Chapter Twenty-five
A FEW DAYS AFTER MY SESSION WITH MELODY, I wandered into Sam’s study. As usual, Donny Most napped away, nestled in the corner of the leather sofa, its age and prolonged usage starting to show. I sat at the desk and turned on the computer. I knew Sam’s password and typed it: vandi05. I really wasn’t sure what I was doing, and had a sick feeling inside, like I was invading his privacy. After the computer booted up, I noticed a word file on the desktop that I had never seen before: NOVEL 1. I clicked on it and opened the file.
When Alexander first met Cassandra at the Conference of Rhetoric and Reality in New York City, he knew he wanted to marry her.
“Please God. Please let her be single.”
He didn’t want to talk to her at first. She was petite with short, dark hair neatly coiffed in the style of the moment, her olive skin straight out of European heritage. He knew he was way out of her league the minute he heard her speak about 20th century rhetoric in a 21st century world. But then he decided such thinking was stupid, and took the plunge.
What was this—a romance novel?
So when she laughed at his jokes and accepted his invitation for a drink and eventually saw how he color-codes his hangers and watched football with him, only then could he get up the nerve to ask her to marry him.
So he did. And she said yes.
He loved to read to Cassandra. Loved to see her face light up just like a child listening to Mr. Rogers. And he would lose himself in her inner child and wonder, “Man, how could I be so lucky?”
I scrolled down about five pages.
Alexander picked up the letter. It was postmarked twenty years ago. Twenty years! Such a nice, even number—what were the odds? He gingerly slid his fingers under the back flap of the parchment envelope and moved them so as to preserve as much of it as possible. It opened with ease. He removed the thin paper, folded neatly in threes, the creases so tight that they were in danger of ripping the letter, its fountain-pen cursive preserved, like a body inside a sarcophagus. With slow, calculated precision, he opened it and began to read.
“Dear Son,”
Who, me?
I scrolled back to the top and read every word from beginning to end. Twice. A man receives a twenty-year-old letter from his long lost father that takes him on a journey to Peru. What if he had received the letter when it was originally sent? Where would he have ended up? As he traces the steps based on clues in the letter, he starts to piece together the synchronicity of his life, and offers a series of stories.
Daring to envision a different life.
Sam was only about thirty-five thousand words in; and yet, I was riveted. How come he never told me? I thought in anger. I wasn’t ready to show you yet, I could hear him answer. That was like him; he was protective of his first drafts, and clearly this was a first draft. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t like it. Maybe he didn’t like it. Maybe he was going to show me the day after our anniversary celebration. Surely he was going to show it to me at some point, wasn’t he?
I called Maggie.
“Listen to this.” I read the first couple of pages to her.
“Sounds good,” she said. “What is it?”
“Sam started writing a novel. I just found it.”
“You’re kidding me!”
“I told you he had been thinking about it, didn’t I?”
“I think you did. So?”
“So what?” I asked.
“So when are you going to finish it?”
I dropped my jaw and held out the phone before putting it back to my ear. “Me?”
“Yes.”
“Are you crazy?”
“No—well, yeah, but not about this. Come on, Andi! This is something for you to do! Summer break is almost here. Why not write?”
“For one thing, I’ve never written a novel before. It’s not my genre. I’m a nonfiction prose kind of girl—you know that.”
“What, you can’t write fiction and use what you know? Talk to Nora Ephron. You think it’s a coincidence that all her characters are journalists who live in New York and cook? Heck, talk to Sam—twentieth century rhetoric? You think he wasn’t writing about what he knew? Besides, couldn’t you tell that the description of Cassandra was totally you? Even the name: Cassandra? Please!”
I hadn’t noticed. Why hadn’t I noticed that?
“C’mon, Mags. I know rhetoric and creative nonfiction. I don’t know fiction.”
“Those were his areas, too, and it wasn’t stopping him, obviously. Besides, fiction isn’t rhetorical?”
“You know what I mean.”
“You’ve never read a novel before?”
“Mags…”
“Andi, you’re a writer. When was the last time you wrote something non-academic?”
“Sss—”
“—not including Sam’s eulogy,” she stopped me before I could even say his name.
“Not since the last collection of essays came out—when was that two, three years ago?”
“If you can’t even pin down the date, it was too long ago.”
“You really think I could do it? I mean, this is clearly a first draft, and I don’t know where he wanted this to go or how he wanted it to end. What if I end it in a way that is totally bogus?”
“When you get to heaven, the two of you can argue about it over a slice of cheesecake. Come on, you can do this! It’s not like you don’t know his writing style. Think of it as something the two of you can work on together.”
I thought about this, about what Melody had said about not only re-seeing my life, but his. Ours.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
The next day, I called Devin and met him late in the afternoon at the Starbucks on
Church Street
in
Harvard Square
. I told him about the novel and asked him what he thought.
“I think you should do it,” he said. “I think it would be good to immerse yourself in such a creative project. I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to get back into writing, actually. I thought you would’ve written about the accident and the grieving process.”
“It’s already been done by Joan Dideon. And no one can catch up to Joan Dideon—she’s the creative nonfiction queen.”
“Who said you had to write to sell books? Who said you had to write it for anyone other than yourself? Who said it even had to be good?” he asked.
I could hear traces of my voice from our past tutorials echoing in his own. For sure, this guy was my former pupil.
I confessed, “I can’t write anymore.”
“Because of the eulogy? Geez Andi, you’ve got to get past that.”
“It’s not that. I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t write. I can’t teach. There’s absolutely no desire.”
“You can. You’re just afraid of fucking up, as usual.”
“Geez, Devin, you’re a real ego booster, you know that? Remind me to hire you to get the Patriots revved up at halftime.”
He slammed his fist on the table so hard that everyone got quiet and looked at us. “Dammit!”
Even the cappuccino machine came to a halt. He got up, grabbed his leather jacket, and walked out. Humiliated, I grabbed my own and followed him.
“Don’t you ever embarrass me like that again, you hear me?” I yelled.
“Stop jerking me around, and stop jerking yourself around! I’m tired of it, Andi. I’m tired of your inertia! I’m tired of your refusal to move on with your life. I thought Italy changed that for you. I thought you were ready to take your soul back.”
“Yeah? Well, you thought wrong.”
“What happened to that woman who allowed herself some pleasure, who allowed herself to touch and taste and feel again? Even years ago, when you were so inhibited, you were willing to do something different. You were willing to at least try. Now you’re just throwing it away. I can’t bear to stand by any longer while you do that.”
“Are you saying you don’t want to be with me anymore?”
“She’s not even listening to me…” he said, looking to his right as if a third party was part of the discussion.
“What the hell is your problem?” I asked.
“I don’t want to pretend to be Devin anymore! I don’t want to pretend like this is enough! God, Andi, when did you get so selfish?”
At that moment, I remembered Maggie blowing up at me and telling me the same thing, telling me how grief is so self-absorbing.
I peered at him, my brows furrowed. “Oh, you have a short memory. For how long did you string me along? ‘You’re my client, Andi.’ That was the excuse you gave. And yet, even then the rules didn’t apply to me. No kissing. No touching. Not unless it was part of the lesson. ‘Whoa, that’s far enough there, girl…’ It was all under your control. Talk about selfish!”
“You’re right. I was a rat-bastard and by the time I came to my senses and was ready to let you in, I lost you. So let me warn you: you’re losing me. You’re losing me as a lover, and worse still you’re losing me as a friend. Do you really want that?”
I didn’t know what to say. Panic crept in and gripped my whole body. “Devin…”
“Oh, for the love of God—my name is David! I’m not the escort anymore. I don’t even wanna be that fucking guy.”
“Well, I’m not Andi Cutrone,” I said.
“I never insisted you should be! I’m perfectly okay with you being Andi Vanzant. I’m perfectly okay with you being Sam’s wife. I’m perfectly okay with you being scared out of your mind, or guilty, or whatever it is you’re refusing to let yourself feel. I’m perfectly okay with Sam being a part of whatever it is that we have. In fact, I would prefer that he was present. At least then I’d know where I stand. You’re the one who has the problem with it. You’re the one trying to shut him out, and me, too.”
Could this be true? Had I left both of them at the Fontana di Trevi?
We were still standing outside the Starbucks and customers inside gawked at us through the window. I wondered if they could hear us. I glared back at them, and they quickly averted their eyes.
I headed up
Church Street
. David walked with me. We said nothing.
Harvard Square
was alive and in a hurry, oblivious to our fight. Something about it reminded me both of Rome and Manhattan. But whereas New Yorkers didn’t give a crap, the Romans supported us and gave us permission to fight, to be passionate about something, even if we were hating each other’s guts in the moment.
And I didn’t hate him.
We turned a couple of corners and then silently strode all the way down to the bridge that overlooked the Charles River. Once there, we stopped and I leaned against the wall and tried to look over it; it was almost as tall as I was. The day’s weather was more typical for New England at that time of year; brisk and breezy. The wind had kicked up and stung my ears.
“What do we supposedly ‘have’?” I asked.
“I thought we started something in Italy. I thought we could continue it here.”
“What—you mean the sex? Hell, Dev—you can fuck any woman you want and you know it. You’re a fantastic lover.”
“What in the world makes you think that all I wanted from you was sex? At what point did you get the impression that I just wanted to fuck you? Are you really that much in denial? Do you really believe that shit?”
“Tell me what you want, then.”
“I love you, Andrea. I want a long-term relationship with you.”
The words took me by as much surprise as when he’d first said them shortly after his father had died.
“Don’t call me Andrea.”
“Don’t call me Dev.”
He paused before continuing. “And by the way, you didn’t exactly run away when we first kissed that night on the balcony in Rome. You touched my esophagus with your tongue, if I recall.”
“Well, you had finished the strawberries, so…”
“You were horny as hell that night and you know it. So don’t get all high and mighty on me about my supposed conquest of you.”
I zipped up my jacket, pulled the collar close to my neck, and rubbed my ears, feeling the sting from the cold. And yet, neither of us moved from the bridge. David drew closer to me in an effort to shield me from the wind. Then he looked at me, shifting from anger to compassion in a manner of seconds, his eyes glistening in twilight.
“My parents were married for almost forty-five years when my father died. And my mother grieved. She had difficulty adjusting to things, like cooking for one person—she doesn’t know how to do it. She usually winds up throwing the food out because there’s no one to eat the leftovers. Still, to this day. But you know what she did do? Joined a bowling league, for starters—can you believe that? You don’t really know my mother, but trust me—bowling is not the first thing you would think of if you did.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that she wasn’t afraid to try new things. She wasn’t afraid to keep living, and continue with her own life, even though the biggest part of it was gone. And for forty-five years, it was the only life she knew.”
“Are you saying that because I only spent five years of my life with Sam—six, actually—that I shouldn’t have any trouble moving on?”
“No—absolutely not. You know I’m not saying that.”
“Besides, at least your mother and you and the rest of your family got to say goodbye to your father. You knew his days were numbered. You got to tell him the things you wanted to tell him.”
He said nothing; just wistfully looked out at the water.
“Didn’t you?” I asked.
“Yes, I did. Two days before he died. I told him that I loved him, and he told me that he loved me.”
I wanted to take his hand, to extend the same compassion to him that he was extending to me. And yet, my own hand stayed lodged in the pocket of my jacket, refusing to move.
“I’m glad you got that chance. I didn’t have that with Sam. I didn’t get to tell him one last time that I loved him, didn’t get to make love to him one last time, or thank him for the joy he gave me, or hold him in my arms. He went out for a bottle of sparkling cider and never came back.”
Tears came to my eyes.
“I have no idea how it must feel to have someone you love ripped out of your life like that and I’m not trying to pretend that I do. I’m not telling you to get over it or anything like that. My mother had the opportunity to join a support group—also out of her comfort zone, I must mention—when my dad was diagnosed, and fortunately she was able to foresee that her life was going to change. And someone in that group was able to show her that, although difficult, this could also be an opportunity to explore and use her life in ways she might not have previously considered. She lost her husband, but she didn’t lose herself. She reinvented herself. It wasn’t easy, but you should see her now.”
“She’s had over five years to do that.”
“There’s no timetable, ya know. Look…” He turned me so that we were facing each other, and touched my wind-burned cheek. “I remember that woman who was so hidden away, so ashamed of her body and afraid that she might be unlovable because of what she didn’t know.”
One by one, the tears slid down my cheeks.
“I also remember the woman in Rome who cried cathartically in my arms for hours—I don’t think I ever loved you as much as I did for those hours, Andi. That was you coming out from behind the curtain, and I was so glad to see it, as heartbreaking as it was.”
He tenderly smudged each tear away as they fell.
“You can’t go back to the way things were, Andi. You can’t be the woman you were when we first met, and you can’t be who you were when Sam was alive. The only option is to move forward, and be who you authentically are, the part of you that no tragedy or childhood wound can touch.”
I went into his arms and he held me close.
“I thought I was ready in Rome, right before we left. Guess I was wrong,” I said between sniffles and sobs.
“No you weren’t. You just got scared and hid her away again. You need to let her out.”
“How do I do that?”
“Forgiveness,” he answered.
“Who do I need to forgive?”
“Sam for dying, yourself for being powerless to stop it from happening, the drunk driver…”
Something inside me started burning, not unlike the rage I felt when I blew up at my students a little over a year ago. I didn’t want to talk about this anymore…how could I stop him from talking about this anymore?
I kissed him.
He smiled warmly.
“I’m freezing my ass off on this bridge, you know,” I said.
“Me too. Wanna get a cup of coffee?”
“Didn’t this fight begin at Starbucks?” I asked.
“Wanna get into a hot bath, then?” He moved his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx.
I smiled slyly and winked. “Last one in has to sponge the other.”
With that, he pretended to dart off in a sprint. We crossed to the other side of the bridge, arm in arm, and went back to his place, where we enjoyed an evening reminiscent of the bathtub date from our short-lived arrangement years ago, only this time I spent the night with him in his bed.
Chapter Twenty-six
THE DAY AFTER DAVID AND I RECONCILED, I TOOK OUT the journal I had kept while in Rome, and found the page on which I listed my “anniversary goals.”
Start a book club.
Start a writers group.
Research for a journal article about the rhetoric of death.
Get back to teaching.
Take a trip somewhere else.
First, I changed the name of the list to “Summer Goals” and added a fifth item: Finish Sam’s novel. Second, I put together a book club consisting of Miranda; Piero, the sexy Italian teacher; Sam’s friend George from EdmundCollege; and Jeff and Patsy Baxter. We decided to start with an oldie but a goodie: Catch 22. The writers group was trickier. David wanted in on it, but I didn’t know who else to ask. When Sam died, I’d isolated myself from so many of our friends that I felt awkward about calling them up out of the blue. Of course, I wanted Maggie to be a part of it, but she was too far away. I’d been trying to convince her to leave Brooklyn and move back to Massachusetts, where we’d first met, but she had tenure at Brooklyn U and didn’t want to start over.
As for the academic article, conducting research was never something I enjoyed doing even when life was sweet and normal and predictable, but I wasn’t ready to check that one off the list just yet.
***
Jeff and I met for lunch at one of the bar-and-grill places in Amherst to discuss my return to teaching.
“I don’t know, Jeff,” I said. “Every time I even think about re-entering a classroom, my palms start to sweat and I get nauseous.”
“Sooner or later you have to get back on the horse, don’t you? The longer you wait, the harder it’s gonna be. We’ll ease you back in slowly. We’ll give you two grad level courses: The Introduction to Rhetorical Theory class and the Robert Connors Essays seminar. No freshmen. What do you think?”
I raised my eyebrows at the mention of the second course—he knew I’d had my eye on it once upon a time—and went back to poking at my salad. “Maybe.”
“Thing is, Andi, I don’t know if you’ll have a place to come back to if you take another semester of teaching off. The contract is pretty strict about that. You’ve had so much time off already.”
“I really don’t know if I want to go back at all.”
“What do you mean, ‘at all’? Are you saying you want to leave the university altogether?”
“I don’t know. It was a thought.”
“I actually thought you just finished a good year here,” he said.
“I did.”
“Then why do you want to leave?”
I sipped my water. “Don’t worry about it, Jeff. Forget I said anything.”
“If you leave, then what?”
“I’m not hurting for money, if that’s what you mean. And I can still write, you know.”
“And that’s enough for you?” he asked.
“For right now, yes. It’d be nice to write something that isn’t up for peer review and doesn’t end up as yet another line on the CV.”
“I think you’ve had a more illustrious career than that the last few years,” he argued.
“It’s getting old fast.”
“I thought you loved it.”
I pushed my salad away and took another sip of water. “I do. Or I did. I don’t know anymore.”
Jeff finished his beer. “What about that guy you’ve been seeing?”
“Devin?” I said absent-mindedly; I was still calling him that whenever I talked to Maggie and sometimes Melody.
“Devin?” he asked, confused.
“—I mean David,” I quickly corrected.
“David?”
“Yeah?”
“Who the hell is Devin?”
“No one,” I said, now gulping my water and spilling some on my shirt.
“Well, what about him?” he asked.
“What about who?”
“Is this an Abbott and Costello routine?”
“It’s starting to feel like one,” I said.
“Well?” he asked, a hint of impatience in his voice.
“What was your question?”
Jeff motioned to the waiter for another beer. I appreciated that he asked me beforehand if it bothered me. “I just thought it must be a good sign that you’re seeing someone.”
“David and I have known each other for a long time. We met when I was at BrooklynU.”
“Was he a professor?”
“No, he was an es…” I quickly coughed on my words. “…an especially resourceful guy. He’s an art dealer. We were friends and then we lost touch until earlier this year. But it’s complicated, you know?”
“Look kid, I just want you to be happy, and I want to see you around the hallways again. That place is so god-awful depressing when you’re not around. You always make it fun.”
“I thought I made it even more depressing, since, you know...”
“Kid, your worst day doesn’t match the inherent misery of some of our faculty and administrators,” he said, followed by a quick eye roll. I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Shit, man. You have got to get out of this role as chairperson.”
He laughed with me. We clinked our glasses and toasted our fucked-up colleagues.
That left traveling. And Sam’s novel.
I remembered telling Melody that Sam had wanted to start traveling. I also remembered Melody telling me to fulfill some of Sam’s goals if I couldn’t think of any of my own. I knew of at least two now. I hadn’t looked at the novel since I’d first stumbled across it. And yet, I also hadn’t stopped thinking about it. In addition to the draft, I had found a folder of notes regarding characters and possible storylines and plot twists. No ideas for an ending, however. Apparently he had no idea where this was going to take him, but he seemed willing to be led. The folder also contained a Google Map of Lima, a personal essay written by a Harvard grad school buddy on the currency system in Peru, and a couple of travel brochures to Machu Picchu.
Why Peru? I wondered. He had never expressed a specific interest there before. Then again, apparently Sam had kept several secrets from me.
***
David and I were at his place, making spaghetti and meatballs. I still wasn’t ready for him to come to my house.
“Ever been to Peru?” I asked.
“No, why?”
“Just wondering. I found a brochure in Sam’s desk. I think he was contemplating a trip.”
“Do you wanna go?” he asked before slurping a strand of spaghetti. He then broke off another strand and handed it to me for tasting.
“Are you inviting me?” I asked. I ate the spaghetti strand and advised him to let it cook for another minute.
“I’m just asking, is all,” he said.
“I don’t know. Maybe. If I did, would you wanna go with me?”
“Possibly,” he answered, and proceeded to set the table.
He didn’t sound gung ho about the idea. I stirred the sauce pensively and thought about brushing up on my Spanish.
***
Two days later, I printed out the draft of Sam’s novel and read it carefully, making edits and underlines and notes in the margins. I wrote down a lot of questions, which I usually did when either Sam (or my students) gave me something to read. I’d ask questions and then give it back to him and we’d sit and talk about it and he was always so grateful for the insight and would tell me that my students were lucky to have me. David had said that too, as Devin, when I had given him writing instruction.
Maggie was right—this novel was something Sam and I were working on together. Every question that I jotted in the margin was a question to him. Sometimes I even found myself talking to him out loud. “How do you want me to do this? Should Alexander methodically research his father’s past and Peru first before going there? Or should he go to Peru on a whim and let it all unravel before him? What’s the deal with this guy? What is his story?”
I stuck the Summer Goals list on the fridge with a magnet and made an additional copy to tape to my bathroom mirror—never had I done that before.
Another new beginning, I thought. One step closer to the ordinary world.