The Twoweeks

by Larry Duberstein

  Because we were expected to stay overnight, I kept waiting for C. to concoct a pretext for our having to change the plan. If a lie was needed, he was the man for the job. He just kept sipping beer and smiling, though, and it fell to me to solve the problem. How (and how soon) could we leave without giving offense?

  Why did I care about giving offense? Well, there was the fact we had invited ourselves. This was our idea, or mine. They had responded with generosity and the least we could do was show appreciation. So there is all of that. Anyway, it’s not that I care about giving offense, it’s that I simply don’t do it. It’s not nice.

  “I guess we’re not the only ones who have relationship problems,” said C. as we headed back to the city. “Whatever happens, we’ll be better off than those two.”

  “I didn’t mind them, really. They were just being themselves. I don’t even mind Gerald’s lectures. And he was funny about his namesake, President Gerald.”

  “Debra was funny there too. When he said the hardest part of losing Nixon was that no one could hate Gerald Ford and she casually mentioned that he was averaging about twelve death threats a day.”

  “To his credit, he laughed at that. Our Gerald, I mean.”

  “Our Gerald isn’t like that when he talks one on one. Only when he senses a group has formed, I guess. An audience.”

  “Debra never disagrees with anything anyone else says, either. How do you suppose they got together? Not to mention got married?”

  “I bet I know how. They went off together for two weeks and had such a good time they wanted it never to end.”

  “I’m not sure how to take that.”

  “What part are you unsure about?”

  “Well, does it mean that whatever happens in a Twoweeks is bound to be unreal and unreliable? Or since nothing of the sort ever did happen to them (they met in college, went out for years, married in a church), does it mean that all relationships can be expected to go sour over time?”

  “Do you suppose they have any idea how it looks? How it is, for that matter—the way they grind against each other. They must have fallen into the pattern inch by inch. You know, if a marriage got just a milligram worse each month, wouldn’t it be like a thousand times worse after twenty years?”

  “Amortized, you mean.”

  “Something like that. Compounded?”

  “Were you going to answer my question?”

  “No. I wasn’t going to. But I was going to say thanks for getting us out of there.”

  “I felt terrible. They had made up the bed. Debra had put flowers on the night tables. I wasn’t at all sure I could come up with the words to say no thanks.”

  “How about, People, we are outta here.”

  “A bit too blunt for me.”

  “Could have been blunter. As in, Sorry but we won’t be free to fuck here, certainly not in the style to which we have become accustomed.”

  “Well, thanks for not saying that. I’m sorry to learn you could think it.”

  “They say you can’t convict a man for his thoughts.”

  “Maybe they can’t, but I sure can.”

  And I meant to. I was going to punish him by refusing his advances that night. Trouble was, he didn’t make any advances. Just went roundly, soundly, to sleep. Then when we both woke in the middle of the night, I was too groggy to remember the lesson plan.

  “What woke you”?” he said, distracting me with small talk while he advanced.

  “Not sure. The moon?”

  “Me too. The moon. In Shakespeare, you know, moonbeams pouring down always translate into love.”

  “Love, huh,” I sniffed dubiously, though we were already making it by then.

  “The act of love, if you prefer.”

  I may have preferred it at that moment, but I was a good deal harder to sway when he woke me an hour later with a bizarre proposition: “Let’s get one more in while it’s still Day 8.”

  So he too was counting the days. (And keeping score, since after all he is a male person.) To the extent I was conscious at that hour, I was astonished at how this man manages to appear to be on top of things. Listening to him, you would have to believe he studies the road map, notes the location of gas stations and restaurants—that his journey through life is under control. Both hands on the wheel.

  Whereas in truth he is driving with both eyes closed and “Look, Ma, no hands!” scrawled inside the cartoon balloon above his heedless head. He has no control over events, no planned responses, he just trusts that he will respond as needed and sometimes I would find myself trusting it too—even as we went careening “ninety miles an hour down a dead-end street.”

  “It is not still Day 8,” I said, fending him off. “It’s Day 9.”

  “Is that a no?” he said, still pressing his request to “get one more in.”

  How to put this politely. Sex can be so easy. It can be a lot of ways, of course. Fumbling/bumbling with Les, yearning/learning with Vince. Ian, and marriage, with its own stages. Here it was just so easy, almost unavoidable. It’s summer, you’re naked—all that. Plus you just fit somehow. The logic that makes it happen is the same logic that makes you drink your morning coffee. What else would you do?

  “Here’s my way of looking at it,” he said, after we had so melodramatically finished what we so laconically began. “The day begins when you rise. The sun rises, you rises, and that’s the start of a new day.”

  “Versus the stroke of midnight-plus-one-second, you’re saying.”

  “Right. Midnight-plus-one may be technically correct, it’s just not how a day is experienced. A night ends when you wake up. And a day begins. That’s what the word ‘dawn’ means, you know. Beginning.”

  I got straight out of the bed (no longer, by that point, self-conscious; somewhere halfway between relaxed and sneaky-proud) and went for the dictionary, determined not to be bamboozled. Damned if he wasn’t right, though. Dawn was defined as daylight appearing. Also as “the beginning of anything.”

  “Maybe having a reference book handy would keep Gerald and Debra from arguing so much. They could just stop, look it up, and abide by the verdict.”

  “Were we arguing?” said C.

  “We were disagreeing.”

  “You were disagreeing. I was merely stating a fact.”

  “You were doing your thing. Which bears little enough relation to fact.”

  “Of course it’s possible they don’t want to be kept from arguing. Gerald and Debra.”

  “Well, I do. Though I wonder, does Day 9 begin when I get out of bed or when you do? When the sun clears the Jacksons’ roof or when it comes over Tiny’s Variety? The midnight-plusone approach avoids any such subjectivity.”

  “So does the dawn approach. Dawn can be as precise as you like. They put it in the newspaper every day: 6:13, 6:16, and so forth.”

  Whatever it is that Gerald and Debra do, this is what we do. Not so much argue as joust, in jest. We can’t stop pushing and pulling the taffy of words and concepts. C. wanted to push the taffy of time, that’s all. And if he could find a way to start a day eight hours later, maybe he could find a way to make the days longer, or make The Twoweeks into three weeks.

  Because by that morning we were approaching a dangerous place. I was wise to redraw the contract (maybe end at eleven days, though, instead of nine) because by now I had lost track of Miller Road as the place Ian and I lived. It had become the place where C. and I were holed up. In the same way, I was no longer getting the vibe about Winnie, or the children, off C. He too had been lulled.

  We could rationalize this (Why miss Ian when I would soon be with him? Why fret over Jake and Hetty when he would soon be frolicking with them?) but we knew something had shifted on us. Whenever it was that Day 8 officially concluded, we both knew the boulder was rolling down the far side of the hill now, and gathering momentum.

  “JUST A few quick points. None of them, by the way, contradicting a word of your account.”

  “What, then? Ignorin
g it?”

  “Amplifying? No, completing. By providing answers to a few of the unanswered questions.”

  “This can’t be a filibuster, Calvert. I’m much too tired.”

  “While we are on the subject of long-windedness, is it my imagination or are these entries of yours getting longer and longer?”

  “I don’t see why it matters.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “I had never kept that sort of journal before. What I had were notebooks, full of scribbled conceits and images, ideas for future poems. Never anything so personal. I had to get used to doing this and I guess I did. So that may be why.”

  “What made you decide to do it at all? If you never had before.”

  “Mostly the obvious, trying to make sense of my life. And it did give me some space, that week in Maine. Ian only needed to know I was ‘at my desk’—that I was working—and he would give me a wide berth.”

  “Ian did give you space.”

  “New poems? he would ask with a sort of rueful smile he had. It’s a smile with no teeth and no mirth. An invitation to confess if I wished, no pressure to do so if I didn’t. And I would say, Just some notes.”

  “True enough.”

  “So went my justification. Plus Ian is a very intelligent man. It wasn’t as if he expected The Twoweeks to end like one of his beloved prizefights—the bell rings, the bout-is-over sort of ending. He knew there would be aftermaths. That we would all be concussed. He was absurdly patient with me.”

  “He was a lot cooler and wiser than the average bear.”

  “Once, after I had come back from Europe, he asked me if he had made a big mistake. Given me too much freedom and lost me in the process.”

  “But that was later.”

  “He asked very little after The Twoweeks. He let me be, hoping I would weather it out.”

  “Cool.”

  “He had a ton of pride, which took the form of self-enforced dignity. And I know he was going on the assumption that the sooner he asked the questions, the rougher would be the answers.”

  “Wise.”

  “I felt like such a bitch.”

  “What did you tell him, by the way? Could he have held on to you?”

  “If he had said no, there would never have been a Twoweeks. But later, after Europe? Life was going on, spiraling off. I was unstable and unkind.”

  “So you could tell him he was damned lucky he didn’t hold on to you.”

  “That is precisely what I told him, more than once. And each time he would display the rueful smile.”

  “Wisdom. Coolth. But no teeth and no mirth.”

  “Sadness, mainly.”

  “Poor Ian.”

  “Calvert, don’t.”

  “Sorry. I’ll get back to the business at hand.”

  “Which was what, exactly? I forget.”

  “We were going over your journal entry. Unless you would rather not?”

  “I already agreed, the entries probably did get longer. I might even agree that—unconsciously—I was using the journal as the only available means of being with you still.”

  “Now there is a rare concession!”

  “Oh come on, Calvert, you knew how I felt.”

  “Never. I never did. Which leads me to the next point, on the subject of sex. Where you write, ‘How to put any of this politely?’ My question is why bother? Why worry about politeness in a journal? In a private conversation with yourself.”

  “Because—as it seems to keep saying here—I was, I am, my mother’s daughter.”

  “Sure, but you are not reticent. Your mom wasn’t particularly reticent, either. She was just of an earlier generation, verbally speaking.”

  “One does tend to speak verbally.”

  “All right, but this was written, not spoken. Why not describe the sex as it was?”

  “I didn’t have the slightest desire to describe it at all.”

  “You couldn’t avoid describing it a little, here and there.”

  “There was a tug. I wanted to remember events, including my reaction to those events. But I certainly didn’t want to become a pornographer.”

  “You just didn’t want Ian to see it, accidentally. Which was fair enough.”

  “Forget about sex. If Ian saw one sentence of this, any sentence, he would have been devastated. I knew that and I was writing it down anyway.”

  “Then why the reticence? You have written poems that I would call erotic.”

  “Erotic, possibly. Pornographic, never.”

  “What’s the difference again?”

  “The difference is words, partly. And directness. You want to be more suggestive than descriptive. I have always hated the words that go with porn.”

  “He was hard, she was wet.”

  “And worse, but along those lines. They are so tired and trite they aren’t remotely erotic. Furthermore—”

  “Did you say furthermore?”

  “—the more you talk about it, view it, review it, name it, analyze it—anything but actually do it—the less erotic it becomes. It’s like putting clothes on, instead of taking them off.”

  “Like your mother and father. Didn’t you used to say they did it fully dressed?”

  “I could never believe they did it at all. There’s proof, of course—me and Liam—but not one pixel of credible imagery. Of the two of them, you know, touching. Mom I could see. She danced, she flirted. But my father must have done it without moving a muscle, in suit and tie, dress socks, polished leather shoes.”

  “Kinky.”

  “Time to change the subject, Cal, or get back to it. Were there other issues?”

  “Amplifications. Clarifications. About this alleged tendency of the male to keep score?”

  “The tally, yes.”

  “I knew the days. Toward the end, I even knew the hours. Only at the very beginning did I have any notion how many times we had fucked—”

  “To put it politely.”

  “How many times conjoined, then, simply because I could remember every one of them. After a few days I hadn’t a clue. Could not have cared less.”

  “What a guy.”

  “It’s just information.”

  “Fine. So is that it?”

  “One last, on the children. Where you say why fret over Jake and Hetty when in a short while etcetera?”

  “Right.”

  “Wrong. The closer we came to Doomsday, to our impending ending, the worse I felt about them. My need to be with them was one thing, but the guilt was about failing them, harming them. And I knew I’d blown that. I was going to be stuck with the mess I had made, and so therefore were they.”

  “You didn’t show any of that.”

  “It was being deferred. What wasn’t being deferred? But the fact I would be seeing them soon, or frolicking with them as you put it, made me terribly sad. I was on the verge of tears a lot of the time, those final days.”

  “You never cried. When did you cry?”

  “The verge, I said. Though I must have cried at Charlie’s Kitchen.”

  “If you did, it wasn’t about Jake and Hetty.”

  “No. Not that night.”

  DAY 10 began with a meeting of the rules committee, or a debate. Resolved: Was it or was it not permissible to repeat an activity? Specifically, having been to Gloucester on Day 1, were we therefore prevented from going to Gloucester on Day 10?

  C.’s position was we owed it to ourselves to be creative and original, mine that we ought to be mirroring life, not art.

  “If we have run out of fresh ideas in ten days,” he said, “what would we come up with over the course of ten years?”

  “That’s entirely academic,” said I. “Two weeks is our portion, not ten years. Besides, people who are together for ten years don’t ‘come up with things to do,’ they have a life. They work and raise children. They do the laundry.”

  “No wonder they’re bored.”

  “Who said they’re bored?”

  When I po
inted out that our portion was two weeks, I felt a twinge of guilt. I had never mentioned a change in plans, a foreshortening of our contract, and the moment was getting closer. Imminent. That our portion might soon be reduced was what the rules committee should have been discussing that morning, but I hadn’t found the right opening.

  “HANG ON a second, Lara. I hate to interrupt, but can we back up a bit here? There seems to have been a mistake—”

  “Cal, I am simply reading this. Word for word.”

  “Sure. But you are reading about Day 10. You’ve gone from Day 8 to Day 10. You see the problem.”

  “Day 9, I suppose you mean.”

  “Day 9 is missing. Here is the solitary original untrammeled—unfudged?—surviving archive of The Twoweeks and fully seven percent of it has been omitted. Or destroyed?”

  “I must have forgotten what we did that day.”

  “Couldn’t remember a thing about it? When you dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s on every previous day? Look, you’ve got conversations going on verbatim for ten minutes—sights and sounds, prices, what we ate—and now there is this total blank?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “Did Ian get hold of it and burn it maybe?”

  “He would never do that. He respects privacy too much, not to mention the good old written word.”

  “What if that entry contained something about him, though, something that violated his privacy. A skeleton in his closet. He cheated on his taxes, or came on to a student . . .”

  “Ian Witherspoon never cheated on anything or anybody in his life. He didn’t even have a closet, much less a skeleton in it.”

  “Okay, then maybe there was a poem in that entry, or a fragment. You tore it out later so you could work on it.”

  “That sounds like a reasonable explanation.”

  “It does?”

  “Sure.”

  “So where’s the poem? Where’s the finished product? I know you remember every line of every poem you ever wrote.”

  “I don’t even remember the ones I finished and published, much less every draft and fragment and image and idea.”