It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive (15 page)

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It always has been. That might seem strange to hear from a man like me. But throughout my entire life – since long before leukemia impinged upon it – it’s been the holiday that’s made the most sense.

It’s a less overtly “religious” holiday than most others celebrated in the United States, but it still possesses significant spiritual heft. That’s kept it the one holiday my family feels most safely secular in celebrating. But my attachment goes beyond that. It’s the one day I’ve felt free to shed whatever inhibitions I’ve had in regard to indulging in and displaying gratitude.

Why the inhibition? Has it been a defense against getting my hopes up? If so, the tactic merely ensures that instead of suffering disappointment as a
result
of anything, disappointment will be the precursor
to
everything. The only guarantee there is that I’ll cause myself the pain I’m afraid others might inflict.

Gratitude is the mind-set that allowed me to save my life years ago. When I was newly diagnosed with leukemia, I had to consciously construct a fortress of gratitude from which to battle the overwhelming urge to squander my energies on an unending series of temper tantrums. I threw my share of tantrums all the same. I was an angrier young man than most of my friends and family knew how to deal with. But I managed to convince myself, from my muscles to my soul (and against much evidence), that I was a blessed man, and that each day of life was a gift to be cherished. How far I’ve drifted since then.

November ’02

Elisa Atti, an Italian-born scientist who’s been in the United States barely two years, and who studies bone biology at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, has joined the Handler family for her first (and my forty-first) Thanksgiving celebration. Elisa and I only had our first official “date” six weeks before her first Thanksgiving expedition. We’ve been living on opposite coasts since we met, she in New York, and me in California, where I moved not long ago. She’s come to North Carolina where I’ve just had knee surgery to repair a torn meniscus to nurse me, to care for me, and to join close to fifty Jews in overeating what will seem to her some of the most puzzling food combinations she’s ever encountered.

I don’t know how other families handle their annual rituals (and I’ve never much enjoyed trying to fit into the well-cemented traditions of families other than my own). But in my family the dinner varies as its venue switches from year to year. There have been gourmet feasts carefully handcrafted by one family member acting as the lone chef. There have been rockier potluck dinners. In more recent years there have been dinners trucked in by extra-familial vendors. Elisa’s first American Thanksgiving dinner is the largest and loudest we’ve ever put together, as it’s being held over the same weekend we’re celebrating my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. If my crutches, electronic ice packs, and medical nightmare flashbacks aren’t enough to frighten away my new Bolognese girlfriend, if she’s not put off by the propensity toward obesity she’ll witness within my genetic pool (or the inability nearly every one of us has to resist interrupting one another mid-sentence), this dinner will introduce her to canned cranberry sauce – still bearing the shape and imprints of the interior of the can – rather than fresh homemade. There will be melted marshmallows – a food substance I can’t figure out how to explain to her, and which still makes no sense to her (or me) once I’ve succeeded – mixed in with the sweet potatoes. There will be a fully grown man who was born out of wedlock to his abundantly tattooed mother, who has herself become a grandmother at the age of thirty-nine. We’re Jews from the Northeast, but that doesn’t make us much different from Southern white trash (no offense to the South, the Northeast, the white race, Jews, any of my immediate or extended family, or trash of any kind intended).

Elisa had already been making me laugh constantly – sometimes purposefully, sometimes not. Over the first few days we spent together she offhandedly dismissed the mime master Marcel Marceau, whom she’d seen perform once in Bologna, and who had, apparently, bored her to tears.

“Okay, he’s a legend. I know,” Elisa said. “But, come on. Ten minutes, maybe.”

I adored her enthusiasm over a compliment tossed her way at an entertainment industry event by the clearly Caucasian fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi. He told her she has beautiful eyebrows and hair. As he walked away she whispered to me, “What kind of name is that? Mizrahi?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Israeli, I guess.”

“Oh,” Elisa replied, all seriousness. “I thought it was Japanese.”

Elisa can sometimes fail to comprehend anything but the most straightforward English language communication, yet perceive everything within the most imagistic transmission. It can take six tries to get through a simple “What would you like to have for dinner?” conversation. Then she’ll glance at the lyrics to a Randy Newman song and say, as if she’s the first to make the discovery, “This man is a genius.”

Within ten glorious days – all spent having a whirlwind adventure in a luxurious Manhattan hotel – we made plans to travel together to visit my parents in North Carolina for Thanksgiving and to stay with her parents over Christmas in Bologna, Italy. I think I was getting the better end of that deal.

It was barely October and we’d already made plans that took us through the beginning of January. I jokingly suggested we make a commitment to stay together at least three months, so as not to lose any money on nonrefundable airfares. Over the next few days we playfully refined our agreement. If, after three months together, we still wanted to stay a couple, we’d sign on for a second three-month term. If, at the end of the second three months, we again wanted to re-up, we’d promise to double the time frame and stick it out for a six-month segment. If, at the end of that – which by then would have kept us together for a year – we were still happy with each other, then we’d promise to stay together for the rest of our lives. A perfect progression: ten days of bliss; three-month commitment; three-month commitment; six-month commitment; eternity. Here’s to the next six months, and wherever we might end up after that.

January ‘03

Some weeks after we visited our families, Elisa and I met in a neutral corner to grab a few more days together. This time, being the orthopedic researcher she is, she was attending a “Bone Meeting” in Montreal. Since I had a couple of days free, I flew from Los Angeles to eastern Canada to be with her.

Our second night in Montreal we attended one of the conference meetings with Elisa’s colleagues. We were fed from utilitarian warming trays in a standard hotel meeting room. After the meal we were entertained by a circus act in which a woman who’d had three of her vertebrae replaced with metal substitutes performed acrobatics between the dinner tables. As she tumbled and flipped, X-rays of her spine were projected onto a screen at the front of the room below the name of the implant’s manufacturer. The spectacles occurring at professional conferences around the world surpass the offspring of the most fecund imaginations.

In Elisa’s hotel room later that night I leafed through a magazine. Offhandedly I tossed an insult toward an actress whose photo was featured.

“Look at that,” I said. “She’s getting another movie produced based on her magnificent breasts.”

“Do you think she has magnificent breasts?” Elisa asked.

I was startled not so much by the question as the tone of her voice. I looked up to see an expression on Elisa’s face I’d never seen before.

“Why don’t you go out with her, then, if you think her breasts are so magnificent?”

I thought she must have been kidding, so I laughed.

“Oh, you think it’s funny?” Elisa went on. “Why don’t you go laugh with your actress and her magnificent breasts? I’m sure she’ll think you’re very funny.”

“Elisa, I don’t even know this woman,” I said. Then I realized that was beside the point. “What’s going on here? I’ve come to see you. I’ve traveled three thousand miles to Montreal in the middle of the winter to see you. Why are you upset about something I said about a photo in a magazine?”

“Oh, I didn’t realize it was such a hardship for you to come and see me. Next time don’t bother. You can go see your movie star girlfriend with her magnificent brea–”

“Stop with the magnificent breasts. I’m sorry I said it. But what’s going on? Why are you so upset?”

This was my first experience with a side of Elisa I hadn’t encountered before. I hate to admit to the stereotyping I’m guilty of by saying so, but I’ve come to refer to it as her “going Italian” on me. Out of nowhere, for reasons either justified or absurd, Elisa’s jealousy will rear up and render her unrecognizable.

I’d thought, until that moment, that I’d discovered the perfect partner. We’d only been seeing each other sporadically over the course of a couple of months. We still lived on opposite coasts. But I’d allowed myself to imagine a conflict-free progression toward a blissful future. I tried to joke with her, I tried to explain the logic of my attempt to impugn the talent of the actress in the photograph, and I apologized for my insensitivity. Nothing I said could loosen the grip of Elisa’s jealousy.

“If you want to insult someone, you don’t talk about her magnificent breasts,” she said. “I don’t think you wanted to insult her. I think you must want to be with her. Go, if that’s what you want. You don’t have to stay here with me. Go be with the movie star with the magnificent breasts.”

The next day I flew back to Los Angeles wondering if the whole thing had been a dream. Or two dreams. The delightful dream of Elisa and I falling in love, and the nightmare of the Montreal meltdown. I didn’t know which one was the reality and which the aberration.

November ‘03

The problem with predictions, or blueprints, is that they don’t allow for improvisation. Anyone who’s ever tried to meld two lives into a single unit knows the infinite opportunities for complications. Coupling up is far more complicated than adding one and one.

Which is one of the many reasons I’m still so glad I found Elisa. Did we fail to stick with our planned progression of commitment? We did. But we failed by moving faster than planned, faster than I would have predicted, faster than I’d ever thought I would, and faster than I’d recommend anyone else try.

Elisa will now join me again for her sophomore (and my forty-second) Thanksgiving celebration. This time we’ll be at my sister’s home, in another state than the year before, with only twelve in attendance. Instead of traveling six weeks after meeting each other, we’ll now be traveling six weeks after our wedding at our favorite restaurant in New York. Our legal legitimization of our commitment came right on schedule. Our wedding day fell just four days short of our one-year-and-ten-day target. But we committed ourselves to its implementation months before we’d originally, and jokingly, intended.

As our clash in Montreal showed, our march toward the aisle wasn’t completely free of conflict. In years past my instinct would have been to head for the hills after such an episode. But I’d already sensed enough about Elisa, and been able to accurately measure the depth of her value to me, to stay in the ring another few rounds. I was shaken by the revelation of her insecurity. I was equally shaken to recognize the aspects of my personality that tend to provoke it.  But the happiest discovery was that, for all the potential explosiveness of the combination, Elisa and I knew how to defuse the flare-ups before they became unmanageable. Once upon a time I would have taken the stand that I shouldn’t have to work so hard to convince my lover of my devotion. With Elisa, I made it my mission simply to help her feel as secure and well loved as I could. Sometimes the way to accomplish that was to keep my mouth shut.

No one who celebrates his first wedding on the cusp of his forty-third birthday escapes all the embarrassments of late bachelorhood. For me the lowlight was my fortieth birthday party. It was a sparsely populated event. This was in spite of the fact that I stretched my address book to its limit by inviting a score of people with whom I was no longer even close. Several of the guests were women I’d had failed relationships with. And, of course, I came to the party – and left it – alone. Still, waiting so long to pledge myself to someone has had tremendous benefits.

I can’t speak with authority on the emotional maturity of anyone other than myself, but I know one thing for certain: I got married as an adult. That wouldn’t have been the case had I gotten married at twenty-five, and it wouldn’t have been the case had I gotten married at thirty. I don’t think I qualified as a child at thirty-five, but that doesn’t mean I was all grown up, either. I might have been mature at thirty-nine, but the woman I almost married at that age wasn’t – which calls into question the very maturity I just bestowed upon myself. The point is, I got married exactly when I was meant to, and not a second later than when I was prepared to handle it.

Elisa and I wanted confirmation of our compatibility to come quickly. There were some odd sensations that resulted from rushing headlong into a love we both felt relieved to have found. If we barely knew each other at all in Montreal, we’d only had ten months more experience with each other the day we got married.

“Almost everyone I know, I know better than you,” my wife quipped on our wedding night. Still, I had not a molecule of doubt that we’d done the right thing.

Whenever the topic of my parents’ wedding comes up, my father is quick to state he had no idea what was going on. He was twenty-four years old and his bride was all of twenty. As he tells it, he was more bystander than planner or participant – unless you count choosing your bride as part of the wedding plans. Since they’ve now passed their sixtieth anniversary and are still happy to have each other, it could be argued that was the most crucial aspect of the event.

Elisa and I were more fortunate than that. Being adults with adequate incomes, and being adults who enjoy independence from our families, we crafted the wedding of our choice. We wrote our own vows, interviewed and chose our own official, made up our own guest list, chose the venue and the menu, and succeeded in creating the event that most perfectly pleased us.