Starting Over (23 page)

He began to see it. First of all Johnny finishing a commercial and saying to the whole world out there watching, “Would you welcome please, Mr. Phil Potter!” Perhaps Doc Severinsen from his personal knowledge of Potter would have picked the Vanderbilt alma mater song, jazzed up, of course, as the theme for his entry, and Potter, cool and smiling, would emerge through the high curtains, parting them gracefully (he hated to see the guests who fumbled their way through the curtains), and would stride to the platform to shake hands with Johnny and Ed and their other guests of the evening—Zsa Zsa and Gore and Don Rickles and Aretha. The men would smile and shake his hand, Aretha would give him a peck on the cheek, and Zsa Zsa would call him “Phil, dahling” and hit him with a smoldering caress that would have the audience screeching and whistling.

“Phil, it's good to see you again.” Johnny smiles, tapping his pencil.

“Good to be back, Johnny.”

“Now, Phil, for those of our viewing audience—those very few—who don't know all about you, could you tell us something about your career?”

“Well, Johnny, as you know, I'm a failure.”

Gasps and giggles from the audience.

“Failure? What does that entail? I don't think I've heard that term recently.”

“Well, Johnny, you're right in thinking it's kind of outdated. You see, ‘Failure' was a popular term in the late Fifties and early Sixties—when I was becoming one.”

Laughter. Camera pans to beautiful girls in the audience who are obviously taken with Potter's clever wit and can't wait to mob him when the show is over.

“You see, Johnny,” Potter continues, “the opposite of ‘Failure' was ‘Success,' which is now exemplified by someone like, say, President Nixon.”

The audience breaks up.

“When I first realized that I had a knack for being a ‘Failure,' Johnny, was back when—”

“I'm sorry to interrupt you, Phil, but we have a message from one of our sponsors. Stay tuned, folks, and we'll be right back to hear about the fascinating career of Phil Potter, an old-fashioned ‘Failure'—and perhaps he'll tell us something about his plans for the future.…”

Applause.

Alpo.

4

With Marilyn going to New York every weekend, Potter set out on a series of haphazard sexual adventures, not out of lust so much as loneliness and boredom. He picked up girls wherever he could—sitting in Cambridge coffeehouses, waiting in line at his bank to cash a check, eating a cheeseburger at Brigham's, waiting for the subway, shopping for records at The Minuteman. He smiled, cajoled, joked, winked, bought them drinks, took them back to his place and put on the ritual records. Once he got them as far as his living room he was pretty sure of getting them from there into bed. On rare occasions, however, the living room was as far as they would go.

The rebuff that hurt most came at the hands of a BU student whom he picked up at an art gallery on Newbury Street. He took her to dinner at Casa Mexico in Cambridge, and she agreed without hesitation to go back to his place for drinks. About halfway through the first drink, she wondered if he minded her asking a personal question.

“Of course not,” he said, imagining he had nothing to hide.

“How old are you?”

Potter felt the tips of his ears getting hot. He had never had a girl ask his age before.

“Why do you ask?” he said, feigning a casual tone.

“I'd just like to know.”

In his own mind, Potter still thought of himself as being twenty-eight. In his twenties, he had never been able to imagine himself being thirty years old. Much less any older. Like most people, he had taken his youth for granted, assuming it would be a permanent condition, imagining against all reason that only people such as his parents got old. But he knew all that was of little interest to the girl.

“
Well
,” he said, trying to smile, “actually, I'm thirty-four.”

“
Thirty-four!
”

She looked as if Potter had just confessed to being a transvestite—Communist—child-molester.

“What's so bad about thirty-four?” he asked, more offended than embarrassed now.

“Well,” she said, “that is—
getting on
.”

“Jesus. I'm sorry.”

“It's not your fault,” she said.

“Thanks a lot. That's very generous of you.”

“Listen, you don't have to get mad. It isn't my fault either. That you're thirty-four.”

Potter knew anything he said would only make matters worse, so he drank and said nothing. In a little while the girl said she guessed she'd better go. Potter agreed. He sat by himself, drinking, the phrase “getting on” blinking in his brain.

The next young girl he met, he lied about his age.

He said he was thirty-two.

Later he was angry at himself for lying, and for making it such a useless lie. Thirty-two wasn't much better than thirty-four. If he was going to lie he might as well have said twenty-nine, but that seemed transparent to him, like Jack Benny's joke of always saying he was thirty-nine. Besides, he couldn't have borne the embarrassment of being caught trying to “pass.”

He began to wonder if he “looked his age.” What did thirty-four look like, anyway? There were a few tell-tale grey hairs in the curly black; circles of dissipation under his eyes, but nothing on his face he would classify as an actual “wrinkle.” His waistline, which had held firmer than most men he knew in their thirties, was only recently beginning to show signs of spreading. Maybe he should diet. Or adopt a program of daily exercise. Shit. It was degrading, getting older, and he figured it could only get worse. He thought of those businessmen in New York who ordered hamburgers without the bun for lunch, trying to stave off the growing flab. He had always smiled to himself about that, thinking condescendingly that it was in some way a humiliating gesture, eating hamburgers without buns—like having a drink of soda without the Scotch. He should no doubt cut down on that, too, but he knew that would be much harder than foregoing hamburger buns. He had heard people talk of a “Drinking Man's Diet.” Maybe he would look into that. Maybe he would have to.

The depression about his age goaded him into more fucking, more indiscriminately, as if he had to get all he could while there still was time. The women were of all shapes and sizes and ages. All they had in common was that none of them were more than a one-night stand in Potter's persistent quest for relief from himself.

He tried, at least, to please them, since nothing seemed really to please himself, including orgasms. Discussions and stories and articles on Women's Liberation had made him more conscious of the woman's right to her own sexual pleasure and, if possible, fulfillment, and with that in mind he attempted to prolong his fucking until there was indication that the woman had come, in some way or other (the great vaginal-clitoral debate, and the widely varying views on it of the women he met, had left him utterly confused on the issue), or until he simply couldn't continue any longer.

But even this effort to please was often in vain. While pumping away in a sandy-haired beautician who had one glass eye and teeth that were smoke-stained a dull yellow, he noticed that the sounds coming from her did not seem to be moans of pleasure, but merely discomfort. He hurried himself to a climax, and afterward, the girl asked, “Are you through now?” in the flat, annoyed tone of a waitress who is anxious to clear off a table and get the customer on his way.

It seemed, during this weird and debilitating period, that whenever Potter fucked he either took too long or he didn't take long enough. When trying to please, he went down on a woman, she complained he hadn't shaved close enough and his beard was scratching the sensitive skin of her inner thighs. Sucking a breast, he was told that his teeth hurt. Trying to go in from behind, he got the wrong hole. Trying a sixty-nine, his partner complained she couldn't breathe. One girl criticized him for being too rough in bed, the next one groused that he was too damn gentle. One lady confided her fantasy was to be fucked by a man with a bag over his head. Potter complied, but he cut out small holes in order to see, and she whined in disappointment that the eye-holes ruined the whole thing.

He seemed unable to do anything right, in bed or out. At a candlelight dinner with a drama student, he said with conviction that she looked quite beautiful, whereupon she banged down her fork and called him a sexist. He said he did not mean to offend her, and that he would not take it amiss if a woman told him he was handsome, or that he looked nice on a particular occasion. She said that was entirely different. He asked why, and she said he wouldn't understand because he was a sexist. Another liberated young lady asked if she could take him out to dinner, because she was “into role reversal.” He thought that was swell, but he had expected that being into role reversal meant that after dinner she would take him back to her place and try to seduce him, but the girl explained that she wasn't “into fucking” anymore. He said in that case she wasn't really into role reversal, and she said he was a male chauvinist pig.

He found himself thinking of Jessica again, nostalgically, wondering whether she had found a new love, whether she would ever marry again, whether it would work if she did, whether he had made a mistake after all in breaking with her. Maybe they should have gone to more marriage counselors. Maybe they should have made a real effort to stop drinking so much. Maybe they should have moved to a real house in the suburbs, with a lawn and a fence and a two-car garage. Maybe they should have bought a farm in Vermont, and lived the simple life, healthy and rustic. Maybe it could have been different.

Maybe
. The word buzzed maddeningly around Potter's mind, an annoying gnat.

Potter was grateful to Ed Shell for inviting him to a party out in Merrimack, where some friends of his taught in the English Department of a small junior college. It was about forty-five minutes from Boston, and Potter drove while Ed told him of new movie deals hatching, without the slightest hint of suspicion or cynicism. Potter tried to think positively about Ed's chances; about everything. He wanted to stop thinking about his own problems, wanted to be a regular fellow, have a good time at the party, make new friends, maybe find a really exciting new girl and begin a meaningful relationship.

The party turned out to be composed entirely of faculty and faculty wives and girlfriends. No extra women. No music. Just serious talk. Ed Shell, all concentration, plunged into a deep discussion of the continuing relevance of Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman
. Potter's own view was that the play was about as relevant now as the foreign policy of John Foster Dulles, the hula hoop craze, and the Single Wing formation. But he didn't want to put a damper on things, and so kept his peace, trying to entertain himself by sizing up the people in the room.

Most of the men smoked pipes.

Most of the women had short, frizzy hair.

At least there was plenty of booze. It was some kind of godawful blended whiskey, but at least it was hard stuff, and that was better than fruit-laden punch.

Potter got himself a second drink, and sat by the only girl in the room who was definitely under forty. She was sitting beside a young teacher, all earnest and corduroyed, who was hotly involved in the
Death of a Salesman
debate.

“Do you teach here, too?” Potter asked the girl.

“I'm a student.”

She looked at him noncommittally, neither friendly nor aloof. She was probably as bored as he was. She wore a flowered dress of miniskirt length that exposed quite hefty thighs. Her hair was the color that once was called dishwater blonde, and pulled to the back. She wore no makeup except for powder that muted but didn't really hide a semi-bad skin. Her eyes were light brown, and anonymous.

They spoke of innocuous matters. Potter got them both another drink. Stiff ones. She majored in English, and lived in a rooming house. She liked Chinese food, and Cape Cod.

“Do you ever get into Boston?” Potter asked.

“Every week or so,” she said.

“I live in Cambridge, why don't you come by, the next time you get to Boston?”

“Why?” she asked.

“What do you mean, ‘Why'?”

“I mean—well, what did you have in mind? What—uh—kind of relationship?”

Kind of relationship. What did he have in mind. Oh, God. Potter thought of saying he wanted to communicate with her soul, or take her for a stroll on the Dunes at the Cape, or go to Joyce Chen's with her for a fine meal, but he couldn't bring himself to play the game, he couldn't through his fog of whiskey summon up any pretense of social nicety, or perform any verbal pirouettes.

“I just want to fuck you,” he said. “That's all I have in mind.”

She lit a cigarette, and Potter closed his eyes, waiting for the putdown, knowing he had blown it. He sighed, opened his eyes, and found that she was looking, blankly, right into them.

In a calm, pleasant tone, she asked, “Would Sunday afternoon be all right?”

Potter didn't really think she would show, but on Sunday he showered, and sort of half-prepared himself for the possible visit, pushing back the worst of the living room debris. Under the circumstances that shouldn't matter much, but it was reflex action, he supposed, of what one should do.

She arrived a little after two, the promised time.

He offered her a glass of wine, which she politely accepted.

He had a Scotch, and wondered what to say. “Did you drive in?” he asked.

“Yes. I have a '67 Galaxie. It's got almost 80,000 miles but it really holds the road.”

“I have a Mustang,” Potter offered.

“How do you like it?”

“Oh, fine. It does just fine.”

She finished her wine, and looked at him.

“Would you like some more?”