Starting Over by Dan Wakefield Page B

creak in the hallway.
    Potter didn’t move or turn to look.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” the boy’s voice asked in a sleepy grouch.
    Potter closed his eyes as tight as he could.
    â€œYou get right back to bed this minute immediately,” Renée said in a quaking sort of hiss, “you get right back to bed and go to sleep.”
    After a silent infinity, she let out a sigh, and Potter raised his head. Renée was sitting up, but huddled over, her hands pressed against her temples. She looked cold and bony and frail, like a refugee or a prisoner who had just been stripped of his only clothing.
    â€œJesus,” Potter said softly. “I’m sorry.”
    â€œDon’t be.”
    Potter sat up on the couch. His head was throbbing, and his prick had shrunk to what felt like the size of a cigarette. Renée picked up her nightgown and draped it around her shoulders, shivering. Potter looked down at the heap of his clothes, inside out and messily tangled. It looked to him like a snapshot of his life.
    When he left he kissed her lightly on the forehead and said he would call her.
    She thanked him for the lovely dinner.
    The day after his date with Renée, Potter had to teach. He had an Alka-Seltzer, three aspirin, and a glass of orange juice for breakfast, but still he felt nauseous and aching. The minutes ticked off like separate eternities. He repeated himself, coughed a lot, and could hear the restless motions of legs crossing, pages riffling, throats clearing, and yawns. Between classes he went to his office, closed the door, and sat with his head on his desk. For lunch, he had one of the secretaries in the English office bring him back a grilled cheese sandwich and a chocolate malt. By the time he got through his PR seminar in the afternoon he was beginning to revive, but he still felt shaky. He figured fresh air would do him good.
    He strolled down Beacon Street toward Arlington, and took one of the paths that curled into the Public Gardens. The air was cool and brisk, and so were the people. No one was idling, as they did in the Indian summer time, but all seemed to walk with purpose, toward some appointed destination. The sky was cold, lavender and pink. Austere. Potter stopped by his favorite statue, the one commemorating the discovery and first medical use of ether. The statue was of a woman holding a child. On one side of the base was inscribed a line from Revelation: “Neither shall there be any more pain—”
    Potter wondered if he reported to the emergency ward of the world famous Mass General Hospital, whether they would give him a dose of ether. If he were ever a president or dictator, he would see that such a service was available to the public, an emergency facility that would dispense some sort of pill or gas or potion for people who felt the kind of pain that came from having nothing to do and nowhere to go and feeling nothing inside.
    In the absence of such a service, he walked. He walked to the glorious statue of George Washington on horseback, and then up the wide center mall of Commonwealth Avenue, with its grey and weather-greened statues of assorted great men of the past. He stopped briefly at each one, as he often did, reading the inscriptions again, making a kind of silent visitation to their memory. There was Alexander Hamilton, and John Glover, a revolutionary soldier from Marblehead. There was Patrick Collins, a turn-of-the-century mayor of Boston, whose qualities engraved in stone proclaimed not only that he was honest and talented, but also that he was “serviceable.” Potter liked that. The notion of being a “serviceable” man. But most of all he liked the staunch figure of William Lloyd Garrison, at ease in a chair that seemed like a throne, whose base bore the words of the great man himself declaring that “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be