The Twoweeks

by Larry Duberstein

  Franz never did vary from his gentle manner, never pressed for more than I offered. Until the heavy wheeze of sleep set in, he even remained a respecter of boundaries. Only then did he become territorial (the Hun will out?) and occupy by increments an impressive percentage of the bed. The Sudetenland fell, Czechoslovakia fell, the Russian border loomed . . . In Birnam I elbowed him with mixed results; in Aberfeldy I ended up sleeping in a mouldy armchair.

  He was right about the salmon. Every stream, all the waterfalls and woven rapids, carried that salmon perfume. Every tree and rock exuded it. Small processing plants and backyard smokehouses were everywhere. This part of Scotland was as saturated with salmon as it was saturated with rainwater.

  The ceiling of cloud might lose coherence long enough to allow a teasing slice of open sky to appear. Once, as we wandered among those birches of Aberfeldy, past the ropes of falling water, along a winding stream-crossed trail, the sun appeared for twenty minutes and we gazed up with mouths agape, like children staring as Superman flew over. Otherwise, the rain continued.

  In a tea shop in Dunkeld, I managed another poem, and though dart and fart were nowhere in evidence, I did nearrhyme, to some effect, tubers and hubris. We had come over the ancient toll bridge behind an astonishing potato truck, or a truck loaded to an astonishing extent with potatoes. It had no cover, not even a loose canvas, and though the spuds were piled so high and wide they cantilevered over the rickety wooden sides, not a single one fell off. A million potatoes, yet stable as the ancient unmortared stone walls. This visual image took root, grew into a metaphor, ended up a poem.

  In that same tea shop, I had the next in a series of odd encounters with small assertive Scotswomen. There would be three in all, beginning with Harriet, the woman on the ferry who looked me in the eye and told me my head was filled with questions. Now came Mrs. Cameron, however, and soon enough I would be meeting Tiny Nurse. So three of them. Given the numerology and the harsh admonitions each of them bodied forth, they seemed in the aggregate portentous, like Shakespeare’s trio of witches. It was not lost on me that we had come to Birnam Wood.

  I incurred my fate, if that’s what she was, while sitting down at one end of a long table anchored at the opposite end by Mrs. Cameron. This was the custom when the smaller tables were taken; yet the instant I sat she rose, as though we were on a teeter-totter. Blushing, I stood right back up, to apologize: “I didn’t mean to scare you off, madame.”

  “No one scares me off, dear girl,” she said with considerable flintiness and the thinnest arc of a smile. She continued on to the counter for more coffee (“petrol” was what she called it, and black was how she drank it) with an impressive spring in her white-sneakered step. From ten paces away, she seemed a small agile athlete. Close up, despite the almost frighteningly blue eyes and a row of small perfectly white teeth, she aged thirty years. Threadlike blue veins lay close to the surface of her paper-thin skin, like a map of rural waterways.

  “Don’t you ever, ever, let anyone scare you off, either,” she said, shutting one eye for emphasis. We were both on the same end of the teeter-totter now, our faces two feet apart.

  Harriet had provided only a first name, Mrs. Cameron gave only a last. In Mrs. Cameron’s company I felt obliged to be Mrs. Somebody too, an obligation I resisted. I remained Lara, didn’t let her scare me off—though it was a close call.

  “I come here each day for my dose,” she explained, “while Mr. Cameron goes and stands like a happy fool on the rocks of the River Tay, and once every blue moon arrives back home with a catch I can cook him.”

  As we talked, I felt a new amorphous guilt creep into my soul. Because I spoke of places and schools and jobs, and because these implied freedom and money and middle-class opportunity, I presumed the guilt must be cultural. Not that any residue of hardship lingered about Mrs. Cameron, who spoke of a house and a garden and two boys “in the city, very successful.” It was just that she had been born a mile from where we sat, had married in a church we could see from where we sat, and had never lived or even traveled anywhere else. The lone variable in her life was whether or not Mr. Cameron brought home a fish for her to cook.

  “You might call me provincial, dear,” she said (like Harriet, reading my mind with ease) “and you’d be right enough. I believe in depth, not breadth, you see. I never meant to alter course, and so I never have.”

  “Good for you, Mrs. Cameron.”

  “You don’t mean it, but that’s all right.”

  “I do mean it. You’ve made your choices. Controlled your own destiny.”

  “That’s utter nonsense. But I’ve not altered course.”

  “No,” I said, much chastened and increasingly wary of the blue gleaming eyes, one of them so fixed and fierce it might prove to be a glassy.

  “We set our course, Mr. Cameron and myself, a long time ago. Fifty years next month, not all cakes and ale, plenty of the other. But we’ve not altered course.”

  “No.”

  “And so we shall reach our destination. Stay on course, dear girl. Don’t scatter your brains to the wind, like some do. I can see you have more sense than that.”

  “One hopes,” I said—modestly, she may have thought. But sense? If anyone was keeping score, only the schizophrenics could be racking up lower totals.

  In all likelihood Mrs. Cameron had seen a few mini-skirted London birds cavorting on the telly, or perhaps she knew of a local beauty rendered pregnant by the itinerant drummer. That was the sort of cautionary tale to fit inside her rubric “like some do.”

  As we were swapping histories, I found (perhaps because I was so eager to reassure her) that mine was to a remarkable extent about Ian. The ways in which I had recently altered course were somehow expunged from the historical narrative. She had not seen me with Franz, knew nothing of Cal. What I did a week ago with Julian Kelman would have caused her to pitch her petrol in my face.

  Not-alter-course remained the bedrock refrain, the homily. Mr. Cameron, the happy fool on the riverbank, was a given. She could hardly criticize her own choice, could she now, having made it freely in God’s sight. So she would live with it fifty years and beyond. My choice was Ian. Only a careless spoiled American child would question it; only an ingrate or a dope, who would come to no good. Mrs. Cameron’s implied judgment, her power to withhold grace, felt almost like a memo from God.

  The memo cost me another night’s sleep. Franz didn’t help. We had done our non-conjugal dance and, in what is usually accounted to be typical male fashion, Franz was sound asleep mere seconds after his bliss subsided. I had no such luck and would squirm in discomfort throughout that long salmonsmelling night, through the hours of his radical sprawling and snoring.

  But I have not been fair to Franz here. As I look back on those confusing cloud-choked days, I cannot recall a single way in which he deceived or disappointed me, or a single thing he did to earn my snotty sarcasm. Franz was a generous and goodnatured companion, who seemed to lack entirely the reflex of complaint.

  He never objected to my Papish evasions in bed, never remarked my moods or contradicted my odd choices: everything was good by him. Silly faces I made (expressions I would have categorized as standard American banalities, such as thumbing my nose or rolling my eyes) he found absolutely hilarious. Something gained in the translation, perhaps, the way any European accent can charm us by its linguistic imprecision.

  He was just so relaxed. And why not, I suppose, if he could make a living playing darts in pubs and writing about it—not to mention stay married while taking lovers. (Widening course!) Still, nothing ruffled Franz’ feathers.

  An example. Leaving a pub one night, we discovered we had brought no cash with which to settle up. In that brief flash of reckoning at the bar rail, I knew exactly how Ian would react: poorly concealed panic and then some elaborate strategy to circumvent his embarrassment. Cal Byerly? I guessed he would have a laugh about it and then escape through the bathroom window.

  Franz simply chuckle
d as he turned his pockets inside out to pantomime our situation for the landlady. Trained to think like Ian, I was about to propose I stay behind as collateral while Franz went to fetch some money. Such a solution, with its implied mistrust, never occurred to Franz or to our creditress. No flint-eyed close-with-a-dollar Scot was she. She shrugged, he shrugged, and everyone in earshot nodded, as though we had all been friends for decades.

  “It’s four and six, as things stand,” she said. “It’ll stay at four and six for a while before the interest begins to accrue. This one” (she was pouring us two fresh pints) “will be on the house.”

  All I mean to say is that Franz was faultless, that the fault lay all with me, for my sketchy participation and now this retrospective sarcasm. Much as I liked Franz, the truth is he remained a sort of shadow figure to me. One morning as we rambled the hills near Fort William, I had a flash of concern I might have strayed too far (from signposts, from fellow humans) and might find myself in danger. Somehow I had managed to forget that Franz was hiking right alongside me.

  Worse than failing to register his presence, I could be embarrassed about it when I did. On one level (that of the high school cheerleader I could never have been?) I regretted that a world of strangers might presume Franz to be my consort. In a bizarre twist of vanity, I felt an urge to explain myself: It’s not what you think, this man is just a casual friend.

  And there it was again, not just the vanity but also the nagging truth that Cal Byerly was still on my mind. I would not have wanted to explain Cal away. If I had to be viewed as someone’s appendage, defined by the company I keep, Cal was the companion by which I wished to be judged.

  And this despite the fact no one was judging, or even noticing me.

  I took to writing Cal postcards. There were things I simply had to tell him. In Arrochar they laid a trout out on my plate, the entire fish, with a maraschino cherry inset like marquetry in the exposed eye socket. How could I not relay this incident to him? How not share with him the stark realization that one is not “eating fish,” one is eating a fish.

  Composing these postcards was therapeutic. After writing the day’s card, setting down such details as the cherry-eyed fish or the overloaded potato truck, I could let go of Cal for a while. Breathing comfortably again, I could remind myself that Ian was my choice; that I had not altered course.

  I had no intention of mailing the cards. The only question was whether I would save them, and it was not much of a question. They were newsworthy, I rationalized each time I added one to the packet, sliding the thick rubber band back into place. They comprised a quirky secondary record of my travels. For one thing, they were never selected for standard fare wish-you-werehere scenery, but rather in diligent pursuit of offbeat local color, as with the photo of four lanky pocky lads from Crianlarich, The Hilltoppers, duded up in rhinestone suits, playing country-and-western music.

  Who knew, by the way, that in the Scottish hill-country one could wake to the strains of Conway Twitty himself singing “Hello Darlin’” on a radio down in the hotel kitchen? This particular song I understood to be nothing less than a postcard back from Cal. I had sent none of mine (and he had no idea where I was) yet surely that explained this unlikely emanation, this poignant comic reminder of our night with the man née Jenkins. As I strained to listen, I had a clear vision of the Twitty Birds: the little Twitty with his eyes shut tight as a televangelist in his transports, the big Twitty rocking so far forward he threatened to topple like a tree onto the front row patrons.

  We had walked home after the concert that night, walked across half of Boston, across the Charles River, then across half of Cambridge, singing as we went. Back at Miller Road we devoured a bag of fat pretzels and drank Colt .45 malt liquor—our fallback meal—and jumped into bed. Recalling this, I found it jarring to think that right now Ian Witherspoon was sleeping in that bed.

  His bed though! His home. (Or our bed; our home. We had lived there for years.)

  I telephoned Ian a second time—from Crianlarich, that morning—to tell him our marriage was over. Fortunately, there was no answer. The marriage might well prove to be over, but Conway Twitty should not be allowed a voice in the matter. And even if I proved capable of reaching such a decision on my own, I ought not pass it along via an awkward, time-staggered, transatlantic phone connection.

  Once again I tried to peer calmly, realistically, into the future that would accompany such a decision. Chaos, loneliness, misery—and then dating. The loss of family, loss of friends. Ian’s mom would not remain my friend. Ian would not remain my friend, either. Who would? I made a list of those who would tilt toward Ian and who toward me. And when my calm began to crumble in the face of such depressing assessments, I simply pulled back from the notion that a confused, dejected, rejected girl spinning her wheels in a foreign land was fit to make important decisions.

  Was there really a decision to make, though? However bleak the prospect of leaving Ian, was staying in the marriage a realistic choice at this point? It was in the context of this inquiry that my encounter with Tiny Nurse (my third, and final, and scariest witch) was particularly disturbing.

  I was reading a book with my dinner and so was she, two women dining solo in a drab coaching hotel. There was only one other party in the room and the instant they decamped she came over to join me, as if our encounter was scripted. (Enter stage left, witch number three.)

  No introductions at all this time. She never gave her name (not in the script, I guess) and so I never gave mine. She only became Tiny Nurse to me when her profession and her weight (“seven stone soaking wet”) emerged. She was an alarmingly thin woman, with skeletal hands and a razor’s edge to her facial bones. Before she uttered a syllable, the restlessly flexing muscles in her jaw and a cold spark in her coal-dark eye marked her as an angry woman.

  At a glance, at a given moment, one could miss it. Lavishly decorated with turquoise earrings, a delicate gold neck-chain, and silver rings on every finger, she was quite pretty when she smiled. The smiles came unexpectedly, quick flickers that fixed you, threw you off the scent. Nonetheless, Tiny Nurse was clearly choked with anger.

  Not at me, mercifully. I was merely her confidant for the evening, the chosen recipient of her widely ranging complaints. In this regard, she was the polar opposite of Franz. He had no complaints, she had an infinite list. It began with her back, the sacs and discs and spurs all so painful and so hopeless in ways clinically detailed, one failed procedure after another.

  Then there was the oppressive, underpaid, thankless job she had just quit. “Be assured, thirteen years with the acute insane was enough for me,” she said, as though I had disapproved of her decision to leave. One wondered whether so many years of proximity to the insane was enough to have rubbed off on her to some extent.

  There was her father’s final illness, forcing her return to the north, to John O’ Groats, to care for him, though he was an awful man and the people of that town were “awful nosy people, through and through.” She turned her head in disgust at the very thought of them, and for an instant I feared she might spit over her shoulder.

  Dear God how she needed to drag herself upstairs, to soak her back in a tub, to sleep ten hours if she could. I encouraged her embrace of this program: the hot bath, the warm bed, they could only help. But she would not go. Instead she rambled on about her love of solitude, her preference for dining and drinking alone. “The doctors all decry drink,” she said, narrowing her eyes in almost comic exaggeration, an expression culled from silent films. “Then what do they do? You know what they do.”

  They drank, the doctors did. I figured that out. But I could not figure out this difficult woman. I would pick up the scent, then lose it again. She would grant me the pretty smile, then tense up and glare. What did Tiny Nurse want from me? She kept reprising the hot soak upstairs and perhaps a massage, which raised the possibility of a come-on, her love of solitude notwithstanding. But this was neither linear nor consistent, and none of it was ev
er clear. I could not decide whether Tiny Nurse was nice or nasty, sane or insane, heterosexual or lesbian, a rustic or a cosmopolitan.

  Not that it mattered what she was, other than a severe caution to any woman in grave danger of cutting herself loose from the safety net. A woman such as myself. In the garbled outline of her life, one did see what the world could do to a woman alone. How inexorably it could reduce her to a set of small sharp bones and a litany of complaint verging on the “acute insane.”

  Tiny Nurse was safely away for John O’ Groats before I came downstairs the next morning, yet she would accompany me across the North Sea. The lurching bumpy flight from Glasgow to London could not shake her loose, the freezing green swells could not drown her. Even in Montmartre, where ten days later I took the tiniest room (with the tiniest window ever fabricated, a window the size of a magazine cover), there would be space for Tiny Nurse to lodge with me. She fit just fine.

  I had selected the room more for its price than its charm. (Apart from a pleasant café two doors down, it had no charm.) But you never know. I did get a poem out of it—out of that minimal window, as a matter of fact, for while very little light came in, one could gaze out upon a visual cornucopia. Through that single page of daylight, I could see the fenestrated bell tower of a church, a dozen tiled roofs (shaken into Cubist planes I tried in vain to understand geometrically), and a world of sagging wires that cross-hatched my patch of sky. There were doves coming and going from their nest in a cornice, and the regimented tops of Lombardy poplars at a nearby park.

  The one thing I could not see was my future; that was a window too small. I understood I was not thinking of Ian the right way. I didn’t miss him in the right way. Never wondered or, by implication, cared enough what he was doing there without me. It was George Eliot who declared that “we fall on the leaning side.” Had I been capable of leaning toward Ian, my life would have been a great deal easier. What could be better than the uncomplicated affection I had counted on from him for so long, and the security? That in the grip of my loneliness and gloom I could be leaning the other way, toward difficulty and insecurity, made my indecision seem primarily a crisis of courage.