Starting Over (17 page)

“God, you don't have to get so—overwrought.”

“I don't, huh? OK. Then just tell me what the thing is you have to tell me, and we'll see how overwrought I have to get.”

Marilyn got up to make herself a new drink. “Want yours freshened?” she asked solicitously.

“Now I
know
it's bad,” he said.

“Don't be silly.”

She fixed the drinks, sat down, and looked at Potter with a tenuous smile.

“I'm waiting,” he said.

Marilyn lit a cigarette.

“I'm waiting for the worst, so you might as well hit me with it,” Potter said.

“Listen, Phil, you're making a big commotion about nothing. All it is—the only thing is—I have to go away for a few days.”

“Away? Where? For what?”

“Well. You remember my mother. In Florida?”

“You mentioned you had one there.”

“Well, she's very old, and she isn't well, and she wrote this really pathetic sort of letter begging me—really begging me—to come down and visit her.”

“I thought you hardly saw her anymore.”

“I don't, hardly. That's just it. I haven't seen her for a couple of years. More than two. She's all alone down there, and if she dies and I haven't seen her it will really be terrible. Dr. Shamleigh said if that happened I'd feel horribly guilty, I'd probably go into some deep depression.”

“That asshole.”

“I know he is, but he may be right about this. It's just for a few days, and then it will be off my conscience.”

Potter's eyes narrowed to a squint. “
Which
few days?” he asked.

“Well,” she said lightly, not looking at him directly, “I thought I could leave on the twenty-fourth and get back on the twenty-sixth. It's just two nights and three days, altogether.”

“It's Christmas!” Potter screamed. “It's Christmas and Christmas Eve! You bitch, you goddamn bitch! I thought we were allies! I thought we were friends!”

“We
are
, Phil, we
are
—”

“And you're leaving me alone on Christmas and Christmas Eve, two of the worst fucking times of all, two of the hardest days of the whole rotten holidays!”

“You think it's pleasure for
me?
” she yelled back. “You think I'm going to have it easy getting through Christmas in a fucking trailer park with my hysterical, alcoholic mother rolling herself around in a wheelchair, and singing Deck the Halls and all that crap? Getting soused and crying about my father gone to the great Christmas in the sky?”

“OK,” he said. “OK. I'm sorry.”

He sat down beside her on the couch, and they put their arms around each other, comforting.

“You'll make it through,” she said. “I know you'll make it.”

“So will you, kid. Listen, I got confidence in you.”

4

On the day of Christmas Eve, Potter didn't want to leave the house. He had the Bertelsen party to go to at six, but he didn't want to risk wandering around Cambridge or Boston before that. The pitch of the season would soon reach its jolly crescendo of wassail and song, before the stone silence of the holy day itself. This was the last chance for shopping and bustling around on merciful missions and the streets would be full of cheerily fake Dickensian characters with long, colored scarves and clown-red noses. The streetcorner Santas would be jingling their bells to hell and gone, those bells that were tuned to penetrate your skull and harangue your brain with their silver insistence to
give give give
, and the shivering Salvation Army combos would be bleating their baleful brass versions of the carols, managing to make a dirge out of “Joy to the World.”

Potter had a container of low-fat peach yogurt and a cup of Tastemaker instant freeze-dried coffee for his noon breakfast, and turned on the daytime soap operas. He had started watching the soaps on television the Monday after vacation began. It was the first time in his life he had resorted to this, and he drew the venetian blinds shut in the living room and kept the volume low, fearing someone would find him out. He figured it was the ultimate degradation. But of course it was not. Whenever you think you've found the ultimate degradation, you soon find ways to elaborate on it, new refinements and improvements to add. Potter started sipping Scotch and sodas while he watched, and used the commercial breaks to run to the kitchen for freshening the drink or getting more ice. But this still left many commercial breaks in which he had nothing special to do, and his mind would begin to slide back to reality. To combat this, Potter took to keeping the
Globe
crossword puzzle in his lap, so that whenever the story was interrupted by a commercial, he could immediately focus his mind on the puzzle. But after a few days of doing this, he discovered he was finishing the puzzle too fast—that is, before the last soap was finished—which allowed his thoughts to go free again during the remaining commercials. He solved this new dilemma by going to the big magazine stand in Harvard Square and buying up a bunch of Crossword Puzzle magazines. He slipped away surreptitiously with them, hiding them beneath a Boston
Globe
, as guilty as if he were carrying hardcore pornography.

Potter was at first surprised to find he
liked
the soaps, that he found them far more credible than any of the dramatic series on nighttime television; their slow, nagging pace of problems and misunderstandings and high-strung, headache-y conflicts were far more typical of daily life as he knew it and saw it around him than the adult evening TV dramas or the quick-image flashings and clean resolutions of the hip new movies.

The episodes he watched on the day of Christmas Eve made him a confirmed fan forever. They seemed to him the only honest portrayals of the whole, hidden horror of the season.

On one of the shows, a troubled young college student went to the home of his favorite professor and his wife, confessing that he didn't have the guts to go home and visit his parents for Christmas. The professor and wife urged him to brave it, saying how much it would mean to his parents, how hurt they would be if he didn't come. Suddenly a strange smile crossed the face of the troubled young man, and he said, “Well, maybe there is a way. A way that would give me the courage to do it.” The prof clapped him on the back, and the sympathetic wife smiled syrup at him. In the next scene the young man sat alone in the living room of his fraternity house. A knock came at the door, and the student let in a suspicious-looking man with dark, slicked-back hair and the collar of his overcoat turned up. The student took off his jacket, and rolled up his sleeve. The pusher got out his works and gave the young man a fix. A Christmas fix. The young fellow smiled beatifically. He could make it home for Christmas now! Over the river and through the woods.

Potter laughed out loud, and got himself a new drink. He sat at the tube engrossed all afternoon, as the real traumas of the holiday were enacted. Deserted wives wept at piano bars while listening to “White Christmas,” husbands explained to lonely mistresses they had to hurry home to the wife and children, idealistic interns tried to comfort patients whose cases were hopeless and later cried their hearts out to lovesick nurses. Young married couples argued bitterly over whether the in-laws who tried to stop the wedding should be given a day of amnesty on Christmas and forgiven with a visit, while unwed mothers shoplifted dolls for their deserted little babes and amnesia victims in far-off flophouses were stricken with flashbacks of former happy holidays in lives whose location they could no longer place.

When the whole marvelous show was over in the waning hours of the afternoon, Potter took a long, hot shower, singing “Deck my balls with boughs of holly,” feeling quite appropriately mad for the spirit of the day. He vowed he would be a glowing guest at the Bertelsen party. He would not let Marva get under his skin with the inevitable questions about where Marilyn was, and why, and whether she and Potter were still an item even though she'd gone away and left him on Christmas.

“Merry Christmas!” Marva said, giving Potter a mistletoe peck on the cheek, then peering around as if someone might be hiding behind him.

“Where's Marilyn?” she asked with concern.

“In Florida,” Potter said, steeling himself with a studied smile.

“
Florida?
By herself?”

“With her mother. Her mother lives in Florida.”

“Oh! How long is she there for?”

“Just a few days. Till the day after Christmas.”

Marva took Potter by the arm, leading him toward the bar, obviously still concerned about Marilyn's absence and the possible hidden meanings of it.

“I'll have a Scotch and soda,” Potter said to the man tending bar.

“We haven't seen you for ages,” Marva said. “Why don't you and Marilyn come for dinner when she gets back from Florida—I mean, if you're still—”

“We're ‘still,'” Potter said.

“It's a shame she had to leave you at Christmas,” Marva said. “I'd have asked you for dinner, but it's been so long, I thought you and Marilyn probably had other plans. But
you
could come, Phil. I won't hear of you being alone on Christmas.”

“Oh, thanks. But I can't.”

“But what will you do? You can't just sit at home!”

“Oh, I'm not. I'm leaving early in the morning for Maine.”

“
Maine?
All by yourself?”

“Well, I'll probably drive up by myself, but there's plenty of people coming to this—well, I don't know how you'd describe it,” Potter said mysteriously, trying hard to improvise.

“What do you
mean?
”

“Well, this guy I used to work with in New York has a sort of estate on an island off the coast of Maine, and he's invited a whole bunch of people up—show people, you know—for a big bash on Christmas Day. You know.”

“No, I don't think I do!”

“Well, you know how show people are. They like things a little—uh—
different
. And this place is so isolated, anyone can do whatever they want.”

“Phil, it sounds like some kind of orgy or something!”

“Well, you never can tell.”

“An orgy, on Christmas?”

“I didn't call it an orgy, Marva. You did.”

“Yes, but—”

“Really, I don't think I'd better say any more about it,” Potter said, trying to sound sincerely apologetic.

He moved off quickly into the guests, leaving Marva with her inflamed imagination. He nodded to the Harvard couple he'd met at the same dinner where he met Marilyn, waved to Max through circles that gathered around him, avoided the rival bachelor Hartley Stanhope, and went toward a frail, nervous-looking woman who seemed to be shivering in a corner.

She turned out to be an old college friend of Marva's who taught Medieval history at Connecticut College for Women, and had come up to Boston for the holidays, to stay at the Bertelsens'. Another of the lost sheep Marva had gathered to the fold. She was tiny, and prim, and her mouth kept twitching. Potter found her appealing, and after her initial shyness wore off a bit she displayed a sharp wit, skewering the Harvard contingent. She shared with Potter an aversion to eggnog, preferring straight Scotch, which he felt was an immediate bond between them. Besides, beneath her hesitant and birdlike demeanor he sensed a sexual magnetism and responded to it, like picking up a wavelength.

He had just invited her to go out somewhere for dinner with him, when he saw Marva motioning wildly to him from across the room. Potter excused himself, and went to Marva, who was all in a lather.

“Do you know who that is you're over there in the corner with?”

“Her name, she told me, is Melissa Vanderbush. Isn't that right or is she really someone else?”

“Phil, don't be funny now. Melissa is a very sensitive person and she's had a terrible time this year.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“Her husband is in the Institute for Living.”

“The Institute for Living?”

“In Hartford. You know. It's one of those exclusive booby hatches. Like McLean's and Austen Riggs.”

“That's too bad.”

“Melissa's all at loose ends right now, and I feel responsible for her while she's here.”

“Fine. What do you want me to do about it?”

“I don't want you to do
anything
about it. That's the whole point. She's very vulnerable right now, and she just isn't the type for a one-night stand.”

“It sounds to me like that ought to be her own business. It certainly isn't yours.”

“Phil, she's my friend.”

“The trouble with you, Marva, is you think that being a friend of someone allows you the license to meddle in their private life and act like you were their shrink and their minister and their welfare worker. I'm sick and tired of it myself, and I imagine your friend is too, and if she isn't yet she will be. She's an adult and I'm an adult and what we do or don't do is no fucking business of yours!”

Marva backed away and put her hand to her cheek, as if she'd been struck, and for a moment looked at Potter with a frozen expression of horror while he stood, hot with his own fury, and she suddenly broke into tears and rushed to the stairs. From across the room Max saw her and followed. Potter went to Melissa and said, “Listen, let's get out of here.”

They had dinner at Stella's and she sympathized with his explosion and assured him Marva'd get over it; she had been like that in college.…

They went back to Potter's and started necking as they wrestled out of their coats and without a word went straight to bed. Potter was excited but apprehensive. He kept thinking he had to be very gentle and careful and solicitous, as if she were a scared virgin. With that in mind he eased himself into her, cuddled her small shoulders close to his chest, and very slowly and discreetly began moving in and out of her, with the rhythm and feeling of a lullaby. Suddenly she cleared her throat, sighed, and in a voice that was deeper and steadier and firmer than he had till then heard come out of her mouth, she said, “Move it around, will ya?”