Five Days (25 page)

But then . . .

Bing.

My cellphone interrupted the moment; that telltale prompt letting me know that a text was awaiting me. Again, the guilt impulse took over. I let go of Richard's hand, but hesitated about reaching for the phone. Richard read this immediately. Not wanting to put me in an awkward position he said:

‘I'll get the girl to deal with all the tags. See you up front.'

Richard headed off in search of the shop assistant. I dug out the phone and read:

Garage all cleared. Love – Dan

I shouldn't have looked at the damn phone, as a stab of remorse caught me. Becoming very friendly with a man I just met yesterday. Shopping for clothes for him. Holding hands with him . . .

Oh Lord, I sound like a twelve-year-old.

Yes, I could see that Dan's text was a further attempt to make amends. That made me feel somewhat guilty. But . . . but . . . that was the first time he had used the word ‘love' in a text to me since . . . well, I couldn't remember the last time he'd said or written anything of the sort. And even the fact that he didn't say, ‘Love you' . . . Just writing ‘Love' – good friends use that at the end of emails. Whereas had he come out and made a direct declaration of love . . .

In that very instant, as I read his five-word text again, something within me shifted. It's curious, isn't it, how a small detail – the fact that my husband left off a pronoun after a somewhat charged word – can suddenly change everything. And the sad thing was: he was trying to be loving. Yet what he had done was underscore, once again, just how thwarted he was; how he could never really engage with me, let alone be talked into changing his clothes.

Glad the garage is cleared. Thank you. Up to my eyes in mind-numbing conferences. Hope you'll get some rest tonight. See you tomorrow. L xxx

Initially I wrote ‘Love you' before my initial and the multiple vacuous xxx's
.
But then I deleted it. I no longer felt like articulating something I actually did not feel.

As soon as the text was sent I did something I'd never done before. I turned off the phone. If Ben and Sally were to text me – and this being a Saturday night, the chance of that happening was up there with a meteor shower directly above Boston Common – it could wait until tomorrow. If there was an emergency Dan knew the phone number of the hotel where the conference was being held, and a message would be awaiting me upon my return. But when had I ever received an urgent message from Dan or Sally? Even when Ben had his crisis, his breakdown (to give it its proper word), the information about all that only came a few days after he'd been found.

No. No. Let's not revisit that. Because what you are doing, in fact, is trying to crowd this wondrous afternoon, the hugely unexpected moment, with all sorts of unnecessary freight. Because you are feeling no longer guilty but still rather tentative about holding that man's hand.

Correction: about bumping into a man who's literate and thoughtful and curious, who takes me seriously and seems genuinely interested in my view of the world.

And who, in turn, I actually find rather attractive.

He called me beautiful. When has anybody called me beautiful?

By the time I put my phone away Richard was back at the changing rooms.

‘So she's de-tagged me,' he said. ‘And I've told her that she can give all my old clothes to charity. She's promised me to put them in a Goodwill bin on her way home.'

‘I'd be a little dubious about that. I mean, she's hardly a Girl Scout.'

‘Well, it's now her conscience she'll have to talk to if she simply dumps them in a garbage can out the back.'

Leaving the shop without bags – Richard's old glasses back on (‘I can't see further than four feet without them') – we walked the two blocks south to the eyewear emporium. Newbury Street was abuzz. This perfect autumn day on this perfect Victorian New England street had brought out the crowds. What struck me immediately was the sense of pleasure on most people's faces we passed by. Yes, I did see one couple – early thirties, with a young baby in a stroller – arguing fiercely as they negotiated their child through the crowds. And there was a woman around my age who came hurrying past us, her face awash in tears, making me want to know immediately what it was that was causing her so much grief. Richard noticed her as well, saying:

‘As my misanthropic father used to say, you walk down a street, you bump into unhappiness everywhere.'

‘Even on the most glorious of days.'

‘Especially on the most glorious of days.'

‘So if I were to say to you,
But look at how happy everyone else appears to be
, you'd reply . . .?'

‘Bless your positive view of the human condition.'

‘But if we all don't travel hopefully . . .' I said.

‘Hey, I just let you talk me into . . .'

With a downward sweep of his right hand he motioned towards the new clothes he was now wearing, then said:

‘So surely this is traveling hopefully?'

He laced his fingers into mine. At that very moment I so wanted him to pull me towards him and kiss me. From the way his grip tightened on me I sensed that he too wanted to do that. Just as I also knew that part of me would have been unnerved and panicky had he embraced me right there, amidst the stream of people on Newbury Street. Just as I also knew that such a kiss would mean the traversing of a frontier I had never considered crossing, Correction: of course I had imagined, at particularly difficult moments, a life without Dan. Of course there were instances when I saw a photograph in some book review of a particularly handsome, clearly intelligent novelist in his mid-thirties and contemplated a night of passion with him. But . . .
between the motion and the act falls the shadow.
This is an afternoon of make-believe, with nothing to anchor it to actual reality.

But then I felt my fingers tighten around Richard's hand. We exchanged a fast, telling look that said everything, but behind which I could also clearly glimpse his own sense of hesitancy, of apprehension. Yet his hand remained in mine until we reached the eyeglass boutique.

‘Well, look at you, sir,' Gary the ‘spectician' said as Richard approached the counter. ‘Clothes make the man – and you are evidently in re-fit mode this afternoon. Bravo.'

Richard accepted this comment with a nervous smile.

‘And to complete the new you . . .'

Now Richard's discomfort was manifest again as he looked down at the tray on which his new glasses were displayed. I put my hand on his shoulder.

‘You OK?' I asked.

‘Fine, fine,' he said, not succeeding at masking his unease. Gary noted this as well.

‘If I may, sir,' he said, reaching out to remove Richard's old frames. Richard initially took a step backwards, as if he was trying to dodge the idea of giving up this last vestige of his old look. But Gary – almost anticipating this – put a steadying hand on his shoulder and quickly pulled the frames off. Then he proffered the tray to him.

‘Try them on, sir.'

Richard reached for the new glasses, then slowly raised them onto his face. Was his anxiety due to the fact that, with these glasses, his outward transformation would be complete? Or because, like me, he too felt we were veering far too close to a frontier he had never been within the proximity of during all the years of his own sad marriage?

Sad marriage
. Now I could stand guilty of presumptuousness. Just as I knew I was talking about the domestic life I'd been leading for so many years.

Glasses on, he didn't look at the mirror in front of him. Rather he turned directly towards me. As before – when he first tried these frames – I couldn't help but think just how perfectly they suited him, giving him a canny, worldly, academic mien. Seen now with his leather jacket, his black jeans and black work shirt . . .

‘You look amazing,' I said.

‘Really?' Richard said.

‘Madame is speaking the truth,' Gary said. With a gentle hand on his shoulder he turned Richard around to face the floor-length mirror nearby. Watching Richard now take himself in I couldn't help but remind myself of the way I stared at myself in the hotel mirror this morning: the fear of casting off my everyday image; the unspoken pleasure in seeing myself transformed into the person I always imagined myself being. Richard was engaged in the same process right now. The old identity, the new identity. I knew just how painful and arduous it was to actually shake off everything you have told yourself you have to be. You can dress up differently. You can change all the externals. But there are still all those ties that bind.

Richard must have regarded himself for a good minute in the mirror – and I instinctually knew it was best not to say anything right now. Gary also was astute here – as he too was watching Richard talk himself out of the anxiety that had overtaken him again as soon as we stepped back into the boutique. And during that very long sixty seconds, I watched as his face divested itself of its dread, his shoulders lost their taut hunch, and a small smile crossed his lips.

‘Thank you,' he finally said to me.

At that moment I caught Gary out of the corner of my eye. I could register him working out that we were, in no way, husband and wife, and that what had just transpired was, in its own unspoken personal way, rather huge. His only comment was a most appropriate one:

‘Congratulations, sir.'

A few minutes later we were back on Newbury Street.

‘Ready to blend in with the fellow hipsters at the ICA?' I asked.

‘I feel somewhere between an imposter and—'

‘Trust me, you're far smarter and more learned than the hip brigade.'

A smile between us.

‘It's a bit of a walk from here, I think,' he said.

‘Down in South Boston on the bay. And it probably closes at six.'

We both glanced at our watches. It was now almost four-thirty.

‘A taxi then.'

As luck would have it one was cruising right by. Richard hailed it. Within moments we were being driven down Boylston Street, passing by several upscale hotels, and a long cliff of tall nineteenth-century office buildings and a theater that Richard said now all belonged to a performing arts college. He started explaining how, just down the street twenty years ago, the remnants of Boston's red light district – better known as ‘the Combat Zone' – was still in full ‘drug-dealing, porno-cinema, working-girls-on-the-street splendor'. Now it was just a cleaned-up theater district. Though it was a more pleasant environment, ‘there's part of me that thinks we've sanitized everything nowadays, to the point where cities have lost an essential raffishness . . . not that I am the biggest expert on things metropolitan'.

‘Still,' I said, ‘you have a point. I made a couple of trips during college to New York with my then-boyfriend. Even in the late 1980s, Forty-second Street and Hell's Kitchen and the East Village were still the wrong side of sleazy, and we loved it. Because it was so not what we knew in Maine. Then, the one time I've been back since . . . well, Forty-second Street now looked like an outdoor shopping mall in any major city in the country. And the city – though still amazing – struck me as having lost an essential edgy vitality. But hey, having never lived there, having never lived anywhere but Maine . . .'

‘That door isn't shut, is it?'

‘As you said earlier, you have to travel hopefully. And believe that you can reinvent yourself anew.'

‘Isn't that the real American dream? The illusion of liberty. Hitting the road and all that? If it doesn't work out for you in Maine, get in your car, burn up the highway for a couple of nights, find yourself in New Orleans, start all over again.'

‘You ever do anything like that?' I asked.

‘In my dreams. And you?'

‘A cross-country trip once with Dan. And before that I did end up in Central America for a few weeks with someone.'

‘Was that somebody Eric?'

‘And here we are in Chinatown,' I said, changing the subject quickly, while also thinking of a moment years ago in a restaurant somewhere near here when Eric told me he loved me, that he was mine forever. A summer night it was. The mercury nearly hitting three figures. The restaurant wonderfully dingy and very authentic and badly air-conditioned. And the two of us holding hands so tightly, as if we were each other's ballast. Though we were kids at the time, we just knew . . .

‘You OK?' Richard asked.

‘Fine, fine,' I lied.

Richard touched my arm in a reassuring way, but I shrugged him off. Not forcibly, but with enough clarity to let it be known that I had just decided not to initiate any further contact with him. I'd go around the gallery with him, maybe agree to a coffee in the café there, then make my excuses and head back to the hotel. Why was I suddenly walling myself up? Because he had mentioned Eric. And because any mention of Eric threw into sharp silhouette all that my life had not been since those extraordinary two years towards the end of the eighties. And because I had padlocked that part of my past so thoroughly that even the slightest reference to it threw me into freefall.

Will you listen to yourself, trying to push this man away.

I just can't cope with the jumble of things that are playing havoc with my psyche right now.

You want directness? Here's directness: you can't cope with the fact that he is so right for you. And you are so right for him.

And I am married. And I have made a commitment. And I cannot . . .

Change
.

I put my face in my hands. I stifled a sob. Richard put his hand on my shoulder. I shrugged him off. But as soon as that happened the sobs started again. This time, I turned and buried my head in his shoulder. He held me tight until I brought the sobs under control. When they subsided he did something very smart. He said nothing except: