Had this ever become overtly sexual, he would have made a fool of himself for sure, like the character in the Marlene Dietrich film, The Blue Angel. Brilliant and yet utterly helpless before the force of female beauty. Professor Unrat? In any case, The Dad was safe there. He kept it in bounds, buttoned-up, and her friends felt flattered, not assaulted.
Lara, who knew all his tricks and disguises, was mostly amused as she watched it unfold that night with Winnie; as she watched Winnie knock him arse-over-teakettle. He would bring her up out of the blue months later. (“By the way, how is your friend Winnifred doing?”) That night at the Turtle did it for him.
So for Lara, there was The Dad, there was Winnie, and there was Hetty. That little girl was the one who bowled Lara over, and maybe she did envy Winnie her children. Winnie had changed all those diapers and now here she was, out the other side, with a quiet thoughtful little boy and a charming little girl who spoke in complete but very funny sentences.
“YOU KNOW something, Lara? I may have two separate occasions confused, or conflated,” said Cal.
All through Lara’s disciplined silence, he too had been silent. Pensive, as though groping after some missing fragment, an unreclaimed detail. Now it had come back to him, or so he declared.
“We didn’t have one accidental small-world encounter at the Turtle, we had two. There was that time before The Twoweeks, when Winnie and I did bring the kids, and there was another time when it was just Winnie and myself. And the second time was not only after The Twoweeks, it was literally the day of the Two Hours.”
HE HAD this one right. It had been the night of the day of the second Two Hours, actually, which made it an absolutely brutal occasion. They had been together in bed that afternoon and then, too soon after, found themselves in the world’s tiniest restaurant, with their respective spouses.
How many tables did the Turtle have? Six? Seven tables, tops, plus the row of seats at the counter, because it used to be a diner. It was impossible not to make constant eye contact, impossible not to make conversation. Officially the smoke had cleared, outwardly there was peace in the valley, but nobody had bargained on dinner-for-four.
It was a scene right out of a French marriage farce, one of those excruciating situations where the audience takes satisfaction from knowing they weren’t the ones who had done this to themselves. Oddly, what made it slightly less unbearable was The Dad. He was there that time too, to provide some comic relief.
He liked the Turtle, it was that simple. Given how persnickety he was, this was a great gift. In most restaurants, The Dad would study his menu, sigh extravagantly, order a cup of soup reluctantly—then leave it untouched. But he liked the pork chop at the Turtle. Sliced thin, well done, with grilled onions. It was almost like a dish from the children’s menu; you cut it up for him. But he would order it without a list of special requirements (“the asterisks,” Lara’s brother called them), and damned if he didn’t eat it. So the Turtle was how they did him.
Nonetheless, Lara experienced ninety minutes of soft-core torture that evening. Never in her life had she felt so utterly stuck, or so wrong in so many ways toward so many people. Jake and Hetty may not have been at the restaurant, but they always ranked first on her guilt list. They were always present. Winnie was her friend, Ian was her husband. There was even Cal, by then; she could hurt him too. The Dad, for once, was not a problem. He had his pork chop and he had Winnie’s face to stare at. Hog heaven for him.
Lara kept her head down and picked at her salad with great concentration (really getting after the radishes) for what must have seemed an uncommonly long time. She tried leaving her body altogether, hopping onto some freight train of the imagination. Or a plane. She took a shot at picturing Paris, traveling back to Paris in her mind. Just get me outta here, man.
Of course, Paris had been spoiled too, in the late days of that magical summer, when she fell in step briefly with Guillaume. In the end, Guillaume was just someone else she had disappointed. You will come back, he had said, you must come back. “I will be checking every flight from Boston, waiting until I see your name.”
Which was nonsense, obviously, or perhaps (to give Guillaume the benefit of the doubt) metaphorical. He would not be poring over any passenger manifests. He was not another heartshrunk existentialism-bleating Gauloise-gobbling Frenchman waiting for American lightning to strike him in a café. He was human, and quite sweet. When she boarded that plane, however, when she tried to escape from the Turtle Café on that imagined night flight, Guillaume blocked her way. In her mind’s eye, he was waiting on the ground at Orly, gazing up from the wet tarmac like Bogart knowing he had just lost Ingrid Bergman.
Like Bergman in Casablanca, though, Lara had the letters of transit. At the moment she might be stuck in a tiny restaurant where everyone present had reason to despise her, but it was in her power to change this and she resolved right then to do so. It was over with Cal. She would never sleep with him again and that was flat. End of story.
Winnie (closely monitored by The Dad) was eating her flan and Ian was sipping coffee, as Lara arrived at the one outcome she could control. It was the easiest outcome as well, since it was what everyone believed to be the status quo: Ian and Lara, Cal and Winnie, period. The Two Hours was never a program, or a decision, it was an accident that happened and now it was over forever.
“You’re right,” she said, “about the two Turtle dinners. There were two.”
No need to walk him through the trivial agonies of that French marriage farce, and no need for further delay. Cal had introduced into evidence the green jacket, the silly pants, and the two Turtle dinners. Now end-of-story could translate into end of backstory. Decanting more bourbon into their glasses, she threw a meaningful glance up at the clock. “Are we all set now?”
“Except for the business of February 22, we are. Though the story of that night does involve my coming to work at Gallery Allison. You got me hired.”
Lara shrugged. It was true, just not the truth. And certainly not grounds for an extension, when his “five minutes” were already closer to an hour.
“I am not claiming you campaigned for the idea,” said Cal, as though to deflect the qualification he read on her face. “I realize it was mostly Winnie’s doing. She was constantly job-hunting on my behalf, something to bring in a little money until Broadway came calling. When you mentioned that the handyman got canned for showing up soused, Winnie said, Aha, they must need a new handyman, Calvert is handy.”
WINNIE INSISTED it was a perfect fit and you explained it was pretty much a janitorial gig, maybe not so perfect. But you did get me an interview with Allison. You even assured her I was honest and hardworking! Of course, I wasn’t half as handy as she wanted me to be. I could tighten the odd screw, maybe change a lock. What she wanted was a full-time plumber/janitor/carpenter/electrician. She only hired me because of your recommendation and the fact I would work for three bucks an hour.
I did like the job. I liked the place and I liked being around you, but it was good clean fun, nothing more. You were Winnie’s friend, not mine, and beyond that you seemed approachable but not available. A flirt yet, in spite of your playfulness, proper. Moral, if that’s still a word one can use. It never crossed my mind to look at you differently until after I’d been hijacked by Sasha Blackburn. It was that lapse, somehow, which opened a window on the world of possibility.
Believe this or not, I was in no way looking for anything like that to happen. An affair. I did not instigate it and I did nothing to encourage it. On the contrary, I resisted to the point where it became a sort of joke between us, where Sasha was Why-not and I was Why. She was Gather-ye-rosebuds and I was Love-the-one-you’re-with. She just wore me down.
The joke progressed to “Check back with me in a week,” which to me was just a way to conclude the discussion and to her was a promissory note. Every Monday night after rehearsal she would sidle up and say, “I’m checking back, Calvert, is this the week that was?” Until finally i
t was. I was walking her home, there was a light November snow, the streetlights had a certain frosty charm, she said her Why-not and somehow I was fallen.
I’m not saying I did it simply to get her off my back. Maybe I was your typical harried married man, something had gone out of my life, blah blah; maybe it was all perfectly sad and trite that way. But let’s face it, Sasha Blackburn was damned attractive. She made it onto the screen in Hollywood while I was still scrounging parts in Providence repertory. So if the devil made me do it the first time, the second time I done it on my own. And the third.
At some point, though, I had begun to fall under your spell. You and I were taking those long coffee breaks in the alley, with Gerald and Debra, and Myra, and Sid. Henry and June. Sometimes Allison even deigned to sit with us. It may have been to enforce the clock, or snoop on us, but I think we were all having such fun she felt left out.
And it wasn’t like anyone was breaking down the gallery doors at ten A.M. That’s why the fifteen-minute breaks were always at least half an hour. Work-wise, it hardly mattered. But you and I would be out in the alley first, and stay out there longest. We couldn’t stop talking, or didn’t want to. We could have talked all day. Something had started happening.
NO POINT arguing otherwise. They did enjoy hanging out, they did become close friends. They each looked forward to the workday a bit too eagerly and they were increasingly incautious about it. All true, yet not the truth.
Then he opened his big mouth and changed everything, so they could no longer be friends. Or to put it in his terms, Cal became Why-not and Lara remained solidly Why. Really, she was just plain No. They had so much to lose, so much they were capable of destroying. Her life was fine, his life was fine, above all his kids were fine. If they did what he suggested (“simply because we want to”), there was a damned good chance nothing would be so fine afterward. Which made it not merely wrong but mighty stupid.
So naturally they went ahead and did it. Not right away, certainly. Again, to frame it as Cal had with regard to the spectacular Ms. Blackburn, they were walking home together, it was a fine frosty February afternoon, he said Why-not, and she was fallen.
She could have said no (as she had again and again) but she didn’t—who knows why. Sure, she was powerfully attracted, maybe more so than ever before. But Lara had always believed you got no credit for being moral if you faced no temptation to be immoral. Once a Catholic always a Catholic. It had to cost you dearly, before you earned grace.
There was something else at work back then. They were living at a time, and in a place, where such behavior could seem almost right. Their so-called generation had fought the good fights, for civil rights and peace and women’s rights, and along with those principled stands came a natural backlash against all restrictions. Maybe this was a crock, history as sound byte, yet it did contain a few grains of truth. The notion of fidelity was at the very least called into question.
To Lara, it could be confusing. She believed in fidelity, yet at the same time fidelity could be made to seem almost silly. Smallminded, outmoded. Cal made it seem that way. So many songs and movies made it seem that way. There were forces in the air, in the culture (vibes, so called, ideas without words) which made it feel that way. You could lose track of who you were, or who you meant to be.
At times her confusion made Lara unsure to what extent she was resisting sin and to what extent she was simply being timid. She understood she could be reluctant to step over lines simply because the lines were there—more Catholicism, perhaps. And knowing she had that tendency, she would occasionally choose heedlessness as a kind of counterweight. Lara was sure this was precisely what happened the day she fell in step with Guillaume.
So there was a sense in which she would not have been calling Cal’s bluff so much as calling her own. She knew she possessed this power—to remain the angel or let herself run with the devil—and she enjoyed having it. Every now and then, she could let herself be a bad girl. The choice was in her control.
“And it was,” she said, “until I let it happen. After that, no one was in control.”
“Pardon? Control?”
“Sorry. I guess I was thinking out loud, about how I let the devil rule me that night. Your famous February 22.”
“The devil? I would not have said you were particularly hellbent that night! At best I’d say you had staked out a street corner in purgatory. Technically yes, you permitted the removal of clothing, permitted the interlocking of previously private parts. What you held back was any sense that there might be a reason for doing so.”
“Come on, Cal. Even you know there were better reasons for not doing so.”
“Were there? One day, as we were squeezing past each other at the back door of the gallery, we kissed. It was totally unpremeditated—we were too close, too proximate physically that is, and our hands were fending off, hence hands on shoulders, hands on hips, I forget exactly how it was choreographed. It wasn’t a brush on the cheek, though, it was a genuine kiss. It lasted a while. That kiss, which we more or less pretended had never even occurred, was far more erotic than what took place on February 22, when you ‘surrendered.’ ”
WHICH IS precisely what you did. You said nothing negative, did nothing positive. You needed it to be a notch or two above rape; you would not participate, merely abide. Which, incidentally, is not how the devil fucks.
In my overheated goal-oriented state, I set that aspect aside. I knew you were ambivalent, I knew we both had to be nervous, plus there is bound to be some awkwardness between unfamiliar partners. Even Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers couldn’t have been perfect the first time they danced. I figured we would do it again sometime soon, in a day or two, and do it better.
We did it again much sooner than that, actually, almost at once. You did touch me as we lay side by side, your hand strayed to my hip, and I took it as an invitation to try again. You were ready now. And the odd thing is that physiologically you were extremely ready both times, but your mind or your heart still forbade any real involvement.
Once again you lay back and permitted it. No attempt to reverse positions, or go adventuring after pleasure. It was more like, This again? I couldn’t keep myself from enjoying it, couldn’t slow the body’s motor with good old delirium on the way. But I could, even in the moment, notice that you were subject to no such transports. Not so much rollicking as resigned. Counting sheep or goats.
It threw me. I never dreamed we could choose to go ahead and yet remain so distant. To me, the folly lay in denying ourselves, to you the folly lay in permitting it to happen, so clearly this difference was being reflected. Still I was sure we would be closer once we crossed our little Rubicon. The act would make us lovers, after all, and not just technically. Lovers in a sense involving some aspect, some fragment of whatever “love” is.
Because even at that age I was not a frivolous person. Certainly you weren’t. If we did this, surely we did it to gain some small portion of a love we both suspected we could have had, would have had, and did not have simply because of other prior loves. And fair enough. But that was the rule we chose to break. The rule saying one is all you get. In breaking it, I assumed we were saying no, we get two. In some partial, painful, temporary fashion, we will be taking two. We will not miss out altogether.
And you were saying, guess again. You wanted it to fail, to prove meaningless. You wanted it to go away. Afterward, you didn’t even bother telling me you feared you were pregnant. You didn’t tell me anything. You know the Bob Dylan line, Just act like you never have met? Well, that was you.
And that, old girl, is the backstory. I’m sorry it took so long, but you did interrupt a number of times.
“WELL, I don’t know if this constitutes an interruption or a postscript, Cal, especially as I have nothing to say. Certainly I will not be discussing my sex life one bit. I won’t discuss the pregnancy scare either, other than to say I was a complete idiot to assume you knew what you were doing. I mean, you had children. Som
ehow I assumed that meant you knew how not to have them.”
“Wouldn’t it be more logical to say you were the one who knew how not to have them? And how not to have them was birth control pills, which I happened to know you were taking. So if I was an idiot, I wasn’t the only one.”
“I was on the Pill. I was proof it wasn’t foolproof. The onetenth of one percent, or whatever. Anyway, I had no good way of telling you anything at the time. The gallery was closed that week, your telephone was also Winnie’s telephone, what was I supposed to do? I wanted to tell you. We already had secrets, which I hated. We already had complications, which I hated. And now we had this—or I had it.”
“And dealt with it.”
“I hated that too. This morning-after pill they have now, whatever it consists of, is apparently reliable. Safe. What they had back then was experimental, sort of off the grid, as I recall. The woman told me it ‘usually’ works and then listed about four hundred charming side effects.”
“None of which you had.”
“That’s because she didn’t list the two biggest. Catholic guilt and female regret. The two got rolled in together at the time. Anyway, I did manage to tell you that I had taken care of the problem.”
“That you had it and that you had taken care of it, yes. In twenty-five words or less.”
“I was at a pay phone, you were home with Winnie. I guessed you would tell her it was a wrong number, or another hang-up call. Because I’d hung up three times already, waiting for you to be the one who answered.”
“Twenty-five seconds or less. Which is more than I got from you after the gallery reopened. No eye contact. Maybe a few grunts. You basically drove me out of the job.”
“I tried to, certainly.”
“Oh, you succeeded. And I did not see you again, not even for twenty-five seconds, until the day you came to deliver The Sentence . . .”
The Twoweeks Page 3
