Though it’s change that’s driving him crackers now. The Markhams say they won’t compromise on their ideal. But they aren’t compromising! They can’t afford their ideal. And not buying what you can’t afford’s not a compromise; it’s reality speaking English. To get anywhere you have to learn to speak the same language back.
And yet they may find hidden strengths: their fumbling, lurching Sistine Chapel touch across the car seat was a promising signal, but it’s one they’ll need to elaborate over the weekend, when they’re on their own. And inasmuch as I’m not in possession of their check, on their own’s where they’ll be — sweating it but also, I hope, commencing the process of self-seeing as a sacred initiation to a fuller later life.
4
It might be of some interest to say how I came to be a Residential Specialist, distant as it is from my prior vocations of failed short-story writer and sports journalist. A good liver would be a man or woman who’d distilled all of life that’s important down to a few inter-related principles and events, which are easy to explain in fifteen minutes and don’t require a lot of perplexed pauses and apologies for this or that being hard to understand exactly if you weren’t there. (Finally, almost nobody else is ever able to “be there,” and in many cases it’s too bad you have to be.) And it is in this streamlined, distilled sense that it’s possible to say my former wife’s getting remarried and moving to Connecticut is what brought me to where I am.
Five years ago, at the end of a bad season that my friend Dr. Catherine Flaherty described as “maybe a kind of major crisis,” or “the end of something stressful followed by the beginning of something indistinct,” I one day simply quit my job at a large sports magazine in New York and moved myself to Florida, and then in the following year to France, where I had never been but decided I needed to go.
In the ensuing winter, the previously mentioned Dr. Flaherty, then age twenty-three and not yet a doctor, interrupted her medical studies at Dartmouth and flew to Paris to spend “a season” with me — entirely against her father’s best judgment (who could blame him?) and without the slightest expectance that the world held out any future for her and me together or that the future even needed to be taken into account. The two of us struck off on a driving tour in a rented Peugeot to wherever seemed interesting on the European map, with me paying the freight from the proceeds of my magazine-stock buyout and Catherine doing all the complicated map reading, food ordering, direction seeking, bathroom locating, phone calling, and bellman paying. She had, naturally, been to Europe at least twenty times before she was out of Choate and could in all instances remember and easily lead us straight to a “neat little hilltop restaurant” above the Dordogne, or “an interesting place for very late lunch” near the Palacio in Madrid, or find the route to a house that was once Strindberg’s wife’s home outside Helsinki. The whole trip had for her the virtue of an aimless, nostalgic return to past triumphs in the company of a non-traditional “other,” just before life — serious adult life — began in earnest and fun was forgotten forever; while for me it was more of an anxious dash across a foreign but thrilling exterior landscape, commenced in hopes of arriving at a temporary refuge where I’d feel rewarded, revived, less anxious, possibly even happy and at peace.
It’s not necessary to say much of what we did. (Such pseudo-romantic excursions must all be more or less alike and closed-ended.) We eventually “settled” in the town of Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme, in Channel-side Picardy. There we passed the better part of two months together, spent a great deal of my money, rode bicycles, read plenty of books, visited battlefields and cathedrals, tried sculling on the canals, walked pensively along the grassy verge of the old estuarial river, watching French fishermen catch perch, walked pensively around the bay to the alabaster village of Le Crotoy, then walked back, made much love. I also practiced my college French, chatted up the English tourists, stared at sailboats, flew kites, ate many gritty moules meunières, listened to much “traditional” jazz, slept when I wanted to and even when I didn’t, woke at midnight and stared at the sky as though I needed to get a clearer view of something but wasn’t sure what it was. I did all this until I felt perfectly okay, not in love with Catherine Flaherty but not unhappy, although also futureless, disused and bored — the way, I imagine, extended time in Europe makes any American who cares to stay an American feel (possibly similar to how a larcenous small-town road commissioner feels during the latter part of his stay in the Penns Neck minimum security facility).
Though what I in time began to sense in France was actually a kind of disguised urgency (disguised, as urgency often is, as unurgency), a feeling completely different from the old clicking, whirly, suspenseful perturbations I’d felt in my last days as a sportswriter: of being divorced, full of regret, and needing to pursue women just to keep myself pacified, amused and slightly dreamy. This new variety was more a deep-beating urgency having to do with me and me only, not me and somebody. It was, I now believe, the profound low thrum of my middle life seeking to be seized rather than painlessly avoided. (There’s nothing like spending eight weeks alone with a woman two decades your junior to make you wise to the fact that you’ll someday disappear, make you bored daffy by the concept of youth, and dismally aware how impossible it is ever to be “with” another human being.)
One evening then, over a plate of ficelle picarde and one more glass of tolerable Pouilly-Fumé, it occurred to me that being there with winsome, honey-haired, sweetly ironic Catherine was indeed a kind of dream and a dream I’d wanted to have, only it was now a dream that was holding me back — from what, I wasn’t sure, but I needed to find out. Needless to say, she had to have been bored silly by me but had gone on acting, in a vaguely amused way, as if I was a “pretty funny ole guy” with pretty interesting, eccentric habits, not one bit to be taken lightly “as a man,” and that being in Saint-Valéry with me had made all the difference in getting her young life started in the most properly seasoned way, and she would remember it all forever. She didn’t, however, mind if I left or if she stayed, or if we both left or stayed. She already had plans to leave, which she hadn’t thought to tell me about yet; and in any case, when I was seventy and in adult Pampers, she’d have been fiftyish, in a surly mood from all she’d missed and in no rush to humor me — which by then would be all I’d want. So that there was no thought of a long haul for the two of us.
But in just that short an order and on that very evening, and without a harsh word, we kissed and broke camp — she back to Dartmouth, and me back to …
Haddam. Where I landed not only with a new feeling of great purpose and a fury to suddenly do something serious for my own good and possibly even others’, but also with the feeling of renewal I’d gone far to look for and that immediately translated into a homey connectedness to Haddam itself, which felt at that celestial moment like my spiritual residence more than any place I’d ever been, inasmuch as it was the place I instinctively and in a heat came charging back to. (Of course, having come first to life in a true place, and one as monotonously, lankly itself as the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I couldn’t be truly surprised that a simple setting such as Haddam — willing to be so little itself — would seem, on second look, a great relief and damned easy to cozy up to.)