The Twoweeks

by Larry Duberstein

  After the ball game we went for tacos and beer at a place near Fenway Park—went, that is, with our dear friends Sol and Abby! We talked baseball, jobs, and politics with them for over an hour. We even covered read-any-good-books-lately. By the end, we were exchanging phone numbers with them, and let’s see how that works out.

  I couldn’t help thinking we were playing at “couple life,” as Ian calls it, the same way we were sort of playing house. There is a loneliness to cheating. You are out there on a two-man raft, bobbing on an open sea, and it’s an awfully circumscribed sort of freedom. Sitting in an arbitrary bar with an arbitrary couple somehow pushed back that lonely-making aspect. We weren’t cheating, we were just having this tiny little two-week-long marriage.

  I am sure it’s why we started talking about a get-together with Gerald and Debra. Or I did. C. could take it or leave it.

  “Couple life, you say?”

  “Social life,” I revised, so as to leave Ian out of it. “At its most basic level. Four friends at a dinner table. I was also thinking it might lighten the load to tell someone.”

  “To tell what we’re doing? Fitz knows.”

  “Someone besides Fitz. Someone who knows us.”

  “Us, did I hear you say?”

  “us, is what I said.”

  He heard the distinction. And he shared a sense that after all the hours we had spent with them at Gallery Allison, we probably were something of a couple to Gerald and Debra. They knew of Ian’s existence, and Winnie’s, but we were the ones they connected with. We were there at Gal Al, and we always came as a pair.

  “Let’s decide tomorrow,” said C., for whom (I have figured out) “tomorrow” is nothing more than a storage bin for unwelcome questions.

  “Sure. Or never. It’s just an idea. But—further incentive?—they do have that house on Plum Island for the summer. We could resume our water leitmotif in style.”

  “We’ll do it. One of these days.”

  As if we had days to burn, an endless skein of days. Clearly, C. would not see the finish line until he tripped over it. At times, I shared his delusion. At other times, I wondered if we should move the finish line up, end it sooner if we hoped to get out intact. It was increasingly obvious that to hoard these days, to treasure each hour, was to invite real trouble. We were barely five days into our little fake marriage and already it felt too much like a life.

  A warped and narrow life, to be sure, yet the situation did create a ferocious focus that bestowed upon that handful of days the illusion of a long-term relationship. With everything so compressed, so accelerated, we knew each other on a level we might have expected after progressing for months at a normal pace. And the closer we grew, the more I wondered whether we were lucky (as we had all along presumed) or very unlucky to have this time together.

  When I doubted out loud that we would ever know the answer to that question, C. replied without the slightest hesitation (or the tiniest scrap of reflection) yet with the utmost authority, “Oh, very lucky. Blessed, entirely.”

  “INTERESTING.”

  “Acceptable, though? To your restless probing mind?”

  “It’s what you wrote down. What you saw and felt. Now as to what you omitted—”

  “Not another quicksand moment? Something essential I forgot?”

  “It seems unlikely you forgot it, so soon after. Omitted, is what I said. And for good reasons, I’m sure.”

  “All right, what was it, and what were the good reasons? Whatever I remembered at the time, I surely don’t remember it now.”

  “It was a pimple, my sweet. And the reason—here I’m guessing—would be simple kindness. And possibly the fact that while it was important to me, it was superficial to you. Not worth mentioning.”

  “You took your shirt off. We discussed that, how unfair it was that men could take their shirts off on a hot day and women couldn’t.”

  “You were tempted to take yours off just to make a point. Or two points . . .”

  “But I didn’t, of course. You did, and there was a bump on your back.”

  “A pimple, yes. So you do remember.”

  “I do now. You were very self-conscious about your bump. More self-conscious than I would have been with my breasts showing.”

  “Or so you said.”

  “You were vain.”

  “Not vain. Concerned. That you might be repulsed.”

  “I told you that bump had been there for days. Calvert, I had been in bed with you for days. I had even touched your terrible spot.”

  “Spot. Bump. So kind, my dear Lara. But bed was one thing, the cruel harsh sunlight of the bleachers might be another. So I worried.”

  “You needn’t have.”

  “On the contrary. I was insecure because you made me insecure.”

  “You? Insecure?”

  “I was madly in love with you and you kept counting down. Nine more days, eight more days, a deal’s a deal . . .”

  “That was the deal. It had nothing to do with pimples, it had to do with Jake and Hetty and Winnie. With Ian.”

  “You know what I had forgotten? To change the subject just slightly. Sol and Abby. I could have given you chapter and verse on the loud asshole who was hassling Bernie Carbo, but I completely forgot our friends from Down East.”

  “No one’s perfect, I guess.”

  “I also forgot how easy it was to go to a game at Fenway back then. You could stroll up to the windows, buy a ticket for a couple of bucks, walk in and watch the game.”

  “That was the hard part. Watching the game.”

  “Like watching paint dry, you said at the time.”

  “Yes, though I also said I like watching paint dry, given a hammock and a pleasant summer day. And I remember liking the way you could see the hands of the men changing numbers on the scoreboard. From inside the Green Monster.”

  “They still do that. Everything else there has changed. It’s such an institution now, it’s like the Pops or the MFA, it’s become big business.”

  “You sound like an old fuddy-duddy, Cal. Why back in my day . . .”

  “I am an old fuddy-duddy.”

  “Young skin, though. Isn’t that what you were told by some wench at a party? In fact, let’s have a look at your back. Step into the light, you whippersnapper, and we’ll check you for bumps.”

  “We could go upstairs and check? If you like.”

  “Another time, champ. Let’s get on with this.”

  DAY 6. That was the morning I called Debra, who was cool with the idea of a foursome, though I was assessed a verbal tax for calling it that. “It’s not a foursome,” C. insisted. “We won’t be playing bridge.”

  He didn’t much like the idea, or maybe the way I had got locked onto it. I guess he had less of a problem with the intensity—the unnatural intensity—of our days. Really, never in my life had I spent a hundred consecutive hours in the company of one person. Nor had I dreamed I was capable of such a thing without going bonkers.

  Again, The Twoweeks “format” dictated this to a great extent. By allotting us a fixed reservoir of hours, it created a powerful drive to wring every drop from each hour. Add the sad truth that we were having a magical time, a uniquely happy time together, and you get to thinking (at least I got to thinking) we had better dilute this somehow or else end it ahead of schedule.

  What had I expected from The Twoweeks? For that matter, what did I want? If I were honest with myself, I would say I wanted it to be a howling success—for maybe twelve days. Special but self-limiting. It would tail off, we would both become eager for the end, maybe bag it a couple of days early, and feel delighted to be going home.

  I suppose I wanted C. to find me hard to get around, because who wants to be easy to get around? But I refused to work for that result. To the contrary. On principle, I paraded all my warts. Gave him every excuse to dismiss me out of hand. Nixon, for instance. C. was exactly like Ian, he had a pressing need for me to hate Nixon as much as he did. But Nixon was so pat
hetic, I couldn’t hate him. How could you not feel a little sorry for such a sad slimy creep?

  The Church was another instance. To C., the Catholic Church was worse than just the smoke and mirrors, it was corrupt and oppressive and a danger to children. So I assured him I still believed, in a way; and still attended Mass. Which I do, very occasionally. I refused to emphasize the occasionally, though I emphasized the attended.

  Then there were my actual warts, all my physical shortcomings. Let him make what he would of my below-average breasts or the mole on my belly. Let him prospect for cilia on my muddy bottom. Far from luring him on, or seducing him, I would be the least appealing version of myself, the Plain Jane version—and positively riddled with uncool ideas. If I hoped he would find me irresistible in spite of it all, that would just be human nature.

  Determined to be as honest with myself as well, I took to weighing out my emotions in milligrams, reckoning affection in fractions. Why couldn’t one admit loving someone say nineteen percent if she loved her husband the other eighty-one percent? Or even forty-seven percent and fifty-three percent, which would seem a clear enough margin in any presidential election. Does anyone, should anyone, ever love a spouse with all her heart? It seemed so unlikely, so unrealistic.

  Anyway, whatever I expected or wanted (or got), our twosome had two days to fill before our foursome on Plum Island.

  “Let’s fill them with hot air,” said C., “and soar above this vale of tears.”

  “Cal, you’re the bad actor. I’m supposed to be the bad poet.”

  “Can we afford to fill them on the Cape? The two days, I mean.”

  “The Cape? It’s summer, Cal.”

  “Yes and no. It’s Monday and it’s still before high season. Plus, you wouldn’t want to go down there when it’s not summer.”

  “Would so.”

  I happen to prefer the Cape in October or November. I like walking on a deserted beach with my clothes on, my belowaverage breasts and my mole entirely private. But if we went to the Cape, C. might stop pretending his eyes weren’t darting around like dragonflies, watching for Winnie any time we left the shelter of Miller Road. The odds of seeing her in Harvard Square might be 5 to 1, the odds on Cape Cod more like 5,000 to 1.

  C. and I had very different memories of the Cape. Ian and I spent our honeymoon there, in Truro, in a sail-loft on the Pamet River. The tidal creek, the leaky rowboat, the creaky bed tucked under pitch-piney ceiling planks. (They sloped down in such a way that not hitting your head became an art.) I did love Ian one hundred percent that week. Given one year to spend anywhere on earth as the world was ending—this was more or less a party game—we agreed we would choose that cottage on the Pamet.

  Meanwhile, Patti Page had not crooned so sweetly about Old Cape Cod to C. and Winnie. Taking up the offer of a free house in Woods Hole one summer, they got a solid week of rain. They tried it again the next year and both kids were sick the whole time.

  So we scratched Woods Hole on grounds of bad vibes, scratched Truro on grounds of good vibes, and decided to try the ruined Cape, some no-longer-charming town where no one we knew would ever go. Dennisport was the lucky winner! The denizens of Dennisport were first in line for our tourist dollar.

  It was just barely pre-season in terms of all the nasty variables (traffic coming and going, traffic there, July and August prices) and because it was a Monday, we got a decent one-night deal at the Horizon Motor Hotel. As of July 1, there would be a minimum three-day stay there, but on Monday, June 24, our hostess Mrs. Amirault was happy to have our twenty dollars while retaining the right to price-gouge someone else on the weekend.

  All the rooms opened onto Nantucket Sound (the Horizon part) in back and onto the parking lot (the Motor part) in front. Each room had a minimal flagstone patio with two folding chairs and the general idea seemed to be you sat in the chairs, drank gin-and-tonics, and stared at the water.

  “Keep going?” said C., when he caught me dutifully (and quite blissfully) staring out to sea. “Is that what you’re thinking? We should keep going and hide out in the Azores?”

  My smile was that of someone tolerating a naughty boy, affection mingled with playful disapproval. What I was thinking (which I kept to myself) was that it might be best to do the Cape Cod days, do the visit to Plum Island, and then bag it at nine days. That would allow some time to enjoy, enough time to give Cal notice, so to speak, and time to adjust.

  We went to the beach for a couple of hours—I waded, he swam—then came back for a “nap” around three. Before dinner, we took a quart of cold Colt .45 and sat by the pool with it. This was part laziness on our part—packing up to go back to the beach seemed almost like work—and part research on mine. I have always wondered why beachfront motels even have swimming pools and the reason, it turns out, is that surprisingly few people swim in the ocean.

  On the beach, people will wade, sunbathe, read (and stare, of course), but if they swim, they swim in the pool. And this is especially true of parents (such as Sherry) with small children (such as Bart).

  C. adopted little jug-eared Bart on the spot. In fact, he so devoted himself to little jug-eared Bart (the swimming lesson, the floating basketball hoop, the ice cream treat) that Bart’s mom started looking a bit nervous. For all she knew, C. was a molester and I was just his beard. There was no way to convey the utterly simplistic psychological truth to Sherry, that this man (the father of a boy he has temporarily abandoned, loves to distraction, feels sick with guilt over) was using her son as a surrogate.

  “He loves kids,” was all I said, smiling at Sherry and her well-above-average abundantly-displayed breasts, and then in a grotesquely us-girls moment I added, “He’s really just a big kid himself.”

  Did I actually speak that sentence? How pathetic we can be, when confined by the shackles of sociability. It was true, though, about C. and children. When Gerald asked him, two days later on Plum Island, why he went and had two kids before the age of twenty-six, C’s answer was perfectly unguarded, so innocent: “Why don’t you have any? Hey man, you’re past thirty.”

  I have never known a man who enjoyed his children as much, and it’s a very appealing trait. How bad can he be if his heart belongs to them like that? Really, what better definition is there of a “good man”? A selfless jungle doctor, braving black mambas to cure malaria? Sure. But in everyday middle-class terms, you might have to go with the loving husband and father.

  C. may fall short on the loving husband part, Ian on the fatherhood. “Not ready to share you with another man yet,” he has said, a statement rendered ironic only through my own failings. He claims that, given a choice, most men would never have a child. “They cost money, get in the way, absorb the little woman’s attention, and wreak havoc on her girlish figure.” He was grinning as he ticked off these charming arguments, but I could hardly imagine Ian horsing around with little jug-eared Bart at the Horizon Motor Hotel.

  We ate fish and chips (eight dollars total, which included horrible coffee in Styrofoam cups) sitting at a bench in another parking lot. Walking back from that fry shack, our ice cream cones rapidly melting, I felt strangely contented. I was the existentialist princess, safe inside the Cape Cod bubble, cut loose from past and future alike.

  Then I noticed C. was on a different page. He had begun to seem uneasy, distracted. Guessing it was about Jake and Hetty (withdrawal symptoms, guilt?) I urged him to call home. He didn’t have to tell them where he was, just say hello.

  “I don’t want to lie to them.”

  “Just to Winnie?”

  “I don’t want to lie to her, either. I won’t lie to them.”

  “Tell them an obvious lie, the kind of lie that’s more like a game. You’re prospecting for diamonds in the Congo, something storybook that they’ll just laugh at. Just so you can hear their voices, and they can hear yours.”

  He smiled absently (translation: No Sale) and I pretty much let it go at that, except to urge upon him that if his reluctance had anything to d
o with a sense of fairness to me, he should abandon it. I wanted him to call. When he did break down later and call, though, it made matters worse. No answer.

  “Try again later,” I shrugged.

  “It’s already late,” he said, despondently. “It’s past their bedtime.”

  This was a worry. If they were not home at bedtime, where were they? Even I knew Winnie could never resist picking up the phone. She is one of those people who hears it ring and constitutionally can’t not answer.

  “Maybe she was busy putting them to bed and didn’t get to the phone in time.”

  “I dialed it twice,” he said, despairingly.

  Then it hit him, eureka eureka. They were going to the country for three days, to Winnie’s parents in Bearsville. That’s where they were, that was the explanation, and the bonus was knowing they would be having a great time. They would be happy.

  Then we had one last flurry of worry: they would be fine “if the car went all right.”

  “Is there something wrong with the car?”

  “Is there something right with it?” said C.

  At that point, though, he was pretty much done worrying. I pretty much had him back. We could be lower-case-us again, at liberty in charmless Dennisport. Standing on the beach, we watched the ceaselessly arriving waves (each one different, like snowflakes) and noted the crescent moon. (“Dwindled and thinned,” I had to quote Hopkins.) At a bar inevitably called the Boathouse, somewhat wearied by our efforts to be carefree, we toasted the ocean with frosted mugs of Tuborg.

  Then home to the Horizon Motor Hotel. Now that C. had wrestled down his demons, he was ready to wrestle me again. Gloomy-guts was ready to be playful. Briefly, though. With all that sun and beer and worry, he fell asleep the instant we were done.

  I was not so fortunate, though I might have been. I’d had the same long day. Sleep was indicated, no question, it simply wasn’t going to happen. For one thing, cars kept pulling in and out. Every time I started drifting, another engine would clear its throat in the parking lot, another set of headlights would sweep our window like a searchlight.