‘Hey there,’ I said, all smiles as I got out of the car. He looked at me sheepishly.
‘It’s the first cigarette in over a week,’ he said.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Good day?’
‘I took the job.’ He was staring down at his feet as he said this.
At that moment I felt relief and a terrible sense of guilt. Because I knew that the last thing Dan wanted to do was accept that offer in the stockroom. Just as I knew that he knew the breathing space that extra money would bring us. I tried to take his hand. He stiffened and pulled away, putting his hand behind his back, out of reach. I said nothing for a moment, then uttered two words:
‘Thank you.’
Four
MEATLOAF. DAN HAD prepared a meatloaf. He’d used his mother’s recipe – covering the loaf in Heinz’s tomato sauce and flavoring the beef with three cloves of crushed garlic (a recipe, he’d told me on several occasions, that was somewhat radical for Bangor, Maine, in the 1970s . . . when garlic was considered nothing less than foreign). He’d also made baked potatoes and a fresh spinach salad to accompany the meatloaf. And he’d bought a bottle of Australian red wine – Jacob’s Creek – which he told me that ‘the guy at the supermaket said was “very drinkable”’.
‘That’s high praise from a guy at a supermarket,’ I said. ‘I really appreciate you going to all this trouble . . .’
‘Thought we should celebrate me landing the job.’
‘Yes, I think that’s worth celebrating.’
‘And I know you’ve got your book thing with Lucy at seven.’
‘That still gives us an hour – as long as the meatloaf is ready by—’
‘It will be done in fifteen minutes.’
‘Wonderful. Shall we open the wine?’
He reached for the bottle and screwed off the cap, pouring wine into two glasses. He handed me one and we touched them.
‘To your new job,’ I said.
‘I never thought I’d be toasting a job in a stockroom.’
‘It’s a supervisor’s job . . .’
‘Assistant supervisor.’
‘Still, it’s a management position.’
‘In a stockroom.’
‘Dan . . .’
‘I know, I know. It will ease up so much for us.’
‘And it will also lead to other things for you. I’m certain it’s just a temporary—’
‘Please stop trying to make me feel better.’
‘Should I try to make you feel rotten?’
He smiled. I came over and put my arms around him and kissed him straight on the mouth and whispered:
‘I love you.’
Instead of kissing me back, he hung his head.
‘That’s nice to hear,’ he finally said.
I put my finger under his chin and tried to raise his head. But he shrugged me off.
‘I need to check the potatoes,’ he said.
I stood there, feeling numb. Maybe I’m sending out the wrong signals. Maybe I’m telling him things subconsciously which he is interpreting as belittling or critical or . . .
‘Have I done something to upset you?’ I heard myself asking out loud. Dan closed the oven door, stood up and regarded me with bemusement.
‘Did I say that?’ he asked.
‘Do you feel I am not supportive enough or am conveying some sort of negative—’
‘Why are you bringing this up?’
‘Because . . . because . . .’
The words were catching in my throat, as they were being intertwined with a sob.
‘Because . . . I’m lost.’
What he said next was . . . well, ‘unbelievable’ was the only word that came to mind.
‘That’s not my fault.’
Now the sobs were no longer trapped in my throat. Now I was sitting down in a kitchen chair, crying. All that I had been repressing for weeks, months, suddenly cascaded out in heaving sobs.
Then Sally wandered in.
‘Another happy night at home,’ she said.
‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ I said, forcing myself to stop sobbing.
‘Sure you are. And Dad’s fine too. And we all love each other. And everything is just great. And, by the way, I’m skipping dinner.’
‘But your father’s prepared a wonderful meatloaf.’
‘Since when was meatloaf ever “wonderful”? Anyway, just got a call from Brad. His parents have decided to eat at Solo Bistro down in Bath tonight and asked if I wanted to come along.’
‘It’s a little late for that,’ Dan said.
‘And why?’ Sally asked.
‘Because your dinner is in the oven.’
‘I’ll eat the leftovers tomorrow.’
‘Sorry,’ Dan said, ‘but I’m not allowing it.’
‘That’s unfair,’ Sally said.
‘Too bad you think that.’
‘Come on, Dad – Solo Bistro is a great restaurant . . .’
‘Can’t say I’ve ever eaten there.’
‘That’s because you’ve been out of work and miserable for the last year and a half.’
‘Sally . . .’ I said.
‘Well, it’s the truth – and you know it, Mom.’
Silence.
Dan slowly bent down and put the potatoes back in the oven. Then, standing up again, he turned away from his daughter as he said:
‘You want to eat with those people, off you go.’
Sally looked at me for confirmation. I nodded and she ran off out the door.
I heard a car pull up outside – and glanced out the window to see Sally heading towards Brad’s silver Mini convertible. He got out to greet her and give her a very full kiss right on the lips. She didn’t hold back either. At that moment I was absolutely certain that they were sleeping together. Not that this had come as a shock, as I was pretty sure this had been going on for a year. Just as I also knew that she had asked for an appointment with my gynecologist six months ago and just said it was ‘routine stuff’. Did that mean my daughter was on the pill or had been fitted for a diaphragm? Either way I suppose it was better than getting pregnant. Gazing at Brad – so tall, so lean, so deeply preppy in a town where preppy wasn’t a common look – all I could think was: He is going to break her heart.
I watched the car zoom away, and saw Sally put her arm around Brad as they headed off into the actual sunset. Immediately I thought back to the time when I was seventeen, on the cusp of everything, so determined to succeed. I reached for the wine bottle and splashed a little more in my glass. In the wake of Sally driving off Dan had stepped outside and lit up another cigarette. The joylessness in his eyes was palpable. Seeing him staring out at the world beyond I felt a desperate stab of empathy for him, for us. Coupled with the realization: He is now a stranger to me.
I set the table. I took out the meatloaf and the potatoes. I ladled sour cream into a bowl. I rapped on the glass of the kitchen window. When Dan swivelled his head I motioned for him to come inside. Once back in the kitchen he looked at the dinner ready to be eaten and said:
‘You should have let me do all that. I was making dinner. I didn’t want you to have to do anything tonight.’
‘It was no trouble at all. Anyway, I thought you might need a little time out.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
He came over and put his arms around me. As he buried his head in my shoulder I felt a momentary shudder come over him and thought he was about to cry. But he kept himself in check, while simultaneously holding me tightly. I returned the embrace, then took his face in my hands and said:
‘You know I am on your side, Dan.’
His body stiffened. Had I said the wrong thing again – even though I meant the comment to be reassuring, loving? Could I ever say the right thing anymore?
We sat down to eat. For a few moments silence reigned. I finally broke it.
‘This is wonderful meatloaf.’
‘Thank you,’ Dan said tonelessly.
An
d the silence enveloped us again.
‘For me, it really is one of the great modern novels about loneliness,’ Lucy said, motioning to the waitress that she should bring us two more glasses of chardonnay. ‘And what I loved about the novel was how it so brilliantly captured forty years of American life in such an economic way. I mean, I couldn’t get over the fact that the novel’s only two hundred and fifty pages long . . .’
‘That really intrigued me as well,’ I said. ‘How he was able to say so much about these two sisters and the times they passed through in such a compressed way, and with such descriptive precision.’
‘This is one of those rare instances when you can actually say there’s not a wasted word in the novel, along with this absolute clear sightedness about the way people talk themselves into lives they so don’t want.’
‘And by the end, we really feel we know these two women so desperately well. Because their lives and choices are a reflection of so many of our own wrong choices, and the way despair and disappointment color all our lives.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ Lucy said as our two glasses of wine arrived.
Lucy and I were sitting in a booth in the Newcastle Publick House – a rather decent local tavern, where the din was never so overwhelming that you couldn’t have a conversation – engaged in our weekly book talk. Actually ‘book talk’ makes this weekly get-together sound formal, rule-bound. The truth is, though we have been having this Thursday get-together for over a year, the only principle that we follow is that the first part of the conversation is all about the novel we have agreed to read that week. That’s right – we try to read a different novel every week, though when we tackled The Brothers Karamazov a few months ago we gave ourselves a month to work through that mammoth enterprise. The only other rule we have is that we take turns choosing the book under discussion and never raise objections if it is out of what Lucy once dubbed ‘our respective literary comfort zones’. The truth is, we both share a similar sensibility when it comes to novels. No fantasy. No science fiction (though we did, at my suggestion, read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles – which we both agreed had more to do with things mid-century American than actual extraterrestrial matters). And no treacly romantic stuff. Having discovered early on that we both read to find windows into our own dilemmas, our choices (outside of The Brothers Karamazov – my idea – and Gravity’s Rainbow – Lucy’s suggestion, and a book which we spent four evenings trying to understand) have largely centered around books which reflect the difficulties inherent in day-to-day life. So we’ve veered towards novels about family complexities (Dombey and Son), money complexities (The Way We Live Now), state-of-the-nation complexities (An American Tragedy, Babbitt), and (no surprise here) marital complexities (The War Between the Tates, Couples, Madame Bovary). We always spend around ninety minutes each week talking animatedly about the novel under discussion – though these Thursday rendezvous (which inevitably stretch to three hours) are also an opportunity for us to catch up with what Lucy once elegantly called ‘our ongoing weather systems’; the stuff that has seemed to constantly circle around our respective lives.
Lucy is a year my senior. She is about the smartest person I know. She went to Smith, joined the Peace Corps, taught in difficult places like The Gambia and Burkina Faso (I had to check out a map to see where that was), then traveled the world for a year. Upon returning to her native Boston she promptly fell in love with a PhD candidate at Harvard named Harry Ricks. Harry landed a job teaching American history at Colby just after he got his doctorate. Lucy retrained in library science and also found a job at the college. Then she lost two pregnancies back to back – the first at three months, the second (even more heartbreakingly) at eight months. Then her newly tenured husband ran off with a colleague (a dance instructor). Then she was badly advised legally and came away from the marriage with virtually nothing. Then she decided that staying at Colby was emotionally impossible – for all sorts of obvious reasons. So she packed up her decade-old Toyota with her worldly goods and headed down to Damariscotta after landing a job at the local high school, running their library.
She was thirty-six when she got here – and I met her during one of her weekend ‘extra money’ shifts at the library in the center of town. We became fast friends. She is the one and only person in the world with whom I confide – and she also knows she can talk with me about virtually anything. Dan has always been pleasant and reasonably welcoming towards Lucy – especially as she usually spends part of Christmas Day with us (she has no direct family of her own). But he is also a little suspicious of her, as he knows she is my ally. Just as he senses what I know Lucy thinks, but has never articulated: that Dan and I are a mismatch. That’s been one of the unwritten rules of our friendship: we tell ourselves everything that we want to share. We ask advice and give it reciprocally. But we each stop short of saying what we really feel about the other’s stuff. Lucy, for example, had a two-year relationship with a wildly inappropriate man named David Robby – a would-be writer who’d fled a bad marriage and a failed career in advertising, and was one of those guys who had just enough of a trust fund to ruin him. Coastal Maine is full of metropolitan refugees like David – whose personal or professional life (or both) have flat-lined and who have come to our corner of the northeast to reinvent themselves. The problem is: Maine is quiet. And underworked. And largely underpaid. Its visual pleasures – the ravishing, primary sweep of its seascape, the verdancy of its terrain, its sense of space and isolation and extremity (especially in winter) – are counterbalanced by the fact that life here throws you back on your own devices, on yourself. And David – an outwardly charming, but clearly unsettled man – was about the last thing my friend needed in her life back then. Still, between the divorce and the lost babies, and the knowledge that her dream of motherhood might be finished, David was, for a time, something of a recompense (even though I found him creepy). But I never said a word against him. Just as Lucy never made any comments about Dan. Was this wrong – a personal confederacy based on being there to hear each other out, but not to ram home certain self-evident verities? I think we trusted each other because we didn’t blitzkrieg each other with lacerating observations – because we both understood our different fragilities and were best keeping ourselves buoyed.
But the book under discussion tonight – Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade – was one of those profoundly disquieting novels that hit you with the most lacerating (and unsettlingly accurate) observations about the human condition.
‘I read somewhere that Richard Yates wasn’t just a serious alcoholic, but a manic depressive as well,’ Lucy said.
‘Wasn’t there that well-reviewed biography of him a few years back,’ I said, ‘which talked about how, even when he was on a binge – which was most of the time – he somehow managed to grind out two hundred words a day?’
‘Words were obviously a refuge for him from all of life’s harder realities.’
‘Or maybe the way he tried to make sense of all the craziness he observed within himself and others. Do you know what the biography was called? A Terrible Honesty.’
‘Well, that is, without question, the defining strength of The Easter Parade. It pulls no punches when it comes to examining why Sara and Emily Grimes lived such unhappy lives.’
‘And the genius of the book,’ I said, ‘is that even though Emily becomes a desperate alcoholic, she’s never painted as sad or pathetic. Yet Yates also makes it so clear that the two sisters have nobody but themselves to blame for their disappointments.’
‘His psychological clarity and his humanity are everywhere. As you said, we all know these women because they are, more or less, reflections of ourselves. It’s what Emily says to her niece’s husband at the end of the book, “I’m almost fifty years old and I’ve never understood anything in my whole life.” That’s the hard truth at the center of the novel. There are no solutions when it comes to life. There’s only mess and muddle.’
‘But we all w
ant answers, don’t we?’
‘You’re talking to a Unitarian,’ Lucy said. ‘We pray “to whom it may concern”.’
‘And the one thing I liked most about being an Episcopalian – besides all that good Anglican choral music – was that it always preached a gospel of thinking about faith in a personal and non-doctrinal way. No real directives from on high. No Old Testament God who kicked butt if you didn’t believe he was the Man in Charge. Still, the one problem with being part of a thinking religion is that there is absolutely no certainty whatsoever.’
‘Does that truly bother you?’
‘Sometimes, honestly, yes, it does unsettle me – the idea that this is it, that there is nothing beyond this except mystery. God knows I’ve tried to believe in a hereafter – that is a component of Episcopalianism. But it’s always held out as more of a poetic idea – a fantasia, so to speak – than an absolute divine truth. As such I doubt I am ever going to run into anyone I know in the afterlife either. But if there is no hereafter, then how do we make sense of this very flawed business called life?’
‘Now there’s a question that will never have a definitive answer. But I do have a question about a completely unrelated, but nonetheless important matter – did Dan take the job?’
I nodded.
‘That’s good news, I guess,’ Lucy said.
‘Not for him. But I didn’t coerce him or force his hand . . . though he acts as if I did.’
‘That’s because he feels guilty about being out of work for so long, as he also hates the fact that he has no choice but to take this job.’
I stared into my glass of wine.
‘I wish it was as simple as that. I just feel that we’re kind of lost together. And that’s an oxymoron, isn’t it? If you are together you’re not supposed to be lost. Then again . . .’
‘So many of us are lost together. Have you suggested counseling?’
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