Free Five Days by Douglas Kennedy Page A

turns choosing the book under discussion and never raise objections if it is out of what Lucy once dubbed ‘our respective literary comfort zones’. The truth is, we both share a similar sensibility when it comes to novels. No fantasy. No science fiction (though we did, at my suggestion, read Ray Bradbury’s
The Martian Chronicles
– which we both agreed had more to do with things mid-century American than actual extraterrestrial matters). And no treacly romantic stuff. Having discovered early on that we both read to find windows into our own dilemmas, our choices (outside of
The Brothers Karamazov
– my idea – and
Gravity’s Rainbow –
Lucy’s suggestion, and a book which we spent four evenings trying to understand) have largely centered around books which reflect the difficulties inherent in day-to-day life. So we’ve veered towards novels about family complexities (
Dombey and Son
), money complexities (
The Way We Live Now
), state-of-the-nation complexities (
An American Tragedy
,
Babbitt
), and (no surprise here) marital complexities (
The War Between the Tates, Couples
,
Madame Bovary
). We always spend around ninety minutes each week talking animatedly about the novel under discussion – though these Thursday rendezvous (which inevitably stretch to three hours) are also an opportunity for us to catch up with what Lucy once elegantly called ‘our ongoing weather systems’; the stuff that has seemed to constantly circle around our respective lives.
    Lucy is a year my senior. She is about the smartest person I know. She went to Smith, joined the Peace Corps, taught in difficult places like The Gambia and Burkina Faso (I had to check out a map to see where that was), then traveled the world for a year. Upon returning to her native Boston she promptly fell in love with a PhD candidate at Harvard named Harry Ricks. Harry landed a job teaching American history at Colby just after he got his doctorate. Lucy retrained in library science and also found a job at the college. Then she lost two pregnancies back to back – the first at three months, the second (even more heartbreakingly) at eight months. Then her newly tenured husband ran off with a colleague (a dance instructor). Then she was badly advised legally and came away from the marriage with virtually nothing. Then she decided that staying at Colby was emotionally impossible – for all sorts of obvious reasons. So she packed up her decade-old Toyota with her worldly goods and headed down to Damariscotta after landing a job at the local high school, running their library.
    She was thirty-six when she got here – and I met her during one of her weekend ‘extra money’ shifts at the library in the center of town. We became fast friends. She is the one and only person in the world with whom I confide – and she also knows she can talk with me about virtually anything. Dan has always been pleasant and reasonably welcoming towards Lucy – especially as she usually spends part of Christmas Day with us (she has no direct family of her own). But he is also a little suspicious of her, as he knows she is my ally. Just as he senses what I know Lucy thinks, but has never articulated: that Dan and I are a mismatch. That’s been one of the unwritten rules of our friendship: we tell ourselves everything that we want to share. We ask advice and give it reciprocally. But we each stop short of saying what we really feel about the other’s stuff. Lucy, for example, had a two-year relationship with a wildly inappropriate man named David Robby – a would-be writer who’d fled a bad marriage and a failed career in advertising, and was one of those guys who had just enough of a trust fund to ruin him. Coastal Maine is full of metropolitan refugees like David – whose personal or professional life (or both) have flat-lined and who have come to our corner of the northeast to reinvent themselves. The