The Twoweeks

by Larry Duberstein

  In lieu of that lie (which I could neither invent nor deliver) I gave it a better try between the sheets. I was “good in bed” to a slightly greater extent, both for Julian’s sake and to give this amoral arbitrary wanton sex a fair chance. It’s bizarre, really, how one can be so uninvolved, for lack of a better word, in an act so intimate. Was there something wrong with me, a unique flaw, or did I just need to see the sun?

  I sailed (they call it that) across the Firth that afternoon, confident the sun would greet me on the other side, in the East Neuk of Fife, where it never failed my father and his golfing buddies. And a few minutes out over the water, it did seem brighter. Away from the gray stone and the gray streets, the gray sheets of glass in shop windows and the gray faces reflected in them. Here at least, in the unenclosed unpunctuated sky, was a more luminous sort of gray.

  Faces looked brighter too, almost ruddy in the spray. One of those faces belonged to Harriet, an older Scotswoman who caught me looking at her and looked me right back. Normally, a woman would have looked away. Harriet not only met my gaze, she introduced herself and offered me a pull from her flask. Though I declined the libation, we were already friends by then. “I know you,” she said, nodding.

  After another pull, she turned palm reader and pronounced, “You are searching for something here. Your head is full of questions.”

  Boy, was it! I had to laugh (at her preternatural insight, or at her presumption) before asking her a couple of easy ones. Nothing about the meaning of life, more in the line of local color. “I’m a word person,” I told her. “Maybe you can help me out on some of these.”

  Oddly, she could not. When I wondered about the difference between a firth and a bay, she shrugged and waved the issue away, saying only “It’s more like a fjord.” And when I pursued the definitions, or differences between a gate, a lane, a wynd, and a close, she winked and said, “Well now, that all depends, doesn’t it.” Harriet was not a word person.

  Then she was gone, the instant we docked at Anstruther, and as soon as she was gone the gray fog closed in again. Everyone else on the ferry had a clear destination. Two by two they left the ark and marched resolutely toward buses and cars, while I stood on the sea-wall watching them go. I was in no hurry. I had no destination and I was transfixed by the rolling and bobbing of the boats at anchor below.

  It was nearly twenty years earlier that we bicycled to this village—Liam and I, Nigel and his sister Katy—and surveyed this precise scene: two dozen fishing boats, most of them faded and worse for the wear, riding the waves below our feet. They lay so close and accessible, we were tempted to jump aboard. As tall green waves swelled against the breakwater, I was tempted to dive in.

  Then we were off, pedaling around for hours. At five o’clock Nigel’s dad would fetch us in his big station wagon. Meanwhile we had all day to explore the small village, eat fish-and-chips from a greasy paper bag shaped like a cone, eat ice cream, play hide-and-seek in a steep wood.

  When finally we coasted back down to the harbor, the boats were gone. Which was not so surprising, except that the water was gone too. An alarming expanse of rippled mud had replaced the Firth of Forth. And to me this was a powerful Biblical scene, like the Red Sea parting. If the sea had run dry, then surely the world must be ending. Apart from the darker teachings of my church, this was a common fear in the 1950s.

  In reality, of course, low tide had arrived. Very low tide. The surf stopped so far out you could walk halfway to Edinburgh without getting your knees wet. And the fishing boats were right where they had been, sort of. The sea level had dropped fifteen feet and so had they. You saw them down there, scattered on sandy mud, when you stepped closer to the railing.

  Liam wrote me off that time too. It was Nigel, though, who broke my heart when with the best intentions he patted my head in sympathy. Or pity. His kind gesture marked me as a foolish child, being consoled by an older wiser man. The wedding was off. Apart from thanking Mr. Patrick for riding us home, I don’t believe I spoke to anyone for three days.

  The Anstruther Arms, pretentious nomenclature notwithstanding, was a small informal hotel two blocks up from the waterfront. Someone had taken the trouble to paint it a dark brown from top to bottom, in keeping with the principle of dull depressing monochromy established by the weather.

  Each day there loomed a single iron-gray cloud the size of the sky (of the universe, the galaxy) and from this cloud would issue forth a froth of cold drizzle, unless (the lone variation) that drizzle thickened into a soaking rain. It reached a point where the lighter sort of rain qualified as fine weather. “I believe it may be clearing” was a straw much clutched at around dusk, when it was harder to tell.

  One gloomy afternoon, I broke our rule and telephoned Ian. That was not an afternoon where anyone believed it might be clearing, more one where you were apt to believe it never would. I was lonely (and wondered how Ian was faring), but it was also about using this particular phone. Planted by a sign marking the road to Crail, it was your classic boothy, red as legend and dense with architectural detail.

  We were only to communicate in the case of emergencies—Ian’s ironclad rule. After a dismal week in Edinburgh and six dismal days on the East Neuk of Fife, I felt justified in defining it as an emergency.

  “I think I’m ready to come home.”

  “Because it’s raining, for God’s sake?” said Ian.

  “Raining and cold.”

  “Get thee to a pub, for goodness’ sake. Sit thee down by a fire.”

  “Tried that. And trust me, I’ll try it again. But even the fires are cold here.”

  “Order up a hot toddy, and some nice hot food.”

  “Mostly it’s been the cold smoked salmon.”

  “So there you are.”

  “I know. That’s the problem. Here I am.”

  “Get thee to the Costa Brava, if all you want is weather.”

  Was weather all I wanted? I had come to think it might be. Being cold is like being hungry, the way it can block out your sense of everything else until you solve it. I was hardly the only victim. Even Angus (my landlord at the Arms, who testified he loved “the wet” and boasted of fishing in the rain at Loch Tay “where the salmon seem to rise to it”) had become fed up. He talked about heading south, if he could only convince his cousin to take over the hotel for a week. South, to him, meant London, where he reckoned you could count on one dry day in four.

  I asked Angus if he recalled a year when the sun didn’t shine for three months. “I recall quite a number like that,” he said, with a smile that bespoke fortitude, not humor.

  He was kidding, I guess, about going away, because I offered to run the place for a week if his cousin couldn’t make it, and he backed off. Couldn’t afford a holiday, could he then? Had I not noticed there was only myself and two other guests at the inn, only a fistful at the bar, an armful in the restaurant? It was so bad he might have to shutter the place up and join the fishing fleet.

  Or so he said. When I trotted out this gossipy detail at the Waterloo, I was quickly set straight by the old girl behind the bar. “Angus says that a lot. He has been about to shutter it for twenty years now, and I’m told his old man was about to do the same for thirty years before that. Angus will join the fishing fleet around the time I get me to a nunnery.”

  Her too? But no, she winked as she said it, and appended a broader wink for a couple of genuine fishermen holding down the curved end of the bar. They had the shiny mahogany slab pinned beneath their pint glasses and their heavy elbows.

  It was clear which of the two was keeping her from the nunnery these days (the older one, “my good man Flatley”), and even clearer when his buddy slid down to chat me up. He too was a winker—a winker, a drinker, and (understandably, given his profession) a bit of a stinker. When he finally got around to inviting me onto his boat for “the grand tour” I was tempted, not so much by Hergy as by his boat. I could board it, case it, and later boast about having done so to Liam.

&nb
sp; “Maybe tomorrow,” I said, dodging. “I’d rather see it in the daylight.”

  “Such as it is,” Hergy grinned. He was just going through the motions. He would have been stunned blind and dumb if I’d said yes to him.

  In bed alone, under a thick pile of thin blankets, I broke a cardinal rule of my own making: I allowed myself to think about Cal. I wasn’t fooling myself when I called Ian earlier that day. I knew it was Cal I wanted to call. Cal whose company I wanted at the pub rail, and Cal whose arms I wanted around me now at the Anstruther Arms. Denying this had not worked; admitting it didn’t do me much good either.

  I did what I could to shape a small independent life. Each morning I would go down to a tea shop where they had terrific currant scones, strong coffee, and the International Herald Tribune with its three-day-old news. It was all news to me, as I had lost track of public events completely.

  After a ritual hour there, I would brave the rain and ride out on a bicycle for miles. I rolled down every gate and close and lane and wynd (however these might be defined) in a joyless solo reprise of our carefree childhood Saturdays. Back at the Anstruther Arms, I would “lie down for a minute” that invariably lasted two hours. Then it was down the stairs to Angus’ sparsely populated dining room, where with reheated coffee from his morning urn, I set myself up at the window table to write. Trying to justify my existence—but to whom?

  After a walk to the docks, I’d come back and curl up with a book, working my way toward suppertime. To Angus’ chagrin, I took to eating my smoked salmon sandwich at the Waterloo, where life was a bit livelier. Hergy turned out to be a decent guy, happy just to gab. He and Flatley and Georgiana, the bartender, were always ready with a wink. And there were others, a crew of locals.

  I expect they were debating whether to categorize me as a harmless lonely woman or a dangerous escaped lunatic. What on earth was I doing here? Too polite to ask, they waited for information to emerge. The problem was I had no information to offer. What was I doing here?

  I have never been a complainer. To the contrary, I drive people nuts with my ceaseless good cheer, and I gather I’m most annoying on the subject of weather. Isn’t this a beautiful day, I can’t help exclaiming, on a day that Ian or Marisa might classify as bearable. Every day was beautiful to me. It just was.

  So what was wrong with these days? What was wrong with me? Reluctant to let it be Cal Byerly, I attributed it to the unrelenting rain. By any objective standard, these were not beautiful days—they were extreme, they were awful. To meet my few fellow travelers (teams of Germans going about, a few Londoners, one Nigerian Brit with a quiet American wife) was to listen to a litany of woe-is-me’s. Their day was ruined, their trip was ruined, their lives were ruined . . . So it wasn’t just me.

  It came as a revelation that the Germans’ English was easier to understand than the Scots’. While I could puzzle through Angus’ harangues and nod approvingly at Hergy’s cheerful utterances, the literal wording tended to escape me. “Would you mind writing that down?” I took to requesting, for on paper their Scottish inflections would evaporate and I would find myself looking at perfectly familiar nouns and verbs.

  Whereas the Germans spoke it clearly. Franz (and yes, while no Heinz materialized, a Franz actually did, one evening at the Waterloo) not only spoke it well, he wrote—in English—for a living. “This is my market,” he shrugged, indicating the four walls of the pub. He was writing a book about darts for his London publisher.

  “A whole book about darts?” I said.

  “Yes certainly darts,” he said in his clear, brusque and always unpunctuated English. I had not seen his written material, but conversationally he had yet to acquire the comma or the dash. “My third whole book and many many articles and so yes I would say so.”

  A darts writer, then. He did have a faint guttural burr to his speech, like the actor Maximilian Schell, but his boldest national marker was baggage, the sheer volume of it. Like all his countrymen traveling around, Franz carried three rooms of furniture on his back. To watch a German board a bus was like watching a complex circus act—part juggler, part strongman, and part contortionist.

  Franz was tall, with lank brown hair and soft round eyes so dark they looked more black than brown. I don’t know exactly what is meant by the phrase “a skier’s body,” but Franz reminded me of a skier, or an Alpine guide, the way he held his head and neck, alert and swiveling as though racing downhill, swerving past flags. He was traveling alone, he confided, because this was his work and because “to travel is not an activity people can do together.”

  This postulate (originally stated as ironclad fact, 2 + 2 = 4) turned out to have a corollary, less stringent in nature. People could travel together “for a few nice days quite successfully,” and Franz suspected he and I might accomplish as much, starting out in the morning. He would be driving to Birnam and Dunkeld, then on to Aberfeldy, where he swore you smelled salmon on the air “the way you smell horses in a barn.” It would be his privilege to show me these sights and smells.

  Could anything be crazier than signing on for such a journey? To be out of touch, in a foreign land, and consent to drive off with a man about whom I knew practically nothing? I didn’t even know for sure he wrote about darts. (Even if he did, what kind of weird obsession was that?) He could be a sociopath, or a collector of Nazi memorabilia. He could be a cannibal, for all I knew.

  He struck me as a gentle soul, though, and honest. “I have of course a wife,” he said, by way of refining his terms. There were to be no deceptions, no illusions.

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “You are glad?” he said, inclining his head as if to better hear me, though possibly he was just swerving past a flag.

  I confirmed that I was glad, without mentioning why, namely that it tended to confirm he was honest, and just possibly normal—except I suppose for the honesty.

  “Don’t you want to know if I have a husband?”

  “What difference does this make? When I propose marriage then yes it makes the difference and then yes I need this fact. Why not let us first go see the Birks of Aberfeldy.”

  This was Franz’ ticket to ride. He was “a writer who need not make anything rhyme. Dart fart tart no need.” But I was a poet and Robert Burns was a poet and roaming the birch forests of Aberfeldy, Burns had set down some of his best rhymes. With pleasure Franz would show me the Birks of Aberfeldy. It would be his privilege.

  He had rented a car in Glasgow and, in fact, would be driving back there by way of the Highlands, if I wished to come along. This would be within the limits to which people could travel together, I gathered, and Glasgow too, he speculated, surely had its lyrical side.

  “Why not let me first come as far as Aberfeldy,” I mimicked him, “and maybe just as a friend. We might be taking two rooms.”

  “A fair arrangement. I am content to clear the premier hurdle. Possibility is possible yes? Nothing more asked.”

  Except that we became lovers an hour later, still in Anstruther. The not-asking worked. It got to a point where I was comfortable with Franz and his quiet uncomplicated delight in everything, and at the same time a point where I had much drink taken. On my way upstairs I teetered between concluding the entire enterprise was an ugly immoral business, on the one hand, and just rolling with it on the other. In a seriously twisted way, I was offering myself up.

  In his rented room (at a house nearby) I expected Franz to shift gears, to accelerate and mount a Luftwaffe-style attack, but apparently something traumatic had happened to the Germanic male, or so I extrapolated from the handful I met. They were so terrified of repeating the past, or owning it on a personal level, that an undiscussed gentle hesitancy, most commonly expressed as excessive politeness, had taken root in their souls. While they did charge around the continent in a commandeering fashion (ve vill do zis, you vill do zat) they left the moral choices to others.

  I chose against intercourse. “It’s a middle way, for us Americans,” I explained
, and he nodded and smiled, saying (without punctuation, as always) “Sure I get it sex but no fucking” and that is what we engaged in that night.

  I also chose to return to my own bed later on, as I was already sobering up and revisiting my decision to leave with Dartman in the morning. Gloomy as it was, I had grown attached to the Anstruther Arms. I had grown fond of grumpy avuncular Angus, plus I had achieved a hard-won order to my days there, a nice balance of melancholy work and melancholy play.

  At bottom I am a nest-maker, and here I had woven my nest. It was lonely and tinged with mildew; still it was a nest. To hit the road with Dartman, who was only presumptively not a cannibal, represented a radical flight from that nest.

  “Save my room,” I told Angus in the morning. “I may be back tomorrow, or even tonight. Don’t bother washing the sheets right away.”

  “I’ll have no trouble saving it, my dear, the competition being slim as it is. But I shall place a plaque on the door and reserve it in perpetuity. No man, woman, or child shall ever lay a hair on your pillow, forever and aye.”

  “What if you shutter the place and join the fleet?”

  “Then I shall put in the terms of sale that Room 6 is sacred space. But for a day or two? Truly, dear, don’t you worry.”

  So away we went to Birnam Wood. Right off the bat, in Birnam and Dunkeld, we established a pattern whereby each morning we would poke about together, each afternoon we would be writers (he researching, I rhyming dart with fart), and by night we were dinner companions and unconventional bedmates. Our dinners were invariably taken at the same pubs or coaching hotels where Franz had done his daily research, since every small village in Scotland has precisely one such hostelry. If you wished for your smoked salmon, your Tennent’s 70 Shilling Ale, and your dish of whinberry crumble, you knew right where to find them.