Five Days

One

THE ROAD. HOW I love the road. Or, at least, the idea of the road. The summer before our senior year at the University of Maine, Dan and I piled into the ancient (but still very serviceable) Chevy that he had throughout college and headed west. The car could do seventy-five miles an hour at a push. There was no air conditioning — and we were trailed by ninety-degree temperatures (at best) everywhere. We didn’t care. We had $2,000 and three months before we were due back east for the start of classes. We stayed in cheap motels. We ate largely in diners. We left highways all the time to explore two-lane blacktops. We spent four days in Rapid City, South Dakota, because we simply liked that crazy Wild West town. We broke down on a stretch of Route 111 in the Wyoming badlands and (this being the days before the cellphone) had to wait three hours until a car showed up. It was a guy in a pickup with a gun rack. We hailed him down and he brought us the forty miles to the next outpost of civilization, and the mechanic there was around seventy and never without a Lucky Strike between his teeth. He insisted on putting us up in a room over his garage for the two days it took him to perform a valve job on the engine: a huge piece of work that should have cost over $1,000, but for which he only charged us $500. Through a lot of crazy budgeting — and the fact that gas back then was just over a dollar a gallon — we were able to carry on west to San Francisco, then head back east through the desert to Santa Fe, which we both fell for.

‘Let’s move here after I finish med school,’ I said, seeing us living in some adobe house (with a swimming pool) out in the mesa that surrounded the city, me having a thriving pediatrics practice in town, my patients the children of artists and New Age types who ate macrobiotically and wrote music for the gamelan and drank green tea with Georgia O’Keeffe and.

‘As long as you don’t make me drink green tea or only eat lentils,’ Dan said.

‘No — we’d be the weirdos out here. Meat-eaters, smokers —’ (Dan was a two-pack a day man back then) ‘and decidedly not into crystals or the zodiac. But I bet we’d meet a lot of young types like us. Santa Fe strikes me as one of those places that attracts refugees from everywhere else in the country — people who want to escape from all the pressures of big-city life, big-city success. We could live really well here — and, hey, it’s the West. Wide open spaces. Big skies. No traffic.’

Of course Dan agreed with me. Of course, within twelve months, all these pipe-dreamy plans were finished. And that big wonderful coast-to-coast drive — in which I truly fell in love with the scope and possibility and sheer insane vastness of my country — was to be our one and only romance of the road.

The road.

We all have our little patch of earth, don’t we? Especially those of us who do the nine-to-five thing and rarely venture further than our home and our place of work. And this morning, on the way south, I was passing through my usual parameters.

Main Street Damariscotta. Tourists come here in the summer. An archetypal Maine fishing town. Lots of white clapboard. Austere historic churches. A few decent restaurants (we don’t do fancy around here). A couple of places where you can buy three types of goat’s cheese and the sort of fancy English biscuits that are way out of my budget. And small-town lawyers and insurers and doctors and our hospital and three schools and six houses of worship and one supermarket and a decent bookshop and a funky little cinema where they show the live relays from the Metropolitan Opera once a month (I always go with Lucy — even if it is $25 a ticket) and water everywhere you look. Then there’s that ingrained Maine sense of independence that pervades so much of our life here, an attitude which can best be described as: ‘You stay out of my business, I stay out of yours, and we’ll treat each other with courtesy and unspoken respect, and we won’t pass judgment out loud.’ What I like about life here is that, though we all know so much about each other, we still maintain the veneer of outward disinterest. It’s the curious Maine dichotomy: we’re as nosy about other people’s mess as anyone else, but we also pride ourselves on keeping our own counsel.

From Damariscotta through the township of Newcastle then onto Route 1 and into Wiscasset. I hate that damn sign they put at their southern boundary: Wiscasset: The Prettiest Village in Maine. I suppose what annoys me most about it — once you sidestep the smugness of that claim — is the fact that it is the prettiest village in Maine. A virtually intact throwback to the colonial past, grouped around a sweeping Atlantic cove, the town’s white clapboard angularity is so authentic, so visually striking — especially as the water too is everywhere. Outside the absurd vacation traffic that backs up the town every weekend during July and August, this is coastal Maine at its most ravishing. Yet like everything else to do with the state, Wiscasset is so low-key about its wondrousness. outside, that is, of that damn sign.

South of Wiscasset there are a couple of depressing strip malls and a supermarket and the requisite McDonald’s which they only opened around a year ago. Then woods which eventually give way to encroaching water and the bridge into Bath. That bridge — across the wide expanse of the Kennebec River — always strikes me as spectacular. I must make two round-trips across it every week (that’s over two thousand single trips in the last decade — have I ever considered that huge number before now?). Heading south, if you look to the left you see the shipyard of Bath Iron Works — one of the last true industrial centers in the state — with at least two half-finished battleships for the US Navy always under construction. But it only takes up a small lip of a shoreline otherwise pristine and expansive. Besides being such a key economic force in our region, I love the fact that ships are still built in our corner of the state. Just as I love looking right while crossing the bridge and seeing the sweep of the Kennebec, especially at this time of the year, the aptly named fall, when the foliage is a hallucinatory palette of crimsons and golds.

Were I a cartographer of the fifteenth century, the map of my flat earth would terminate at the town of Brunswick, as I so rarely venture beyond its boundaries. Brunswick is a college town. Bowdoin is there. It was also, until recently, the home of a naval air station. There used to be a paper mill on the banks of its river. It’s now long closed. But as a kid passing through the town I can always remember the strange toxic whiff of glue that seemed to permeate the place. We were in Brunswick two or three times a year, as Dad’s closest childhood friend — Arnold Soule — was a professor of mathematics at Bowdoin. Dad and Arnold grew up in the same small town and bonded at school over advanced calculus. But whereas Dad chose U Maine and a high-school teaching career, Soule got a full scholarship to MIT and followed that with a doctorate from Harvard. He was a tenured professor at Bowdoin by the time he was twenty-eight and wrote wildly theoretical books about binary number theory (his specialty) that, according to Dad, were hugely acclaimed ‘in the theoretical mathematics community’. Arnold also happened to be gay — something he confided to my father when they were much younger, and at a time when such a revelation could have destroyed his life. Dad, for his part, kept Arnold’s secret just that — something that Arnold told me many years later when I was supposed to be coming down to the college with Lucy to hear a chamber music concert. When Lucy was flattened with flu and had to cancel at the last minute I called this great family friend and asked him if he’d like to join me. That was just over five years ago. Arnold had finally come out in the early nineties and was living with a graphics designer twenty years his junior named Andrew. When we met up that night Arnold was seventy and had just retired. He was a little rueful about giving up teaching, even though he was engaged in a massive ten-year writing project that was (as he told me) an accessible history of mathematical theory from Euclid onwards. I always liked Arnold, always felt that he was the interesting, understanding uncle I never had (I had rather judgmental aunts on both sides of the family). That evening five years ago — when we talked over a dinner in an Italian restaurant on Maine Street before hearing a visiting pianist from New York play a sublime program of Scarlatti, Ravel and Brahms at the college recital hall — he asked me a direct question:

‘Happy with your life, Laura?’

The question immediately unsettled me. Arnold saw that.

‘My life is fine,’ I said, hearing the defensiveness behind my response.

‘Then why did you flinch when I posed the question?’

‘Because it took me by surprise, that’s all.’

‘Your father tells me you’re highly regarded in your field.’

‘My father is being far too kind. As you know I run scanning machinery in a small local hospital. It’s hardly a great accomplishment.’

‘But it’s very important, skilled work. The thing is — and I say this as someone who has known you since you first arrived in this world of ours — I’ve always wondered why you seem to short-change yourself. And maybe it’s absolutely none of my business. But I’ll say it anyway, because you’re still a young woman with possibilities—’

‘I have two children and a husband and a mortgage and far too many bills. So my actual possibilities are few and far between.’

‘So you say. The truth is, we all have greater possibilities than we ever realize or want to accept. Look at me — I always wanted to live in Paris, teach absurdly abstruse calculus at the Йcole Normale Supйrieure, master the language, and take up with a marvellous French chap whose family just happened to own a chвteau in the Loire. And yes, I know that all sounds so clichйd — a gay mathematician’s picture-postcard reverie. But here I am, at seventy, and except for a week in the City of Light every summer with Andrew — to whom I’ve never revealed the French lover fantasy — have I ever used a sabbatical break or even the three months we get off every summer to live there? Hell, no. Know what I think? I think part of me still believes I don’t deserve Paris. Isn’t that terrible? And Andrew — who I also didn’t think I deserved when I first met him, but thankfully he thought otherwise — is now insisting that next summer, when he can take some leave from his job, we spend six months there. He’s already apartment hunting for us. And I am finally giving in to the idea.’

‘Good for you,’ I said, noticing that I was simultaneously strangling the napkin in my lap.

‘Yes, it’s only taken me fifty years of adult life to finally come to the conclusion that I deserve happiness. Which, in turn, leads me to ask: when are you going to start thinking you deserve happiness?’

‘I’m not unhappy, Arnold.’

‘You remind me so much of your father. He could have had the full ticket to Harvard or Chicago or Stanford or any other major university — because, on many levels, he was even cleverer than me. Just as I know you got accepted here at Bowdoin, but chose U Maine.’

‘You know why I chose U Maine. They offered me a full scholarship. Here it was only fifty per cent — and I would have had to take out a loan. ’

‘Which — had you gone to medical school — you would have paid back five years after getting your MD degree. And having just said that, I know I’ve overstepped. ’

‘Perhaps you have,’ I said. Thinking: You cannot begin to imagine how many times over the years I have privately reproached myself for this piece of late-adolescent bad judgment.

‘I’m truly sorry,’ Arnold said. ‘But I just want you to not make the mistakes I made.’

‘I’m afraid it’s too late for that. And I really think I’d like to get off this subject now. ’

‘Of course, of course.’

The remainder of the meal was rather forced, our conversation stilted, guarded, overshadowed by the uncomfortable exchange that had just occurred. Then we listened to the concert — but I didn’t hear a note, as everything Arnold told me kept churning around my head. Because it was, sadly, all so true, so right on the money. Afterward, my father’s friend walked me to my car, his head lowered, clearly distressed.

‘Will you forgive a foolish old man his foolhardy attempt to give out advice?’

‘Of course I forgive you,’ I said, embracing him lightly.

‘OK,’ he said quietly, realizing the landscape between us had changed. ‘Don’t be a stranger, eh?’

‘And don’t you find a way of not going to Paris.’

‘I’ll try not to.’

I never heard from Arnold again. Two months later he woke up one morning with chest pains — and died of a coronary occlusion less than an hour later. Life is like that. You’re here, in the midst of things. Then, out of nowhere, something shows up and snuffs your existence out. It’s always so dreadful, a sudden death like that. Always so profoundly unfair. And so distressingly common.

Brunswick. The border beyond which I rarely cross. My world: the thirty miles from Damariscotta to Brunswick.

And now.

Portland.

Our one proper city in Maine. An actual functioning port. A place of business. A foodie paradise — and a town which, if I was twenty-five and wanted to start out in a city away from the big metropolitan ambitions and pressures of a New York, a Los Angeles, a Chicago, I’d certainly think about considering. Ben especially likes what he calls ‘the Portland vibe — urban Maine bohemia’. I think he envisages himself in the future in some warehouse space near the docks, living simply, but having a huge studio space and doing well enough as an artist to meet his bills and fund his work. ‘I don’t really want to go to New York or Berlin,’ he told me recently. ‘I just want to stay in Maine and paint.’ As this comment came in the wake of that terrible period of his life I didn’t want to say that, quite honestly, the best thing that could happen for him as an artist was to get out of Maine for a few years.

Still, if he ends up in Portland. well, of course, I’ll love the fact that he’s just an hour down the road. And it will give me an excuse to drop down here more often — because this is a city I should be using frequently. And maybe now that Dan is bringing in a salary again.

No, let’s not think about any of that this weekend. Let’s call a moratorium on all domestic thoughts for the next forty-eight hours.

As if.

Kennebunkport. Summer home of the Bush family. I voted for Bush Senior, but couldn’t give my support to Junior — as he reminded me of a richer, more vindictive version of the frat boys I always seemed to dodge at college. I’ve always loved the beach at Kennebunkport — a curiously rugged stretch of the Atlantic and a wondrously savage contrast to the well-heeled, upscale community that fronts it. I would love to somehow, sometime, live directly by the sea. Just to be able to wake up every day and immediately look out at the water. No matter what was going on around me there would be the immense consolation of water.

I glanced at my watch. I was making good time, listening to a Mozart symphony on Maine Public Radio. The 36th, subtitled the Linz. The announcer explained how Mozart showed up, in 1781, on a Monday at the home of the Count of Linz, wife in tow, and the Count, knowing Mozart’s habit of running up debts, offered him a nice sum of money if he could write a symphony for the court orchestra by Friday. Four days to write and orchestrate a symphony! And one that is still being played over two centuries later. Is genius, among other things, the appearance of effortlessness when it comes to great work? Or is there some sort of mystique hovering around the notion that all truly serious art must have a long gestation period; that it must be the result of a profound and torturous struggle? Even as the reception began to crackle, once I crossed the bridge that links Maine to New Hampshire, I couldn’t help but be carried along by the immense lyricism of the symphony — and the way Mozart seemed able to reflect the lightness and darkness lurking behind all things in the course of a single musical phrase.

New Hampshire — just a stretch of highway here on this corner of I-95. Then Massachusetts — and suburban Boston announced itself with billboards and shopping malls and fast food and strip bars and places to buy lawn furniture and endless car dealerships and cheap motels. The conference was being held in a Fairfield Inn along Route 1, just a few miles from Logan Airport. I’d Googled the place in advance — so I knew it was a large airport hotel with a conference centre attached to it. Up close it was a concrete block. Inconsequential. Uninteresting. A place you would never notice unless you were stopping by. But I didn’t care if it was big and squat and all reinforced concrete and this side of ugly. It was an escape hatch for a couple of days. Even the unappealing can look pretty good when it represents a break from routine.

Two

FLORAL CARPET. FLUORESCENT lights. Concrete walls painted industrial cream. And a big reception desk made from cheaply veneered wood, over which were clocks that showed the time in London, Chicago, San Francisco and (of course) here in Boston. This was the reception area of the Fairfield Inn, Logan Airport. It did not look promising, especially since there was already a huge line in front of the desk.

‘Must be all the X-ray people,’ said the man who had just joined behind me.

I smiled.

‘Yes, must be,’ I said.

‘“X-ray people”,’ the man said again, shaking his head at this comment. ‘Makes it sound like 1950s sci-fi. Not that you were around in the 1950s. ’

‘Glad you think so.’

‘I would say you were born in 1980.’

‘Now that is flattery.’

‘You mean, I got it wrong?’ he asked.

‘By about eleven years, yes.’

‘I’m disappointed.’

‘By my age?’

‘By my inability to guess your age,’ he said.

‘That’s a major personal fault?’

‘In my game it is.’

‘And your game is.?’

‘Nothing terribly interesting.’

‘That’s quite an admission,’ I said.

‘It’s the truth.’

‘And the truth is.?’

‘I sell insurance.’

I now stepped back and got a proper look at this insurance man.

Mid-height — maybe five foot nine. Reasonably trim figure — with the slightest hint of a paunch around his stomach. Graying hair, but not thinning hair. Steel-rimmed glasses in a rectangular frame. A dark blue suit — not particularly expensive, not particularly cheap. A mid-blue dress shirt. A rep tie. A wedding ring on his left index finger. He had a Samsonite roll-on bag in one hand, and a very large black briefcase on the floor next to it — no doubt filled with policy forms just waiting to be filled in as soon as he landed the necessary clients. I judged him to be somewhere in his mid-fifties. Not particularly handsome. Outside of the gray hair, not looking bloated or too weathered by life.

‘Insurance is one of life’s necessities,’ I said.

‘You should write my sales pitch.’

‘I’m certain you’ve got a better one than that.’

‘Now it’s you who’s flattering me.’

‘And where do you sell insurance?’

‘Maine.’

I brightened.

‘My home state,’ I said.

Now he brightened.

‘Born and bred?’ he asked.

‘Absolutely. Heard of Damariscotta?’

‘I live about twenty miles away in Bath. ’

I then told him where I’d grown up, also mentioning my years at U Maine.

‘I’m a U Maine grad as well,’ he said — and we quickly discovered which dorms we lived in during our respective freshman years and that he was a business studies major at the college.

‘I did biology and chemistry,’ I said.

‘Far more brainy than me. So you’re a doctor?’

‘What makes you guess that?’

‘The two science majors, and the fact that there is a radiography convention this weekend at this hotel — and all you X-ray people are delaying my check-in.’

That last comment came out with a smile. But I took his point, as there were fifteen people ahead of us and only two receptionists at work. We were going to be here awhile.

‘So you’ve decided I’m an X-ray person,’ I said.

‘That’s just deduction.’

‘You mean, I don’t look like an X-ray person?’

‘Well, I know I look like the sort of man who sells insurance.’

I said nothing.

‘See,’ he said, ‘guilty as charged.’

‘Do you like selling insurance?’

‘It has its moments. Do you like being a radiographer?’

‘I’m just a technologist, nothing more.’

‘If you’re a radiographic technologist, that’s a pretty important job.’

I just shrugged. The man smiled at me again.

‘Which hospital?’

‘Maine Regional.’

‘No kidding. Were you working there when Dr Potholm ran the department?’

‘Dr Potholm hired me.’

The man smiled and stuck out his hand.

‘I’m Richard Copeland.’ He simultaneously handed me his business card.

I took his hand. A firm grip. A salesman’s grip. I pocketed the card. I told him my name.

‘My first grade teacher was named Laura,’ he said, ‘though we called her Miss Wigglesworth.’

‘Well, my mother told me that, after much debate, the name choice came down to Laura or Sandra. My father preferred the latter, but my mother was certain I’d end up being called Sandy.’

‘Sandy’s a little bit Californian, isn’t it?’

Now it was my turn to giggle. Richard Copeland certainly had an easy conversational style. But he was also somewhat cautious with his body language, as if he was always fighting a certain physical shyness. I could see him looking me over and then trying to mask the fact that he was looking me over. The banter between us was simultaneously breezy and guarded. I characterized him as a flirt who was not totally at ease with being a flirt. But this was, without question, a flirtation — of the sort that two strangers have when caught together in a long line and they know that, in fifteen minutes, they’ll never be seeing each other again.

‘Funny you say that. When I was thirteen my dad mentioned to me that I almost ended up with another first name, but “Mother hated the name Sandra”. And when I asked her why she was so against that name, Mom said that Sandy would have made me sound like “a surfer girl”.’

‘Spoken like a true Maine mother.’

‘Oh, Mom would have been very much at home in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.’

He looked a little surprised by that last comment — almost flinching a bit.

‘Have I said the wrong thing?’ I asked.

‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘It’s just that it’s not every day you hear someone make reference to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.’

‘Most of us read The Scarlet Letter at some point in school.’

‘And most of us have forgotten all about it.’

‘Well, I can’t say I’ve downloaded it onto my Kindle. not that I have one.’

‘You prefer paper?’

‘I prefer real books. And you?’

‘I’m afraid I’ve crossed over to the dark side.’

‘It’s not a mortal sin.’

‘I do have twenty books in my in-box right now.’

‘And what are you reading right now?’

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

‘Let me decide that. What’s the book?’

I could see him blush. And stare down at his well-polished black cordovans.

‘Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.’

‘That is a coincidence,’ I said.

‘But the truth.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘I could show you my Kindle if you don’t believe me. ’

‘No need, no need.’

‘Now I’m sure you think I’m weird.’

‘Or just weirdly literate. Anyway, The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne and all that.’

‘It remains a great novel.’

‘And rather prescient, given the current wave of religiosity sweeping the country.’

‘“Prescient”,’ he said, phonetically sounding it out as if it was the first time he’d ever spoken it. ‘Nice word.’

‘That it is.’

‘And even if I don’t agree with a lot of what the Christian Right bangs on about, don’t you think there are certain things about which they have a point?’

Oh, no. A serious Republican.

‘Such as?’ I asked.

‘Well, such as the need to maintain family values.’

‘Most people with families believe in family values.’

‘I wouldn’t totally agree with that. I mean, look at the divorce rate—’

‘But look at the time before divorce, when people were trapped in marriages they loathed, when there was absolutely no latitude for anyone, when women were expected to give up careers the moment they got pregnant, when if you dared turn your back on a husband and children you were considered a social outcast.’

I realized I had raised my voice a decibel or so. Just as I also saw Richard Copeland a little taken aback by the vehemence with which I had rendered that homily.

‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ he said.

‘I’m not usually so fierce.’

‘That wasn’t fierce. That was impressive. Even if I disagree with much of what you said.’

He delivered that last line with his chin pointed down at his tie, as if to dodge the heated exchange he was nonetheless courting. I didn’t like this. It struck me as timid-arrogant. Say the controversial thing — but do it in such a way where you don’t bury its import by speaking it into your damn shirt.

‘Well, I’m hardly surprised to hear that,’ I said.

‘What I meant to say was—’

‘You know what? I think this is a good moment to draw a line in the sand and simply say: Have a nice weekend.’

‘Now I feel bad. I really didn’t mean—’

‘I’m sure you’ll get over it.’

At the reception desk there was a young woman in a maroon suit with a yellow shirt and a name tag that let it be known she was called Laura.

‘Hey, Laura, say hello to Laura,’ she said after perusing my driver’s license.

‘Hi, Laura,’ I said, hoping I didn’t sound too dry.

‘And how’s your day been so far?’

‘Curious.’

This caught her by surprise.

‘I guess curious is better than boring, right?’

‘That is a very good point.’

‘Let me see if I can turn your “curious” day into a better day — by offering you a complimentary upgrade. Top floor, king bed, view of the pool. How does that sound?’

‘Just fine,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

The pool view was only possible if you opened the window, stuck your head out and engaged in some serious vertigo as you looked straight down onto the cinder-block patio below. The problem was, when you opened the window you were hit with an interesting amalgamation of traffic noise and traffic fumes — and this was clearly the quiet side of the hotel with the preferred view. So after a quick look down and into the near distance — more gas stations and parking lots — I closed the window, shutting out the outside world.

I sat down on the bed and wondered why I was feeling so cheerless just now. Maybe it was something to do with the less than inviting nature of this room, with decor that hadn’t been updated in over twenty years. A floral carpet with faded coffee stains. A floral bedspread and matching floral drapes that all looked like they belonged in a home for the aged. The bathroom had a tub in molded plastic and a shower curtain that had begun to mildew. Oh, well, you’re only sleeping here this weekend — and it is just for two nights. But these were the only two nights I would be away from home this year. Had I the money I would have checked myself out of this sad place immediately, grabbed a taxi into Boston, and checked myself into something nice overlooking the common. But that was so out of my financial league, so beyond anything I could afford. Make the best of it. enjoy the freedom of being away from everything for a few days.

And, of course, before I heeded that advice (could I heed that advice?) I popped open my phone and began to text my son:

Sorry we didn’t connect last night. In Boston now. Please send update on life and art when you have a moment. Or if you feel like calling, even when I am in conference about lymphatic dyes (yes, there is one!) my cell will buzz silently. Will also do me a huge favor by getting me out of ‘The Case for Fewer Colonoscopies’. not that I will be at that one! Miss you. Love — Mom

Then I sent a fast text to Sally:

I know things can get difficult between you and your father. Just as sometimes we get up each other’s noses (excuse the metaphor!). Please know I am always here for you, always in your corner. If you need me this weekend just pick up the phone day or night. Love you — Mom

Once the text was sent, I had two more duties. The first was a call to Dan — but I got his voicemail, making me think he might have headed to the gym or the beach. He started work again at four a.m. Monday morning — and though I was certain he was already dreading the job I hoped that, at least, he was finding a way of relaxing for these three final days before he was back in the workaday world. I also hoped that he was taking a long view when it came to the job and saw it as a way back into the company which had tossed him away like an ill-fitting shoe twenty-one months earlier; a stepping stone to better things.

You really do try to see the best in everything, don’t you?

But is there anything truly wrong with that? What else can any of us do except travel hopefully?

‘Hi, hon,’ I said, speaking after the beep commanded me to leave him a message. ‘In Boston. The hotel could be better. And it would be lovely if you were here to share the city with me. I hope to go there sometime tomorrow. Anyway, just wanted to say hi, hope you’re having a lovely day. Miss you. ’

As I clicked the phone shut it struck me that I hadn’t said: ‘Love you.’ Did I still love Dan? Did he still love me?

No. Not now. Not this weekend.

The endless refrain.

I stood up. I checked my watch. I glanced down at the convention welcome pack on the bed. I saw that the talk on ‘CT Scanning and Inoperable Stage Three Lung Cancer’ was beginning in ten minutes. Better than loitering in here, thinking, thinking. Imagine using a seminar like that the way most of us use a movie we know isn’t going to be very good — as a form of pure escapism. Still, anything is better than this room.

I grabbed my convention badge, attached to a red ribbon. I dropped it over my neck and gave myself a fast glance in the mirror, thinking: God, I’m looking older. Then I headed downstairs, thinking over that curious conversation I had with the insurance man from Bath — and how I had enjoyed the banter, the harmless flirtation, before he began to sound like a knee-jerk Republican.

No, that’s not fair. He was literate (who makes a reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne these days?) and clearly well-informed and, like me, nervously enjoying this exchange. And you overreacted when he said something that you took the wrong way.

Was I overreacting because I was flirting with him? Was my petulance bound up in the sense that I was doing something I shouldn’t have been doing. that I can never recall having done before during all the years of my marriage?

Oh, please. It was conversational give-and-take, nothing more. The guy was as awkward as you are — so it was clearly something he didn’t engage in very often either. But he was also far more intelligent than any insurance man you’ve ever encountered. not that you’ve exactly encountered vast numbers of men selling you indemnity against life’s possible horrors.

Still, I shouldn’t have snapped at him like that.

In the elevator going down to the main lobby there was a woman who stood about five foot four. Slight to the point of being petite, yet with eyes that seemed so animated. She was wearing a plain mid-brown pants suit. Her gray hair was cut simply. She was a woman so unimposing that you would pass her on the street without noticing her. Until you caught sight of her smile. A smile which hinted that she was one of those rare souls who have a sanguine way of looking at the world. I glanced at her conference badge: Ellen Wilkinson / Regional Memorial Hospital / Muncie, Indiana. Standing next to her (with her back to me) was a tall, spindly woman, also in her mid-fifties. As the elevator door closed behind me I heard Ellen Wilkinson tell this lofty woman:

‘. what can I say? I come home after a day full of horror in the scanning room. And Donald is there. And after thirty-eight years together I still look at the guy and think: Lucky me. And from the way he always smiles at me — even if he too has had a terrible day — I know he’s thinking the same thing. Lucky us.’

Out of nowhere I found myself lowering my head as my eyes filled up with tears. I turned away, not wanting these two women to see my distress; a distress that had caught me so unawares. But Ellen Wilkinson of Muncie, Indiana, clearly caught sight of my upset, as she put her hand on my shoulder and asked:

‘Are you all right, dear?’

To which I could only quietly reply:

‘Lucky you indeed.’

Then the elevator door opened and I walked straight into the seminar about ‘CT Scanning and Inoperable Stage Three Lung Cancer’.

Three

SOMEWHERE DURING THE third seminar of the late afternoon — no, it was now early evening — the thought struck me: I’ve not absorbed a word of anything I’ve heard. Deep technical discussions about the new MRI techniques for uncovering cerebral arterial sclerosis. A long, badly delivered, but still important (I suppose) paper from a research fellow at the Rockefeller Institute about the complexities of coronary valve imaging. Two radiographic technologists from St Louis doing a double act on a pioneering technique they developed for early ultrasound detection of ectopic pregnancies (I was cheered by my fellow technologists being saluted for a breakthrough that research scientists usually handle — and which they discovered through sheer application of all their years of technical knowledge). And a talk about advances in intravenous radiographic dyes and their heightened efficacy.

Yes, I did listen to everything being said in these back-to-back sessions. Yes, my brain occasionally did register interest in what was being discussed. But, for the most part of the long afternoon I spent in that large, overheated conference room, I was elsewhere. It was all due to that overheard conversation in the elevator. A declaration of long-term marital love that I’d never heard expressed in such a direct and simple and touching way. And behind my distress was a certain envy. How I so wanted to look at the man who shares my life and think: Lucky us. But that was simply not our story. And that made me cry. In public. A fact which so unnerved me. Because, yet again, tears arrived without warning, and I had let my guard down. The same heavily guarded self which had enabled me, for all these years, to never hint to anyone (outside of Lucy) that I come home to unhappiness night after night. Then again, I was brought up with the idea that complaining was a shabby thing to do. My mother couldn’t tolerate anyone who moaned about how difficult things were in their life. ‘You can complain all you want when you’re dead — and then not be able to do a damn thing about it. But while you’re alive and kicking, you just keep working. Complaining is lashing out against things over which you largely have no control. like the smallness of other people.’

Mom said all that to me on a Saturday afternoon four years ago when I went up to see her at her home. She had just completed her last chemotherapy session and was rail thin with little hair.

‘The oncologist is making all sorts of noises about him being the General Patton of cancer doctors, and leading an onslaught against all those crazy T-cells that have landed me in this mess. But I’m not convinced.’

‘Oncologists rarely say positive things until they believe they can deliver good results,’ I said.

‘Well, this guy would tell a man already half-eaten by a shark: “Hang in there, there’s still a way out of this.” But I know my body better than anyone. And my body is telling me: This is a battle we’re going to lose. I am resigned to that. Just as I am resigned to the fact that I should have done more with the time I had. ’

‘Mom, you’ve done loads. ’

‘Now you are talking nonsense. I’ve had a rather small, little life. Outside of your father, yourself and a few friends, my passing will be noted by no one. I am not being excessively morbid, just honest. I have spent my whole life in one corner of Maine. I have worked in a library. I have been married to the same curious man for forty-four years and have raised a daughter — who is a much more accomplished person than she gives herself credit for. And that’s about the sum total of it all. besides the fact that I should have made more of things over the years.’

That last sentence came back to haunt me many times after her death. Just as it returned yet again today as I sat through the final session of the early evening, listening to a ‘radiology fellow’ at the Rockefeller Institute engaging in a long, wildly technical discourse on future possibilities of imaging early-stage cancer. Might a next-generation MRI system actually trope malignant cellular activity? Had it been functioning three years ago would it have helped detect the pancreatic cancer early enough to save my mother? Then again, pancreatic cancer is a largely silent disease; ‘the Trojan Horse of cancers’, as my mother’s oncologist described it, and almost always a death sentence. The problem with life-taking illnesses is: you can never completely control them. You can zap them, tame them, try to get them to disintegrate or take another course. Even when subdued or even temporarily vanquished they so often reassemble their forces for another toxic push for control. In this sense you can’t truly control their strange logic any more than you can control the actions of someone whose behavior you want to change. or, worse yet, whom you want to love you.

But can we ever know the truth about another person? How can we ever really understand the inner workings of someone else if we so barely grasp all that is transpiring in ourselves?

Why is everything, everyone, such a damn mystery? And why did I allow that woman’s happiness to so devastate me?

When the last session finished I drifted out into the lobby. It was after six p.m. and I needed to eat. There was a restaurant in the hotel, but it looked just a little greasy and depressing. Why give myself an additional dose of grimness tonight? So I headed up to my room, checked my phone for messages en route (there were none), then grabbed my raincoat against the evening chill and returned downstairs to the parking lot and my car. Twenty minutes later I found myself in Cambridge and got lucky, finding a parking spot on a side street right off Harvard Square. I wandered into a diner that I remembered once eating in around twenty years ago — when I came down with Dan from U Maine for a weekend. We were both seniors. We had no money, and we had just made several big decisions about our joint future together which I was already beginning to rue (correction: I had rued it from the start). Still, it had been a peerless late spring day in Cambridge, we’d found a cheap hotel near Harvard (they still existed back then) and had just spent the morning at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (my choice — there was a big Matisse show on at the time), then sat in the upper deck at Fenway Park, watching the Red Sox beat the Yankees in ten innings (Dan’s choice — though I actually rather like baseball). Then we came back to Cambridge and had grilled cheese sandwiches in this diner opposite the university. Though we were the same age and generation as all the students in the place, between us there was that unspoken discomfort of being around all these representatives of academic privilege and prestige — and how they would have an easier entree into the adult world with their Harvard degrees.

Then one of the undergraduates at a nearby booth — clearly drunk and preppy with an entitlement complex — began to berate the Latino waiter taking his order. The guy’s Harvard cohorts egged him on. The waiter was very distressed by the way they were chiding him for his bad English. Dan and I listened to this in tense silence. When the preppy ringleader began to tell the guy that he ‘should really get the next bus back to Tijuana’, Dan suddenly stood up and told him to stop the trash talk. The preppy stood up, towering over Dan, and told my boyfriend to mind his own damn business. Dan stood his ground and said: ‘If you say another racist thing to this man, I’m getting the cops. And then you can explain to the police — and the Harvard administration — why you like to bully people and make cracks about their background.’

The preppy got even more belligerent.

‘You think I’m scared of some hayseed nobody like you?’ he asked Dan.

To which my boyfriend replied:

‘Actually, yeah, I do think you’re scared. Because you’re wasted and breaking the law. And if I call the police, you’re going to get expelled. or force your rich daddy to build a new science center at Harvard to keep you from being thrown out. ’

‘Fuck you,’ the preppy said.

‘Have it your way,’ Dan said, and headed towards the front door. But when the preppy grabbed hold of his jacket his Harvard friends were on their feet, restraining him, and quickly apologized.

‘Fine then,’ Dan said. ‘I presume there will be no more trouble.’

As he slid down opposite me in the booth I looked at him wide-eyed with admiration.

‘Wow,’ I whispered. ‘That was amazing.’

He just shrugged and said:

‘I hate bullying. almost as much as I hate preppies.’

That was the moment when I thought I really did want to marry Dan — because who doesn’t swoon when someone stands up to unfairness and shows himself to be so chivalrous? Though part of me was still dubious about our future together, another part of me reasoned after this incident: He is that rare thing, a decent, honest guy who would be there for me.

Such are the ways futures are made — out of an incident in a coffee shop and a need for certainty at a moment after everything had been so profoundly painful.

I wandered into that diner off Harvard Square. Everything else about this area had changed. The big revival-house cinema that faced the square was long gone. So too the countless number of used bookshops that once seemed to be an intrinsic part of Cambridge life. In their place were fashion boutiques, upmarket chain stores, cosmetic emporiums, places to buy exotic teas, and yes, the one constant from that time twenty years ago, the Harvard Coop. And, of course, this coffee shop.

I went inside. It was just after seven; that quiet time before the arrival of all the students who would roll in much later on, fresh from whatever the evening had brought them. The waitress told me to take any booth I wanted. On the way in I’d passed by an on-the-street red box and picked up a copy of the Boston Phoenix, remembering when it cost a dollar. I liked paying for it (rather than getting it free now), as it felt as if you were funding a little corner of the counterculture. I ordered, for old times’ sake, a grilled cheese sandwich and a chocolate milkshake (promising myself an hour on the cross-trainer in the hotel gym tomorrow to atone for all the comfort-food indulgence). Then opening the Phoenix and going directly to the arts pages, I considered taking in the eight p.m. show at the Brattle Cinema. It was the last remaining revival-house movie theater in the Boston area. They were showing The Searchers. When was the last time I saw a classic old western on a big screen? And God knows, I didn’t need to be running back to that grim hotel in a hurry, as the first seminar of the morning began at ten and I’m certain I could get an hour in at the gym beforehand, and.

I suddenly wanted to speak to Dan, to tell him where I was. So I dug out my cellphone and hit the autodial button marked ‘Home’. He answered on the second ring.

‘You will not believe where I am sitting right now,’ I told him.

When I informed him of the location his response was muted:

‘That was a long time ago.’

‘But I still remember how you stood up to those Harvard guys.’

‘I can’t really recall much about it.’

‘Well, I certainly can. In fact, all of the details came rushing back just now.’

‘By which you mean happier times?’

He didn’t pose that comment in the form of a question; rather as a statement of fact, and one so bluntly delivered that it took me a little aback.

‘By which I mean,’ I said carefully, ‘I was just recalling how wonderful you were. ’

‘During my one unrepeated “profile in courage”?’ he said.

‘Dan. ’

‘If you remember I start work Monday morning at four in the morning — which means I am trying to adjust to this new brutal schedule by getting to bed every night by eight. It’s now nearly nine-fifteen and you woke me up with this call, which is why I am sounding grumpy. Because you should have thought about that before phoning. So if you’ll excuse me. ’

‘Sorry for waking you,’ I said.

With a click, he was gone.

The grilled cheese sandwich and the milkshake arrived moments after I put my cellphone down. I suddenly had no appetite. But I couldn’t let the food go to waste. I ate the sandwich and drank the shake and settled the check. Then I wandered down the street to The Brattle. There were only a handful of people standing outside the box office. I bought a ticket and went upstairs. What a little gem this place turned out to be: maybe three hundred seats, including a balcony, in a room that looked like it was once a small chapel, but which had been outfitted as the perfect place to watch old movies. The seats were very 1950s. The screen was stretched across a small stage, and the lights were just bright enough to squint at the program of forthcoming films. There couldn’t have been more than ten of us in the cinema. Just as the lights came down a man came rushing in, dropping into the row in front of me. He looked a little out of breath, as if he was truly high-tailing it in here to make it just before the film started. I noticed immediately the blue suit, the graying hair, the tan raincoat — all of which seemed out of place among this largely student crowd. As this businessman stood up again to take off his raincoat his gaze happened upon me. At which moment he smiled and said:

‘Well, hello there! Didn’t know you liked westerns.’

It was the insurance man from the hotel. The insurance man from Maine. It was Richard Copeland.

Before I could reply — not that I knew how I should reply to this greeting — the cinema went dark and the screen burst into technicolor life. I spent the next two hours watching John Wayne riding across the empty spaces of the American West, struggling with his demons as he tried to find his way back to a place he might just call home.

Four

I RARELY CRY in the movies. But there I was, sobbing over a western I’d never seen before. It centered around a man who carries so many griefs and furies with him — such anger at the world — that he spends years trying to track down his young niece who was kidnapped by the Apaches when she was just a girl. When he finally discovers her as a young woman — and now one of the wives of the chieftain who had slaughtered her family — his initial instinct is to kill her. Until a profound sense of personal connection kicks in and he saves her, returning her to her remaining relatives. As they welcome her back with open arms, the man who has endured so much while searching for her watches as she disappears inside their home. Then, as the door closes behind her, he turns and heads off into the vast nowhere of the American West.

It was in this final scene of the film that I found myself crying — and being surprised by the fact that I was crying. Was the reason due to the fact that, like the John Wayne character in the movie, I so wanted to go home? But was that ‘home’ I so longed for just an idealized construct, with no bearing on reality? Do we all long for homes that have no bearing on those we have built for ourselves?

All these thoughts came cascading out in the last minute or so of the film — along with the tears that once more arrived out of nowhere and made me so uncomfortable.

The lights were now coming up — and I was racing around my handbag for a Kleenex, trying to dry my eyes in case that man decided to engage me in further chat. I really was hoping he’d do the easier thing, maybe nod to me goodnight, then be on his way.

I dabbed my eyes. I stood up, along with the other ten or so people who were seated in the downstairs part of the cinema, and deliberately walked the other way out of the theater to avoid running into Richard Copeland. But when I reached the exit door and turned back I saw that he was still in his seat, lost in some sort of reverie. Immediately I felt a little ashamed about wanting to get away from a man who was simply trying to be nice to me in the few moments we’d spoken together, and who had been as touched by the film as I’d been. So, without thinking too much about what I was doing, I lingered for a moment or so in the lobby until he came out. Up close I could see that his eyes were red from crying. Just as he was registering the fact that mine were red too.

‘Quite a film,’ I said.

‘I never cry in movies,’ he said.

‘Nor do I.’

‘Evidently.’

I laughed. An awkward pause followed, as neither of us knew what to say next. He broke the silence.

‘You get talking with a guy standing in line for the hotel reception, next thing you know he’s at the same movie theater as you.’

‘Quite a coincidence.’

‘I’d just had dinner with a client of mine who runs a machine tool company in Brockton. Not a particularly interesting town — in fact, it’s the wrong side of grim — and not the most interesting guy in the world either. Still, he’s been a loyal client for eleven years — and we knew each other back in high school in Bath. And I’ve no darn idea why I’m telling you this, bending your ear. But would a glass of wine interest you now?’

I hesitated — as I was somewhat thrown by the invite, even if I was not displeased by it either.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said in the wake of my silence. ‘I completely understand if. ’

‘Is there somewhere nice around here? Because the hotel bar. ’

‘Agreed, agreed. It’s pretty damn awful. I think there’s a place next door.’

Again I hesitated — and simultaneously glanced at my watch.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘if it’s far too late. ’

‘Well, it is just after ten o’clock. But it’s not a school night, right?’

‘Right.’

‘OK — let’s go next door, Richard.’

‘You remembered my name.’

‘You did give me your card, Mr Copeland.’

‘I hope that wasn’t too forward of me.’

‘I just thought you might be trying to sell me some insurance.’

‘Not tonight, Laura.’

I smiled. He smiled back.

‘So you remembered my name,’ I said.

‘And without a calling card as well. Then again, salesmen always remember names.’

‘Is that what you consider yourself, a salesman?’

‘Yes, unfortunately.’

‘I had a grandfather who ran a hardware shop in Waterville — and he never stopped telling me that everybody’s always selling something. At least you sell something of value to people.’

‘You are being too kind,’ he said. ‘And I’m probably now keeping you from something.’

‘But I just said I was happy to have a glass of wine with you.’

‘You sure about that?’

‘I won’t be if you ask me that question again.’

‘Sorry, sorry. A bad habit of mine.’

‘We all have bad habits,’ I said as we walked out of the cinema and into the street.

‘Are you always so kind?’ he asked.

‘I wasn’t kind to you this afternoon.’

‘Oh, that. I really didn’t think. ’

‘I was bitchy. I’m sorry I was bitchy. And if you tell me I wasn’t bitchy—’

‘OK, you were bitchy. Totally bitchy.’

He said this with a small, somewhat mischievous smile crossing his lips. I smiled back.

‘Good!’ I said. ‘Now that we’ve gotten all that out of the way. ’

The cafй into which he steered us was called Casablanca and had been done up to very much resemble the joint that Humphrey Bogart managed in the film. The bartenders all wore white tuxedo jackets, the waiters gendarme uniforms.

‘You think we’ll run into Peter Lorre tonight?’ I asked Richard.

‘Well, as he got shot in the third reel. ’

‘You know your movies.’

‘Not really — though, like everyone, I do love Casablanca.’

The maitre d’ asked us if we were here to eat, drink or enquire about letters of transit out of Casablanca.

‘Drinks only,’ Richard said.

‘Very good, monsieur,’ the waiter said in what could only be described as a Peter Sellers French accent. As soon as we were installed in a booth Richard rolled his eyes and said:

‘Sorry. If I’d known this place was a theme bar. ’

‘There are worse themes than Casablanca. At least you didn’t bring me to a Hooters.’

‘Not exactly my style.’

‘Glad to hear it.’

‘But if you’d rather go elsewhere. ’

‘And miss the charms of Morocco in Cambridge?’

‘I’ve never been to North Africa. In fact, never outside of the US or Canada.’

‘Me neither. And the thing is, I always told myself, when I was much younger, that I was going to travel, going to spend an important part of my life on the road.’

‘I told myself that too.’

‘Looking around here. it’s funny, but I remember when I was around fourteen and going through the usual adolescent nonsense — and having a really bad time of it with my mother — I announced to her one day: “I’m joining the French Foreign Legion,” because I’d seen some old Laurel and Hardy movie on TV where they ended up in the Foreign Legion. ’

‘Sons of the Desert.’

‘And you say you know nothing about movies.’

‘Just useless bits of information, like that one.’

‘Anyway, I did that thing kids do when they’re furious with their parents: I got a bag out of the closet, counted up all the allowance money I’d saved over the past months, thought about which bus I’d take to New York, and would I have enough cash to buy myself a ticket to wherever it was these days that the French Foreign Legion hang out.’

‘Probably Djibouti,’ he said.

‘Where’s Djibouti?’

‘Somewhere in the Sahara.’

‘And how do you know the Foreign Legion are there these days?’

‘Read an article in National Geographic. Had a subscription since I was a kid. My dreams of travel started there, with that magazine. All those interesting color features about the Himalayas and the Brazilian rainforests and the Outer Hebrides and—’

‘Favorite desert hangouts of the French Foreign Legion?’

He smiled again.

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘And that’s why I know where Djibouti is.’

‘Do you think Laurel and Hardy shot their movie there?’ I asked.

‘You’re quick, did you know that?’

‘Actually, I’ve never thought myself that.’

‘You mean, nobody ever told you that you were clever?’

‘Oh, a teacher, a professor, from time to time. Otherwise. ’

‘Well, you are clever.’

‘Now you’re trying to flatter me.’

‘You don’t like being flattered?’ he asked.

‘Of course I like being flattered. It’s just. I don’t think I merit it.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Aren’t we getting a little personal here?’

His shoulders suddenly hunched, and he was back again, looking away, looking guilty. Much to my surprise I no longer found this disconcerting. Rather I felt a certain compassion for him — a compassion rooted in the fact that I so understood what it was like to be self-conscious and just a little ill at ease with my place in the larger scheme of things.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said. ‘There I go again, talking before thinking.’

‘And there you go again, being self-deprecating. ’

‘Even though my self-deprecation was due to your self-deprecation?’

‘Touchй.’

‘I wasn’t trying to score a point.’

‘I know that. I also know that what we sometimes criticize in others is something that we find wanting in ourselves.’

‘I didn’t think you were criticizing me.’

‘Well, I thought that.’

‘Are you always so self-critical. speaking as someone who shares the same habit?’

‘So I noticed. And now I’m dodging the question, right?’

Richard smiled at me. I smiled back — and simultaneously found myself disarmed by the fact that it was surprisingly easy to talk to this man, that we seemed to riff off each other. The waiter arrived. We both ordered a glass of red wine — and I liked the fact that when asked whether he preferred a merlot or a cabernet sauvignon or a pinot noir, Richard told the waiter that he knew very little about wine, and said that he’d follow his advice.

‘A light or robust red?’ the waiter then asked.

‘Something in between maybe,’ Richard said.

‘Pinot noir will do the job then. Same for the lady?’

‘Why not,’ I said.

The waiter disappeared.

‘So you’re not afraid to admit you don’t know something,’ I said.

‘I don’t know many things.’

‘Nor do I. But most people would never dream of revealing that little fact.’

‘My dad always told me that the three most important words in life were: “I don’t know”.’

‘He has a point.’

‘Had a point. He’s no longer with us.’

‘Sorry.’

‘No need to be,’ he said. ‘A rather complex man, my dad. Someone who always gave advice he couldn’t himself follow. Like ever admitting that he didn’t know things.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Fifteen years in the Marine Corps. Worked his way up to the post of colonel. Then got married and returned to Maine — he was a Bath boy — and started a family. He also opened a little insurance company.’

He said this last line quietly, his gaze averted from mine, his need to state this and get it out of the way underscored by his discomfort in admitting this.

‘I see,’ I said.

‘Yep. Followed Dad right into the family firm.’

‘Is it a big firm?’ I asked.

‘Just me and my receptionist/bookkeeper. who also happens to be my wife.’

‘So it’s a real family firm.’

‘Two people are hardly a firm,’ he said, and again looked away — clearly not wanting to talk about this anymore. So I asked if he had children.

‘A son. Billy.’

‘How old?’

‘He turns twenty-six next month.’

Which must make Richard around fifty-five or so.

‘And where’s he now?’

‘For the moment he’s living at home. Billy’s kind of between things right now.’

The way he stated this I could tell he wanted to get off this subject as well.

‘I too have a child living at home.’

I could see him exhale as he got me talking about my kids and my husband. He told me he knew all about that downsizing period at L.L.Bean. Three friends of his also got the axe around the same time as Dan. But wasn’t it a great thing that my husband had been re-hired by the company, especially given how tough times are right now. How long had I been married? Twenty-one years? Well, he beat me on that score — ‘twenty-nine years and counting’ — and wasn’t it rare and wonderful to be the last couple standing, so to speak, given how so many marriages fall apart these days?

He said this all with an air of bonhomie which I found curious. A look of skepticism must have crossed my face, as he suddenly asked:

‘Am I laying it on a little thick?’

‘Not at all. Many people do have happy marriages. Then again, many people say they have happy marriages because they can’t say that theirs is difficult. But I’m glad yours is happy.’

‘Sorry, sorry. ’

‘For what? You don’t have to keep apologizing.’

‘For coming across like a salesman. All slick patter, all “Everyone’s happy, right!”’

‘Was your father like that?’

‘I was always the salesman, Dad the numbers cruncher.’

‘But he must have been something of a salesman to have started the firm.’

‘He initially had a business partner — Jack Jones. A fellow Marine. Unlike my father Jack actually liked people. Don’t know what he was doing in business with my father, as Jack was a genuinely happy-go-lucky guy and Dad was kind of dyspeptic about life.’

‘I like that word, dyspeptic.’

‘“Bilious” would be a good descriptive word as well. “Liverish” might also fit the bill.’

‘How about “disputative”?’

‘A little too legal, I think. Dad was a misanthrope, but never litigious.’

I looked at him with new interest.

‘You like words,’ I said.

‘You’re looking at the Kennebec County Spelling Bee Champion of 1974, which is kind of the Middle Ages now, right? But once you get hooked on words you don’t really ever lose the habit.’

‘But that’s a most aspirational habit.’

We shared another smile. I saw him looking at me with new-found ease, as we were now on interesting common ground.

‘“Aspirational”,’ he said. ‘Upward mobility, Horatio Alger and all that. Very American.’

‘I think aspirational is not simply an American construct.’

‘“Construct”,’ he said, repeating the word to himself, taking evident pleasure in its sound. ‘Even though it has two syllables it has a certain musicality, doesn’t it?’

‘If used constructively.’

‘Or affirmatively?’

‘That’s too Boy Scout.’

‘OK, I give you that. How about “abrogatory”?’

‘Now you’re getting far too fancy. “Approbative”?’

‘That’s not fancy? Sounds downright florid to me.’

‘Florid isn’t “aureate”.’

‘Or “churrigueresque”?’ he asked.

‘Oh, please! You are beyond flamboyant, baroque or, indeed, churrigueresque.’

‘And I am wildly bedazzled by your vocabulary. Were you in the spelling bee racket as well?’

‘Actually I sidestepped all that, even though I had an English teacher in junior high who was really trying to get me to join the spelling club after school. The thing is, I always had my nose in a thesaurus. ’

‘Just like me.’

‘A geeky habit, as everyone else at school was happy to remind me. But though the teacher who ran the spelling team actually thought I could be the captain. ’

‘So he thought you were that good?’

Before I could reflect on that question I heard myself saying:

‘I’ve never thought myself that good.’

‘At anything?’

Now it was my turn to look away.

‘I suppose so,’ I finally said.

‘Why’s that?’

‘You ask a lot of questions, sir.’

‘My name is Richard, and the reason I ask a lot of questions is part professional habit, part personal interest.’

‘Why should you be interested in me?’

‘Because I am.’

I felt myself blushing. Richard immediately saw that, and it was his turn to get all embarrassed, saying:

‘That really wasn’t supposed to sound so forward. And if it did. ’

‘It didn’t. You were just being nice to me.’

‘Was I?’

‘Oh, please. ’

The drinks arrived. Richard raised his glass. And said:

‘Here’s to Roget, and Webster, and Funk and Wagnalls, and the OED and. ’

‘The Synonym Finder. which was my bedtime companion throughout most of high school.’

‘Well, I suppose your parents didn’t object to that.’

‘My father was a mathematician, and one who really preferred the abstract to the concrete. So he largely stayed charming and affectionate and rather disinterested — in a thoroughly nice way — when it came to anything to do with my life, including my first boyfriend.’

‘And who was the first boyfriend?’

‘Surely that’s not a question you ask on the life insurance form?’

‘I wasn’t aware that we were filling in a policy questionnaire.’

‘The wine is good. Pinot noir. I have to remember that.’

‘Is that a way of telling me you’re not going to say anything about your first boyfriend?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, then I certainly won’t push the point. But when it comes to your love affair with The Synonym Finder. ’

‘I actually saved up two weeks’ babysitting money when I was fourteen to buy it. It was about twenty dollars, a small fortune at the time, but worth every penny.’

‘What made it so valuable?’

‘The fact that I could lose myself in it. Have you ever seen The Synonym Finder?’

‘I actually own two.’

‘You are a fellow geek.’

‘Absolutely. But you are not a geek.’

‘Actually I am. But getting back to The Synonym Finder — you know that the great pleasure of that book is that it’s not as formalized or rigid as a normal thesaurus; that it has real depth and breath when it comes to equivalent words, and that it really is geared towards semantical junkies.’

‘“Semantical junkies”. I like it.’

‘Well, that’s me. In fact, it’s always been me.’

‘Even though the sciences were your real mйtier?’

‘Are sciences a “mйtier”?’

‘Isn’t everything a mйtier?’ he asked.

Again I found myself looking at this man with care — because it was so rare to run into somebody who could utter such an eloquent phrase in the midst of normal conversation. Richard saw me considering him differently, and reacted with a shy smile, then a quick bowing of the head to avoid my gaze. This immediately made me think: Oh God, were you projecting interest or — worse yet — infatuation? I felt myself blushing again. And then — now this was really compounding things — I registered the fact that he was registering the fact that I was blushing. So I tried to mitigate things by saying:

‘You have a nice turn of phrase. ’

‘And I seem to have embarrassed you. ’

‘No, it’s me who’s embarrassed me.’

‘But why?’

‘Because. ’

I couldn’t say what I was thinking: Because you’re clearly smart and I find that attractive and I shouldn’t be finding you attractive for about ten obvious reasons.

‘Well, nobody has ever told me that before,’ Richard said.

‘Told you what?’

‘That I have a nice turn of phrase.’

‘Surely your wife has. ’

As soon as those words were out of my mouth I regretted them. Because I realized I had overstepped a boundary.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said immediately. ‘I shouldn’t have implied that. ’

‘You implied nothing. It’s a reasonable question. I love words. I love using words. I love painting with words — even though I don’t get much of a chance to do so in my normal day-to-day work. And yes, it would be lovely if my partner in life, my wife, appreciated the way I use words. But when does your spouse ever really appreciate you the way you think you should be appreciated? I mean, that’s asking a little much, isn’t it?’

He said this with such lightness, such high irony, that I found myself giggling.

‘I don’t think it is asking much,’ I said. ‘Still, my father used to say that one of the problems of being smart at something is that you unintentionally show the other person up. It really gets under their skin, the fact that you have an ability, a talent, a way of looking at the world, that they so clearly believe they lack.’

‘Having a thing about words is hardly a talent. It’s more of a hobby. Like collecting model trains or stamps or old fountain pens.’

‘It’s a little more cerebral than any of those talents.’

‘So you consider yourself cerebral?’

‘Hardly.’

‘See! We’re cut from exactly the same Maine cloth. We might love things semantical. We might have both spent long involving hours exploring the world of synonyms. We might both have this love affair with language. But that doesn’t make either of us intelligent, now does it?’

Again I found myself smiling and nodding my head.

‘Bull’s-eye,’ I said, raising my glass. He picked his up and clinked it against mine.

‘Here’s to low self-esteem,’ I said.

‘Better known as — the insidious art of undervaluing yourself.’

‘Do you write?’

Richard seemed taken aback by that question.

‘Why do you ask that?’

‘Just a hunch. The way you use language, love language.’

‘I’m hardly a published writer. ’

‘But you have written, do write.?’

Richard lifted his glass and downed the remaining wine.

‘I had a story published four years ago in a little magazine in Portland.’

‘But that’s great. What was the magazine?’

‘Kind of a lifestyle mag. Chic places to eat and shop. Designer apartments. Hotels in which to spend a romantic weekend. That sort of thing.’

‘And was your story about chic places to eat and designer apartments, with a romantic weekend in a coastal bed and breakfast thrown in?’

Richard smiled. ‘I walked into that, didn’t I?’

‘You were apologizing for being in a lifestyle magazine.’

‘Well, it’s not exactly the New Yorker.’

‘That might happen one day.’

‘Wishful thinking.’

‘Positive thinking,’ I said.

‘Very Norman Vincent Peale.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘The Power of Positive Thinking by Rev. Norman Vincent Peale. Probably the first American self-help book.’

‘By a man of God.’

‘A 1950s man of God — who now seems positively secular compared to the Bible thumpers out there right now.’

‘But I thought you supported their “family values” sentiments.’

‘You have quite a memory,’ he said.

‘Well, at least you didn’t quote the Book of Revelations to me.’

‘I’m hardly religious.’

‘Then what’s with the support for the born-agains?’

‘I just don’t like knee-jerk liberal dismissal of all things Christian.’

‘Now speaking as a liberal — albeit a sensible one — I think what worries even the more sensible Republicans I know is the fact that the charismatic Christians have a political agenda that runs up against basic American ideas about separation of church and state, about basic human rights like a woman’s right to control her own body or a gay couple’s civil rights when it comes to having the legal protection afforded by marriage.’

‘You know I’m not against anything you just said.’

‘And I know I sound like I’m on a soapbox.’

‘That’s fine with me. You’re a sensible liberal, I’m a sensible Republican. though some people nowadays might think that a tautology.’

He flashed a mischievous little grin at me. I couldn’t help but think: He’s smart. And he can argue smart, and can use language so incisively, and in such a quick-witted way.

‘So tell me about your story,’ I asked, changing the subject.

‘You mean, you no longer want to hear my views about the Almighty?’

‘A personal friend of yours?’

‘Hey. I sold him a Full Life Policy last year which pays out five percent above the deductible.’

I laughed.

‘So God lives in Maine?’ I asked.

‘Well, there is a reason why they call it “Vacationland”. As such, He doesn’t answer prayers very often.’

‘Have you asked Him for a favour?’

‘Haven’t we all?’

‘But I thought you were a non-believer.’

‘I’m reserving judgment,’ he said. ‘Raised Presbyterian — but that was a family heritage thing. And I think my father approved of Presbyterianism because it was so dour, so austere.’

‘And your mother?’

‘She went along with everything my father said. Then again, his authority was never to be challenged.’

‘Did you try?’

‘Of course.’

‘And?’

A pause — in which Richard looked down into his empty glass. Then:

‘I’m running his company.’

‘But you’re still writing.’

‘He couldn’t stop me from doing that.’

‘And if you asked God to get you into the New Yorker.?’

‘Even He doesn’t have that kind of pull.’

Again I laughed.

‘But you believe in. ’

He looked up and met my gaze straight on.

‘I believe in wanting to believe in something.’

Silence — as that statement hung in the air between us. Ambiguous. Perhaps charged with meaning. Perhaps not. But the way he was looking at me right now.

A voice behind me curtailed the moment.

‘How you folks doing?’

It was the waiter.

‘Now I wouldn’t want to speak for the two of us,’ Richard said, ‘but I think — just fine.’

‘I concur,’ I said.

A smile crossed between us.

‘So are you ready for a second glass of wine?’ the waiter asked.

‘Well. ’ I said, thinking of at least five excuses I could give for an early night.

‘If it’s too late or you’ve got stuff to do in the morning. ’ Richard said.

I knew the simplest way to end the evening would be to say something along the lines of: ‘Alas, the first group conference — Advanced Bone Marrow MRI Techniques — is scheduled for ten. and the radiologist back at my hospital will want to know all about it.’ (Not true at all — we always send bone marrow cases to Portland.) And yes, fretting about a second glass of wine while driving would be a good exit strategy. Because I was finding this interesting conversation a little too interesting. And because, moments earlier, when Richard looked up at me and said: ‘I believe in wanting to believe in something,’ I couldn’t help but think that his hesitancy was due to the fact that he stopped himself from saying ‘someone’. And also because, as his eyes met mine when he uttered that sentence, I actually found myself disconcerted by the fact that the insurance salesman I first saw as gray and just a little drab was now holding my interest.

So yes, there were sensible reasons why I was about to tell Richard: ‘You know, I really think it’s getting a little late for me.’ But instead, something else — something hitherto unknown to cautious little me — kicked in. And I heard myself saying:

‘I’m up for the second glass of wine if you are.’

Richard looked momentarily taken aback by this — as if he too would have found it easier if I had called it quits and let us both go our separate ways back to the hotel. But instead his moment of disconcertion was replaced with a smile. And five surprising words:

‘If you’re in, I’m in.’

Five

THE SECOND GLASS of wine lasted two hours. I didn’t realize that so much time had evaporated until someone else informed us that it was indeed late. All right, I am being a little fast and loose with the truth. Once or twice I did ponder the fact that we were talking, talking, talking — and the conversation was so surprisingly spirited, so free-flowing and smart (I feel like such an egoist noting that), that, though a voice in the back of my mind occasionally annoyed me with a reminder that it was getting late, I chose to ignore it. Just as I carefully nursed that second glass of wine, worried that if it was drained too quickly it might spark a nervous exchange about perhaps ending the evening there and then, especially as we were both driving and both had things to do tomorrow morning.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. We agreed on a second glass of wine. When it arrived Richard let the waiter know that he shouldn’t trouble us again by simply stating: ‘We’re good now.’

The waiter nodded acknowledgment, then left us alone. As soon as he was out of earshot Richard said:

‘I bet he’s an MIT PhD candidate in astrophysics who really wishes he didn’t have to get dressed up four nights a week in that gendarme uniform and work for tips.’

‘At least he knows that, all going well, he’ll be in some high-powered research or academic post in a couple of years and will be able to use his year as a part-time waiter at the Cambridge Casablanca as a sort of party piece.’

‘If astrophysicists actually have party pieces.’

‘Doesn’t everybody?’ I asked.

‘OK then, what’s yours?’

‘I doubt I have one.’

‘But you just said. ’

‘That’s the problem with a witty retort. It always lands you in trouble.’

‘All right, let me put it this way, if I asked you to sing something. ’

‘I have a terrible voice,’ I said.

‘Play something?’

‘Never learning an instrument remains one of my great regrets.’

‘Recite something?’

I felt myself momentarily clench — and, in the process, foolishly give the game away.

‘So you do recite things?’ Richard asked, all smiles.

‘What makes you think that?’

‘The way you’re blushing right now.’

‘Oh God. ’

‘Why get embarrassed?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s because. ’

‘Yes?’

‘Poetry,’ I said, sounding very direct — as if I was spitting out a confession. ‘I recite poetry.’

‘Impressive.’

‘How would you know? You’ve never heard me recite anything.’

‘Do so now.’

‘No way.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because. I don’t know you.’

As soon as I said that I had a fit of the giggles.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said, ‘that sounded ridiculous.’

‘Or rather wonderfully old-fashioned — “I never recite poetry on a first date.”’

I felt myself clench again.

‘This is not a first date,’ I said, sounding rather terse.

Now it was Richard’s turn to express embarrassment.

‘That might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever said. And totally presumptuous.’

‘Just needed to get that clear.’

‘It was clear already. I just sometimes let my mouth work before my brain. And not for a moment did I think—’

‘Emily Dickinson,’ I heard myself saying.

‘What?’

‘The stuff I recite to myself. It’s frequently Emily Dickinson.’

‘That’s impressive.’

‘Or weird.’

‘Why is it weird? I mean, if you told me it was Edgar Allan Poe or, worst yet, H. P. Lovecraft. ’

‘He didn’t write poetry.’

‘And he might be the most overrated writer this country ever produced — but I’ve never gone for High Gothic. I suppose the sort of writing I like most deals with the heart of the matter, the everyday stuff of life. ’

‘As Emily Dickinson did.’

‘Or Robert Frost.’

‘He’s very underrated now, Robert Frost,’ I said. ‘Everyone always characterizes him as the old Yankee, the grandfatherly poet. And yes, there is “the woods are lovely, dark and deep, and I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep”. which is always held up as American Pastoral and the sort of poem that even truck drivers can appreciate.’

‘Unlike Wallace Stevens.’

‘Well, he did sell insurance. In fact, he remained in Hartford — insurance capital of America.’

‘That’s some claim to fame.’

‘Ouch.’

‘Sorry — that was catty of me.’

‘But you’re right. Hartford has little to recommend it.’

‘Mark Twain lived there for a while. while he was selling insurance.’

Richard paused for a moment, clearly taking me in.

‘Did I say something wrong?’ I asked.

‘On the contrary, I was just allowing myself to be impressed by all that you know.’

‘But I don’t know that much.’

‘Even though you can talk about the early non-literary career of Mark Twain and cite Wallace Stevens.’

‘I wasn’t citing Wallace Stevens. I was talking about Robert Frost.’

‘And your favorite Frost poem?’ he asked.

‘It’s probably the least traditional and the most disquieting of all his poems. ’

‘“Fire and Ice”?’

Now it was my turn to look at Richard with care.

‘You really know your stuff,’ I said.

This time there was no shy smile, no turning away from my field of vision. This time he looked directly at me and said:

‘But the only reason I am talking about these things is because you know your stuff.’

‘And the only reason why I’m telling you all this is because you know your stuff. You know “Fire and Ice”.’

‘But I can’t recite it.’

‘I bet you can.’

I took a large steadying sip of my wine. Lowering my head I gathered my thoughts, my memory flipping me back to senior year in high school, that day in assembly when I had been asked by my English teacher, Mr Adams, to stand up in front of the school and recite.

No, no, don’t replay that again. Don’t remember how you.

Why do we always seem to hark back to the bad stuff? The moments when we were embarrassed, mortified, mocked. When the very thought now of reciting something and being rewarded for it tosses up the most anguished remembrances of things past. When.

Silence. Richard’s gaze — which he held from the moment I looked up at him and began to recite the poem — didn’t waver from me. But having finished the recitation I found myself almost looking at him for validation. Then realizing that I was staring at him like a schoolgirl wanting to be told she had pleased the teacher, I turned away. Richard saw this and ever so briefly touched his hand against my left arm as he said:

‘That was impressive. Very impressive.’

I felt myself flinch as he touched me — even if the gesture was in no way redolent of anything but gentle reassurance.

‘Again you’re being far too kind,’ I said.

‘No, just accurate. Why do you know that poem?’

‘Doesn’t everyone know that poem?’

‘You’re being disingenuous.’

Disingenuous. He actually used that word. I smiled. He smiled back. And for the first time in this conversation I let down all the self-editing barriers and found myself telling him a story I had always kept to myself.

‘I read the Frost poem during my first semester of senior year. I had an English teacher, Mr Adams, who actually rated me — even though I was a science geek. He was this man in his fifties — very patrician New England, very erudite, very much a bachelor about whom nobody knew a thing. Anyway, Mr Adams worked out early on that, though I was very much drawn to chemistry and biology, words played such an important role in my life. Mr Adams gave a seminar on “Great Writing” for seniors. It was an elective, and there were only five of us in the class. “Book geeks” is what the cheerleader brigade called us. And, of course, they were right. Mr Adams called us his “literate brigade” — and over the course of that final year, he had us reading everything from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist or Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. which I particularly loved because it so dealt with self-delusion and the way we all resist looking at the reality around us. But he also made us read American poetry. Dickinson. Whitman. Stevens. Frost. I remember the first time he introduced us to “Fire and Ice” — and I couldn’t believe this was the Robert Frost whom everyone looked upon as the kindly grandfather. This was a poet who had a libido, who felt desire and anger and rage. All the things I was feeling in my own messed-up, “no one gets me, why am I so alone?” teenage way. We spent two whole classes talking about the poem — and how, in just a few short lines, it pointed up the fact that, within all of us, there is this capacity for love, for grace, and for all the dark stuff we don’t want to acknowledge.

‘Anyway, the poem became a real benchmark for me. At the end of the semester — right before Christmas — I actually signed up for a speech competition that was to be held at an assembly in front of the entire school the day before we broke up for the holidays. My speech teacher, Mrs Flack, encouraged me to go in for the competition — the first prize for the winner being that year’s edition of the Webster dictionary. which, for a word junkie like me, was something I really wanted to win. And Mrs Flack — who once told me she tried being an actress for around ten minutes in New York during the late sixties — really thought the poem was an amazingly original choice for the competition. She worked with me for a couple of hours on my presentation. It involved all the lights in the hall blacking out and me being discovered in a single white spot and then reciting the poem in a highly controlled, quiet way, with me staring out at the audience at the end, and the light snapping off. When I think about it now, maybe it was all too Greenwich Village circa 1965 for Waterville High in 1986. But I thought it really edgy and out there.

‘Then backstage on the day of the competition, right before going on, I had the biggest case of nerves imaginable. Completely seized. Terrified of getting out there in front of the whole school and looking like an idiot. Don’t know where this came from. Never had it before. When they called me — told me it was my time to go on — I refused to move. Mrs Flack was backstage. She coaxed me onstage. The light blacked out. I moved quickly to the assigned spot. The spotlight snapped on. There I was, alone, staring out into blackness, knowing I just had to say the words as I had rehearsed them, and all would be over in less than a minute, and I could retreat again into my private little life. But, standing there, that spotlight glaring down on me, feeling absolutely naked, exposed, absurd, my mouth couldn’t open. I was frozen, immobile, ridiculous. After a half a minute like this, the giggles started. Even though I could hear some of the teachers hushing the other students, slow hand-clapping started, and a few whistles, and then a girl — whom someone told me later was Janet Brody, the captain of the cheerleading team — yelled: “Loser.” Everybody laughed. The spotlight snapped off. Mrs Flack hurried out and got me off the stage. And I remember, once we were in the wings, putting my head on her shoulder, crying uncontrollably, and Mrs Flack having to call my mother to come collect me. Mom — who was never the most touchy-feely of people, and who hated any kind of personal weakness — drove me home, shaking her head, telling me I would spend the rest of my senior year trying to live down what had just happened, and “Why on earth did you set yourself up to fail like this?” I said nothing, but those words slammed into me like an out-of-control car. Because they were so accurate. I’d set myself up. I’d allowed myself to be publicly shamed. I’d short-changed myself. Just as I did so often afterwards as well.

‘And I never recited “Fire and Ice” again.’

‘Until now,’ Richard said.

Silence. I hung my head.

‘I’m sorry,’ I finally said.

‘Sorry for what?’

‘Sorry for boring you with an adolescent embarrassment I should have gotten over years ago. And something I shouldn’t have shared with you.’

‘But I’m glad you shared it.’

‘I’ve hardly shared it with anybody before.’

‘I see,’ Richard said.

‘There’s nothing to “see” here. There’s just the fact that there are moments in life you find so mortifying. ’

I let the sentence die before finishing it. I suddenly wanted to be anywhere but here. Suddenly felt as vulnerable and awkward and lost as I felt that moment on that high school stage with that white-hot spotlight on me. I fingered my glass.

‘I should go,’ I said.

‘Just because you told me that story?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘Your mother. was she always so brutal with you?’

‘“Brutal” is perhaps too brutal a word. She was very much pull-no-punches. All tough love. No real warmth. Why do you ask?’

‘My dad. He was brutal. Physically brutal — as in hitting us with a belt when we stepped out of line. Once my brother and I were beyond the spanking stage — though being whacked on the thighs with a belt is not exactly spanking — he then started working on us in different ways. Like the time I won the short story competition at the University of Maine. A story about a lobster man who takes his teenage son out to teach him the basics of his trade, and the boat capsizes and the son drowns. The prize was two hundred and fifty dollars and the story not only got printed in the college literary magazine, but also in the weekend supplement of the Bangor Daily News. It turns out half my father’s clients Down East saw the story. He called me up at college and tore a strip or two off of me, telling me that I had caused him all sorts of professional problems, as he had insured a whole bunch of lobster men, and my depiction of the lives of these men, and — most of all — a terrible tragedy happening owing to one man’s negligence. well, it was just outrageous. Especially as I didn’t know a damn thing about their world, me being a guy who was anything but hearty, and who had the audacity to think of himself as a writer when I was just turning out “mediocre drivel”. Those were his exact words.’

Silence. Then I said:

‘And you’re telling me this to make me feel better?’

‘Absolutely. Because I know what it means to have any sort of confidence zapped out of you through the unkindness of others.’

‘My unkindness was towards myself — which is far worse. Because we all short-change ourselves.’

‘Not you.’

‘You’re sugaring the pill.’

‘Well then, how have you short-changed yourself?’

‘That’s another conversation.’

The smallest smile formed on Richard’s lips as I uttered that.

‘OK,’ he said.

‘If there is another conversation.’

‘I’d like that.’

‘My weekend’s really busy.’

‘All those radiology conferences?’

‘All those radiology conferences.’

‘That’s a shame,’ he said. ‘Except for another morning meeting tomorrow in Brockton, I have the day free.’

‘Well, I don’t.’

My tone was sharp, dismissive, so stupidly defensive. I turned away — but from the corner of my eye I could see that Richard had been unsettled by the hint of anger underlying my reply. Again I had just slammed shut a door. out of fear. Fear of what? The fact that this man was suggesting we spend the afternoon together? The fear that I had just told him a story that I could never bring myself to tell my husband — perhaps out of the knowledge that his reaction would have been the roll-of-the-eyes, poor silly Laura look that I saw Dan give me on so many occasions.

‘I’ve obviously uttered the wrong thing again,’ Richard said, simultaneously motioning to the waiter for the check.

‘No, it’s me who’s been the impolite one here.’

‘I shouldn’t have been so personal, asking you how you’ve short-changed yourself.’

‘That wasn’t the reason I got tetchy. The reason was. ’

I broke off, not wanting to say anything more.

‘You don’t have to explain anything,’ Richard said.

‘Thank you,’ I whispered, suddenly wanting a hole in the floor to open up and suck me out of this embarrassed place.

The check arrived and Richard insisted on paying it. He then asked me if I could get email on my cellphone.

‘I could,’ I said, ‘but it’s too expensive to run on a monthly basis. So I rely on texting.’

‘Well then, I am going to put the ball completely in your court. Here again is my card. My cell number is the one at the bottom. I am free tomorrow as of twelve noon — and I would love to spend the day with you. If you don’t contact me, no hard feelings whatsoever. It’s been lovely sharing this time with you. And I truly wish you well. Because — if I may say so — you deserve good things.’

Silence.

‘Thank you,’ I finally said. ‘Thank you so much.’

We stood up. I found myself wanting to say: Shall we meet somewhere downtown around one p.m.? But again I held back.

‘Can I walk you to your car?’ he asked.

‘No need. I got lucky and found a spot right outside the movie house.’

‘That still requires a few steps.’

We left the bar and said nothing as we walked less than half a block to my elderly vehicle. If Richard noticed its decrepitude he was very good at not showing it.

‘Well then. ’ I said.

‘Well then.’

Another silence.

‘I’m sorry tomorrow won’t work out,’ I said, thinking: Now the door has been slammed twice.

‘You have my number.’

‘That I do.’

‘And that cheerleader — the one who heckled you — I bet she regrets all that now.’

‘I tend to doubt it. But do you want to hear one of the great supreme ironies of my life? My daughter’s a cheerleader. Not a mean one, I hope. But very much a cheerleader. And very much desperate to be popular at all costs.’

‘So she’s lonely.’

And I heard myself say:

‘Aren’t we all?’

As soon as those words were out of my mouth, I whispered a fast goodbye and climbed into the car, unnerved by the fact that I had just told a stranger the one central thing that had been unsettling me for days, months, years: the fact that I’ve felt so terribly alone.

And having made that huge admission, what did I do? I slammed the door and drove right off into the night.

Six

WHEN I GOT back to the hotel it was almost one a.m. When was the last time I had stayed up so late, talking, talking, talking?

I felt a stab of self-reproach. Especially as I saw a text from my husband.

I was out of line before. Sorry. Dan

So there it was. An apology of sorts. Terse. Telegraphic. Devoid of emotion. Devoid of love.

And how did I react to this detached expression of regret? Without a pause for reflection I texted back:

No problem. We all have our off moments. Love you. Laura

Once contempt is finally articulated in a marriage, it never really stops. And though Dan’s anger of late had been so quietly contemptuous, his surliness tonight was, in part, due to the stress he’d been under, and the fact that he’d been roused out of sleep by my ill-timed call.

Why was I excusing his very bad behavior right now? Because part of me was feeling just a little guilty about having those two glasses of wine with Richard. and so enjoying myself. Just as I was also simultaneously castigating myself for turning my blurted-out admission of loneliness into a reason to dash off into the night. No doubt he now considered me highly strung and profoundly uptight. Except for that one innocent aside about this being something akin to a first date — an aside which I absurdly jumped on — Richard did absolutely nothing to indicate that he was in any way cruising me. Nor did he signal whatsoever that he was unhappily married or so frustrated with his personal situation that he wanted to.

But the way we talked about words, the way he got me to recite that poem by Frost, the way this man — who struck me initially as rather gray and fusty — suddenly came alive when we got discussing matters literary. He really seemed to get me on a level that.

Oh, will you listen to yourself. ‘He got you?’ Now you sound like an adolescent who’s met the fellow class geek and is dazzled by the fact that he seems genuinely interested in what you yourself so value.

And what is so wrong with meeting someone who actually thinks there is worth in language spoken and written? And why the hell are you classifying yourself and Richard as geeks?

Because I married a man who told me once he feared his son had ‘inherited the geek gene from his mom’.

Of course, I never said anything about this remark (made just before Ben had his breakdown and was already displaying signs of fragility). Of course, when Dan saw my shocked expression in the wake of this comment, he then backpedaled, telling me he was just jesting, ha-ha. Me being me I let it drop. But it has nagged at me since. Because it struck me as so unkind. And because, before that, Dan had never done unkind.

And now.

Once contempt is finally articulated in a marriage, it never really stops.

Bing.

Another text on my phone.

Hey Mom — weird thing happened today. Out of nowhere Allison dropped by my studio.

Oh God. Why do manipulative heartbreakers always come back to wreak more havoc? I read on.

She was being all-friendly. Saying what a brilliant artist I am. Making really complimentary noises about the new painting I’m working on. Dropping all these hints that she really missed me. I know you’re going to say not to go near her. But the thing is, I want to. Even if I get burnt again. Maybe will be a bit more flame-resistant this time. No lectures, please, but would like to know your thoughts. B xxx

Oh God. Allison the Arch Manipulator. Having aided and abetted my son’s breakdown she now has probably sniffed out the fact that he’s gotten over her and is back painting. So, naturally, she has to see if she can inflict more damage on him. But, reading through Ben’s text around five more times, what intrigued and pleased me most was the hint that he knew she might do her best to hurt him, but he could handle it. Part of me wanted to tell him: Slam the door in that vixen’s face. But I knew that Ben would interpret this as far too maternal, edging perhaps into the puritanical. Ben saw himself as a bohemian — and one who reacted badly when lectured on morality or the need to ‘be responsible’ or act like ‘some dull asshole who sells insurance’.

I thought about phoning Ben right back — he never got to bed before three on most nights — but also knew that this was not a wise idea. When Ben wanted to talk he’d phone me. When he wanted to limit the communication to the written word he’d email. When he wanted an immediate response — without direct conversation — he’d text. So I resisted the temptation to dial his number. Instead I punched out the following message:

Ben — all cliches are true, especially: leopards don’t change their spots. I think she’s toxic. But I am not you. If you feel you can get involved again — and not get hurt — then by all means enjoy the sex, but don’t think it’s romance, let alone love. Those are my words of wisdom for Friday night. Call me whenever you want to talk. I love you — Mom

As always I read through the text several times before sending it, making certain it didn’t sound too cloying. I hit the ‘send’ button, then sent a text to Sally:

Hi hon — in Boston. Hotel isn’t much, but nice having a little time away. Hope you’re having a chilled weekend. You deserve some serious downtime. Around if you need me. Otherwise see you Sunday night. Love — Mom

Again I scrutinized the message carefully before sending it, taking out the word ‘chilled’, as that was an expression Sally used all the time (as in: ‘I so wish I could chill’ — something she genuinely found hard to do). Coming from me it would sound a hollow note, as if I was trying to use her generation’s argot and could stand accused of trying to be ‘with it’ (to use my generation’s argot). Just as I know that Sally certainly didn’t need some ‘serious downtime’. She needed seriousness.

Children: the ongoing open wound. And the two people without whom life would be unimaginable. As I once told Sally when she went into a ‘I know you’d prefer a brainier daughter’ routine:

‘I have never — and would never — think that. You are my daughter — and I love you without condition.’

‘Love always has conditions.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘I just know it.’

‘Well, between a parent and a child. ’

‘You mean, your mother loved you unconditionally?’

Ouch. Though I hadn’t talked much with Sally about my mother’s pronounced chilliness, I did drop some hints to her that our relationship was less than a close one (even though I remained a dutiful daughter until the end of her life). Yet Sally had far more emotional insight than she gave herself credit for.

‘My mother was my mother,’ I replied to her rather tart (and painfully acute) question. ‘But I am not my mother — and I do love you unconditionally.’

‘I’ll quote that back to you when you find me smoking crack.’

‘That will never happen.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ she asked.

‘Because if given the choice between five hundred dollars a week on drugs and spending the same amount of money on clothes. ’

‘I’m going with the clothes.’

We both laughed.

‘You know, Mom, sometimes you can actually “do” cool.’

High praise from my daughter.

The text scoured for any possible tricky phrases, I hit the ‘send’ button, then tossed my cellphone on the bed, kicked off my shoes, and collapsed backwards against the synthetic floral bedspread. I closed my eyes.

Bing. A text. From Ben.

Mom — never thought my mother would say have sex with someone and dump her at first sign of trouble. Know if I start I might get smitten again. That’s the thing about love, right? You have to take risks. Which invites possibility of hurt. So — is it potential for pain, or caution, hesitation, no risk? Am sleeping on it. B xxx

My son the philosopher. Reading through his text again I couldn’t help but marvel (maternal pride talking once more) at the way Ben could get to the heart of the matter when it came to the nature of choice. Especially the choice that sends you onto a little island of safety that becomes sterile and confining.

‘Yep. Followed Dad right into the family firm.’

Out of nowhere that comment popped into my head. But when is anything ‘out of nowhere’? Especially as Richard had been there, seated opposite me, much of the evening. Ever since then, he’d been clouding my thoughts.

You have to take risks.

My son the purveyor of uncomfortable, ever-so-evident truths.

I sat up. I reached into my pocket and dug out the card that Richard had given me — the card with his cellphone number. I picked up my phone. I sent a text.

Sorry about hasty exit tonight. Not my best moment. As contrition, how about lunch in Boston tomorrow? Should be able to meet around 1 p.m. Any thoughts? Best — Laura

I hesitated for a moment before hitting ‘send’. But less than a minute after it was dispatched, bing — a reply:

Laura — no need to apologize. I had a lovely evening. And am happy to meet you for lunch tomorrow. I’m buying. Will make a reservation and text details anon. So — can I say this? — it’s a date. Best — Richard

I smiled. After all my objections before when he had dropped that word, now.

I texted back.

Yes. It’s official. It’s a date.