Five Days Page 20

  ‘Congratulations, sir.’

  A few minutes later we were back on Newbury Street.

  ‘Ready to blend in with the fellow hipsters at the ICA?’ I asked.

  ‘I feel somewhere between an imposter and—’

  ‘Trust me, you’re far smarter and more learned than the hip brigade.’

  A smile between us.

  ‘It’s a bit of a walk from here, I think,’ he said.

  ‘Down in South Boston on the bay. And it probably closes at six.’

  We both glanced at our watches. It was now almost four-thirty.

  ‘A taxi then.’

  As luck would have it one was cruising right by. Richard hailed it. Within moments we were being driven down Boylston Street, passing by several upscale hotels, and a long cliff of tall nineteenth-century office buildings and a theater that Richard said now all belonged to a performing arts college. He started explaining how, just down the street twenty years ago, the remnants of Boston’s red light district – better known as ‘the Combat Zone’ – was still in full ‘drug-dealing, porno-cinema, working-girls-on-the-street splendor’. Now it was just a cleaned-up theater district. Though it was a more pleasant environment, ‘there’s part of me that thinks we’ve sanitized everything nowadays, to the point where cities have lost an essential raffishness . . . not that I am the biggest expert on things metropolitan’.

  ‘Still,’ I said, ‘you have a point. I made a couple of trips during college to New York with my then-boyfriend. Even in the late 1980s, Forty-second Street and Hell’s Kitchen and the East Village were still the wrong side of sleazy, and we loved it. Because it was so not what we knew in Maine. Then, the one time I’ve been back since . . . well, Forty-second Street now looked like an outdoor shopping mall in any major city in the country. And the city – though still amazing – struck me as having lost an essential edgy vitality. But hey, having never lived there, having never lived anywhere but Maine . . .’

  ‘That door isn’t shut, is it?’

  ‘As you said earlier, you have to travel hopefully. And believe that you can reinvent yourself anew.’

  ‘Isn’t that the real American dream? The illusion of liberty. Hitting the road and all that? If it doesn’t work out for you in Maine, get in your car, burn up the highway for a couple of nights, find yourself in New Orleans, start all over again.’

  ‘You ever do anything like that?’ I asked.

  ‘In my dreams. And you?’

  ‘A cross-country trip once with Dan. And before that I did end up in Central America for a few weeks with someone.’

  ‘Was that somebody Eric?’

  ‘And here we are in Chinatown,’ I said, changing the subject quickly, while also thinking of a moment years ago in a restaurant somewhere near here when Eric told me he loved me, that he was mine forever. A summer night it was. The mercury nearly hitting three figures. The restaurant wonderfully dingy and very authentic and badly air-conditioned. And the two of us holding hands so tightly, as if we were each other’s ballast. Though we were kids at the time, we just knew . . .

  ‘You OK?’ Richard asked.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ I lied.

  Richard touched my arm in a reassuring way, but I shrugged him off. Not forcibly, but with enough clarity to let it be known that I had just decided not to initiate any further contact with him. I’d go around the gallery with him, maybe agree to a coffee in the café there, then make my excuses and head back to the hotel. Why was I suddenly walling myself up? Because he had mentioned Eric. And because any mention of Eric threw into sharp silhouette all that my life had not been since those extraordinary two years towards the end of the eighties. And because I had padlocked that part of my past so thoroughly that even the slightest reference to it threw me into freefall.

  Will you listen to yourself, trying to push this man away.

  I just can’t cope with the jumble of things that are playing havoc with my psyche right now.

  You want directness? Here’s directness: you can’t cope with the fact that he is so right for you. And you are so right for him.

  And I am married. And I have made a commitment. And I cannot . . .

  Change.

  I put my face in my hands. I stifled a sob. Richard put his hand on my shoulder. I shrugged him off. But as soon as that happened the sobs started again. This time, I turned and buried my head in his shoulder. He held me tight until I brought the sobs under control. When they subsided he did something very smart. He said nothing except:

  ‘Want a drink?’ To which I immediately replied:

  ‘That sounds like a very good idea.’

  Six

  RICHARD WORKED HIS phone and discovered two salient pieces of local information: the gallery was open until nine o’clock this evening (if we did want to head there eventually), and there was a cocktail bar in the same vicinity with the straightforward name of Drink.

  ‘Sounds like it will do the job,’ I said, impressed with Richard’s ability to glean all this information in under a minute on his phone. I am still such a Luddite when it comes to most things technological. Just as I so appreciated the way he said nothing about my crying fit and didn’t even gently enquire why I had broken down. And when, in the wake of him telling me about the late museum hours, I said: ‘You know, I might head back to the hotel after a drink,’ he worked hard at disguising his disappointment, telling me:

  ‘Whatever works best for you, Laura. There’s no pressure whatsoever.’

  Again I found myself thinking: He is such a truly gentle man. And so much in the ‘kindred spirit’ realm. No wonder you’re pushing him away.

  Drink turned out to be an uber-stylish lounge, filled with uber-stylish types drinking uber-stylish cocktails.

  ‘Glad I changed my clothes,’ Richard said as the hostess on the door seated us in a rear booth.

  ‘You fit in perfectly here. But the thing is, even if you were dressed as before it wouldn’t have mattered one bit to me.’

  ‘Even though I bet you initially characterized me as a gray little man.’

  ‘All right, truth be told, I did consider you, when I first saw you at the hotel, somewhat traditional.’

  ‘Which is a euphemism for “dull”.’

  ‘You are anything but dull.’

  He touched my arm with his hand.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘The thing is, I have deliberately allowed myself to be perceived as dull. Outside of Dwight – who actually is quite the reader – I never allowed myself to appear too informed or interesting in public. When I’d tried that as a younger man – with my writing, my editorship of the U Maine literary magazine—’

  ‘You edited The Open Field?’

  ‘You remember its name!’

  ‘Of course I remember its name. I was on the editorial staff during my time in Orono.’

  ‘Doing what exactly?’

  ‘The poetry editor.’

  ‘That’s extraordinary.’

  ‘Not as extraordinary as being the editor-in-chief, especially as I presume you weren’t an English major.’

  ‘Wanted to do English, but my dad put his foot down. So it was economics and business administration. But I still managed to end up as the first non-English major to edit The Open Field. That was a real source of pride for me. I spent my first three years at the college working my way up the editorial ranks. Of course, when Dad also found out that I had been named editor-in-chief – and he gleaned that little detail when it accompanied the short biographical note that appeared alongside the short story in the Bangor Daily News – he was even more livid. Told me I had to resign the editorship immediately.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘Indeed it is. The thing is, though I always hated him for making me give it up – and I only had one more issue to put to bed – the person I really hated was myself. Because I had given in to his limiting meanness. Because I allowed myself to be intimidated b
y him. Because I was always so desperate to please a father who could not be pleased. And how did we get on this subject?’

  ‘It’s all right to be on this subject,’ I said. ‘That man—’

  ‘—was a bastard. Excuse my language. But it’s the only word to describe him. Small, mean, petty, angry at the world, and determined to keep me confined to the limited horizons within which his own life had been lived. The truth of the matter is that I accepted those limitations. I resigned the editorship of the magazine. I followed him into the family business. I never wrote a word again for almost thirty years. I married a woman who matched him for coldness and thrift. On his deathbed, when we were alone together in his hospital room and the colon cancer that was killing him had spread everywhere, and he had maybe forty-eight hours to live, he took my hand and told me: “You were always something of a disappointment to me.”’

  I reached over and threaded my hand into his.

  ‘I hope you told him what a monster he was.’

  ‘That would have been the good Eugene O’Neill ending, wouldn’t it? “May you go to your grave knowing your only son despises you . . . and he’s now selling off your nasty little insurance company and is setting sail for the Far East as a crewman on a tramp steamer.”’

  ‘Did that thought cross your mind?’

  ‘Variations on that theme.’

  ‘Like me with the French Foreign Legion when I was a teenager.’

  ‘Even though their all-male rule might have put a dent in your plans?’

  ‘Like you, it was all about dreams of leaving. But even my rather cool, distant mother at her chilliest couldn’t match your father. He was clearly beyond contemptible.’

  The waiter arrived, asking us what we’d like to drink.

  ‘I’m not too knowledgeable about cocktails,’ I told Richard, ‘but I remember once drinking a very good manhattan on my one visit to New York.’

  ‘Then two manhattans,’ he said.

  The waiter asked us if we preferred ours with bourbon or rye. We both professed ignorance. The waiter recommended Sazerac rye – ‘for a manhattan with a slightly more syrupy texture, but with a complex smoothness’. I could see Richard trying to keep a straight face.

  ‘“Complex smoothness” sounds fine to me,’ he said.

  ‘Me too,’ I added.

  As soon as the waiter was out of earshot, Richard said:

  ‘It’s one of the more curious things about modern life: the amount of choice on offer. Back twenty years ago, rye was that cheap Canadian Club stuff my dad used to drink. Now there are probably two dozen different ryes on offer. Just as Scotch was always J&B, and wine was Gallo red or white. We don’t just live in a consumerist culture. We live in a wildly consumerist culture.’

  ‘But there are benefits to all that – like the fact that good coffee is a given just about everywhere . . .’

  ‘Even in Lewiston?’

  ‘Poor Lewiston – the butt of all in-state Maine jokes. But I’m sure you can still find a decent cappuccino even there.’

  ‘And a decent rye manhattan?’

  ‘That might be a stretch. Maybe I’ll give up radiography to open a cocktail bar in Lewiston.’

  ‘And I know a good bankruptcy lawyer you can talk to when it all goes south.’

  ‘“O ye of little faith.”’

  ‘Matthew eight, twenty-six.’

  ‘That’s impressive,’ I said.

  ‘Another legacy from my father. A real Presbyterian. Scots-Irish – the most dour Celtic combination imaginable. No joie de vivre. A real Hobbesian view of the human condition.’

  ‘And I bet this is the first time that Thomas Hobbes was ever mentioned in this cocktail lounge.’

  ‘Let alone Matthew eight, twenty-six.’

  ‘Well, there’s a first for everything.’

  ‘And thanks to dear old Dad – who made me go to Sunday school for fifteen years – my brain is crammed with far too many scriptural references.’

  ‘Can you do The Book of Mormon as well?’

  ‘That’s a little beyond my realm of knowledge.’

  I found myself laughing – and quietly realized that Richard, in his own canny, quiet way, had just managed to talk me out of the sadness that had overcome me in the taxi, simply by being smart and funny and interesting. And by sharing all that terrible stuff about his father.

  ‘I am so sorry for blubbering like that earlier,’ I said.

  ‘Never be sorry for that. Never.’

  ‘But I am. Because I was brought up by a mother who thought crying was something akin to a profound character flaw, and a dad who spent much of his life dodging any direct emotion whatsoever. So to cry, openly . . . I’ve managed to sidestep that one for most of my life. Until recently.’

  ‘And what changed recently?’

  ‘Good question,’ I said as the drinks arrived.

  ‘Hope you approve,’ the waiter said as he put the two cocktail glasses before us.

  ‘Here’s to . . . complex smoothness?’ Richard asked, raising his glass.

  Hoisting mine I said:

  ‘How about . . . to us.’

  Richard smiled. And touched his glass against mine.

  ‘I like that,’ I said. ‘To us.’

  ‘To us.’

  I sipped the manhattan.

  ‘My word,’ I said, ‘dense libidinous fluency.’

  ‘Or . . . libational eloquence.’

  ‘Or . . . spiritous volubility.’

  ‘Or . . . no, I can’t top that,’ Richard said.

  ‘I bet you can.’

  ‘You’re wonderful, did you know that?’

  ‘Until this afternoon . . . no, I didn’t know that. And you’re wonderful, did you know that?’

  ‘Until this afternoon . . .’

  I raised my glass again to his.

  ‘To us.’

  ‘To us.’

  ‘And yes,’ I said, ‘I do find myself crying frequently these days. Half the time I think it’s about all the usual unsettling thoughts that arrive with middle age. But maybe it’s also about my husband. And about my children and all the stuff that seems to be blindsiding both of them all the time. Maybe also about the fact that my work now seems to impact on me in a way that it never used to. That’s what unnerves me the most – the loss of professional detachment.’

  ‘But surely that’s linked with all the stuff at home.’

  ‘When Ben had his breakdown . . .’

  Over the next half an hour or so, Richard got me talking in more detail about all that had befallen Ben; how his depression had only widened the gulf between him and his father, and the way he was inching his way back to some sort of stability.

  The first manhattan cocktail was drained. And so was I.

  ‘I’ve talked far too much,’ I said.

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘I’ve bent your ear.’

  ‘But I wanted my ear bent. And after having told you all about Billy this afternoon . . .’

  ‘I’m not usually comfortable talking about personal stuff.’

  ‘But it’s about you. And I want to know everything about you.’

  ‘Can we ever know everything about another person?’

  ‘Everything? As in, the whole, the aggregate, the entirety?’

  ‘Or to be colloquial, all but the kitchen sink, the whole megillah.’

  ‘No, we can hardly know the corpus, the lot,’ he said, while motioning to the waiter to bring us two more drinks. ‘But if you are drawn to someone, surely you want to know about—’

  ‘Eric,’ I heard myself saying. As I said it, it struck me that, outside of this afternoon, when I mentioned his name, the word ‘Eric’ had been banished from my vocabulary. Outside of Lucy – to whom I told the story early on in our friendship – no one else knew about his existence. No one except Dan and my parents. But Mom and Dad never raised the subject of Eric – largely because they both knew it was something I didn’t want to talk about, let alone consider. And
Dan dodged it completely – for all sorts of self-evident reasons. Even Lucy – having heard the tale – never made reference to it. She understood it was so off-limits. The forbidden topic.

  But now . . .

  ‘Eric Lachtmann,’ I said. ‘A New Yorker. From Long Island. German-Jewish background. His grandfather was a jeweler in the Diamond District of Manhattan, his dad a CPA, his mom classic frustrated housewife territory. Two older brothers, both heading into business careers. And Eric – who had decided at the age of fifteen that he was going to be a Great American Novelist – also spent much of high school pursuing arty pursuits and not caring very much about class work, with the result that his college choices were not exactly prestigious ones. A couple of the better state universities in New York wanted him. He was wait-listed at Wisconsin. But – as he told me later – something about being “way up in the Maine sticks” really appealed to him. If I remember correctly, he told me that his decision was partially based on the fact that, during his senior year in high school, he’d been reading all those early Hemingway stories set up in northern Michigan – and had this romantic notion that landing himself into the boondocks was an essential part of his “writerly training”. Of course he was also planning to live in Paris, and travel overland to Patagonia, and get his first novel published by the time he was twenty-five, and marry me and bring me everywhere.

  ‘That was so Eric. Big talk. Big plans. Big brain. Probably the smartest person I’d ever met. But the thing about him was, though he talked in a grandiose way, there was always real substance behind the talk. Even at eighteen he put his money where his mouth was. And he was already, by the time I met him, living a writerly life.

  ‘He was quite the character at U Maine. You remember how conservative the school was, how State U, how the student body was largely rural and backwater. And how few out-of-staters there were. Here was Eric – this “Manhattanite in waiting” as he called himself – dashing around the campus in a black trenchcoat, sporting a fedora, with these ultra-smelly French cigarettes on the go all the time. He’d found a place in Orono where he could actually buy Gitanes – those cigarettes he so adored – and a daily copy of the New York Times, at a time when that newspaper was something of a cargo cult up in Maine. And he was always talking books, books, books. And foreign movies. Within his first semester at Orono, not only had he taken over the college Film Society and was programming an Ingmar Bergman retrospective, but he was also fiction editor of The Open Field. Which is where I met him. I had talked my way onto the editorial committee of the magazine, even though I was pre-med and clearly not the type the magazine attracted. As you no doubt remember from your own time up there, Orono did boast a small bohemian coterie within their student body – who, like Eric, had ended up there after less-than-brilliant high school careers, but still were very determined to act as if they were all up at Columbia during the era of Ginsberg and Kerouac.’