Starting Over

by Dan Wakefield

  “Sorry,” the man said.

  Potter broke away, smiling awkwardly. “Quite all right,” he said.

  Carol smiled at the man and asked if he wanted to dance.

  “I want to go home,” he said.

  “Do we have to?” she asked. “This early?”

  “It’s late enough,” the man said firmly.

  Oh, shit, Potter thought, standing up straight and trying to collect himself, trying to look casual and friendly. The last thing he wanted was a New Year’s Eve brawl with some chick’s jealous date.

  “I’ll get our coats,” the man said, and left the room.

  Carol leaned up against Potter and kissed him, but he gently pushed her away. “You better go on with your date,” he said.

  “Oh, him,” Carol said. “He’s not my date.”

  “Then how come you have to go home with him?” Potter asked.

  Carol shrugged. “Tradition,” she said.

  “What kind of ‘tradition’?”

  “The regular kind. He’s my husband.”

  “Oh,” said Potter, backing away from her. “Well, that makes sense, then.”

  Carol smiled. “Does it?” she asked.

  It turned out that Potter guessed right about Marilyn’s bald guy being a man of distinction. When they got back to her place she told him the man was a leading psychiatrist in New York City. Furthermore, he had a wife and four children there. Furthermore, he had a date with Marilyn and she intended to keep it. He was charming and brilliant and wealthy.

  “And married,” Potter said.

  “And bored with his wife,” Marilyn said.

  Potter told her about Carol, who was evidently bored with her husband.

  “Well,” said Marilyn brightly, “we did pretty good. We’ve both got dates for the New Year.”

  “Yeah, but with married people.”

  Marilyn, weaving, shucked off her gown. “Don’t knock it,” she said.

  “Shit. It just means trouble.”

  Marilyn burped, unhooked her bra, and turned to Potter with a look of tired but firm conviction.

  “Trouble,” she said, “is better than nothing.”

  PART FOUR

  1

  Potter got a call from Carol at four on Wednesday afternoon.

  “Would you like to meet me?” she asked.

  “I thought you were coming to my place.”

  “I think I’d like it better if we met. Someplace. To have a drink.”

  Potter took a deep breath. He wondered if he now was going to have to talk himself into something that he thought was already agreed upon. This seeming change of the ground rules annoyed him, but still, he was curious. Besides, he had nothing better to do, and he’d been looking forward to the event. If it led to trouble, maybe Marilyn was right, that trouble was “better.”

  Than nothing.

  That was even more likely to kill you than an angry husband.

  Nothing.

  “OK,” he said. “Wherever you say.”

  It was a sort of cocktail lounge on top of the Wursthaus restaurant in Cambridge. He had often been to the Wursthaus, but he never knew it had this little cocktail lounge overhead. Not too dark, not too light, not too populated. He wondered if Carol went there often. On Wednesdays.

  “I guess I was pretty drunk,” she said. “When we met.”

  Jesus. He wondered if the whole thing was going to be an apology, an explanation of an embarrassing misunderstanding.

  “I guess we both were,” Potter said.

  She ordered a daiquiri. He ordered a double Scotch on the rocks.

  She was wearing a grey suit, and proper pearl earrings. She looked as if she were on her way to some kind of legal meeting.

  “I have three children,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “Two girls, twins. And a boy.”

  He didn’t know how he was supposed to react to this information.

  “That must be nice,” he said.

  “Sometimes.”

  The drinks came, and she looked down into hers for a while, as if it might reveal something.

  “Do I look that old?” she asked.

  “No,” Potter said quickly. “How old do you mean?”

  “To have three children.”

  “Jesus, you could be twenty for all I know. A person twenty could have three children. Especially if two were twins.”

  He figured she must be somewhere in her early thirties.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  He didn’t want to say “You’re welcome,” so he said nothing and took a swig of his drink.

  “I said Wednesday because that’s when my husband goes to Providence. He teaches an art course there. On Wednesday and Thursday. But Thursdays I have dance class.”

  “So that leaves Wednesdays.”

  “Yes,” she said, “that leaves Wednesdays.”

  She started sipping her daiquiri then, and telling how her husband had a girl he stayed with in Providence, one of his art students, and how for the children’s sake they had agreed not to get a divorce, and not to ask questions of one another’s private life. They didn’t talk much about anything anymore, and didn’t sleep together anymore, and yet they weren’t angry toward each other. They just didn’t feel anything, one way or other.

  With the second daiquiri she told how he once had dreamed of going to New York and making it as a painter and then he got her pregnant and it was twins for godsake and he took that as a sign and got a job as a commercial artist and when she urged him to keep up his real work, the work that he loved, he got the part-time job teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence. After he got the part-time job he got the studio, and after he got the studio he got the girl to go in it.

  “I still like marriage, though,” she said. “In the ideal. But I guess it never happens there—in the ideal.”

  “Not many things do,” Potter said.

  She smiled, and he liked her.

  They each had two more drinks, and Potter asked if she’d like to have dinner. She looked very tired.

  “No thanks,” she said, “I don’t have time for dinner.”

  “Well, can I take you someplace then?”

  He meant to her car or a bus or a train, however she was going home.

  “How about your place?” she asked.

  Afterward, he took her in to Boston, to the underground parking garage beneath the Commons, where she’d left her car. They squeezed hands, and didn’t say anything.

  That Saturday, he got a letter from her. It was on pale blue stationery, with her married name and address engraved on the back of the envelope. He opened it, apprehensively, wondering if she was going to cause trouble after all, wanted to get involved in some big, complicated affair, or was angry or sorry about what happened, or wanted to blame him or her, or what. Before he took the letter out of the envelope he poured himself a drink. He sat down on the couch, and pulled from the envelope the single piece of blue paper, bordered in white. It said:

  Dear Phil,

  It was beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful …

  The beautifuls covered both pages.

  Potter showed the letter to Marilyn.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, smiling. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Nothing, probably.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem like that kind of thing.”

  “You aren’t going to see her again next Wednesday?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to stop while I’m ahead, maybe. While everything is beautiful.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know. I just don’t want to go on with it.”

  Marilyn sighed, then shrugged. “Men,” she said.

  “Don’t ‘men’ me,” Potter said.

  “I’m sorry. Besides, I shouldn’t complain about men right no
w. I found myself a terrific one.”

  “The distinguished shrink. How did it go?”

  “He stayed over in Boston two extra nights. With me.”

  “And?”

  “And he wants me to go away with him.”

  “How far away?”

  “The Virgin Islands.”

  “Great. You’ll probably have a good time.”

  “I want more than that.”

  “How much more than that?”

  “Marriage.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “But why? Why a married guy who has a family?”

  “Well, let’s see. We had beautiful sex. And a wonderful time. He’s warm, and wise, and he’s wealthy. He’s been married sixteen years, and he’s bored with his wife. He hasn’t slept with her for several years.”

  Potter wondered if any husband in America was sleeping with his wife.

  Marilyn stood up and started walking around the couch. “Besides,” she said, “why the hell shouldn’t I have a townhouse on the Upper East Side, and a summer house on Martha’s Vineyard? And servants, and money, and clothes, and—and—”

  She turned around to face Potter, with tears coursing down her cheeks. “And,” she said sobbing, “four children!”

  Potter put his arms around her, held her tightly as she cried, and rubbed the back of her neck.

  “I know,” he said, “I know.”

  He got her to take a shower, and a tranquilizer. He gave her a backrub with Isopropyl, and took her to dinner at the Athens Olympia. She ate hearty, consuming a leg of lamb and rice and a Greek salad, and two baklavas for dessert. When they got back to her place they had brandy and sodas, and Marilyn seemed in good spirits again. She talked of the coming trip to the Virgin Islands, of how she had always wanted to go away like that in the winter to some sunny place. Then she fell silent.

  “What is it?” Potter asked after a while. “What are you thinking about?”

  “The Game,” she said.

  “What game?”

  “The one we all play. With each other. Me and Herb, even though we just met. You and that woman. The woman you aren’t going to see next Wednesday.”

  “What about her?”

  “I was thinking about that letter she wrote you, the one with all the ‘beautifuls.’”

  “Yes?”

  “She wrote the wrong letter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If she wanted to see you again, she should have written, ‘Dear Phil, it was terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible …’”

  “Shit,” said Potter, but he couldn’t help smiling a little.

  “Don’t give me that,” Marilyn said. “I’m right.”

  Potter didn’t say anything. He didn’t move. Without meaning to, he realized he was holding his breath, trying not to think.

  Marilyn leaned toward him and spoke, quietly, insistently: “I’m right,” she said. “Aren’t I right? Wouldn’t you have dragged your ass all over New England to see her again? If she’d written it was terrible, terrible, terrible?”

  “Shut up, goddamn it!”

  He slapped her.

  She drew back, holding her hands on her face, her eyes wide and bright and wild with fright, not of what he would do, but of what she understood from what he did.

  Potter shook his head violently, as if trying to come out of a spell. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Neither of them spoke for a long time, and finally Potter placed his hand on top of hers and, without looking into her eyes, spoke to her very quietly.

  “You’re right, of course. It’s always The Game. And you have to play it with your wonderful Doctor if you really want to get him.”

  “I know, I know, but I hate it. I just want to tell him I love him, and be able to enjoy it.”

  “That’ll be the end of it.”

  “I know, damnit, but it’s so hard, to be coy and scheming and say things you don’t mean and keep thinking all the time about keeping him hooked, unsure—and thinking up new strategies and all of it. It’s all so hard.”

  “Listen,” Potter said. “I’ll help you. I’ll be—like an advisor.”

  Marilyn thought for a moment. “OK,” she said. “I’ll try anything.”

  “OK. It’s a deal.”

  “A deal.”

  They shook on it.

  The new issue of Time magazine had a picture of actress Ali MacGraw on the cover, and a story on “The Return to Romance,” which explained how the fantastic success of Love Story as a book and now as a movie indicated a vast movement among the populace away from cynicism and toward sentiment. Potter read it with special care, not only because of his natural interest in the subject, but because he had to teach it.

  Before the vacation break he assigned his Communications students to buy the issue of Time that appeared the week classes resumed, and read whatever happened to be the cover story. The exercise was part of the course’s attempt to make students conscious of the style and techniques of persuasion used by the different news and information media.

  “All I know is, it made me cry,” Miss Korsky said.

  “You’d cry at anything,” Mr. Stevenson said.

  “Wait a minute,” Potter said. “Wait a minute. Miss Korsky, you mean to say the article in Time made you cry?”

  “No, no. The movie. Love Story.”

  “I don’t see what’s so romantic about dying of cancer,” Mr. Stevenson said.

  “Wait,” Potter said, “we’re not discussing the movie of Love Story. I mean we’re not supposed to be. We’re supposed to analyze the article in Time.”

  “I think it’s right,” someone said from the back of the room.

  Right. Wrong. Good. Bad. Pass. Fail. Potter had hoped for a more detailed analysis. How could he wrench from the class some subtlety of observation, make them see some shades of distinction?

  “Let’s look at the article itself,” he said. “Let’s try to see how it moves from describing the success of Love Story to more general assumptions about the society.”

  The class went blank and silent for a moment, all heads downturned toward the magazine. Pages riffled. Someone blew his nose. Potter found himself making an almost audible grunt, as if pulling oars, trying to psychically pull some specific responses from them.

  “Now listen to this,” Potter said, “carefully. Time quotes this NYU professor who says, “The mood today, particularly on campus, is toward personal relationships rather than politics, love rather than action. Not by accident does this mood coincide with the Nixon era.’”

  A roomful of faces stared at Potter, blank or quizzical.

  “Well,” he said, a note of desperation beginning to creep into his voice, “do you agree with that? You’re students. He’s talking about your mood. Is he right? Do you feel that way?”

  “What does he mean, ‘love rather than action’?” Miss Korsky asked.

  “Good point!” said Potter, pouncing gratefully on anything specific.

  “What do you think he means?” Potter asked, proud of his Socratic technique.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Try,” Potter pleaded.

  Miss Korsky, responding to Potter’s need, tried. “Well,” she said, “I’m not sure what he means, but I don’t agree. I mean, it sounds like you have to choose between love and action, like you can’t have both. A lot of actions are done out of love. Aren’t they?”

  “Yes, absolutely,” Potter said beaming. “I think the statement is a contradiction. You see, I want you to be aware of what these articles say—don’t just take them in but question them, decide for yourself how valid the statements are.”

  Potter made a kind of game out of looking for other contradictions in the article and the class got into the spirit of it, actually interested, actually—Potter hoped—learning something.

  Toward the end of the hour, Mr. Halligan even found what he felt was a contradiction in the caption of one
of the color photos that accompanied the article. The photo was of the actress Sarah Miles, demurely dressed and posed in a pastoral scene. Miss Miles was quoted as saying, “I’m a romantic to the end. I think people are sick and tired of all the sex stuff. They want a story. Life is so hard to live anyway.”

  “I don’t think it follows,” Halligan said. “I mean to say that people are tired of sex and life is hard anyway. Wouldn’t it be harder if they didn’t have sex?”

  The class giggled, and Potter smiled.

  “I guess so,” Potter said, and, surprising himself, added, “I’m not really sure anymore.”

  Potter counted the class a success; it had even made the teacher think.

  2

  Gafferty had something on his mind, something he wanted to discuss in private. When Potter returned from his afternoon seminar Gafferty was waiting in his office, twiddling his fingers behind his back and examining the shelves of textbooks with feigned interest, as if he hadn’t seen them a thousand times. He suggested they take a stroll over to Jake Wirth’s. It wouldn’t be crowded now, they could doubtless have a booth to themselves.

  On the way out of the building they ran into Ed Shell, who asked if he could join them for a beer. Gafferty made an animated apology, saying right now he had a little business to discuss with Potter, but by all means, without fail, the three of them had to go together for a real drinking session sometime, sometime soon. Shell, obviously miffed, said “Sure, sure,” and went off brooding down the hall.

  Potter and Gafferty walked across the Commons purposefully, not speaking, the weight of whatever was Gafferty’s private business holding them silent. It was brutally cold, and the sky had a dark, purplish cast. The aura of the afternoon was Icelandic.

  They entered Jake Wirth’s puffing and stomping and rubbing their hands, and Gafferty headed for a booth. There was an old man eating knockwurst, and a couple of others sipping shells of pale gold beer, but otherwise the place was deserted. An ancient waiter in a frayed tux took their orders for steins of dark, and Gafferty shifted his bulk around in the booth, as if trying to burrow into a solid position.