She was thirty-six when she got here — and I met her during one of her weekend ‘extra money’ shifts at the library in the center of town. We became fast friends. She is the one and only person in the world with whom I confide — and she also knows she can talk with me about virtually anything. Dan has always been pleasant and reasonably welcoming towards Lucy — especially as she usually spends part of Christmas Day with us (she has no direct family of her own). But he is also a little suspicious of her, as he knows she is my ally. Just as he senses what I know Lucy thinks, but has never articulated: that Dan and I are a mismatch. That’s been one of the unwritten rules of our friendship: we tell ourselves everything that we want to share. We ask advice and give it reciprocally. But we each stop short of saying what we really feel about the other’s stuff. Lucy, for example, had a two-year relationship with a wildly inappropriate man named David Robby — a would-be writer who’d fled a bad marriage and a failed career in advertising, and was one of those guys who had just enough of a trust fund to ruin him. Coastal Maine is full of metropolitan refugees like David — whose personal or professional life (or both) have flat-lined and who have come to our corner of the northeast to reinvent themselves. The problem is: Maine is quiet. And underworked. And largely underpaid. Its visual pleasures — the ravishing, primary sweep of its seascape, the verdancy of its terrain, its sense of space and isolation and extremity (especially in winter) — are counterbalanced by the fact that life here throws you back on your own devices, on yourself. And David — an outwardly charming, but clearly unsettled man — was about the last thing my friend needed in her life back then. Still, between the divorce and the lost babies, and the knowledge that her dream of motherhood might be finished, David was, for a time, something of a recompense (even though I found him creepy). But I never said a word against him. Just as Lucy never made any comments about Dan. Was this wrong — a personal confederacy based on being there to hear each other out, but not to ram home certain self-evident verities? I think we trusted each other because we didn’t blitzkrieg each other with lacerating observations — because we both understood our different fragilities and were best keeping ourselves buoyed.
But the book under discussion tonight — Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade — was one of those profoundly disquieting novels that hit you with the most lacerating (and unsettlingly accurate) observations about the human condition.
‘I read somewhere that Richard Yates wasn’t just a serious alcoholic, but a manic depressive as well,’ Lucy said.
‘Wasn’t there that well-reviewed biography of him a few years back,’ I said, ‘which talked about how, even when he was on a binge — which was most of the time — he somehow managed to grind out two hundred words a day?’
‘Words were obviously a refuge for him from all of life’s harder realities.’
‘Or maybe the way he tried to make sense of all the craziness he observed within himself and others. Do you know what the biography was called? A Terrible Honesty.’
‘Well, that is, without question, the defining strength of The Easter Parade. It pulls no punches when it comes to examining why Sara and Emily Grimes lived such unhappy lives.’
‘And the genius of the book,’ I said, ‘is that even though Emily becomes a desperate alcoholic, she’s never painted as sad or pathetic. Yet Yates also makes it so clear that the two sisters have nobody but themselves to blame for their disappointments.’
‘His psychological clarity and his humanity are everywhere. As you said, we all know these women because they are, more or less, reflections of ourselves. It’s what Emily says to her niece’s husband at the end of the book, “I’m almost fifty years old and I’ve never understood anything in my whole life.” That’s the hard truth at the center of the novel. There are no solutions when it comes to life. There’s only mess and muddle.’
‘But we all want answers, don’t we?’
‘You’re talking to a Unitarian,’ Lucy said. ‘We pray “to whom it may concern”.’
‘And the one thing I liked most about being an Episcopalian — besides all that good Anglican choral music — was that it always preached a gospel of thinking about faith in a personal and non-doctrinal way. No real directives from on high. No Old Testament God who kicked butt if you didn’t believe he was the Man in Charge. Still, the one problem with being part of a thinking religion is that there is absolutely no certainty whatsoever.’
‘Does that truly bother you?’
‘Sometimes, honestly, yes, it does unsettle me — the idea that this is it, that there is nothing beyond this except mystery. God knows I’ve tried to believe in a hereafter — that is a component of Episcopalianism. But it’s always held out as more of a poetic idea — a fantasia, so to speak — than an absolute divine truth. As such I doubt I am ever going to run into anyone I know in the afterlife either. But if there is no hereafter, then how do we make sense of this very flawed business called life?’
‘Now there’s a question that will never have a definitive answer. But I do have a question about a completely unrelated, but nonetheless important matter — did Dan take the job?’
I nodded.
‘That’s good news, I guess,’ Lucy said.
‘Not for him. But I didn’t coerce him or force his hand. though he acts as if I did.’
‘That’s because he feels guilty about being out of work for so long, as he also hates the fact that he has no choice but to take this job.’
I stared into my glass of wine.
‘I wish it was as simple as that. I just feel that we’re kind of lost together. And that’s an oxymoron, isn’t it? If you are together you’re not supposed to be lost. Then again. ’
‘So many of us are lost together. Have you suggested counseling?’
‘Of course. To Dan the idea of talking about our problems in front of a third party. it’s anathema to him. Anyway, I only know one marriage that was saved by counseling—’
‘And that’s because they had a suicide pact.’
I found myself laughing. Loudly.
‘You’re terrible,’ I said.
‘I think it’s called being a realist.’
‘I don’t want the marriage to end.’
‘But you don’t want it to continue as it is.’
‘No. But. how can I put this? I don’t know of a way out. If I leave, then what?’
‘You’ll be like me. A woman in her early forties on her own in small-town Maine. Were I the devious type I’d encourage you to leave him — so you’d end up where I am now. Alone. Wondering what the future holds. Thinking: Maybe I should try my luck in a bigger place — Boston or Chicago or somewhere in the Sun Belt, not that I could stand the politics down there. But then what? You cart your baggage with you wherever you go. So, I suppose the real question is—’
‘I know what the question is,’ I said.
‘The thing is — do you have an answer?’
Again I looked down into my wine.
‘I have many answers and no answers,’ I finally said.
‘Join the club.’