“Absolutely. She planned the whole wedding.”
“Did you plan to have a kid, or did that just happen? And then Hetty. Did you have her because you already had Jake? How does that all work?”
“Lara, my bright-eyed darlin’, is there some reason you are trying to bring us down ahead of schedule?”
“Honestly, I’m just curious. Though there is the elephant in the room aspect. Pretending the elephant isn’t there—”
“That’s not what we’ve been doing. It’s more like the elephant isn’t in the room for two weeks and we’re making use of the space he’ll take up when he returns.”
“Suit yourself. Anyway, I’d better get to the store pretty soon and get stuff for the salad. You do remember, don’t you? Mr. and Mrs. Normal are going visiting?”
“That’s us. Salad and dessert.”
“You know what we haven’t done, that would have made us truly normal? Watch some TV together. Hunker down on the couch and catch a few shows.”
“You don’t have a couch. Or a TV, for that matter.”
“We had one when I was a kid. Liam and I used to sit on the couch and watch together, every Saturday night for two hours straight. We had our special shows, that no one was allowed to interrupt.”
“Your parents probably thought of it as two hours when you would not be interrupting them.”
“We could eat whatever we wanted, too. They just closed the door and left us alone.”
“Hey, I’ll take that deal. Curl up with you every Saturday night for two hours? Close the door? Eat whatever we want?”
“I felt so betrayed,” I went on, ignoring his lame joke, “when Liam grew up on me. He turned thirteen and then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, fourteen. Really, I never saw him again.”
“Wasn’t he just here last Christmas?”
“That wasn’t him. I never saw him again as he was. Because he was never that way again.”
“Nor were you, presumably.”
“He went first, and by a substantial margin. When he was thirteen, I was ten. So I watched alone on Saturday night, with my icebox cookies and milk. My mother felt so sorry for me she would sometimes come in and watch with me, even though she never liked westerns.”
“Did she like icebox cookies?”
We weren’t due at Gerald and Debra’s until four, so we were not really in a rush. I voted we curl up and read, but C. was restless and hustled us out to the car, where for some reason he insisted I drive.
“Why?” I asked, only because this was an unexplained change.
“It’s your car.”
“It was my car yesterday, too, and the days before. All of which you drove.”
“So obviously it’s your turn.”
“All right, fine. Tell me where we’re going.”
“Nope. You drive and you choose.”
I might have protested such outright tyranny (not to say weirdness) on his part and I did, in a way, by choosing a destination he had previously rejected, Walden Pond. I didn’t believe it was risky on a weekday, plus I knew that Monday was Winnie’s dreaded long day, concluding with the dreaded endless staff meeting.
I expected the paranoia anyway, but C. kept me off balance by letting it go. As we were riding out to the pond, I came up with several theories to account for this relaxation of the red alert. Theory #1 was that he had painted himself into a corner with his cavalier behavior. He told me to choose, I chose, and he was stuck with it.
According to Theory #2, we had both been growing reckless. Secrecy is wearing and you do come to hate it. How much freedom have you grasped, after all, if you have to skulk and hide? Plus, after two weeks in which we had spent virtually every second together, we felt less the subjects in a crazy experiment than like lovers working through the kinks and knots of a compelling relationship. We were minding our own business, why should anyone mind us?
Theory #3 was the most radical, or psychologically complex. According to this one, C. actually wanted to be found out. I was mindful that as yet he had not lost me or Winnie, so he was doing pretty well here, but just maybe he craved to put an end to the lying. Underneath the swagger and bluster, C. is a very decent human being (it turns out) and so (according to Theory #3) he wanted to come clean. Deeply reluctant to cause pain and havoc, he could not bring himself to act on this impulse, yet he could wish (subconsciously) for it to happen.
It was even possible that, subconsciously, he wanted to keep me. Jettison the Twoweeks agreement, ditch both our spouses, and be “together forever” on grounds that we were so right for each other it was worth any devastation we would leave in our wake. I did not want to even consider this possibility. The Twoweeks contract was what gave me a way to handle my emotions and I knew enough to stand behind it.
Nevertheless, as we circumambulated the pond (quickly past the strewn sunbathers, making for the more isolated shore below the railroad tracks) I was stunned to think we had exactly one day remaining. The Twoweeks was about to conclude the way a movie does: the familiar words appear—THE END—the reel runs out, and everyone goes home.
And this would happen simply because neither of us ever expressed the notion we ought not allow it to happen. Shouldn’t we at least discuss the matter? What did C. feel, at this point? What did I feel? Something had pulled us past all intention, and convention, past all sense, into this foolhardy experiment. And then the experiment proved the pull was awfully strong, that together we might have a rare connection, something transformative. Hard to describe this, much less justify it, but I was pretty sure we both felt it.
I resolved to leave these difficult considerations behind and try to enjoy the moment at hand, enjoy Walden, which is still a lovely place to be on a July morning. Maybe they did sell Thoreau pencils there a hundred years ago, and maybe you see a few too many cars in the parking lot now, but the place retains a trace of magic. Thoreau’s verities (and America’s refusal to learn from them) suffuse the atmosphere. It’s a small pond in New England; no one would ever mistake it for Disneyland or the Santa Monica Pier.
Mainly it’s mothers and small children devoid of agendas other than sun and water. None of the mothers seemed concerned about how they looked in their bathing suits and few of the children were old enough to know wherein self-consciousness lay. We had left them all behind in any event, back at the public beach. Rounding the toe of the pond, where it pools into a narrow lagoon, we floated our blanket over a pallet of pine needles, on a sunny knoll above the water’s edge.
“Thoreau was onto something here,” said C., “though I have to admit I don’t know his deal that well. Simplify simplify? And that the cabin cost about thirty bucks to build.”
“I’d say you have grasped the essentials. All you are missing is his reverence for natural beauty, common sense, peace, and poetry.”
“Hey, I’ve got at least an hour in which to expand my education.”
We played childish games in the water. Splashing games, ducking games. He disappeared underwater and butted me gently with his head. He yanked on my bathing suit bottom, pulling it down, and I scolded him though none of it mattered. We were acres away from anyone else who even might care.
C. does like to push the envelope and my reflex is to resist his nonsense. Then there is the side of me that hates being predictable and so was tempted to call all his bluffs. That was the side that let him pull the suit off. Now what, was more or less my game. Me testing him back.
The letting-go aspect does interest me. What happens in a tug of war when one team completely releases its grip? What happens to the balance the struggle created? In this case, what would this wise guy do with half a bathing suit in his hand and a bottomless girl in the water?
I had called his bluff and what he did in response was to call mine. He walked out of the water with the suit, looped it neatly onto the branch of a sapling, and lay down on the blanket. Soon pretended to fall asleep, snoring extravagantly. Making it my move.
So I called his bluff again.
Faking a devil-may-care blitheness, I emerged from the water bare-assed and sassy, as though nothing could be more natural. (Which is true, after all, or was true, in the Garden of Eden.) I stretched out beside him on the blanket. Making it his move.
I guessed he would sprint off with the suit, waving it and teasing me. After all, weren’t we being perfectly childish? Instead he went into what I suppose was one of his Beckett routines, feigned innocence and indirection. He did not react to (pretended not to notice) my state of undress. Took out an orange and peeled it. Casually offered me sections.
Then we spotted a yellow Labrador retriever sniffing and snuffling on the opposite shore of the lagoon, and heard voices trailing close behind. We were about to have company and now C. tossed me the suit. He was ready to conclude our tricky little skit. But was I? Why should he get to make the rules? Why should it be up to him who gets to be naughty, and for how long?
Moral edges, psychological angles. These were the silly symphonies we had always played—as acquaintances, as friends, as lovers. Wrestling for meaningless advantage in the name of fun. But where, I had to ask myself, was the fun in mooning a couple of complete strangers? If only for their sake, I decided it was time to step back inside my thin veneer of decency.
Catching the suit as he tossed it, I was struck by how minimal it was. It was like catching a butterfly. A tiny weightless thing, it disappeared inside my hand. If I’d had a pocket, it would have fit inside. This garment was nothing, or next to nothing, and yet it seemed that without it I was by definition a wanton woman (indeed, a criminal), while with it I became a harmless cipher, a dull normal.
Though when I gave voice to all this, C. flattered me in his fashion: “Never dull, hardly normal.”
As planned, we picked up salad makings at the farm stand in Lincoln. Not a lot of their own stuff yet: it was pretty much iceberg lettuce, iceberg tomatoes, iceberg onions. Clearly it would have to be an iceberg salad. Debra would give us a pass, Gerald would lament that we hadn’t gone to the Haymarket, as he always did, for his ingredients.
Considering how snippy snobby we had been about going, we ended up having a perfectly nice time with them. Gerald made a wonderful stifado (a far cry from the gourmet hot dogs C. had prognosticated) and a gooseberry fool. The fool gave rise to a symposium on desserts, and what exactly was a gooseberry, other than a “berry word” that provides lovely assonance with the word fool? And then, what was a fool? As for pastry, what differentiates a crumble, a crisp, a crunch, a brown betty, a pandowdy, and so on ad infinitum. We looked them all up in a dictionary, struggled to refine the hazy dictionary distinctions.
“Only in Cambridge,” Debra remarked, to which Gerald replied that while we might be of Cambridge, we were not technically in Cambridge.
“Cambridge, for sure,” Debra persisted. “I mean, can you imagine anyone wasting time on this sort of thing in say Lincoln, Nebraska?”
“Regional snob,” I said, with our own snobbery still on my mind.
“People in Nebraska tend to be sane, that’s all I meant. Whereas we are clearly insane.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Gerald, never neglecting an opportunity to contradict his wife. “We are this nation’s lonely truth-seekers.”
“A great man once said that anyone seeking Truth is by definition insane.”
I provided this pearl, though I knew of no such great man, or quotation. I made it up! Fortunately for me, Gerald demanded no attribution. Then C. had the last word before the fireworks began:
“Whatever else is true, that was one hell of a fool.”
On top of one blanket and snuggled beneath another, we were pretty darned normal that night on the beach, and pretty darned happy. It was both impossible to remember and impossible to forget that THE END was near. Impossible to believe it. My consciousness would disappear into the showers of orange sparks and the smoke floating over the dark surf. Then I would look at Gerald and Debra, amazed that they could be together forever while we were counting down our final hours.
The fireworks display was modest and brief, as befits a July 1st celebration. We stayed long enough to help clean up the kitchen, thanked our hosts with all the sincerity of our contrite souls, and hugged them goodbye in a larger sense than they could know. In the car, C. joked that we would be home in time to watch our favorite TV shows. We could pick up some icebox cookies at the all-night Star Market, and he could play the part of my brother Liam. “The radio can play the part of the TV and you can just play yourself.”
Which self, though, pray tell? The one who after a bit more of pretend would be sensibly married to Ian Witherspoon and resume her sensible life free of turmoil, angst, and longing? Or the one who keeps trying to shake Cal Byerly from her mind like a puppy shaking a baby’s blanket? Who can’t let go when the thrashing is such fun.
At dinner, Debra had asked if we might make it to their Labor Day party. Nothing fancy, she assured me. Gerald would grill kielbasa and chicken, they would build a small bonfire on the beach, where a dozen compatible souls would gather . . .
And again, for an instant, I forgot who we were. “Sounds good to me,” I said, glancing at C. the way I would have glanced at Ian, to confirm spousal alignment, unanimity.
C. may have blushed. I had never seen him blush (had been led by Winnie to believe he was incapable of blushing—“unembarrassable” was her word) so maybe not, too dusky to be sure, though he definitely did something one could only call hemming and hawing. It’s a phrase one rarely sees now. Hawing? I must look that one up.
He hemmed, he hawed, and he emitted a little click of demurral, like a coded indication of some unfortunate scheduling conflict. Perhaps we were committed in Seattle that week, alas, touring behind the Godot.
We were “otherwise engaged,” C. regretted aloud, and I picked it up from there.
“Too bad, too. I’d much rather be here for the kraut and kielbasa. Just don’t tell me you’ll be toasting marshmallows. I couldn’t bear to miss that.”
“For your sake, I’ll pretend it’s never been part of the tradition,” Gerald chuckled, smugly. “But I do expect we’ll have a nice plum duff that night.”
“Thank God it’s not a plum crumble,” I said, as the pastry joke rolled on.
“You can always come at the last second,” said Debra, “if you change your minds. It’s just two more indentations in the sand.”
“It’s not our minds we would need to change,” I remarked, flippantly.
But in fact it was. Granted, to change our minds was to change our entire lives into the bargain. That was not an easy question to confront, so we had not confronted it. We hadn’t even gotten around to leveling with Gerald and Debra about The Twoweeks, what it was and what it wasn’t.
In bed that night, I found myself compiling a list of all the people we would seriously harm by such a change. Winnie, Hetty, Jake, and Ian were obvious, and of primary importance. But what about Ian’s parents? (And Winnie’s.) What about my brother and Jessica, Ian’s brother and Anne and their kids? Our nephew Bradley adored Ian, ran to him like an excited puppy whenever we visited. For that matter, Bradley’s puppy loved us. Not to mention friends, dozens of friends. The list kept expanding outward.
A lot of people would be hurt, a lot of stuff would be screwed up. Would they survive? Sure they would. They would survive if we died, for goodness’ sake. But the alternate reality screamed out for attention: who would be hurt if we did not change our lives? And the answer was no one.
Or no one beyond the two of us. Would we survive? Sure we would. I could not easily imagine Cal with Winnie, nor quite imagine myself reunited completely with Ian. But that would change in time, wouldn’t it?
At that point it was necessarily a question without an answer. It still is, except now I am wondering more specifically how much time. When does one form a conclusion? Because of course time goes on forever.
“THAT WAS right on, about being unable to imagine going back. I was in the exact same place.”
“You more than imagined it, Calvert.”
“Unless you can live with someone and still be unable to ‘imagine’ being there.”
“That’s pure gobbledygook.”
“It really isn’t. I started living that very distinction, the day after you wrote those words.”
“I wrote them several weeks later.”
“You know what I mean. ‘When we two parted, in silence and tears.’ When I went back to Winnie.”
“When you were there but couldn’t imagine being there.”
“I was physically present. My mind, my spirit—whatever you want to call it—was elsewhere.”
“Did Winnie notice?”
“Sure. I mean, we had been apart for two weeks. She was trying her best not to stand in judgment, but obviously she was wondering who the hell I was. What I was feeling.”
“Still with no idea where you had been.”
“If she had known that, she might have had a better shot at what I was feeling. At understanding my distance, and my odd—”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Listlessness? I was like a dead man walking.”
“Not with the children, surely.”
“I hope I managed to put a better face on that, but it wasn’t good. There were too many times I felt trapped. At the same time I was grateful, because they kept me from just blowing away, like a kite that gets lost in the sky.”
“You wax poetic!”
“Not at all; that was literally how it felt. I was a kite, sailing above my own life looking down, hoping someone had a hand on the string—”
“I’m sure Winnie did.”
“I could see the kids screaming and chasing after me, as I went sailing off into space.”
“This is sounding more like a dream than a poem now.”
“One night we went out to dinner with Fitz and Carrie. Best friends, a nice night out—and I was miserable. Totally distracted. I sat there remembering the good times we had with Gerald and Debra, who were no one’s best friends.”
“They were our only friends.”
The Twoweeks Page 14
