Starting Over (5 page)

“I'm hungry,” he said.

The three or four people standing by him stopped their own conversation and looked at Potter with curiosity.

“Why, Phil,” one girl said helpfully, “there's a whole ham and turkey right over there on the table. Would you like me to fix up a plate or a sandwich for you?”

He shook his head, his expression fixed in a sort of trance. “That isn't what I mean,” he said.

“Well—uh—what is it—you're hungry for?” the girl asked, warily now. “Steak or something?”

“No,” he said, still evidently staring at something beyond or above the people who were now so attentively watching him; whatever he saw was beyond the party, the room, the evening.

“We could fall over to Thompson Street and get some Italian food, if that's what you want,” his roomie Al Solonkis said.

“That isn't what I want.”

“Well for the love of Jesus, will you tell us what in the name of God you want?” Al burst out.

Potter suddenly smiled, as if the trance was broken, and looked at his friends as if they should have understood all along what he meant that he was hungry for now, what he really wanted for the first time in his life.

“Money,” he said.

Once it happened it seemed only natural—all too natural, Potter thought—that he was just right for public relations. Going with Olney and Sheperdson, who handled a lot of theatrical clients, made it seem even more natural, an extension of his former interest. Shouldn't he have known it all along?

He had feared it all along.

But that was not the sort of thing to tell the young people gathered in his brand new seminar; it did not convey the sort of image he wished to create for either himself or the subject. Whatever hostility or disrespect or condescension he felt about the field, he figured in part, at least, was due to the fact that it was not what he started out wanting to do at all, but a very distant second choice, not even in a sense a choice at all, but a seemingly inevitable solution, a half-baked bargain with a charming sort of devil. But if students were attracted to the sort of work and life that public relations offered, he saw nothing shameful about it, did not wish to discourage them, and hoped in fact to give them as much advice and good counsel, intellectual stimulation and accompanying entertainment as he possibly could.

After his initial fumbling with the question, he spoke of the “challenge” of the field, tried honestly to take into account the financial attraction it had for him after years of playing the starving artist, how it was in fact related to his old love, the theatre, not merely, in the case of his own firm, in gross press-agentry for stars, but in the planning of long campaigns for top-notch serious Broadway productions, promotion of meaningful cultural events, fund-raising for a topflight symphony—oh, a rich variety of noble works and deeds. But as he spoke of these things his mind was far away, thinking of how he was able to continue the job as long as he did, after the novelty of new work and a good income had worn off, how he was able to not only keep plugging away but to strive for even greater rewards—and the explanation of that was even more inappropriate for the young ears of the students in his opening seminar, for the answer was inextricably tied to his affair and eventual marriage with Jessica.

She was a model. Tall, of course, and tawny, sharp bones and big eyes; small chest, long slim legs that he recognized from his fantasies, from TV bath oil commercials, from
New York Times
Sunday Magazine hosiery ads. She seemed very bright and very vulnerable, unsure beneath the cool gloss of her beauty. He met her at a cocktail party and after two drinks, he mentioned, off-hand, as if it were something quite natural and matter-of-course, that he intended to marry her.

“Oh?” she asked; lashes lifted in an interested, inquisitive way.

They went to bed together later that evening, and didn't really get up again for three days, except to make forays into Jessica's kitchen for booze or yogurt or frozen steaks. The attraction was of a kind that is sometimes described as electric.

“Something must be wrong,” she kept saying.

“Why?” he asked.

“It always is.”

“But this,” he assured her, “is different.”

She cried a great deal, especially when, a year after meeting, they were married. Because, she said, of being so happy. He asked, with increasing irritation, why being happy made her cry, and she said because it couldn't last.

Time proved her right: a little over four years, in which they moved here and there around Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights, tried her working and her staying home, tried shrinks and booze and pot and pets, second and third and forty-second honeymoons, summer houses and winter vacations, infidelity and urban renewal; tried everything but Children. And both of them despite benevolent advice from friends, balked at that—until they had worked things out for themselves they vowed not to bring any innocent parties into the act.

On their fourth Christmas Potter insisted that they refuse the invitations of family and friends and just be together, the two of them; he had some Dickensian fantasy of the holiday bringing them together. Tight-lipped, she agreed, after making it clear how nice it would be to see her sister in Moline and her sister's children and her alcoholic brother-in-law who sold for John Deere in the Quad Cities area. Potter mused on the warmth and comfort to be found in a big old-fashioned Christmas dinner at home, with the phone off the hook and carols on the hi-fi.

Jessica was busy in the kitchen most of that Christmas morning; busy but silent When she served the dinner, Potter thought it would never end; she bore in the bird, then the trimmings—cranberries and sweet potatoes and creamed onions and succotash and homemade bread and buttered carrots and hominy grits—each dish laid down like an indictment against him. When the table was laid, laden, loaded down, she sat, primly, her face drained of color, her eyes alarmingly wide and calm, and said smoothly, “You wanted a Christmas dinner—here it is.”

Potter had several creamed onions and then ran to the bathroom and vomited.

“No appetite?” she asked, solicitously.

They made up, then and many more times, but it was then, over the groaning holiday table, that he knew, for certain, it was over.

But whatever criticism he could make of the time with Jessica, he could never complain that it was dull, and during it he worked with her in mind, with the two of them in mind, with the prospect of all that they might do and have, to urge him on, and he knew if it had not been for her his career in public relations would not have been as long or as productive or as lucrative.

But that would have been—to say the least—as difficult to explain to a college seminar as it would have been inappropriate. So Potter kept his private life to himself and managed to get through the hour tossing out generalizations that he hoped were not too namby-pamby and anecdotes he hoped were not too irrelevant. When the time was up, though the day was unseasonably cool for September in Boston, Potter's shirt was soaking wet.

Potter discovered that teaching a class was in a way like making love. Sometimes he did it with great enthusiasm, artfully building up interest and getting a rising response of excitement that peaked with a mutual rapport between himself and the students. Sometimes he did it because it was expected of him, and he forced himself to go through the motions, mechanically, ending sooner than he should have, leaving both himself and the class feeling grouchy, disgruntled, unsatisfied.

He felt pretty sure of himself in the PR seminar, and after his beers with Gafferty, he devised his own way of teaching the Communications sections. It was required that the classes read and study current periodicals—newspapers, magazines, the underground press, trade publications—and Potter picked a selection he felt comfortable with and interested in. It was also required that McLuhan's book
Understanding Media
be read, and after that the individual instructor was allowed to “build up and out.” Gafferty did it with the Irish poets, and Potter struck on the notion of doing it with Shakespeare. He even got the idea from McLuhan, who wrote in
Understanding Media
that one could create “a fairly complete handbook for studying the extensions of man” by reading Shakespeare; he pointed out that in
Othello
Shakespeare was concerned with “the transforming powers of new media,” and that
Troilus and Cressida
is “almost completely devoted to both a psychic and social study of communication.”

Eureka! Under the approving mantle of McLuhan himself, Potter devised a Communications course that included
Othello, Troilus and Cressida, King Henry V
. A production of
Lear
that he saw as a kid at the Booth in Washington had originally turned him on to the theatre, and after the performance, thrilled, he went to his father's library and one by one took down the little blue volumes of the complete set of Shakespeare, devouring each with wonder and excitement. Reading the plays again, discussing them, reciting in class those lines, those rolling cadences, inspired his teaching and gave him new energy. He wanted to convey this richness to his students, to make them see, hear, and feel what was there; he wanted, indeed, to communicate.

He liked the students. None were especially brilliant, or militant, and that was fine with Potter. For the most part they seemed pleasant, and bright enough. He enjoyed the realization that he was being paid to help them, to tell them what he knew and what understanding he had of the books and subjects they discussed; and, in such discussions, he found that he made new discoveries himself, that sometimes a student's question or comment would open up an unexpected angle of viewing a thought or situation, and he found that such occasions brought him a quiet kind of pleasure.

He soon learned that his office hours, his consultations with students, were not strictly limited to matters academic. Halligan, a tall, serious Vietnam veteran, invited Potter to have a beer with him, and with the second glass, confided that his girl was pressing pretty hard to get married.

“She's bought these dishes,” Halligan said.

“Dishes?”

“A whole set of this very expensive kind. More than regular people would ever use. You know, the kind that break easy.”

“I think I know the kind.”

“So before, we'd just been talking about getting married, but now that she's got these dishes, she says we have to really get going on it, that's what they're for. To start your marriage.”

“I take it you're not so anxious to get married.”

“Well, I think I love her, you know, and I know that we should probably—well, we'll eventually have to get married, I guess, but—Jesus. I don't know. The idea of having to cart all those dishes around, it makes me feel sort of closed in. Like you start accumulating all that stuff, and you can't just take off or anything.”

“Not easily,” Potter agreed.

“I guess I hadn't really thought about marriage. What it would really feel like.”

“Well, I'm afraid I'm not a very good person to tell about marriage,” Potter said.

“You're divorced, you mean.”

“How did you know?”

Halligan shrugged. “Things get around. About faculty.”

“Oh. Well, anyway, my own marriage just didn't work, but it doesn't mean it's not right for other people.”

“I guess you can't tell until you do it.”

“I'm afraid not.”

They didn't resolve anything, nor did Potter wish to influence Halligan's decision on matrimony, but it made him feel good, that the guy would want his advice, would regard him as someone to talk things over with.

Potter felt he was getting along pretty well with the students, felt that in general they liked him, and he was surprised when Lester Harnack said he'd like to give him some advice about “student relations.” Harnack was a part-time instructor in Communications who had published a couple of poems during the Beat era, and was said to have once hitchhiked from New York City to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with Gregory Corso. Harnack had kept pace with the changing styles of the counter culture, and now lived in a communal house in Boston's South End, a “transitional” neighborhood.

“At least let your hair grow,” Harnack counselled Potter. “The way you dress—it creates a kind of barrier between you and the kids. I'm not just speaking of academic bullshit—I mean the girls. A lot of these girls really swing, and they're looking for father figures. If you know what I mean.”

Potter knew. He thanked Harnack, but said he thought he'd stick to his old-fashioned style, he was pretty much set in his ways. He was well aware that his Brooks Brothers garb was a kind of uniform—just as Harnack's Wrangler pants and boots and buckskin shirts with fringe was another kind—but it was a matter of pride with Potter to stick to the style he'd grown up with even though it was no longer in fashion, in the spirit in which one might continue to wear the colors of some once-illustrious regiment that had since gone from glory.

Besides that, Potter wasn't interested in student seduction. Aside from disliking the cliché nature of it, the prospect of such involvements seemed messy and complicated, and Potter was trying to avoid that. He was waiting for some kind of clear-cut, mutually satisfying relationship.

But he was getting tired of waiting.

PART TWO

1

A woman friend of Potter in New York called to tell him she heard he had got a divorce and moved to Boston, and she wondered if he'd like to meet a nice available lady who was also recently divorced.

“I assume,” Potter said, “that this lady is not only divorced, but that she has two children.”

“How did you know that?” his friend asked.

“A feeling,” Potter said. “Probably telepathic.”

Potter knew because he had begun to suspect that in the great IBM machine of life, his mating card had been programmed in such a way that he was only allowed to meet a woman if she was divorced and had two children. He had nothing against divorced women with two children—some of them he had met were admirable human beings, attractive and intelligent, yet the fact that since he had started going out in his new life in Boston, except for the fragile Alison Farr, he had not met women of any other category, had begun to spook him a little.