Starting Over Read Free Page A

that.
    When Max and Marva went to bed, Potter stayed up, keeping the fire in the library going, drinking giant Scotch and sodas, pondering his possible futures. He wished, in a way, he could just move in with the Bertelsens—like a black-sheep son, unfit for employment—and hide in the warm safety of their house, their friendly protection, their ordered lives.
    The thought of the old dream of acting reminded him of the dangers of the world outside, the dangers of caring and desiring, of wanting something so bad you can taste it, but having it always recede before you until in order to live at all you had to turn your back on it—swear off it as surely as an alcoholic swears off the sauce—and for something less, something else.
    The dream had become a memory, still vivid and painful. When Potter finished college and the Navy and came to New York, he came with the casual assumption that—with time and the breaks and professional training—he would emerge as a new Marlon Brando or Jason Robards, and after a successful run on Broadway in a new Tennessee Williams hit, he would hop off to Hollywood, swatting producers away like gnats, and do the star bit, but not let himself be taken in. He played in his mind many times the scene in which he politely told the roomful of Hollywood moguls that he couldn’t accept their fantastic offer for the lead in the screen version of a new Harold Robbins novel, but had chosen instead to return to New York and do Shakespeare in the Park for scale.
    After four years of making the rounds, with his smile and his folder of glossy profile photos, he landed one part in a TV drama series in which he dashed into a room and said, “Telegram for Mr. Bostwick.”
    It did not lead on to bigger things.
    One afternoon at a casting call for parts in a new TV crime series Potter was sitting on the usual bench, crowded with other palmsweating aspirants, his head aching and his feet sore, wanting to take a piss but afraid to be gone in case his name was called, when a door was flung open from the inner sanctum, the warm secret source of carpeted power, and out came a girl he saw around a lot at parties, who was bright and on her way up and treated him with a flirtatious sort of friendliness. Her name was Madeline and she never wore makeup except on her eyelids. They were purple. Potter moved slightly forward, simply to greet her, but before he could open his mouth she flashed by him, and, though her eyes never fell upon him, never made the slightest flicker in his direction, her long delicate arm, as if guided by radar, reached out at the moment she was precisely perpendicular to him, and her longnailed fingers made a quick, fleeting ruffle through his hair, while, at the same split-second she said, “Hi, Love,” and then she was gone, with her papers and her power and her purple eyelids.
    Potter sat for a moment not moving; his scalp, where her fingers had flicked across it, felt on fire. He did not see the room, or the people in it, but he stood up and moved, in a trance, to the elevator. It came, and he pressed the lobby button and stood facing front. He turned right, out the glass revolving doors, and with his mind as blank as a newly washed blackboard, he walked to the nearest city trash basket and stuffed in the folder containing his résumé and his glossy photos and walked on, as if guided by an electronic beam, to the nearest sign that said LIQUOR, walked in and asked in a pleasant monotone for a quart of Cutty Sark, hailed a taxi, went back to the apartment he shared with a girl named Tandy who had graduated magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr and was working her way up in publishing and said she would help pay the rent and do the dishes and whatever the fuck needed to be done to help Potter make it in the theatre because she believed both in Potter and the theatre.
    When she came home she found him in his underwear guzzling from the bottle, glassy-eyed, and when