The Twoweeks

by Larry Duberstein

  We never got the splendid prospect. Lost track of the yellow blazes, veered off the trail, and fell among mosquitoes and their smaller cousins, no-see-ums according to C. We didn’t see ’em but we sure felt ’em, and we were also feeling the building heat of the day. There was a bit of shade on that forest track, but there was no breathable air and no breeze at all.

  “Two expensive educations wasted,” I said, as I murdered another mosquito. “Off we go into the woods to engage the enemy on his own turf.”

  “Her own turf. Or didn’t you know that only the female mosquito bites?”

  “To me, that is an insignificant detail, not an indictment of Germaine Greer.”

  “I wasn’t indicting anyone, just correcting the possessive pronoun. As someone so expensively educated ought to do.”

  “Correct this,” I said, bumping him with my backside.

  “Impossible. The body part in question does not allow of correction.”

  “You can stop flattering me, Calvert. The seduction part is done. We’re in the muck now.”

  This was not metaphorical. We had come into a marshy area (clearly a Mecca for insects) where our shoes made sucking sounds each time we lifted them. I was about to suggest we turn back, just make a run for it, when suddenly the woods opened out onto smoky blue sky and dead treetops, and we found ourselves at the edge of a small weedy pond.

  “Water!” we cried, like desert rats spying an oasis. C. was out of his clothes and into the murky pool in ten seconds flat. My reaction was more cautious, as in No way, not I. Snakes occurred to me, and leeches. But I changed my mind after a minute spent watching C. splash around like a happy child, while I stood there providing a landing strip for every female mosquito in Massachusetts.

  He had thrown off his clothes as though they were on fire. I removed my own a good deal more carefully, and even more carefully folded Gram’s necklace into the neat pile I made. Then I went in, just as carefully, step by experimental step. This water, or soup, was totally opaque; you couldn’t see a thing under the surface. It was cool and soothing, though, once I became submerged. Snakes were still on my mind, but for the moment no one was feasting on my flesh.

  “Why do you suppose God even made mosquitoes?” I said. “Do they do something useful?”

  Only our heads were above the waterline when C.’s head said, “God? Is that someone I should meet?”

  We were both raised Catholic. C. now is as religious as a brick—it’s utter nonsense to him—whereas I am unable to say that. I can see it appears to be nonsense, but I can’t quite say that it is nonsense. (What I say instead is, Why do you suppose God made these bugs?)

  We had not jumped into anyone’s classic old swimmin’ hole. That water was pretty gross. Any time your feet touched bottom, a swirl of disintegrating leaf matter was released upward. If you raised an arm, it came out coated with blackish bits of stuff. When you stood to your waist, your breasts were so heavily decorated with this subaqueous compost you felt dressed, albeit like a creature from a horror flick.

  And when finally you waded out, the muck on your backside somehow clung to and revealed hairs that were “not really there—they’re only there when the mud defines them as such,” or so C. told me later, in the shower, as he leaned down to examine me closely (both visually and manually) and failed to locate these hairs.

  We had debated what was worse, staying in or getting out. We were lost in the woods, I mentioned, but did that dictate staying in or getting out? C. assured me we could not be lost because he had a compass in his head. “Is this it?” I said, rubbing a sort of knob on his cranium.

  Maybe it was (and maybe he was just lucky) because he did get us back to the skein of blazed triangles and then quite briskly to the car. Soon enough we were pulling into a roadside hamburger stand shabby enough to serve people who looked the way we did—which is to say extremely marginal, like escaped criminals who hadn’t had time to change clothes. There was one umbrella table on a gravel turnout and we sat there, dining al fresco, downing our cheeseburgers and Cokes like true-blue Americans. For some (unexamined) reason I felt ridiculously happy.

  Then about twenty ridiculously happy miles to the east, I let loose a sudden bloodcurdling scream that, to C.’s credit, did not cause him to drive off the road. I never go anywhere without Gram’s necklace and I never, ever, take it off. But I did take it off at that godforsaken pond to avoid losing it, and so I lost it. That chain was always around my neck, how could I not notice it was gone? How could I have been so distracted?

  Even in my moment of stark panic, though, I did grasp that this was not war or cancer. It was a trivial, sentimental, bourgeois loss. Which only meant I had no justification for the grief that flooded my throat and chest. It was the same constriction I had felt there when Gram actually died and I had to walk myself through the fine art of breathing.

  There was nothing for it. The necklace was an hour in the rearview mirror, a mile into the woods, and who knows how deep in the damp disintegrating leaf matter of that swamp. All I could do was to keep breathing and start adjusting. Grow up and start getting used to the fact Gram’s necklace was gone.

  Offer it up, as Mom would say. Because life was loss, end on end. Only by offering up your losses could you manage to absorb them. She never said how, and it did become something of a chuckle between us. What it boiled down to for her, I think, was a good trick for hanging on to your happiness. A way to keep loving life even when life did not love you.

  “Offer it up?” said C. “Now there’s one I haven’t heard in a while. You must have known my Aunt Grace.”

  “My mother. Maybe it was their whole generation, or at least that generation of Catholics . . . Cal, what are you doing?”

  (He was hanging a U-turn, was what.)

  “It could have been worse,” he was saying. “We could have got all the way to Cambridge before you realized it was gone. Hey, it won’t even be dark for hours.”

  “Calvert, you don’t have to do this. It’s just a necklace. It isn’t even real. I mean, the stones are paste.”

  “You should see your face. If you think you can convince me this isn’t the most important object in the world to you, just take a look in the mirror.”

  “The point is we’ll never find it. We’ll never even find that place. Honestly, I will survive.”

  “We might not find it, but we have to try, don’t we? If we fail, then it’ll have to be okay. You can pay for the extra gas, if you feel that bad about it.”

  “I don’t get it. Where is your famous temper? Where is your legendary impatience?”

  “Bum raps, obviously. And I do like a challenge.”

  “You think you’ll find it, don’t you? A treasure hunt. Find the tiny necklace in the big messy bog.”

  “I’m just saying we give it a shot. Why not take advantage of the compass in my head?”

  I gave his head a vigorous rub (for luck) and joked about the compass, but my emotions were all over the map—a big messy bog. I was sad about Gram, ashamed of myself, grateful to C. for his determination to cheer me up a bit before admitting that needles in haystacks are not really findable.

  Sometimes they are, though. He had no trouble getting us back to the pond and to the clump of brush where I had piled my clothes (“It wasn’t likely anyone had erased our footprints,” he said) and no hesitation in fishing the necklace from a handful of shallow soil. He gave it a quick rinse and placed it around my neck and that was that, as if nothing could be more ordinary. As if he had not just performed a miracle.

  And though I could not/would not say so, at that moment I truly did believe in God. All appearances favored Him.

  The ride back was sweet and quiet, listening to WCOP on the radio and sort of musing. How could C. have been so considerate, I mused? How (I mused) could he have performed this little miracle so gently? Was this the same man who had snarled at Winnie that day?

  That man might well have said, If a stupid piece of jewelry was that import
ant to you, why didn’t you take better care of it? And he would have been right to say so. Instead he gave my hand a squeeze, wheeled the car around, and retrieved Gram’s necklace for me—a needle in a swamp. I am wearing it now and I don’t doubt it will stay right where it is every second from now until the day I die.

  I just wonder if every time I touch it, I will think of C. first and not Gram. Because so far (not very far, admittedly, not yet a month) that has proved to be the case.

  “I LIKE it. I don’t like the part where you expected me to be a shit, but I like the outcome, where I cure cancer and walk on the moon. There is one minor correction—”

  “It can’t be corrected, Calvert. It’s a historical document. A primary source.”

  “One major omission, then. You left out the whole quicksand panic.”

  “Quicksand?”

  “Come on, Lara. You went on and on about it. How you had no fear of anything in nature. Lightning, avalanches, crocodiles—there was a long impressive list of everything that had never alarmed you in the slightest. And quicksand was the sole exception. You had watched a movie when you were eight. The safari starts to ford a jungle river and only too late they realize it’s . . . quicksand. They start sinking, their rifles and backpacks go under, their mouths, their hats—and then they’re gone.”

  “Quicksand is really scary.”

  “You were convinced the floor of that pond was quicksand. You were dead set against going in.”

  “I had a shred of common sense, if that’s what you mean. Face it, Cal, you would jump into any old water. So I had you test it the way paranoid tyrants have food-tasters. If you sank from sight, I would pass it up. If you didn’t, I would take a refreshing dip.”

  “So you do remember.”

  “Here’s what I remember: that when we were driving home the second time (we had retrieved the necklace, you had cured cancer) and we were quiet and happy and extremely tired, I watched the landscape going by and realized quicksand was the perfect metaphor for what we had stepped into. Muck and mire you wash off and go on with your life. Quicksand you sink, helplessly.”

  DAY 4 had taken some of the starch out of us. It wasn’t the miles we walked, or the miles we drove. It was the bugs, the heat, the being lost, the whole necklace fiasco. It was doing everything twice, backtracking, under pressure. Something else Mom once said came back to me: when you get past fifty, the morning can be stronger than you are. So I guess we were fifty-four that morning.

  We took our toast and coffee back to bed and just lay there talking as sunlight poured into the room. Did not budge, except to get ourselves more coffee at “break time,” as Ian calls it. The only job he ever had where they did a regular workingman’s coffee break was one summer in college, as a laborer on the Alaska pipeline. He was there about two months and yet ten A.M. will forever be “break time” to him.

  We were just bumping feet, massaging legs with toes, talking. About C.’s parents, an engineer and a nurse, and about his Uncle Lew, who played minor league baseball and then became a sportswriter for the Albany paper—the Times-Union, maybe? About high school. I was surprised to learn he didn’t have a girlfriend until he was seventeen, then had a pregnancy scare that warned him off serious sex until college.

  I remember feeling self-conscious when I went back to the kitchen, and considered how odd that was when we had been naked together for the last ten hours. I reached for my robe, though, and C. said, “Please don’t, I’m watching you.” (Maybe that’s why I felt self-conscious. Watched!) “In fact, I’m taking pictures of you in the nude.”

  “I hope not,” I laughed, and he assured me his pictures were “not pornographic, not even erotic, just beautiful. Plus of course there is no actual camera.”

  I leaned over, kissed him on the nose, and put on my robe. Only to take it off again a minute later. Clearly, not everything makes sense. Who knows why I wanted to cover up when I was standing ten feet away, and didn’t care at all when we were close enough to sin.

  Afterward we put together the water leitmotif. How each day, willynilly, we had wended our way to sea, river, or pond. This was logical enough (“It is ‘late June,’ ” said C.) and I wasn’t complaining, just identifying a pattern. Then, because C. likes a challenge, I challenged him to come up with a land-locked destination for the day at hand.

  “I know a place we can get to without driving, that has no recreational water, and where there will be twenty thousand complete strangers. Care to guess?”

  “State prison? Army barracks? M.I.T.?”

  “Close. Fenway Park. What do you say? A dollar apiece, if we sit in the bleachers.”

  “Won’t we be bleached?”

  “Broiled. But they have beer for that.”

  “Twenty thousand people from around here might not all be strangers, Cal.”

  “We’ll go in disguise. Sunglasses and hats, for starters. Maybe I’ll walk with crutches.”

  “Why stop there? Why not rent a wheelchair and have me push you. Why not wigs?”

  “Wigs, for sure! I know a place that rents them.”

  Over the phone, C. told the saleslady we needed one Harpo Marx and one Elsa Lanchester (“her Bride of Frankenstein look”) and was encouraged to pleasehold while she checked. In the end we settled for the sunglasses and hats (she had those in stock) and altered hairstyles. I put mine up and pinned it inside a scarf (with the sunglasses, I was Garbo) and C. slicked his straight back, greaser style. To us, at least, we did not look like us.

  The ballpark turned out to be a pretty neat place to spend an afternoon. I loved how the green green grass seemed both warm and cool, the way the stands felt both crowded and roomy. Maybe there really were twenty thousand people, but there are over thirty thousand seats. The bleachers were so sparsely populated that we became fast friends with the beer man and the hot dog man. Hot Dogs even sat with us for an inning. Unstrapped his hamper, lit a cigar, and took in the game.

  I must say that baseball is an awfully casual sport. It unfolds almost in slow motion, or slow motion punctuated by absolute stillness. All those terrific athletes with nothing much to do. Bernie the right fielder was sufficiently bored to engage with the fans, frequently waving and smiling. Before each inning he and another outfielder would heave a ball back and forth, then he would look for a kid in the stands and toss the ball to him.

  Nice as Bernie seemed, one beer-swilling beer-spilling leatherlung kept riding him, screaming what a bum he was, what a dog. Bernie was cool. He would just turn and smile. After he made a good catch, kind of casually over his shoulder, he gave the guy a quizzical shrug as if to say, How am I doing now?

  Oddly, no one appeared to care a lot about winning or losing. Like us, Bernie seemed content to be stationed out there in the sunshine, on that lovely grass, though C. suggested he might also like the fat paycheck. A couple several rows behind us heard him say this and came down to discuss it. “Do you mind?” we heard someone say, and before we could mind or not mind we had new friends, Sol and Abby.

  Sol, who was very serious and clearly political, felt a need to inform us that Bernie made more money standing still two hours a day than he, Sol, would earn from working hard all year. I saw Abby touch his arm gently—it was clear Sol had gone on about this before—and speculate that Bernie gave a lot of it to charity.

  “Ask him,” said C., only half joking, since Bernie seemed perfectly willing to join in any conversation.

  It struck me that to Sol and Abby we must appear to be a relaxed, sociable couple from Cambridge. We did not explain that each of us represented fifty percent of a different, legitimate couple and that we were therefore blackguards, archvillains. They had come down from Maine for their “annual baseball-junkie junket” and they seemed as uncomplicated as Midwesterners—though I did recall the one subtle gesture, Abby restraining Sol’s political tirade.

  Much later, back at Miller Road, C. would point out to me that they might be plenty complicated. That for all we knew they were just
like us: escapees, cheaters, swine. We could not even corroborate their claim to be from Maine. “Sol sounded more like New Jersey to me.”

  “You don’t suppose those were wigs they were wearing?”

  “I wouldn’t bet against it. Things are not always as they seem.”

  “Maybe things are never as they seem.”

  “Discouraging, isn’t it. Trying to figure anything out.”

  “Such as?”

  “Us?”

  “That one is easy. There is no Us, Calvert.”

  “Oops, I forgot. Though it’s interesting that, as you say, to Sol and Abby there did seem to be an Us. Or do we deny that too?”

  “No, we admit that.”

  “Just as to us—lower case us, of course—there did seem to be a Sol and Abby.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Would you admit there was a ‘we’ sitting in the bleachers this afternoon—the very same ‘we’ that is lying here now? And, if so, would you admit that ‘we’ are about to be fucking?”

  “Get away from there,” I said, but he didn’t and so we were (fucking, though I do not care for the word) and I will not discuss it except to say it was not a lower case F—.

  Here’s the thing with sex: it’s what matters. Nobody cares what two people do together, so long as it isn’t sex. They could be incredibly close, totally interdependent. They could meet for coffee, take long walks in the arboretum, go to the movies. Provided with a magical mystical guarantee there would be no sex, their spouses wouldn’t much mind the rest of it.

  It’s sex they mind, just as it’s sex we wanted the freedom to have. Otherwise we would not have needed The Twoweeks. Why didn’t I know this, when it was so obvious? Normal people probably learn it in junior high school: that the only dangerous attraction is sexual, the deep desperate jealousy is sexual.