The Twoweeks

by Larry Duberstein

  To sacrifice a child, or two children, so you could go to bed with someone other than their mother? Go to Revere Beach, or to a Conway Twitty concert? It was absurd to believe God was ambiguous on the matter.

  I could hardly communicate this tangled “truth” to Lara. I couldn’t begin to summarize my three A.M. debates with God, with my parents, and with good old Father McGowan. Whether it was useful or not, the truth I had to offer was simple: I did love her. I needed her as much as she needed me and I could offer myself, my physical and emotional presence, in whatever creative way she could devise. After all, she had come up with The Twoweeks.

  But I could not sacrifice my children.

  Lara had never been willing to have an affair. That was why The Twoweeks had to end after two weeks. To her this was a matter of principle, not of mere semantics, and I respected her position completely. Yet now in our time of truth-telling (or blood-letting) she felt obliged to speak of casual affairs undertaken last autumn, in Europe. For Lara had gone abroad on her own; Ian had not gone with her.

  I was obliged to listen. I was expected (since these affairs were “casual” and also “useful” for clarifying her state of mind) to remain emotionally neutral as I listened. In effect, Lara’s honesty required me to be dishonest. If I rolled over on my back and started kicking my feet in the air in jealous protest, the conversation could not have continued.

  At some juncture in a succession (she tossed the word off so lightly, a succession) of arbitrary “liaisons” (another casual usage, equally fraught with referred pain), she had begun asking herself this question: if she was signing on for ill-considered, self-destructive relationships, why not ours?

  One answer she provided herself was control. She had invented those relationships. She had drawn up the terms. They could not harm her the way ours could, and they could not harm my children. Plus it seems that Ian had condoned them.

  Then there was her fear that an open-ended connection (“a skulking back-alley affair,” as she invariably called it) would risk losing everything that had impelled us together in the first place. This one made my head spin. Hadn’t that been her precise goal in The Twoweeks? To lose everything that impelled us together? Now she was torn between destroying our bond and preserving it! It was “worth something” even if we couldn’t have it.

  So for both of us, this was a time for tortured logic. As each new two hours drew to a close, we would arrange for “one more rendezvous to sort things out,” whatever that meant. To me, it likely meant backsliding into carnal sin; to Lara it meant continuing (or concluding) the conversation. On her way home, in any case, she would regain her senses, revisit first principles, and decide to cancel the sorting-out.

  The first time this happened, she had an opportunity to convey the decision almost immediately, when by truly perverse chance we both found ourselves at the Turtle Café for dinner. Lara with Ian, and I with Winnifred.

  Lara’s balmy father saved our bacon that time. Only small talk was made, and all that small talk was deflected toward and filtered through Francis Xavier Cleary. It even helped that he was hard of hearing, as each harmless remark needed repeating. But as the restroom relay began, Lara managed a whispered aside: “Cal, we can’t. I can’t, anymore. Okay?”

  I’m sure I was white as an albino coming back to the dessert and coffee after that little zinger. It felt like a version of the Cosa Nostra kiss: the embrace and the muffled shot to the gut.

  At the slid-together tables, Ian, in bizarrely high spirits, was not only offering Winnie a taste of his flan but actually feeding it to her. He asked Lara’s dad to pass the cream, got no response, and with hearty familial cheer promised to buy him an ear trumpet next Christmas. He even had a line for me: “You look relieved, Cal.”

  I had relieved myself—that was the joke, of course—but I am sure he could see I was the opposite of relieved, burdened, I suppose. Gutshot, by his damned wife.

  That would turn out to be the first, not the last, of Lara’s pained resolutions. There would be more meetings and more partings, and she would be proven right about losing the magic we had. Even when it was rousing between the sheets, we did not laugh a lot. The buoyancy of the past had been displaced by a leaden acquiescence. Our drive to meet derived less from the benefits of being together than from the deficits of being apart.

  “Nothing has changed, Cal,” she would remind me. “You know that, right? We have no reason to be here.”

  Did Lara want things to change, though? Did she want me to ditch Winnie and the kids? Was it even certain she would ditch Ian? These were the seismic questions we shied from even asking; this was where the honesty stopped. If we were going to take up such inquiries, we had better be ready to act on our conclusions and I don’t think we were.

  I know that both of us hated the aspect of melodrama that had entered our lives. Among other things, The Twoweeks had been a brilliant counterpoint to melodrama. It had been proposed as one part frivolous lark, two parts cold business arrangement.

  Lara liked to describe herself as a realist. Even professionally. Though they all wrote prose, not poetry, she revered Tolstoy and Flaubert above all others, honored Chekhov and Maupassant. These were the writers who seemed able to transfer life directly onto the page unaltered. As we fell into a scattered pattern of assignations (as it began to be an affair, albeit unapproved and undefined as any such thing), Lara undertook to reread those master realists and soon discovered that Realism was a little scary.

  “This is too obvious,” she said, in a conversation that for us at that time passed for humor, “but I had kind of forgotten that both Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina kill themselves in the end.”

  “Remember, though: they never really lived,” I comforted her, adding that we would be extremely odd twentieth-century American citizens if we allowed characters in nineteenth-century European literature any voice in our decisions.

  Decisions, though? We were on our own there, and for my part I was still as incapacitated as Hamlet. I could make the hard choices, I just couldn’t make them the same way two days running or, accordingly, act on them. I was like the cigarette smoker who has quit a hundred times—one step forward, one step back.

  Lara never pushed. If she wanted me to be free for her, she would no sooner demand it than she would ask Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. She would simply remind me there was no upper case Us, and then pronounce the lower case us kaput, yet again.

  I ransacked the text of the play for clues. Did Shakespeare see Hamlet as a pathetic man of weak character, or as a man facing an insoluble problem? What could Hamlet have done to avoid the orgy of madness and death to which the tragedy descends? What had he missed? What was I missing?

  I never brought these maunderings of mine to Lara. Hamlet was arguably the greatest tragedy ever written and we were just modern people with a made-for-TV conflict. I did waste a few brain cells on Lipsky’s theory that if television had existed in 1600, Shakespeare would have been writing for the networks. Who knows, maybe Shakespeare would have elevated our madefor-TV problem to something grander.

  Obviously, I needed to set aside idle thinking and come clean with my wife, but that was another hard choice I made too many times. One night I was literally forming the first sentence of my confession when Winnie woke up shaking from a bad dream. Lost inside my own waking reverie, I was surprised to discover she had been asleep. Holding her as she subsided, I lost all momentum, lost conviction, never said a word.

  Winnie herself might be the one to set things in motion. Indeed, that was part of the case for telling her: this was her life too. Infuriated, she might kick me out unceremoniously. Injured, she might insist I end all contact with Lara and commit to our marriage—or else be kicked out unceremoniously. Unfortunately, these outcomes boiled down to the same two I already had in my power. To shift the burden onto Winnie seemed worse than weak, it seemed cowardly. To tell or not to tell, cowardly either way.

  Thus Lara and I stumbled along without definiti
on. It was never every other Monday, or every third Wednesday, because it was not an affair. Nothing could be assumed, much less taken for granted. Lara might say, as we were parting, “I don’t want to make a plan, let’s just let it go for now.”

  Did this refer to the relationship as a whole, or merely to the specifics of a future rendezvous? Lara did not clarify and I did not seek clarification. Then after we had met again (and had done so because I dropped a note on the seat of the Dart) she would say, “Don’t leave me any more notes, Cal. Just stay the hell off my street.”

  I would comply, and withdraw for a week, two weeks, or more, at which point she would put on her sunglasses and hat and come strolling up to the HoJo MoHo desk. Because by now, of course, we did know how to find one another.

  8

  Boxing Day

  (DECEMBER 26, 2008)

  “Fairlee’s next,” said Jake, in his comic train-conductor voice. “All out for Fairlee.”

  “We can’t stop, Jake,” said his sister Hetty. “We do not have time to stop.”

  “I know I know, but we have to stop anyway. I can’t see out the back window.”

  “Fine, scrape the window. But we can’t go in and eat anything. We’re only an hour away.”

  “True, but if we went in and ate just pie?—then we’d be an hour-and-a-half away!”

  “I want cherry,” said Al, from the way-back.

  “No, baby,” said his mother Cicely.

  “Maybe baby,” sang Jake, a snatch of the old Buddy Holly song.

  “I wouldn’t entirely mind a pit stop,” said Iris. “But any pie had better be secret. Dad’s making the banana cream especially for someone.”

  “Secret pie sounds good to me,” said Jake.

  “I want cherry,” reiterated Al.

  “That’s cool, bud, they’ll have that too. What do you say, Cissy? Just pie, no ice cream, and only for those who want it.”

  “That’s so considerate of you, dear. We’re not required to eat a piece of pie?”

  “All’s fair at the Fairlee Diner.”

  They were the only patrons. Late on a Friday afternoon, snow falling. The waitress (Connie, embroidered in script on the pocket of her dress) said they had just been debating whether to close early.

  “We’ll be quick,” Cicely assured her.

  “No problem, honey,” said Connie. “You take your time.”

  “We’d like to try the secret pie,” said Jake, with a wink for his son (no worries, cherry pie would be forthcoming) “but I’m not sure how many. Show of hands?”

  Five hands went up, Cicely abstaining. All the secret pies would be cherry, Jake specified, and only his would require a scoop of ice cream. “Chocolate or vanilla?” said Connie, in a slightly weary just-the-facts tone.

  Out the front windows, on the Route 5 side of the diner, eighteen-wheelers would occasionally obliterate the prospect and shake the glassware in passing. In back, at the base of a steep declivity, the ice-fringed Connecticut River made its way between snowy fields that were taxed in Vermont and snowy fields that were taxed in New Hampshire.

  Hetty, always fascinated by the arbitrary nature of borders, wondered aloud who paid higher taxes and whether they complained about it constantly. Iris (soon to be a doctor without borders) shrugged and rubbed her eyes.

  “You feeling okay, I.?” Jake asked her.

  “Just tired. I was on nights this week and we were busy nonstop. Three A.M., four A.M. . . .”

  “Why don’t you snoozle for an hour? When we get back on the road.”

  “Yeah, right. With Al and Lorna on a sugar high?”

  “Sit up front with me.”

  “In the death seat?”

  “We can talk.”

  “And this would be while I’m snoozing?”

  “Four A.M. on a weekday?” said Cicely. “I would have guessed everyone was sleeping.”

  “Teenagers don’t sleep. They stay out late crashing cars. They also drink and drug and get sick a lot. The flu has started. There was a heart attack—a real one. We get ten false alarms for every real heart attack.”

  “Heart attacks that turn out to be indigestion, you mean.”

  “Or anxiety. I used to hate false alarms, sort of like who needs this, but I’ve learned to be grateful for them. You get to send everyone home happy.”

  “Iris, you are going to just love it in Uganda,” said Hetty.

  “Not a help.”

  “Sorry. I’m just feeling for you in advance.”

  “Do you remember the time we took you to the emergency room in the middle of the night, I.?” said Jake, though of course they all remembered. It had been designated a Family Event.

  “I fell out of bed and busted my chin open. Graceful, as always.”

  “Ten stitches,” said Jake. “I watched the guy do it. It may have been the inspiration for your career, but it was when I knew for certain I could never be a doctor.”

  “That happened the week you turned five,” said Hetty, who then referenced another Family Event: “The Chuck E. Cheese birthday.”

  “Yuck E. Cheese, you guys called it.”

  “You insisted on a normal party. You wanted whatever Heidi had, or Heather, and they actually complied. They bent their value system for you.”

  “Anything for Baby I.,” Jake ribbed her.

  “Come on. Like they didn’t do what you wanted on your birthdays?”

  “I didn’t want anything,” said Jake.

  “I wanted presents,” said Hetty. “No parties. I hate birthday parties to this day, don’t I, Lorna?”

  Her daughter shrugged. Busy playing handsies with her cousin Al while they waited for their pie, she had not been listening to the grown-ups’ talk, barely heard her name mentioned.

  “There’s a snapshot from that party,” said Jake, “with Dad staring at the Chuck E. Cheese clown like he was one big contagious germ. You know the picture?”

  “I do,” said Hetty. “I also remember something really mean you said.”

  “Jake’s never mean,” said Iris.

  “To Pop he was. He said if Pop didn’t like the way the clown was acting, why didn’t he apply for the job himself.”

  “Because Dad always thought he could do it better.”

  “Maybe he could,” said Iris.

  “Oh he could,” said Jake. “That wasn’t the point.”

  “What was the point.”

  “He always put people down for those gigs. Clowns and mascots at games, ads on TV—commercial work was the buzzword. Except when it was him doing it. Then it was always ‘elevated to new heights.’ ”

  “He was joking.”

  “Sort of. How many times has he told people he ‘starred’ in the last Brylcreem ad ever made?”

  “He’s joking when he says that too, stupid.”

  “Then how come he has the tape of it? How come he showed it to Cissy the first time I brought her home?”

  “He did do that,” said Cicely. “I assumed it was a joke too, though you can’t always tell with your parents. The strangest part was his hair, all that dark hair. I didn’t entirely believe it was him.”

  “His hair was dark then,” said Hetty. “That’s probably why they chose him.”

  “Come on,” said Iris. “I mean, there were probably a million actors with dark hair.”

  “She’s right, Hetto. Dad was just perfect for the role.”

  “Meanie.”

  “It’s so funny you guys knew him with dark hair,” said Cicely. “To me he’s this distinguished looking silver-haired man, who must have always been that way.”

  “You and I watched that TV show, Cissy,” said Hetty. “Where they dyed his hair red and pinned a red beard on him.”

  “That was weird too,” said Cicely, laughing.

  “That was his swan song,” said Jake, because Cal had called it that, saying he would do nothing but Shakespeare from then on. “A principle,” Jake pointed out, “he violates only when someone offers him work.”
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  “Come on, cut him a little slack,” said Iris. “It’s what he does.”

  “Someone tell him that, is all I’m saying.”

  “Plus he is your father.”

  “No kidding. Hetto. Remember how we pretended it wasn’t him on Path of Gold? Rick and Ginny would say I saw your dad, and that their mom watched it every day while he was on, yada yada, and we would say it’s not really him—even though his name was right there on the credits.”

  “I don’t get why you guys were embarrassed,” said Iris. “It’s not like that stuff was all he was doing. I saw him in lots of good plays. Or serious plays, anyway. I never actually liked any of them.”

  “We never got to go to plays. They would always say it was too late at night.”

  “That was just Mom,” said Jake.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Obvious. If Iris got to go and we didn’t, then Lara must have said okay and Mom must have said no. Dad was the low common denominator.”

  “Low?”

  “You know what I mean. The common denominator.”

  “Some of them my mom said no to,” said Iris.

  “Our mom said no to all of them.”

  “That’s just your theory,” said Hetty. “Maybe the plays were different a few years later. Less sex or violence, or whatever.”

  “We can ask them tonight,” said Jake. “After we finish reading Under Milk Wood for the nineteenth time.”

  “Is your mom coming up?” said Iris.

  “Saturday, I think. They’re all coming,” said Hetty, raising her eyebrows slightly. “Mom, Big Bob, and Little Bob.”

  “Last time I saw him, Little Bob was like six feet tall,” said Iris.

  “He’s eight feet tall now,” said Hetty, “Taller than Big Bob ever was.”

  “Anyway,” said Jake, “we can ask Mom and Lara what the rules were and who laid them down. Then Hetty and I will know who to thank.”

  “You know what, Hetty, he is mean. I never knew he was so mean.”

  “You stop agreeing with her, Baby I., or I won’t pay for your pie.”

  “Know something else, Jake?” said Cicely. “I believe I am seeing a few of those silvery hairs on your head. Check this out, you guys.”