The Twoweeks

by Larry Duberstein

  I stayed in control, though, striving to remain outwardly blameless, and so could seem blameless to my wife when eventually she gave voice to the obvious, that I was not quite myself after all. I seemed distracted, possibly even depressed? My reputation went so far in the other direction (irrepressible, undepressible) that this was alarming.

  If I assured her that I was fine, she would just smile and kiss my forehead. When I forgot things (though I never forgot to pick up the kids) she would joke that I was “not firing on all cylinders.” Her trust and caring shamed me to the core. How could I fail to love this person absolutely? And when she steered the conversation toward the suggestion I might benefit from some time alone, how could I fail to steer it clear of what I knew to be a ruinous rocky coast?

  Not only did I allow this proposition to be aired, I labored to shape it. Some time alone? Maybe that was something we each deserved. Two kids, two jobs, tight budgets, tight schedules: we would be foolish to deny there were strains involved. Surely it made sense to take a break from it all, if the details could be managed. . . .

  Somehow my slump, as she had come to call it, got folded into a hypothetical plan whereby each of us would be rewarded with “a week or two off,” what nowadays is called personal time. We called it a retreat, as though we would be bound away for the tranquil monastery in Paxton, whose grounds we used to stroll.

  First Winnie would go, then I would, and finally both of us, as a child-free couple. Part Three, she called it. We would dump the kids on parents, on sisters and brothers, and get away together. We could camp out in the Berkshires, hike around, rent a canoe—or maybe just stay home (sneak right back to the empty apartment) and go to bars, to movies, to bed. Be the way we were in our carefree romantic days. It would serve as a reminder, act as a restorative.

  This sounded so wise and so promising that I almost forgot it was all an elaborate trick, a selfish device designed to liberate me so I could betray my wife and abandon my family. Winnie did not really want to go anywhere alone. She went for a single night, stayed over Saturday with Jess Merriman in Northampton, and was back by dinnertime on Sunday.

  “Mama,” Hetty cried out, flying into her arms. They have antennae; they feel everything.

  “I missed you too, rabbit,” said Winnie, hugging her daughter, shrugging at me with her eyes. “I did have a nice time,” she assured me.

  It was my turn. I would hold off, I said, and see how it went. Maybe things would lighten up, maybe I could just skip it. And I could always go later, maybe toward the end of June . . . I might just hole up at the monastery and read my way through all of Shakespeare’s plays.

  “That sounds like a lot of fun,” Winnie joked, pained no doubt but pretending for my sake. Not understanding (how could she?) yet being understanding.

  “It’s a crazy idea, isn’t it?” I said.

  “The kids would miss you. So would I.”

  “I’d miss you too. Maybe I’d end up coming back in twentyfour hours, like you did. Though,” I added, carrying along my Machiavellian deception, “I have always been more disciplined than you.”

  It was a perfectly hideous act of stagecraft. Of cruelty and betrayal. Of evil, I suppose I should admit. By the time all my tacit lies had tumbled into place, I might barely be able to face myself. But I could say to Lara Cleary (however and whenever I found a way to do so) that yes, I had two weeks too, toward the end of June.

  4

  The Twoweeks

  Day 1, Wednesday, June 19. As arranged, we met in the alley behind the gallery and the instant I saw him I realized the whole proposition was a mistake. Not only would it be pointless (and likely painful), it would be incredibly awkward. It would be weird.

  There had been moments when I thought two weeks with C. would seem unbearably brief. Now as we stood on the street unable to decide the simplest stupidest aspects (Do we kiss hello? Theoretically yes, but standing there I felt a total absence of affection), two weeks seemed unbearably long.

  To make matters worse, I learned he had not told Winnie what we were doing. So we would be hiding and skulking, the exact situation I had tried so hard to avoid. It wasn’t as if we were being whisked away to sunny Marseilles; we would be right here. We had no plan and no money. How could we make ourselves invisible for one hour in this town, much less two weeks?

  C. had been this irresistible force. Making something happen between us had seemed imperative, to use a word I don’t believe I have ever used before. Now, though, I felt no force fields pulling me, I felt only the strangeness of the occasion. Who are you? I thought. What are we doing here?

  “This could be a long two weeks,” were the first words I managed to speak.

  C. looked surprised. Not because he disagreed (or agreed), but because he had not thought ahead two minutes, much less two weeks. “Why don’t we just take it one day at a time,” he said, as if this calm trite utterance represented a workable approach.

  “In fact,” he added, “let’s take it one hour at a time,” and that helped. An hour? An hour seemed workable. I am an acknowledged problem solver. If I greeted each arriving hour as a brand new problem, I might downright flourish. While this bright breakthrough did strike me as a little batty, the whole deal, The Twoweeks, was perfectly batty, and it was all about coping.

  The truth is that solving that first hour actually did solve the entire first day. We just started walking, randomly. Walked all the way to North Station, which in itself took an hour, and as a bonus provided us with topics as we marched across Boston. Then we boarded a train for Gloucester. Our criterion? Gloucester was where the next train happened to be going.

  It also happened to be a perfect destination. Where better to go on a gorgeous June morning than Cape Ann, and what better way to get there than by train? Trains free you up; I don’t know why, they just do. We did not even feel a need to talk as we rattled along. It was enough to let the passing landscape (faded signs and loading docks, salmon-colored bricks leached by sunlight, emerald green lawns and pale green fields, white clapboards and acres of silvered shingles) speak for itself. The process of moving through such scenery together carried us clear of the city, both physically and psychically.

  It restored us to being the people we were, a pair of drooling morons who had stepped into terra incognita without roadmap or compass. Strangers to one another still, yet by now recognizable. We walked again, over the rippled rumpled strand. Sea air, wet sand, the long horizon, blue vault of sky. We had brought no blankets, of course (no bathing suits, no packed lunches, nothing), yet it was wonderful. It was like looking at a blank page and knowing I had a poem there somewhere. Knowing that something was happening without caring exactly what it would turn out to be.

  This was the same emotion I felt that spectacular afternoon in France, riding the Deauville train without Ian, off on my own. Though it began with a jangly anxiety, it quickly switched to wild exhilaration as the bright world whirled past and I came to realize it was mine. It was all for me, as soon as I managed to get out of my own way. I could step outside myself, like a body leaving its ghostly host in a movie. Like Cosmo Topper, slipping his transparent aura, free to do the unexpected.

  Gloucester was a tame enough adventure, to be sure. No special effects there. No ghosts or explosions, no riderless white horse careening down from the hills. What we had was a clam shack, a six-pack of Black Label beer, and lots of waves breaking around our knees. Two kids in the water challenging each other in rapid-fire Spanish. A sky so uniformly blue it seemed painted, custom-blended to Cerulean Blue.

  Two sailboats looped around the point and, though the sailors remained unaware, we entered them in a serious highstakes race to a bright red buoy. (My boat won easily.) But we were just hanging out together. Suddenly comfortable with it; somehow relaxed. C. suggested we stay overnight, sleep on the beach.

  “I didn’t bring a toothbrush,” I laughed.

  “I bet they sell toothbrushes here,” he said, and that’s when it hit me he wa
s serious. He wasn’t simply a bad planner, he was utterly clueless. He didn’t know Ian was gone, didn’t realize we had a place to stay. Which in a way was my fault—how would he know if I didn’t tell him? Still, did he really expect us to sleep under the stars everywhere we went, like Frost’s two tramps in springtime?

  I pulled him into a hug. Touched by his innocence, flattered by his faith. I had called and he came, no questions asked. All along I had allowed for the basics: one, that he was male and therefore wanted sex; two, that he was married and wanted nothing more than sex. Now I had to concede it might be a little different than that.

  It did feel weird again at Miller Road. I had cleared the decks there, changed what I could change (shoved the bed under the window, turned the kitchen table ninety degrees), but it was still our house, mine and Ian’s. Ian had been in the bed two nights earlier and he would be back in it come July. So it got tricky for me there; it fritzed my brain for a while, like intermittent static.

  C. did not appear to experience the weirdness. He had set foot inside the apartment just once, so it held no particular significance for him. To him it represented shelter, a hole we could crawl into at night that was a few steps up from a hollow log. He truly had imagined a hobo existence, sleeping on beaches, in parks, on trains, maybe splurge on a motel here and there. If that constitutes a plan (as he alleged with a straight face), he had one.

  I was glad we weren’t virgins together. That chilly occasion in his friend’s bedroom? It counted. That room in all its appalling filth and ratty disorder, and the out-of-body experience during which I tried to see and feel nothing? It nonetheless counted as sex. We had done it before and now we were going to do it again, which made it so much easier. Plus of course I had bargained for it. Might as well face that one, lady.

  We did set guilt aside; it simply wasn’t present. And C. was so sweet, I could accept his tenderness—could move with him beneath the flannel sheet and hold him close without feeling threatened by what we were doing. Which was crazy, of course. I was never so threatened in my life. But at least it was my own damn fault.

  “I DON’T remember you writing anything down. What did you do, hide out in the bathroom with a yellow pad?”

  “No, you’re right, I didn’t do it then. Ian and I went to Maine later that month and I had a few hours each morning in a cottage, at a desk. Where supposedly poems were being written.”

  “So you’re saying this entire account is based on mere memory.”

  “Very fresh memory. And I did have a calendar marked. You saw me do that.”

  “No.”

  “I went by the calendar for the raw data. Which day was which. That on Wednesday the Umpteenth we did such-and-so. The rest was easy enough—emotion recollected in tranquility.”

  “Wordsworth?”

  “Good for you, Calvert. I’m impressed.”

  DAY 2. We had yet to begin calling it our water-park theme, but it was already tending that way. And given those late June days, what better way for it to tend?

  My first thought upon waking that morning was . . . I am waking. Profundity thy name is Lara! But this was “I am waking, therefore I have slept” and how was it possible to sleep in that bed, in that house, on that night? There was a different man on my husband’s side of the bed and yet I slept like the concrete block chained to a disposable mafioso. Something had to be seriously wrong with me.

  I made coffee. Made it and then sat on the back stairs drinking it . . . with C. instead of Ian. How could I? What kind of a heartless freak was I? Firing his dishwasher and hiring a new one, a restaurant owner might feel more remorse.

  Mrs. Ridley frowned in confusion at the lineup change, though she did do her queenly little wave. Possibly she mistrusted her eyesight. (“My Ian” looks different today, she maybe thought?) I leaned toward chickening out and introducing C. as my brother from out of town. I mean, why not lie to spare Mrs. Ridley? Even Father Chastain might approve. But the moment was defused, the sin deflected, when she ducked back inside her apartment—most likely to check us out more closely through the curtains.

  What next, was the question. (It would frequently be the question.) I suggested Walden Pond, C. ruled it out. Too many friends could float up, so to speak. Not to mention Winnie and the kids. I pointed out that there was privacy, a jungle really, on the far end where the train tracks run by. He said fine, if they’ll copter us in. Otherwise you have to start from the tiny public beach, where every face is visible and you are visible to every face.

  I was expected to sign on for this cheerful paranoia. We are being watched! The federales are coming after us with pistols drawn! Instinctively, I resented it. Let Winnie be there, I thought. I didn’t make it any easier for Ian. I didn’t lie to him. Why should I be forced to lie now, for someone else?

  On the other hand, I had zero interest in being confronted by Winnie, or in tackling the whole big issue of what anything meant. I did not care to defend myself, or explain myself, or even just be hated. Above all, I did not want those beautiful children impacted in any full frontal way. Thus did moral relativism stare me in the eye.

  I have always despised it. Always believed an act was moral or it was not, however one might try to fudge it. Now I was buying in (I’ll have a hundred shares of fudge futures, please) and telling myself it was “for the best.” Famous last words before fording the River Styx.

  We boarded the Concord train at Porter Square. Got off in Concord and hitchhiked to a bridge where they rent canoes. This was distinctly not the River Styx. It was a sweet throwback scene featuring unpainted wooden shed, iconic red Coke machine, and green canoes strewn like pickup sticks on a sloping grassy riverbank.

  This time we came with provisions, strawberries and tuna fish sandwiches and a bottle of wine. C. asked if the river water was drinkable and the owner hit us with an are-you-serious smile, so we bought two Cokes from his machine. Didn’t want to declare the wine, for fear it might be confiscated by the river police.

  “There’s a pair of great blue herons nesting half a mile downstream,” the owner cued us. “If you head that way you’ll likely see them.”

  So we headed that way, downstream, though we never did see them. There was no shortage of birds, just nothing as dramatic as a great blue heron. (“What’s so great about them, anyway?” asked C., predictably.) We did see dozens of turtles, basking on flat rocks and fallen trees. Saw a hundred hyperactive dragonflies.

  With the gentle current and a breeze at our backs, we glided effortlessly down the twisting river, concluding we must be complete naturals, seriously talented paddlers. Oh how we praised ourselves for timing, synchronicity. Recalling the canoe trip, at good old Camp Cornish, when Andrew Eagerman declared me a hopeless klutz, I suddenly understood the problem had been Andrew, not me. A Concord River epiphany.

  Because C. and I were a team, weren’t we? Beyond the simple act of teaming up (traveling, boating, bed) you have to function well together. You have to mesh and we were meshing, weren’t we?

  It helped that we did our meshing in a paradise: lush sunthreaded forest, meadows and marsh, no houses or cars. We never even encountered another canoe.

  “Let us pray,” said C., “that these folks do better on the weekends, or they will starve to death running this business.”

  “Let us assume,” I prayed, “that they run it as a tax shelter and could care less how many canoes they rent.”

  The riverscape became our world in the same way the weedy gravel patch by the Gal Al dumpster had been ours. There was never any hint of our real lives back there, no suggestion of Ian or Winnie. Apart from any obvious metaphors involving garbage, it was a place defined by our presence, our connection. Likewise on this pretty river: it was easy to forget we were a couple of cheaters, easy to feel entitled to the freedom we had so ruthlessly seized. And the further we glided, the freer I felt.

  We parked on a tiny island, not much larger than a suburban yard. Jumped out and dragged the canoe to where rocks and g
ravel gave way to grass. When my jeans got soaked in the process, I simply removed them and hung them on a tree in the sun. This was paradise, after all. The island smelled wonderfully of sun-dried earth, of grass and water mingled. Mountain laurel was in full bloom along the south-facing bank.

  The red wine (dollar and a half at Libby’s) tasted fine and we went right through it. “Pass the bottle!” we kept saying—the refrain from a Russian song C. knew, possibly from a Chekhov play? I would take a swig, he would exclaim “Pass The Bottle!” and then vice versa until we started to lose the rest of our clothing. It was like strip poker without the poker.

  After we had sinned deliciously, we sank down into an even more delicious sleep. I did suffer one brief pang, one small wave of guilt that rolled over my soul as I was drifting off. It was a vision of Ian’s face, looking so disappointed, sorrowful, as he had the night he left. He wouldn’t let me take him to the airport, which if designed to make me feel terrible was well designed indeed. Now it cheered me to feel terrible. It allowed me to think I might be human after all; that I might have “a shred of decency” in me.

  Then I was out like a light. It may have been ten minutes, it may have been two hours. (We shared an aversion to wearing watches.) However long a time, we woke to a radically changed day. Paradise Revised! The sun had vanished, the sky had turned a nacreous gray. A chill wind made it feel like late October.

  An occluded front, said C., whatever that meant. “Is that a weather joke?” I said. “Is there such a genre?”

  The joke was on us, in any case. Everything had changed. That imperceptible current was mighty perceptible as we paddled back upstream and into cold swirling gusts. As we battled our way back, it began to dawn on us just how far we had glided. (Too far, by miles.) Weakened by wine, sex, and sleep, we were no longer claiming to be championship paddlers.

  “We’re fucked,” said C., in his inimitable low-spoken way. “Though hopefully it was worth being so?”