Part Two: Chapter 8

VIII

Another of the many worthwhile tips in Life’s Little Instruction Book has to do with rental cars. Think economically when purchasing an automobile, is the gist of it, but feel free to be extravagant if you are renting. Nothing wrong with a taste of luxury, apparently.

On my fifth call I find what I am looking for, a car that I am far too politically correct ever to buy, but one that satisfied a need I feel right now, to armor myself: a brand new Lincoln Navigator with cruise control and a six-disc CD changer with Bose speakers. They ask me if I want GPS and I fight back a momentary image of Bruce Gibbs hacking his way free from his own charred remains to haunt me. I decline the option.

I leave my hotel “key” on the dresser with the twenty-dollar bill that is still left over from yesterday – I am suddenly feeling bizarrely flush – and Amy and I just walk out of the hotel rather than risk checking out formally with some desk clerk who may have just finished perusing the morning papers. We walk over to Tower Records on Mount Auburn Street and pick out half a dozen CDs for my trip: Joan Armatrading, Shawn Colvin, Richie Valens, Bob Marley, Marianne Faithfull, and Springsteen.

If there was ever any doubt about whether or not Amy would accompany me into exile, my choice of road music seals the deal, but I am not even open to her suggestion. On either point, actually.

“You starting today at the Globe?” I ask her as we walk the block or so to the rental office.

“Half an hour ago.”

“Break a leg, Tuckerman.”

“You too, Branford.”

“Chet.”

“Chet.”

She hugs me. I hug her back. The physical convention does not even come close to being commensurate with the affection and gratitude I feel for her.

“I will email you,” I whisper.

“Use my personal account.”

The SUV is huge, like driving a small house through city traffic. How is this not just a fancy truck? But once I am out on the highway I am glad to be driving it. I am coated in protective armor, high above everyone else on the road.

I sing along with Richie Valens:

“I had a girl, and Don-na was her name.

Since she left me, I’ve nev-er been the same.

Oh, I love that girl,

Don-na where can you be-ee?

Oh, where can you be?”

I stop at an L.L. Bean outlet just off the highway in Concord, New Hampshire and spend seven hundred dollars on clothes, comfortable shies, and a duffel bag. Before leaving the store I change into a casual outfit: cargo shorts, a green knit short-sleeved shirt with fish all over it, and a pair of very spiffy trail running shoes. I pack the duffel bag with the new clothes to add verisimilitude, at customs, to my anticipated claim that I am headed for a week’s vacation in Quebec.

If Mary Kate had wanted me to stand in for Bruce Gibbs as Rachel’s father, why couldn’t she just ask me? Of course, that would have required her to tell me the story, or make the lies even more elaborate.

After we eloped and returned home, Mary Kate received her college admissions letters. She got in everywhere: Stanford, Barnard, Dartmouth, Chapel Hill, and Radcliffe, which was still a women’s college, but only nominally separate from Harvard. I naturally assumed she would take Radcliffe since I was already finishing my second year at Harvard and, after all, Harvard was Harvard. But Mary Kate became very stubborn.

“Stanley, I really need to get further away from home,” she said.

“We’re an hour away already,” I exaggerated, a little defensively. We were entwined on my single dormitory bed in Dunster House. “We don’t ever have to go back to town if you don’t want to go back.”

“I just need to be further away.”

Eventually we reached a mutually unsatisfying compromise. She deferred her college admission for a year so we could live together in Cambridge for my junior year, and I agreed to then transfer to Dartmouth for my senior year. I persuaded Mary Kate that our year in Cambridge would be a wonderful year of having coffee and croissants at cute little patisserie joints on the side streets in the Square, making love each morning and afternoon, and taking romantic little weekend getaway trips wherever and whenever we pleased. She could get a part-time job in a bookstore to supplement our frugal lifestyle, write poetry and learn to play the guitar as she had wanted to do, and whenever we began to feel hemmed in or bored with Cambridge we could just pretend we were Hemingway and Hadley living in Paris. Then we would move up north the following summer so that she could start and I could finish at Dartmouth. Of course I had already fallen in love with city life and with the possibility that I might have a future as a hard-boiled urban reporter, so I harbored a secret hope that Mary Kate would quickly grow to share my love for the city and perhaps reconsider the second phase of our plan. My secret hope did not pan out.

I drive straight north on Interstate 93 until I am in the White Mountains, where I pull off onto Route 2 heading east and drive into western Maine. This is the long part of the drive, meandering east and then north through the western wilds of Maine on Route 201, a very quiet two-lane blacktop where you drive along for hours at a time without seeing a house, a filling station, or any commercial enterprise. There are no other vehicles aside from an occasional overstuffed logging truck. The road is straight and mostly flat, hacked through the woods, a tad on the narrow side.

I do not eat breakfast on my first day in exile. It seemed important not to waste any time getting out of Massachusetts, although I have been careful, given my fragile legal and existential status, to stay within a few miles per hour of posted speed limits. Then as time passed I simply forgot to eat, or perhaps I forgot how desolate the road ahead of me in Maine would be, or I would have stopped somewhere in New Hampshire where at least there were some diners along the way. Once I am headed north in Maine it begins to appear as if I will also go without lunch, because there is simply nothing here, for miles and miles at a time. Without food or coffee, I am concerned about my driving stamina, but I maintain my alertness by singing along with Shaw Colvin covering Tom Waits’ Saturday night song and Marianne Faithfull’s “Ballad of Lucy Jordan” and a rendition of “Working Class Hero” that is the equal of Lennon’s, totally raw, no sentimentality.

The music and the open road mitigate the depression I might otherwise feel given my imminent expatriation, but in any case I feel strangely excited. I know that this should feel like I am about to disconnect myself from the people I love, from the entire human race, but instead, if anything, I feel as if what is changing is that I am no longer responsible for the entire human race. And that, right now, if it is not a good feeling, is at least a somewhat neutral sort of relief. I don’t even feel responsible for myself. After all, when it comes right down to it, who the hell am I?

To the extent that I can focus on anyone, other than myself, it is on Mary Kate. But even there it is not any active mindfulness, just her magnetism even now that is drawing me occasionally nearer as I drive due north, and ruminate.

I play little mental games with the odometer and the digital clock to help me straight-arm sleepiness as I drive, and at 11:54 I see a moose ahead of me in the road. I pull over to the narrow shoulder. I stop the car but I do not kill the engine, which idles more noisily than I would expect for a fifty-thousand-dollar car. The moose is taller than the Navigator and considers me and the car from a sidelong perspective for several moments before galumphing over to the tree line to pick at some bark.

I think of the word “avuncular” and say it aloud. When I say it aloud I am playing a little word game that Mary Kate and I used to play, as if she is sitting there beside me. I reach over to feel the seat leather in the passenger seat. When we were kids and I would drop her off at her house and say goodnight after we had spent a hungry hour parking down at the end of Grove Street past Shawme Pond, I would always be thrilled somehow just to feel the earthy warmth of her butt still there in the upholstery where she had been sitting, as if the existence of that furnace effect were proof of her love for me.

“Avuncular,” I say again, and I think of the moose and the sound that the word would have made leaving her lips and the question of whether she would enjoy sitting quietly here to watch the moose, or perhaps be a little afraid. I decide that she would not be afraid. My notion of her fearfulness in life appears more and more to be a fiction of my own creation, a creation that I needed to organize things as I needed to see them. More likely I would be the one to be afraid, even if I convinced myself that I was fearful on her behalf.

Our little word game was not something that either of us ever tried to describe or codify (until now), nor did we ever play it with anybody else, to the best of my knowledge.

“Did you ever play our game with anybody else, Kate?” I ask aloud with a slight tilt of my head toward the passenger seat. Mary Kate does not answer me, because she is not actually there.

I’m not sure I can explain the key to the game. Sometimes a word or phrase sounds like a thing that you see or hear or experience together, but its meaning has nothing directly to do with the thing, or very little. If the game had a name, the name of the game would be to the existential as the phenomenon of onomatopoeia is to the auditory. Mary Kate always played the game perfectly and effortlessly, so that her word-offerings were themselves beams of light that illuminated the lives we experienced together and gave me joy. My own efforts in our game were usually reaches. They often required effort, mine or hers or both of ours, and I felt that she humored me at times. I would gladly have ceded the role of word-offerer to Mary Kate as often as I could, but that was not possible if it was to continue for us as a playful experience, a game.

A bit after one o’clock, well over halfway up the state of Maine according to my crude mileage extrapolations for the rental agency’s map, I see a modest restaurant on the west or southbound side of the road. I could have kept going without food, but I would have to stop to pee in the woods if this opportunity had not presented itself. I am pleased. Although it seems fair to put some faith in Amy’s assertion that Bruce Gibbs has given me a free pass by apparently committing suicide in my name, I would not want to invite the scrutiny of local authorities by being caught committing some petty infraction such as relieving myself by the side of the road.

“Let’s eat,” I say. I reach over again to feel the heat of Mary Kate’s butt on the leather seat.

Inside, the restaurant is carved whole from a time past. What is any of this doing here? The waitress is about thirty-five, yet it is my simple-minded sense that she is my elder. She wears her henna-colored hair in a net. She sports clean white sneakers with little red dots on the heels and a sharp, if retro, black-and-white uniform dress. A blazing fire burns in the fireplace and the large single dining room has the cozy feel of a hunting lodge with deer, elk, and bear taxidermy mounted on the walls, a very elaborate Molson Beer clock that employs lights to create the illusion of a flowing waterfall, and imitation candle lights set high on each of the dozen or so thick pine posts that comprise the interior skeletal structure of the room. My strange notion of the presence of Mary Kate aside, the waitress and I are the only people palpably present in the dining room, but I assume that behind the swinging doors to and from the kitchen there are one or two others.

It is a peaceful room, and it would require only the slightest exaggeration for someone to imagine that this dining room has just been opened up for me after months of disuse. The dishes and utensils on my table appear to be clean, but I would not be surprised, were I to run a finger across the plates on other tables, if it might leave a trail in dust. It is hard for me to imagine that other people come here. Where would they come from? Maybe there is a brisk business during hunting season, but that is no reason for the place to be kept open now. It is a long time until hunting season.

Toward the end of eighth grade the school system administered a standardized IQ test to our class. The test results were to be used along with teacher recommendations and other factors to determine which of us would be assigned to the college preparatory course schedule and which would be placed in “general education,” which turned out in the case of most of the guys that they were tracked for assignment to Vietnam. Some of the factors included grades, social status, and the impressions that Mr. Ovian, the school principal, gathered when he called us down one by one for what everyone knew as his “A Strong Foundation Makes a Good House” talk. I don’t know exactly what kind of impression I made on the principal, but while I was sitting across from him I made use for the first time of an investigative skill that I was to employ many times, later, as a newspaper reporter: upside-down reading. On his desk was a printout with all the members of my class ranked by IQ score. My name was second on the list. I remember being slightly disappointed by my score of 144, because I had read in the Sunday Parade magazine that a score of 145 was the cut-off for “genius.” I would go through life, it appeared, having missed out on being a genius by a single point because I had failed to compute correctly the area of a parallelogram or I had speculated incorrectly that college was to school as cardinals were to fish.

I usually had the highest actual grades in my class, but if I had been able to record an IQ of 146 or 147, I doubt I would have minded being ranked second in my class in intelligence and thus, logically, an over-achiever. Then I noticed who was first: the list said upside-down that Bruce Gibbs had an IQ of 163. I never shared the IQ information with anyone else until after Mary Kate and I were married. I told her mine and then I told her about Bruce and made a somewhat dismissive and mean-spirited little crack about his being an idiot savant, and she surprised me: “No, he really is a genius. If anything I wouldn’t be surprised if it was actually a lot higher than that.”

The waitress in this place out of time is actually named Gracie, she tells me.

“Would you like to hear our specials today?”

This amuses me, because to me the notion of “specials” implies a certain level of traffic, but I cut her off.

“I’m just hungry for a good hot meal,” I say. “Could you just bring me the best hot plate of meat and potatoes that you can muster up?”

Five minutes later she re-appears with a heaping plate of turkey breast slices under gravy, stuffing, lightly steamed asparagus tips with hollandaise, and a huge baked potato. It is a feast, but I have hours left to drive and no place to take a nap. When she leaves the table I look across to where Mary Kate would be sitting if she were here physically, and I take a weak stab at the word game.

“I read Erica Jong,” I say.

“I don’t believe in Zimmerman,” I can almost hear her say.

My last hour or so in Maine I see no people. No houses. No cars. Then customs goes smoothly at the Canadian border – Chet Spiro is a tourist! – and as if by magic I am practically in suburbia again: I have passed, after all, from the desolate tundra of northwestern Maine to balmy southeastern Quebec with its well-kept hillside communities of French Canadians. This dramatic difference due only to the delineation of an arbitrary border has never made any sense to me, but then nobody has asked me to be an arbiter.

As I approach Quebec City the Chateau Frontenac shines in the glow of the Canadian sunset with the river brilliant beneath its steep hillsides. Mary Kate chose this as our honeymoon hotel from pictures she had seen in the National Geographic and I was awed to find we were trysting in an elegant castle. She spoke French to me all weekend and I did not mind the fact that I understood little or that the actual room where we spent the preponderance of our time was rather ordinary but for our presence. What was important was only that the lock worked on the door and the bedding was firm. It was the first time we had ever been able to make love indoors, on a bed, and by the end of the weekend when it was time to drive back to Massachusetts we had perfected the activity. With her natural, willing, even frisky transformation from prim and proper schoolgirl to my eager sister in carnal communion, Mary Kate expanded and illuminated all my half-baked late adolescent notions of what was a woman and seared through the hypocritical mythology that still enshrouds most interactions between men and women. We never spoke much about any theoretical underpinnings or deeper psychological meanings of this transformation and for my part I was quite willing to accept Mary Kate’s verbal reticence in favor of her carnal eloquence. “Let’s not talk sex into the ground,” she said to me once. Another time she asked if I would rather do it or talk about it.

Sometimes, it is true, I thought about it. Six months into our marriage Mary Kate was still plenty frisky in the sack, but when I began to notice some early signs of what I would now call depression I made what might not have been a very well-chosen conversational venture by commenting that “between the sheets” sometimes seemed like the only place where she was truly happy. Another transformation was occurring, and my comment was one of those instances where you blurt out the truth before you ever stop and reflect on the fact that it is true. We were married, and suddenly it was beginning to seem to me as if Mary Kate was depressed. But if my comment amounted to a blurting out of an essential truth, Mary Kate’s candor was even more stunning: “Sometimes I feel like it’s the only thing that I do well.”

I bit my tongue. Something not quite the same, but a little too close for comfort, had occurred to me about my wife. I was not about to remark then that it was true that I could not imagine anyone on the face of the earth being better, more imaginative, more of a virtuoso at lovemaking than Mary Kate. And I did not say the other things that I’m ashamed to admit occurred to me just then, that she was also awfully good at dancing and playing tennis, because, first, I knew that she took these gifts for granted as things that came naturally to her so that such feedback would provide no comfort to her, and second, I sensed however dimly that it was one of those times when a man – a husband, usually – should refrain from speaking because, if he speaks, he can be counted on to come up with the worst possible response to a vulnerable remark by a woman.

The truth, of course, is that while Mary Kate was wonderfully gifted at a thousand things, what made her wonderful to me was not any competency that could be measured, but her attitude and humility and willingness to try to understand and embrace people: her denial of the kind of hypocrisy and artifice that young girls and young women use so often to set themselves apart from others or even from their own realities. Of course you also do not tell a woman who has just volunteered that the only thing she can do well is screw that, in fact, her outstanding trait is her humility.

Another notion that I self-censored in that conversation, because the topic was almost a taboo, was that Mary Kate’s body was exquisite, the envy of most of the other girls with whom she had grown up. This was not only because those early days of the mass feminist movement were beginning to warn so-called liberated men away from being too enthusiastic in our expressions of appreciation for women’s bodies. The fact was that Mary Kate’s physical perfection had come at an awful price: long before I ever heard words like “anorexia” or “eating disorder,” Mary Kate had virtually starved herself for months at a time as a teenager because, as she said, “I just don’t feel like eating anything.”

I worried, when I began to notice early in our marriage that Mary Kate seemed troubled or depressed. I wasn’t aware enough of the dynamics of young women’s eating disorders to worry that she would stop eating again. Instead, I did what seems to me now like a very wrongheaded thing. I acted as if her depression was about me and about our marriage: like it reflected on me and needed to be dealt with accordingly. I worried that she might up and leave me, or kill herself (another form of leaving me), or, worst of all, have an affair with another man. (I can add here, safely, that Bruce Gibbs was nowhere near my radar).

She was struggling desperately, and the only thing that I could see that was new or different was that we were married. Eventually she asked me if I thought she should seek professional help. I had trouble hearing the question on its own terms rather than as a rebuke to my virtues or even my adequacy as a husband. I am not proud of my responses. I would not have described myself as insecure at the time, but for those of us who spend any time nurturing our capacities for self-doubt the experience of growing up in a small town can steer us toward a tendency to fear any sort of social stigma. I am well reconstructed now, I think, and I would encourage any member of my family to get any form of help she might need or to try practically any step toward self-awareness that might occur to her, but I was not yet that man for Mary Kate at that point, and I regret it. I still had way too much small town in me and I was too haunted by some notion that both sets of our parents might somehow be right there in our apartment with us observing and cataloguing our every inadequacy as young married people.

“Professional help?”

“Yes, a psychiatrist or something like that.”

“Sure,” I said. “If you think it’s necessary.”

My response was not very inviting of further conversation, and there wasn’t much more conversation. I remember being uncomfortable about the issue of how much money it might cost for Mary Kate to see a psychiatrist, and part of that discomfort was that I was uncomfortable even raising that issue with Mary Kate. Dense as I may have been, I knew enough to know I should not make explicit financial resistance to the idea. It was enough, of course, merely to say, “If you think it’s necessary.”

So when she made an initial appointment with a University Health Services psychiatrist, and kept it, I was forced to conclude that it was necessary, and I struggled to be supportive, and to overcome my personal distaste for the situation. I had read Marcuse and R.D. Laing and Freud and Lawrence and Norman O. Brown and developed a thoroughgoing social critique of the psychological discontents of our civilization. I had postulated to myself the whimsy that everybody on the planet needed help and that the planet could be saved in toto by some combination of individual and mass therapeutic intervention. But if it was not, immediately, going to be everybody, I was certainly loath to embrace the notion that the process should begin with my wife Mary Kate.

Still and all I tried to be open. After her first appointment I asked lightly, “How did it go?” and I received a curt monosyllabic answer: “Fine.” Nothing more. After her second appointment I tried again.

“So are you finding some worthwhile things to talk about?”

“Stanley, I really need for you to respect my boundaries on this.”

I apologized. I did not ask again, at least for a while. I wondered to myself if she had role-played with her psychotherapist how she would parry such an encroachment by me, because I was impressed with the seamlessness of her response. But I also wondered: “Where is it written that this is an encroachment?” If the subject matter of her psychotherapy was not fair game for our marital terrain, how could we expect to have true intimacy in our marriage? I was worried.

It was only a month or two later that Mary Kate brought her course of psychotherapy to an abrupt end. At the risk of disrespecting her boundaries I asked why.

“All he wants to talk about is sex.”

“You don’t want to talk about sex.”

“Not with him.”

“Isn’t that kind of limiting?”

“Not to me.”

The conversation seems much more important to me now than it seemed then. My adoration of Mary Kate and my desire or need to see her as a wise woman were so total that I rationalized the conversation to be about something other than what I now judge it to have been about. Then, I decided conveniently that it was about Mary Kate’s generally healthy desire to avoid overanalyzing the joy of our sexual love. The ecstasy that we shared together was still new and fresh enough that, if I ever thought about what sex was, to us, I would have defined it as what we were sharing and making anew together each night and day, and not any baggage or legacies of our early years or our interactions with anyone in the world except each other. So I wasn’t really looking for any area of concern or pain that Mary Kate might be evading either with me or with a shrink, and it seemed perfectly natural to me that she would want to protect the freshness of our physical interaction by avoiding over-verbalization of it.

“Let’s not talk it into the ground,” as she had said to me.

Just so, I thought.