The Twoweeks Read online

  And I would be alone. “Let’s give it a few extra days,” was Ian’s wise prescription upon leaving for Coeur D’Alene. So he would be gone two weeks plus the few extra days—not flying back straight away. Flying back, as it happened, on July 6th, otherwise known as the Saturday following.

  Meanwhile, I would be left holding the weirdness bag while C. was reuniting with his family, spending the 4th of July at his in-laws’ country seat, as I confess I had begun to call it. Why should he have that to fall back on? Why should the beautiful Winnie also have the most wonderful parents and C’s “favorite place in the world” to further skew the competition? What did I have to counter that?

  I shook off this onslaught of self-pity and reminded myself I was a happily married woman with no need to “counter” anyone’s summer house in the Catskills. All I had to do was get Debra Gordon off the phone. Which would have been simple enough had I wished to explain The Twoweeks to her. It felt too private, though, or maybe just too strange.

  She had unfolded so many different scenarios for getting together that there was no easy way around her. I ended up agreeing to another visit without registering that it would be Day 13 (if there even was a Day 13 . . .), and then slipped deeper into obligation by offering to bring salad and dessert.

  “How bloody normal can I get?” I complained to C. “Dessert and bloody salad.”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted from them? To feel normal?”

  “Plus, that would be Day Thirteen.”

  As I said this, I became acutely aware that the moment for speaking up had arrived. If I was going to rewrite our timetable, I had to tell C. right then. But I couldn’t do it. I froze up and let the conversation roll on, let it flow swiftly past the moment and into a sea of painless repartee. “We can leave early again,” he was saying, as I watched the moment bob away and disappear.

  “No chance of that. There’s some sort of early fireworks display on the beach and it won’t start until dark.”

  “I say the fireworks start right now.”

  “Hands off until we figure this out.”

  “There’s no more figuring to do. You put us in the quicksand, babe. Stuck is stuck. Best we can do is—?”

  “Offer it up,” I groaned.

  “Right you are. And let’s not forget that it was nice of them to invite us. Hey, we might be perfectly happy to go there if we had a few years to fill instead of a few nights.”

  “And if wishes were horses then beggars could ride.”

  “If wishes were chickens then beggars could eat eggs for breakfast.”

  “We’d better tell them the truth this time. Or enough of the truth so they don’t blow your cover with Winnie.”

  “They’ve never even met Winnie.”

  “Sure. But suppose you and Winnie run into Gerald and Debra at, say, Buddy’s Sirloin Pit. Hellos, introductions, conversations, invitations?”

  “They aren’t idiots, Lara.”

  “Suit yourself. Winnie is your cross to bear.”

  “I don’t mind telling them. But what exactly would we tell them? What is the Truth?”

  “I just meant the basic situation. That we’re a secret and that we’re over, or will be. That’s all they need to know: not to confuse this with real life.”

  “Perish the thought.”

  Meanwhile, we were packing for another day at Revere Beach. Its ineluctable tackiness appealed to a recessive honkytonk gene we each carried, plus we liked how easy it was. The train goes right there. You step off and stroll down to the sand in one minute flat.

  Or down to the gravel that only wishes it were sand. Just so, you wade into the Swimmable water that wishes it were Healthy but at least is not Dangerous, or wasn’t, on either occasion. Then it’s out past the bobbing plastic bottles to frolic in dramatic onefoot swells.

  It’s not that bad, really. Looking back in from the water, it’s almost picturesque. You see what’s left of the old amusement park, and Kelly’s, and the Rotunda, all set against the backdrop of a hill rising to the busy streets of the town. It’s easy to imagine the place as a going concern a century ago, a lively seaside destination with trains arriving quarter-hourly from Boston, laughing women changing into their itchy woolen bathing suits, braying men with handlebar moustaches flexing their muscles. It makes a lovely black-and-white postcard in my mind’s eye.

  We lunched at Kelly’s. C. went with the clam strips again, I stayed with the scallop roll. William, meanwhile, opted for the greasy cheeseburger.

  William (chubby, carrot-topped, nine) was C.’s latest surrogate son; he found one everywhere we turned. But unlike Bart’s mom, who had seemed attached to her boy, Wm.’s mom was only too happy to loan the lad out. A chain-smoking harridan in gilded slippers, she asked if we would “grab the kid a cheeseburger since you’re going up there anyway” and C. grabbed it, though Mom omitted to pay. Can I go with them, ma, can I can I, went Wm. and Mom went, Sure you can. Without bothering to ask us.

  In her defense, C. did seem prepared to adopt. Long before l’affaire cheeseburger, he had thrown a ratty nerf football to the lad for a solid half hour. “I hope you aren’t jotting down his Christmas list,” I whispered.

  We had mastered the drill, the Revere Beach Shuffle, on both land and sea. Brought air mattresses to cushion the gravel, brought big towels to cushion the air mattresses, and knew to keep our mouths shut in the putatively Swimmable water. One thing you do not get at Revere is that deep sea feeling of being supremely clean, as though scrubbed by Mother Nature. Instead, you make liberal use of the outdoor shower.

  You do get shed of Wm. when you swim. Want to come in, said C., and Wm. replied (in full-throated parody of the Boston accent), “Are you guys nuts?”

  When finally we shed him for good (when Wm. and The Harridan broke camp and started uphill to their “stinking steaming apartment,” as she characterized it, after we marveled at the agreeable notion of a seaside residence), C. waved as they receded from view. Wm. did not condescend to wave back.

  “Did you even like that kid?” I said.

  “He’s okay. I mean, given Ma?”

  “I found him mildly repulsive.”

  “Lara, he’s a child.”

  “He is a small male person. Is it your educated guess that he will be a nice male person when he grows larger?”

  “I’ll be rooting for him,” said C. with a grin.

  “You know, you may have missed your calling, Cal. Aren’t the Cub Scouts always looking for a few good men?”

  “That’s the Marines.”

  “Really, though. You are a male person who exhibits patience with kids.”

  “And has roots in the community! You make it sound like I’m a convicted criminal angling for a lighter sentence.”

  “Lighter than going to Hell, you mean?”

  “Oh, much lighter.”

  We ate dinner at the Paddock Lounge, nothing but top-drawer venues for us. The place boasts a pervasive racetrack theme (Suffolk Downs one train stop away) with saddles and silks and historic photo finishes on the walls. A very small man sat a few stools from us, alongside a framed picture of the same man in cap and silks, posing in the winner’s circle with a horse.

  As C. headed off to the washroom (Colts on one door, Fillies on the other) I realized why William had tapped into my uncharitable side. I was jealous. Not of nine-year-old William exactly, and not jealous jealous—merely protective of our time, of our fast-fleeting limited exclusivity. Where exactly did that leave me, given my resolve to limit it even more?

  Unaware of my unspoken scheme, C. was in a good mood. Clowning around, he improvised a scene for the barmaid, scrolling down the beer card as though it was the wine list in a fine dining establishment and he a connoisseur painstakingly making his selection. Disappointed that the waitress did not applaud (or even notice) his performance, he was further disappointed to find that Rolling Rock was their idea of a snob beer.

  “They serve normal beers,” I explained to him. “It
goes with their normal food.”

  “Oh well,” he said, “we came for the waters, really.”

  I had a Hey Mabel Black Label with my Portuguese cabbage soup, he had Rolling Rock and the Salisbury steak, we split a wedge of lemon meringue pie. When he hauled me up by both hands and said, “Come on, old girl, time to go home,” it was so sweet, so offhandedly affectionate, that it felt right. It felt real.

  But I should not have let it pass. “Home” was not where we were going and I should have said as much. And I should have said, right then and there, that we had a lot less time than he thought we did. That not only were our days numbered, they were numbered differently than he thought. Again, though, those words simply were not available to me; the mood was just so powerfully otherwise. Outside on the street, we kissed. Waiting at the T-stop, we kissed again.

  The inbound train was virtually empty, with maybe a dozen riders scattered through three cars. Gloomy fluorescent light blanched a bald head; worn signage offered to prosecute your accident claim; dim stations flickered by with their gray littered concrete platforms. At Government Center, where we emerged, a cool breeze swept the vast plaza.

  In spite of our heavy imposts, we somehow held hands as we walked. On the Longfellow Bridge, halfway between two sets of pepper-pots, we stopped to watch the river. (This was almost a tradition by now, viewing Boston from the bridges.) Narrowing back toward Harvard’s enclaves in the dusky air, bejewelled with golden streaks of light, the river glowed like an Impressionist painting. It was gorgeous. With all our water-going forays, we had never considered the possibilities of the Charles River, so close at hand.

  “It’s true you can’t swim in it. Or fish. I have seen canoes, though.”

  “Winnie?” said C. “Jake? Hetty?” By which he meant they sometimes strolled the riverbank.

  “I forgot to worry.”

  “That’s all right,” said C., brushing my cheek.

  But it was not all right, it was a bad sign. Just as he had forgotten Miller Road was not our home, I had forgotten Winnie, Jake, and Hetty. Pretty much forgotten their existence. I was bearing down on the schedule, obsessing over the days, without registering the reason why. Without remembering that Cal was not mine.

  And of course, I was the one charged with reminding us.

  “FIRST OF all, I’d like credit for holding my tongue.”

  “I take it you aren’t planning to maintain that discipline.”

  “Come on, you didn’t think I would miss it, did you? The smoking gun? Incontrovertible corroboration of Day 9?”

  “You’re still on that?”

  “ ‘We packed for another day at Revere.’ There it is. Clearly there was an earlier day at Revere; just as clearly it has to be the lockbox day.”

  “You certainly are tenacious of a point.”

  “And this line about having ‘learned the drill’ obviously refers back to the day in question. In fact, I recall that you detested Revere the first time. We hadn’t been there two minutes when you stated flatly that you wouldn’t be coming there again. And yet you did.”

  “I have always been flexible.”

  “Less so now, though still agile for your years.”

  “I did not mean in any prurient sense, as you know, Calvert. We ended up liking it, that’s all. I took note of the fact.”

  “We ended up loving it. How could we not? Turds floating past the Swimmable sign? Our threadbare towels laid over sharp rocks? Plus, for a bonus, you got bit on the backside by the Guinness Book of World Records horsefly.”

  “It left a big red welt on my whitest part. Or so you said.”

  “Smack dab on the sweetest curve in Christendom, that half-moon slice of lower buttock that mere underwear could never contain.”

  “It itched like crazy, I will say that.”

  “And you scratched it like a man: butt itches, you scratch it. But then you were distracted. Right after the horsefly came The Weirdo in the Speedo? Do you remember?”

  “Sounds like a distasteful topic.”

  “We laughed at the time.”

  “Remind me. Or maybe don’t.”

  “Just a guy who thought he was on the beach at Cannes, or St. Tropez. Prowling back and forth in his itsy-bitsy. And either he believed he looked better than he did or he was wonderfully unselfconscious about his appearance.”

  “Maybe he was a genuine European.”

  “One of the thousands of French tourists flocking to Revere Beach? At the time, you called him a weirdo.”

  “He was behaving oddly, walking on his tiptoes and singing to himself. Didn’t I speculate he might be a dancer?”

  “One of the many internationally famous dancers flocking to Revere?”

  “Either he didn’t care how it looked or he didn’t know. Like me, that day in Duxbury.”

  “When you swam in your underwear.”

  “Only because you assured me it looked like a bathing suit.”

  “You believed that?”

  “The top and bottom matched. It was opaque. It was in no way different from a bathing suit, you assured me. At the time, I didn’t know you well enough to ignore you.”

  “Did I ever tell you how I would check the newspaper—for years, actually—to see if Revere was Healthy, Swimmable, or Dangerous? I would get lonesome for you and recall the greasy clam strips, and the bobbing turds, and Gamby. I’d get nostalgic every time I read anything about Gamby in the paper.”

  “That was our jockey friend?”

  “Carl Gambardella, the greatest race-rider in New England history.”

  “The bartender asked him to sign a shirt for some kid—and then the shirt got wet. Something spilled, remember? Don’t let the ink run, Gamby? You sang it on the train, to the tune of ‘Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie.’ ”

  “I should have had him sign my shirt too. Then you’d have had Harold Jenkins and Carl Gambardella among your collectibles.”

  “What did you write when people asked for autographs?”

  “If there were three or four of them, I made a quick slash, like the mark of Zorro. If there was just one, I would ask her name and put it in.”

  “Her? Was it always a her?”

  “Pretty much. I’m sure it was that way for Conway Twitty, too. With Gamby it might have been different.”

  “The little guy was a man’s man?”

  “In a man’s world. But isn’t memory an amazing feature, how all this stuff comes flooding back? The whole scene there that night: the fish tank; the lady with the ripped cobweb stockings; the bartender with Waylon Jennings hair.”

  “That’s why one keeps a journal.”

  “Oh, does one?”

  “Well, if one did. It’s a way to keep from losing bits of your life. Though I wasn’t sure about these particular bits. This journal.”

  “You could have burned it, at any time.”

  “You don’t do that. If you write it down, you hang onto it. You know where you put it, you take it with you when you move.”

  “And yet here you are, claiming to have never once read it.”

  “Oh, this one? Not until tonight.”

  “Honestly, though?”

  “Honest injun. I am in the same boat as you are. We are both about to find out what happened on Day 12.”

  “Lead me back into temptation, old girl.”

  DAY 12 was not the day we parted—that whole idea was slipping fast—it was the day we got arrested. And C. acted like a jerk.

  The poor cop was just figuring out what the hell to do with us and here’s C. holding out his wrists, saying “Cuff ’em officer.” Saying, “Cool, we’re under arrest,” because he had lost out at a couple of recent auditions and the standard joke among actors is that they are so overlooked they can’t even “get arrested.” So to him this was funny. He was getting arrested. It would be a story to tell.

  A story for Winnie, though? Would she cheerfully post bail for him and serve as a character witness at the trial? Such minor complicatio
ns rarely cross his mind.

  That day started out with bad vibes on Miller Road. Mrs. Ridley no doubt suspected we had murdered Ian and buried him in the cellar. She adores Ian. He’s her go-to guy. For power outages, cigarette runs to Tiny’s, imaginary robbers, advice on her dialysis . . . she always turns to Ian. “He’s my husband, too,” she once smiled and said, as he helped her up the rickety stair.

  All that morning she had been pacing like an angry red squirrel, wearing a path in the yard. Sounds escaped her from time to time, but she never spoke and she never pounced. She started to wrestle with her folding table, even more strenuously than usual, as though to call Ian back from the dead for this, his favorite chore.

  When C. innocently offered to give her a hand, she hissed and clawed at him. Maybe I exaggerate, but she definitely rejected his help with a No Thanks that sounded like the metal whacking the wood in a rat trap. “She’s all yours,” he said. “You sort her out.”

  Fair enough. He and Mrs. Ridley would not be facing off for much longer. Soon enough she would have “our husband” back. The question was, would she tattle on me? Would she take our Ian by the sleeve, as she liked to do, and pour poisonous confidences into his ear? She could never have imagined we were on the up and up, that my betrayal was pre-approved.

  C. spent some time with a map, determined to come up with “something good” to do with the day. What he came up with was a lake on the Wellesley College campus, which he said looked promising. To me it looked like a tiny blue smudge on the map.

  “I feel there will be images for you.”

  “Whatever you say, Cal. We’ll go out and collect a few images.”

  “You don’t sound enthusiastic.”

  He had caught me absently wondering if I wouldn’t rather go in to work that day. Hypothetically. Maybe I didn’t miss Ian, but I did sort of miss my life. And while I wasn’t getting tired of C., I was growing weary of our ground rules. So I was not in the best mood, and driving in traffic did not improve me.

  Nor, by the way, did being detained by the lake police. But C. was right about one thing. “Comparing Apples and Images” got started that day, or I should say that the seed of it was planted. Nothing (not a word) actually got written during The Twoweeks. Apart from the newspaper, I scarcely read a word, which is a far cry from my book-a-day ways.