Then a poem started pecking away at me. A shard here, a thread there, finally a shape of sorts—a sense of what it was trying to be about. As coherent lines began forming, I did feel responsible for at least moderating the process.
An hour later, I was off the poem and doing some basic math. According to my calculations, we were nearly halfway through The Twoweeks and would be nearly two-thirds of the way when we returned from our foray to Plum Island. If we were to shut it down after nine days, as I contemplated, we would be at the finish line after Plum Island! This was serious, even radical momentum.
When I tried going back to the poem for solace, I found it had flown. The sense of it escaped me. At a bright red 3:18 on the digital clock radio, I got out of bed and went outside and there (right there) was the white curling surf, the restless front paws of a worldwide tide that turned and returned twice each day from the shores of far continents. That such a vast global tub-tilting could reveal itself at the back door of the Horizon Motor Hotel somehow calmed me. Our precious days were once more rendered trivial. However many or few we had left to us—however happy or sad, however free or fraught—they were obviously trivial, and somehow this condition reassured me. Somehow, mercifully, it allowed me to sleep.
According to a placard atop our TV, we were “Entitled” (no less) “to the Sandbar Breakfast, served Free of Charge in the comfortable sunroom off the lobby.”
The sunroom was comfortable enough, but the coffee was weak and burnt, and the pastries were dry as dust. Stale last week. I suggested a diner we had noticed half a mile up the highway, but C. wanted to stay and eat a few stale free-of-charge crullers. Getting our money’s worth was his thing.
Which meant breakfast at the diner was on me. Which was fine. The who-pays-today game was just a joke, though perhaps the exchanges were indicative. I laughed when C. was stuffing that ghastly thing into his mouth, but would I have been laughing if we were married? If we were a real couple (traveling, foraging) and he reacted that way? Ian and I had always been nicely aligned on the money question, both willing to “waste” a little money when it is yielding zero enjoyment. C. would suffer through an awful movie because why waste a ticket he had paid for; Ian and I would make our escape, and gladly, because why waste the time?
It started out rainy that morning (Day 7) and people scattered like cockroaches when the kitchen lights come on. Offseason or not, all the roads were clogged with cars. Maybe stale crullers were the continental breakfast at every motel, because that diner was packed, no chance at a table. We grabbed the last two seats at the counter as a waiting line was forming. Hungry souls loomed over us as we ate.
“Pretend you’re still chewing,” I said, as the impatient horde pressed forward, looking ready for open revolt.
“I am still chewing,” said C., chipmunking his cheeks to prove it. The refill lady just gave him a dirty look when he held out his coffee cup for a refill. Not today, bub.
Rain or no rain, we took a final stroll down the beach, where half a dozen intrepid couples were walking their dogs. (Although it did appear, as C. remarked, their dogs were walking them.) This was obviously a daily ritual, and carried an unspoken declaration: we are the year-rounders, the true proprietors of Cape Cod. The rain was their validation. The fly-by-nighters had flown.
Dogless and homeless, we were as far from permanent residency as you can get. We were impermanent non-residents. Still, we earned a few smiles for our willingness to accept the wet weather. We even forged a cheerful agreement with two of the year-rounders that a day was not erased, the Cape not cancelled, simply because it was raining.
Then either the rain ended or we outdistanced it. The sky brightened as we traveled back to Boston. To break up the drive, we made a few peculiar stops, most memorably the topiary zoo and a miniature golf course. Was there perhaps an air of desperation to our agenda that day, I asked, as we were teeing off with our putting irons.
Hardly, C. insisted. These were perks. These were the small luxuries of freedom. “Activities you would never find the time for.”
“Activities you would never spend any time on,” said I, though actually it was all a hoot. Lions and tigers carved out of (or into) boxwood hedges are impressive in their way, not to mention a boxwood monkey perched on a boxwood zebra’s back.
And who knew that miniature golf still existed? That was a real trip back in time for me, to senior year and my first date, with Les Carney and his restless paws. We went on a “double date” that night. Is that sort of thing still done, or was it just a device from a more innocent time—guarding Our Virginity through peer oversight? If so, it didn’t stay Les Carney’s restless paws, or keep Bill Friedlander from practically raping Mary Burgundy in the backseat.
C. could do me one better. I had already heard the tale of his own miniature golf date and how it ended up on a cabin cruiser, where he surrendered his own virginity—not to his date but to the girl’s sister, somehow. How he was so sick afterward (from the shock of sex? from the rolling seas?) that he threw up over the side for an hour.
These were stories we had shared at Gal Al and we did not retell them that day. Instead, we pretended it was real golf, where no conversation is tolerated. Where there falls a respectful hush. We hushed, and we frowned with appropriate high seriousness, until there on the last “fairway” (lining up his shot, mock-testing the breeze by flipping shorthaired grass into the air), C. suddenly burst out laughing. Soon enough I was laughing too and neither of us could stop. We laughed until my stomach ached.
When our hysterics finally subsided (out there on the fairway) C. hugged me and said, “You know, it would be crazy if we weren’t confused right now.” While this was a nugget, to be sure, it was hardly something we could fall back on for support. Confusion was not a solution, so we fell back on the respectful hush, and later a cup of coffee at the Howard Johnson’s on Route 24.
That was just after our first bout of car trouble and just before the second. Both times the radiator boiled over and we were lucky to get going again. Wait fifteen minutes, pray, and turn the key—such was our approach. Hardly the stuff of automotive know-how, but it worked.
At the Sagamore Bridge, we had dared to gloat about how all the traffic was headed the other way. We were done gloating as we sat on the side of the highway wondering who in Heaven’s name we could call for help. And speaking of Heaven, each time we got going (and kept going) C. proclaimed he could almost believe in God again.
“Why would He do us any favors?” I asked.
“Possibly because He moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform?”
The next day Pete would replace a radiator hose he told me looked like the thousand-year-old man’s artery. I did not ask to see his medical degree, not after he handed me the hose, parched and cracked and soft as pudding.
“WHAT IS that face supposed to mean?”
“I didn’t care for the Bart part. The kid. You made that part up.”
“That’s a perfectly absurd thing to say, Calvert. The evidence is right here in black and white, recorded at the time. It’s irrefutable.”
“Inadmissable, you mean. And certainly uncorroborated. I am sure I was okay about Jake and Hetty at that point. I knew they were going to Bearsville. I knew there would be a house full of people, with lots going on.”
“Think what you will.”
“Plus, you garbled the story of Sarah Schilling’s sister. The seduction took place in the little boathouse, an hour before we went on board—”
“Oh my, in the little boathouse. And is that a tongue twister? Sarah Schilling’s sister?”
“Is that an act of rhyme? Twister and sister?”
“I’ll rhyme you. Sarah Schilling’s sister had a blister on her keester.”
“Anyway, I was feeling sick before we went out that night. The seasickness just finished me off.”
“The way I heard the story, it was the older sister who finished you off. And by the way, shouldn’t she have a name? Doesn’t
the woman who deflowered you deserve naming rights?”
“Linda, maybe? Lucille? Pretty sure it started with an L. I remember the person, not the name.”
“The person or the person’s creamy white bosom?”
“Her hair, most vividly. A great cloud of dark curly hair on her head, a small cloud of dark curly hair below.”
“Excellent clues. Why, we’ll have her rounded up in no time.”
“But here’s the most serious error, Lara, and only because you weren’t aware of it. I didn’t sleep through that night, either. At one point I got up and went a mile down the beach. And when I came back I just watched you for a long time. You were asleep and I studied your face and your bare shoulders, by the silvery light of the Horizon Motor Hotel parking lot.”
“What were you thinking? On the beach.”
“Thinking how lovely the beach was in the middle of the night, empty. Thinking about the kids. And I thought about Estragon, and his unfinished joke.”
“Estragon in the play.”
“My character in it, yes. We were doing it that fall, four shows over a weekend at the Klein. And I had been experimenting with Estragon’s voice, his tone and speaking rhythm.”
“So what was his unfinished joke?”
“It’s the story of the Englishman in the brothel. That’s how he leads into it. ‘Of course you all know the story of the Englishman at the brothel.’ ”
“I don’t.”
“The Englishman drinks too much at a pub, weaves his way over to the brothel next door, bows to the madam ceremonially. The madam inquires, in her extreme Cockney accent, as to whether he would prefer a fair, a dark, or a red-haired wench. And that’s it. That’s where the joke gets cut off.”
“Well then, I see where it qualifies as unfinished.”
“Vladimir says, Estop, Enough! Estragon reels back into silence, and the play goes on. It’s my third favorite moment in that play.”
“Aren’t you the coy one! First the unfinished joke, and now the third favorite moment. Merely implying the first and the second.”
“Favorite moment is when Vladimir, waxing sentimental, reminds Estragon of the old days, in the Macon County, and Estragon leaps up shouting, I never once set foot in the Macon County! I have puked my puke of a life away right here, I tell you, here in the Cackon County!”
“That certainly would not be my favorite moment.”
“Second favorite moment is the vaudeville skit at the end, when Estragon’s pants fall down. Loose clownish pants that just collapse to his ankles and Vladimir says, Pull up your trousers and Estragon replies, What, you want me to take off my trousers? No no, they are off, I want you to put them back on. And so forth.”
“Did you have underwear?”
“Loose clownish underwear, yes.”
“How merciful. Those were the days when audiences began to be assaulted at every play. By gratuitous nudity.”
“I don’t know about assaulted. As I recall, people were queuing up around the block to see those shows.”
“A transparent excuse for exhibitionists and peeping toms. That’s all it was.”
“Well, I had big baggy underpants. I was a very respectfully covered theatrical person in that production. Less so in some others.”
“Anything for your art.”
“In those days, yes. At that age.”
“So then you came back to watch my shoulders sleeping. At the motel.”
“Yes, but first, as I was walking back, I thought about my dog Lucky.”
“Lucky in the play?”
“No, no relation, but good for you, there is a Lucky in that play and that’s what got me started on it. That or the beach itself, because Lucky and I spent a lot of hours there. He would fetch a stick from the surf endlessly. If I threw it ten thousand times, he would have fetched it ten thousand. Or died trying.”
“A boy and his dog.”
“Innocence, is how I would put it. How easy it was for that boy on the beach to be happy, how tricky it was for the man.”
“That boy might have grown up in Cambodia. Or Watts.”
“Understood. But he didn’t. He was a cheerful fortunate son of the middle class. The man was cheerful too, mind you, but he was finally coming to understand that after childhood there would always be elements of unhappiness mixed in with his happiness. Happiness would have to subsume some unhappiness, forever after.”
“And such were your profundities as you regarded my sleeping shoulders? That I was the unhappiness inside your happiness?”
“You were also the happiness inside my unhappiness. That was the problem.”
“And the solution?”
“There was no solution, as you know. Though I did resolve to get the kids a dog. Whatever else happened, there was no good reason I couldn’t get them a dog that summer.”
“Bret.”
“Yes.”
“A name suggested by the boy Bart, perhaps? The one who never existed?”
“Named after Bret Maverick, whose show I used to watch with my dog Lucky.”
“But didn’t Bret Maverick have a brother named Bart?”
“Plus another brother named Beau. Anyway, that’s how I got back to sleep that night. That decision pushed me past the shame of being a bad father. I would present them with a dog. How bad a father could I be?”
“Not bad at all, Calvert. But do you know what I made of it—when Marisa told me that the dog Bret had joined your family? That’s that, is what I made of it. The door had slammed shut. The way I saw it, you had just made a fifteen-year commitment, the life span of a mutt. You would never leave Winnie, never leave those kids, and you would really never leave a puppy selected in a moment of cavernously deep guilt. In my mind, Bret put an end to any remaining ambiguity after The Twoweeks.”
“Ah, but ambiguity never ends.”
“Marisa went to see your play. I had carefully avoided knowing about it, avoided reading any reviews, but Marisa saw it and reported back. She ran right through my stop sign, all the way to the dog Bret. Though she did spare me the knowledge that you dropped your pants.”
“Did she finish the unfinished joke? Honestly, for years I was asking everyone. I would even rummage through books of jokes in the library, desperate to learn the rest of the Englishman’s story.”
“You couldn’t figure it out? Or just make it up?”
“I knew the Englishman couldn’t have made a definitive choice. If he had done that, it wouldn’t have been a joke. So he chooses one—say the fair-haired one—and ten minutes later he comes back to the madam with a change of heart. He’d like to try the dark-haired instead. I got that far. I just couldn’t see where it ends up.”
“That’s always the tough part, isn’t it?”
DAY 8. Halfway through The Twoweeks, seven days behind us and at most seven more ahead. It struck me that for the first seven days, we had been doing addition. Time passing seemed to accumulate in our favor, to bless or validate our plan: we really did need this time together.
From now on, though, we would be doing subtraction. Each passing hour would be another crate removed from our dwindling storehouse of time. And this would be more radically true if I opted to cut the deal short, at nine days, or ten.
In the poem “February Snow,” I am trying to cast the whole transaction as a fabulous snowman. You create it heedlessly, then watch as your creation comes to nothing. As it literally evaporates. Humans add, God subtracts.
Even though I was the one who pushed for our date with Gerald and Debra, I found myself regretting we had made it. Partly this had to do with C. (if our time together was about to be cut short, did we wish to spend our last two days on couple life?) and partly it had to do with Ian and a flare-up of conscience.
Ian had sent a postcard. It was harmless, just a line about his brother’s family and a gentle joke about fishing sixteen hours a day. I know him, and I know he sent it to make me smile, not to make me feel guilty. But I did. Pictured Ian twiddling
his thumbs in Idaho while I was out “gallivanting around” (as Mom would have put it) and felt that out of fairness, I ought confine myself to the dull and the normal too.
True, we would be with Gerald and Debra (who are about as dull and normal as anyone that smart can be), but the house presented a problem, or the location did—out on Plum Island, before the greenheads hatched. We had heard them rhapsodize about sunsets on the “portico” (which would turn out to be a porch, as I had suspected all along, albeit a really nice porch) and soft grass running right down to a strip of warm sand the consistency of sugar, blah blah blah.
Anyway, we had the social obligation and we went. Me, C., and my guilty conscience. And though their glowing description would prove accurate, the occasion might yet qualify as dull and normal. Certainly it was tame. Making soup and salad, wading and walking, eating and talking. Or not so much talking as listening to Gerald talk, and then to the two of them arguing.
How they do it is this: he delivers a lecture (he is used to it, breath-conditioned from the classroom, a subscriber to the idea that they paid their tuition in order to hear him talk) and Debra listens raptly. She never interrupts until he throws the floor open for questions, whereupon she disputes everything he has just said. Then they argue about it.
At first they argue pleasantly, eventually it gets a tad snippy, finally they have to be separated by the referee. (Not sure how they handle this part if no referee is present.) I must say I witnessed this psychodrama in considerable awe. This is not a good template for marriage, I was forced to conclude. These two people, each of whom I like and enjoy, do not bring out the best in one another.
C. behaved remarkably well. Smiled and sipped his beer, even managed to look attentive for long stretches. Occasionally he tossed off a moderating phrase, like a handful of sand on the bonfire. “You could both be right,” he declared judiciously, when Debra equivocated on the nuclear power plant (“It’s as good a location as you could hope for”) and Gerald (“It’s insanity, plain and simple”) raged against it.
The Twoweeks Page 9
