The Twoweeks

by Larry Duberstein

  I had left the bookstore by then and taken another part-timer, manning the front desk at the Howard Johnson Motor Hotel on the river, three 8-hour days a week. This was a choice role in itself, as there (in jacket and tie, no less, and clean-shaven every day) I was obliged to smile obsequiously at everyone, including the stray pig who handed me his shoes to shine and his wife who required someone to “do” her fingernails instantly.

  I smiled obsequiously, I rang my little bell, I answered the red telephone as pleasantly as a country pastor. And I brought home the capital sum of 72 dollars per week, a pay cut from my 80 at the bookstore.

  Winnie was so glad to be breaking even on daycare costs that for a while she made no references to her Five Year Plan, whereby I would be getting a “real job” if after five years I was not being paid decently as an actor. The terms were elastic (If 72 dollars a week did not qualify as decent pay, what about 144?) but I understood the clock was ticking on my dicey career choice.

  One can conceal a lot within the chaos of raising small children. I suppose the checks and balances ensure that middle-class parents raising small children have few issues to conceal. By presumption they are young and in love; not so very long ago they chose this course, so (by presumption) they are still playing for the same team. Let the chaos rip, if beneath its wild windblown surface lies the bedrock of love.

  Beneath the chaos that enabled Winnie and me to miss connections lay an unseen well of helplessness and sorrow. Whenever I was alone (and too often when I was not), Lara Cleary laid siege to our household. If Winnie called to say she was stuck working late, I was relieved, not disappointed. I hated being relieved, but it meant there would be fewer hours of pretending all was well.

  This diverged radically from my state of mind during my prior slip-up, with Sasha Blackburn. I was unworthy of Winnie that month, no question, but at least I loved her without a mote of ambivalence. Loved her more than ever. I was always so glad to get home from those trysts. Talk about abnormality: I would actually fantasize about my wife while in bed with Sasha.

  So what was I doing there? My buddy Fitz, in whom I confided, accused me of careerism, of playing that game, because everyone believed Sasha was “going places.” But he was just hassling me. He knows I don’t operate that way. I accused myself of making a mistake and precluded any chance of future favors from Sasha Blackburn by correcting that mistake a bit too bluntly.

  If Winnie knew how little that affair meant to me, she might not have minded it that much. Men will be men, her mother liked to say, with pre-feminist resignation, and Winnie had some of that philosophical tolerance in her. There was a line from a song she liked, “I have not always been faithful / But I always have been true.” Possibly my dalliance with Sasha could come under that heading.

  But the line did not apply to Lara Cleary. With Lara, I had indeed been faithless, and the cost to Winnie was yet to be fully reckoned. The costs to me, so far, were palpable: the overwhelming weight of betrayal, a distraction so constant it was almost comical, and a sadness that really did seem to radiate straight out from my heart.

  Then I wrote the stupid letter. Composed it at the HoJo desk, on HoJo stationery. My first attempt was pathetic, endless pages of scrawl and sentimentality. I purged the sentimental stuff ruthlessly, and by the third run-through I had excised every reference to love including the rather mild “I loved that place best.”

  It hardly mattered which words I put in and which ones I took out, since she would never see the pitiful thing. I honestly believed I was just doing what I always do, refining a voice in my head, getting the character right, even if the character was me. It’s funny how some directors will shoot you on sight for changing a single word, while others exclaim over your genius at improvisation.

  The version I eventually left for her (alas, she would see the pitiful thing after all) was pared down to a single page. It was still silly, little more than a sort of thank-you note (Thanks for a lovely time!), along with the assurance that this had been no small deal to me and was mighty rough going in the aftermath.

  I knew Lara well enough to expect she would be thoroughly annoyed by the letter, yet also pleased. It’s nice to be missed, regardless of the circumstances. And what if she was struggling as much as I was? What if the sorrow infecting my happy home had infected hers as well?

  What if it had? said Jake, as we drove in silence to Spy Pond with our skates and sticks and a pocketful of pucks. Lara and I had tacitly decided the two critical points: that somehow we “deserved” The Twoweeks and that we deserved nothing more than that. We had chosen to sip from the poisoned chalice. Ian had not. Winnie and the children had not. If we found ourselves sad, or depressed, or obsessed, so what? Jake was right again. Hard cheese, old chap.

  Though there were no excuses for delivering that letter (even in its highly sanitized shorthand form), there were reasons. Weakness, self-indulgence, and a complete collapse of discipline don’t count as reasons, but maybe the blind hope of relief does? To people who have acted in the classic Greek tragedies, catharsis is real. Catharsis is supposed to happen.

  Timing was the major factor. At Cronin’s, the night before I took the letter to Miller Road, we read the last three acts of Hamlet, and I was Hamlet. Oh man, was I ever Hamlet. Talk about inhabiting a character. All his dithering, all that folding in on himself until his mind was hopelessly twisted and constricted? I didn’t know a hawk from a handsaw either.

  Hamlet’s most memorable line was as potent as ever: “To thine own self be true and thou canst not then be false to any man.” Like millions before me, I fell under the spell of Shakespeare’s words so thoroughly that I nearly called Lara from Cronin’s that night to propose a cultural interchange. For here woven together on Shakespeare’s loom were our two crafts, the poetry she revered and our lame dramatic presentation of it.

  Fortunately, I fathomed how drunk I was, even on the strength of Cronin’s watered-down beer. And I understood how easily one could be true to one’s “own self,” while being false to everyone else—men, women, children. The spell did not last long (spells do not tend to) but it did last the night and before it lifted I had pinned the note on Lara’s door.

  It met, of course, with a deafening silence. Which was fine, and fully expected. Sober, I only hoped my lapse had not caused her new problems. I rationalized that it might instead have helped Lara, by rallying her together with Ian against a common enemy. Even sober, though, I was not exactly sorry I’d done it. I needed to do it.

  And sitting at the HoJo MoHo front desk in my jacket and tie, I could not keep from fantasizing that Lara’s would be the next face to emerge from the revolving glass doors. You saw motion, then reflections and a blur of clothing, finally the faces. So the moment of revelation was always suspenseful and we did get the occasional celebrity—Dizzy Gillespie for one, also the writer Bernard Malamud. Maybe she had changed a bit (I was ready for that) but Lara would appear, perhaps on business (to book an upcoming function in our splendidly appointed Blaine Room), with my note showing like a popup handkerchief in her breast pocket.

  Or perhaps, I fantasized, we would meet on the icy Weeks Bridge, as we rushed headlong in opposite directions, like two characters in a Dostoevsky novel. The circumstances might be less melodramatic but there was no getting around the law of averages: sooner or later, fantasy might well collide with reality. Apart from our lengthy history of serendipitous encounters, Cambridge is a small city and both of us walked a lot.

  Hopelessly restless, I walked even more after leaving the note. One stormy afternoon the kids and I must have logged five miles, to the point where Jake complained he was tired. Whoa, now. Tired? “I’m not tired” was my boy’s mantra. It was a declaration that escaped his lips with such frequency I could mistake him for a talking doll with its single embedded stringfed phrase.

  It was doubtful I’d really worn him down, far more likely I’d pissed him off with too many sidelong glances. Some days I was like the partygoer who chat
s you up while peering past your ears, scoping the scene for someone more interesting.

  “What are you looking for?” Jake said, more than once.

  “Early signs of spring. I told you, I can feel spring in the air.”

  “Papa!” Hetty protested, her arms spread wide in characteristic dismay, her expression poised between the old silly-papa-is-joking-us and a new papa-is-off-his-rocker. “It’s snowing.”

  “Hey, if you guys can’t handle a few spring snowflakes, we can go home any time,” I said, for oh what a rogue and peasant slave was I.

  Winnie seemed to suspect nothing. In any event, she said nothing. Never once had she pressed me on where I was during our it’s-not-a-separation separation. She merely took my word for it that I felt better. In one way she was offering her jaw for the knockout punch, in another she was making it impossible for any such punch to be thrown. By giving me no grounds for resentment, no context for anger, she disarmed me of everything save my sorrow. And from that she simply averted her gaze.

  Then one night she surprised me. Winter was wearing us down, she said. What a shame it was, she said, that we couldn’t afford to take a trip. How nice it would be, she said, to escape the cold weather for a few days and travel someplace warm and sunny.

  This was something we had never done. We were not like a real grown-up American family of the sort who had money in the bank and took an annual trip to the sun. Occasionally we took a small trip—in the car, no frills. We camped or stayed with friends, counting our quarters at roadside diners. Fancy resorts in Florida were never a consideration.

  So I just smiled when she raised this idea. Even when she raised it a second time, I shrugged it off. The weather hadn’t been all that bad. Lately, the kids and I had seen some early signs of spring, hadn’t we? Things were looking up.

  Winnie shifted ground. If we couldn’t afford it as a family, maybe I should get away for a few days on my own. Take another break. As brightly and solicitously as she framed it, this was the closest she came to acknowledging the unshakeable malaise I had labored to hide from her. I had been the cheerful caretaker of the children, the willing shopper, the whistling dishwasher. Also the solicitous mate, inquiring after her day at the office, listening to the litanies. Now here she was, undermining my entire masquerade, stoving in the façade.

  “No way,” I said. “If I go anywhere, we all go. It’s only fair.”

  “Then we all stay,” she laughed, more lighthearted than I had heard her in some time. Maybe I had passed another test, because a day later Winnie announced we would be going on a trip after all. A trip we could afford, because it was free.

  Unsolicited (or so I was told), Winnie’s parents were giving us this present. It was not anyone’s birthday, not Christmas, yet they had booked us for a long weekend in the Catskills. “It’s almost April,” Priscilla chirped over the phone. “We wanted the children to ski at least once before the season ends.”

  It was true Winnie’s folks had done a version of this the previous winter. We stayed with them, however, not at a fancy-dan hotel. And while they did treat us to day passes and schedule a few lessons for Jake and Hetty, it was clear that Priscilla and Johnny were really purchasing three days of grandchildren, not three days of skiing. Hetty skied for about three minutes that first afternoon, reported back that the mountain was slippery (who could argue otherwise?) and spent the rest of her time in Priscilla’s kitchen.

  I was pretty sure this winter’s gift had been engineered by Winnie as a replacement for the sunny getaway we could not afford. It may have been a benign conspiracy, but it was a conspiracy nonetheless. Schedules had been coordinated, reservations had been made, the hotel had been paid in advance. We had to accept and go.

  The trip was also benign. Transporting the family to a fresh venue gave us a boost, gave me some mental space. In Bearsville, I could focus on what was right in front of me. Winnie was so charming and so pretty (with her green hat and red cheeks, ice chips in her flyaway hair) that I was convinced I could love her. How could anyone not?

  And Jake was so consumed with the Olympic competition raging inside his head that he became a child again. Hour after hour I streamed down the hills with him as though the piano, strapped to my back for so long, had finally been delivered. Hour after hour we were pals, not Khrushchev and Kennedy going eyeball to eyeball.

  In the restaurants, where all the bills were being siphoned to Johnny, we were under strict instruction to order from the full dinner menu, the impressive wine list, the lavish dessert tray. “None of your usual penny-pinching,” Johnny insisted. “If I catch you ordering spaghetti or splitting desserts, there’ll be heck to pay.” Every aspect of the weekend had to be luxurious.

  And so it was. As we sat by the parlor fire with a mug of Irish coffee (the children tucked away in a pine-lined loft so cozy they fell straight asleep), it felt like a honeymoon. There were plenty of actual honeymooners at the inn, and there were all sorts of programs and perks designed just for them. We did not partake of the heart-shaped hot tub or the bizarre frilly nightwear, but we did luxuriate. We did consent to being spoiled.

  It felt as though we had broken the back of a tough winter. I was in remission. My blood test showed no trace of Lara Cleary, my brain scan no sign of my maundering obsessive attachment to the idea of her. An obsession, I recalled from Bugsy Brennan’s high school psychology class, was rarely founded in reality. It was an emotional glitch, just as cancer was a physiological glitch.

  Riding home that Sunday night, we basked in the afterglow of three perfectly self-indulgent days. For the first time in my life, I entertained the notion that maybe the rich really were happier, maybe money really could ease all burdens, cushion all pain. When the license plate game ended and the songs trailed off and the children were finally lulled asleep in the backseat, Winnie reached over and touched my arm in a gesture she has for expressing complete contentment. It had been nine months since my last glimpse of Lara Cleary. Might that be the gestation period of a marital comeback?

  At first it was like one of those colds you have trouble shaking; the symptoms seem milder or even gone, then they trickle back. Traversing the slushy streets of Cambridge that week, I felt such a relapse coming on and tried to fight it off. To prevent those streets from organizing themselves into a maze leading to Miller Road, I carved out new circuitous routes around town.

  To keep Lara from invading my thoughts, I employed strategies of distraction, tricks really—coping mechanisms roughly equivalent to counting sheep at night. I would present myself such stiff intellectual challenges as reciting the starting lineup of the 1967 Red Sox—or the 1968 Red Sox, a far greater challenge. I would generate lists, propose categories. Who were the ten greatest film actors of the 1940s? Starting with Julie Garfinkle, provide birth name and fake name for ten prominent film actors of the 1950s.

  Walking the kids back from school as spring got underway for real, I would identify the birds and blossoms. Hetty listened intently, working to learn them, while Jake was already sufficiently informed to dispute my designations. We could agree about the obvious (Bradford pears with their white cloud of blossoms, forsythia bushes of declarative yellow) but he was having none of my copper beeches and horse chestnuts. Having studied up in a book Winnie gave him, the kid knew more than I did. Copper beech my eye.

  Spring gave rise to an idea that got me through a few Sundays. Why not take short, inexpensive trips on the weekends. Day trips. Three gallons of gas would get us to the matchless curve of beach at Ogunquit. For another twenty bucks, we could rent a motel room with two double beds (“Magic Fingers!” Jake exclaimed) plus coffee and doughnuts in the morning. The kids had a blast there and they liked it even better in Mystic Seaport, where they commandeered the penny-squashing machine and got to eat hot dogs for lunch.

  After dinner, Jake and I would pore over maps, planning more forays. We were tuned to the siren song of the good old open road, man, and Winnie smiled upon our endeavor. I suppose the pr
ogram was an attempt to recreate the illusion of safety I had experienced in Bearsville. The problem was that to recreate and perpetuate it, we might need to go on the road for the rest of our lives.

  We couldn’t do that, but maybe we could move to the Catskills. We should move somewhere, I found myself suggesting in bed one night. After ten years in one place you either moved or found yourself mired down. You could wake up decades later and find your entire lives were lived in a place you had come to accidentally, temporarily, for college. Find you had lived out an accidental life.

  Winnie disagreed vehemently. Far from being stuck, we were damned fortunate to be in this civilized place, this livable city where the schools were topnotch, the movie houses played Truffaut instead of Dumbo, and no one would have dreamed of voting for Richard Nixon. A city, moreover, where she had a very good job, and where I had more acting opportunities than I could expect to find anywhere except New York.

  Did I want to move there? To New York City?

  All lives are accidental, Winnie insisted. Growing up, no one knows where he or she will live, or with whom. No one knows what he or she will do to earn a living. Then the accidents begin to happen, the life begins to unfold. That’s just how it is.

  All I could do was smile and concede she had made some good points. And that no, I did not wish to relocate to New York City. The song of the open road did not point me toward the Big Apple.

  At Cronin’s, on the first day of May, we did a reading of Odets’ Golden Boy. The play is definitely a period piece, 1930s proletarian theater, but Lipsky pushed it as “newly relevant” and chock full of lively language, meaty dialogue. “The waitresses will love us,” was his clincher.

  When he parceled out the male roles, I was hoping for Joe Bonaparte, the cocky kid. Joe was the Golden Boy and a lot of those good lines were his. Moody, his manager, had some good lines too, but Moody was older, a has-been and a cuckold. None of us was the right age for Moody, but according to Lipsky, I came closest. I was “mature” and had the right voice. Ken Carlisle would read Joe Bonaparte.