The Twoweeks

by Larry Duberstein

  Perhaps, at the time. But now the rain began, and as cold as it was, I suppose we could be grateful it didn’t snow. Conditions were so freakishly awful it was almost funny, like a bad road movie. Or a good river movie, The African Queen, where Bogart and Hepburn (squabbling and seedy and falling into love) tow the damaged tugboat through leach-infested waters.

  No cameras on us, and no soundtrack except the seething rain and tubercular wind. We pushed and the river pushed back. Time and again, the wind spun us off course. October gave way to November.

  We were shivering and soaked, and it was all such an obvious stacking of the deck against us that at one point we both started laughing and couldn’t stop. Mild hysteria, of the contagious sort. Finally C. managed to speak, and reminded me that even after we made it back to the rental shed, we would be miles from the train depot. We would have to hitchhike there (and who would pick up two wet strays?), then take the train, then the T, and then walk again, another mile to the house. “It could take years.”

  It did take years. By the time we got back to Miller Road, we were wiped out. Frozen, hungry, and poor, because we messed up that nice man’s tax shelter by owing him an extra fourteen dollars for going past our time limit. Yet somehow we did not hate each other. Somehow we were happy to share the blame. We were a team of fools, a lot less effective than a team of mules, but a team after all.

  We sprinted for the shower, jostling for position, and C. cranked it to maximum heat (Scalding or Flaying maybe—whatever it had said before the words wore off the valve) and stood under the stream thawing. The cure for being wet, it seems, is being wetter.

  Eventually we soaped one another’s backs, and bottoms, and unmentionables, until such shenanigans led us straight to bed, all for the sake of warmth, to be sure. The amazing aspect is that later—later—when we were clean and dry and dressed, it was not only still light out, it was summer again. The storm had passed and the sun came back in time to set in standard dramatic fashion at the end of Western Avenue. The world-class pollution over St. Johnsbury Trucking yielded a Biblical sunset so grand that one was tempted to begin walking toward it, like a pilgrim.

  “May we?” I asked. I probably sounded like a teenager asking her homeroom teacher for a permission slip.

  “You don’t think we’ve walked enough today?”

  “We have. But I want to walk too much.”

  “Well, Winnie should be home at this point,” he said, clearing what was, by his lights, the first hurdle.

  But a strange new flutter passed through me. I was not deluded. I knew the deal; I had made the deal. Still, after the day we had just shared, cautionary thoughts of Winnie seemed inappropriate. Which could only mean that it was time to install a few cautionary thoughts of my own; to slap myself upside the head for making fine distinctions within the mea culpa.

  “Which leaves only two hundred other people who might see us together?”

  “We are friends,” he said, approaching the next hurdle. “We did work together. If someone could bump into us, why couldn’t we have bumped into each other?”

  “That’s our story?”

  It was, and I would be simultaneously relieved and disappointed that no one bumped into us en route to the House of Florence, or during the hour we sat inside sharing a pizza and a pitcher of beer that was as bad as it was cheap.

  Cheap had begun to matter. C. had started with $150, was already under 100. I started with 75. “We could end up eating mushrooms in the woods,” he said, “like Elvira Madigan.”

  “I always wondered whether those two were doomed lovers or just helpless fools?”

  “Either way,” said C. “Don’t you think we qualify on both counts.”

  “Speak for yourself,” I said, alluding to the many cans of tuna and many boxes of pasta in my pantry and the job I would be going back to, in less than two weeks. If I stooped for any wild mushrooms, it would be for the gastronomic pleasure.

  C. liked hearing that about as much as I had liked his bringing Winnie into the frame. So there were these frissons, little electric shocks, already happening. It was still becoming less complicated for us at that point, easier to be together, yet looking back I see that the complications were massing just offstage, like the clouds that mustered while we were snoozing in Eden.

  “NOT BAD.”

  “No complaints?”

  “It’s not my place to complain, dear Lara. Mine is merely to ruminate, and maybe elaborate here and there. I was ruminating on outdoor sex, and how it’s kind of an ancient memory at this point. It’s not something one does after a certain age, is it?”

  “I would imagine that’s circumstantial.”

  “The main circumstance being youth! But one does remember the instances of outdoor sex. There’s always something memorable. The mud, the mosquitoes. Getting caught. Remember the guy with the camera in Ogunquit?”

  “It’s the very first occasion I plan to forget, as soon as my Alzheimer’s sets in.”

  “The funniest part about that time on the island was that we were so into it, really into it, but in my mind’s eye I kept seeing your shapely white bottom rising and dropping in the bold blaring sunlight. Thinking what a sight it must have been for someone slipping quietly past the island in a boat.”

  “Mercifully, apart from your mind’s eye, it went unseen.”

  “Who knows? At the time, we wouldn’t have noticed someone standing two feet away, making a lollygagging Maori face at us.”

  “We were such fools. I mean, really, what were we thinking?”

  “Thinking?”

  “Actually, I know what I was thinking. I was thinking God might be too busy to find us right away. Two weeks? With any luck we might be back in our rightful beds while He was still sorting out Angola, or Libya.”

  “That’s where your head was at?”

  “It was more like a little prayer I prayed. That He wouldn’t strike me down. That I’d make it to confession before He cottoned on to me, and then He would have no choice but to forgive me.”

  “Did He?”

  “I’ll find that out at the pearly gates, wise guy.”

  DAY 3. That next morning was so lovely (our little tong wars, our jousts and jests, somehow morphing into easy affection) that I had to fight off the illusion this was my life. Had to work at remembering that it was not my life.

  I had not forgotten Ian—how could I?—but it seems I had compartmentalized him. He was my husband, who I dearly loved and with whom I would soon be reunited. That’s who he was. Until the night of July 6, he was not so pertinent.

  Not that this was conscious. Consciously, alas, I did not even need to push him aside. I was where I was, and glad of it. I might dislike being a woman who could shuttle Ian out the front door, bring C. in through the back, and be okay with it. And maybe I should have been bearing down, staging more of a struggle against this callous edition of myself. We were too far inside the storm at that point, though; the wind was pushing us too hard.

  God knows I resisted any consideration the storm wouldn’t blow over. If C. was right, that the “problem” was sexual, it was all the more likely to pass. For the moment, the deck was unfairly stacked in our favor. In effect we were taking a dream vacation—no work, all play—and taking it in the first beautiful flush of summer. Under such circumstances, I might have been happy running around with Godzilla.

  We had taken flight and simply averted our gaze from the crash landing that lay ahead. C. was more and more relaxed. He must have compartmentalized Winnie, as I had done with Ian. Could he compartmentalize the children too? I didn’t know how to ask, and didn’t ask, just wondered. According to Marisa (she of the three boys, with a fourth on the way) you always compartmentalize the children. The trouble is that their compartment is so much larger than yours.

  I did ask if he was keeping in touch with home. After all, what if there was some sort of emergency? Wasn’t he having nightmares of ambulances and fire trucks gathered outside his house? It turned
out he did have a system for putting his mind at ease. If anything like that came up, Winnie would contact Fitz and Fitz would “find a way” to contact C. So I had to assume Fitz knew the deal; that he was an unindicted co-conspirator.

  Which did not surprise me. What surprised me was that C. actually had planned ahead, in this one way. But then I did know those children were more important to him than anything—important enough, it turned out, to activate his brain!

  I got the car back from Pete that morning (“The clutch,” he told me, “should be okay for a while”) so we had new means of travel, even a cramped rolling hotel in a pinch. We didn’t go far, though. Did not “flee the area,” like a pair of escaped killers we heard about on the radio that morning. We began by driving west about twenty miles, stopping for a picnic at Nagog Pond.

  The pond is surrounded by woods, though there is a road along the western edge and a few houses before the road dissolves into rocky shore. We jammed the car into a hole in the trees, then bushwhacked fifty yards or so to a minimal beachhead, a silky sandbar not much larger than a living room rug. A huge boulder squatted at the far edge, like emphatic punctuation. The spot seemed so private, the clearing so intentional, that I assumed we were breaking the law.

  “What law would that be?” said C. “We still have our clothes on.”

  “Well, trespassing is one obvious possibility. And adultery, come to think of it. That’s against the law, you know.”

  “But we still have our clothes on.”

  “Ingestion of a controlled substance?” I offered next, as I saw him breaking out a joint.

  “Worth going to jail for, I’m told. Chimichanga Red, or something—the crème de la cream.”

  “According to—?”

  “Fitz. Who does know his dope.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I almost never touch the stuff.”

  We had discussed this, actually, at one of our dumpster symposiums, and had agreed the “correct” position on marijuana was to enjoy it if it proved enjoyable (for me, not very), but avoid heavy use (Fitz) or major expenditure (Ian’s colleague Merrill Bauer).

  “Fitz insisted on giving us a present.”

  “So he does know our sad little story.”

  “He is the only one, and he won’t tell a soul. For a drug addict, Fitz is surprisingly reliable.”

  “All right, but I don’t think I’m into the cream de la crème today.”

  “There’s always tomorrow,” said C., a phrase that was fated to become a comic routine between us. He would say there’s always tomorrow and I would point out that for us there would not always be a tomorrow, and he would look at me as though Day 14 lay somewhere in the next century. The man is not exactly a visionary.

  Then we had our little scare. We were in this hole-in-thewoods hideout (and had seen no sign of human life on Planet Nagog) when out of the silence a gravelly voice behind us went “Howdy.” Scalps tingling from the shock of it, we turned to see a gray-haired fellow decked out for fishing.

  Damned if C. didn’t say “Howdy” right back, even as he was smoothly palming and stowing the joint. You could have peeled the old gent right off a Norman Rockwell canvas: the flannel shirt and overalls, the rod and reel and creel.

  “I’m afraid we’ve invaded your favorite spot,” I said, once the shock had passed.

  “No. This is Roger Sessions’ land, not mine.”

  “It’s a pretty place.”

  “And you are a pretty lady, so fair’s fair. Oh yes, I can still tell by looking. No offense, I hope?”

  Genuflecting to the feminist movement, I suppose. He was harmless enough and clearly he meant to be sociable. In fact, he seemed delighted to have company—so delighted he refused to let us leave. We tried hard, kept feeding him closeout lines, said sayonara in several languages, and the fellow just kept clutching at our ankles. (Metaphorically.)

  “Here’s to good fishing,” said C., taking my hand, and starting away.

  “Care for an apple, either of you?” was the reply.

  It wasn’t exactly a non sequitur and it wasn’t a sequitur either. It was a device. He was binding us to him with an offering.

  “I was pretty sure that was a poison apple,” C. would later say.

  “You’ve read too many children’s books.”

  “I would bite into it and die, he would slide my body into the pond, then have the pretty lady all to himself.”

  I had a different paranoia going. In mine, this fellow was an emissary from Winnie, a bolt of reality therapy, a jolt of a reminder that the world is always with you. You can run but you can’t hide, and “all that happy horseshit” as Ian would say.

  We finally shook free, continued west, tried again for our picnic in a tame state park. The main trail was cordoned by a thousand flowering rhododendrons and featured more seating facilities than a cafeteria—bench and a barrel here, bench and a barrel there, that was the master plan. We ate the lunch I packed (and smoked the joint), then decided to head back to town. Everything on our agenda was going to be arbitrary, but somehow this super tidy slice of “wilderness” seemed to beg the question. It was still early afternoon when we got back to Miller Road, plenty of time for our next arbitrary move.

  “So here we are,” I said, “with nothing to do.”

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky again,” said C., tackling me onto the bed and starting to strip off my clothes, of which there were few. It might have been the Chimichanga Red that had us rolling around like puppies and laughing.

  It was kind of brilliant, C’s way of making sex a joke (or framing it as a playful game, which after all is what it is) because it had been so good the last time that it made me shy. Absurdly, I had felt some pressure to match or top it and now that felt ridiculous. C. eliminated the possibility of “failure.” Had it been flat, or merely passable, we could just say, Oh well, not so lucky after all.

  Which did not prove necessary, though we will have no specifics here from Sally Cleary’s daughter. I thought of her actually, after the pyrotechnics. I remembered the phrase she had for men she found attractive, mostly movie stars from the ’40s and ’50s. “A fine physical specimen,” she would say. Gary Cooper was her favorite, and later Robert Mitchum. Even back then, even without showing any sex in the movies, Hollywood expected people to see it and they did. My mother saw it, for goodness’ sake, in her fine physical specimens.

  It isn’t C.’s looks, though. I might have thought that, but I am afraid he could be ordinary looking and still have presented a big problem. It isn’t his other obvious attributes, either, that he is smart and funny (and fun, which is another matter entirely) and much nicer than I ever dreamed. He gets high marks all around. He was even a track star, I gather, should anyone care about such things.

  The problem was more that he is so comfortable to be around. Comfortable with himself, comfortable in the world. That we were so comfortable together. I was beginning to trust him even though from my point of view nothing could have been crazier. Trust what, exactly? Lower my defenses for what earthly reason? But it isn’t like that. It’s an emotion, and I was in danger of disappearing down into it.

  DAY 4, June 22, was a bad day for the simple reason that it was such a good day. Such were the paradoxes I found myself fielding. There was even a moment when the word “love” flashed across the sky of my childish mind. Just a word—and a word unspoken, to be sure. I never said love. Plus, as the song says, “a moment isn’t very long.” Hadn’t there been a moment, the very first time I met C., when I actively disliked him? So that was not valid either.

  I remember a quiet start to that day, sun blasting the bedroom early, coffee and toast (with Dundee’s orange marmalade) and the newspaper parceled out like old marrieds. How did we manage to have this? Why did Ian and Winnie allow us to have it? I do understand we were selfish and we took it. Still, what were they thinking? I was almost angry with them for not stopping us.

  Ian nearly did, of course. Walking home one day, h
e reported, his “liberalism faded, big time” and he decided to write me off. He was all set to walk in and say “Fuck you, go if you want, but you won’t find me awaiting the verdict when you get back.” Why didn’t he stick to his guns? What would I have done if he had?

  Honestly, I expected nothing less from him. I never dreamed he would say fine, get it out of your system, I need you to lay it to rest as much as you do. Yet that’s what he said, before and after. That he loved me and he knew it; that he needed me and would take the chance. “It’s a chance I get you for good, as much as a chance of losing you.” As though I were a prize of some sort.

  It’s almost a joke that these two attractive men, men who could have their pick of the litter, would pick me. Ian, who broke up with Amanda Hooper for me, and C., who is married to the beautiful Winnifred. In a field which included Amanda and Winnie, I am somehow the prize?

  Officially, I am “fun.” That’s always been said, even in high school—and why not, it’s a high school sort of category, a yearbook accolade, Most Fun to Be With. So I was maybe fourteenth most-fun-to-be-with. But no one ever called me beautiful. No one even found me attractive until I was eighteen. At which point I must have been a distinctly unusual attraction, at five feet six and about 99 pounds.

  I may be a slightly stronger candidate now (at five feet six and 114), yet it remains bizarre, this intense attention. I don’t think anyone is lying, exactly, I just can’t trust it. I am no more immune to flattery than the next person, it’s just that I was inoculated against its worst toxins early on. Any day, I caution myself, the bubble could burst and they will again see me as I really am.

  Anyway, on Day 4 we shared an impulse to lay low, stay home all morning and be lazy, and we might have done that had C. chosen a different phrase. “Why don’t we just stay home,” is what he said, though, and the word sounded in my skull like a gong. This was not home, or not our home. We were sublessees and our lease was short.

  The day was broiling hot by the time we headed out Route 2 again. The freshly hatched (and of course arbitrary) plan was to explore out by the Quabbin Reservoir, maybe find some place to swim, eat lunch in a diner somewhere. This was hardly a tightly wrapped itinerary, and it got a lot looser when we decided to hike down a blazed trail in search of the “splendid prospect of the central valley” that was promised on a faded bulletin board.