Starting Over (27 page)

“He agrees? I mean about the ‘no,' not about the symptoms.”

“He has to think it over.”

“How long?”

“I told him to let me know tomorrow, I had to go back.”

Potter looked at the bed, which could have passed for the scene of a six-day orgy. “You know, of course, he'll come tomorrow, fuck you some more, and say he still needs time to think it over.”

“I won't let him.”

“Fuck you tomorrow?”

“Think it over anymore. After tomorrow.”

“OK.”

Potter suggested they take in the late-late show. After that they watched the late-late-late, and then, connoisseurs that they were, stayed glued to the late-late-late-late-late, which brought them into the early. One thing you could say in favor of New York, its TV stations knew what the citizens needed.

Continuous numbing.

The morning was cold and soot-speckled. Potter went out and got orange juice for them, put Marilyn to bed with a call for ten, and said he would meet her that afternoon at four. He went to his own cubicle across the street, took a shower, and passed out. He slept fitfully, woke around noon, and went out for the Sunday
Times
and something to eat.
The Times
, like the New York TV stations, filled its most important mission of providing enough material to blank out the customer's mind as long as needed. It kept Potter going till four.

The special sad sunlight of Sunday afternoon spread over Marilyn's room. Maid service had cleared the traces of whatever had happened with her and Herb, but there was no type of service to clear her face of what anyone who saw it could surmise had occurred.

Passion. Pleadings. Pledges. Post mortems. Protests. Promises. Parting. Packing.

She sat quiet and prim, like a political exile who has been ordered to leave the country on the next train.

Potter looked around the room and found the bottle of Scotch with a tiny bit left. He poured it into a bathroom water glass, sat down, and guzzled it. “You ready?” he asked.

“No hurry.”

“No booze, either.”

She shrugged. “Order some if you like.”

“You join me?”

“If you like.”

Potter dialed room service and ordered a double Scotch on the rocks and an extra dry martini straight up with a twist.

They finished those off without saying anything, and Potter ordered up two more rounds of the same.

When they neared the end of those, Marilyn said they might as well have some more, since Herb was paying. She hadn't checked out yet, and he would pick up the bill.

“Fuck it then,” Potter said. “Let's celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” she asked.

“Don't ask what, ask how.”

“All right. How?”

“We'll figure it out as we go along.”

Because it was to be a celebration, they started with champagne and caviar. Since Herb was paying.

The notion that Herb was paying served as an incentive.

Since they had such a hard time deciding what to have, Marilyn hit on the idea of simply ordering the most expensive item offered in each category of the menu, from appetizer to dessert.

And more champagne.

After the feast, with a fine bottle of brandy, they decided it was silly to go out into the night and fight their way to a cab and on to the next shuttle flight. Marilyn said in the past couple months she had learned there was nothing so depressing as catching a Sunday night shuttle flight back home. They decided to take an early one next morning. What the hell. Potter had already checked out of his hotel, but Marilyn had already stayed past check-out time and had told the desk she wasn't sure when she was leaving, so the room in effect was paid for the night anyway. There was a double bed, with plenty of room for Potter.

But they didn't need the extra space. For the first time since they had stopped being lovers they fucked, in a kind of spontaneous frenzy of anger and lust, mean and low-down and totally abandoned, hurting and liking it, saying no words, only making sudden squeals or grunts or moans or shouts, tearing and clawing and pumping and thrashing. It was like a “grudge fuck” only the grudge was not against the partner involved but against Herb, against all betrayal and loss and frustration, against the whole damn rest of the world.

On the plane going back the next morning, they were silent, and exhausted. They never spoke again of what happened that night. They were friends.

2

The faint hint of spring in the air at the end of February was only a temporary tease, and the day after Potter and Marilyn returned from New York, Boston was hit by a full-scale blizzard. Potter woke to an arctic scene outside his window. The cars parked up and down the block bumper-to-bumper, including his Mustang, were one solid chain of frozen silver humps. He didn't even attempt to scrape and shovel his own car out, but literally bundled himself to the teeth, wrapping a woolen scarf around his mouth and nose, and set out in full winter regalia to go for supplies. He tromped back home from Mass Avenue with a half-gallon of Cutty Sark, a dozen eggs, a dozen knockwurst, a Sara Lee cheesecake, a jar of Maxim freeze-dried instant coffee, and a carton of Pall Malls. He felt secure and self-reliant, a plastic era pioneer.

Potter welcomed this early March regression to winter. It constituted a kind of postponement of a spring he was not looking forward to. It would bring, among other things, his thirty-fifth birthday. It would also bring decisions about his “future,” the very thought of which depressed him. He no longer saw “the future” as he once had in his mind's eye as a vast road widening purposefully before him toward the horizon, but rather as a rocky, downhill path that dwindled darkly below, a not-very-smooth slide toward oblivion.

The blizzard allowed him to hibernate, which suited his mood. Classes were cancelled, traffic was stalled, and for several days Potter was able to burrow into his apartment, into himself, without feeling irresponsible, having the legitimate excuse of being a common victim of the elements just like his fellow citizens and neighbors. He read Shakespeare, took long hot baths, watched television, and felt himself recuperating from the ordeal he partly shared with Marilyn. If the whole thing had left him feeling beaten and bruised from what was mainly vicarious participation, he figured it must have laid Marilyn out flat, and he didn't think he should even call her until she too had time to recuperate.

On the first day of warm sunshine and melting slush, Potter slogged his way to the subway and in to school, and arranged to stop by Marilyn's for a drink when she got off work. Her own office had carried on with business much as usual during the storm, and Potter expected to find her bleary-eyed and distraught, depressed and down at the mouth.

Instead, he found her humming.

It surprised and even annoyed him a little. He hadn't expected any sign of cheeriness and wondered if it wasn't even … improper, somehow, her recovering so quickly from what was supposed to have been a major crisis. After dragging Potter down to New York and her dire dilemma with Herb, did she now consider the whole thing had only been a lark?

Humming indeed.

“What's that?” he asked irritably.

“What's what?” she said, her eyes large and fresh and blinking.

“What you're humming.”

“Oh,
that
.”

“Yes,
that
.”

“Probably something from the new Cat Stevens album.”

“Cat
who?
”

“Cat
Stevens
.”

“Who the hell is that?”

“A singer. Singer-composer. You know—like your Judys and Jonis—except—”

She grinned gleefully, and said, “He's a guy instead of a girl.”

“That's swell.”

Potter got up to make himself a drink, since the usual pitcher of martinis was noticeably absent. “You want me to mix the martinis?” he asked.

“Oh, no. Not for me, anyway. I'm just fine.”

Potter made himself a Scotch and sat down, eyeing Marilyn suspiciously. “What's up?” he asked.

“Hmmm? Why, nothing.”

She was rummaging around in her purse.

“Looking for a cigarette?” Potter asked.

He reached in his pocket and held a pack of Pall Malls toward her.

Marilyn giggled. “Not
that
kind,” she said.

Proudly, she pulled from her purse a rather bulkily-rolled joint.

“Oh, for godsake,” Potter said.

“I know you don't think you like grass, but this is something special.”

“Oh, Jesus. I suppose you're going to tell me it's Acapulco Gold.”

“Not at all,” she said smugly. “Vermont Green.”

She lit the twisted end and it flared, almost singeing her eyelashes.

“For Christsake, be careful!” Potter shouted.

Marilyn coughed, patted herself on the chest, and opened her eyes, cautiously.

They were watering. She held out the joint to Potter.

Resigned, he took the damn thing and did his best to inhale. They passed it back and forth until it was too small for either of them to hold, and when Marilyn tried to stub it out she burned a finger and the roach dropped to the carpet, under the couch. Potter went after it, as if the goddamn thing were a live animal, which in fact it might as well have been. When he mashed it out he sat back up and had a long sip of his Scotch. Marilyn was sitting back smiling, her eyes closed, looking like St Teresa just prior to lift-off.

“You want a drink now?” Potter asked.

“I'm
fine
,” she said. Not opening her eyes.

Potter freshened his Scotch.

“Try to go with it,” Marilyn whispered, her eyes still closed, her voice unbearably mystic.

Potter lit a Pall Mall, deciding to wait out Marilyn's trance.

When she finally stood up, opened her eyes, and got herself a drink, Potter felt he could talk to her again. Rationally.

“Where'd you get that goddamn stuff?” he asked.

“A friend,” she said coyly.

“Come off it. What's going on?”

It turned out that Marilyn had seduced a cute hippie dropout boy who worked in the mailroom at her office, and he had given her the grass.

“What's he like?” Potter asked.

“Beautiful,” Marilyn sighed, “and only nineteen.”

Potter felt a flush of anger rising, and then it just as suddenly subsided as he saw that she was doing what he had so often done. She had simply gotten herself a young pretty one of the opposite sex to forget things with, no doubt providing an instructional and enlightening experience for him, too, in the process; hopefully a matter of mutual profit.

“Hey,” he said, “that sounds terrific. Your boyfriend.”

“It is,” she said. “Just what I need now. Mindless fucking.”

“Terrific. But now that you're all set, what about me? Alone in the world.”

He expected friendly mockery, but instead Marilyn smiled, and gazed mysteriously at her glass.

“I've been thinking about that,” she said.

“You
have?
Tell me!”

Marilyn lit a cigarette, slowly, and took a long, dramatic drag, blowing a line of smoke at the ceiling. “What do you think of Southern girls?” she asked.

“As a rule, they smell good,” Potter said. “Also as a rule, they are not very bright, or they go to great lengths to pre
tend
they're not very bright. But they make up for that by this delicious odor they have. Per capita, they probably bathe more often than your average Northern or Western girl. Why do you ask?”

“There's the Southernest girl you ever saw in my office. In accounting. She and her roommates are having a Sunday Brunch, and you know what they need for it, honey-chile? The lacking ingredient?”

“Let's see—a sack of grits?”

“No. They have plenty of that.”

“What do they need, then?”

Marilyn smiled. “Men.”

“Aha.”

“Do you volunteer?”

“It's the least I can do.”

“OK, but try to behave. These are delicate flowers.”

“Of course. I'll do anything you want.”

Marilyn smiled. “Try not to let your nostrils flare,” she said.

Potter had thought that Marilyn would take him to the Southern Girls' Sunday Brunch, but she said she preferred to stay home and smoke grass and fuck her new hippie dropout boyfriend, so Potter had a bracing Bloody Mary for breakfast and set out all by himself.

The Southern Girls' Sunday Brunch was at a large, sunny apartment on Mt. Vernon Street. The “good side” of Beacon Hill. It must have been expensive as hell. The place was beautifully furnished, and there were lots of plush pillows and cushions all over the place. The apartment had two bedrooms, and was shared by four girls.

Amelia, Lilly, Samantha, and Pru.

It sounded like a garden. Potter wondered which flower to pick.

The four roommates were all from Georgia. There were also girls at the party from Virginia, Alabama, and North Carolina. They seemed to have banded together in the cold, foreign clime of Boston according to their states of origin, rather like the Puerto Ricans who settled in New York with people who hailed from the same hometown on the island.

Only one man at the party was an identifiable Southerner, an insurance man from Savannah. None seemed to be native Bostonians. They were the usual male Singles crowd that is almost interchangeable in any large city, former fraternity types grown into accountants and bankers, realtors and lawyers, ad men and department store buyers, not really rooted anywhere, looking for the action, saving their money for orange Porsches and mirrored bedrooms, subscribers to
Playboy
who ski and scuba-dive according to season, have their own home wine-making kits and hang their college diplomas in the room they refer to as The John. Many of them belonged to churches, few had abandoned their faith in God, and most believed secretly that if they lived a reasonably honest and hard-working life they would go to Swinging London when they died.