‘I said nothing during all this – though I started to feel that dewy chill which accompanies fear. I couldn’t help but wonder if Dad’s friend, the cop, hadn’t done a little detective work himself on my father’s behalf. The fact that he knew so much about Sarah slammed home the point that he had quite a dossier put together. And remember – in the late 1970s homosexuality was still somewhat closeted. As Dad put it:
‘“Bowdoin’s the sort of liberal-minded place that doesn’t care about such things. But the man is still untenured. Think what will happen if word gets around about his wife and her very young twenty-three-year-old lover, and the fact that the professor is living most weekends with another man . . . well, it might not deny him tenure, but it will certainly be great newspaper copy, won’t it? And if you think the college wants that kind of publicity . . .”
‘At that point I stood up and told my father he was a bastard. He just smiled and said that if I walked out of the door now I would never be allowed back, that I was effectively dead to him and to my mother. My reply? “So be it.” I walked out his door, my father raising his voice just a bit to tell me: “You’ll be back here, begging my forgiveness, in a week.”
‘My mother, as it turned out, was standing outside his office door – having clearly been primed by my father to be there, and to hear everything. She had tears in her eyes – my mom, who never showed an iota of emotion. And she clearly was very thrown by all that she had just heard.
‘“Don’t do this to us,” she hissed at me, choking back this terrible sob. “You are being ensnared by a man-eater. You will destroy yourself.”
‘But I pushed by her and kept walking.
‘“This will kill me,” she cried as I headed out the front door. I was now on autopilot. I remember getting into my car and driving at high speed to Brunswick. And falling, punch-drunk, into Sarah’s house. And telling her everything that happened. And Sarah stopping me at one point to give me a glass of Scotch. And listening to the whole terrible emotional blackmail story in silence. And then coming over to me and putting her arms around me and saying: “Your real life begins now. Because you have finally walked away from that third rate tyrant.”
‘I didn’t sleep that night. I was wracked by the worst sort of guilt. I also worried enormously that my father would make good on his threat and expose us all. Sarah reassured me, telling me she would be talking to her husband the next day and that there would be a very robust fight-back should my father make good on his promise of trying to destroy the two of them.
‘That did reassure me. But in the days that followed this rupture I felt something close to deep depression. The exhilaration of standing up to that repellent man was overshadowed by the realization that I had essentially cut the bridge between myself and my parents, that I was now an orphan. Sarah saw the effect this was having on me – and suggested that I might want to speak to someone professionally about all this. Copeland Men don’t go spilling their guts to some therapist, is what I remember thinking at the time – and how absurd was that? I was resolute about moving forward. I was completely frightened. Even though I now had time on my hands – as I no longer had any gainful employment and it was another four months before we headed to Michigan – I found myself unable to do what I should have been doing during this difficult interregnum, which was writing. I was blocked. The words wouldn’t come. Total creative impotence. It was as if the old man had put a curse on me, willing me to be unable to do the one thing that I knew would get me away from his tentacles. Truth be told, a creative block comes from within. Some writers have worked through the most appalling stuff. Me – a rank beginner? I allowed myself to be cowed into a block of major proportions.
‘Then came the coup de grâce. My mother made good on her threat. No, she didn’t die. But she did suffer a major stroke. So major that she lost the capacity to speak and was catatonic for over three weeks. It was my father who called me with the news. He was crying, and the bastard never cried. He told me to hurry to Maine Medical, as she might die that night, that he needed me there, that he needed me. I felt something akin to horror. I’d caused this. I’d killed her. Sarah kept telling me this was a distortion – that strokes are not caused by emotional distress, and anyway, wasn’t it my damn father who had caused all this distress? So to now be running back to him . . .
‘Of course she wasn’t trying to stop me from seeing my mother. She was just warning me of what was going to befall me if I accepted my father’s embrace. “He’ll weep on your shoulder and tell you he loves you and that he was wrong to cast you out. Then he’ll beg you to come back ‘just for a little while’, to put graduate school on hold for a year. Once you’re back you’ll never be free of his clutches again. He’ll see to that – and you will tragically go along with all this, even though you know it’s self-entombing – even though one of the terrible results of this decision will be that you’ll lose me.”
‘As always Sarah said all this in the most preternaturally calm voice. But I was so overwhelmed by the terrible blow dealt to my mother – and still convinced that I had pulled the cerebral trigger which had leveled her – that I raced down to Maine Medical and fell into my father’s outstretched arms.
‘Being such a profoundly well-read woman, Sarah had a huge understanding of subtext. Especially the sort of subtext which is anchored to the worst sort of emotional blackmail. Everything she predicted came true. Within a week I was back at the firm. Within two weeks I had written to Michigan, asking for a twelve-month deferment owing to my mother’s illness. Within three weeks Sarah wrote me a letter. She was very much someone who didn’t like melodramatic finales and preferred the nineteenth-century epistolary approach to the end of a love affair. And I remember her exact words: “This is the beginning of a great grief for both of us. Because this was love. And because this was an opportunity that would have changed everything. Trust me, you will rue this decision for the rest of your life.”’
Silence. I reached out and took his other free hand. But he pulled away from me.
‘Now you feel sorry for me,’ he said.
‘Of course I do. But I also understand.’
‘What? That I was a coward? That I allowed myself to be blackmailed into a life I didn’t want by a man who always needed to hobble me? That not a day goes by when I don’t think about Sarah and what should have been? That only now, all these years after the event, I’m finally getting back to writing, and only because my damnable father finally died a year ago? That I feel I’ve wasted so much of this opportunity that is life? Especially as, four years after Sarah, a young, quiet woman named Muriel came to work for us in the firm. I knew from the start that she was somewhat reserved and certainly didn’t share much of my bookish interests. But still she was relatively attractive and seemingly kind and genuinely interested in me. “Good wife material,” as my father put it. I think I married Muriel to please the bastard. But there was never any way I could actually please the bastard. The tragedy is, I secretly knew this truth about my father from the age of thirteen onwards. And now listen to me, sounding like a self-pitying—’
‘You are hardly self-pitying. You just made choices that were fueled by guilt and a sense of obligation. Just as I did.’
He looked directly at me.
‘I don’t have a marriage,’ he said. ‘I haven’t had one for years.’
He didn’t have to tell me more – or to underscore the subtext of that comment. I too was so conversant with this territory: the slow, quiet death of passion; the complete loss of urgency and desire; the sense of distance that accompanied occasional moments of intimacy; the intense loneliness that had installed itself on my side of the bed . . . and, no doubt, on his as well.
‘I know all about that,’ I heard myself telling Richard, realizing that another forbidden frontier had just been traversed.
Silence.
‘May I ask you something?’ I said.
‘Anything.’
‘Sarah. What happened to her?’
‘Within a week of me receiving that letter from her she was gone out of Brunswick. Off to Ann Arbor – as her friend did find her a job in the university library there. Divorced her husband who did get tenure at the college and is still with – in fact, married to – the Harvard professor. Around two years after she left I got a letter from her – formal, polite, somewhat friendly – telling me that she had met an academic at Michigan. He was a doctoral candidate in astrophysics, of all things. And she was seven months’ pregnant. So she did decide to take the risk again. As desperate as this news made me feel, another part of me was genuinely pleased for her. I didn’t hear from her again for another five years – when her first volume of published poetry arrived in the mail. No letter this time. Just the book from her publishers – New Directions, a very reputable house. On the dust jacket there was a biographical blurb, saying she lived in Ann Arbor with her husband and two children. So she’d become a mother twice over again.
‘Since then . . . we’ve dropped out of each other’s lives. But that’s not totally the truth, as I have bought her five subsequent books of poetry. I also know that she has had a professorship in the English department at Michigan for the past twenty years, and that her last volume was a finalist for the Pulitzer. She’s done remarkably well.’
Silence.
‘And she did love you,’ I said, ensuring that this statement didn’t sound like a question.
‘Yes, she did.’
I touched his hand, threading my fingers in his.
‘You’re loved now,’ I said.
Silence. He finally looked back up at me.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.
Eight
NIGHT HAD SERIOUSLY fallen. It was cold outside. Cold and dark, with a low mist coming in off the nearby bay. As we stepped out onto the street I felt another jolt of doubt course through me: that reproaching voice telling me I was entering a true danger zone. Make that move and all will change. Change utterly.
What melodrama. What a good child I had always been. What a responsible young woman, an intensely responsible adult. Faithful, loyal, always there. And though I doubt that Dan has ever cheated on me, I’d come to see his isolation as a form of betrayal.
Will you listen to yourself. The ongoing endless, sad negotiation you conduct all the time. The blockades you are putting up now in the nanoseconds after you’ve just declared love for this man. A man who also knows a thing or two about lost love and self-entrapment. A man who is telling you what you are telling him: we are so right for each other. There is a chance here, if only we can both keep our nerve and . . .
‘Shall we head over to the water?’ he asked me. ‘Unless you want to try for the gallery?’
‘I want—’ I said.
In an instant we were in each other’s arms. Kissing passionately, wildly, grasping each other with such desire, such need. It was as if there had been, between us, a mutual detonation. A sudden eradication of all those years of longing and inhibition and frustration and emotional washout. How wonderful to feel a man’s hands on me again; a man who so clearly wanted me. As I so wanted him.
He broke away from our mad embrace for a moment, took my face in his hands, and whispered:
‘I’ve found you. I’ve actually found you.’
I felt myself tighten. But this tightness wasn’t due to any reticence or fear or some sort of ‘I wish he hadn’t said that’ reaction to what he had told me. On the contrary, that moment of internal tautness was just a direct, instantaneous confirmation of everything I was sensing; everything that was overwhelming me right now.
‘And I’ve found you,’ I whispered back, and we began to kiss again like a couple who’d been separated for an age – and had been envisaging this moment of passionate reunion for weeks, months, years.
‘We should go somewhere,’ I finally whispered.
‘Let’s get a room.’
‘Not the rooms we have at that hideous hotel.’
‘My thought entirely.’
‘Glad you’re a fellow romantic.’
‘A fellow romantic who has looked for you his entire life.’
Another long, wild kiss.
Then:
‘A cab is necessary, I think,’ he said.
Still holding me tightly with one arm he put up his hand and a taxi stopped. We climbed in the back.
‘Ninety Tremont,’ Richard told the driver. As soon as the cab took off we were kissing again wildly.
Richard’s hand had slid up the back of my turtleneck. His skin against my bare skin. I stifled a little groan of pleasure; the same pleasure that shot through me as I felt his hardness against my thigh, and the way he was grasping me with such barely controlled ardor. I wanted him in a way I had wanted nobody since . . .
The taxi pulled up in front of an entrance to a hotel. Within moments we were in a lobby. Chic. Modernist. Executive. Cool. My hand in his, Richard led me to the front desk. The clerk was a woman in her twenties – and studiously blasé.
‘We’d like a room,’ Richard said.
She gave us the once-over and I saw her take in the wedding rings on both our hands. Just as the way we were holding hands – and the way we had arrived off the street, without baggage, clearly in a hurry to get upstairs and slam the door on the world – must have told her: They may be married, but not to each other.
‘Do you have a reservation? she asked, all disinterested.
‘Nope,’ Richard said.
‘Then I’m afraid the only thing I can offer you is our King Executive Suite. But it’s seven hundred and ninety-nine dollars per night.’
I could see Richard try not to blanch at the price. Certainly I was appalled at the cost. It was almost one week’s salary for me.
‘We can go elsewhere . . . or even back to the airport hotel,’ I whispered in his ear.
Richard just kissed me, then reached into his pocket and brought out his wallet.
‘We’ll take the suite,’ he told the clerk, slapping his credit card down on the countertop.
Two minutes later we were in an elevator, heading to the top floor. My hand was still in his, our gazes firmly locked. But we had both fallen silent. Desire and fear: that’s what was so engulfing me. But the longing, the immense carnal need, was shoving whatever dread I was feeling away. I wanted him. I wanted him now.
The elevator arrived on the top floor. We followed a hallway down to a large set of double doors. Richard used the key card. There was a telltale click. He pulled me towards him. We fell into the room.
I took in very little of my immediate surroundings, except for the fact that the suite was capacious, the bed was in an adjoining room, the lights were preset low. From the moment the door shut behind us we were locked in an unrestrained embrace, and falling backwards into the bedroom, and pulling each other’s clothes off, and kissing wildly, and tumbling together headlong into the sort of unbridled passion that, if you are lucky, you have experienced once or twice in your life – and which might just be the closest thing to raw love imaginable.
Time meant nothing now. All that mattered was the two of us together on this bed, submerged in each other, silently overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all.
And then, in a moment of quietude afterwards, he took my face in my hands and whispered:
‘Everything has changed. Everything.’
Sometimes the truth is a wondrous thing.
Sunday
One
LOVE.
I woke with the dawn. The room was dark, festooned with shadow. Early-morning light creased in from the drawn curtains. Though I had only been asleep for a few incidental hours – sleep finally overtaking us in the wee small hours of the morning after hours of making extraordinary love – I felt wildly, profoundly awake. And wildly, profoundly in love.
Is this what’s meant by a coup de foudre ? That huge overwhelming realization that you have finally met the man of your life, that individual for whom you were destined? Years ago, I though
t that man was Eric. But one thing had struck me so forcibly over the past twenty-four hours: the Eric I so cherished and adored was, like me, such a kid when we came together. What did we really know about ourselves or each other? Everyone is, I suppose, a work in progress up until the day they are no longer part of the world. But when you’re nineteen you are still so unformed. Still so deeply naive (even though you do your absolute best to convince yourself otherwise). But you really know very little about life’s larger profundities. And even if you have – as I did – experienced the worst sort of loss at such an early stage of adulthood, your deeper existential understanding of loss won’t gain purchase until you have reached the halfway point of your temporal existence. It is then that you start to reflect on everything still not achieved, everything that underwhelms, everything that gives your life the undercurrent of an ongoing letdown. And it all congeals to remind you that time is now a diminishing commodity, that standing still (though the easier option) had rendered you static. And you quietly tell yourself: Life must be grabbed.
But then you throw up manifold excuses for staying put, accepting the cards dealt, telling yourself: Things could be far worse.
Until, out of nowhere – at a moment for which you are not prepared, in a situation which is so not designed to be conducive to such things – you meet a man who changes everything for you. And within twenty-four hours . . .
Love.
And the man in question . . .
I think it was the moment we started trading synonyms that I began to fall for him. And the way he told the story of his son without an ounce of self-pity. Then showing me the place he wanted to buy on Commonwealth Avenue. That’s when I knew. Standing in front of his future place, his new life, I understood the subtext behind this side trip. And just a few hours ago – when we were finally thinking about getting up after the evening in bed, entwined with each other, sharing the sort of intimacy that I never considered possible in my life – he took my face in his hands and said those extraordinary words:
Five Days Page 23
