‘You need a very large drink.’
She produced a bottle of something French and red. We sat down in the two overstuffed armchairs by her fireplace. The whole story was recounted by me in the sort of hushed, emotionless tone of someone who has just witnessed a terrible accident and is reiterating her account without realizing that the calmness she is displaying is a byproduct of the trauma suffered. When I finished, Lucy said nothing for a very long time. But I could see her trying to keep her own emotions in check. I looked at her, bemused.
‘You’re crying,’ I said.
‘Does that surprise you?’
‘I’m . . .’
Words were suddenly beyond my reach. It was as if I had lost all my bearings, my way in the world. Whatever small reserves of equilibrium had gotten me through the past few hours had just run dry. I was truly lost.
That’s when I found myself letting go again. As the crying escalated Lucy came over and held me for the many minutes it took me to subside, never once trying to soothe me with any kind words or the sort of specious bromides that well-meaning people often invoke when faced with someone in the throes of grief. Instead she just let me cling to her until I was cried out. Then I staggered off to her bathroom to wash my face and attempt to do something with makeup that would lose the terrible darkness that had formed around my eyes. When I returned she handed me my refilled glass of wine and the following smart observation:
‘I won’t say something stupid like, “You’ll get over it.” Because I don’t think you will. But what I will say is this – that man has already realized he’s made the mistake of his life. Though part of me despises him for his cowardice – and most especially for causing you such horrendous anguish – part of me pities the sad bastard. Because even if it will always hurt you in some way – as I know it probably will – the truth is you will find some sort of accommodation with this heartbreak. And as to your earlier question, would the two of you still be together if he hadn’t gone off to fetch your suitcases—’
‘If I hadn’t been clueless to what he was actually telling me,’ I said, cutting her off.
‘Clueless? Oh, please. Even if you were together now, his doubts, panic, whatever, would have started the moment he was away from you.’
‘But had we been together tonight, perhaps he would have—’
‘What? Had the Pauline conversion that would have kept the two of you together?’
‘It was love, Lucy. Real love.’
‘From everything you reported, I believe you. And that’s why he too will be broken by this. But still too frightened, too cowed, to get back in touch with you.’
Silence. Then Lucy said:
‘Do you know why I cried earlier? In part, because of the hurt rendered on you. But also – and I hate to admit this – because of sheer, sad envy. How I have longed to feel what you’ve felt for the last few days. To be wanted that way by someone. To find actual love – even if it just lasted a weekend. To think: I’m no longer alone in the world.’
I shut my eyes and felt tears.
‘You have your children, you have your friends,’ Lucy said.
‘And I’m still alone.’
Another silence.
‘We’re all alone,’ she finally said.
We talked until well after midnight, finishing the bottle of wine. I managed to avoid another bout of tears. Then exhaustion hit. Lucy pointed me in the direction of her guest room, telling me that I should sleep as late as I wanted. If I woke and she was gone, I should make breakfast and coffee and loiter here as long as needed.
‘And if you don’t want to go home, the garage apartment is yours,’ she said.
‘I’m going home,’ I said.
‘I hope that’s the right decision.’
‘Whether it’s right or wrongheadedly wrong, it’s the decision I’m making.’
‘Fine,’ Lucy said, her tone lightly hinting at a disapproval she would never actually articulate, but which she clearly felt.
Lucy’s guest room had a double bed with the sort of ancient mattress that seemed to have caved in around the time of the first Kennedy assassination.
At three-thirty in the morning I admitted defeat when it came to surrendering to sleep. Getting up, getting dressed, I left a note on Lucy’s kitchen counter:
Going home. To what? Well, there’s the rub. Thank you for being, as always, the best friend imaginable. And please know that you too are not alone.
Ten minutes later, I pulled up in front of our house. Dan was sitting on the swing bench on our front porch, smoking a cigarette. As soon as I pulled up he tossed the cigarette away, his face all schoolboy guilt.
‘Hey,’ I said, getting out of the car.
‘Hey,’ he said back. ‘Weren’t you supposed to be staying in Boston tonight?’
‘Couldn’t sleep. Decided I should come home and be in time to see you off on your new job.’
He looked at me carefully.
‘You really drove all the way back here in the middle of the night just to do that?’
There wasn’t suspicion in his voice, just the usual quiet, world-weary disdain.
‘How long have you been awake?’ I asked.
‘All night. You weren’t the only person who couldn’t sleep.’
‘Dan, you don’t have to do this job.’
‘Yes, I do. And we both know why. But thank you for coming back in time to see me off to my new role as stockroom clerk.’
I blinked and felt tears.
‘You’re crying,’ he said.
‘Yes. You’ve made me cry.’
‘And now I feel like an asshole.’
‘I don’t want an apology. I want love.’
Silence. He stood up, reaching for his car keys, clearly thrown by what I had just said.
‘See you tonight,’ he said.
Silence.
He headed off. Then, with a quick about-face, he turned back to me and gave me a fast kiss on the lips.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry for so much.’
I searched high and low within me for a retort. But all that came to me was the loneliest of replies:
‘Aren’t we all.’
Dan got into his car and drove off to his new job. I sat rooted to the garden chair, staring up at that big black infinite sky, the limitless possibilities of the cosmos. Thinking one thought:
The death of hope.
Thursday
SUNRISE. I USED to get up after it. Now I wake well before the dawn. A readjustment of my body clock that also arrived with my ability to again sleep through the night. Sunrise. I usually have had the second cup of coffee by the time those initial tentative shafts of light have found their way into my kitchen. On fine clear mornings – and there have been a string of them this week – the early-morning light, especially at this time of year, can be like copper filament; a luminous braiding that always seems to target the little counter where I sip the Italian roast that I make in a cafetière, and which I now get specially ground for me.
The interplay of the light, the heavy aromatics of the coffee, the fact that I have just woken up from a reasonable night’s sleep without (for the past six weeks) the aid of medication. Significant small details to celebrate at the beginning of another day of life.
I have become a runner. Every morning, after a sunup breakfast, I put on a very lightweight pair of track shoes that Ben convinced me to buy (he too has gotten the running bug) and go out for a five-mile jog to the water. My route rarely changes. Houses, avenues, road, more houses (the initial stretch of neighborhood modest, the next expansive and expensive), a bridge, trees, open spaces, rolling green lawns, then that telltale white marine light announcing that I am close to the water’s edge.
Running suits me. Solitary, singular, very much bound up in a daily negotiation with how far you’re willing to push yourself; the frontiers of your endurance. At first, when I decided that, yes, I would force myself out for a daily run, I was a mess. I could not get myself
further than a half-a-mile, and I would frequently find myself winded, or suffering the sort of physical agonies that beset neophytes to the jogging world. Then Ben – who’d become so smitten with the sport that he ended up on the university’s cross-country team – told me I should come spend a Saturday with him at Farmington, during which he’d take his mother out and teach her a few tricks of the running trade. Actually my son bettered that promise, as he convinced his coach – a very nice young guy named Clancy Brown (very thoughtful and cool in his non rah-rah way, and clearly pleased to have a talented young painter as one of his star runners) – to spend an hour looking over my form. He helped me rid myself of all sorts of bad habits I had already picked up.
Since then, Ben and I run together whenever we see each other (which is about once a month – not bad considering that, when I was in college, I only went home at Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter). My form has considerably improved. Five miles is now the quotidian target – but, as Clancy recommended, I do take one day off a week. I also pace myself with care, as I don’t want to court serious injury or the sort of burnout I read about all the time in the running magazines to which I now subscribe. Now I can do the five-mile jog in around an hour – and I’m pleased with that. Like Ben, it is the ability to lose myself in the tangible physicality of running – coupled with the rising endorphins which brighten life’s darker contours – that has made me such a convert.
And this morning – given the meeting I must attend in a few hours’ time – an endorphin rush will be most welcome. The fact that the daybreak sunlight is so radiant certainly helps. So too does the fact that, at six-twelve a.m., which is when I started my run this morning (I now always regard the digital readout on the watch on my wrist before starting), the city of Portland is only just waking up. As such I can make it to and from my apartment on Park Street to the lighthouse in Cape Elizabeth before the bridge traffic begins to build up.
My apartment: a two-bedroom place in a reasonably well-preserved Federalist building on what I think is the city’s nicest street. When I came to look at it around some months ago, my first thought was that the houses here are very like the sort you find on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. Immediately I found myself having one of those moments of encroaching melancholy that became so predominant after that weekend, and which I finally took steps to curb (the jogging being one of the ways out of the darkness into which I fell for a time). But I still adored the street – and the apartment was, at $1,150 per month, not exactly a bargain. Just under one thousand square feet. A little homey, a little old-fashioned, a little bit scuffed up. But the owner told me (via the realtor) that he knew it needed a paint job and sanded floors and revarnished kitchen cabinets and a bunch of other home improvement details. So he was willing to knock off two-fifty per month from the rent for the first two years if I would undertake it. Again it was Ben who stepped in. We set a parts and labor budget of around $4,000 – absolutely all I could afford. In August he and two college friends literally moved in with air mattresses and sleeping bags. They did all the work in three weeks, pocketing $1,000 each. They left me a very clean and airy place of white walls and varnished floorboards. I then worked twenty hours a week overtime for the next two months – and through judicious shopping at several of the quirky secondhand stores around town, I managed to furnish it in a style that is largely rooted in mid-fifties Americana, and which Lucy deemed ‘retro cool’ when she first saw the apartment put together. Frankly that’s a little generous on her part. It still feels very much as if it is a work in progress, just one step above basic. But there’s a room for Ben or Sally when they come visit. And Ben surprised me with a gift of an original painting of his: a blurred series of blue geometric shapes, on a grayish-white background; very Maine marine light in its sensibility, very much using that Tetron Azure Blue I scored for him. I had to hold back my tears when my son showed up with the painting, telling me: ‘Let this be your water view.’
He’s right: the apartment itself doesn’t have much of a view (it faces the rear alleyway behind my building and is on the ground floor). But outside of the occasional weekend revelers who stagger down the rear passageway late Saturday night, it is fantastically quiet. And it does get the most sensational early-dawn light. And it’s been such an important bolthole for me.
Coffee and muesli finished, I washed up the dishes (I still don’t have a dishwasher), then reached for my nylon running jacket on the back of the stool at the little kitchen counter-bar where I eat most of my meals. I am very conscious of the time this morning, as the meeting in question begins at eight-thirty, and is a ten-minute drive from here. I’ll need to shower and wash my hair and put on the one suit I own beforehand – which means a good hour when I get back from my run. Which means I must leave now.
October again. The first Thursday in October. A year ago to the day, it was the eve of my leaving for Boston. And now . . .
Now I run.
Grabbing my keys I zipped up my jacket, locked my door behind me and hit the street. A perfect day. The sun gaining altitude, that bracing autumn chill underscoring the morning, the city still hushed, the elms and pines on my street truly golden. I turned right. Two jogging minutes later I was down by the port. Another right-hand turn, a hard uphill climb on the pedestrian pavement that accompanies the car ramp up to the bridge, then a spectacular run at suspended altitude across Casco Bay. Then a stretch of shopping centers. Then an extended neighborhood of middle-class modestness until I reached that stretch of grand homes fronting the water. The homes of the city’s top lawyers and accountants and the few captains of industry that we have in the state. Homes that speak of discreet wealth. No ostentation. Just understated ocean-view reserve. Beyond this small enclave of serious money (and there are so few of those in Maine), there is a public park built around Portland’s venerable lighthouse. It’s a ravishing public green space; a hint of savage sea just a short distance from the city center. My run takes me right down to the water’s edge, then up a path to the lighthouse: a white beacon standing in crisp silhouette against the angry majesty of the encroaching Atlantic. I read somewhere that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – when resident in Portland – used to walk here every day. In my darker moments some months ago – when I had just moved into the apartment, when the gloom that had encircled me for so long like a particularly bad weather system was still refusing to blow off into the next county – I couldn’t help but wonder if Longfellow had plotted out his most famous poem, Evangeline, while following the same lighthouse route along which I jog almost every morning. And given that Evangeline is a sort of American Orpheus and Eurydice tale of separated lovers searching for each other amidst the continental vastness of this once-new world . . . well, life has its attendant ironies. Even when jogging.
This morning there were just two other runners out by the lighthouse, including a man of around seventy whom I seem to inevitably pass every morning. He’s highly fit, his face as taut as piano wire, always dressed in the same gray sweat pants and a Harvard sweatshirt. As he jogged by me today he gave me his usual brief wave of the hand (which I always reciprocate with a smile). I have no idea who this man is. Nor have I made any attempt to find out, as he, in turn, has never chosen to discover my name and particulars. I sense that, like me, he prefers to keep it that way. Just as I also appreciate the fact that, for a few seconds every morning, I have this silent greeting with this individual about whom I know absolutely nothing. As he knows nothing about me. We are passing objects with no knowledge of each other’s story; of the accumulated complexities of our respective lives; of whether we are with someone or alone; of the way we will individually negotiate the trajectory of the day ahead; of whether we think life is treating us well or harshly at this given moment in recorded time.
Or, in my case, the fact that, ninety minutes from now, I will be in a lawyer’s office, signing the legal agreement that will trigger the end of my marriage.
* * *
The legal agreement that w
ill trigger the end of my marriage.
Yes, it’s legal – in that two lawyers have negotiated it, and once it is signed by both parties it will be legally binding. And the split of the shared assets we have has not been contentious. But the word ‘agreement’ hints at a reasonable parting of the ways. Sadly this has been anything but an amicable parting – as Dan, all these months later, still cannot get his head around the fact that I ended the marriage; that I left him because I was unhappy and felt our relationship was terminal, dead; that, as he put it during one of the many moments when he pleaded for a second chance, ‘If you were actually leaving me for someone else at least I could understand. But to leave me because you just want to leave me . . .’
He never found out about how I was going to leave him for someone else, or how broken I was in the wake of all that suddenly not happening. The very fact that he never registered the emotional slide I had slipped into thereafter . . . well, that was our marriage. And one which I continued to accept in the initial months afterwards, largely because I was still carrying so much injurious sadness. Going through the motions of life, but coping with the most aching sort of loss.
My children, on the other hand, quickly registered the distress I was in. On the morning that I arrived back home before dawn to see Dan off to his new job – and found myself in tears at the realization, I should not be back here with this man – I was found three hours later by Sally, passed out in the porch chair in which I had parked myself; sleep overtaking me as I gazed upwards into the limitlessness of space.
‘Mom, Mom?’
Sally nudged me back into consciousness. I woke, feeling stiff and unwell. When she asked me what I was doing out in the cold, all I could do was bury my head in my daughter’s shoulder and tell her I loved her. Usually Sally would have reacted with adolescent horror at such a show of parental emotion – especially as I had to fight to maintain my composure when hugging her. But instead of displaying sixteen-year-old disdain, she put her arms around me and said:
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