind, maybe he just knew a potential stowaway when he saw one, but every fascinating tidbit our Robbie recited, he recited to me personally. Making firm eye contact, awaiting my nod of assent. At every turn he took my elbow, as though I had lost all capacity to steer myself. On one steep step he all but lifted me up, while older, feebler tourists hauled away on the iron banister. Were the superpowers at work, or was he merely suspicious?

  In my memory of 1957, our guided tour had taken hours, traversing acres of cold stone-bound space. No doubt the world seems larger to a child (and time limitless), but Robbie’s tour was compressed down to half an hour, much of it spent on a narrow parapet, where we snapped photos of one another. In ‘57, we had strolled freely through the Cemetery of Soldiers’ Dogs. This time, we had to read the headstones (Major, Scamp, Yum Yum, and the rest) from an overlook. No one tried the velvet ropes; no one ducked from Robbie’s sight lines.

  There did come an invitation to lunch, which I politely declined in part because he looked so unhealthy. (Lara: “I am a happily married woman.” Robbie: “But you are traveling alone.” Not a bad summation.) Never have I seen a paler face or such pale yellow eyes. Even his lips were pale. As pleasant a fellow as he was, Robbie definitely needed to get out of the castle more.

  Or out of town. That week, at least, Edinburgh was not the place to mount an attack on the problem of pallor. There may have been a sun somewhere above the earth, but apart from the presence of wan daylight (implying the orb), no trace of it was discernable at ground level. I could only conjure it up in daydreams, most of which derived from The Twoweeks. Fenway Park, Revere Beach, the Concord River.

  At first I did not, as the Scots say, “muckle mind” the weather. Generally the rain was soft and sparse, so I could wander my way between cafés and bookshops. During one stronger downpour, I holed up all afternoon at James Thin, Bookseller, seated beneath a clock as big as the Ritz, and was enormously pleased to find myself working through a new poem. Suggestible as ever, I wrote about clocks, or how clock time ceases to dominate the human equation once a person steps outside her normal haunts and patterns.

  James Thin, Bookseller, became my normal haunt. By the time I saw Busse (Swedish, despite the dark hair) there for the third time, we felt old-friendly enough to chat. He brought over scones and coffee, behaved graciously, and included with his dinner invitation a pledge to ask “no personal questions.” This was an odd promise (almost odd enough to intrigue me) until he added that what he would in fact ask were “questions about your political figures, Nixon and Eldridge Cleaver.”

  Busse was tall, dark, handsome, and nice. The trouble was I believed him. He really wanted to know about my nation, not me, and he had genuinely concluded that “Nixon and Eldridge Cleaver” would be the place to begin. Sorry, Ian: not this one either.

  Then came Julian.

  Neither a Scot nor a Swede, he hailed from Frieth, west of London, and he was staying at hostels while writing a sociology thesis on The New Youth. We gravitated together as
a category (postgraduate) in an establishment where the clientele ran about eighteen years of age and management twenty. Management (two pallid bony lads and pallid stocky Stella) judged me doubly insane: first as an American (therefore sex-crazed and bloodthirsty) and then as an old lady putting up at a youth hostel. Not that there were rules against it. It was just, well, you know, weird.

  Not to Julian. He considered it the luckiest thing that had ever happened to him—or so he testified. It could be pure unadulterated poppycock, a line he used once a week and twice on Saturdays. “I could have gone the year without meeting a woman,” he said, as we sat in the dank, dark breakfast nook, sipping tea. “And I could have gone a lifetime without meeting a woman like you.”

  “Meaning what? What am I ‘like’?”

  “Gorgeous. Brilliant. Game.”

  “Game as in willing to have sex with a stranger?”

  Here Julian blushed becomingly, for that was precisely his meaning. And “game” put it quite well, for he could hardly say exciting or sensuous after what had basically been my disinterested observation of his transports. He kept praising me (I was wonderful in bed, so lovely in bed) where in truth I was not much better than an inflatable doll might have been.

  That was in no way Julian’s fault, no more than the bad weather was. Had the sun appeared on the day we met, I would never have consented in the first place. All we had to spur us on were the cold dark skies over Scotland and Ian’s voice in my ear saying this might be your best chance. Surely Julian qualified as “Someone.”

  Someone I liked, that is. I liked the way he was both foreign and familiar to me, culturally I suppose I mean. I enjoyed his bemusement at the academic pecking order, and at the silliness of his thesis topic. “The New Youth seems quite like the Old Youth,” he said with a puckered grin, “albeit with a bit of fresh slang, some insufferable new tunes, and superior contraception.”

  I liked him well enough to walk with him in the Pentland Hills (bringing a bag of crisps that we ate in a chill wet wind at Arthur’s Seat) and well enough to sleep with him a second time, mostly out of charity, just before I left. I didn’t want him feeling he had let me down, or failed any tests. He was so sad to hear we would not “continue to be together in every way” (amazed less that I was leaving than that I would consent to sex while planning to leave) that I wished I could concoct some sweet lie to ease his distress.