Starting Over (2 page)

It occurred to Potter—as a man who dealt in images—that perhaps he'd feel better if he tried a little harder right now to behave according to his own image, and so he stoked up his charm, and asked a
Serenity!
singer to lunch.

Her name was Cressy, and she had big, dewy eyes. “Are you sure you're not married?” she asked.

He assured her he in fact was officially divorced (he had the postcard to prove it), and she seemed to relax.

“It's not a moral thing with me,” she explained. “It's just bad karma to make it with a married man.”

Potter assured her he understood, and things went pleasantly enough for a while. Then Cressy began picking at her chicken salad in a laconic manner. Something else was on her mind.

“Why do people get divorced?” she asked, her eyes large and vacant.

“Why—uh—it's different,” Potter said sweetly. “Every case is different. You know—like Tolstoy's ‘unhappy families.'”

The literary allusion was lost on Cressy; Potter stared intently at a tiny dab of mayonnaise on her lower lip, which was pouting slightly outward. He imagined leaning over to lick it off, but only smiled, patiently.

“Why did
you
though? Do it?”

“Simple,” Potter said, lifting his palms upward. “My wife and I couldn't live together.”

“Didn't you love each other?”

“Madly and passionately.”

“Well—what was the problem, then?”

“I just told you.”

“
Loving
each other?”

“It's a hard thing to live with, day in and day out.”

“I guess I don't understand,” she said.

“Maybe you will. Sometime.”

Cressy grew despondent and grumpy, refusing dessert and monkeying with the strap on her watch. Potter called for the check.

The next morning he woke around ten with a specially bad hangover. He was not in the small, cluttered apartment on Christopher Street he had sublet from a girl at his office who had moved in with an electric guitarist on the Lower East Side. But he knew from the noise he was still in Manhattan. The garbage trucks were gorging themselves in the street below, making that high metallic groan as they swallowed the muck that the city had prepared for their morning feast. Potter thought of them as a herd of mechanical dinosaurs that would someday take over and rule the whole island. And, just down the block, came the headsplitting rapidfire bursts of a pneumatic drill that was ripping up the street again. Potter turned and looked beside him in bed, groggily expecting he might see his wife—now former wife—but saw instead a stranger he had picked up the night before at Julius's. She was a secretary somewhere or other. She was not especially pretty, and had vomited on the stairs. The girl moved toward him under the sheet, yawning. He put his hand gently on her shoulder. “I'm going,” he said.

“Hmmm? For breakfast?”

“No, for good.”

She jerked up, as if slapped, blinked her eyes, and pulled the sheet around her shoulders, protectively. “Well thanks one hell of a lot.”

“I'm sorry. It's not you. I mean I've got to get out of this whole damn thing.”

He flung himself out of the bed and started pulling his clothes on, frantically, as if he were leaving a burning building.

“
What
whole damn thing?” the girl demanded.

Potter waved his arms, wildly, trying to encompass what he meant. All he could say in explanation was: “New York.”

2

Instead of going to work that day, Potter went to Boston. He often fled there when things seemed to be closing in on him, took a train or a shuttle flight and holed up at Max and Marva Bertelsen's fine old brownstone in Louisburg Square, the ritziest part of Beacon Hill. It was a haven, a place to unwind and calm down from the jangle and rush of New York.

He caught a one o'clock train from Penn. Station. It was New York spring and the day was warm and drizzly, the tops of the taller buildings shrouded in smog. Potter didn't like to fly in that weather—but even more important, he wanted the luxury of slow, suspended time that the train would afford. He went to the snack car—a compromise combination of diner and club car, and ordered a club sandwich and a beer. He finished quickly, then settled back to enjoy a series of slowly-sipped Scotch and sodas. He was calmed by the rocking motion of the train, the rain slurring the windows, and the wet towns and cities he could watch from the safety and warmth of the car, isolated. He had bought no papers or magazines, but chainsmoked and sipped his drinks, not exactly trying to “think things out,” but hoping something would come to him, some new idea or answer.

Around New London, Connecticut, he recalled a magazine article he had read a month or so before in his dentist's waiting room. At the time it meant little to him, but now seemed extremely significant. It told how different guys in middle age had completely changed their lives, had left lucrative but unsatisfying jobs and careers and even professions and set out to find true fulfillment, even though it meant less money and prestige and more hardships. A veterinarian who had built up a terrific practice in Beverly Hills had thrown it all up, including his house with kidney-shaped swimming pool and Jaguar XKE, and gone to Oregon to work in a lumber camp. An auto executive who was rising up the corporate ladder and leading the good life in fashionable Grosse Point, Michigan, had chucked everything to become a male nurse. The owner of a textile mill in West Virginia had sold out to some conglomerate and taken his wife and children to live on a commune outside Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where they learned to make pottery and tie-dyed bedspreads.

All over the country, it seemed, growing numbers of people were giving up the grind, getting out of the rut they were in, and doing what the hell they pleased. It wasn't just the kids anymore. It was solid, respectable people like auto executives and veterinarians. Not many perhaps, but a growing trickle, a discernible stream. Potter himself knew a couple who had left the publishing business and bought a working farm in New Hampshire. They had sent out a mimeographed newsletter to their old friends in New York, reporting how happy they were and explaining they were “into crop rotation.”

When Potter graduated from college in '58, nobody did that stuff; at least nobody you knew, nobody who had a good education and a chance of making it in business or the arts or professions. Only the weirdos, the copouts and dropouts who couldn't cut it anyway left the mainstream of American opportunity, spurned the golden current of success, and really meant it. But now, if you left a good job in a leading law firm and went to northern Vermont to tap maple sugar, you were sort of envied. At least you weren't scorned. The truth was, as far as Potter could figure it, nobody gave a shit anymore. There was something nice about that. But it was also a little bit scary, as if in the middle of a game you were playing the rules had been changed, or just forgotten about, and you had to pretty much make things up as you went along and pretend you knew what the hell you were doing. On top of that, Potter was uncomfortably aware that for him a good part of the game was already over. He had just turned thirty-four. That was pretty near the halfway mark, or maybe even way past it, the way he was boozing. Time to shit or get off the pot if you were going to make a new move, really start over. And what better time than now, the first year of a new decade? The Seventies. Stretching ahead, as yet only four months soiled.

“You don't have any children,” Marva Bertelsen said. “You're free to do anything you want.”

Potter took a swallow of Drambuie. It was sticky, like his mind felt. “The hitch is,” he said, “I have to want to do something.”

He looked to Max, hoping for an answer, a direction, hoping he might say “Go west, young man,” or “Take up the plough,” and Potter would do it. But Max only sipped at his espresso, looking knowledgeable but inscrutable.

Potter met Max in the Service, when they both were stationed at the Navy Department in Washington. Potter as a yeoman typist, Max in the psychiatric division. Max was a shrink, and though Potter never saw him on a professional basis, he kind of adopted him as a father. Max was only three years older than Potter but seemed a lot more than that, maybe because he was so goddamn calm and in control all the time. When Potter met him, Max had recently finished his training analysis, and he seemed to be one of the few people Potter knew for whom that process had “worked.” There was something comforting about the result, but also something Potter found a little bit scary. It was something in Max's calm, unruffleable demeanor; as if some wire had been unhooked, the one that connected you with anger and frivolity and unpredictable thought and action. Max smiled a lot, but seldom if ever laughed. When something struck him especially funny he would smile and say, “That's very funny.”

“Those guys in the magazine article,” Potter said, “the article I was telling you about—they all seemed to have some burning desire to do some particular thing they'd never been able to do—but I can't think of anything like that. Becoming a lobster fisherman or something. You know.”

“What about—your acting?” Marva asked brightly.

“Come on Marva, that's over,” Potter said forcefully. “Done. Dead. Buried. Gone.”

“OK, I just thought.”

“What about teaching?” Max asked.

“Teaching
what?
”

“What you know about—the theatre. Even public relations.”

“Who the hell wants to know about
that?
”

“You might be surprised,” Max said with a smile.

“Don't worry, Phil,” Marva said, “Max knows
everyone
.”

Potter didn't doubt that.

When Max and Marva went to bed, Potter stayed up, keeping the fire in the library going, drinking giant Scotch and sodas, pondering his possible futures. He wished, in a way, he could just move in with the Bertelsens—like a black-sheep son, unfit for employment—and hide in the warm safety of their house, their friendly protection, their ordered lives.

The thought of the old dream of acting reminded him of the dangers of the world outside, the dangers of caring and desiring, of wanting something so bad you can taste it, but having it always recede before you until in order to live at all you had to turn your back on it—swear off it as surely as an alcoholic swears off the sauce—and for something less, something else.

The dream had become a memory, still vivid and painful. When Potter finished college and the Navy and came to New York, he came with the casual assumption that—with time and the breaks and professional training—he would emerge as a new Marlon Brando or Jason Robards, and after a successful run on Broadway in a new Tennessee Williams hit, he would hop off to Hollywood, swatting producers away like gnats, and do the star bit, but not let himself be taken in. He played in his mind many times the scene in which he politely told the roomful of Hollywood moguls that he couldn't accept their fantastic offer for the lead in the screen version of a new Harold Robbins novel, but had chosen instead to return to New York and do Shakespeare in the Park for scale.

After four years of making the rounds, with his smile and his folder of glossy profile photos, he landed one part in a TV drama series in which he dashed into a room and said, “Telegram for Mr. Bostwick.”

It did not lead on to bigger things.

One afternoon at a casting call for parts in a new TV crime series Potter was sitting on the usual bench, crowded with other palmsweating aspirants, his head aching and his feet sore, wanting to take a piss but afraid to be gone in case his name was called, when a door was flung open from the inner sanctum, the warm secret source of carpeted power, and out came a girl he saw around a lot at parties, who was bright and on her way up and treated him with a flirtatious sort of friendliness. Her name was Madeline and she never wore makeup except on her eyelids. They were purple. Potter moved slightly forward, simply to greet her, but before he could open his mouth she flashed by him, and, though her eyes never fell upon him, never made the slightest flicker in his direction, her long delicate arm, as if guided by radar, reached out at the moment she was precisely perpendicular to him, and her longnailed fingers made a quick, fleeting ruffle through his hair, while, at the same split-second she said, “Hi, Love,” and then she was gone, with her papers and her power and her purple eyelids.

Potter sat for a moment not moving; his scalp, where her fingers had flicked across it, felt on fire. He did not see the room, or the people in it, but he stood up and moved, in a trance, to the elevator. It came, and he pressed the lobby button and stood facing front. He turned right, out the glass revolving doors, and with his mind as blank as a newly washed blackboard, he walked to the nearest city trash basket and stuffed in the folder containing his résumé and his glossy photos and walked on, as if guided by an electronic beam, to the nearest sign that said LIQUOR, walked in and asked in a pleasant monotone for a quart of Cutty Sark, hailed a taxi, went back to the apartment he shared with a girl named Tandy who had graduated magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr and was working her way up in publishing and said she would help pay the rent and do the dishes and whatever the fuck needed to be done to help Potter make it in the theatre because she believed both in Potter and the theatre.

When she came home she found him in his underwear guzzling from the bottle, glassy-eyed, and when she asked what had happened he explained, “I quit.”

For a while she tried to reason with him, told him how that sort of thing happened all the time to everyone, tried to taunt him, appeal to his machismo, but finally she understood that something had clicked off, that indeed the big theatre dream was as busted inside him as a pricked balloon, and that nothing could patch it together and blow it up again; and when she was sure of that she set down her cup of Medaglia d'Oro and lit a Pall Mall, and after exhaling a long, thin stream of smoke, like a line drawn across the empty air, she said in a calm, thoughtful voice: “You'll be drunk tonight. And puking in the morning. When you're through, get your shit together and clear the fuck out.”