Starting Over (14 page)

“Oh!” Phyllis Merton said. “Is there a game on? What game is on?”

Max's father looked at her as if she were insane. “There's always a game on Thanksgiving Day,” he said. “The Thanksgiving Day Game.”

“Of course,” said Phyllis, “the Thanksgiving Day game. I've heard of that one.”

Marilyn finished off her champagne and whispered quietly but fiercely in Potter's ear, “Get me a real drink, for godsake.”

Potter got up, excused himself, and went to the kitchen. Marva was fussing around, and, from the looks of things, getting in the way of the cook. The kids were there too, peeking into pans, sticking fingers into pots. Potter poured himself a giant Scotch, and got a glass of gin and ice for Marilyn. He couldn't find any vermouth, so he just dropped an olive in, to give it the respectable look of a martini.

When Potter returned to the living room, Ramikanandra was discoursing on the Gold Standard in his sing-song, bright-toothed monotone, and Potter slipped off to the den to catch a bit of the Thanksgiving Day Game. Max's ancient father was waving his fist in excitement. He turned to Potter and told him the Packers were leading the Lions 7–3. It turned out Max's dad was a big Packers fan.

“That Lombardi, he's a real man. One of the last real men. Should have gone into politics. But look at that ball-club of his.”

Potter was somewhat confused, since Lombardi had died the past August, and had left Green Bay to coach at Washington the year before that; but he figured the old man merely meant that the Packer club was still part of Lombardi's heritage.

“Look at that Hornung, will ya!” the elder Bertelsen croaked with delight. “Look at 'im go!”

Potter moved closer to the screen, wondering exactly what the old chap was looking at. Hornung had retired some years ago. Perhaps they were showing a re-run.

“But they better watch out for the Lions' Bobby Layne—oh, he's a sly one!”

Potter finally realized that Max's old man was watching the game that was being played live that day, but inserting coaches and players of the past; he had them on the right teams, but in the wrong era. Mr. Bertelsen was about a decade out of synch.

“Send out Don Hutson for a long one!” the octogenarian urged, thus plunging back another decade.

Potter edged his way from the room and into the kitchen for a stiffer drink.

By the time the party was seated around the groaning holiday table, Potter and Marilyn were well-sloshed, but the booze had not made them any merrier. Marilyn reported privately to Potter she was suffering a pounding headache over her left eye. Potter, wishing he had had toast instead of martinis for breakfast, felt an overall nausea, and had passed from human hunger to a savage starvation.

Just when the assembled revelers were about to dig in, little Daphne Bertelsen banged her fork on her plate and cried, “No, nobody can eat yet!”

“What's the matter, dear?” Marva asked.

“It's Thanksgiving.”

“Yes?”

“So we have to go around the table and everybody tell what they're thankful for.”

“Oh, no,” Marilyn whispered, pressing a hand to her left temple.

“We've never done that before, dear,” Max said.

“But we're
sposed
to,” little George said.

“Who said so?” Max asked.

“Miss Mallory told us at school.”

“Yeah! We learned it in our room too,” shouted Daphne.

“Well, we don't observe that custom at our house,” Max explained firmly.

“Then it's not Thanksgiving!” Little Daphne began to sob.

“All right, all right,” Marva said. “I'm thankful for having such a fine young son and daughter.”

She looked to her right, where Phyllis Merton gulped from her wineglass, forced a smile, and said, “Well, let me see—I'm thankful that, in spite of everything, in spite of all that's happened this past year, I'm thankful that even though—even though Roger left me for that—that scrawny little nitwit—”

But before she could finish, her face melted, like a wax figure in a furnace room, and she burst into tortured tears.

Little Daphne, evidently pleased that ritual was being observed, pointed a fork toward Marilyn and said, “Now
you!
”

Potter quickly said, “Marilyn and I are thankful we didn't have to eat at the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria today.”

Max, in one of his rare shows of force, told the kids in a tone not open to dispute that “We are going to eat now, and we'll have no more questions or you go straight to bed.”

Lucille Merton stared straight ahead, seemingly oblivious to her mother's tears diluting the gravy, and said, “This is a crime. Eating all this food. There's Vietnam, and the ghettos, and we all sit here stuffing ourselves.”

No one replied, or acknowledged the statement. Somehow the meal was got through.

Later, while Potter and Marilyn were sprawled across her bed in their underwear, drinking double Alka-Seltzers, Marilyn said, “Well, anyway, it's over. We survived it.”

“Yeah,” Potter said. “One down. Two to go.”

2

December, with its long, slate-colored days and sudden snowfalls, brought a more secret and somber tone to the city. Muffled and bundled, heads bent forward, citizens seemed like spies, moving back and forth on appointed missions, possible and private. Codes, in colored Christmas lights, blinked from windows of stores and homes. Shadows fell, cathedral-length.

Potter took to hanging around school longer, postponing the trip back to Cambridge and his still unfinished apartment with its liquor boxes full of books, its accumulating piles of magazines and papers, laundry and dishes. Like his life, his apartment seemed to be in a perpetual state of disarray.

Even though he and Marilyn were friends, and saw one another quite often, Potter felt essentially alone again, having no lover. He found it harder to activate himself out of apathy the way that Marilyn did with her therapy and evening classes, her tutoring of ghetto children, her initiative in getting tickets to plays and concerts and going with one of the girls from the office, “making an evening of it,” as she said.

Potter decided he should have more friends. He enjoyed drinking with Gafferty, but that always had to end early so Gafferty could get back home to his wife and baseball team of a family. He didn't want to go alone to the Bertelsens' at this stage, knowing Marva would try to pry out new information about him and Marilyn that he didn't feel like discussing now.

Dean Hardy had asked Potter to look up a fellow Communications instructor named Ed Shell, whom he felt he would have much in common with, Shell being a “promising young film writer” and Potter a former man of the theatre. Though the Dean assured Potter he and Shell were sure to “hit it off,” Potter was not so confident of that when someone first pointed out Gilpen's promising young film writer. Shell was wearing bell-bottom trousers, cowboy boots, a button-down shirt with a rep tie, and a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, giving him the incongruous look of a man who dressed the top part of himself for the Fifties, and the bottom half for the Seventies. Besides that, Shell had a dour, frowning kind of seriousness about him that Potter found unattractive. He reasoned, though, that he was committing the sin of snobbery, of judging by appearances, and he ought to give the guy a chance. Besides, he had nothing better to do.

Potter agreed to go have a drink at Shell's place, even though he lived in Somerville, which was unfamiliar territory. Somerville began at the edge of Cambridge—the poor, un-Harvardy edge. It had a large contingent of Portuguese and Italians, interspersed with students, hippies, teachers, dropouts, the underground Bohemian set who had come to the area because of low rents and proximity to Cambridge.

“Welcome to the pad,” Shell said when he opened the door.

It reminded Potter of the temporary living quarters of his own starving-artist days in New York. It was one small room, with a kitchenette and bath. The room had peeling flowered wallpaper, and a large poster of Orson Welles. There was a mattress on the floor with grubby striped sheets flung over it, and scattered debris—a partially empty cup of yogurt, an overflowing ashtray, one dirty sock, a tattered copy of an old
Esquire
, an empty pack of True Menthols, and a can of Colt 45, tipped over and leaking the last of its contents.

“Get you a beer, man?”

“Sure,” said Potter.

He picked his way over scattered and piled pages of what must be movie scripts, and sat down cross-legged on one of the pillows that evidently served as chairs.

Dedication
, Potter thought;
Dreams
.

It made him feel very old.

“It looks like you're very productive,” he said when Shell brought him a Colt 45.

Shell sat down on a pillow across the small room, and said, “Seventeen scripts. So far. Working on the eighteenth.”

“Jesus. That's a lot.”

“When one hits, a lot of 'em will hit. Ones that've been turned down'll get done.”

“I guess that's the way it works.”

“It's a matter of time. You have to wait it out, and keep working.”

“I know.”

Till you can't wait any longer, till it's gone and drained out of you
, Potter thought.

Shell assured Potter that he wasn't just daydreaming, having acquired an M.A. in Film at Boston University, and written-directed-produced a four-minute film on a waitress at a hamburger drive-in that won honorable mention in a national contest for film students sponsored by a nationwide motel chain. The award had brought him fifty dollars, a free night with meal of his choice at any of the chain's motels throughout the land, and a confidence that he had what it takes to make it big in film.

“My last script,” Shell said, “this director who's very hot now was dying to do, but he couldn't get a producer. One before that, this very highly regarded producer was hot about, but he's committed to a three-picture deal with a particular studio, and they just had a big turnover in management, and so the whole project got fouled up.”

“Damn, that's too bad.”

“It's just a matter of getting it all together. It's bound to happen soon now.”

“Hell, yes.”

“That's why I have to live like this—temporary. Ready to go.”

“Go? Where?”

“The Coast.”

“Oh.”

“I've got a suitcase packed. In the closet.”

“Well, that's—uh—very shrewd of you. Looking ahead that way.”

When Potter left, Ed Shell gave him one of his scripts to read. Potter was both fearful and fascinated, wondering what it would be like, terrified it would be a hopeless exercise, but dying to know if it just might—by the most incredible chance—be a goddamn miraculous feat of genius.

It was neither.

Potter lay on his bed at home, smoking a cigarette, holding the script on his lap, pondering the thing. The script was called “Karen.” It was about a bright young girl who went into social work and was disillusioned by the bureaucracy but still kept her faith in helping people and fell in love with a poor young guy on her welfare route who worked for his old man at a fish market in the Boston harbor. It wasn't anything that would knock you out, and had its share of cliché ideas and situations, but it wasn't all bad either; it wasn't as bad as a lot of stuff Potter had seen on the screen or on television. As far as he could tell, it could perfectly well be done, would help fill up time and space for a number of people, would bring money and satisfaction to Ed Shell, who would have with its production confirmed his image of himself. And it could just as well go begging, lost, undone, for all the justifications of it that could also be made, and Ed Shell could end up—how many years later—waiting for the call to the Coast, keeping his suitcase packed. But you don't keep your suitcase packed forever. Potter knew all about that. If it didn't happen, the day would finally come when Ed Shell would unpack that suitcase. Potter would just as soon not be around to see it or know about it.

It occurred to Potter, though, that even if Shell had to someday unpack his dream, in the meantime it gave a shape and purpose to his life, helped him get through the day. The value of a dream was that, like booze or religion or dope, it filled you up for a while.

Potter's next evening was empty. Marilyn had a date with a guy from her Existentialism course who had asked her for coffee after the last class, and had sprung for an invitation to dinner. She had high hopes for this one, a lawyer who was taking the course to “broaden his horizons.” Potter thought that sounded a little hokey, but he didn't want to disillusion Marilyn in advance. Besides, he wished her well and hoped something nice might come of the date. A lawyer who wanted to broaden his horizons might just turn out to be her Mister Right.

When Potter complained about his own lack of companionship for the evening, Marilyn suggested he try going to a bar called The Pub, where she said it was possible for nice men to meet nice women; it wasn't a hooker place or anything. She had been there herself a couple of times with girls from the office, and sometimes they'd made a connection with a couple of guys, perfectly decent sorts, just wanting to meet people.

With no other prospect for the night but television, Potter went.

There were a lot of little tables, but he headed straight to the bar. After his eyes adjusted to the dim light of the place, he swung around on his barstool, casually, and gave the place a quick survey. Most of the girls were in couples; some had one or two men already joining them or trying to join them. But one girl, at a table way back against the wall, sat alone. Potter peered at her through the gloom, and she stared right back. He looked away, looked back, and she still was staring straight at him. No mistaking it. He finished off his drink, and went over to her table.