Starting Over (20 page)

“But why? Why a married guy who has a family?”

“Well, let's see. We had beautiful sex. And a wonderful time. He's warm, and wise, and he's wealthy. He's been married sixteen years, and he's bored with his wife. He hasn't slept with her for several years.”

Potter wondered if any husband in America was sleeping with his wife.

Marilyn stood up and started walking around the couch. “Besides,” she said, “why the hell shouldn't
I
have a townhouse on the Upper East Side, and a summer house on Martha's Vineyard? And servants, and money, and clothes, and—and—”

She turned around to face Potter, with tears coursing down her cheeks. “And,” she said sobbing, “four children!”

Potter put his arms around her, held her tightly as she cried, and rubbed the back of her neck.

“I know,” he said, “I know.”

He got her to take a shower, and a tranquilizer. He gave her a backrub with Isopropyl, and took her to dinner at the Athens Olympia. She ate hearty, consuming a leg of lamb and rice and a Greek salad, and two baklavas for dessert. When they got back to her place they had brandy and sodas, and Marilyn seemed in good spirits again. She talked of the coming trip to the Virgin Islands, of how she had always wanted to go away like that in the winter to some sunny place. Then she fell silent.

“What is it?” Potter asked after a while. “What are you thinking about?”

“The Game,” she said.

“What game?”

“The one we all play. With each other. Me and Herb, even though we just met. You and that woman. The woman you aren't going to see next Wednesday.”

“What about her?”

“I was thinking about that letter she wrote you, the one with all the ‘beautifuls.'”

“Yes?”

“She wrote the wrong letter.”

“What do you mean?”

“If she wanted to see you again, she should have written, ‘Dear Phil, it was terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible …'”

“Shit,” said Potter, but he couldn't help smiling a little.

“Don't give me that,” Marilyn said. “I'm right.”

Potter didn't say anything. He didn't move. Without meaning to, he realized he was holding his breath, trying not to think.

Marilyn leaned toward him and spoke, quietly, insistently: “I'm right,” she said. “Aren't I right? Wouldn't you have dragged your ass all over New England to see her again? If she'd written it was terrible, terrible, terrible?”

“Shut up, goddamn it!”

He slapped her.

She drew back, holding her hands on her face, her eyes wide and bright and wild with fright, not of what he would do, but of what she understood from what he did.

Potter shook his head violently, as if trying to come out of a spell. “I'm sorry,” he said.

Neither of them spoke for a long time, and finally Potter placed his hand on top of hers and, without looking into her eyes, spoke to her very quietly.

“You're right, of course. It's always The Game. And you have to play it with your wonderful Doctor if you really want to get him.”

“I know, I know, but I hate it. I just want to tell him I love him, and be able to enjoy it.”

“That'll be the end of it.”

“I know, damnit, but it's so hard, to be coy and scheming and say things you don't mean and keep thinking all the time about keeping him hooked, unsure—and thinking up new strategies and all of it. It's all so hard.”

“Listen,” Potter said. “I'll help you. I'll be—like an advisor.”

Marilyn thought for a moment. “OK,” she said. “I'll try anything.”

“OK. It's a deal.”

“A deal.”

They shook on it.

The new issue of
Time
magazine had a picture of actress Ali MacGraw on the cover, and a story on “The Return to Romance,” which explained how the fantastic success of
Love Story
as a book and now as a movie indicated a vast movement among the populace away from cynicism and toward sentiment. Potter read it with special care, not only because of his natural interest in the subject, but because he had to teach it.

Before the vacation break he assigned his Communications students to buy the issue of
Time
that appeared the week classes resumed, and read whatever happened to be the cover story. The exercise was part of the course's attempt to make students conscious of the style and techniques of persuasion used by the different news and information media.

“All I know is, it made me cry,” Miss Korsky said.

“You'd cry at anything,” Mr. Stevenson said.

“Wait a minute,” Potter said. “Wait a minute. Miss Korsky, you mean to say the article in
Time
made you cry?”

“No, no. The movie.
Love Story
.”

“I don't see what's so romantic about dying of cancer,” Mr. Stevenson said.

“Wait,” Potter said, “we're not discussing the movie of
Love Story
. I mean we're not supposed to be. We're supposed to analyze the article in
Time
.”

“I think it's right,” someone said from the back of the room.

Right. Wrong. Good. Bad. Pass. Fail. Potter had hoped for a more detailed analysis. How could he wrench from the class some subtlety of observation, make them see some shades of distinction?

“Let's look at the article itself,” he said. “Let's try to see how it moves from describing the success of
Love Story
to more general assumptions about the society.”

The class went blank and silent for a moment, all heads downturned toward the magazine. Pages riffled. Someone blew his nose. Potter found himself making an almost audible grunt, as if pulling oars, trying to psychically pull some specific responses from them.

“Now listen to this,” Potter said, “
carefully. Time
quotes this NYU professor who says, “The mood today, particularly on campus, is toward personal relationships rather than politics, love rather than action. Not by accident does this mood coincide with the Nixon era.'”

A roomful of faces stared at Potter, blank or quizzical.

“Well,” he said, a note of desperation beginning to creep into his voice, “do you agree with that? You're students. He's talking about
your
mood. Is he right? Do you feel that way?”

“What does he mean, ‘love rather than action'?” Miss Korsky asked.

“Good point!” said Potter, pouncing gratefully on anything specific.

“What do
you
think he means?” Potter asked, proud of his Socratic technique.

“I don't know.”

“Try,” Potter pleaded.

Miss Korsky, responding to Potter's need, tried. “Well,” she said, “I'm not sure what
he
means, but I don't agree. I mean, it sounds like you have to choose between love and action, like you can't have both. A lot of actions are done out of love. Aren't they?”

“Yes, absolutely,” Potter said beaming. “I think the statement is a contradiction. You see, I want you to be aware of what these articles say—don't just take them in but
question
them, decide for yourself how valid the statements are.”

Potter made a kind of game out of looking for other contradictions in the article and the class got into the spirit of it, actually interested, actually—Potter hoped—learning something.

Toward the end of the hour, Mr. Halligan even found what he felt was a contradiction in the caption of one of the color photos that accompanied the article. The photo was of the actress Sarah Miles, demurely dressed and posed in a pastoral scene. Miss Miles was quoted as saying, “I'm a romantic to the end. I think people are sick and tired of all the sex stuff. They want a story. Life is so hard to live anyway.”

“I don't think it follows,” Halligan said. “I mean to say that people are tired of sex and life is hard anyway. Wouldn't it be harder if they didn't have sex?”

The class giggled, and Potter smiled.

“I guess so,” Potter said, and, surprising himself, added, “I'm not really sure anymore.”

Potter counted the class a success; it had even made the teacher think.

2

Gafferty had something on his mind, something he wanted to discuss in private. When Potter returned from his afternoon seminar Gafferty was waiting in his office, twiddling his fingers behind his back and examining the shelves of textbooks with feigned interest, as if he hadn't seen them a thousand times. He suggested they take a stroll over to Jake Wirth's. It wouldn't be crowded now, they could doubtless have a booth to themselves.

On the way out of the building they ran into Ed Shell, who asked if he could join them for a beer. Gafferty made an animated apology, saying right now he had a little business to discuss with Potter, but by all means, without fail, the three of them had to go together for a real drinking session sometime, sometime
soon
. Shell, obviously miffed, said “Sure, sure,” and went off brooding down the hall.

Potter and Gafferty walked across the Commons purposefully, not speaking, the weight of whatever was Gafferty's private business holding them silent. It was brutally cold, and the sky had a dark, purplish cast. The aura of the afternoon was Icelandic.

They entered Jake Wirth's puffing and stomping and rubbing their hands, and Gafferty headed for a booth. There was an old man eating knockwurst, and a couple of others sipping shells of pale gold beer, but otherwise the place was deserted. An ancient waiter in a frayed tux took their orders for steins of dark, and Gafferty shifted his bulk around in the booth, as if trying to burrow into a solid position.

Potter waited.

“The thing of it is,” Gafferty said, “I'd like to use your apartment sometime.”

“My apartment?”

“Sometime, that is, when you wouldn't ordinarily be there. I mean, I don't want you to have to go out and sit in some bar just on my account, but if there's some particular time, an hour or so, when you wouldn't be being there anyway and it wouldn't be inconveniencing anything for me to—uh, have the use of it, at such a time.”

“Hell, man, you can use my apartment any time you want. You know, it isn't any luxury pad or anything, it's just an ordinary apartment. It's a mess most of the time, but Christ, yes, of course you can use it.”

“No luxury?” Gafferty laughed. “Ah, man, it'll be luxury indeed compared to the little office I have at Gilpen, with the door locked but people passing by it down the hall and occasionally someone pounding and pressing their face against the frosted glass, trying to squint through it. Luxury? Ah, I presume you've some kind of bed, and even a pallet on the floor is luxury compared with the cold steel desk.”

“Desk?” Potter asked, not getting the picture, “you sleep on your desk?”

He imagined poor Gafferty, exhausted from staying up till all hours doing battle with his thesis, maybe from waking in the night to the bawling of little kids, rising at dawn to drive in to Boston, teaching his classes, counselling his students, preparing lectures, grading tests, and finally, sapped of all strength and lightheaded from lack of sleep, sprawling over the hard, unyielding surface of his long grey desk, dozing off fitfully, only to be jolted awake by the pounding fists of impatient students.

“Not sleep, exactly,” Gafferty said. “Ah, Phil, you see, the matter is—damnit, man, I've a girl.”

Potter sat for a moment with his mouth dumbly open, and then started laughing, not at Gafferty or the news that he had a girlfriend, but at his own obtuseness. A grown man asks to use his apartment and he thinks the poor bastard wants to take a nap.

“Sure, I know, it's a comical thing, a man in my circumstances, mind you I don't want to change my circumstances, but—”

“No, no, I'm not laughing at you. It's me. I'm a fool.”

“Nothing of it, you only assumed that I was happy with my wife and family, and mind you, that is a
correct
assumption, I love them all, wife and kids, but after a time—”

“Jesus, man. You don't have to explain. Or least of all, apologize. Listen, you can use my place whenever you want.”

“Oh, it's a hell of a thing to ask, I know, but I can't afford the price of a proper hotel room, and my girl—well, she lives with her parents. More's the shame. A student, of course. The old, old story. Me the dirty old man, you know, the leering professor, and a young girl—”

“Cut it out,” said Potter. “If you want to confess, see a Priest. Jesus. You're only human.”

“There's those that would think otherwise,” Gafferty said, scratching madly at his head in a kind of anguish.

“Fuck them. Listen. You can use my place whenever you want. Just let me know in advance. Sometimes I spend the night at Marilyn's, and you could stay all night at my place. Or even—hey!”

“What?”

“Marilyn's going away for the weekend. She'll probably leave me the key, and I can stay at her place. You could have my apartment for the weekend.”

“
Weekend
,” Gafferty whispered. “My God, man, that's an eternity.”

Potter smiled, happy to have the power to grant such a miracle to a friend. “It's yours,” he said.

Marilyn told her boss that her mother was ill in Florida and got a four-day weekend from her office so she could fly to the Virgin Islands for the tryst with her new married man shrink-lover. Potter went shopping with her and picked out a new bikini that Marilyn thought was outrageous but which he assured her was just the ticket. He also advised that she get a pair of tiny-heeled black mules with dainty puffs of feather on the toes.

“Why do I have to have them?” she asked.

“Because,” said Potter, “you can't go slinking around the bedroom in your old red sweatsocks.”

“OK, if you say so.”

“I say so.”