Five Days (38 page)

And this morning – given the meeting I must attend in a few hours' time – an endorphin rush will be most welcome. The fact that the daybreak sunlight is so radiant certainly helps. So too does the fact that, at six-twelve a.m., which is when I started my run this morning (I now always regard the digital readout on the watch on my wrist before starting), the city of Portland is only just waking up. As such I can make it to and from my apartment on Park Street to the lighthouse in Cape Elizabeth before the bridge traffic begins to build up.

My apartment: a two-bedroom place in a reasonably well-preserved Federalist building on what I think is the city's nicest street. When I came to look at it around some months ago, my first thought was that the houses here are very like the sort you find on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. Immediately I found myself having one of those moments of encroaching melancholy that became so predominant after that weekend, and which I finally took steps to curb (the jogging being one of the ways out of the darkness into which I fell for a time). But I still adored the street – and the apartment was, at $1,150 per month, not exactly a bargain. Just under one thousand square feet. A little homey, a little old-fashioned, a little bit scuffed up. But the owner told me (via the realtor) that he knew it needed a paint job and sanded floors and revarnished kitchen cabinets and a bunch of other home improvement details. So he was willing to knock off two-fifty per month from the rent for the first two years if I would undertake it. Again it was Ben who stepped in. We set a parts and labor budget of around $4,000 – absolutely all I could afford. In August he and two college friends literally moved in with air mattresses and sleeping bags. They did all the work in three weeks, pocketing $1,000 each. They left me a very clean and airy place of white walls and varnished floorboards. I then worked twenty hours a week overtime for the next two months – and through judicious shopping at several of the quirky secondhand stores around town, I managed to furnish it in a style that is largely rooted in mid-fifties Americana, and which Lucy deemed ‘retro cool' when she first saw the apartment put together. Frankly that's a little generous on her part. It still feels very much as if it is a work in progress, just one step above basic. But there's a room for Ben or Sally when they come visit. And Ben surprised me with a gift of an original painting of his: a blurred series of blue geometric shapes, on a grayish-white background; very Maine marine light in its sensibility, very much using that Tetron Azure Blue I scored for him. I had to hold back my tears when my son showed up with the painting, telling me: ‘Let this be your water view.'

He's right: the apartment itself doesn't have much of a view (it faces the rear alleyway behind my building and is on the ground floor). But outside of the occasional weekend revelers who stagger down the rear passageway late Saturday night, it is fantastically quiet. And it does get the most sensational early-dawn light. And it's been such an important bolthole for me.

Coffee and muesli finished, I washed up the dishes (I still don't have a dishwasher), then reached for my nylon running jacket on the back of the stool at the little kitchen counter-bar where I eat most of my meals. I am very conscious of the time this morning, as the meeting in question begins at eight-thirty, and is a ten-minute drive from here. I'll need to shower and wash my hair and put on the one suit I own beforehand – which means a good hour when I get back from my run. Which means I must leave now.

October again. The first Thursday in October. A year ago to the day, it was the eve of my leaving for Boston. And now . . .

Now I run.

Grabbing my keys I zipped up my jacket, locked my door behind me and hit the street. A perfect day. The sun gaining altitude, that bracing autumn chill underscoring the morning, the city still hushed, the elms and pines on my street truly golden. I turned right. Two jogging minutes later I was down by the port. Another right-hand turn, a hard uphill climb on the pedestrian pavement that accompanies the car ramp up to the bridge, then a spectacular run at suspended altitude across Casco Bay. Then a stretch of shopping centers. Then an extended neighborhood of middle-class modestness until I reached that stretch of grand homes fronting the water. The homes of the city's top lawyers and accountants and the few captains of industry that we have in the state. Homes that speak of discreet wealth. No ostentation. Just understated ocean-view reserve. Beyond this small enclave of serious money (and there are so few of those in Maine), there is a public park built around Portland's venerable lighthouse. It's a ravishing public green space; a hint of savage sea just a short distance from the city center. My run takes me right down to the water's edge, then up a path to the lighthouse: a white beacon standing in crisp silhouette against the angry majesty of the encroaching Atlantic. I read somewhere that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – when resident in Portland – used to walk here every day. In my darker moments some months ago – when I had just moved into the apartment, when the gloom that had encircled me for so long like a particularly bad weather system was still refusing to blow off into the next county – I couldn't help but wonder if Longfellow had plotted out his most famous poem,
Evangeline
, while following the same lighthouse route along which I jog almost every morning. And given that
Evangeline
is a sort of American
Orpheus and Eurydice
tale of separated lovers searching for each other amidst the continental vastness of this once-new world . . . well, life has its attendant ironies. Even when jogging.

This morning there were just two other runners out by the lighthouse, including a man of around seventy whom I seem to inevitably pass every morning. He's highly fit, his face as taut as piano wire, always dressed in the same gray sweat pants and a Harvard sweatshirt. As he jogged by me today he gave me his usual brief wave of the hand (which I always reciprocate with a smile). I have no idea who this man is. Nor have I made any attempt to find out, as he, in turn, has never chosen to discover my name and particulars. I sense that, like me, he prefers to keep it that way. Just as I also appreciate the fact that, for a few seconds every morning, I have this silent greeting with this individual about whom I know absolutely nothing. As he knows nothing about me. We are passing objects with no knowledge of each other's story; of the accumulated complexities of our respective lives; of whether we are with someone or alone; of the way we will individually negotiate the trajectory of the day ahead; of whether we think life is treating us well or harshly at this given moment in recorded time.

Or, in my case, the fact that, ninety minutes from now, I will be in a lawyer's office, signing the legal agreement that will trigger the end of my marriage.

* * *

The legal agreement that will trigger the end of my marriage.

Yes, it's legal – in that two lawyers have negotiated it, and once it is signed by both parties it will be legally binding. And the split of the shared assets we have has not been contentious. But the word ‘agreement' hints at a reasonable parting of the ways. Sadly this has been anything but an amicable parting – as Dan, all these months later, still cannot get his head around the fact that I ended the marriage; that I left him because I was unhappy and felt our relationship was terminal, dead; that, as he put it during one of the many moments when he pleaded for a second chance, ‘If you were actually leaving me for someone else at least I could understand. But to leave me because you just want to leave me . . .'

He never found out about how I was going to leave him for someone else, or how broken I was in the wake of all that suddenly not happening. The very fact that he never registered the emotional slide I had slipped into thereafter . . . well, that was our marriage. And one which I continued to accept in the initial months afterwards, largely because I was still carrying so much injurious sadness. Going through the motions of life, but coping with the most aching sort of loss.

My children, on the other hand, quickly registered the distress I was in. On the morning that I arrived back home before dawn to see Dan off to his new job – and found myself in tears at the realization,
I should not be back here with this man
– I was found three hours later by Sally, passed out in the porch chair in which I had parked myself; sleep overtaking me as I gazed upwards into the limitlessness of space.

‘Mom, Mom?'

Sally nudged me back into consciousness. I woke, feeling stiff and unwell. When she asked me what I was doing out in the cold, all I could do was bury my head in my daughter's shoulder and tell her I loved her. Usually Sally would have reacted with adolescent horror at such a show of parental emotion – especially as I had to fight to maintain my composure when hugging her. But instead of displaying sixteen-year-old disdain, she put her arms around me and said:

‘You OK?'

‘Trying to be.'

‘What's happened?'

‘Nothing, nothing.'

‘Then why are you out here in the cold?'

‘That's a question I've been asking myself for years.'

Sally pulled back and looked at me long and hard, and finally asked:

‘Are you going to leave him?'

‘I didn't say that.'

‘And I'm not stupid. Are you going to leave him?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Don't stay for me.'

Hugging me again tightly she then left for school.

An hour or so later I had to head back south to Portland and get Ben's paints into the hands of his professor. Heading south meant passing through the town of Bath. I still had Richard's business card, and had earlier unpacked his leather jacket from my suitcase and put it in the trunk of my car. I also still had his glasses in my shoulder bag. No, I wasn't going to do anything dramatic like drop them both off personally at his office. Though I also toyed with the idea of putting them both in a box and mailing it to him with a simple one-line note, ‘
I
wish you well
', I instinctually knew that the best thing to do now was to do nothing. So I got to Portland and dropped the paints in with the receptionist at the Museum of Art, who assured me that she'd get them to Professor Lathrop. En route back to the car I texted Ben, telling him the Tetron Azure Blue had been delivered to the museum and should be with him tonight. Then I passed one of the many homeless men who always seem to line Congress Street in Portland and always ask for a handout so they can eat that day. The guy I saw just a few steps from the museum looked around fifty. Though he was unshaven and clearly downcast I could see from the soft way he asked if I could help him out that he was someone whom life had banged up badly. The morning had turned cold and gray. He was just wearing a light nylon jacket that wasn't providing much in the way of insulation. Walking on to my car, I retrieved the leather jacket from my trunk, then returned to where the man was crouching by a lamppost and handed it to him.

‘This might keep you warmer,' I said.

He looked at me, bemused.

‘You're giving me this?' he asked.

‘Yes, I am.'

‘But why?'

‘Because you need it.'

He took the jacket, and immediately tried it on.

‘Hey, it fits,' he said, even though it actually swam a bit on his lanky frame.

‘Good luck,' I said.

‘Any chance I could hit you for a couple of bucks as well?'

I reached into my bag and handed him a $10 bill.

‘You're my angel of mercy,' he said.

‘That's quite the compliment.'

‘And you deserve it. Hope you get happier, ma'am.'

That comment gave me pause for thought all the way back home. Was I that transparent? Did I look that crushed? Though the man's observation got me anxious, it made me force myself to present a cheerful face to my hospital colleagues when I returned to work the next morning. By the end of the week Dr Harrild also discreetly asked if there was ‘something wrong'.

‘Have I done anything wrong?' I asked.

‘Hardly, hardly,' he said, slightly taken aback by my tone. ‘But you've seemed a bit preoccupied recently. And I'm just a little concerned.'

So was I, as I hadn't slept more than three hours a night since returning from Boston, and was beginning to feel the instability that accompanies several nights of insomnia. But I also understood the message behind Dr Harrild's voice of concern:
Whatever is going on in your life that is so clearly vexing you, you can't start letting it affect your work.

I called my primary physician that evening – a local woman named Dr Jane Bancroft who is very much an old-school local doctor: straight talking, no nonsense. When I phoned her office and told her receptionist it was a matter of some urgency – and could she ring my cellphone, and not the land line – I got a message back five minutes later, saying the doctor could see me the next morning if that would work.

I changed plans and decided to drive over to Farmington and spend the day with Ben there. Texting my son and saying I would now arrive around one p.m., I made it to Dr Bancroft's office, as arranged, at nine a.m. – after another night where sleep only overtook me around five. Dr Bancroft – a woman of about sixty, petite, wiry, formidable – took one look at me and asked:

‘So how long have you been depressed?'

I explained how the sleeplessness had arrived in my life only a few days ago.

‘Smart of you to get in here fast then. But the insomnia is usually a sign of larger long-term difficulties. So I'll ask you again – how long have you been depressed?'

‘Around five years,' I heard myself saying, then added: ‘But it hasn't affected my work or anything else until now.'

‘And why do you think the sleeplessness has arisen this week?'

‘Because . . . something happened. Something which seems to have crystallized a sense that . . .'