The Pursuit of Happiness (2001)

by Douglas Kennedy

  ‘That’s the problem with Army life,’ he said. ‘There’s never any privacy.’

  We stopped walking. I turned him towards me.

  ‘Let’s get this over with, Jack.’

  ‘You sound like Barbara Stanwyck - the original tough dame.’

  ‘I think it’s called - in war movie parlance - “trying to be brave”.’

  ‘There’s no easy way to do this, is there?’

  ‘No, there isn’t. So kiss me. And tell me you love me.’

  He kissed me. He told me he loved me. I whispered the same thing back to him. Then I yanked him by the lapels.

  ‘One last thing,’ I said. ‘Don’t you dare break my heart, Malone.’

  I released him.

  ‘Now go get on that ship,’ I said.

  ‘Aye-aye, sir.’

  He turned and walked to the gates. I stood on the sidewalk, frozen to the spot, forcing myself to remain stoic, controlled, sensible. The guard at the gates swung them open. Jack spun around and shouted to me, ‘September first.’

  I bit down hard on my lip and shouted back: ‘Yes. September first … without fail.’

  He snapped to attention and executed a crisp salute. I managed a smile. Then he turned and marched into the Yards.

  For a moment or two I couldn’t move. I simply stared ahead, until Jack vanished from view. I felt as if I was in freefall - as if I had just walked into an empty elevator shaft. Eventually, I forced myself back to the subway station, down the stairs, and on to a Manhattan-bound train. One of the women at the Navy Yards gates sat opposite me in the same car. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. As soon as the train lurched out of the station, she fell apart, her heartbreak loud and unrestrained.

  Being my father’s daughter, I would never have dreamed of crying in public. Grief, affliction, heartache were all to be suffered in silence: that was the Smythe family rule. If you wanted to break down, you had to do it behind closed doors, in the privacy of your own room.

  So I kept myself in check all the way back to Bedford Street. As soon as my apartment door closed behind me, I fell on the bed and let go.

  I wept. And wept. And wept some more. All the time thinking: you are a fool.

  Four

  ‘YOU REALLY WANT my opinion?’ Eric asked me.

  ‘Of course I do,’ I said.

  ‘My completely honest opinion.’

  I nodded nervously.

  ‘Okay then, here it is: you’re an idiot.’

  I gulped, reached for the bottle of wine, refilled my glass, and drank half of it in one go.

  ‘Thank you, Eric,’ I finally said.

  ‘You asked me for an honest reaction, S.’

  ‘Yes. That is true. And you certainly gave me one.’

  I finished the glass of wine, reached again for the bottle (our second of the afternoon), and refilled my glass.

  ‘Apologies for the bluntness, S,’ he said. ‘But it’s still no excuse to hit the bottle.’

  ‘Everyone occasionally deserves a glass or two more than usual. Especially when there’s something to celebrate.’

  Eric looked at me with amused scepticism.

  ‘And what are we celebrating here?’

  I raised my glass.

  ‘Thanksgiving, of course.’

  ‘Well, Happy Thanksgiving,’ he said wryly, clinking his glass against mine.

  ‘And I’ll have you know that, on this Thanksgiving Day, I am happier than I ever have been. In fact, I am so damn happy I am delirious.’

  ‘Yes, delirium is the operative word here.’

  All right, I was feeling a little cockeyed. Not to mention emotionally overwhelmed, spent, and exhausted. Especially since, once I finally brought my crying under control, I only had an hour or so before I had to meet Eric at Luchows for Thanksgiving lunch. Which gave me no time to do anything restorative (like sleep). So I had a fast bath, heated up the remnants of the coffee I’d made earlier that morning, and tried not to cry when I saw the cup Jack drank from, sitting forlornly in the sink. Then, after I finished the pot of now-acidic coffee, I caught a taxi over to Luchows on 14th Street.

  Luchows was a great New York institution: a vast German-American restaurant, which was allegedly modeled after the Hofbrauhaus in Munich - though, to me, it always looked like the extravagant interior of some Erich von Stroheim movie. Germanic art deco … and just a little over the top. I think it appealed to Eric’s sense of the absurd. He also had a soft spot (as I did) for Luchows’ schnitzels and wursts and Frankenwein … though the management deliberately stopped serving German-produced wine during the war.

  I was a little late, so Eric was already seated at our table when I arrived. He was puffing away on a cigarette, buried in that morning’s edition of the New York Times. He looked up as I approached, and seemed a little stunned.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he said melodramatically. ‘Love at first sight.’

  ‘It’s not that obvious, is it?’ I said, sitting down.

  ‘Oh no … not at all. Your eyes are only redder than your lipstick, and you have that post-coital glow …’

  ‘Shhh,’ I hissed. ‘People might hear you …’

  ‘They don’t need to hear me. One look at you, and they’d know in a minute. You’ve got it bad, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  ‘And where, pray tell, is your uniformed Don Giovanni now?’

  ‘On a troop ship, bound for Europe.’

  ‘Oh, wonderful. So not only do we have love, we also have instant heartache. Perfect. Just perfect. Waiter! A bottle of something sparkling, please. We need urgent lubrication.’

  Then he looked at me and said, ‘Okay. I’m all ears. Tell me everything.’

  Fool that I am, I did - and worked my way through nearly two bottles of wine in the process. I always told Eric everything. He was the person I was closest to in the world. He knew me better than anybody. Which is why I dreaded telling him about the night with jack. Because I knew Eric had my best interests at heart. Which meant that I also knew how he’d interpret this story. Which, in turn, was one of the reasons I was drinking far too quickly and far too much.

  ‘You really want my opinion?’ Eric asked me when I finished.

  ‘Of course I do,’ I said.

  ‘My completely honest opinion.’

  That’s when he told me I was an idiot. I drank a little more wine, and toasted Thanksgiving, and made that ludicrous comment about being deliriously happy.

  ‘Yes, delirium is the operative word here,’ Eric said.

  ‘I know this all sounds mad. And I also know you think I’m acting like an adolescent …’

  ‘This sort of thing makes everyone revert to being fifteen years old. Which makes it both wonderful and dangerous. Wonderful because … well, let’s face it, there is nothing more blissfully confusing than really falling for someone.’

  I decided to venture into tricky territory. ‘Have you known that confusion?’

  He reached for his cigarettes and matches. ‘Yes. I have.’

  ‘Often?’

  ‘Hardly,’ he said, lighting up. ‘Just once or twice. And though, at first, it’s exhilarating, the big danger is the hope that there might be a life beyond this initial intoxication. That’s when you can really do yourself some damage.’

  ‘Did you get hurt?’

  ‘If, during the course of your life, you’ve fallen hard for someone, then you’ve undoubtedly been hurt.’

  ‘Does it always work that way?’

  He began to tap the table with his right index finger - a sure sign that he was feeling nervous.

  ‘In my experience, yes - it does work that way.’

  Then he looked up at me with an expression on his face which basically said, don’t ask me anymore. So, yet again, that section of his life was ruled off-limits to me.

  ‘I just don’t want to see you get injured,’ he said. ‘Especially, as … uh … I presume it was the first time …’

  I quickly nodd
ed my head, then added, ‘But say you felt so certain about this

  ‘Excuse me for sounding pedantic, but certainty is an empirical concept. And empiricism, as you well know, isn’t rooted in theory … but wholly in fact. For example, there is certainty that the sun will rise in the East and set in the West. Just as there is certainty that liquid will freeze below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, and that if you throw yourself out a high window, you will land on the ground. But there’s no certainty that you will be killed from that fall. Probability, yes. Certainty? Who’s to know? It’s the same with love …’

  ‘You’re saying, love’s like throwing yourself out a window?’

  ‘Come to think of it, that’s not a bad analogy. Especially when it’s a coup de foudre. You’re having a relatively normal day, romance is about the last thing on your mind, you show up somewhere you didn’t expect to be, there’s this person on the other side of the room, and … splat.’

  ‘Splat? What a charming word.’

  ‘Well, that’s always the end result of a free-fall. The initial plunge is totally intoxicating. But then, inevitably, you go splat. Otherwise known as: coming back down to earth.’

  ‘But say … just say … that this was truly meant to be?’

  ‘Once again, we’re entering the realm of the non-empirical. You want to believe that this man is the love of your life - and that you were fated to meet. But all belief is theoretical. It’s not grounded in fact, let alone logic. There’s no empirical proof that this Jack Malone guy is the preordained man destined for you. Only the hope that he is. And in purely theoretical terms, hope is an even shakier concept than belief.’

  I was about to reach for the wine bottle, but thought better of it.

  ‘You really are a pedant, aren’t you?’ I said.

  ‘When necessary. I am also your brother who loves you. Which is why I am counseling caution here.’

  ‘You didn’t like Jack.’

  ‘That’s not really the issue, S …’

  ‘But had you liked him, you might not be so sceptical.’

  ‘I met him for … what? … five minutes. We had an unfortunate exchange. End of story.’

  ‘When you get to know him …’

  ‘When?

  ‘He’ll be back on September first.’

  ‘Oh my God, listen to you …’

  ‘He promised he’d be back. He swore …’

  ‘S, have you lost all reason? Or judgment? From what you’ve told me, this guy sounds like a total fantasist … and something of an operator to boot. A classic Irish combination.’

  ‘That’s not fair …’

  ‘Hear me out. He’s on shore leave, right? He crashes my party. He meets you - probably the best educated, most elegant woman he’s ever encountered. He turns on the blarney, the mick charm. Before you can say “hokum”, he’s telling you you’re the girl of his dreams: The one I knew was meant for me. But, all the time, he knows that he can say these things without commitment - because, come nine a.m. this morning, he’s out of here. And sweetheart, unless I’ve got this all wrong, you’re not going to be hearing from him again.’

  I said nothing for a very long time. I just stared down at the table. Eric tried to adopt a more comforting tone.

  ‘At worst, chalk the whole thing up to experience. In some ways, him vanishing out of your life now is probably the best outcome. Because he will always be “that boy” with whom you had one wildly romantic evening. So the shine will never go off him. Whereas if you married the guy, you’d probably discover that he likes to cut his toenails in bed, or gargles too loudly, or clears his throat through his nostrils

  ‘Splat. You’ve brought me back down to earth.’

  ‘What else is a brother to do? Anyway, I bet you anything that after you get a really good night’s sleep, a little perspective will sneak up on you.’

  But it didn’t. Oh yes, I did sleep wonderfully that night. Nearly ten hours. But when I woke late the next morning, I was instantly consumed by thoughts of Jack. He took up residence in my mind within seconds of my eyes blinking open … and then refused to go away. I sat up in bed, and replayed frame by frame - our entire night together. I had total recall to the point where I could perfectly conjure up his voice, the contours of his face, his touch. Though I tried to heed my brother’s advice - telling myself over and over that this was nothing more than a fanciful brief encounter - my arguments didn’t sway me.

  Or, to put it another way, I could see all the reasons why I should be sceptical and dubious about Jack Malone. The problem was: I didn’t want to accept any of them.

  That was the most unsettling aspect of all this - the way I refused to accede to logic, reason, good old New England common sense. I was like an attorney trying to contest a case she really didn’t believe in. Whenever I thought I might just be on the verge of rational judgment, Jack would come flooding back into my mind again … and I’d be lost.

  Was this, verily, love? In its most pure, undistilled form? I couldn’t attach any other meaning to what I was feeling - except that it was as all-consuming, debilitating, and dizzying as a serious bout of flu.

  The only problem was: unlike the flu, the fever wasn’t breaking. If anything, it got worse with every passing day.

  Jack Malone would not leave me be. The ache I felt for him was huge.

  On the Sunday morning of Thanksgiving weekend, Eric phoned me at home. It was the first time we’d spoken since lunch at Luchows.

  ‘Oh, hi there,’ I said flatly.

  ‘Oh dear …’

  ‘Oh dear what?’ I said, sounding cross.

  ‘Oh dear, you don’t sound pleased to hear from me.’

  ‘I am pleased to hear from you.’

  ‘Yes - and your exuberance is noted. I was just calling to see if the Gods of Balance and Proportion had landed on your shoulder?’

  ‘No. They haven’t. Anything else?’

  ‘I detect a certain brusqueness to your tone. Want me to come over?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Fine.’

  Then I suddenly heard myself saying, ‘Yes. Come over. Now.’

  ‘It’s that bad, is it?’

  I swallowed hard. ‘Yes - it’s that bad.’

  It got worse. My sleep began to fracture. Every night - somewhere between the hours of two and four - I’d snap awake. I’d stare up at the ceiling, feeling empty and full of the most overpowering sense of longing. There was nothing reasonable or clearheaded about this need I had for Jack Malone. It was just always there. Omnipresent. Irrational. Absurd.

  I’d finally surrender to my insomnia, and get out of bed, and go to my desk and write Jack. I wrote him every day. Usually I’d restrict myself to a postcard - but I might spend up to an hour drafting and redrafting a five-line epistle on a legal pad.