The Twoweeks

by Larry Duberstein

  “Do I believe that?”

  “It’s true. Sometimes I’ll come across an old notebook and be amazed at the stuff I never got back to. Really promising starts, which I simply abandoned and never glimpsed again.”

  “What about that list of fabulous titles you never used. Do you still have that?”

  “I do. And I reserve all rights to use those titles in the future.”

  “Cool as that was?—it did come as a disappointment to me, Lara. The same way I was disappointed to learn The New Yorker has people placing one man’s caption under another man’s drawing.”

  “Not with their better cartoons. Never with Charles Addams.”

  “Do we know that? They have one shoebox full of captions and another full of drawings, and someone whose job is to pin the tail on the donkey.”

  “I would never use one of those titles unless it was absolutely right for a poem. Which is why they never have been used. I keep that list in knowing sorrow that probably they never will.”

  “A poem and its title should grow together, like the briar and the rose.”

  “Agreed. Shall we resume now?”

  “Absolutely. As soon as you tell me what really happened to Day 9. I have a right to know about that day, Lara. It’s my life too.”

  “But it’s my journal.”

  “That sounds like a confession.”

  “To what?”

  “To concealing or destroying the entry for Day 9.”

  “I confess nothing.”

  “You insist you don’t know what happened to it?”

  “I insist nothing. Except that my notes for Day 9 are not here. I suggest we go on to Day 10, which is here.”

  “We can go on, but I am not forgetting Day 9. And despite all your disingenuousness on the subject, I don’t believe you have forgotten it either.”

  “Good for you, Cal.”

  THAT WAS the hottest day of the year, 100 degrees by mid-morning. Twice we stepped into the shower just to cool off, then sat buck naked in front of the screen door, hoping Mrs. Ridley did not suddenly appear. (A cup of sugar? No problem!)

  At some point we recalled that air-conditioning had been invented. This came slowly to our joint consciousness because we both disapprove of it. A whole appliance just to get you through the handful of seriously hot days each year? Air-conditioning is strictly for whiners, it’s wasteful, it’s terrible for the atmosphere . . . and where can we find us some?

  The movies, was one obvious answer. Winnie would not be at a matinee, although she could (C. pointed out) be somewhere along our path to the movie theater. She was somewhere every second (I pointed out) and therefore might be on the path to anywhere. Were we not allowed to walk anywhere?

  “Now that you mention it, it would be safer in the car.”

  “Because she is never in the path of cars?”

  “Because she never even notices cars. Whether it was a car or a truck, whether it was red or green or white—much less the make or model. Just doesn’t register with her.”

  This seemed dubious. Not only had Winnie ridden in my car, she had stood at the curb as I pulled up to get her. A faded blue Dart with a bustle of rust around the doors and panels? Distinctive, I would have thought, in its shabby way. Hard not to notice.

  Before I gave voice to this, C.’s paranoia had raced ahead to the next potential disaster, that his son Jake had “a dangerous brain.” All those specifics that Winnie failed to register, Jake would see clearly and question closely. Places he had been driven past while seemingly asleep in the backseat he would later describe with precision. He noted (and retained) the price of everything in every store. Able to read at four, he read (and retained) every road sign and billboard. So there was Jake.

  “Has he met you? Has he seen your car?”

  “Yes and yes.”

  “Then you’re in the file. Though you may not loom that large.”

  “What about his famously firm grasp of minor characters? Didn’t you tell me his favorite Milne character was Owl?”

  “Owl looms large.”

  Between Jake’s dangerous brain and our discovery that the car (smelted all morning in the furnace of the sun) was literally too hot to touch, it seemed a taxi might make sense. Jake wouldn’t associate us with it even if he had opened a dossier on the driver, plus it would be air-conditioned.

  “It would also cost four bucks each way. Eight bucks.”

  “Then hop in, cheapskate. I’ll drive.”

  We put sheets on the seats of the Dart and finally got going. The movie houses weren’t open yet, though, so we went first to the Gardner Museum. Having skipped breakfast in the heat, we decided to eat something in their (air-conditioned) café. Which was another lovely idea, except that it cost nine bucks.

  “Worse than a cab,” I couldn’t help noting.

  “But it’s not a total loss—which a cab would have been.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Well, because there’s no free lunch. Say we made a couple of tuna fish sandwiches at home and split a can of beer. Say we then went down to Tiny’s and split a Three Musketeers bar. A minimal meal like that would cost around five bucks. So our real dollar loss on lunch is four.”

  (Nor would our “real dollar losses” stop there. Tabulating the museum fee, the movie, my popcorn and C.’s Raisinets, keeping cool would prove no cheap endeavor.)

  C. had been able to relax on the Cape and on Plum Island. Now he was uptight again. In the café, he positioned himself with his back to the wall, facing the door like Wild Bill Hickok. Afterward, he passed through each gallery portal as Wild Bill surely would have: eyes sweeping the room, guns drawn. No one was going to back-shoot my guy.

  He cooled it at the movies—no worries in the dark. It was dark and sparsely populated (a Chabrol, with subtitles, in the early afternoon) and cold! You have to dress for air-conditioning, it turns out. It was so cold in there that the butter on my popcorn congealed.

  “I guess this comes under the heading, Be careful what you wish for,” I said, as we exited into the steam heat. For the last hour, we had been huddled together for warmth.

  “Or: We got our money’s worth—unfortunately.”

  “How about, Can’t win for losin’,” I said.

  “Just skate your lane and keep your stick on the ice,” said C.

  “Can’t say I follow that one.”

  “I thought we were doing clichés. Which always remind me of my high school hockey coach, who spoke exclusively in clichés. ‘Keep your stick on the ice and the goals will come’ was another favorite. We would sit on the bus coming home from a 7–1 defeat and say, Geez, we must have taken our sticks off the ice. But he had an endless supply.”

  “And I’m sure you had an endless supply of wiseass responses.”

  “ ‘Let’s play ’em one at a time,’ was his standby. So we played ’em one at a time and lost ’em all, anyway.”

  Back at Miller Road, back into the shower—a shorthand version of our water theme. We did consider the city pool, not far away, a dime a swim. C. had taken his kids there and assured me it was not bad, so long as you didn’t mind unguided 50-pound missiles landing on your neck now and again. It was his admission that these missiles (cannonballs and can-openers launched carefreely from the pool’s rim) could be hefty 150-pound teenagers that tore it for me.

  (Much later, when in a desperate moment we considered taking the last train for Gloucester and sleeping out on the beach, C. said, “That’s fine, if you don’t mind a 250-pound cop stepping on your neck.”)

  For dinner that night we had fat pretzels and Colt .45 so cold it was just shy of frozen. Even at nine o’clock that night, you could step out of a cold shower, towel dry, and find sweat beading at your temples. This was one night when no one could possibly want sex to happen—or so I thought.

  I was just as certain I would not mention it here either (not after what I wrote yesterday) and yet here goes. The fan was on, Ray Charles was on, and side one was fi
nished before we were. (The record kept going around, making that little drumbrush sound until we finally noticed it and laughed.) “Just for a Thrill”? Ray was right about that, even at one hundred percent humidity.

  Sometime in the night the weather broke, with stupendous concussive thunder and tracers of lightning in the yard—the fire-bombing of Boston. Splashed by rain through the screen, chilled in fact, we bundled together and naturally (naturally would be the mot juste here) started up. Our attraction seemed to survive both hot and cold.

  A factor worth noting is that neither of us ever seems to run low on energy. It’s the first thing people say about C., but they have always said it about me too, so combined we must be like pi R squared or something. You have to direct all that energy someplace; and while it is true enough we should have been building hospitals in Latin America, we simply weren’t. We were just fucking our selfish brains out.

  (Sorry, Mom, promise I’ll never say it again.)

  “THERE YOU have it, plain as day.”

  “Have I it?”

  “You have, my sweet. A crystal clear reference to Day 9. And not merely that there was such a day—that much we knew, ontologically—but proof that you wrote about it in this very journal. The missing day referenced, if you will.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Right here, where it says ‘not after what I wrote yesterday.’ With the obvious implication that you wrote about sex. Which may explain the book burning?”

  “Book burning is a bit strong, though I guess I see your point.”

  “You would have to be George W. Bush not to see it.”

  “Well, I certainly am not George W. Bush.”

  “Though you do share a behavior or two with him.”

  “What a nasty thing to say.”

  “By purest chance, my sweet. But deceit? Evasion of discussion? Concealment of relevant documentation?”

  “You of all people are talking about deceit?”

  “I will gladly withdraw the George W. Bush analogue, if you will produce for me the missing—let’s say missing, rather than concealed—entry. Will you?”

  “Not at this time.”

  “Because?”

  “Because it isn’t here.”

  “You admit it exists, admit you still have it, admit you purposely separated it out, and allege that it is not in this house at this time?”

  “I admit nothing.”

  “Can you summarize for me what it says? What it would add to this story, were we privileged to have it?”

  “I can’t do that, no.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Can’t. Won’t.”

  “Can you at least say whether it is a short spicy entry, or a long dreary outpouring?”

  “Let’s imagine that it’s quite short and terribly unspecific. That it doesn’t have much to say about what we did that day, which is both why it doesn’t add to the story and why I can’t summarize it. I mean, I could summarize it easily enough if it said we went to New York, to a Miriam Makeba concert at Carnegie Hall, ate a cup of borscht at the Russian Tea Room afterward—”

  “Enough of that. I know we didn’t go to New York.”

  “There you are, then. Maybe you can summarize Day 9 for us. You seem to think you recall those days with fair accuracy.”

  “Was it the night we saw Conway Twitty at Jordan Hall?”

  “I believe it was! You could be light years away from the onset of Alzheimer’s, Cal. Do you remember that little pink sunsuit he wore? A matching top and bottom, in not even bad but truly astonishing taste. Such that I could not believe my eyes.” “Stalwart Conway fan though I am, I too was taken aback.”

  “Still, they put on a great show.”

  “The Twitty Birds were in rare form.”

  “The Twitty Birds! Two guys, right? Bass and guitar?”

  “And a drummer floating somewhere in the background. They all wore baby blue sun-suits. The Big Twitty Bird, maybe six foot six, on upright bass, the little one, about four feet high at the shoulder, on guitar. And the opening act that night was—?”

  “No idea. Total blankitude.”

  “Hank, Junior. Who at that point was only Hank, Junior—had no hits of his own, sang medleys of his daddy’s songs in his daddy’s voice. He came out and did a tour de force, though. Playing big riffs on every instrument, including an absolute dead-on Jerry Lee on the piano. He did a very scripted wildman thing—wild yet flawless, canned yet impressive. Hank, Junior.”

  “We walked home.”

  “There was a full moon—”

  “Now you’re making stuff up.”

  “It could be true. Under a full moon, the city lay quiescent, the river in all its gleaming liquidity slipping beneath the bridge as we stopped at the 49th Smoot—”

  “Smoot me no Smoots, Calvert.”

  “Maybe it was the 50th Smoot. I know we walked over the Mass. Ave. Bridge and I know we waved to a cabin cruiser. Two men smoking cigars and drinking on deck.”

  “Plumbers!”

  “That’s right, I surmised they were plumbers.”

  “Because all plumbers get rich and buy boats.”

  “Yes, but there was also something about the name of the boat. In Hot Water, or Down the Drain. Something like that.”

  “It was a beautiful night.”

  “Very likely you did do something of a poetic nature with it. Then, naturally, you tucked the pertinent material into a separate folder, a poem-in-progress folder. You can admit that, can’t you?”

  “If I did, would you cease and desist?”

  “I would, after the most cursory glance at the material. I’d also like to see the autographed program, which must be in the same lockbox.”

  “That’s right. You actually made him sign the damned thing.”

  “And I gave it to you. That program is worth big money now, Lara.”

  “Remind me of Conway’s real name.”

  “Harold Jenkins.”

  “You tricked him. Told him you had a sick nephew named Jenkins and cajoled him into signing his real name. You lied to Conway Twitty, Calvert. How low can you go?”

  “It was his real name. I didn’t trick him into writing it backwards, or anything, like Mr. Mxpltk.”

  “He died, you know.”

  “Mxpltk?”

  “Conway Twitty. He’s dead.”

  “A lot of them are. The amazing thing is that the two most likely by far to be dead are still going strong. George Jones and Jerry Lee.”

  “Life is unpredictable. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I wasn’t, but certainly it is. Take Jake.”

  “All right, but why Jake?”

  “When he was ten, or twelve, I would wonder what he’d become. I had a dozen guesses and none of them came close. A river guide? Come on.”

  “And a filmmaker, don’t forget.”

  “That’s just his way of jacking up the price. They get the trip and they get a film of the trip. It is a nice little gimmick.”

  “I disagree. Those are terrific films, very much worth having. But what did you guess he would be?”

  “Everything except an actor. That was the one thing I knew he wouldn’t be. Hetty thought it was glamorous—especially when I was on TV—but to Jake it wasn’t a real job. It wasn’t work.”

  “So there you are. He rejects fantasy in favor of bedrock nature. River guide.”

  “What would you have guessed for Iris?”

  “At that point? That she would never exist. We were getting close to the part where we would never see each other again.”

  “Did I ever tell you that after The Twoweeks—when we were busy never seeing each other again—I would sometimes walk by St. Paul’s, just in case you were inside confessing your sins.”

  “I have to confess: I haven’t been to confession since college.”

  “You might have gone, though. That summer or fall.”

  “It crossed my mind. It crosses my mind a lot, stil
l.”

  “But you’d rather go to Hell?”

  “Please don’t joke about my religion, Cal.”

  “It’s my religion, too.”

  “Not in any real way.”

  “Such as going to confession? Living the dogma?”

  “I won’t try to explain myself to you. Or to any priest, for that matter.”

  “As I said, you’d rather go to Hell.”

  “I presume I will go to Hell. That we both will. How could we not be consigned to Hell?”

  “If there were no Hell. That would be one way. If God were dead, another. And what if He is alive and happens to be a wise old Jew?”

  “Calvert.”

  “Why is that blasphemous? He was Jesus’ daddy, right? Unless He converted, He would by now be a four-thousand-year-old Jew. Who was capable of forgiving sins long before the business wing of the party came up with the Baltimore Catechism.”

  “Calvert.”

  “There is one thing He would never forgive, though, and that’s concealing the journal entry for Day 9.”

  “So there you are. I told you I was going to Hell.”

  DAY 11, June 29. Debra called that morning to say, We get it, we like it, you guys seem great together, always did. It turns out everyone at the gallery presumed C. and I had something going on, and would have been amazed to hear otherwise.

  I chose not to relay this corroborating evidence of “chemistry” between us to C. For starters, he would have gloated. Then too, the case for my innocence would have become the case for my ignorance, or obliviousness. Who needs that?

  “Who else thought that about us?” I asked Debra.

  “Who didn’t? Henry and June had a pool going on the outcome. Brief affair versus long painful affair versus totally busted marriages versus suicide pact.”

  “Henry and June should talk.”

  “They weren’t criticizing. It wasn’t like that at all.”

  Debra had called to propose another foursome. Dinner in the city, the 4th of July on Plum Island, the Saturday following, “Whatever works.” We had never been the couple they presumed. Before “the Saturday following” rolled around, we would not even be the couple we were two days ago, at their cottage. We would be an ex-couple, or an ex-non-couple. Just a couple of people life chewed up and spat out.