The Twoweeks

by Larry Duberstein

  Kenny and I were the exact same age, but I didn’t make a fuss. I didn’t care, really. It was just a Thursday night roundtable at Cronin’s, and then I had such a high old time with Moody that I ended up campaigning to stage the silly play, dated or not. Meanwhile, Ken’s cocky kid fell flat as the Sahara, mostly because the character was fairly bogus to begin with.

  “You did what you could with it,” I consoled him.

  “Blame Odets,” Jennifer seconded the motion. Tradition required we blame the playwright for our bad performances.

  After the session, after we closed Cronin’s down and departed (a new world-and-Olympic-record five sheets to the wind) I took a long route home. Belatedly, I did resent having been cast as a washed-up loser whose life trails behind him like a pathetic footnote. It rankled that Lipsky could see me that way, as someone whose life was a done deal. Whose youthful charm and vitality had dwindled down to a slumped, sad reliability.

  It rankled because it was too true, too close to home. Like Moody, I was reliable because I had no choice, no room to maneuver. My once happy home had been remodeled, reduced to a ten-by-ten jail cell with no windows on the world and no chance of parole. All I could do was be a model prisoner; take it like a man. Pace my cell with dignity.

  That night, however, in a swirl of sweetened springtime air, I had to bust out. An ill wind got caught up in my five sheets and blew me to Miller Road. Sad reliability my arse.

  There was a full moon, directly overhead and so bright it made the leaves black underneath. I could see in clear detail all the small square yards behind the small square houses, the onetime worker’s cottages that soldiered down Lara’s block. Fresh white paint on a picket fence glowed like phosphorus. This was a surrealist’s streetscape, overly luminous and oversimplified, featuring some of the accoutrements of life (bicycles, hibachis) but no living creatures. It looked like a Walt Disney neighborhood the night they dropped the neutron bomb.

  Lara’s Dart was in its spot. Inside, on the backseat, lay a jacket I recognized and a hat someone had sat on. The floor was cluttered with books and trash, par for the course. As I catalogued the debris, I heard a shade snap up on a second-storey window across the street and saw the silhouette of an overweight man. Standing there in the bright defining moonlight, I sensed the police would shortly be taking a call from an overweight, insomniac, concerned citizen.

  Part of me (the part that was five sheets to the breeze) wanted to stay and give them a taste of Estragon as they clapped me in irons. I was never in the Macon County, I have puked my puke of a life away right here I tell you, here in the Cackon County.

  Or maybe give them Moody. You can put me in your bughouse right now. Step right up, folks, and wipe your shoes on me—Moody’s the name.

  The rest of me (the sober, slumped, sadly reliable portion) gave them back their happy little street and scurried home to my own.

  It was a warm June day, though of course we were airconditioned at the HoJo MoHo. I was at my post (necktie safely loosened because Harry, our beloved day manager, had gone on one of his see-you-later lunches) when a fifty-something couple asked for directions to “the beach.” They were from Shipshewana, Indiana, the fellow grinned, “where the ocean is just a notion.”

  I laughed on cue and told them a truth the Boston Chamber of Commerce withholds, namely that geographical assumptions aside, they were a long way from any ocean beach that might be considered desirable. There was Revere, of course. They could take the train and be there in half an hour. “So we’ll go to Revere,” said the gent, interrupting before I got to the less desirable aspects. I felt compelled to make mention of “items” washing up on the strand, of “things” floating in the surf. Of gravel where they might expect sand.

  In the end, he tipped me two bucks and they went to walk around Castle Island. All they really wanted was the smell of salt water, the long horizon, and a bucket of fried clams. I watched them go with a twinge of envy, which at first I misinterpreted, presuming it was about their day at the beach versus mine at a carpeted hotel lobby.

  Then it smacked me square in the face: Revere Beach, on a summer day. I glanced at the date on today’s paper and saw it was the literal anniversary. One year ago precisely, The Twoweeks had commenced. An entire bloody year had passed.

  I should have seen it coming, but then again, why assign special meaning to 365 days? It was one more than 364, one less than 366. Missing Lara (and missing was a word that dramatically understated the difficulty of being apart from her) was by now a given, a constant, that might well go on for 10,000 days. That it was the “anniversary” should not have mattered. The fortune cookies tell it true: today is always the first day of the rest of your life.

  That fine June day, though, as shirtless scullers glided past us on the glistening surface of the river, it mattered. Truisms notwithstanding, it made itself felt. Not so much the first-day part as the rest-of-your-life part. Cut off from those sun-drunken boats, imprisoned behind my wall of plate glass, I realized that for the first time in conscious memory I could not describe myself as a happy man. The rest-of-my-life seemed a longer darker prospect than it ever had before.

  “Big fucking deal,” I could hear my pal Fitz say, for such was his unvarying assessment of all developments, large or small. My perennially impassive pal, to whom such darkness was axiomatic and for whom any relief from it intermittent at best, drug-induced whenever possible. What saved Fitz wasn’t drugs, though, it was humor. What had saved me thus far was dumb luck.

  Winnifred was right when she claimed that life is largely accidental. She and I had met by chance. As definite as she seemed, Hetty had been the product of pure chance, a happy “accident.” Really, though, everyone’s birth, each specific existence, is fraught with a million variables large and small. The dance of sperm and egg alone—this one or that—can tip you toward Aunt Sophie with polio or Uncle Jack who swam the Bosporus at sixty.

  Lara Cleary had come into our lives (first Winnie’s, then mine) via a hundred uncharted variables, a sequence of one chance after another. And The Twoweeks? The dice had taken some mighty crazy bounces for that one to be dreamed, much less broached. So it should not have been surprising when, by chance, Lara and I finally did cross paths.

  I was coming downhill from the Delmar Street playground (the one where she had found me and spoken The Sentence) and she was coming uphill from Mass Ave. It seems we had each wandered those quiet leafy side streets with some frequency through the late winter and early spring, and now there we were. There she was. Wearing a dress, for some reason I didn’t think to ask. I did notice the color (pale blue, radically faded) and that the dress was sleeveless, with a plain white tee-shirt underneath. I took in the outfit. I was almost afraid to look up and take in her face.

  One misremembers details. Lara seemed smaller than I recalled. She had been five foot six (and no doubt was still five foot six), but she struck me as shorter than that and more vulnerable, her face surprisingly delicate. Fragile. Lara’s natural expression was one of an illusory sorrow, flowing from the liquidity of her eyes and the Renaissance Madonna conformation of her facial structure, the classical triangulation from cheekbones to chin. The tension between that visual suggestion of mournfulness and her actual joyous demeanor was a large part of Lara’s allure, in the same way the tension between a horn player’s serene countenance and the wild flight of notes is a large part of his cool.

  “You’re still here,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Well, not really. I mean, I hadn’t seen you, or heard, you know—that you were at this party or that concert—”

  “I knew you were still here,” she said, in a tone that pointed unambiguously to my all-but-forgotten lapse, the stupid note.

  “I shouldn’t have written that note. I was just having a hard time.”

  “Were you?” she said, with hefty irony.

  “I am, I should have said. Am having a hard time.”

&nb
sp; Then, shifting gears abruptly, she stepped out from under an invisible cloud of anger and asked after Jake and Hetty? “How are they doing?”

  I told her about Jake’s hound dog instincts and his relentless unspoken disapproval. Though it had happened a year ago, I told about Hetty’s brief rebellion at Morning Glory, when she pretended I was not her father.

  “What did you do? When she said that.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “I know. I’m just curious how you got out of it.”

  “I had them vet me by calling—”

  “Your wife,” she supplied, as my hesitation to speak Winnie’s name stretched out.

  “Yes, Winnifred was willing to vouch for me.”

  “That was good of her,” she said, ducking back under the darker cloud.

  Though Lara had me on the spit and kept poking me with the fork, I was adjusting to the fact she was standing there. I was becoming glad she was standing there and also aware it was happening, or had already happened: the quickening, the jump to a higher level of being alive. We had always been drawn together like atomic particles with no plan of their own, no powers of intention, and clearly we still were.

  “It’s a little strange not to be holding you. Now that here we are, I mean.”

  “That’s the deal, though,” she shrugged. “Whether here we are or not.”

  “It just feels a little strange.”

  “Life is strange.”

  “Love is strange,” I corrected her. “That’s the song you probably have in mind. But we could remedy the not-holding part, I should think.”

  “Should you? Because we’re friends, and friends hug hello?”

  “That would work. Or we could take a huge gamble that the FBI are all watching somebody else at this precise moment. Is Richard Kimble still on the lam?”

  The hug was more a clutch of relief, like the full-body lock a parent puts on a child safely returned from danger. The kiss we slipped into might have lasted ten minutes, though. I suppose we must have breathed at some point.

  “I might have two hours,” said Lara, pulling back to assess me with a half-smile that said she might be joking and she might not. Holding my eyes, daring me to laugh or cry, say yes or say no. (Or to guess what she really meant, if she even knew . . .)

  “That would set me back another year.”

  “So you don’t have two hours?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  We did not take the fastest route to the nearest bed. This wasn’t a movie and, short of checking into a room at the HoJo, there was no bed we could readily access. Sex was present (even our ears were erogenous zones) but we both got that this was not about sex. Unfortunately, it was about something far more serious and frightening.

  We did not take the fast route to anywhere. Absently, we made our way to the river. Still dazed, we sat on the grass, not far from the Weeks Bridge. Though our hands were laced together, our attention was turned outward. Toward the boys flipping a Frisbee and boisterously running it down, two girls basting themselves in new bikinis, bikers and hikers streaming along the footpath. The whole familiar riverbank scene was an upbeat flashback, a reminder that Cambridge was still there, that life could still be fun. There were still carefree people loose upon the land.

  “So do you think we’ve successfully melted into the crowd?” Lara asked.

  “I honestly don’t care,” I said.

  “What if I care, though?”

  “In that case I will too. I can be flexible.”

  “You?” But she was smiling, and leaning against me. We both knew it was her line, not mine.

  Lara told me that the instant she saw me she had flashed on an image of two cats lying in the road, a snapshot that had stayed with her. She and a friend were driving a lakeside road in Scotland when they spotted the cats.

  “Dogs in the road, absolutely. Black labs, yellow labs, always. But I couldn’t remember ever seeing a cat lying in the road before. They didn’t move, either. We blew the horn forever.”

  “Maybe they had made a suicide pact,” I said, more caught up on the part where she and a friend were driving in Scotland than on the cats.

  “There’s always that. Would you want to do that?”

  “Suicide for two? Lie down in the road together and wait for death?”

  “Want to?”

  “What did you call the poem, Lara? ‘Cats in the Road’?”

  “No poem yet. It’s just how I measure surprise now. The millisecond I saw you, I thought of those two cats.”

  “I didn’t think a goddamn thing. When I saw you. Just went blank.”

  “What do you think now?”

  “Not a goddamn thing. I don’t think thinking would be a help right now.”

  She put her hands around my neck and strangled me gently. I gave her a few playful puff-punches in the belly. After all the time and energy we had devoted to daydreaming one another, neither of us was remotely prepared for the reality.

  “If this hadn’t happened?” I said. “If it never happened? Might we have gone through life without ever speaking again? Do you suppose?”

  “Hard to say.”

  It was hard to say much of anything, really. There was the “what to leave in/what to leave out” aspect, for starters. And though our hands were behaving badly, we understood our basic situation was unchanged. It was no less impossible than it had been an hour earlier or, for that matter, over a year ago, when we parted. The question remained: if we had not met by accident, would we ever have met by design?

  Nevertheless, this chance meeting had a force or logic of its own. And while it could not change our situation, it definitely messed with the program. There was still no way to reconcile the principles threatened on both sides, hers or mine, hence no way to express the unspoken conviction that this time we were not going to let go cleanly.

  So we worked without words. The topics and the emotions we had stored up were too large to fit into a small borrowed space anyway, much less into sentences. The whirling carnival of runners, dog-walkers, cyclists, and sun-worshippers seemed to speak for us, as shoulder to shoulder, temple to temple, hand in hand, we absorbed the faintly salted breeze blowing off the tidal river.

  I know what was going through Lara’s mind only because she revealed it to me a week later, when we took our next two hours. She was acknowledging to herself, after long resistance, that she was angry with me. I had not called, not begged or come crawling back to her, and I should have.

  At the same time she was acknowledging (to herself, after long resistance) that she was not angry I left the note. She was glad about that. It had been a struggle, apparently, coming to these truths—or to these lies she had been telling herself. That she wasn’t angry at me when in fact she was; that she was angry at me when in fact she wasn’t.

  “This is all so screwed-up,” she would say, strangling me gently again, for such was her truest formulation. But surely now (and now encompassed that first two hours and the next and the next) was the time for complete honesty. After a year spent incommunicado, nothing else made any sense.

  I felt pressured to supply a parallel narrative, to offer some truth about my own state of mind: where I stood, once divested of lies and disguises. I had become so habituated to disguise, though, that I hardly knew how to step out of character, out of costume. I had lost the ability to follow ideas in a straight line, to a sound conclusion. Even when I tried to convey them to myself in the night silence, I tangled them in knots. Tangled them up with God, of all people.

  I did not dismiss or ridicule the notion of “true love.” Of love not as a means of selling magazines or Valentine cards, nor as an immature state of mind or a passing fancy. I did not discount the possibility that love could be akin to silver or tin, something hard and deeply embedded, so that when you mined it out it could not be reduced or dissolved. It was not a gas or a liquid, it was a solid.

  That was a fairly straight line: love was the gold standard an
d I loved Lara Cleary. Yet even setting my feelings for Winnie aside, there was no question I loved Jake and Hetty. That much was bedrock. If there were different kinds of love, which kind should take precedence? Which love was greater in God’s eyes?

  Oh yes, after decades of disdain, I found myself involving Him. Churches were fine by me. They were community centers, where goodhearted people came together over coffee and crullers on Sundays. God, however, was obviously a wishful construct, a desperate metaphor—the outward expression of a universal need that nevertheless went unattended century after century. Pray for peace or justice? For man’s humanity to man? Get out your very best prayer rug and give it a try.

  Such was my belief system: no belief. To believe in God (or in a benign God) you had to make a leap of faith far beyond the objective and observable. Beyond silver and tin, beyond the trees He supposedly made, or the houses we made from them. God was no different to me than the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. To conclude otherwise was to blink away 100% of what you knew. It took a fool.

  Now, for the first time since I was eight years old, I was that fool. God had lost me when I found out He once required Abraham to sacrifice Isaac—to kill his own son—as a sign of respect. I had no grasp of the War or Hiroshima or the Holocaust, each of which my own father took as proofs that God must have died, a popular strophe at the time. I only knew that God had told a father to kill his son for no reason.

  Now I saw a different lesson in that Old Testament parable. Clearly God had made this demand the definitive test, the hardest choice. No greater sacrifice could be asked because nothing could be stronger or more important than a father’s love for his son. Face it, God did not say to Abraham, “Bring Sarah, bring your wife.” It was the sacrifice of Isaac that would prove the man’s faith.