The Twoweeks

by Larry Duberstein

  Whereas sex with Ian was more than important, it was life and death. The life or death of our marriage, of my soul, and of his happiness, I feared. I hated lying to Ian. Rather than do so, I had put him through the terrible suffering of The Twoweeks and its aftermath. Now, in his hour of need, I could not allow myself to say I loved him—in case I didn’t. Even a potential lie I would not utter. Consequently, fewer and fewer words were uttered.

  We could discuss the chicken or the wine at dinner, and the news of the day, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Muhammad Ali. We could take up my work search, his actual work, his mother’s impending 65th birthday. At breakfast we could share the Globe, as always, reading one another the outrages and follies of the day as we came across them. Concerning ourselves, and our peculiar impasse, we had nothing to say.

  By the following Thursday we had reached a point where Ian would never have taken the initiative in bed, not if he sensed my reluctance. He would just up and go, walk out the door, before he would pressure me. For me to make it happen was a sort of lie, I suppose, but I was humbled by his suffering and by his sense of honor. Plus, as I say, it was another Thursday. The devil really is in the details.

  I lied far more egregiously that night when I whispered “Goodnight, love” as we rolled apart. Though I tried to rationalize it (I had not said I loved him, exactly), the truth is my simpleminded moral discipline had broken under the weight of his pain. I so badly wanted to comfort him, to make him feel loved, that the word seeped out under the iron gate of my will.

  To my mother, pride was the worst of the deadly sins. “Selfcentered” was the dirtiest word in her vocabulary. When at age eighteen I was transformed into this woman who magically attracted men, she was quick to inform me how lucky I was to have this power arrive late in life.

  “Late in life? Mom, I’m eighteen.”

  It was late enough, she explained, in terms of character formation. “You’ll never be too proud. Not when you’ve seen how superficial it all is, how arbitrary and fickle. You were a sensitive child, and you will be a sensible woman.”

  Now here I was manipulating my husband’s heart like a puppeteer. Mixing the sauce of our lives like a chef—a shot of Tabasco, a splash of lime. Steering our ship toward the shoals, clinging to the tiller though I lacked all skill and had no plan. Every second-rate metaphor applied to my ceaseless, useless selfexcoriation. Whoever I loved, I knew who I hated: myself.

  To make matters worse, I had not written four good lines of poetry since leaving Europe. I understand that nothing could matter less to the average person. It’s also true one could publish a hundred poems and count oneself fortunate if a dozen people bothered to read them. They might not even be worth reading. But to a poet none of that matters.

  And by poet I mean nothing highfaluting, nothing more than a human being who chooses to write poetry. I render no judgments. My mother’s pal Jackie Loughery wrote a poem every Saturday morning for decades. She had them tucked carefully inside the pages of each year’s calendar, and those poems were what any critic would call doggerel, or worse, drivel. Lilacs in May, cute kittens, the soul on fire.

  But Mrs. Loughery was deeply pleased by each one she fashioned. She was completed by them, in a way neither her Sunday morning churchgoing nor her Sunday afternoon golf games could approximate. Church was her duty; golf was her fun; poetry was her fulfillment.

  The one thing I did get right was steering clear of Cal Byerly. I knew his routes and haunts, so the temptation was there to run into him “accidentally.” Then there was the lesser temptation to check back on reviews for the Godot play, see how his Estragon had been received, possibly learn what was next for him. I did not do those things and I didn’t ask any third parties about him. My hands were clean.

  I did run into Gerald Gordon one afternoon at the Grolier, where he greeted me like a long lost friend. Where had we been? I knew Gerald’s “we” encompassed Cal, not Ian. We never did get around to explaining our strange arrangement to them, The Twoweeks, so they had drawn their own perfectly reasonable conclusions.

  “How is Calvert?” he therefore asked. When I put my index finger to my lips to shush him, then shook my head no, the only reasonable conclusion Gerald could draw was that I had lost a few marbles since he last saw me.

  Into the maw of this fine mess came Cal’s note. The envelope arrived sometime after we had both left for work and before Ian would be getting home. Had Cal spied on us? Had he gauged our comings and goings to make sure I saw the note first, or had he thrown caution to the wind, carelessly relying on dumb luck? Even a passerby would have seen it from the street: a bright white rectangle pinned to the blue door, like a public notice of the hanging.

  I wondered about this even as I was snatching the envelope and jumbling it in with the day’s mail. Wondered too if Mrs. Ridley had observed my sleight of hand from her front window. Had she watched Cal come and go? She had an uncanny knack for being at that window any time you hoped no one was looking. Ian was careful never to pick his nose, for fear Mrs. Ridley would catch him in the act and tell him how disappointed she was. Disappoint her, I shrugged, but he would never.

  I used to think I was a reasonably mature woman. College, travel, jobs, marriage. Oh, and I own a car. Technically, what else is involved? Children? I felt ready for that too. One shameful day in Paris I had fantasized Winnie’s untimely death, and a call for me to step in. Jake and Hetty would need me there, Cal would want me there. I felt capable of taking over, accepting the challenge. I didn’t wish for it, it wasn’t that sort of fantasy; more like a what-if, or an anything-can-happen.

  Mature, though? This note whittled me down to a jittery teenaged girl, and just the sort of teenaged girl I had never even been: volatile, and vulnerable, and fearful without knowing why. Too fearful to tear open that envelope. Instead, I set about the breakfast dishes, gave the junk mail an unusually close reading, put on a pot of coffee I had no intention of drinking. Swept the kitchen floor, only to find myself sweeping it again.

  It’s the pattern I fall into when I have a response from a magazine. The poem might be a hopeless stab (sent in cold to The New Yorker, where they remove unsolicited poetry from one envelope and put it into another in a single graceful unbroken motion) or a fifty/fifty shot at Treetops or The Low Plains Review, each of whom had taken poems in the past. No matter. Whenever I find myself standing at the gates of Acceptance and Rejection, my approach is to stall.

  But what would constitute rejection here? For that matter, what would constitute acceptance? I could not come up with anything on either side of the equation, and yet I was sure such a judgment must be contained within the envelope.

  I sat, I stood, I paced. I locked the back door against the possibility of Mrs. Ridley bursting in, wagging her big loose index finger in my face and seizing the document before I could read it. I poured some of the coffee I didn’t want, doctored it with cream and sugar it wouldn’t need, checked the pilot light because the kitchen smelled of either mildew or gas.

  Finally I sliced the envelope open and peered inside cautiously, as though peering around a dark corner in a bad neighborhood. It contained a single page, crowded with word clumps organized by topic.

  Sorry. I didn’t mean to write, then didn’t intend to deliver what I’d written. I wrote it, I delivered it, I’m sorry. I was seeking catharsis.

  Music. Day 14 was the day the music died. Never again for me the work of Harold Jenkins and I may require surgery to get Linda Ronstadt out of my head. It’s been a Long Long Time already.

  Water. I am grateful for winter, for frozen ponds and rivers. In a movie it was summer and the troupe of laughing skinny-dipping actors made me sad. I just wanted to get arrested, with you, at that lake in Wellesley.

  Poetry. The book you gave me. I wanted so much to love it, and I couldn’t. In my head I keep apologizing for this failure and trying it again. No dice.

  The T. Never took it before you, haven’t taken it since. There is a curse on every T-stop.
I get depressed just walking past the entrances. Before The Twoweeks I would not even have noticed them.

  Miller Road. Your neighborhood is cursed too. I turned down a dinner invitation on Brainerd Street that might have led to a part at the Wilbur. It was too close. What if I had veered off, detoured down Miller Road like a homing pigeon, climbed into your bed?

  Gerald and Debra. I sort of miss them. I think of the “good times” and I think of Gerald and Debra? Uh oh. But of course who I really miss is you. Every hour, pretty much.

  This note. “Hope this finds you well.” I have tried to keep it short & snappy, not too awful an imposition. In fact I cut it by 92% because a famous editor (are there famous editors?) supposedly said that was the whole trick. Honestly, Lara, you should have seen the first draft.

  Though it bore no salutation and no signature, it was obviously From Cal, With Love. It was a love letter, whether he knew it or not.

  But it was not a help. Not to me anyway, and not likely to Cal either. The letter indicated that he missed me, wished life could be different, and was struggling emotionally. Confessing as much would not change anything, or for that matter provide catharsis, it would only slow our recovery. It was a sweet confession and a stupid thing to do.

  The note upset me terribly. And it frustrated me, because I had such a powerful impulse to write back. I was burning to respond, to drop a note in the pneumatique instantly, by return mail. I wanted to deliver the entire packet of postcards I had written him.

  It was my duty to resist this urge, for his sake and mine. Our movie was over, whether or not we liked the ending. Catharsis lay nowhere on our map, however frustrating we found that to be. There was only quicksand on our map, in every direction, and we would be fools to wade in any deeper.

  I did resist writing back. I resisted even thinking about it. But I felt invaded by that damned note. From that moment on, Cal was hovering just outside my door. How could I ignore the fact that this time he had actually been there? He had been on my street, on lots of streets, and he was on them all still. Once again he was like an invasive species, like kudzu, spreading through the city.

  The note saddled me with brand new guilt, as well. Maybe it was not my fault it came, but until I brought myself to tell Ian it had come, anything else I said to him would constitute a lie. To ask if he had slept well, how his lecture went, whether he liked the idea of pine nuts in the salad—these were all terrible, trivial lies.

  “I have had a note from Cal,” was the single tellable truth. Any other words from my mouth simply compounded the original lie with blather.

  6

  Tea and Coffee

  (DECEMBER 26, 2008)

  It wasn’t why she woke before dawn, but it was her first thought upon waking: would Cal find the page she had removed from her Twoweeks journal? Somehow she had forgotten how persistent he could be.

  She had made no serious effort to conceal it, merely placing it out of the way, slipping it into the “current” file because that one was handy. As she did so, Lara had asked herself why it mattered, why she cared so much to keep Cal from seeing now what she had been feeling way back then. For that matter, why did it matter then?

  Well, there was all that fencing with him, jockeying for position: it was always a chore holding your ground against Cal Byerly. Lara, who had never cared to be (or even appear to be) vulnerable to anyone, had perfected a surface insouciance as protective coloration. There was a ditty she sang to him more than once in those difficult days—“Got along without you before I met you / Gonna get along without you now”—and she used it, or the stance the jaunty lyric represented, to maintain a balance, both within herself and between the two of them. Sometimes, she believed it was a true sample, the way she was, but at all times it was how she presented herself. So there was that.

  Downstairs, Lara lit the burner under the kettle, hushed its whistle the instant it rose, handled the glass and spoon like brittle eggs, kept the quiet. She was tired and could have slept hours more, had further sleep been obtainable. She took her tea to the study and sat stilly at the desk for a moment, hands enclosing the steaming glass, absorbing its heat, eyes shut. Then she sipped twice, opened her eyes, and saw it was darker inside the house than out. The moon, still high, spread its light evenly over a surrounding sea of snow.

  She switched on the lamp and settled into the corner chair, holding her tea in one hand and the foolish page in the other. Lara had glanced at it the other day. Had leafed through the manuscript and taken out the page describing (or not describing) what they had done on the ninth day. She did not read it. As she told Cal, she had not looked at any of those notes in thirty-plus years.

  I can’t recall if it’s Leverkühn or another character, but someone in Mann’s Dr. Faustus defines love as “the astonishing change in the relation of one’s self to the external world.” There must be a million clever definitions out there, but that is the best one I have ever seen, especially as it pertains to Day Bloody 9.

  The crux of the matter was Revere Beach. Had I gone there another time, presumably with Ian, I would have hated it. Ugly and filthy, with threats to one’s health on all sides, it could hardly be called a pleasant place to spend the day. What were we thinking, Ian and I would have said, to come here? This isn’t a beach, Ian and I would have agreed, it’s a rubble-ridden sandlot, which just happens to have the Atlantic Ocean for its eastern boundary.

  On Day 9, however (and this is all I will have to say on the subject of Day 9), I loved Revere Beach. It seems there had been an “astonishing change” in my relation to the external world. I could try to ignore this conclusion. I could (and will) set depth charges of rationalization and denial designed to undermine it. But it was pretty damned clear that afternoon. Revere Beach was all the proof I needed to conclude I was doomed.

  Not that life will cease, or even cease to be rich. And though the “astonishing change” may be lost to me now, who can say that won’t be for the best? There is a strong case to be made that losing love is more apt to save a woman than doom her. Besides which, Adrian Leverkühn (as Cal would be quick to remind me) is a fictional character. No way to ask him whether the phenomenon he so perfectly defined leads to salvation or to doom. Thomas Mann was real enough, though, and didn’t he choose to pass love by—difficult, immoral love—rather than see himself devoured by it?

  As she set the page aside, Lara felt faintly embarrassed about it. She had been terribly melodramatic—Adrian Leverkühn, for goodness’ sake, and doom—and on top of that she detected a rare note of self-pity. Maybe this alone was sufficient reason for suppressing the entry: not so much to hide her vulnerability as to hide the lapse of common sense. Honestly, had she given a single minute of her life since then to pondering salvation, doom, or the best definition of love? It was jarring, really, to discover how young she was when all this was happening.

  The strange part was that she felt more committed, not less, to keeping the page private. She might very well have reasons, but she felt no need for those. Lara had always loved the Richard Wilbur line about “the winter way of doing things for reasons.” A wonderful line and a wonderful excuse, always, whenever one preferred to be steadfastly irrational.

  If she needed reasons, she had another one in Cal’s insistence. He could almost bully you with charm; certainly he could wear you down with logic. Say no to him nine times, say yes the tenth. Unless, like Lara, you refused on principle. What exactly that principle might be she did not care to specify, even to herself, at what was now nearly six A.M., with the dogs moving around outside her door, the day apparently begun. She was content to let go of the inquiry, let it end and the day begin.

  “Self,” she said, nonetheless, as she carried her empty glass back to the kitchen, where she was greeted politely—they were gentle, well-trained retrievers—by both dogs, and was surprised to see Cal dressed and standing in the side yard, or what was left of it, given the snow. He had already walked and fed them, already made himself coffee.
He could be quiet, too.

  But that was the principle, she told him, albeit he could neither see nor hear her as she shaped her statement. It might have any number of arms and legs, subsets and corollaries and whatnot, yet it was as basic as could be. Self, and the right to preserve it, always.

  7

  A Dazed Child

  (1974–5)

  Jake kept bouncing the basketball off his foot and then, even more uncharacteristically, thrashing around in frustration. For months he had it on a string, like a small white Earl the Pearl; he even had the spin move and the crossover; never lost the handle.

  So what was this? Did ball-handling come and go in stages? Could growth spurts cause backsliding? I always thought it was a nice straight line in sports. You mastered something, then you had it. Went on from there to master the next thing.

  Free-throw shooting, maybe. You might hit a spell where your shot went off, it got into your head, and for a week or so the stroke just wasn’t there. Not that Jake could shoot free throws. Shooting wasn’t his thing yet, ball-handling was. Forget the Pearl, he was a small white Marques Haynes.

  It crossed my mind he might be shamming, goofing up on purpose. Hey, the little guy might be acting, a chip off the old block. But why? If he was doing it on purpose, what was his purpose in doing it? To punish me, somehow?

  Kids can be just as tricky to deal with as grown-ups. Winnifred is a smart, savvy woman who seemed to have no clue my soul was AWOL. She’s busy, she’s trusting, and yes, physically I am there. “Present,” when the roll is called. The four of us sit down together at the dinner table, the bedtime stories get read. I eat, I read, I am there.