Five Days (29 page)

‘Anyway, some of this came out at that first lunch with Sarah. She was quite the polite interrogator. She got out of me the fact that I wanted to be a writer, that I had published a story, and that I had an impossibly dictatorial father. She also had me talking about my literary tastes, and ascertained that, outside of a brief, inconsequential four-month thing with a graduate student named Florence during my U Maine years, I was largely inexperienced when it came to the world of women. Sarah, in turn, volunteered several things about herself.

‘You know I lost a child,' she told me. ‘I doubt I'll ever get over that – though to the outside world I will always maintain a certain decorum. And you possibly know that my husband, of whom I am inordinately fond, has fallen in love with a professor at Harvard named Elliot . . . but for the sake of “decorum” we are maintaining a proper public front for the time being. We live together during the week as he teaches at the college. Calvin goes to see Elliot at the weekends. My husband remains my great friend. We will never have children again – which is my choice, because were I to become a mother again the specter of possible tragedy and appalling loss would always be there, and I know I could never support the fear that would haunt me every day. I am very accepting of that decision, as painful as it is. Just as I am very accepting of Calvin's new life – as I knew, more or less, all this about him from the moment we met in New York eight years ago. As far as Calvin is concerned I have carte blanche when it comes to my own personal life and how I choose to conduct it. Which is why, when we finish lunch, I suggest we return to my house – Calvin is away today – and go to bed.”

‘She said it just like that. No hemming or hawing. No “Let's get to know each other”. No apprehension or fear. She chose me. I certainly wanted to be chosen. And in the seven months that I was Sarah's lover she taught me so much. Both in and out of the bedroom. And God, that must be the second manhattan talking.'

‘You're telling me this because you want to tell me this,' I said. ‘Keep going.'

‘Was it love? I certainly think so. We saw each other three times a week. We managed to sneak off for a weekend to Boston, and to Quebec City . . .'

Quebec City
.
The adjacent Paris
for entrapped Mainers
.

‘. . . and Sarah told me, around four months into our relationship, that what I needed to do, as a matter of urgency, was walk out of my father's “firm” and apply for a top MFA program in writing at Iowa or Michigan or Brown. She was sure I would get in somewhere good. And she would come with me – because she could always find interesting work in a college town. And because she knew I had talent.

‘“I may have a talent for life,” she told me. “I may know how to make a wonderful
coq au vin –
”
that was no lie – “and what wine to pair with it, and which new emerging Polish surrealist poet I should be reading –” she was always glued to literary magazines – “but I don't have any real creative spark in me when it comes to words or music or paints. You, on the other hand, have the possibility of a proper literary career, if you can only shake off your King Lear father. He has been determined to break you of your talent from the moment he read that short story of yours in print.”

‘Of course she had hit the bull's-eye – as unsettling as it was to hear such truths being articulated. We were sprawled across her bed at the time. And that was the afternoon she told me that she loved me, that we were kindred spirits, that together everything was possible . . . and Sarah was never the most emotionally effusive of people. I told her that I too loved her, that she had changed my life, that, yes, I would start to apply for MFA programs and quit my job at the end of the summer and . . .

‘All these amazing plans. All within the realm of possibility. Because love – at its truest – allows all the impediments to fall away. You see a vision of the life you want to lead. A happy life. A fulfilled life. With someone who wants to share everything with you, who so completely gets you, as you get her. A love also based on deep mutual desire. And passion. And a shared curiosity about everything in life. That was my life with Sarah – the whole fairy tale we tell ourselves we so want, and then do everything in our power to subvert.'

He fell silent. I reached out and took his hand.

‘Did your father find out?' I finally asked.

‘Your interpretative powers are impressive. I applied to about a half-dozen MFA programs. Though I didn't get into Iowa – which is the most prestigious and competitive – I did get accepted to Michigan, Wisconsin, Virginia, Berkeley. An amazing choice of schools. Sarah and I agreed that Michigan was the best option. It was ranked second in the country as an MFA writing program, and Ann Arbor is a great college town. Sarah even had a friend who was a senior librarian there, and who told her there was an opening in the cataloging department. It was all so serendipitous. Here was our immediate future. Here was the life ahead together. I'd even started writing again. A new short story about a man who cannot force himself to leave a bad marriage – even though he knows that the marriage is killing him. It was, at heart, the story of my dad and my mother, but also about my father's anger at me, at the world in general, all fueled by the fact that my mother was such a dry, cold woman. The only good thing I can say about her is that, as she knew my dad was doing the heavy guilt reinforcement on me, she didn't criticize me the way that Dad did. She was just cold and distant.

‘Anyway, Sarah and I used her address in Brunswick for all the MFA applications. After I accepted Michigan – which came with a partial scholarship, by the way – they needed my official mailing address. So I put on the form my address in Bath, but also enclosed a note stating that all correspondence should continue to be sent to the Brunswick address I'd been using. Of course, my father discovered it. But being the truly manipulative man he was he kept this knowledge from me for weeks. Then, one evening, as I was about to head down to Brunswick and a weekend with Sarah, he asked if I could step into his office for a moment. Once seated in the chair opposite his desk, he began to talk in this ultra-low voice that he switched into whenever he was angry, whenever he wanted to be ruthless and menacing.

‘“I know everything,” he told me. “I know about your plans to go to Michigan and pursue a useless degree
in writing
. I know about your relationship with that married harpy down in Brunswick. I know all about the fact that she is planning to move to Ann Arbor with you. I know all about her pederast husband. I know the name of his boyfriend at Harvard. And I know if word of all this got around the community it would profoundly harm our family name and that of our family firm.”

‘I said nothing during all this – though I started to feel that dewy chill which accompanies fear. I couldn't help but wonder if Dad's friend, the cop, hadn't done a little detective work himself on my father's behalf. The fact that he knew so much about Sarah slammed home the point that he had quite a dossier put together. And remember – in the late 1970s homosexuality was still somewhat closeted. As Dad put it:

‘“Bowdoin's the sort of liberal-minded place that doesn't care about such things. But the man is still untenured. Think what will happen if word gets around about his wife and her very young twenty-three-year-old lover, and the fact that the professor is living most weekends with another man . . . well, it might not deny him tenure, but it will certainly be great newspaper copy, won't it? And if you think the college wants that kind of publicity . . .”

‘At that point I stood up and told my father he was a bastard. He just smiled and said that if I walked out of the door now I would never be allowed back, that I was effectively dead to him and to my mother. My reply? “So be it.” I walked out his door, my father raising his voice just a bit to tell me: “You'll be back here, begging my forgiveness, in a week.”

‘My mother, as it turned out, was standing outside his office door – having clearly been primed by my father to be there, and to hear everything. She had tears in her eyes – my mom, who never showed an iota of emotion. And she clearly was very thrown by all that she had just heard.

‘“Don't do this to us,” she hissed at me, choking back this terrible sob. “You are being ensnared by a man-eater. You will destroy yourself.”

‘But I pushed by her and kept walking.

‘“This will kill me,” she cried as I headed out the front door. I was now on autopilot. I remember getting into my car and driving at high speed to Brunswick. And falling, punch-drunk, into Sarah's house. And telling her everything that happened. And Sarah stopping me at one point to give me a glass of Scotch. And listening to the whole terrible emotional blackmail story in silence. And then coming over to me and putting her arms around me and saying: “Your real life begins now. Because you have finally walked away from that third rate tyrant.”

‘I didn't sleep that night. I was wracked by the worst sort of guilt. I also worried enormously that my father would make good on his threat and expose us all. Sarah reassured me, telling me she would be talking to her husband the next day and that there would be a very robust fight-back should my father make good on his promise of trying to destroy the two of them.

‘That
did
reassure me. But in the days that followed this rupture I felt something close to deep depression. The exhilaration of standing up to that repellent man was overshadowed by the realization that I had essentially cut the bridge between myself and my parents, that I was now an orphan. Sarah saw the effect this was having on me – and suggested that I might want to speak to someone professionally about all this.
Copeland Men
don't go spilling their guts to some therapist,
is what I remember thinking at the time – and how absurd was that? I was resolute about moving forward. I was completely frightened. Even though I now had time on my hands – as I no longer had any gainful employment and it was another four months before we headed to Michigan – I found myself unable to do what I should have been doing during this difficult interregnum, which was writing. I was blocked. The words wouldn't come. Total creative impotence. It was as if the old man had put a curse on me, willing me to be unable to do the one thing that I knew would get me away from his tentacles. Truth be told, a creative block comes from within. Some writers have worked through the most appalling stuff. Me – a rank beginner? I allowed myself to be cowed into a block of major proportions.

‘Then came the coup de grâce. My mother made good on her threat. No, she didn't die. But she did suffer a major stroke. So major that she lost the capacity to speak and was catatonic for over three weeks. It was my father who called me with the news. He was crying, and the bastard never cried. He told me to hurry to Maine Medical, as she might die that night, that he needed me there, that
he needed me
. I felt something akin to horror. I'd caused this. I'd killed her. Sarah kept telling me this was a distortion – that strokes are not caused by emotional distress, and anyway, wasn't it my damn father who had caused all this distress? So to now be running back to him . . .

‘Of course she wasn't trying to stop me from seeing my mother. She was just warning me of what was going to befall me if I accepted my father's embrace. “He'll weep on your shoulder and tell you he loves you and that he was wrong to cast you out. Then he'll beg you to come back ‘just for a little while', to put graduate school on hold for a year. Once you're back you'll never be free of his clutches again. He'll see to that – and you will tragically go along with all this, even though you know it's self-entombing – even though one of the terrible results of this decision will be that you'll lose me.”

‘As always Sarah said all this in the most preternaturally calm voice. But I was so overwhelmed by the terrible blow dealt to my mother – and still convinced that I had pulled the cerebral trigger which had leveled her – that I raced down to Maine Medical and fell into my father's outstretched arms.

‘Being such a profoundly well-read woman, Sarah had a huge understanding of subtext. Especially the sort of subtext which is anchored to the worst sort of emotional blackmail. Everything she predicted came true. Within a week I was back at the firm. Within two weeks I had written to Michigan, asking for a twelve-month deferment owing to my mother's illness. Within three weeks Sarah wrote me a letter. She was very much someone who didn't like melodramatic finales and preferred the nineteenth-century epistolary approach to the end of a love affair. And I remember her exact words: “
This is the beginning of a great grief for both of us. Because this was love. And because this was an opportunity that would have changed everything. Trust me, you will rue this decision for the rest of your life
.”'

Silence. I reached out and took his other free hand. But he pulled away from me.

‘Now you feel sorry for me,' he said.

‘Of course I do. But I also understand.'

‘What? That I was a coward? That I allowed myself to be blackmailed into a life I didn't want by a man who always needed to hobble me? That not a day goes by when I don't think about Sarah and what should have been? That only now, all these years after the event, I'm finally getting back to writing, and only because my damnable father finally died a year ago? That I feel I've wasted so much of this opportunity that is life? Especially as, four years after Sarah, a young, quiet woman named Muriel came to work for us in the firm. I knew from the start that she was somewhat reserved and certainly didn't share much of my bookish interests. But still she was relatively attractive and seemingly kind and genuinely interested in me. “Good wife material,” as my father put it. I think I married Muriel to please the bastard. But there was never any way I could actually please the bastard. The tragedy is, I secretly knew this truth about my father from the age of thirteen onwards. And now listen to me, sounding like a self-pitying—'