He was a popular teacher of political science at the state university, was a man entering middle age in flight from the wreckage of two failed marriages. He refused to call them that, however—“failed,” as if marriage were an experiment, a test of some giddy hypothesis he’d cooked up in his youth. Gregory was sensitive to value-laden language. Besides, in each case, his commitment to the marriage had been total, absolute, without hedges, without a control. Gregory had loved both women.
He preferred to think of his marriages as “ended”; to him they were distinct blocks in time that may as easily have been the best of times as the worst. Or why not simply the time of his life? For they had been that, too. Gregory Dodd was one of those men who in their mid-forties enjoy casting their past in a slightly elegiac light.
The important thing was that both marriages were ended now, that’s all—the brief marriage of his adolescence and the fifteen-year marriage of his young manhood: over and done with, and sufficiently behind him that he was able to begin anew, as it were, and he had done that, he believed, with Susan. The elegiac view, even if somewhat premature, makes renewal possible. So that, by falling in love with Susan, Gregory felt that he had moved into a new block of time, one that was as endless-seeming as each of the others had been in the beginning, and he was thrilled again. And now, once more, it was Christmas Eve, and even though Gregory’s own three nearly grown children were in the home of their mother, his second ex-wife, he was nonetheless playing Santa Claus again, loading his car with presents for Susan and her three children, much younger than his, driving down on a snowy night from his house in New Hampshire to Susan’s shabby flat just beyond Boston in Jamaica Plain, Handel’s Messiah roaring from the radio and, at the chorus, full-throated Santa at the wheel singing gladly along: Hallelujah, hallelujah, hal-la-loo-loo-yah!
In New Hampshire, the snow had been dry and blew at the car from the darkness ahead in long white strings, and driving on the Interstate was easy. He kept the Audi at seventy all the way into Charlestown. But here in the city, as he crossed the Fens from Kenmore Square to Huntington, taking the quicker back way across Boston’s South End to Jamaica Plain, the snow was wet and fell in fat flakes that slickened and made driving difficult. It was the night before Christmas, and traffic was light; the nearly empty city streets and darkened brick buildings were beautiful to Gregory: they exuded a stoical melancholy that reminded him of an Edward Hopper painting, although he couldn’t remember which one.
He had overspent, he knew, as usual, but what the hell, it would be worth it to see Susan’s grateful delight when he brought into her living room and heaped under the tinsel-covered tree the dozens of carefully wrapped gifts he’d carted all the way down from New Hampshire for her children. And for her, too—a lovely, dark green, velour robe, Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, all three volumes, an espresso machine he’d ordered in October from the Williams-Sonoma catalog, and an antique cameo pin he had found in a boutique in Portsmouth. He would have to march up and down those narrow, sour-smelling stairs from the car three times to unload it all.
Susan was ten years younger than Gregory, a photographer whose harshly documentary style was out of favor, especially in Boston, and who lived close to the same line of poverty that most of her subjects, blacks and Hispanics in the projects and the worst sections of Roxbury, lived below. She viewed her poverty as the direct consequence and expression of her art; Gregory regarded it as a permanent form of bohemianism and a plight, which he tried to ameliorate with his bourgeois common sense and generosity. He balanced Susan’s checkbook for her and for her birthday had bought her a dishwasher.
Near the Museum of Fine Arts, Gregory slowed and turned left off Huntington onto a potholed side street, following the taillights of the only other car in sight. The two vehicles moved past dark, high buildings—alternating rows of warehouses and public housing from the fifties and sixties—where here and there a short string of Christmas lights or a solitary electric candle blinked from a window as if with sarcasm. The car ahead had slowed; the driver seemed to be looking for a number on one of the graffiti-splashed doorways. This was not so much a neighborhood as a zone of half-destroyed buildings located between construction sites, a no-man’s-land still being fought over by opposing armies; people lived here, but not by choice, and only temporarily.
In the seventies Susan and her ex-husband, the father of her three daughters, had been active in the Weather Underground. Her radical past and marriage she regarded as a chapter in her life that had ended, although the momentum of that chapter had carried over long enough for her to have been five months pregnant with her third child before finally obtaining a divorce. By then her husband had gone underground altogether, and separating her life from his, she felt, had been like granting him his last wish. It had certainly been the best thing for the children. A year later, with two white women and a black man, he tried to rob a Brink’s truck in Framingham, and a guard had been shot and killed. Susan’s ex-husband and one of the women had been captured the following day in upstate New York, and the rest, as she said, was history.
Gregory had tried to get Susan to tell him more about her life with her ex-husband; he was fascinated by it, slightly aroused in a sexual way that he did not understand, and he wanted either to chase his arousal into desire and satisfy it or else to exorcise it altogether. There were no pictures of the man in her apartment, and the children never spoke of him. It was as if he had died before they were born and their only parent was their mother.
Though the girls were little more than a year apart in age, the way Susan described it, she and their father had never actually cohabited: “Oh, God, it goes back to college, really, to Brandeis. But he was married to the Movement, from the start, like an organizer, sort of He’d show up for a few days, and then he’d be gone for a month, sometimes longer,” she said in her vague and elliptical way, which frustrated and sometimes annoyed Gregory.
Usually, when they talked about her marriage it was late at night in bed, after making love, over cigarettes and the last glass of wine from the second bottle. He didn’t want to press her on the subject, to insist that she provide details, instances, dates and times and specific circumstances—although he surely did want to know them all—for fear that she would think he was unnaturally fixated on this closed chapter of her life. “It was like, every time we made love, I got pregnant. I couldn’t take the pill, it made me sick and fluttery and all, and nothing worked. We didn’t do it all that much,” she said, and lightly laughed.
“Well, three times at least,” Gregory said.
“At least,” she said, and she punched him on the shoulder. “C’mon, Gregory, it’s history.”
“I know, I know. I’m only kidding you.”
The vehicle ahead suddenly stopped, and Gregory hit the brakes, and the Audi slid and came to a stop a few feet behind it. Gregory reached over and turned down the radio, puzzled. The car ahead of him was a battered, ten-year-old Chrysler with a huge, flat trunk; the number plate was wired loosely to the rear bumper, and Gregory imagined fixing it with a pair of twenty-cent stove bolts.
The rear window of the Chrysler was covered with snow, and Gregory couldn’t see inside. He cut left and pulled out to pass by, and as he drew abreast of the other car, it moved out also, as if to make a U-turn in the middle of the street. Gregory jumped on his brakes and spun the wheel. The Chrysler drew quickly in front of him, the Audi swerved, and when its front bumper ticked the rear bumper of the other car, Gregory thought he heard the number plate clang.
Abruptly, the other car stopped, half-turned in the middle of the deserted street, blocking Gregory’s passage. The driver stepped from the Chrysler and walked slowly toward Gregory. He was a black man, tall and wide, in a leather jacket and watch cap, scowling. A second black man got out of the Chrysler and came along behind. They were both middle-aged, his age, and seemed irritated, but not threatening. A mistake, Gregory thought. He must not have known I was so close to him. Gregory pressed the button and lowered his window, to explain and even apologize for nearly colliding with the man’s car and ruining Christmas for all of them.
He said, “I thought you were stopped—” and the larger of the two men simply said, “Yeah,” and slammed his fist through the open window straight into Gregory’s face. Then they turned and walked back to their car and got in. Gregory spat a piece of tooth, touched his lip with fingertips, and came away with blood; he looked at the steering wheel and thought: I must have hit the wheel when I stopped; I must have broken my mouth by accident; something that I don’t know about must be what just happened.
The Chrysler pulled back onto the street and moved slowly away, its taillights shrinking in the snowy distance, and Gregory began to tremble. Rage washed over him like a cold wave, and when he was covered, his entire body turned suddenly hot. He touched his lips again and found that they had swollen to nearly twice their normal size. His shirt was spattered with his blood, and when he groped through his mouth with his tongue, he realized that a tooth had been broken and several others loosened by the blow.
The Chrysler was gone now, and Gregory was alone on the street, sitting in his car with all his presents for Susan and her children. What was he to do now? Where could he go, his face all bloody and swollen, his chest heaving, his hands clenched to the steering wheel as if he were being yanked violently from the car? He was utterly ridiculous to himself. He was a fool, a man whose life was unknown to him and out of control, a man whose past was lost to him, and whose future was a deliberate, willed fantasy. He felt like an unattached speck of matter afloat in space, and all he wanted was to be in his own home with his own children and their mother, in his proper place, his life intact, all the parts connected and sequential.
He put the car into gear and drove slowly away, toward Susan’s home, where she lived with her children. He knew that she would be alarmed when she saw him and then would comfort and take care of him. But they would not be the same together as they had been before and as he had planned, so that while he drove he had to fight against the new and terrible longing to turn back.