Midnight in Boston

Back in my unexpectedly fancy hotel suite, looking out at the lights on the Charles.  It's probably 30 years since I've been here, but the feeling of Boston never changes.  It's not home to me in the way that New York City is, but there's still that familiarity, that piece of me that still belongs here.

Belongs here, belongs with the wonderful friend with whom I had dinner... but then, alone, waiting for the bus in the rain, there's time to think again, and none of my thoughts are happy. 

For starters, I don't want to go to this conference.  It would be more accurate to say that I'm frightened to go.  There are people who will be here who are part of a long-ago past, when I was a rising star in this field.  People who I haven't seen in 15 years, people who probably won't remember me... or if they do, it may not be in a good way.  It's a small academic world, and malice travels faster than truth.  Of course, I type that, and it seems more than a little absurd.  But you know how it is, you know you've heard something about that person, and you can't remember quite what, but you look at them a little differently...

Plus of course, there's my future employment opportunity, the fantastic contract that existed for one brief moment and then didn't.  But perhaps will.  Or not.  And the bridges that I might or might not have burned with my other publisher.  There's just nothing like feeling like you're going to be in a room of people who dislike you or are suspicious of you to just make you feel totally creeped out.  And that's everything that I feel about this.

When I was sitting at the bus station, I wanted to write about Michael and grief and walking around wanting to scream, to say, look at me!  There has been this tragedy, and no one can see it!  I can't even bear to think about that now, and the reality it that tomorrow, the next few days, is all about pretending that tragedy never happened.

I don't know how I will bear it. 

I will, of course.  One foot in front of the other.  Perhaps this will be my last conference.  Perhaps it will all fall together in some better way, some unexpected way that will make this all right. 

I can't see the future.  It's as hazy as the moon tonight.

A story of the past

When I was 17, I fell in love.  Not with a man, but with a person and a lifestyle and with the idea of belonging to it.

I think that we’re all looking for ourselves at that age, who to be, how to be.  I see that in my kids, Caitlin with her friends and the changes in who she wants to be from day to day, defining herself as “I’m the kind of person who _____”, Jonathan with his style and his shades and his attitudes.  I wanted to be… I don’t even know now, but I think that I’ve always wanted to be the kid that I would have been if we’d stayed in Connecticut rather than moving to rural Maine when I was 12. 

I had two friends in school, Jacquie and Chris.  Brother and sister, a little younger than me.  Their father owned the hardware store in town, and that was pretty much all I knew about their family background, until it surfaced that their mother lived in Boston.  I don’t even remember how it came about any more, but I was invited to take the bus down to Boston with them, to stay with their mother. 

And so I did, of course, and entered a world that I wanted with all my being.  Their mother, Suzy, was twice divorced by then, with another child, an adorable boy of 6 or 7.  And she was magic.  Not conventionally pretty, but the kind of woman that men love, petite and funny and possessed of a deep, sexy voice that made anything seem possible.  She was fun.  She drank vodka martinis from a bottle that she kept in the freezer, and let me drink them, too.  We took picnics to the Mount Auburn Cemetery, across the street from her lovely Cambridge apartment.  We ate dinners of lambs tongues on the roof of the building, and we watched the stars.  We went to church at this wonderful place where everyone knew everyone, and we helped with the breakfast that was served after the service, and I was instantly part of it all.  I loved her, and I wanted to be her, and I wanted to have that life and her style and everything.

I became instantly involved in the saga of Hugh, the man she’d been dating for a while, and her new interest, Bill, a lawyer at the prestigious firm at which she was a paralegal.  We all made plans, me and Suzy and the kids and later Bill, for vacations in Maine and what we would do at Christmas.  And I was home. 

I started college that fall, and Suzy would write me long. long letters, and Bill would talk to me on the phone and give me advice and debate with me about constitutional law, and they were my alternate family, the family that I wanted to have.  I would come stay for a few days every time I headed home or to school.  I hadn’t yet learned that guests and fish smell after three days, but I always came laden with gifts and happiness and love.

Until it all unraveled in the wink of an eye.

I can’t even remember the timing of it any more.  It must have been the end of my freshman year.  And I’d come to stay at Suzy’s on my way back to Maine.  And we were having dinner, and drinking martinis, and she said, I love you, but I have to ask you to leave.  I was, probably first of all, drunk, as was she.  And then astonished.  And then wounded.  In retrospect, I think sitting down and having some kind of conversation about this might have made sense, but I did what was characteristic of me at the time; I walked out the door, and I never spoke to her again. 

I remember that night so clearly… or as clearly as is possible, given years and vodka.  Bundling all my stuff into my crumbling ’65 VW bug and driving over to Bill’s… Boston is a nightmare to drive in anyway, especially if you don’t know it well, and you’re upset and drunk.  I kept accidentally finding the Old North Church, adding a bit of surreal to the whole thing.  I spent the night at Bill’s, and the next day, I went home to Maine, and I never spoke to either of them again.

And my heart broke, more than a little, because I loved them, and more than that, I loved who I was with them, I loved that world.

A different person might have asked, point-blank, for an explanation, and honestly, looking back, I don’t know why I didn’t.  I tried to get some kind of answer from her kids, later, but again, it was never a point-blank thing, and the answers were kind of “she’s like that.”  Or things that made no sense to me.  My friendship with them, never central, waned as high school things do. 

I’m ten years older now than Suzy was then, and I can try to make some guesses about what happened… how hard it would be to pet a puppy and suddenly find that you’d adopted it.  That seems most likely to me.  I don’t know how I would have dealt with this, honestly, except that I would not have allowed a drunken 18 year old to get into a car.  It would have been hard for me to say, you are spending too much time here.  Or whatever the real problem was, since I have no true idea.

People are different.  I was an 18 year old damaged and needy kid.  She was a 39 year old alcoholic and probably very damaged woman.  We were both pretty damn self-absorbed… at different stages and for different reasons.  I find, writing about it, that I’ve lost most of the curiosity and hurt about what happened, but I still mourn the loss of that world, the world that I wanted, the world that I felt like I fit into so neatly.  And those people, sparkly and kind and who I wanted to be. 

I’ve never been back to Boston since then.

There are only three times in my life when I’ve felt that instant sense of slotting into somewhere I belonged; one very recently, which is what made this all come to my mind.  Once with John, the man I loved so much and couldn’t get over for so long.  And this time, in Boston, so long ago.  I don’t know what any of it means, honestly, except that it makes me afraid of my instinct, and afraid, too, of being that homeless puppy again, wanting so much to be loved and ruining everything with your need. 

And on a side note, I did some Googling.  Bill, sadly, died five years ago of leukemia.  Just before his only daughter graduated from high school.  He stayed in Boston, still owned the Beacon hill building that he had when I knew him, but moved to Brookline at some point and also changed law firms.  He was a wonderful man, and I am sad to know that he’s no longer here.  His daughter loves Scotland and ice hockey and looks a little like him. 

Suzy moved to the Midwest years ago and married again… I knew this before.  She’s in her 70s now, and there’s not much record, although she doesn’t seem to have been at the wedding of her son, the tiny boy of my memory who is now tall and gorgeous and lives in Massachusetts.