The Twoweeks

by Larry Duberstein

  3

  The Sentence

  “I have two weeks,” she said, “maybe late June.”

  That was The Sentence. Lara spoke it and was gone. Yet I remember that moment the way people are said to remember where they were standing when the Bombs were dropped on Japan, or when Kennedy was shot in Texas. When the Towers came down in lower Manhattan.

  It’s absurd to place our insignificant personal history (as Lara liked to call it) alongside those momentously struck notes of epochal history. Nevertheless, it had three things in common with them: it came as a bolt from the blue, it was something I never imagined much less anticipated, and yet it had the capacity to change the way everything to follow was experienced. Looking back over the decades of my (admittedly insignificant) life, The Sentence is the solitary instance that even comes close to fulfilling these three prerequisites.

  I was sitting in the children’s park on Hancock Street with my new friend Sydney—Female Sydney, as we called her—on that lovely spring day, the last day of April and the nicest in a long time. Everyone was taking lunch outside, heading for the parks or down to the river.

  Sydney worked, as I did now, at Uncle Bunny’s Incredible Edibles, on Mass. Ave. This was my second get-a-paycheck-any-paycheck job since leaving Gallery Allison under duress. I had been fired from the first job (tending bar at The People’s Republic) for pouring too generous a glass; I was about to be fired from this one for packing too full a quart of ice cream.

  Female Sydney was just someone who made the job more pleasant. Cute, impulsive, and always entertainingly dressed, Syd was a trip. She was fun and I wondered why I felt so certain she could not be more. I was curious about the difference between Syd and Lara Cleary, who had likewise “made the job more pleasant” at Gallery Allison. And the incredibly simple answer, according to my analysis, was that I could never love Sydney. In that regard she was like every appealing woman I had met in the last ten years—except Lara Cleary.

  The same Lara Cleary whom I had not seen in two months and yet who (as I looked up from my chicken salad sandwich, no doubt with some of that chicken salad lingering on my chin) I now saw motioning to me from over by the swing-set. She had materialized out of thin air, as in a dream, or possibly a hallucination.

  She was also the same Lara Cleary whom I not only could love but had: we had become lovers, finally. To me, at any rate, we were lovers. To her we were two people who happened to have sex. We had sex and then she shut me out, completely. Not because the sex was bad (though it was), but because however it had gone for us she knew it meant trouble.

  We both knew that. It happened because we could not quite step around it and Lara hoped that by doing it (and dismissing it as done) she could step around it now. Or so I assumed. As for knowing, I knew nothing. In the total news blackout since our one rash hour in bed, I had spent my best energies trying to shake free of the strange web we had woven together. But the worm of it had crawled inside me.

  Even in the many and even predominant moments of happiness at home, I found myself profoundly distracted. As wonderful as my children were, as much as I adored and enjoyed them, I often felt a sense of relief when they were safely asleep. Then I could get back to the essential business of being miserable. In some bizarre way I needed to be miserable, as though Fate was saying to me, Deal with this or I will never let go of your soul.

  Now at the arched cast-iron portal to the playground, where our slow two-shot drift toward one another concluded, Lara (in the flesh, not a hallucination) placed both palms against my chest. This was affectionate, a sort of caress, but it was also a stop sign: no embraces, it declared, nothing beyond this one gesture.

  She looked absurdly beautiful to me, not so much tanned as lightly toasted in a way that glorified her gray-green eyes and streaky chestnut hair. She seemed to have thrived during our time apart, seemed to have been anything but distracted or miserable. Only the words she spoke hinted otherwise. “I have two weeks, maybe late June.”

  At first I had no idea what to make of this, no background against which to place her declaration. Lara’s palms were still pressed against my chest and now she pushed off, launching herself backward like a swimmer kick-turning at the end of the pool. Dumbfounded, I watched her recede down Hancock Street and then turned to field a glance from Female Sydney that was more like a dart, all of her “And-what-have-we-here” irony focused into a sly accusatory smile.

  “What was that?” she said. “And do not tell me you don’t know.”

  It was, of course, the only true answer I might have summoned. I didn’t know.

  “Just a friend,” I offered to Syd, who wildly mugged her disbelief.

  Lara Cleary had her principles, God knows, and apparently those principles dictated she utter not one word more than she had. Presumably this had mostly to do with her husband Ian, to whom she had owed fidelity and now owed loyalty in some skewed form. It also had something to do with her approach to risk.

  Her approach was that she would never take a risk if she could identify it as such. While the long unsettling tug of love and war between us (leading up to February 22 and now to The Playground Statement) may have seemed fraught as hell with risk, it wasn’t, exactly. Lara understood how far she could push a situation without harming Ian irreparably (or losing him), and she was forever reckoning how far she could push herself without endangering either her marriage or her mortal soul. She may have been wrong—the calculus was intuitive—but it was there.

  I was good at closing distances, Lara was good at maintaining them, sometimes even in times of intimacy. She was as charming as a woman can be; she could charm the pants right off you. After she had done so, however, it did not gain you any rights or privileges. Pants or no pants, you might find yourself at arm’s length.

  As I pondered her words later that afternoon (as I dipped and rolled the mile-high ice cream cones at Uncle’s), the fog of mystery blew away from them. Lara’s appearance was so melodramatic and her proposal so startling that initially I resisted its narrow clarity. But there was no other possible interpretation. She had managed, by whatever means, and for whatever reasons of her own, to obtain a fortnight of freedom from Ian, and if I could somehow arrange to do the same we might share that fortnight.

  It was an invitation and, by her lights, a handsome one: confessing to interest, hinting at attraction. But one spare sentence, with no room for a reaction, much less a hug? The delivery was as strictly limited as the message itself. It was absolutely minimal and so I took it as literal. Just as we had never been permitted a past or a present in her iconography, we would be denied a future. Or any future beyond the two weeks on offer. Even as she tendered the invitation, Lara was reprising her refusal to acknowledge any real bond between us. Two weeks was what we might have. Up to me. All the same to her.

  Had I declared it impossible, Lara was covered. No problem, she would say, sayonara Cisco. Clearly she had feelings; just as clearly those feelings were not to be granted primacy. It was a handsome invitation and at the same time it was a gauntlet laid down.

  There was genius in it. If one could get away with such temporary arrangements—if one were a sophisticated European, in the mythology—many a sagging marriage might be propped up by it. Revival, survival, call it what you will. For the most part, the grass only seems greener on the other side of the hill. For the most part, we choose a spouse carefully and for sound reasons, so there are qualities to fall back on. There is, or presumptively has been, love.

  Reviewing the handful of women I had been attracted by over the course of my marriage to Winnie (cute Shelley, funny Elke, undeniably sexy Lynn), I could see nothing that would have threatened us under the mythologic European format, the stray-and-return model. There is jealousy to consider. I am aware, from movies seen and books read, that there can be jealousy even in Europe. Sometimes in French films there can be guns brandished, in violent final scenes that cloud the credits with gun-smoke. So I suppose we are talking percentages her
e.

  Meanwhile we are also talking about a couple, Winnie and myself, who had never bandied about (much less adopted) this European dream of personal freedom. I doubted it was any different with Lara and Ian. What had Lara told him? I was willing to bet she had not uttered any outright lies to him, yet precisely how much truth had she told? How much truth had she acknowledged to herself, for that matter? Because Lara did find it useful to keep herself in the dark regarding her own emotions.

  And why would she shake Ian up that badly without first gaining some assurance that I was on board? My compliance with the odd proposition could hardly be taken for granted. Maybe she did want to stick her neck out, though. Maybe playing it safe, like lying, would have felt immoral to her. Lara would want to be punished (and by God, no less!) if she refused to accept the consequences of her sins. So here she was slipping a twisted thread of loyalty into the fabric of betrayal.

  I was guessing at all this, flying by the seat of my intuition. Nor did my “analysis” matter a whit. I had not been placed in charge of her half of the plan; I was assigned to deal with my half. Did I or did I not wish to play a serious high-stakes game of relationship roulette, a dangerous game in which the goal might be to beat the house but the end result might be to raze it.

  Even if I agreed this was a good idea (or more accurately an irresistible opportunity), even if I elected to grab those two weeks and squeeze the spice out of them, how in the world would I manage it?

  Lying was the obvious first option for me to weigh. I was never the moralist Lara was, I was a pragmatist and lying was pragmatic. But a good lie can be hard to find. The best one I conjured up was to say I had been offered a part in a play running two weeks in Cincinnati, or farther west if necessary. Winnie would not doubt it (indeed, she would applaud it) and she would not be free to accompany me.

  I got as far as considering the specifics (would this play be a Shaw, an Ibsen, or something new and experimental?) before reality erupted and blew up the inchoate plot. Winnie might not come along to the nation’s midsection, but she could certainly telephone me there, a detail not easily finessed. Likewise the problem of fabricating contracts, publicity photos, reviews. And while she could not get away from work for two weeks in Ohio, she might insist on being there for opening night.

  Long before that, she would expect to be my sounding board. Expect to help me rehearse my role. Ah yes, my role . . .

  I did consider telling the truth. The truth had one obvious advantage, namely that the guilt of infidelity would not be accelerated by the guilt of dishonesty. When people insist they prefer to be told the truth, though, what they really mean is that they prefer the truth to be different than it is. Would Winnie really feel better hearing of this tidy little scheme? And why should she be asked to countenance such treason? Winnifred is an extraordinarily fair person, liberated and flexible, and would have forgiven an infidelity more sensibly than most. She wouldn’t forgive me in advance, though. Why should she do that?

  For a time I weakened (or had I strengthened?) and fell to thinking I would just say no. Thanks much, but as it happens I do not “have two weeks.” What simple relief it would provide from the tricky calculus I was mired in. Where the other choices were fraught and stressful, this one seemed weightless. It whisked the problem away like a TV cleansing agent.

  Except, of course, that it did no such thing. Letting go of Lara (especially when she was, for once, not proposing to let go of me) was way past counter-intuitive. It was impossible, emotionally. I knew that already and now it seemed Lara knew it too. If not, there would be no such prospect as these two weeks, however stingy or limited in scope.

  So it seemed reasonable to wonder if she might sign on for a less apocalyptic arrangement. Why did it have to be this deal or no deal? Lara had rendered her terms, why couldn’t I render mine?

  That phase of my deliberations lasted about a minute. Somehow I knew that her offer was writ in black ink, that it was more an ultimatum than an initial chip. She had parsed the terms of the contract, bargained back and forth with her “better self” (and possibly her husband) on the fine points, and this was her best offer.

  I went back to just-say-no and stayed with it for a solid week. To prop up my wobbling willpower, I took on extra shifts at Uncle Bunny’s. At home, I took over all the cleaning, shopping, laundry, and cooking. I took over the kids completely: pick-up and delivery, meals and snacks, games and baths, songs and stories. They were such lovely children, who could ask for anything better than taking them over? Who would dare ask? Was I not as fortunate as a soul could be?

  Truly, I was. All my life I had been blessed, from the genetics on up. Unless you counted money (and I did not), I lacked for nothing that mattered. The “rest of the story” was that now I did lack Lara Cleary. And though I could and did reply “So what?” to this purported hardship, something inside me kept laughing off the so-what defense. My normally sturdy psyche was being undermined, collapsed by unseen tunnels. I could never quite extricate Lara’s image or voice from my mind, could not dislodge her essence from my corpuscles.

  Who knows from effing corpuscles, you say. Who has ever seen a corpuscle? It’s an absurd conceit, an extreme one, yet mine had become an extreme state of mind. Lara had become so deeply embedded that I felt as if I twisted left and she twisted with me; I bent and she bent. As with the sharp pain from a kidney stone, I could achieve no posture that provided a haven from the pain.

  So what, I told myself again. Even if the pain is real, even if it counts the way a dislocated shoulder counts, it can always be endured. I could choose suffering—not for two weeks or a year, but forever, if necessary. People suffer terribly, in so many ways. In a case of such minor (and elective) suffering, I should choose it and, moreover, not dare call it by that name.

  All through this time, I kept expecting my boy Jake to say, Papa where are you? What are you thinking about, as I had said so many times to him, in his own abstracted moments. I was that absent, that inadequate. Jake is the most alert, yet how could any of them fail to notice? Especially when I began to lose my temper. . . .

  The phrase is wrong. You lose your cool, you find your temper; it’s just that you didn’t want to find it. My policy was never to rush Hetty at bedtime. If you rushed her, it would not only end up taking longer, it would provide a joyless experience for all concerned. One night, nevertheless, I could not manage to keep it together.

  I had been faking it for hours, going through the motions of engagement with both of them. Their need was for routine and for the love that lay at the foundation of our family routines. My need was to be released from the rare gift of familial happiness into a murky pool of confusion, a private facility where I could wrestle undetected with the trivial misery I almost, in an odd way, cherished.

  Generally I could use the hour before Winnie came home to process the confusion, cram it back in its box, so I could be composed for her. Be “normal,” or at least appear normal. To the eternal spousal question (“What’s wrong?”) the eternal answer (“Nothing”) can never be rendered convincingly—and mind you, I say this as a trained actor. If the question must be asked, then “Nothing” is simply not among the plausible answers.

  That night, in any case, I refused to read the one-more-story Hetty invariably requested. The one-more was like the encore at a concert, it was part of the set list, planned in advance as the real final number. Instead of reading the one-more, I tucked Hetty in almost forcibly, right up to her cool sweet chin, which I kissed, as I kissed her forehead and sweet soft cheeks and her nose. I adored her, after all. But I fled the room almost angrily and refused to return for the curtain call. When finally I did return, I was still stern-faced and pinch-voiced, a complete stranger to my darling child.

  “Why are you being mean, Papa?” said Hetty, another sentence, by the way, bound to stay with me all my life.

  Inevitably I was mean to Winnie as well. Hetty was still awake, still squalling, when her mother got home. It was her
late night at work and she was rag tired. We were all tired and shorttempered. (We were “not ourselves,” or such would become the explanation.) I cited charges that were utterly baseless, or misplaced. Winnie was stunned to hear these charges, that she had been neglecting Jake, neglecting me, never had the energy for sex. Has there ever been a purer example of what the therapists call projection?

  We went to bed in a jangle and rose the next morning feeling as though the house had been shattered by a storm overnight, a tree had come crashing through the roof. Weary and reeling, we looked around and began picking up the pieces, groping our way toward breakfast like shipwrecked survivors rearranging the island.

  It was awful, it was entirely my fault, and somehow it ended up being my ticket to ride. Inadvertently, it set the seed of a notion that would sprout into two weeks of liberty, a way to eat my cake and have it, without apocalypse and without even asking. I’ll explain.

  We put the family back together that Saturday. In the afternoon, I loved the kids to heaven and the Henry Bear toy store, and in the evening we all went for tacos and enchiladas verdes at El Phoenix Room, where Jake drank two fingers of my beer and Hetty conducted a lengthy conversation with their plastic donkey. In the midnight hour Winnie and I had tearful (her) guilty (me) sex, and on Sunday morning, at my insistence, she slept in. I brought her coffee in bed, made the kids blueberry pancakes, and labored to erase all memory of the monster they had glimpsed the night before. Order was restored. We were “ourselves” again.

  Nevertheless, not surprisingly, hints and bits of trouble persisted, poking up at unpredictable moments. It seems I was not hearing everything they said to me (all three reported this separately, lending credence) and when I did hear, I was apt to respond in odd ways. I made toast for Hetty, after she had declared for cereal. I ran a bath for Jake, though he always took showers. Like any amateur criminal, I was drawing attention to myself.