Five Days Read online

  ‘And was that your story?’ Richard asked. ‘Did you end up there because you hadn’t been as rigorous as you should have been during high school?’

  ‘No – I ended up there courtesy of my own profound need to self-sabotage.’

  And I told him all about being accepted at Bowdoin on a partial scholarship, and turning it down because I could go to U Maine for nothing.

  ‘So that is still a source of immense regret?’

  ‘Of course it is. Because – and I only realize this now – it was the start of a process in which I began to deliberately sell myself short. Clip my wings. Limit my latitude. Still, had I gone to Bowdoin I would never have met Eric. And had I not met Eric . . .’

  The second round of drinks arrived. We touched glasses. I took a long sip of the manhattan, part of me telling myself that I should stop talking now.

  But the other part of me – fueled, no doubt, by the alcohol, by the low lighting and subdued intimacy of the lounge, and (most of all) by the profound need and desire I felt to impart this story to Richard – forced myself to keep talking.

  ‘So I walked into an editorial meeting of the magazine, having heard word around campus about this smart-assed New York guy who talked a mile a minute and seemed bent on refashioning everything arts-wise at the university to his own liking. Here I was this bookish, science-oriented girl from a middling Maine town, still a virgin –’ (God, the manhattans really were playing havoc with my sense of propriety) ‘and someone who always felt herself plain, unattractive, especially when compared to all the so-called “popular” girls at school. As I walked into the magazine’s office, Eric looked up at me. In that very instant . . . well, I just knew. Just as Eric knew. Or so he told me three days later, after we slept together for the first time. That’s right – even though I was just eighteen and completely inexperienced, and Eric, as it turned out, had only had one serious girlfriend before me, and that was just a summer fling – we became lovers in a matter of days. Immediately after that editorial meeting where we first met, he invited me to a local bar – remember when you could drink in Maine at eighteen? – and we must have spent the next six hours there, nursing beers, talking, talking, talking. By the time he walked me home to my dorm that night, I knew I was madly in love. We saw each other the next evening – talking, talking, talking until around three in the morning. Even though we were in his dorm room, he made no move, put me under no pressure whatsoever. Instead he walked me home, kissed me lightly on the lips and told me that I was “nothing less than extraordinary”. No one had ever said that to me before. No one after Eric ever did either . . . until you said something very similar just a little while ago. The next night – it was a Saturday – when we found ourselves still talking in my room at two, and he wondered out loud if he should go home, I told him I wanted him to stay. It was my choice, my call. When we awoke the next morning, he told me, quite simply, that he loved me – and that we were now inseparable. And I told him I loved him, and would never love anyone else.

  ‘Saying all that now, part of me thinks, how wondrously naive, how innocent. But the truth is – and this is the middle-aged woman talking – the love I felt, the love given, the love shared . . . it was nothing less than matchless. Yes, we were kids. Yes, we were living in that bubble which was college. And yes, we knew nothing of the larger world and its infernal compromises. But here was a man I could talk to about anything. Here was a man who was so original, so curious, so thoughtful, so vital . . . and who made me feel capable of everything. After the first semester we shocked everybody by finding an apartment off campus and moving in together. When my parents met Eric they were completely charmed. Of course they both found him a little over the top. But they also saw his love for me – and the way he was, in his own determined way, pushing me to do my very best. And Eric’s parents – very formal, very stiff, very much in despair over what they saw to be their wayward son – simply adored me. Because I was the small-town Maine girl who clearly loved their son and also seemed to keep him grounded, within the earth’s gravity.

  ‘It was love. Absolute extraordinary love. We were both so profoundly happy. Because it was also so easy together. My grades that first year skyrocketed. I made Dean’s List. I was asked to join the Honors Program. Eric, meanwhile, was establishing his hegemony – yes, that is the correct word – over the literary magazine, the film society, and even managed to talk his way into staging a radical reworking of Twelfth Night set in a suburban high school. The guy was just bursting with talent. Hearing me say all this now . . . I know it all sounds so romanticized, so quixotic, too good to be true. I know it was all twenty-two years ago, and time has a habit of soft-focussing so much, especially when it comes to first love. But . . . but . . . I think I see life with a certain clarity. My work forces me to do that all the time – because being a radiographic technologist is all about being able to view the most elemental cellular forces within us with absolute pellucidity. But one’s emotional life is always more murky, isn’t it? There’s no clarity when it comes to matters of the heart. Except one thing about which I am still absolutely clear – Eric Lachtmann was the love of my life. I had never been happier, more productive, more fulfilled. Everyone who knew us back then saw that we were, in a word, golden.

  ‘Of course we had plans. So many plans. The summer after our freshman year we both got teaching jobs at a rich kids’ prep school in New Hampshire, tutoring the far too well off and stupid who weren’t going to get into college if they didn’t bump up their grades. The money was pretty good. Good enough for us to head to Costa Rica on the cheap for the last two weeks of the summer vacation. Eric had an artist friend of the family there with a place on the Pacific coast. Even though it was the rainy season, the sun still came out six hours of the day and, hey, we were in Central America, how cool was that? While in Costa Rica we agreed to go to Paris for our junior year, and spend the next twelve months doing intensive French. Eric was pretty certain there was an exchange program for pre-med students at the Fac du Médecine at the Sorbonne. There was, and I got in.

  ‘But then a small bit of drama landed in our laps when I discovered I was pregnant. I knew how and why it had happened. While in Costa Rica, I forgot to take the pill two days in a row. Bingo. Back in our apartment in Orono I started getting sick every morning for five straight days. I told Eric my suspicions and how guilty I felt about missing those two doses of the pill, though he already knew that because I told him immediately about it when I realized that all the mezcal we’d drunk one weekend with that crazed artist friend of the family – a real Bukowski type – had led me to slip up on the contraception front. Eric and I had that kind of relationship where we promised to tell each other everything. And did. So when one of those home pregnancy tests confirmed what was readily apparent – I was going to have a baby – Eric being Eric he told me: “Hey, we’ll keep it. Bring him or her to Paris. Raise this baby to be the coolest citizen imaginable and just carry on with our lives.” His exact words. That also was pure Eric – the art of the possible. Nothing too arduous that couldn’t be countered with wild enthusiasm and work. Of course the guy had his dark moments like anyone – and could get into these occasional black funks where he sometimes refused to get out of bed for two days. But that’s what came with living life at such a manic, exalted level. Those episodes . . . they were maybe a quarterly event. He always pulled himself out of them. And he always joked afterwards that it was his body’s way of telling him to stop trying to be endlessly brilliant – as the guy was a straight A student in English and philosophy, on top of everything else. But outside of those occasional moments it was always “the art of the possible”. And part of the “everything is possible” was this baby. Our baby.

  ‘As upbeat and persuasive as Eric was it was me who said: ‘Not now.’ I was still very young, after all. Even though I was living with a man, and very much in love, and knew that Eric was the person I would travel through life with, I was also very cognizant of what having
a child would mean. How it was a non-stop responsibility. How it would limit so much at a time in our lives when we should really be unencumbered. And how Paris would not be Paris with a baby.

  ‘So, very rationally and with, I must admit, little guilt whatsoever, I told Eric that it was best for us if we waited a few years – frankly, after I finished medical school – before starting a family. He was cool with that. I sense he was privately relieved – but also would have gone along with it all had I insisted on keeping it. Eric being Eric he took charge of everything. Found me a really lovely, sympathetic clinic in Boston where the termination took place. Booked us into a nice hotel for the weekend, so I could recover after the procedure. Was so supportive and loving throughout. Honestly, I got through that all so easily because, of course, Eric and I loved each other, and we were going to be together for all the decades to come. So, of course, I’d be pregnant again in a few years with Eric’s baby. Only this time the moment would be right.

  ‘Just thinking about that – only this time the moment would be right – when you’re young you are never really conscious of the way time will later on accelerate at such a ferocious speed. Just as you also think that you are invulnerable to that terrible underside of life which is dictated by the random, the happenstantial.

  ‘Anyway, the pregnancy was terminated in mid-September. Our sophomore year was another golden period – where we both continued to surpass ourselves academically, where Eric became fiction editor of The Open Field and I was promoted to poetry editor, where we both got into the Sorbonne on that junior year exchange program for the following September, and both did accelerated French to the point where we agreed to spend two hours a day talking with each other dans la langue de Molière – one of the few phrases I remember from back then.

  ‘Life was, in a word, splendid. Yes, Eric still had those “black dog” moments – and they had started creeping up on him every other week. But he always shook them off. Always kept going. Always amazed me with his resilience and his ability to constantly embrace life with both hands.

  ‘That Easter we were thinking of heading down to see some friends in Cambridge. At the last minute I got a bad stomach bug, and was up sick the night before we were due to leave. So we stayed put at our place in Orono. I started getting ill again and Eric said he’d run up to the pharmacy and get me something to curb the vomiting. We both had bicycles. Eric took his. Before he left he gave me a kiss and told me he loved me. Then he headed out – and never came back. After an hour I was panicked, but was so weak from being sick that I couldn’t get out of bed and go searching for him. Around two that afternoon the police came to my door. A woman social worker was with them. That’s when I knew. They told me that Eric had run a red light on his bicycle a block away from the pharmacy and had been knocked down by an oncoming truck. He’d been thrown clear of his bicycle and slammed into a lamppost. Death, they told me, was instantaneous. He probably felt and knew nothing. That’s when I started to collapse, to weep uncontrollably. Eric dead. It was beyond unthinkable. It was as if my entire future – all possibility of happiness – had just been permanently decimated.

  ‘The next eighteen months were a depressed blur. My father was never good at emotional ballast. And my mother – though initially sympathetic – essentially told me to snap out of it, that I was young and had my whole life ahead of me, and what I needed to do now was look forward. My college friends were nice. I did talk for a bit to a psychologist on campus. But he wasn’t making me feel better, so I stopped the sessions, which I now realize was a bad idea. Back then, I didn’t want to feel better. I was so consumed with grief. So profoundly devastated. Everything just started to come asunder. Though my professors were, at first, kind to me, my grades really started to slip, as I no longer cared whether I did well or not. I cancelled the year abroad in Paris because I thought it would be unbearable without Eric. I kept largely to myself. I did middling class work, and my straight A average slipped into the Cs. But so what? I no longer had a purpose. The love of my life had been snatched from me. Though several professors and friends really did try to get me to start some serious therapy I refused. I was wildly depressed, but still functional enough to get through the day, to keep my apartment clean, to do just enough course work to pass my exams and not flunk out. What I realize now is that I was on a self-destructive kick – and really needed to punish myself. I went about it with profound determination.

  ‘Somehow I made it through junior year. My mother looked at my grades and shook her head and said: “There goes your medical career.” I didn’t care. My dad – when I had his attention – told me I should really think about doing something outside the box for a couple of years, like maybe joining the Peace Corps. But when I started to cry and ask him where and when I would meet another Eric, he just put a hand on my shoulder and told me that life would go on and – if I allowed it – it would get better.

  ‘Actually that was smart advice – especially about joining the Peace Corps and taking myself off to some extreme Third World country where I could maybe get a great deal of distance and emotional perspective. But did I follow it? I was so bent on hurting myself – something that I only understood rather recently – that, in the final trimester of my junior year, I managed to allow myself to be asked out by a guy named Dan Warren. A computer science major from way up north in Aroostook County. A nice enough fellow – whom I met when I got talked into joining an outdoor club by a friend who thought that getting me hiking might improve my mental state. Dan came from a different planet than Eric. Though intelligent he wasn’t an intellectual, had no imaginative flights of fancy, preferred the concrete to the realm of ideas, and his basic philosophy could be summed up as: Feet firmly on the ground is the only way to travel. Still, he was kind. And he really seemed to get me and couldn’t have been more sympathetic and canny when it came to dealing with all the deep, residual grief I still felt for Eric. We were friends for a month before we became romantically involved. Though there was none of the passion I felt for Eric it was an antidote to the past months of agony. Dan himself couldn’t have been more thrilled. He thought I was a catch. My friends found him “nice”, “straightforward ”, “uncomplicated ” – all those euphemisms for dull and less than animated. My parents met him. “Decent enough guy” was my dad’s rather flat verdict. Mom was more direct. “I hope he gets you out of your dark wood and then you move on to someone with a little more depth in the outfield.”

  ‘Still, that summer before our senior year, he took me cross-country on a road trip, which was kind of wonderful. Even if I did frequently wonder what I was doing with this guy. But it was comfortable and easy. So on it went. Then, another small disaster. We’d always used condoms as birth control, as I’d gone off the pill after Eric’s death and it really didn’t agree with me. One night – around two weeks before our graduation – a condom that Dan was wearing broke while we were making love. At the time it was difficult, but still possible to get the morning-after pill. It required a drive down to that clinic in Boston where I had my termination. I had a biology final on Monday and I was frightened of failing it – that’s how much I had let myself slip, even after hooking up with Dan – who, truth be told, wasn’t much of a student when it came to chasing high grades. And I was due to have my period in seven days. And . . .

  ‘Oh, the excuses I invented. I think now, deep down, I couldn’t bear the idea of terminating another pregnancy, even though the morning-after pill – despite what the born-again lobby thinks – is a far cry from a termination. There was another part of me that, ever since Eric’s death, had been carrying a huge amount of guilt about not doing what Eric suggested and having our baby. You can’t believe the amount of times I’ve told myself, if only we’d had the baby Eric would still be here today. If only I had listened to him, and hadn’t pushed for an abortion. If only . . .’

  Richard reached out and took my hand.

  ‘You can’t think that. You did absolutely nothing wrong. Nothi
ng.’

  ‘I would have had his baby. That part of him would still be here . . .’

  ‘Had Eric not run that red light at the time—’

  ‘The only reason he ran that light is because I’d gotten sick. Had we gone to Boston despite my stomach flu—’

  ‘Laura, please, stop. You had no hand in what happened to Eric. It was the music of chance, nothing more.’

  ‘But afterwards I did have a choice – and what did I do? I walled myself into a life I didn’t want. My mother – who never knew about the first abortion – firmly told me that she would “take care of everything” if I wanted to terminate the pregnancy. Even Dan was OK with the idea of ending it. But no. The guilt I felt was so rampant, so unexamined, so self-punitive that I insisted on keeping the child. And to keep Dan’s very conservative, very Baptist parents happy we were married that same summer. Even a week before the wedding Mom tried to talk me out of it. Saying I was making the mistake of my life. But . . .’

  I reached for my drink and drained it, gripping Richard’s hand even tighter as the alcohol provided momentary balm against all I had refused to confront for years, decades. Then:

  ‘Every day I give thanks for the fact that I have my two wondrous children. When I think how, had I terminated that second pregnancy, Ben would not be here now – my brilliant, extraordinarily talented son – that nullifies all the other regrets. Just as Sally – whom I so adore, and who I see is in the midst of a gigantic struggle right now – would also not be here had I not chosen to stay with Dan. So, there are huge recompenses for a life otherwise—’