But when Jim Carpenter suddenly asked me out one afternoon, I surprised myself by saying yes. Jim was an instructor in French at Bowdoin. He taught the class I was auditing. He was in his late twenties—a tall, gangly fellow with sandy hair, rimless glasses, and a retiring, somewhat shy demeanor that masked a mischievous streak. Like everyone else at Bowdoin (the students included), he dressed in the standard New England academic garb: tweed jacket, gray flannels, button-down shirts, a college tie. But, in the course of our conversational lessons, he dropped the fact that Bowdoin was his first teaching job—and that he’d landed in Maine after two years of work on his doctorate at the Sorbonne. I was the only auditor in the class. Though I was also the only woman student (Bowdoin was resolutely all-male back then), Jim remained quite formal and distant with me for the first two months of the course. He asked a few basic questions—en français—about my work (“Je suis journaliste, mais pour l’instant j’ai pris un congé sabbatique de mon travail” was all I’d say about it). He made discreet enquiries about my marital status, and whether I was enjoying my time in Maine. Otherwise, he maintained a professional stance of complete disinterest. Until one afternoon—a few weeks after the column started—he caught me on the way out of class. And said, “I’m enjoying your column enormously, Miss Smythe.”
“Oh, thanks,” I said, feeling slightly embarrassed.
“One of my colleagues in the department said you used to write for Saturday Night/Sunday Morning. Is that true?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I never knew I had a celebrity in my class.”
“You don’t.”
“Modesty is an overrated virtue,” he said with a slight smile.
“But immodesty is always boring, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps . . . but after a couple of months in Maine, I really wouldn’t mind a dose of good old-fashioned Parisian arrogance. Everyone is so polite and self-effacing here.”
“Maybe that’s why I like it. Especially after Manhattan, where everyone’s always selling themselves. There’s something rather pleasant about a place where, five seconds after being introduced, you don’t know what the person does, how much they earn, and how many times they’ve been divorced.”
“But I want to know that stuff. Maybe that’s because I’m still trying to shake off my Hoosier roots.”
“You’re actually from Indiana?”
“It happens.”
“Paris really must have been an eye-opener then.”
“Well . . . the wine is better there than in Indianapolis.”
I laughed. “I think I’ll use that line,” I said.
“Be my guest. But on one condition: you let me take you out for dinner one evening.”
I must have looked surprised, because Jim instantly blushed, then said, “Of course, you’re under no obligation . . .”
“No,” I said, interrupting him. “Dinner one night would be fine.”
We arranged the date for three days’ time. Twice before then, I thought about calling up and canceling. Because going out with anybody was the last thing I was interested in at this moment. Because I didn’t want to have to do a lot of explaining about everything that had happened to me over the last six months. And because I was pregnant, damn it.
But another voice within my head told me to stop being such a cautious stiff. It was only a dinner, after all. He didn’t seem like the sort of guy who had fangs and slept in a coffin. Though I was eschewing social gatherings, I was suddenly beginning to rue the absence of company. So I put on a decent dress and a spot of makeup, and let him take me to the dining room of the Stowe House for dinner. He was somewhat nervous and hesitant at first—which was both endearing and annoying, as I had to work hard initially at making conversation. But after the second cocktail, he started loosening up a bit. By the time he had most of a bottle of wine in him (I restricted myself to two glasses), he began to show flashes of a genuinely amusing mind . . . albeit one forced to hide behind a button-down countenance.
“You know what I loved most about Paris?” he said. “Besides, of course, the sheer absurd beauty of the place? The ability to walk until dawn. I must have squandered half my time there, staying up all night, wandering from café to café, or just meandering for miles. I had this tiny room in the Fifth, right off the rue des Écoles. I could pay my rent and stuff my face for fifty dollars a month. I could spend all day reading at this great brasserie—Le Balzar—just around the corner from my garret. And I had a librarian girlfriend named Stéphanie who moved in with me for the last four months of my stay . . . and couldn’t understand why the hell I wanted to exchange Paris for a teaching post in Brunswick, Maine.”
He paused for a moment, suddenly looking embarrassed. “And that’s the last glass of wine I’m drinking tonight—otherwise I’ll start sounding like a walking edition of True Confessions.”
“Go on, encore un verre,” I said, tipping the rest of the bottle into his glass.
“Only if you join me.”
“I’m a cheap date. Two glasses is my limit.”
“Have you always been that way?”
I was about to say something foolish and revealing like, “I’m under doctor’s orders to drink no more than a glass or two a day.” Instead, I kept it simple: “It always goes to my head.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” he said, raising his glass. “Santé.”
“So why did you throw away Stéphanie and la vie parisienne for Bowdoin College?”
“Don’t get me started. I might commit an act of self-revulsion.”
“Sounds like a grisly prospect. But you still haven’t answered my question.”
“What can I say . . . except that I’m the son of an ultra-conservative, ultrasafe insurance executive from Indianapolis. And if you’re brought up in the insurance world, you always think cautiously. So, though Paris was a great dream, when the job offer from Bowdoin came through . . . well, it’s a salary, right? And the potential for tenure, security, professional prestige. All that boring, cautionary stuff . . . about which I’m sure you happily know nothing.”
“On the contrary, my father was a big cog in the Hartford insurance machine. And my guy did public relations for . . .”
I suddenly cut myself off.
“Oh, there’s a guy in your life?” he asked, attempting to sound as nonchalant as possible.
“There was a guy. It’s over.”
He tried to stop himself from beaming. He failed. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“It all happened around the same time as my brother . . . You know about my brother?”
He put on a serious face again. “Yes. When I mentioned you were auditing my course to a colleague at the college, he said that he read a news story about him . . .”
“Dying.”
“Yes. Dying. I really am sorry. It must have been . . .”
“It was.”
“And that’s why you moved to Maine?”
“One of the reasons.”
“Was your former guy another reason?”
“He added to the mess, yes.”
“God, what a tough year you’ve . . .”
“Stop right there . . .”
“Sorry, have I . . . ?”
“No, you’ve been very sweet. It’s just . . . I really can’t take much in the way of sympathy . . .”
“Okay,” he said. “Then I’ll play tough and cynical.”
“You can’t—you’re from Indiana.”
“Is everyone from Manhattan as smart as you are?”
“Is everyone from Indianapolis as fulsome as you are?”
“Ouch.”
“That wasn’t meant in a derogatory way.”
“But it wasn’t exactly fulsome either.”
“Touché. You are quick.”
“For a guy from Indianapolis.”
“It could be worse.”
“How’s that?”
“You could be from Omaha.”
He shot me one of his m
ischievous smiles. And said, “I like your style.”
Truth be told, I liked his too. When he walked me back to my front door that night, he asked if I might be willing to risk life and limb by taking a day trip in his car this coming Saturday.
“What’s so dangerous about your car?” I asked.
“The driver,” he said.
His car was a two-seater, soft-top Alfa Romeo, in bright tomato red. I did a double take when he pulled up in it outside my house that Saturday morning.
“Aren’t you a bit young for a midlife crisis?” I asked, sliding into one of the low bucket seats.
“Believe it or not, it was a gift from my father.”
“Your dad, Mr. Indianapolis Insurance King? I don’t believe it.”
“I think it was his way of applauding my decision to return home and take the job here.”
“Oh, I get it. It’s a variation on How You Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Paree? With a sports car, naturally.”
“A heavily insured sports car.”
“Surprise, surprise.”
We spent the day zooming north on Route 1. Past Bath. Past splendidly atmospheric small towns like Wiscasset and Damriscotta and Rockland, eventually reaching Camden around lunchtime. We killed an hour or so in a wonderful used-book shop on Bayview Street. Then we walked down to a little waterfront joint, and ate steamers, washed down with beer. Afterward, Jim lit up a Gauloise. I declined his offer of a cigarette.
“Good God,” he said. “A low alcohol tolerance, and an aversion to cigarettes. You must be a secret Mormon in disguise.”
“I tried to be a smoker in college. I failed. I don’t think I ever got the knack of inhaling.”
“It’s an easy knack to master.”
“One of my many lapses in talent. But answer me this: how the hell can you smoke those Frenchie butts? They smell like an exhaust pipe.”
“Ah, but they taste like . . .”
“. . . a French exhaust pipe. I bet you’re the only guy in Maine who smokes them.”
“Should I take that as a compliment?” he asked.
Jim was great fun. We kept up an entertaining banter all day. He had wit. He was ferociously literate. He could also mock himself. I liked him enormously . . . as a pal, a chum, un bon copain. Nothing more. Even if I’d been in the market for romance, he wouldn’t have fit the bill. Too gawky. Too doting. Too needy. I wanted his company, but I didn’t want to fuel his hopes that this might lead to anything more than camaraderie. So—when he suggested a date a few days later—I pleaded work.
“Oh, come on,” he said lightly. “Surely you could manage a movie and a cheeseburger one night this week.”
“I’m really trying to focus on my column,” I said, and instantly hated myself for sounding like a precious prig. To his credit, Jim laughed. And said,
“You know, as kiss-off lines go, that stinks.”
“You’re right. It does stink. What’s the movie?”
“Ace in the Hole, directed by the very great Billy Wilder.”
“I saw it last year in Manhattan.”
“Any good?”
“The nastiest movie about journalism ever made.”
“Then you’ll see it again.”
“Yeah. I guess I will.”
So much for trying to put Jim off. But, to his infinite credit, he never hinted at a romantic subtext to our nights out. Like me, he was new in Brunswick. He craved company. And—though I didn’t like admitting it—so did I. Which made it very hard to refuse his offer of a movie, or a chamber music concert in Portland, or an evening with a few of his faculty friends (yes, I was finally becoming sociable). Even after a month of seeing each other, the goodnight kiss was always planted on my cheek. There was (dare I say it) a part of me that wondered: why the hell isn’t he making a move? Even though I sensed that his reticence in that department came from the fact that he knew I wasn’t interested.
I also knew that, eventually, I would have to own up about my pregnancy. Because—now nearly five months on—I was beginning to develop a telltale bulge in my belly. But I kept putting off this revelation. Because, coward that I am, I feared the effect it might have on our friendship. I so liked him. So wanted him to continue being my pal . . . and sensed that it would all fall apart when he discovered my news.
I resolved to tell him, however, after one of my weekly appointments with Dr. Bolduck.
“Once again, everything seems to be going according to the usual pregnancy plan,” he said.
“I am following your orders to the letter, Doc.”
“But I hear you’re at least getting out and about a bit . . . which is a good thing.”
“How did you hear that?”
“It’s a small town, remember?”
“And what else did you hear?”
“Just that you’d been seen around at a couple of Bowdoin faculty dinners.”
“In the company of Jim Carpenter, right?”
“Yes, I did hear that. But . . .”
“He’s just a friend.”
“Fine.”
“I mean that. I am not stringing him along.”
“Hold on here. No one’s saying you’re stringing him along. Or that you’re an item. Or anything like that.”
“But people have noted we’ve been seeing each other. Well, haven’t they?”
“Welcome to Brunswick, Maine. Where everyone knows everyone else’s business. In a nonmalicious way, of course. Don’t let it bother you.”
But it did—because I knew that Jim would publicly look like a fool as soon as my pregnancy became around-town news. So I resolved to tell him the next day.
It was a Saturday. We had arranged to drive out to Reid State Park for the afternoon. But that morning I woke up feeling a little nauseous: a condition I blamed on some tinned salmon I had eaten the night before. So I called up Jim and begged off the afternoon. When he heard I was feeling poorly, he instantly offered to call a doctor, rush to my bedside, and play Florence Nightingale . . .
“It’s just an upset stomach,” I said.
“That could mean a variety of things.”
“It means I ate a can of bad Canadian fish last night, and now I am paying for it.”
“At least let me drop by later on and check in on you.”
“Fine, fine,” I said, suddenly too weary to argue.
Moments after I put down the phone, the nausea actually hit. I raced to the bathroom. I became very sick. When the worst was over, I rinsed out my mouth and staggered back to bed. My nightgown was soaked with sweat. I felt chilled. But, at least, the vomiting had stopped.
It started again five minutes later. This time there was nothing to come up. I hung over the toilet, retching wildly, suddenly feeling ill beyond belief. After this bout of the dry heaves, I made it back to bed . . . and was up a few moments later, hugging the toilet bowl for ballast.
On and on this went for an hour. Finally, my stomach could heave no more. I collapsed into bed. My body finally surrendered to exhaustion. I passed out.
In Brunswick during the 1950s, nobody ever locked their doors. Initially when I moved into my apartment, I always threw the latch. Until the woman who cleaned the place left me a note saying that I didn’t need to maintain this security-conscious habit—as the last house robbery in town was around four years ago . . . and the guy was drunk at the time.
I hadn’t locked my front door since then. Without question the fact that my door was left open that Saturday afternoon saved my life. Because, around three PM, Jim showed up at my apartment and knocked on the door for five minutes. I didn’t hear his persistent knocking, as I was unconscious at the time. Knowing I was unwell, he decided to enter the apartment. He kept calling out my name. He got no response. Then he entered my bedroom. As he later told me:
“I thought you were dead.”
Because he found me in a pool of blood.
The sheets were crimson, sodden. I was insensible. Jim couldn’t get a word out o
f me. He dashed to the phone. He called an ambulance.
I briefly came around in the hospital. I was on a gurney, surrounded by doctors and nurses. I heard one of the doctors speaking to Jim.
“How long has your wife been pregnant?” he asked.
“She’s pregnant?”
“Yes. Didn’t you know . . . ?”
“She’s not my wife.”
“What’s her first name?”
“Sara.”
The doctor began to snap his fingers in front of my face. “Sara, Sara . . . are you there? Can you hear me?” I managed to mutter three words: “The baby is . . .” Then the world went dark again.
When it came back into focus, it was the middle of the night. I was alone in a small empty ward. I had drips and tubes in my arms. My vision was blurred. My head had been cleaved by an ax. But it was nothing compared to the pain in my abdomen. I felt splayed, eviscerated. My flesh was raw, on fire. I wanted to scream. I couldn’t scream. My vocal cords appeared frozen. I fumbled for the call button dangling by my side. I held it down for a very long time. I heard brisk footsteps down the corridor. A nurse approached my bedside. She looked down at me. Again I tried to speak. Again I failed. But my face told her everything.
“The pain . . . ?” she asked.
I nodded my head wildly. She put a small plunger in my hand.
“You’re on a morphine drip,” she said.
Morphine? Oh God . . .
“So every time the pain gets too much, just press down on this plunger. And . . .”
She demonstrated it for me. Immediately a surge of narcotic warmth spread across my body. And I vanished from consciousness.
Then it was light again. Another nurse was standing over me. The bedclothes had been pulled down. My hospital nightgown was over my belly. A bloody bandage was being yanked off my skin. I shuddered in pain.
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