The next day the weather was clement, sunny – so I decided to walk off my nocturnal phantoms with a long hike down Unter den Linden. I turned left at the Brandenburg Gate, and then happened upon two acres of gray stone slabs. This was the Holocaust Memorial. Walking into it was an unsettling experience, as the slabs were laid out like sarcophagi in a cemetery. The deeper you walked into their labyrinth-like formation, the more they engulfed you. After fifteen steps into its epicenter you were entombed by it all – gray block upon gray block, removing all peripheral vision, all sky, all sense of anything beyond the absolute unyielding prospect of immutable slabs of rock, determined to bury you.
It was overwhelming, this memorial to a horror that was beyond words. It said everything by not trying to say anything. Its creator understood that a grief – whether collective or individual – is entombing. And how do you excavate yourself from a tomb?
I had no idea. But again, I worked at getting through the days.
Berlin improved once I discovered Prenzlauer Berg. It was a reconstructed quarter just north of Mitte; a place of nineteenth-century burgher sensibilities updated for the new century, and in a once-divided city remaking itself. Prenzlauer Berg was a place of young families – and that was hard. But on the bulletin board in its very excellent English-language bookshop, the St George, I saw an ad for a small studio apartment. I paid it a visit. It was just 15 square meters of living space, but off Kollwitzplatz – the best address in the district – and tastefully furnished in a simple bleached-wood style. The landlord was willing to rent it to me on a three-month basis, renewable thereafter. I didn’t have to buy anything for it bar sheets and towels. I signed up for an intensive language course at the Goethe-Institut. I spent six hours a day mastering umlauts and the dative case – and met a quiet Swedish artist named Johann. He’d come to Berlin on a fellowship to learn the language and to paint. Much to my surprise we drifted into a fling: nothing serious (he told me he had a girlfriend back home) and, through mutual agreement, pleasantly circumscribed. We went out two, maybe three nights a week together. We got cheap seats for the Berlin Phil or the Komische Oper. We went to jazz joints that didn’t have a cover charge. We saw movies at the cool little kino in an alley off Hackescher Markt. And then we would spend the night together in my fold-out (but still double-sized) bed.
It was strange – almost impossible – at first to reconnect to that arena called physical intimacy. When Johann first made a move, my initial reaction was to flee. But fortunately that reaction was internalized and was supplanted by a far simpler thought: I wanted to have sex again.
Johann was decent, tender, and a little distant . . . which, truth be told, suited me fine. I liked being held by him. I liked being taken by him, and I liked taking him. We rarely talked about things that mattered to us – though I did hear about his authoritarian semi-aristocratic father who wanted him to join the family law firm, but still half-subsidized his attempts to be an abstract painter. The fact was, he did have talent and the Ellsworth Kelly-style color studies he showed me demonstrated actual promise. But as he himself admitted, he had just enough of a trust fund to ruin him – and he preferred mooching in bars and cafés to getting down to the serious business of mastering his craft. He rarely asked me much about myself – and when he once commented, early on, that I seemed to be in the throes of an ongoing sadness, I just shrugged and said: ‘We all have our stuff.’
And my stuff was something I simply didn’t want to discuss.
Nor did I want to go near anything to do with the press – though a week after I landed in Berlin I passed a newspaper kiosk and saw that, on the front page of a particularly low-rent tabloid, there was a grainy photograph of Coursen with the headline: ‘
Das Monstrum der Rockies!
’ In the future, I averted my eyes whenever passing any news-stand.
But between intensive German, and my nights with Johann, and the fact that I could always fill a free evening with a concert, a film, a play, the time in Berlin passed easily. There was a playground on one corner of Kollwitzplatz and that had to be avoided. So too did a dinner with some German friends of Johann’s. When he mentioned that it was at the home of a couple with a five-year-old daughter I begged off.
‘I’m not that keen on young children either,’ he said. ‘But do what you want.’
That was the beginning of the end of things with Johann – not that it ever progressed beyond a pleasant enough convenience for both of us. He announced one day that he was returning to Stockholm in a week’s time. Jutta – the woman he’d been with for three years, a diplomat’s daughter, well-heeled – was missing him. And his father had offered to buy them an apartment if he would return to his long-abandoned law studies.
‘I suppose I’ll be a part-time painter now,’ he said, sounding a little sheepish.
‘I’m certain you’ll have a very good life.’
‘And what will you do now?’
‘Return to the States – and find a use for the dative case.’
Beyond such facetiousness, I knew that I had to be doing something with my life. There was a part of me that couldn’t function without a sense of direction, of ambition, of some sort of purpose to the day. As I found out in those early months in Calgary, to drift meant to retreat deeper into myself. Even taking German classes now struck me as treading water. Maybe I just wasn’t good at playing the bohemian card. Or maybe, deep at heart, I was simply frightened of standing still for any longer. Whatever the reason, I knew that Dr Goodchild was right all those many months ago in Calgary: What choice did I have in life but to go back to work?
So, around a week before I made the decision to head home (‘
home
’ – it was the first time I had used that word in years), I sent an email to my old contact, Margaret Noonan, at the Harvard Placement Office – explaining that, due to a ‘personal tragedy’, I had left the academic world for the last while, but was now thinking how much I missed standing up in front of a class and talking about literature. And I was just wondering if she might know of any teaching job that had opened up for the fall.
A day later I had a reply – and one which began with Noonan saying she had, of course, learned about my ‘personal tragedy’ and could only express her ‘immense regret’ at my ‘terrible loss’, but was pleased to hear that I was ready to ‘re-enter the world’.
Re-enter the world?
Perhaps – but with everything changed. Changed utterly.
She also said my luck was with me. Did I know Colby College in Maine? A top-twenty liberal-arts college, lovely rural location, smart students. A two-year post had just opened up there, a faculty member having just been offered a big job at Cornell. And though I’d be in competition with around eight other candidates, she was pretty certain they would like my credentials. Was I interested? I emailed back, saying yes indeed. Five days later I was told I had a job interview in a week’s time.
So I threw away my fixed-date ticket back to Calgary and bought a one-way fare to Boston. I closed up my apartment and said goodbye to Johann. We had one valedictory night together in bed. In the morning, as he left, he simply said: ‘I enjoyed our time together.’ Then he kissed me on the head and was gone. En route to the airport my taxi was diverted around the Brandenburg Gate and I passed the Holocaust Memorial for one last time. Today – after days of early spring sleet – the sun had cracked the gloomy dome of the Berlin sky. It was actually balmy. So balmy that a trio of adolescents had decided to use three of the Memorial’s slabs as makeshift sun beds. I wasn’t offended by this. Rather I found it strangely affirming. What I see as a metaphor for all the granitic grief in the world you see as a tanning opportunity. Life – even at its most excruciating – is never more than a few steps away from all its inherent absurdity.
Later that day, as the plane dipped and began its approach to Boston, I felt nothing but dread, wondering how,
if
, I could handle being there. I rented a car at the airport and drove straight up to Waterville, Maine. The college had arranged a hotel for the night. The chairman of the department – a young live wire named Tad Morrow – took me out to dinner. He’d liked my book. He liked my credentials. He liked the fact that I could talk a good game about recent novels and movies, and had even tried being a librarian for a while. And I actually found him good news – very convincing about the college’s attributes and the pleasures of living in Maine, while also explaining that, up here, you were cut off from big-league academia.
‘I can live with that,’ I told him – and the next day, despite fighting jet lag, I nailed the interview. So much so that, when I returned to Boston that night and checked into a hotel called the Onyx near North Station, there was a message awaiting me from Margaret Noonan. I had been the last candidate to be interviewed and I actually had the job, starting this September.
‘The chairman did indicate that the post could go tenure track, especially if you publish another book in the meantime. I have here in my notes that you were, at one time, working on a biography of Sinclair Lewis. Might you think about going back to it?’
‘I might.’
So there it was: a job offer, a motivation to return to that world.
I was still flagging from the flight – but the management of the hotel had put a complimentary bottle of wine in my room, and I celebrated with a few glasses of Australian red. Then, around midnight, too wired to go to sleep, I called a number I had so wanted to call for so many months, but just couldn’t.
I could hear Christy’s sharp intake of breath as I said hello.
‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘Where are you?
How
are you?’
‘That’s a rather long story,’ I said. ‘But the short answer is: I’m in Boston and I’m . . . OK, I guess.’
‘I’ve only tried to make contact with you around six hundred times . . .’
‘I know, I know. And I hope you know why that was impossible for me.’
‘I did know about Montana and your flight north to Calgary. Half a dozen times I was ready to jump into my car, drive over and arrive unannounced . . . but Barry always advised me against it.’
‘Who’s Barry?’
‘Barry Edwards is a town planner here in Eugene. In fact, he is
the
town planner for Eugene, Oregon. And he also happens to have been my husband for the past six months.’
‘Now that’s news.’
‘Yes, it certainly came as a surprise to me as well.’
‘Happy?’
She laughed.
‘Like you I don’t do happy. But . . . well, it’s actually not bad. And I’ve got some other news as well – and I’d rather tell you straight out than later. I’m pregnant.’
‘That’s . . . wonderful,’ I said. ‘When are you due?’
‘In sixteen weeks. And I find it difficult telling you all this.’
‘But you just did. And I’m glad you did now, rather than when I come out to see you.’
‘Now
that’s
news. Do you have an ETA?’
‘That depends on your schedule.’
‘My schedule remains what it was. I teach on Tuesday and Thursdays. I lock myself away from three to six all other days to try to inch my craft forward a bit – my usual prolific output of a poem every ten months, if I’m lucky. But . . .
you
. . . I need to know more about you.’
‘I’ll tell all on Friday. I’m going to Calgary in two days to close down my life there. I’m pretty sure I can fly on to Portland.’
‘What brings you back to Boston?’
‘You’ll get the whole
spiel
on Friday.’
‘You’re not planning to see Theo while you’re around Cambridge?’
‘Jesus Christ, no. I haven’t been in contact since I had an incident with himself and his lover in a diner off Harvard Square.’
‘Yes, I did hear about that . . .’
‘I figured you probably did. The world is sometimes too damn small.’
‘Well, I know for a fact that Theo wants to talk to you.’
‘And how do you know this?’
‘Because he’s called me every couple of months, wondering if I had any further news of your whereabouts. On two occasions he was rather drunk and very teary. Talking about how Adrienne had dropped him, and how not an hour went by when he didn’t think about Emily and you, and how he wished—’
‘I don’t want to hear any more of this.’
‘I don’t blame you. So . . . Friday then. Email me the flight details. I’ll be there.’
‘I’m really pleased with all your news, Christy. All of it.’
‘Who would have thought? Me who always said I’d run a mile from all this.’
‘Life does have this habit of upending all our dogmas.’
‘I am so glad you called.’
‘I’m glad too.’
Afterwards I put my head in my hands. Theo. In all the months since Emily’s death I’d tried to suppress my rage against him. In one session after my botched suicide Dr Ireland told me that, at some point in the future, I would have to find a way of detaching myself from the hatred I felt for him.
‘I’m not saying you have to forgive him,’ she told me. ‘That might be impossible – and if it proves so, there it is. But what you will have to do is stop hating him. Because hate is ultimately toxic to yourself. You can’t win with hate. It goes nowhere, it solves nothing and, sadly, it can’t turn back time. One of these days – and it might be years from now – you’re going to have to drop it. But that might take a long time.’
Too damn true – because all I could still feel was contempt and fury.
I told Mr Alkan the same thing when I met him the next day. He seemed genuinely pleased to see me – and, in his own quiet, hesitant way, asked me how I was bearing up.
‘Some days are tolerable, some aren’t. The nature of the beast, I guess . . .’
‘Before we get on to other things I must tell you that your . . . “ex-partner” I suppose is the official term for him . . . Mr Theo Morgan . . . has been in touch with me on a regular basis, attempting to re-initiate contact with you. Naturally I followed your instructions to the word and never contacted you about this. But . . . how can I put this? . . . he fell apart on the phone and seemed disconsolate about his break-up with you and . . . uhm . . .’