{"id":5802,"date":"2014-05-01T10:00:54","date_gmt":"2014-05-01T10:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/?p=5802"},"modified":"2014-12-20T04:46:16","modified_gmt":"2014-12-20T04:46:16","slug":"thank-you-anne-bernay-wherever-you-are-a-writing-romance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/thank-you-anne-bernay-wherever-you-are-a-writing-romance\/","title":{"rendered":"Thank You, Anne Bernay, Wherever You Are\u2014A Writing Romance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cChris, whatever you do, just keep writing.\u201d<\/strong><\/em>
\n \u2014Anne Bernay, 5\/1994<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n


\n<\/strong>Twenty years ago\u00a0<\/strong>this month, I\u00a0had no idea what I was doing with my life. I knew I wanted to write, and that\u2019s it. That\u2019s all I knew.<\/p>\n

Since graduating from college in Boston two years earlier, I had been working as a reporter for a weekly newspaper. Then\u2014very briefly, while between reporting jobs\u2014a waiter, a substitute teacher, and a Radio Shack salesman. Then a reporter for a daily paper.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Boston skyline.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was in February\u2013March\u00a0of 1994 that my musician friend Tony Scotto and I got the idea of moving to Boston. It would be his first time there, and I was returning. Our brilliantly conceived\u00a0plan amounted to this: he would get a day job that enabled him to gig at night, and I would wait tables and write while looking for a reporting job.<\/p>\n

Like many plans\u2014especially the quarter-baked ones of two 24-year-olds\u2014they disintegrated soon after we settled in. Tony and I had a temporary falling-out, and I was forced to find another place to live. Luckily, my longest friend (now about 35 years!), Jason Scott<\/a>, came to my rescue by inviting me to share his one-room studio apartment across the river in Cambridge for a while. So I did.<\/p>\n

Jason had never been particularly \u201cdomestic\u201d (major understatement), so when I showed up and saw the filthy kitchen, the mountains of laundry, and the general state of disorder in the place, I wasn\u2019t at all surprised, and I set out to fix it. I had that day off from the restaurant where I was working\u00a0(Atlantic Fish Company on Boylston Street), so I spent the entire day cleaning the apartment and preparing a nice meal for my friend. And we ate it together\u2014he on his futon bed, I on my deluxe cot (which cot, by the way, Jason and his girlfriend at the time soon broke\u2014don\u2019t ask).<\/p>\n

\"Au<\/a>
Au Bon Pain, Harvard Square.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Besides waiting tables 4\u20135 days and\/or nights a week, I was writing my fiction\u2014every day. Since the apartment (366 Harvard St.) was so tiny, and since Jason\u2019s snoring rivaled the sawmill that Hemingway lived above in Paris for a while, each morning I walked down to Harvard Square and set up among the chess players, the students, and the homeless newspaper hawkers. And there I wrote.<\/p>\n

(Right about now, you\u2019re asking yourself, \u201cWhat does all of this have to do with Anne Bernay? Who is she? What are you thanking her for?\u201d Well, as Polonius says to Queen Gertrude in my favorite play,\u00a0Hamlet<\/em>, \u201cStay awhile…I will be faithful.\u201d)<\/p>\n

I wrote every morning inside the snug Au Bon Pain caf\u00e9 (or outside, if the weather was nice) from 7:00 until 11:00, and then I was free to walk anywhere in Boston. I went to the Boston Public Library and checked out books. I went to lunch with former professors. And a couple of times, I dressed up and sat in the lobby of the Copley Plaza Hotel eye-flirting with the beautiful rich women. I was free, that is, unless I had to wait tables that afternoon or evening.<\/p>\n

I was\u00a0not<\/em> a good waiter. I tried, believe me, but it required skills I simply don\u2019t have. Like multitasking. When given more than three tables, I would start to panic. Thankfully, the female waitstaff all liked or pitied me, and they frequently helped me out. One of them, Helen\u2014a lovely girl from Ireland\u2014said to me, \u201cChris, you can never work in service. You\u2019re always thinking about something else.\u201d And she was right. Often during a shift, I would duck into the walk-in refrigerator and write something in my pocket notebook.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Atlantic Fish Company in Boston.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Still, even with the help of other waitstaff, the pressure got to me, and it came to a head the day after the Boston Marathon. I had been working double-shifts for 10 days straight, I hadn\u2019t been able to write very much, and I was scheduled for another double that day. I snapped. I told the assistant manager that I needed a break.<\/p>\n

She refused. We argued. And I quit.<\/p>\n

I remember that as soon as I walked out of there with my meager tips for the day, I took a homeless man to dinner.<\/p>\n

With my afternoons and evenings now free as well, after my morning writing sessions at the Au Bon Pain, I began taking longer and longer excursions into Boston, often ending up at a bar, drinking a beer and making notes about my adventures that day. And it was at one of those bars, at the end of the work day on May 10, 1994, that I met Anne Bernay.<\/p>\n

At rush hour that evening I saw a covey of attractive, laughing young women flock into Bertucci\u2019s, a brick oven pizzeria near Faneuil Hall. The womens’ shoes echoed on the cobblestones, and when I got a whiff of their perfume in the salty sea air, I decided to follow them in.<\/p>\n

I was at the bar, jotting down my day\u2019s observations in my pocket notebook. Since quitting the restaurant, at the end of every day of exploring I would stop into a different bar around the city and write down anything unusual that had happened or that I\u2019d seen, heard or smelled. It was practice in the art of observation.\u00a0I sat at one corner of the bar drinking 20-ounce drafts of Sam Adams Boston Ale and trying to recapture these moments that had struck me in some way. One was from a few nights earlier, when I\u2019d been walking back to Cambridge:<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The MIT\/Mass Ave Bridge at night.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cSaw a couple eating dinner on the MIT bridge tonight. He wore a tux and she an evening gown, and they had a complete table set up on the sidewalk with a light blue tablecloth, silverware, candle in a hurricane lamp, and cobalt blue place settings.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

When I finished with my observations exercise, I ordered another beer. Down the bar, a trio of women about my age were smoking, and a miasma of cigarette smoke hung in the air around them. For some reason, the smoke cloud triggered a memory of my first job, at 14, as a busboy and dishwasher in an Italian restaurant.<\/p>\n

Turning back to my notebook, I drifted into the memory, smiling at surprising details like how every Thursday afternoon Sonny would clean out the cash register, bundle up the cash in a paper bag and host a dozen dark-suited men in a closed dining room that evening. The restaurant was right off the Taconic Parkway, about 80 miles north of New York City, so even at age fourteen I had imagination enough to know they were mobsters paying a \u201cvisit.\u201d Three pages in, I ordered another beer and looked around. The smokers were gone.<\/p>\n

\"417EFm69gyL._SY445_\"
Enter redhead Anne Bernay, in an emerald rain slicker.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

However, in their place, a few stools away from me was a woman with fair skin and pale blue eyes. She wore an emerald rain slicker, which I only mention because it perfectly complemented her hair: full, thick, and with loose curls<\/a> that just touched her shoulders, forming little cursive J\u2019s, O\u2019s and S\u2019s, it was a color I\u2019d seen described as \u201cLight Red Copper<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

A pi\u00f1a colada sat on a napkin in front of her, and she was twirling the glass around and around in her fingertips while staring at it. I went back to writing and put down two more sentences and half of another when I noticed her watching me. She must have known that I was on to her because she quickly\u00a0turned her head back to her drink, making her curls jiggle. She took a sip of the pi\u00f1a colada, swallowed and said, \u201cSo, what are you writing?\u201d<\/p>\n

I closed my notebook,\u00a0stopping in mid-sentence (I know this because that entry\u2014May 10, 1994\u2014remains unfinished to this day).<\/p>\n

\u201cI was remembering my first job\u2014as a dishwasher in a mob restaurant.\u201d<\/p>\n

She giggled. \u201cWell, that explains it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cExplains what?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy you were so intense about it. What else do you write?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Not<\/a>
Not what Anne’s red hair looked like, but it was too delicious not to include here.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I gave her my spiel, and in retrospect I probably laid it on a bit thick. I talked about being a \u201cformer\u201d newspaper reporter (I\u2019d left the paper only two months earlier), and that I had a magazine piece coming out soon about a champion tennis player\u2019s experiences at Wimbledon (neglecting to mention that the piece was about my own tennis coach, Gaurav Misra, and that it was going to appear in a local magazine, not Sports Illustrated<\/em>). All the while, she looked unblinkingly at me with those pale blue eyes and shook her head as though in a daze.<\/p>\n

\u201cWow,\u201d she said when I finished, \u201cyou\u2019ve got a lot of guts. Do you do other work to earn a living?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLike a day job?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI do, but I quit it a few days ago. Long story.\u201d<\/p>\n

She looked into her drink. \u201cI wish I were a writer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAh, you wish you were<\/em>,\u201d I said. \u201cThe subjunctive mood. Nice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI majored in English.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere?\u201d<\/p>\n

She told me. \u201cI wrote some stuff for the magazine, too, but I haven\u2019t done anything since.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s never too late,\u201d I said. \u201cWhat do you do now?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a proofreader in a law firm.\u201d She looked down at her drink again.<\/p>\n

\u201cHey, at least you have<\/em> a job.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou<\/em> have a job\u2014you\u2019re a writer,\u201d she said. \u201cJust think of anything else you have to do as experience for your writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Not<\/a>
Not the bar in Bertucci\u2019s, but you get the idea.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I wanted to leap out of my stool, take this woman in my arms and kiss her, but I thought that might be a bit much. Instead I grabbed my things, including my beer, and moved down to the stool beside hers. I gestured to the bartender for two more drinks and put a twenty down to cover them.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou didn\u2019t have to do that,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow else am I going to have my way with you, if I don\u2019t ply you with alcohol?\u201d<\/p>\n

She giggled. \u201cYou\u2019re cute.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou think I\u2019m kidding,\u201d I said. \u201cCan\u2019t you tell I\u2019m one of those guys that needs to get girls drunk first?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI seriously doubt that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cChris Orcutt,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnne Bernay.\u201d<\/p>\n

We shook hands, and I raised my beer.<\/p>\n

\u201cA toast?\u201d Her eyes widened. \u201cTo what?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo beautiful Boston redheads in shiny emerald coats.\u201d<\/p>\n

She smiled and clinked my glass with hers. She wasn\u2019t wearing a wedding ring.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, Chris,\u201d she said, \u201cwhy are you here all alone?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you want the long version or the short version?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, if it were any other guy, I\u2019d want the short version, but I like listening to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGood, I\u2019ll give you the epic version.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Radcliffe<\/a>
Radcliffe Quadrangle\u2014photo by Rose Lincoln.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now…I could tell you about how that evening, after meeting at the bar, Anne took me to dinner, and how we\u00a0walked to the quad at Radcliffe College, sat on a bench and held hands. The air was warm and the lawn was lush, and several old maples in the courtyard stirred in the shadowy breeze.<\/p>\n

I could tell you how we met in Harvard Square a few days later, how she picked me up in her Volkswagen Cabriolet (with the top down) and we played tennis at the courts over at the Business School, and it began to rain, and we kissed in the rain, remembered that the top was down and ran back to the car and toweled off.<\/p>\n

I could tell you about how we went to dinner in the North End, and how the old Italian couple that owned the restaurant thought we were married and gave us a table in the brick courtyard outside and brought us a complimentary bottle of Chianti. I could tell you about how Anne and I painted a picture of a life together, and how we took walks in the Public Garden, and how I met her for lunch a couple times outside\u00a0the law firm where she worked as a proofreader. I could tell you about how she was with a man she didn\u2019t love, and how in two short weeks we fell for each other. I could tell you about all of those things, but I won\u2019t. Not here. Not now.<\/p>\n

What I want to tell you about are the things Anne said to me\u2014words that have sustained me while writing in relative obscurity for the past 20 years. She truly was an angel, and she came along when I most needed one.<\/p>\n

During our dinner in the Italian restaurant,\u00a0I told her about my new job as a parking valet, remarking that it was pathetic compared to her boyfriend\u2019s work as a lawyer. But instead of scoffing at my new job or belittling it, she scowled and said something I\u2019ve never forgotten. She said,<\/p>\n

\u201cChris, don\u2019t let those little shit jobs get you down. You\u2019re a writer. You\u2019re above all that crap. Just think of it as experience for your writing.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For Anne, the days after our dinner in the North End were hell. She and her boyfriend had a big blowout, during which she considered moving out and getting her own apartment. I tried hard to convince her to do it. At some point during this escapade, she came by Jason\u2019s place and sat uncomfortably on the corner of the futon mattress and read through some of my writing. I walked around the block while she read, and when I returned, she put down the pages slowly. Then she turned to me with a smile\u2014a smile that I still remember because it was tinged with awe\u2014and said, \u201cChris, whatever you do, just keep writing.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Looking back on it now, there was finality in that statement. I think she had made up her mind about the kind of life she wanted, and while she admired me and my willingness to live as an artist, I think she knew that she didn\u2019t have it in her to make the necessary sacrifices. (I don\u2019t say this as a criticism, by the way; honestly, I think she would have been nuts<\/em> to choose me over her stable boyfriend.)<\/p>\n

She asked to borrow some of my pages to show her college friends, and the reverence with which she asked and put them in her bag told me I didn\u2019t need to worry about them. Besides, I wanted her to take them. I wanted to guarantee that I saw her at least one last time.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Boston Public Garden.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A few days later, we met in the Public Garden. The ducks were out, as were the swan boats, and the flowers were in bloom. We walked together holding hands, but as soon as someone approached us on the path, we uncoupled because she was worried about bumping into people she knew.<\/p>\n

And once again, she said something that has stuck with me, kept me going all these years, and I realize now that maybe our purpose in meeting was to inspire each other. She said,<\/p>\n

\u201cI told my friends I met a writer and they asked me if he was the real deal. And I said, \u2018Yeah, he is. He really is.\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anne Bernay, wherever you are, when you said that, my heart swelled. You were the first woman who truly appreciated and encouraged my writing.<\/p>\n

Thank you, Anne, wherever you are.<\/p>\n

\u2014Chris<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cChris, whatever you do, just keep writing.\u201d \u2014Anne Bernay, 5\/1994 Twenty years ago\u00a0this month, I\u00a0had no idea what I was doing with my life. I knew I wanted to write, and that\u2019s it. That\u2019s all I knew. Since graduating from college in Boston two years earlier, I had been working as a reporter for a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5875,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,75,7,13,14],"tags":[102,103,110,100,114,108,106,115,107,109,112,111,113,105,104,93,101],"class_list":["post-5802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","category-memoir","category-personal","category-writers","category-writingexperiences","tag-20s","tag-anne-bernay","tag-autobiography","tag-boston","tag-cambridge","tag-coming-of-age","tag-encouragement","tag-harvard","tag-inspiration","tag-literary","tag-literary-biography","tag-memoir-2","tag-nostalgia","tag-personal-history","tag-redheads","tag-writing","tag-youth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5802"}],"version-history":[{"count":83,"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6328,"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5802\/revisions\/6328"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orcutt.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}