Starting Over (25 page)

Potter wanted to get out as soon as he could, before making some smart-ass remark he would later regret, and so he took up the invitation of the Kennedy Center man for a ride home. The man was Sid Persons, who was on leave from what Potter gathered was a high-powered consulting firm in Washington to take this year at Harvard.

“I don't really buy the whole academic scene,” Persons said, “but it's a nice change of pace.”

Potter agreed, and finding Persons an amiable sort, less pretentious when removed from the Harvard Dinner scene, Potter also agreed to have a nightcap at his place. Persons lived in an elegant modern high rise on Memorial Drive, his own one-bedroom apartment finely appointed in a masculine, comfortable club style, with big leather chairs, deep carpeting, and heavy velvet draperies. Persons himself was a big, handsome, club-member looking guy with distinguished greying hair and a sunlamp tan. He put on a record of some kind of string quartet, very soothing, and brought Potter a he-man sized Scotch and soda. Potter quickly, on request, filled in a little of his own background, saying he wasn't really sure if he'd continue teaching or if he did for how long. His plans were all up in the air.

“Ever been married?” Persons asked.

“Once. Just split—less than a year ago.”

“Rough. It's always rough.”

“You divorced?”

“No—never quite made it down the old aisle. Came pretty close a couple of times, but at the last minute—well maybe you could say I chickened out, or maybe you could say I was wise. At any rate I've never regretted staying single, playing the field. Now I'm a confirmed bachelor.”

“Well, it must be nice to know what you want. Know how you want to live.”

“You mean you'd do it again? The marriage bit?”

“I really don't know. I just don't have any policy about it. It seems to me like it's hard either way.”

“Well, seems to me if a man's tried it—what the hell. Once is enough. No sense being one of those jokers who just keeps trading in wives, going through the same thing over and over.”

“True.”

“The way things are now, people don't have to try to fit themselves into the old grooves like they used to. Society's opening up. And if you ask me, it's a healthy development. Let people do what they want.”

“Hell yes.”

“Here, let me freshen that drink.”

“Oh—”

Potter was only about halfway through, but he took a big gulp and handed the glass to Persons. Whistling, Persons came back with a Scotch and soda mixed by martini proportions, the soda getting as short shrift as vermouth.

“Hey,” he said, “you dig Sinatra?”

“Sure.”

“Good. I know he's out of fashion now, but I guess I'm hung up on him from the old days.”

Persons put on the Sinatra album of “Songs for Young Lovers.”

As always, The Voice made Potter feel mellow.

“I tell you,” Sid said, “I still like the old music, but I'm glad we've gotten rid of some of the old ideas, the hangups and prejudices.”

“Absolutely,” Potter said.

“Some people attack the Women's Movement as being a bunch of lesbians, like it's still some kind of crime. Jesus. If a woman wants to make it with a woman, why shouldn't she? It's a personal matter.”

“Of course it is.”

“Just the same as if—” Persons paused, as if trying to think of the right analogy, and said with a shrug, “as if, for instance, a man wants another man.”

When Persons brought Potter the second drink he had sat down on the couch with him; not close, but close enough so that now as he casually threw his arm up along the back of the couch his hand was resting directly behind Potter's head. Potter didn't move. He was aware of not moving. He was also aware, with sudden clarity and self-reproach that he had, as naively as a virgin schoolboy, got himself into what was almost a compromising position. The “almost” was exactly the distance between the back of his head and Sid Persons' hand. He judged that to be about three and a half inches. He had only to tilt his head back that far to begin what would soon be turned into a passionate embrace by his genial, broad-minded host.

You moron
, he thought, meaning not his host but himself.

“I don't mean I go for the Gay Militants parading around in the streets with banners and picket signs,” Persons continued, “but if an adult male happens to find that—in addition, mind you, to enjoying women—he enjoys physical contact with another man, I see no reason why it's the business of society to condemn him.”

“Of course not,” Potter said, shifting slightly so that he was farther from Persons' hand, and facing him more directly. His main concern was to get out of the situation without either leading Persons on any further or embarrassing him. He wanted to convey the feeling that he had no opposition to homosexuality for those who found it pleasurable, that he did not look down on any man, Persons included, if he was a practicing homosexual,
but
, thank you, it was simply not his own thing.

His head now as clear as if he had drunk nothing more than a glass of milk, he politely, respectfully, sincerely, expressed his staunch support of the right of every man to pursue whatever sexual course attracted him but that, perhaps, due to his own middle-class upbringing or some possible lack of imagination on his part, he did not prefer homosexual encounters for himself, which made him no better than those who did, it was simply a circumstance of his own life and nature and personality.

Persons nodded, gravely, evidently with acceptance of Potter's position, but when Potter rose to say he'd better get on home, he had to get up and teach in the morning, Persons suddenly came toward him, embraced him, put his head on Potter's shoulder and said, his voice shaking, “
Please stay
.”

“I can't,” Potter said. “Please understand. I can't do it. For godsake, man, I'm sorry, but there's just no way. I'm sorry. No shit. I have to go.”

He wrenched himself away, not wanting to look back, and ran out into the carpeted hallway and down the stairs, into a cold, slow rain. A cab passed, but he wanted to walk.

He felt exposed and ludicrous, not because of what he had seen of Sid Persons but of what, through him, he had seen of himself. Persons had shown him something he had never looked at before. There had been something hauntingly, teasingly familiar about the whole situation; Persons mixing him the strong and stronger drinks, putting on the romantic music, leading into a personal discussion of sex, casually maneuvering himself into physical proximity on the couch, close but not too obviously close; the seduction pitch made, rebuffed, and then the pitiful plea to stay.

What Potter understood he had seen was simply the same performance he had gone through a thousand times himself, with a woman; but for the first time, that evening, he was privileged to see it through the woman's eyes. What he saw made him feel supremely silly.

Marilyn was in a real stew because her regular shrink had advised her to stop seeing her shrink-lover.

“Why?” Potter asked.

“He says I'm being self-destructive. He says I'm letting Herb take advantage of me. And that it won't lead to anything. Then he gives me that bullshit about how I ought to meet ‘eligible men' and he won't believe there aren't any.”

“So what the hell does he want you to do?”

“Well, he wants me to end it with Herb, and I said I wouldn't. Then he wants me to go into this ‘Assertion Group' thing. It's a kind of behaviorist therapy technique that he says is getting a lot of results now.”

“And what did you say to that?”

“I said I'd try it.”

“That seems fair enough.”

“But Phil—”

“Yes?”

“I don't want to go alone.”

“Now wait a minute—”

“I know, I know how you feel about therapy, but it's only once. Just go with me the first time. Then, if you hate it you don't have to come back.”

“You mean I'm supposed to be part of it? The therapy?”

“Well? Don't you have any problems?”

“Don't get smart.”

“It can't hurt you. Phil? Please?”

The group met in a spare, brightly-lit little room in an office building on Boylston Street. Besides Potter and Marilyn there were only three other people, though the group leader, a bearded young guy named Bill Buford, said there would be more the following week. He explained that the purpose of their efforts was to work on specific problems of behavior by practicing troublesome situations with one another, and then act the same way when the situations arose in real life. He said they weren't into a lot of Freudian self-examination, just clear-cut specific instances of acting in a more productive way with other people.

They all introduced themselves, and told briefly what they did, and a few told what they wanted to work on. To his surprise, Potter had an immediate feeling of community with this unlikely assortment of people, more so than he would have had he met them in “real life,” but being together in the room, it was as if by accident they found themselves in the same lifeboat, on a rough open sea, during wartime.

A woman named Adele volunteered to go first. She was tall, well-built, not beautiful but quite attractive, and charming. There was a genuine kind of warmth about her, a feeling that she liked
you
, and so it was easy to like her in return. She wore her hair swept up in back, and piled on her head. She was a legal secretary. She was married, and had no children. Potter guessed her age in the mid-thirties.

She said her problem was that her boss was very disorganized, and just before quitting time every day he gave her all kinds of work to do, and it made her rushed and nervous and she was inevitably late getting home.

Bill Buford asked Potter to pretend to be her boss, and had Adele come up to him and politely explain the problem, and say she would appreciate it if he could arrange things so that she could get the work earlier in the day and be able to finish by five. Potter thought she seemed calm and entirely reasonable, but he made some bogus protests and questions to give her “practice,” which she also answered intelligently and convincingly. Bill said she had done very well, and he was sure she could pull it off with her boss. Adele mentioned, as if in passing, that of course this was only a small, surface kind of problem compared to the really complicated things, the deep things that really bothered her.

No one asked what those things were.

Buford called on Joe, a young computer analyst recently up from Georgia, who spoke in a shy drawl about his problems meeting new women now that he was separated from his wife. He kept twisting the wedding band on his finger while he talked. He tried to practice picking up Adele, and Buford pointed out it was bad form to keep twisting his wedding ring, calling attention to it, maybe he should even get rid of it. Joe blushed, mussed his hair, and said “Shee-it.”

Potter began madly searching his mind for some kind of situation to practice if called upon. Rebuffing Sid Persons and trying not to make him feel bad? Making Gafferty reveal the identity of the student he was fucking? Nothing seemed suitable. He wondered, also, if Marilyn would try to go into the whole complexity of her affair with the shrink-lover in New York. Would she practice making him swear to get a divorce and marry her? Potter was relieved when Adele spoke up again.

“Do you have another situation you'd like to try?” Buford asked with enthusiasm.

“Well—I don't have any more like the first one,” she said. “The thing with my boss—to tell the truth, that was easy. That's nothing compared to what I have going on inside.”

“But internal feelings can always be externalized,” Buford assured her. “Try to explain what it is you mean. I'm sure we can work out a situation for it.”

Adele took a deep breath. “I don't know what's wrong. I'm happily married. I love my husband and he loves me. It's what I always wanted. I never wanted to be a career girl. I don't mind working, but that wasn't my goal. I always thought that if only I found the right man, if I had a good home and a happy marriage, all these things that have made me miserable all my life would disappear.”

She paused, and pulled a wad of Kleenex from her purse.

“It's like,” she continued, the words tumbling faster now, “where I read once that Dustin Hoffman used to walk around New York and see those theatre marquees and think if only he had his name on them, as the star of a really good movie, everything would be all right and he wouldn't have to worry anymore and he could relax and enjoy his life. I don't know if that's exactly what he said but that was the idea. And then he got his name on the marquee and he walked around New York, and he saw it and saw the crowds waiting to see the movie, and yet it didn't help, it didn't change anything.”

Adele poked the Kleenex at her eyes. Tears were flowing down her cheeks.

The room was frozen in a kind of silence that was different than just a lapse, or an interlude, or a break in the session. No one moved or coughed or itched or blinked.

“So now I have what I wanted—my version of the name on the marquee—the love and warmth and the man and the home and all I dreamed of and there's no real reason to be unhappy anymore, no reason to feel anxiety or fright or sorrow or loss but I am just like I always was it isn't any different inside me it is still the same misery and now it's worse because there's no reason for it, nothing to blame it on.”

Adele rubbed the Kleenex over her cheeks. Not even the therapist spoke. Potter was grateful that Buford did not attmpt to “externalize” what Adele had poured out, into some “real life” situation that she could “practice on.”

Everyone in the room had slightly bowed his head, but neither that communal gesture nor the silence that followed it were born of embarrassment or confusion. And yet there was a tangible feeling in the room, a shared emotion, and Potter, wanting to name it for himself, realized it was not a word that appeared in psychology books. Maybe there was no word that covered it at all, but the one that came closest was reverence.