Starting Over

by Dan Wakefield

  Potter met Max in the Service, when they both were stationed at the Navy Department in Washington. Potter as a yeoman typist, Max in the psychiatric division. Max was a shrink, and though Potter never saw him on a professional basis, he kind of adopted him as a father. Max was only three years older than Potter but seemed a lot more than that, maybe because he was so goddamn calm and in control all the time. When Potter met him, Max had recently finished his training analysis, and he seemed to be one of the few people Potter knew for whom that process had “worked.” There was something comforting about the result, but also something Potter found a little bit scary. It was something in Max’s calm, unruffleable demeanor; as if some wire had been unhooked, the one that connected you with anger and frivolity and unpredictable thought and action. Max smiled a lot, but seldom if ever laughed. When something struck him especially funny he would smile and say, “That’s very funny.”

  “Those guys in the magazine article,” Potter said, “the article I was telling you about—they all seemed to have some burning desire to do some particular thing they’d never been able to do—but I can’t think of anything like that. Becoming a lobster fisherman or something. You know.”

  “What about—your acting?” Marva asked brightly.

  “Come on Marva, that’s over,” Potter said forcefully. “Done. Dead. Buried. Gone.”

  “OK, I just thought.”

  “What about teaching?” Max asked.

  “Teaching what?”

  “What you know about—the theatre. Even public relations.”

  “Who the hell wants to know about that?”

  “You might be surprised,” Max said with a smile.

  “Don’t worry, Phil,” Marva said, “Max knows everyone.”

  Potter didn’t doubt that.

  When Max and Marva went to bed, Potter stayed up, keeping the fire in the library going, drinking giant Scotch and sodas, pondering his possible futures. He wished, in a way, he could just move in with the Bertelsens—like a black-sheep son, unfit for employment—and hide in the warm safety of their house, their friendly protection, their ordered lives.

  The thought of the old dream of acting reminded him of the dangers of the world outside, the dangers of caring and desiring, of wanting something so bad you can taste it, but having it always recede before you until in order to live at all you had to turn your back on it—swear off it as surely as an alcoholic swears off the sauce—and for something less, something else.

  The dream had become a memory, still vivid and painful. When Potter finished college and the Navy and came to New York, he came with the casual assumption that—with time and the breaks and professional training—he would emerge as a new Marlon Brando or Jason Robards, and after a successful run on Broadway in a new Tennessee Williams hit, he would hop off to Hollywood, swatting producers away like gnats, and do the star bit, but not let himself be taken in. He played in his mind many times the scene in which he politely told the roomful of Hollywood moguls that he couldn’t accept their fantastic offer for the lead in the screen version of a new Harold Robbins novel, but had chosen instead to return to New York and do Shakespeare in the Park for scale.

  After four years of making the rounds, with his smile and his folder of glossy profile photos, he landed one part in a TV drama series in which he dashed into a room and said, “Telegram for Mr. Bostwick.”

  It did not lead on to bigger things.

  One afternoon at a casting call for parts in a new TV crime series Potter was sitting on the usual bench, crowded with other palmsweating aspirants, his head aching and his feet sore, wanting to take a piss but afraid to be gone in case his name was called, when a door was flung open from the inner sanctum, the warm secret source of carpeted power, and out came a girl he saw around a lot at parties, who was bright and on her way up and treated him with a flirtatious sort of friendliness. Her name was Madeline and she never wore makeup except on her eyelids. They were purple. Potter moved slightly forward, simply to greet her, but before he could open his mouth she flashed by him, and, though her eyes never fell upon him, never made the slightest flicker in his direction, her long delicate arm, as if guided by radar, reached out at the moment she was precisely perpendicular to him, and her longnailed fingers made a quick, fleeting ruffle through his hair, while, at the same split-second she said, “Hi, Love,” and then she was gone, with her papers and her power and her purple eyelids.

  Potter sat for a moment not moving; his scalp, where her fingers had flicked across it, felt on fire. He did not see the room, or the people in it, but he stood up and moved, in a trance, to the elevator. It came, and he pressed the lobby button and stood facing front. He turned right, out the glass revolving doors, and with his mind as blank as a newly washed blackboard, he walked to the nearest city trash basket and stuffed in the folder containing his résumé and his glossy photos and walked on, as if guided by an electronic beam, to the nearest sign that said LIQUOR, walked in and asked in a pleasant monotone for a quart of Cutty Sark, hailed a taxi, went back to the apartment he shared with a girl named Tandy who had graduated magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr and was working her way up in publishing and said she would help pay the rent and do the dishes and whatever the fuck needed to be done to help Potter make it in the theatre because she believed both in Potter and the theatre.

  When she came home she found him in his underwear guzzling from the bottle, glassy-eyed, and when she asked what had happened he explained, “I quit.”

  For a while she tried to reason with him, told him how that sort of thing happened all the time to everyone, tried to taunt him, appeal to his machismo, but finally she understood that something had clicked off, that indeed the big theatre dream was as busted inside him as a pricked balloon, and that nothing could patch it together and blow it up again; and when she was sure of that she set down her cup of Medaglia d’Oro and lit a Pall Mall, and after exhaling a long, thin stream of smoke, like a line drawn across the empty air, she said in a calm, thoughtful voice: “You’ll be drunk tonight. And puking in the morning. When you’re through, get your shit together and clear the fuck out.”

  Potter said nothing.

  Thinking back, he wished he’d had some kind of line of farewell. He at least could have done a quick buck-and-wing and said “Remember me to Herald Square.”

  The old saw that “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” was part of the vague prejudice Potter had carried with him against the academic life, but that seemed no more applicable now than many of the other set assumptions he had grown up with in the Fifties. Teaching had the potential for the sort of personal satisfaction that people seemed to value more now than old-fashioned success, and Potter was willing to give it a fling if any institution was bold enough to grant him the chance. Knowing the market was already glutted with Ph.D.s, he couldn’t imagine that his own academic background, which sported nothing gaudier than the now perfunctory B.A., would qualify him for anything. But Max Bertelsen, who knew what was happening, said that Potter’s practical experience might just be of interest to certain institutions whose programs were now in flux.

  Gilpen Junior College was in flux.

  It was one of the many brownstone schools of higher education on Beacon Street, former family houses converted into factories of learning, ranging from certified distinction of a minor sort to high-priced havens for middle-class kids who had nowhere else to go, were not yet ready or willing to marry or work, and whose parents could afford the luxury of a largish tuition in exchange for the solace of saying “My son/daughter is at Gilpen Junior—you know, in Boston.” This college, as well as many others scattered through the metropolitan area, had flourished for a while with fairly staple servings of a liberal arts stew, and a boast of being small, selective, and “giving special attention to the individual student.” But along with many other private colleges, Gilpen had felt the pinch caused by the end of the postwar baby boom, rising costs, the growth of state institutions with vastly lower tuit
ions, and had brought in a new dean who was a real live wire to revolutionize its program to meet current needs and trends.

  As Dean Guy M. Hardy, Jr., explained it, “The day of the Ivory Tower is past. In fact, ‘the past’ is past. What’s happening is Now, in education as in other fields.”

  Dean Hardy tamped his meerschaum and his brow furrowed in studied seriousness. His greying hair was styled in a brush-cut, and with his snapping little eyes and pudgy, lineless pale moon face, he reminded Potter of an apprentice FBI agent. Actually, he had “been in government” before going into higher education. From the way Hardy spoke of “being in government” it sounded as if he had probably held some sensitive post pretty high up in State, but Potter knew from Max Bertelsen that Guy Hardy had served in the nether regions of the USIA, editing a quarterly designed to capture the minds of the intellectuals in Central America and producing a series of Brief Lives of American Presidents for Radio Free Europe. He had also seen overseas duty, holding down the post of librarian at the American consulate in San Salvador for eighteen months.

  “The world is changing, and with it, education,” Hardy continued.

  Potter tried to concentrate.

  He gathered that Dean Hardy had been sucking around the Harvard Crowd, and had through some such connection gained entrée to the Bertelsen salon. That was big potatoes in the Boston-Cambridge intellectual circuit, and Potter understood clearly the reason he had been granted the interview was because of high recommendations from Max.

  “So we stress,” said Hardy, “Communications. We do not have ‘Freshman English’ as such, but a wide-ranging course of study designed to meet the needs of students growing up into one of the most media-oriented societies known to man.” He paused, proudly, and said, “We call this core, required line of study ‘Contemporary Communications in a Media-Oriented Society.’”

  “Very apt,” said Potter.

  “Or,” Hardy chuckled, “as the students call it, ‘Con Com.’”

  Potter smiled.

  “Max tells me you’ve done quite well in public relations. What brings you to consider leaving the field?”

  Potter got out a cigarette, paused, and sizing up his audience in the way that he would a prospective client, proceeded artfully to feed the Dean every cliché he figured he would gobble up, all covered with a thick sauce of sincerity. When he finished, Hardy was clearly impressed, and said he liked the idea of having some faculty who had come by their experience “in the real world of push and shove.”

  “I can honestly say,” Potter said with a grin of camaraderie, as if sharing a personal insight with a man of the world who would understand, “I’ve done my share of pushing and shoving.”

  Hardy winked, and nodded. He offered Potter a position as instructor, teaching two sections of Con Com—and a prize!—a seminar in public relations.

  For that one, Potter mused, he could take the class to lunch, have each student drink four martinis and abstain from any food; the ones who could return and work until five would pass the course. After the interview, Potter walked down Beacon Street and into the Public Gardens, where he sat on a bench, feeling expansive and excited, looking around at this curious old-new city, seeing it now not just with the appreciative eyes of the tourist but the proprietary feeling of a soon-to-be citizen of the place. It was the way he once felt when he was new to New York, sitting on a bench in Washington Square.

  3

  Trees and grass.

  Grass and trees.

  Potter rented a ground-floor apartment in an old frame house on a quiet street in Cambridge where traffic jams of contentious taxis and demolition crews from Con Edison seemed as unlikely as cattle stampedes. He figured as long as he was fleeing New York he might as well get as far away from its spirit as possible, and so chose to live across the river from Boston in the more pastoral, less-citified world of Cambridge. It was only a ten minute commute by subway, and the subway itself was a joyride compared to the roaring, rocking, hellbent human cattlecars that blasted back and forth beneath the boroughs of New York in their underground chambers filled with pestilent air and ages of grime. The subways Potter took to Boston from Harvard Square were brightly-painted trolley-type cars that reminded him of childhood and a less frantic era. And, in what Potter considered an extra dividend of the trip, the trains clanged up from underground to cross the Charles River on a bridge that provided the passengers a sudden, sun-glinted view of water and sailboats, skyline and sky.

  Potter sat at his bowed-out living room window with a glass of instant iced tea, just looking at the green, luxuriating in the sight, devouring it, letting it feed him. It was one of the important factors in making his move, and it helped him to view it as rational and right. He felt the presence of grass and trees might even make him drink less. Bring order. In New York you had to drink just to clear the soot from your throat. Burn off the grime. In New York you had to drink for your goddamn health. Or your job. Just by leaving his PR job, Potter had eliminated all the expense account luncheons with three martinis and a brandy for dessert, and all the freebie cocktail parties after work. He vowed not to drink in the daytime anymore, and figured that ought to be easy since there wasn’t any reason for it now. That was certainly a plus for his change; in fact, almost everything he could think of about his new move was a plus except for a considerable cut in salary, but in its own way he looked on that, too, as a healthy change. It would be good to live frugally for a while, help in his desire to simplify and purify his manner of existence.

  Those were the pleasant kinds of thoughts that came to him while looking out the front window, but when he had to turn back into the apartment itself he felt less assured and confident of things. Not that there was anything wrong with the apartment; it was the sort of place that prompted everyone to say, “You could really do a lot with it.” The problem was, Potter did not know how. What furniture he and Jessica had accumulated during their marriage he had left for her own use. He hated the painful process of “dividing up,” and anyway he didn’t want to bring the furniture of his old life into his new one. He only brought books and records. Marva Bertelsen had been kind enough to take him to Jordan Marsh to pick out a rug for the living room, and help him get the necessary linen and towelling. She also showed him a second-hand furniture store in Cambridge where he bought a couch for the living room, a mattress and springs for the bedroom, and a beat-up desk and chair. He picked up a couple of canvas sling chairs for the living room, and improvised a coffee table by setting a varnished door on some cement blocks. He had meant to use the blocks for putting a bookcase together, but he thought the coffee table more important, so that left the bookcase still to be done, and in the meantime he kept the books in the old liquor boxes he had packed them in, and shoved them against the wall in the living room where the actual bookcase would be when he got around to setting it up. The walls were white and nude, except for a travel poster of Rio de Janeiro that Potter hung with thumbtacks.

  Supplying the kitchen turned out to be the hardest part of all. It was hardest because when Potter went to buy the minimal stuff he needed, it reminded him of all the times before he was married when he had moved from one place to another, finding it easier to leave junk behind and pick up a new set of pots and pans and dimestore dishes and silverware to start with again. He bought four of everything, anticipating a girl for himself and a nice other couple they would entertain with quiet gourmet dinners at home. Selecting the cheapest stuff he could, he rushed through the ordeal as quickly as possible, throwing in dishtowels and potholders and paring knives at random, performing the task with a feeling very much like swimming underwater. When he finished, he took his rattling packages and ducked into the nearest bar for a double Scotch on the rocks.

  Once he recovered from the essential furnishing, Potter bought a marked-down portable stereo, a model that probably was mostly sold to Puerto Ricans new to the mainland. He was being frugal. He even figured he could do without a television.

 
; In a few weeks, he changed his mind about that.

  Potter had stayed on at Olney and Sheperdson through most of the summer, working hard, padding his expense account more than usual, and saving as much as he could for the coming time of his new, more stringent circumstances. He moved into his place in Cambridge in early September, in time for the hot gold burst of Indian summer that fired the whole city with a heightened glow. Scores of schools and colleges and universities began preparation for a new semester, and the atmosphere was charged with a pleasant sense of anticipation.

  Except for quiet dinners at the Bertelsens’, Potter didn’t do much in the way of social life, nor did he desire to yet. It was an intermediate time for him, a pause between his old life and new one about to begin. There were times like that when he found it was best to hold back, to wait, to be alone as much as you could stand it, to try not to press things. Potter had a roommate in college who referred to such times as periods in which he “devoted himself to science”—read a great deal, tried to get some exercise, refrained from alcoholic or sexual or emotional binges, in general rallied his forces, got into shape for the good times to come.

  You had to believe, of course, that the good times indeed were coming, and that wasn’t always easy. Sometimes Potter was stricken with doubts and regrets, wondering if what he was doing made sense. Sometimes the thought of Jessica opened in his mind like a sudden wound, and he would wonder where she was, what she was doing—who she was doing it with. The line of the old song, slightly revised, would ring through his head in a cruel taunt: “I wonder who’s fucking her now?” He heard she was back in New York, and was thankful he wasn’t there himself where he might run into her, walking hand in hand with some new lover, looking cool and glamorous.