“At the very least, it began on February 22 of that year—a night I recall very clearly, by the way, even if I don’t have a little journal to prove it.”
“This isn’t about what we remember, though. It’s these pages,” she said, riffling them. “Just a dry, factual account of those fourteen days as they unfolded.”
“Written words are hardly the same as facts, Lara. And even if they were, facts have no meaning without a context. Context is what gives meaning.”
She had fallen partway into the trap; she had started taking him up point for point and was in clear danger of going on with it ad infinitum. “That’s nonsense,” she wanted badly to say. “Nothing gives meaning, there is no bloody meaning,” she had to restrain herself from arguing. But she succeeded. She held her tongue. The only way out is through, someone said in a song. The way up is the way down, T. S. Eliot said in a poem.
“Five minutes,” she said. “And I’m holding you to it.”
“Five should do it,” said Cal.
THE FIRST time we actually stood face to face and spoke was on Church Street, near the old Radcliffe Yard. I almost knew your name, you did know mine. You knew a lot about me from Winnie, who would inevitably slip into talking about me and even more so about the kids. Socially we were her default position: Calvert, Jake, and Hetty. She could bore you to death with our exploits.
That was a weekday, a quiet afternoon in the Square, which back then was still a university village, with none of the teeming artificial life it has now—the tourists, suburban kids, spare change guys. The occasional busload of Asians with cameras. None of that back then. It was a student town. Now you only realize that when the hour chimes and herds of students cross Mass. Ave. carrying their Starbucks and chewing on their cell phones.
Elsie’s, Tommy’s, Buddy’s. Hayes-Bickford, the U.R., the S.S. Tasty. There wasn’t a single chain store, only one-of-a-kind businesses, each one an institution unto itself. Cronin’s, Mr. Bartley’s. At least a dozen book stores, half a dozen record stores. The college was at the heart of it all, but none of us were connected to the college anymore, except for your husband—except for Ian. Winnie and I just hadn’t left town yet, hadn’t figured out a better place to be.
For me it was still a pretty good place just because there was so much theatre, with more opportunities than anywhere outside New York. You and I had that in common: you were writing poems no one read and I was acting in plays no one came to see.
“Hey, I know you,” I said, and you said, “Either that or you are being a bit forward.”
Which was perfect, it was just like you, with your outmoded genteel airs. Like it’s rude to open a conversation without first handing the servant your card in the vestibule and waiting patiently by the cast-iron boot-scraper for a reply. Miss Fiddlestick will see you now.
“Forward or backward, you are still Winnifred’s friend Laura. Aren’t you?”
“Close enough. And you are Winnifred’s husband Calvert. So we’ve got that all straightened out.”
I remember the late afternoon sunshine pouring through the horse chestnut trees behind you, thinking what a splendid day it was, watching your smile become part of that splendor.
“Which way are you headed,” I asked, harmlessly, and you said “Paris!” Said it with a sassy top-that tone.
“Well, then.”
“Sorry. Couldn’t resist. We aren’t actually leaving for a month. Though I did just buy this hugely expensive map,” you said, brandishing it.
“So many arrondissements to master,” I said, giving you the needle. But you didn’t deflate. Didn’t feel the needle.
“I’ve yet to set foot in a single arrondissement. Have you been there?”
“I was there a few years ago, at a very bad time. 1969, when the gendarmes were extremely hostile toward anyone carrying a guitar or a book. Or who needed a haircut, in their view. The policy was more or less, Eh, François, why not whack these kids upside the heads with our nifty billy clubs.”
“You could use one now, actually. A haircut, that is.”
“Who is being forward this time?”
“Sorry. Couldn’t resist. So how long were you there?”
“Too long. We had made the mistake of assuming we’d love it. Have a blast and want to stay as long as we could.”
I was beginning to register your face, to get a bead on the offbeat beauty, how it worked. Beautiful would not have been the word, if you had pressed me on the spot. Interesting, maybe. Original could easily be the word. I wasn’t felled like a tree or anything, I just found myself enjoying the occasion because of this wonderful original sunny face and the slightly challenging comic spirit that came with the face.
It crossed my mind to suggest a cup of coffee, but that felt like the wrong thing. A shift of venues, from sunshine to shadow, or a shift in the pace we had fallen into would not have worked out. And there were parameters: neither of us was eager to leave, yet we both sensed it was time. We had hit the outer limit of the occasion, a chance encounter between acquaintances. Anything more would have constituted flirtation. So I went home, you went to Paris, and we didn’t meet again for quite some time.
LARA HAD been restraining herself on a couple of counts this time, the most obvious being that he had it all wrong. What he had taken for flirtation on her part was nothing more than simple joy. She was high that day, sailing. He had caught her at a point of perfect freedom: leaving her job behind without losing it, going to France where Ian would be working while she would be free to do as she pleased. It was like getting a giant poetry grant for which she had never even applied.
She spent that summer roaming, mastering quite a few arrondissements in the process. She explored the river for miles, mined the bookstalls along its banks, met all sorts of people. Her French improved so much she was sometimes mistaken for a native speaker. At Ian’s last lecture, the one in Lyons, they pretended Lara was Ian’s interpreter, not his wife.
Anyway, what Cal experienced that day on Church Street was nothing more than her exhilaration at the footloose summer to come. He was just breathing the secondhand smoke.
But he was also wrong in pegging Church Street as their first encounter. They had met a month earlier, when she and Winnie stopped by the apartment and found Cal at home. At home and in a very bad mood—so bad that Lara had taken against him, which was hardly what she would have expected. Given the picture Winnie had painted, Lara assumed she would find him at the very least appealing.
Winnie was a very pretty woman. By the criteria of the times she was ideal, with the long blonde hair, the lovely smiling eyes, and a figure (as they used to call it) not a bit compromised by the bearing of two children and which no accumulation of faux hippie rag trade drapery could entirely disguise. In today’s parlance, she was hot. But she was also sweet. Pure.
Sometimes a woman like that will ally herself with an outwardly homely guy. Not so much the beauty and the beast thing as beauty joined to intellect, or to power. It happens a lot, because to a woman looks aren’t everything. And male model looks, movie man looks, are not the ideal in any case. Belmondo’s messed-up mug was a lot more interesting to Lara than a pretty face like Alain Delon’s.
So she had allowed for the possibility that, all of Winnie’s testimonials aside, the guy might look like Edward G. Robinson, or Sartre. A frog face. Which he did not. So far as looks went, he came as advertised. He was reputed to be this cool dude, though, the All-American boy and the Bohemian rebel rolled up into one, and instead he behaved like a pinch-faced middle-aged accountant.
Winnie had brought him a present that day, a hat or a scarf, nothing of significance. And he was all over her about the money: couldn’t afford it, didn’t need it, had one already, whatever it was. He was not joking, not smiling, not remotely pleasant. For all Lara knew he was about to haul off and slug her. Plenty of women who talk about how great their husbands are, or their boyfriends, those are women who get pushed around. It’s real, that whole syndro
me, and for all she knew that was exactly what she was seeing.
Far from feeling harmless envy of Winnie, as she half anticipated, Lara ended up feeling badly for her. Afterwards, Winnie was at pains to convince her this had been a baffling departure, Cal was never like that. And he wasn’t, of course. It really was an aberration. Still, if it was backstory Cal wanted, she felt obliged to mention it.
“Actually, that wasn’t the first time we met. We met at your apartment, a month or so earlier. Which is why you ‘almost’ knew my name.”
I WAS talking about our first one-on-one, our first conversation, if you will. And in case you don’t remember where we had our second conversation, I’ll tell you.
You were walking down Mt. Auburn, coming up from the Square, and I was walking the other way—with Winnie’s mother. Who almost never came to visit us. She was there that day, though, fated to glimpse the woman she would come to hate. And apart from Nazi war criminals and a few right-wing pols, Priscilla never hated anyone. So you came to occupy a unique position in her iconography.
To give you your due, or her hers, I will add that she felt no such way at the time. “That was an awfully charming young lady,” was what she said to me as we walked on. And she gave me her knowing look, accompanied by her famous ironic chuckle, meaning Oh yes, don’t think for a minute I didn’t see you drinking her in.
You were dressed as follows: blue jeans, blue sneakers, small leather jacket of faded forest green over a faded pink oxford cloth shirt. The jacket looked a size small, probably a hand-medown or a Dollar-Dealer, and that may have been the first sign of trouble. That this ill-fitting jacket looked so right on you. I know our third meeting held such a portent, an “insignificant detail” that later proved not quite so insignificant. But I’ll get to that.
You told us you had just returned from California, from a poetry symposium in Big Sur. You had met Gary Snyder and Ferlinghetti, and you had helped run a seminar with someone else whose name I recognized. You were really getting around.
“You do look more mature,” I said.
“You mean I look older?” you said.
“You look just fine, dear,” said Priscilla, “whatever Calvert means.”
“I meant that all these worldly endeavors have added a soupçon of sophistication to your resumé.”
“He is such a bull-slinger,” said Priscilla, cackling at her familiar no-nonsense line, a line she had aimed at so many of the men in her life, foremost among them myself and her husband Johnny. Then she patted me affectionately and added, “But he’s really a wonderful man. One in a million, I always say.”
“Right, and then Winnie always says, Let’s hope so. It’s a little vaudeville routine they have worked out.”
You laughed, Priscilla laughed, and then I promulgated for the first time the notion that we ought to get together soon, “we” being the two couples, you and Ian, myself and Winnifred. More than anything else this was a parting mechanism. Even as I said it I was thinking it didn’t sound promising, or likely. I had never even met Ian, and with the kids we didn’t have much time for that kind of social life anyway, couples getting together. As I say, it was just a way of rounding off the occasion.
Then you were gone and Priscilla made her remark about how charming you were and when I said nothing in response, she pushed it a square farther across the chess board: “Pretty too, don’t you think?”
“I didn’t notice,” I told her, with a disarming smile she would take to mean I was kidding, of course I noticed, and it could not matter less. We went on to the Square, bought whatever it was she had wanted to buy there, and then went back to the apartment, where Winnie and the kids were just waking from a nap.
“Our turn now,” Priscilla said, with the cackle, and that’s what we did. We each took a nap. It was a good transition, too, because I was still slightly focused on you. Mildly distracted. I attributed it to the blue sneakers and the green leather jacket.
“THAT WAS all very interesting, and now I see your five minutes have expired.”
“And we are almost done. But there was that third encounter. The one featuring the insignificant detail which would later prove to be not so insignificant?”
GIVEN THE nature of this detail, I can see why you might not have as clear a memory of the occasion, but I can tell you precisely where we were standing at the time. Who knows, our DNA may linger there to this day, as proof positive.
There were four of us in front of (and reflected in) the plate glass window of the Empty Café on Holyoke Street. Do you remember that much? It was one of those eateries which fail no matter how many times they get a new owner and a new name. Which is why everyone called it the Empty Café. Because it was always empty.
That’s how the conversation began. You were with some guy and I asked in confusion and wonderment if the two of you had just partaken at the Empty Café. You both laughed, in on the joke and clearly kind of tight with each other, though he wasn’t Ian, he was introduced as “my friend Keith” or whatever.
I was with my friend Fitz, who would not have had much to say. He would have mostly exuded, and let his twinkling blue eyes imply the great good fortune of having such clear skies, such excellent marijuana, and yes, of finding himself in the presence of such a lovely lady. I would have done all the talking.
And you, by the way. Admit it, deny it, or pretend to have forgotten the day altogether; it remains the truth that we hit it off. We had the verbal spark from jumpstart.
Still, it was the pants that marked that occasion. They were characteristic of the times, certainly, not at all characteristic of you, as I would later learn. To me you had been the girl in the green jacket, now you were the girl in the Carnaby Street trousers. Circus pants, colorful bellbottoms, hence flared absurdly at the calf, yet also very snug in the seat, let us say. Those pants informed the world that Lara Cleary was in firm possession, let us say, of a world class—what? Ass, would have been the word back then, hence the egregious phrase that descends therefrom, a piece of ass.
You always said bottom, another of your genteel word choices. Jewish moms say tushy, spankers say backside, nowadays people say butt. In the ’70s one had a lovely ass, or didn’t, of course. You did.
This was out of keeping with the rest of you, or one’s perception of the rest. There was no sense of roundness, or protuberance about you. You had registered as a lean, fine-boned, modest-breasted lass, and fetching in your green jacket. Now you were the same girl, with the same attractive features, plus the new “insignificant” detail, a frankly astonishing bottom. Which changed the equation. Though I say this retrospectively, it seems that sex, or sexual appeal, had become a factor.
“I HATED those pants,” said Lara. “They were a mistake and I never wore them again. I had no idea what the back of me looked like in them, all I knew was that the front of me looked ridiculous and that they were uncomfortable. I couldn’t wait to take them off. Though I gather you couldn’t either.”
“It wasn’t exactly like that. All of this coalesced gradually in my mind. I do remember being disappointed to see you in a dress a few weeks later, on the occasion of—let’s see—must have been our fourth meeting. At the Turtle Café.”
“We never met there.”
“Not us. You and Ian. Me and Winnie. It really was still a small town in those days. You would always bump into friends on the street, always take two hours executing a simple errand. So it was either that aspect or it was fate, but the pace at which our paths crossed by accident was accelerating. The backstory was building.”
Perhaps registering her clear impatience with the whole backstory idea, Cal held a palm up, then reduced it to an index finger: bear with me, one more minute. Surely she could not be so petty as to refuse him a single minute?
“And the attraction, I might add, was obviously building too. It was hard not locking in on one another that night. Pretending to listen to Ian’s wine recommendations or participating in Winnie’s soup versus salad conundrum .
. .”
HE HAD it wrong again, one hundred percent wrong. Memory was surely a curious business. She did wear a dress (her angel dress, Ian called it, who knows why) and they both liked the dress a lot. Who really liked it was her father, probably because it reminded him of the ’40s or something. But he was with them that night at the Turtle.
Her mother was not there, so undoubtedly it was during one of her parents’ 57 varieties of separation, though the truth was that Lara had not a single memory of sitting in a restaurant with both her parents. Maybe it never happened. Maybe if you strung together the 57 separations (ranging in duration from one night to three years, before the actual divorce), there were scarcely any occasions when it would even have been a possibility.
In any event, they had just been fielding The Dad that night. He and Ian got along fine. When it came to “making conversation,” the two of them were championship material. So it was their show, with Lara as moderator. Seeing Winnie come in did brighten her evening and surely it was a treat seeing Jake and Hetty. But whatever Cal thought of her, or the circus pants, or the angel dress, he occupied very little space in her consciousness on that occasion.
The funny thing, given what Cal relayed about Winnie’s mother, was that her father had a similar reaction, only more extreme. He was absolutely floored by Winnie. The Dad struck most people as this dry stick figure. “Buttoned-up” is an expression that might have been invented just for him. No one would readily connect him to the idea of human sexuality, whereas in truth he was always a sucker for a pretty girl.
When her friends were fourteen, when they were in college, later at the wedding, The Dad reliably fell for the pretty ones. He could be charming, always prepared to trot out his courtly persona, but he tended to be very low wattage around women who struck him as homely, and something else entirely, beaming, upon the ones he judged to be “lookers.”
The Twoweeks Page 2
