The Twoweeks

by Larry Duberstein

  My emotions lay close to the surface, my tears barely below it. Nearly anything could start me crying. I cried at sunup and sundown, cried when I dressed and undressed, cried when I fried an egg. At my most pragmatic, I cried in the shower.

  As events began to unfold, Ian and I shared a real determination to make it work. We did cook nice dinners and eat them on the landing, welcoming the sunset with cheap red wine. We did march up to the Welles two consecutive Wednesdays, and mosey over to the Plough after the movie. Mrs. Ridley watched us come and go, like a wily detective waiting for the perpetrator to make a mistake. Though her skeptical gaze demanded it, I refused to overdo the wifey part for her.

  When we went out to see his parents in San Carlotta, I was more willing to lay it on. I owed it to Sebastian and Sally more than I did to Mrs. Ridley, and it was hardly a stretch with them anyway. It felt genuine to be part of Ian’s family and then to be the two of us coping with Ian’s family in all the old ways, for here came his dreadful sister Lydia and the nephews from Hell. Here, in their wake, came the bedraggled misused abused Peter.

  In keeping with tradition, we would flee to the mall, of all places, for peace and solace. Cultural snobs to the core, mall haters from the first jump, we took refuge in the Mexican café we had always rationalized did not belong in a strip mall because it was “authentic.” The lovely couple who ran it worked so hard and charged so little that we tipped like crazy to help balance their books.

  “Maybe we should move out here,” I said one night, after two tequilas at the café.

  “Move here?” said Ian.

  “Well, move. From Cambridge.”

  “Where I work?” he pointed out.

  Rick Ruane had his imaginary handbook, his comic map of all the places “people like us” could feel at home. Sixties people, we were being called. Meaning what? That we liked music and art and literature and personal freedom? That we believed in Civil Rights and emphatically did not believe in a grotesque misbegotten war? Which among those values could any decent, intelligent American citizen reject?

  Still it was valid, the Ruane Map. We all knew it was, even as we laughed. Cambridge and Berkeley, Madison, Santa Fe, Austin, Ashland, Homer. Greenwich Village carried an asterisk, as I recall, and Des Moines a footnote of some sort. Parts of certain cities had qualified, neighborhoods, like Dinkytown in Minneapolis. We could find a good fit somewhere. Maybe Ian could get a teaching job in Dinkytown.

  If we had normal jobs we could be forced to move willy-nilly to places well off the Ruane grid. Liam and Jess had lived that way for ten years. They had been “relocated” by Liam’s company to Fort Wayne and then again to Charlotte. Children go where I send thee, sayeth the man who writeth the checks. If they could survive it, why couldn’t we?

  After we returned from San Carlotta, where in five days I shed not a single tear, the weepies returned. Out west, my mind could go to other places, larger spaces. In Cambridge, I might run into Cal anywhere, or hear news of him from mutual friends. If willpower was all that kept us apart, propinquity generated danger.

  I never did see him (nor, mercifully, did I see Winnie) but I was constantly keyed up for the accidental meeting. Mainly I did not want to be taken off balance, so each block I turned down became a nerve-wracking affair. Even at home, I found myself staying alert. The telephone unnerved me whenever it rang. The doorbell posed such a threat that I took steps to disable it.

  Cal wouldn’t just appear at the door, would he? To take a careless shot at finding me alone or (conversely, perversely) to make a clean breast of it with Ian. If he did find me home alone, would he be there to apologize or to commiserate? Or to propose! He could propose anything from a walk in the park to marriage.

  I did assume Cal was mired in the same emotional swamp as I, yet what if he wasn’t? What if appearing at my door was the farthest thing from his mind? I couldn’t even know whether to love him or hate him. Not that I had any proper business (nor anything to gain) doing either. So it was a mess, and I was a mess.

  It’s a mystery to me where Ian finds his equanimity. He won’t even take credit for it, insists it’s nothing but common sense. But his Someone Else Entirely idea (which started during our week in Maine) made no sense to me. We were almost okay for a while, almost ourselves, except perhaps in bed. Really, the worst part of it, and the most surprising, was how bad we felt when it was good in bed. It worked! we all but shouted, as if neither of us believed it could.

  Soon it came clear that it had only worked technically. It had not drawn us closer, as it should have, as it always had in the past. Instead it shouted right back at us, You have got a problem here, kids.

  Ian, with his bottomless equanimity, was determined to confront said problem head-on. He brought Cal right into the bed with us, albeit in a lighthearted way. What do you think of that, Calvert, he said, after we finished one night. Another time it was Uh oh, better cool it, girl, or you’ll make Calvert jealous.

  At the restaurant in Damariscotta I happened to notice this guy in the kitchen. The dishwasher? The cook? I saw him through the portal, a good-looking guy with thick brown hair and a blow-’em-down smile. Ian noticed me noticing and said it again: “Careful now, or Cal will be jealous.” Going with the joke, I assured him the experience was purely visual, like looking at a movie star.

  He was being too easy on me. His reward? I was getting annoyed with him, bitchy and critical. What did I want him to do, for goodness’ sake, slap me around and stuff me into a trash barrel? What could he do to please me if being wry and sweet and supportive failed to do the trick?

  It didn’t, though. Ian could do nothing right in Maine, and by the end of our stay there he had grown weary with trying. So over a dessert, which Handsome Harry, as we had taken to calling him, delivered to our table (and incidentally my movie star was not so good in close-up—his skin was pitted and he had taken a fatal overdose of peach-scented cologne), Ian introduced the Someone Else Entirely theme.

  To him, The Twoweeks was known as The Hiatus. How went The Hiatus, he asked on the day he returned, hale fellow well met, as though we were not a marriage in crisis but voyagers returned from separate pleasure cruises. Now he was suggesting a longer version, Hiatus Squared.

  “You might need a complete change of air, as Henry James might have phrased it.”

  “The air here is just fine, thank you.”

  He persisted. I might not need him or Cal Byerly: “You might need Someone Else Entirely. Which sounds too formal. Why don’t we just call him ‘Someone’ for short?”

  “Ian, please be serious. And please don’t bring the busboy into it again.”

  “Oh, he is much more than that. I’ve seen him dress salads and answer the phone. He could be anything from the great factotum to the restaurateur.”

  “Please?”

  “Fine. He shall be designated Noone. As opposed to Someone.”

  This was Ian being snippy. He was smiling and making witty, but I knew him: these were shots fired. He wanted me to experience them as such, without pegging him as the shooter. In his subtle, indirect way, he was finally lashing out, and I could hardly blame him.

  Nor did I. The trouble was I didn’t care enough. It didn’t matter enough that he was angry (truly, it made perfect sense) and though his being hurt certainly mattered, even that didn’t have the desired effect on me. It simply doesn’t work that way, the heart. To my shame, “heartless” is probably the word that best describes my failing.

  Heartless and imbalanced. One evening we noticed a beautiful wooden sailboat anchored off the point. Boats had come and gone all week, dinghies had come ashore. With the binoculars we would read their names, scope out what sort of people were aboard. This time, absurdly, I imagined Cal Byerly might be on the new boat and that after Winnie was safely asleep he would bring the dinghy in.

  Even more absurdly—insanely?—I kept a close eye on this “situation” past midnight. I took a walk down to the jetty, to check on it. I recited (to myself)
Browning’s lovely brace of poems, “Meeting at Night” and “Parting at Morning,” as I pictured Cal rowing in by moonlight, then rowing back “as the sun peeked over the mountain’s rim.” My mind was shot, and we would be stuck in Damariscotta for two more days.

  Those were rough days. Days that would make us look back nostalgically on our first weekend there, when the weather was splendid and when we believed we had come there to heal. We were confident we could work through this crisis and preserve (or revive) a marriage we had never before had cause to question. Instead, we were doing the worst thing a couple can do, waging guerrilla warfare behind phony smiles. Ian’s subversive sarcasm crashed against the walls of my bizarre indifference. It was so awkward and out of synch; the opposite of dancing.

  There was a last supper which felt exactly like a last supper (Judas, the betrayer, within me) and a last night on which we were as likely to reach for one another as corpses were. Not to mention a last breakfast at which Ian could not eat a bite, while I shamelessly gobbled up his bacon. “We’ll get you something on the road,” I said, as though he wanted not my love but a better cheese danish.

  About a week after Damariscotta, more or less out of the blue (we were on the landing at Miller Road, watching the sun start down) Ian said, “You should call him.”

  From Mrs. Ridley’s door, one storey up, you can see across the river to the Boston side. From our level, you just get sky pressing on the treetops, but the colors can be spectacular, shot through with beautiful pollutants, multilayered, varicolored. This was something we had always done, watching the sky change at that hour. It was a designated affirmation of life.

  I guess I sighed. Exhaled, anyway. A moment earlier I had entertained the idea we should simply drink more, drink as much as it took, and end up in bed. A wall had bloomed between us there. Night after night, we either fell asleep quickly or pretended we had. It had reached a point where we needed to utilize the bed for its other special function before that function became vestigial.

  “Can you call him?” Ian went on.

  “Who?”

  “Oh come on, Lara.”

  “Winnie is the one I should be calling, you know. She must be wondering why I haven’t.”

  “She hasn’t called you, either, in case you haven’t noticed. Which might provide a clue as to her likely attitude if you do call her.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Yikes indeed. I’m saying something different: that you need to talk to Cal.”

  “I don’t. There is no provision for checking in. It’s done with.”

  “That assumption isn’t working for you, Lara. Maybe it isn’t working for him.”

  “He’ll have to make it work, and I’m sure he will. I’m pretty sure he has.”

  “Because he hasn’t called?” Checkmate, said his pained, twisted smile.

  “No, because he doesn’t want to call. Doesn’t want me calling him, either. Knows what it was and knows it’s over.”

  “I see,” said Ian, cranking the hideous rictus a notch or two tighter.

  He was not having a lot of fun. He was very apt to say the hell with it; to hell with waiting while I completed my “evaluation” of our chances. Ian is an eminently sane man. He is even capable of choosing sanity, or order, over love. Whatever love is.

  “All right, so how are we going to do this, Lara?” he said now.

  A chill went down my spine. (Cliché, yes, and yet there it was, a chill.) Sudden tears blurred my vision. I didn’t bother to feign ignorance. I knew what he was saying, though I could not say anything.

  “Do you want to hear my idea?” he said.

  “Oh, Ian.”

  “Obviously I could get a place, or you could get a place. One of us could stay with friends for a while. Alternatively, you could go to Mexico, file for divorce there, and be free in a week.”

  “Ian, please.”

  “My idea, however, is that you take a trip on your own. Go back to France, if you still want to. But dislodge yourself from Cambridge, one way or another. Travel, brood, write some poems—and find Someone Else Entirely. To get clear of the immediate situation.”

  “You make it sound so simple.”

  “Well, it’s simple enough to do it. To book a flight and get on it. Easy for you to meet people. If you wanted to go to London, you would already know people. Ben and Lila. Katia. And of course, they know tons of people.”

  “Quit my job?”

  “Sure.”

  “Money?”

  “We can cover it.”

  “You would foot the bill for me to run off and look for ‘Someone Else’ in Europe?”

  “Someone Else Entirely. Yes, I would pay my share.”

  “Am I that horrible?”

  “Not horrible, just unhappy. And not sufficiently yourself for me to even recognize you, if I needed to place blame. It’s not Lara Cleary making my life miserable, it’s this lookalike replacement they sent from the temp agency.”

  “Ian, I’m really sorry. So sorry, for doing this to you.”

  “I think we would both benefit if you took the trip.”

  My reflex was to contradict him, to walk him past a low moment. Cheer him up, win him back. In any case, not lose him. I hated the idea that Ian could stop loving me, even if I had stopped loving him. Did that mean I had not stopped?—or did it just mean I was a narcissistic bitch?

  I did try to console him. I did not find any useful words (or none that would have rung true) but I hugged his head, stroked his hair, wrapped him in my arms. I took him to bed and there I took down the wall, which it turns out I had put up by myself. Yet as we lay there hip to hip, each a tick or two more optimistic, I was already musing on the shape such a trip might take. On the relief it might provide.

  Not at all on the opportunity for cheating on my husband. Ian had convinced himself that a brief affair could break through the binary equation in which we were currently imprisoned. He was always bound by logic, and now his logic told him we had already lost what such an affair might be expected to cost us: the closeness, exclusivity, and trust.

  At the very least, he logicked, what we stood to gain was clarity. And he was willing to gamble that, in the throes of total freedom, I might find I wanted nothing more than to have my old life back. His logic told him our marriage might start looking pretty good after a while. Ian never kidded himself—that was never an option, not a part of his temperament—but on one level he simply could not believe anything looked better than what we had.

  Cal and I had spoken once of our early loves, youthful adventures in romance—or his. From early on, earlier than he felt ready or even willing, he had been sifting through offers. He wasn’t ready and he was picky. Apparently, there were only five (count ’em, five) girls he found attractive in his high school and not many more when he got to college. But reciprocity was never the problem. The ones he wanted seemed to want him too.

  Whereas there were plenty of boys good enough for me—or so I assumed. Since I was not deemed good enough for any of them, it was hard to know for sure. I did not have a hint of a boyfriend until just before senior prom when suddenly (and to this day no one has ever told me how or why) I was everyone’s first choice.

  Something had happened. Somehow I had won the lottery and suitors began pursuing me. You would have thought I just moved to Braxton, that they were all getting their first look at me. Certainly they were looking through a new lens.

  I hardly knew where to begin, so I began by snubbing them, cutting off my nose to spite my reappraised, upgraded face. I did this more in confusion than in vengeful retrospective anger at anyone. The effect was to make them even more eager to win my previously worthless heart and hand.

  The transformation was real, apparently. I was an altered, improved commodity. Even my mother commented on it, and my favorite Uncle Satch (Louie, to his friends) was bombarded with good-natured wolf whistles and dirty old man jokes when he danced with me at my cousin’s wedding that summer. A famously graceful ho
ofer, he had danced me all my life, at first in the air, then on his feet, playfully. Later, when I was the ugly duckling, Uncle Satch would take care to shield me from wallflower status, though in truth I felt perfectly at home with it.

  Now he was dancing with an eighteen-year-old in a scary backless dress and he could not stop telling me how wonderful I looked. He meant it, too. They all meant it. I would enter college with a clean slate. No one there would know I was an ugly duckling. To them I would be this other creature—no beauty, God knows, just a girl who had something that worked. Something that gave her power over boys, whether or not she could bring herself to believe it.

  At first I did not believe it, or trust it to continue. I had never even fantasized such a state, never dreamed a boy might want my company. Convinced I would remain flat-chested all my life, I was surprised and grateful when small (almost normal!) breasts snuck up on me senior year. I didn’t have them at fifteen, when everyone else did, so I had given up waiting, stopped noticing, didn’t much care. I never wanted to be Gina Lollobrigida, I just wanted to be sufficiently normal that no one would notice me.

  I was shy, a “reject,” and the only sort of boy I could imagine being interested was a corresponding reject, someone like Timmy Gabrielson from French Club. Tim looked a lot better too, by the by, when he got rid of his braces and came back from the Peace Corps tanned and confident. Teenagers just have a hard time believing in the future. The present can be so overwhelming that it feels solid and permanent.

  In my teen incarnation, I ruminated less about boyfriends than about a peaceful spinsterhood or (more vividly than that for a time) sisterhood—an actual nunnery. It seemed a solution of sorts. A nun is not a reject, after all, she is the one who rejects, or renounces, the world. She takes herself out of the running in a way that serves only to enhance her stature.