While I live in New York, he is still in China visiting farms and factories, promoting American soybeans. For the last few weeks, though, he has been in Cincinnati sitting at his mother’s side in a nursing home as her cancer slowly kills her. When he calls me, I can hear her in the background. She is screaming. She is in pain. He buys her grapes, and raspberries, and the two of them inch their way toward the conversations they were unable to have when she was well.
He had cancer himself many years ago, when he was still almost a boy. He was shaving at home on one of his leaves from the navy when his mother spotted an ugly bluish patch on his shoulder. By the time Terence and I met, the only souvenir of that episode was a scar that looked like a map of Texas. She caught it early before it metastasized, he told me, leaving him with nothing worse than a sore shoulder.
Ruth, his mother, isn’t so lucky. Though she and Terence were estranged for years, she suddenly called him in China. Come home at once, she said. I am dying. I never got to meet her. He has just buried her and must return to China on Monday. Her illness and death have seemed to energize Terence with a frantic, almost manic, life. Perhaps her illness—and Terence’s own youthful bout with melanoma—should have alerted us that something was lurking in the background. It did not.
We meet in Florida to give him a break before he heads back to
Beijing. This trip is supposed to afford him some rest. I fly down from Manhattan to join him.
Our reunion is visceral, not romantic or tender. Once again we collide with the inevitability of thunder. He is not resting. He is not sentimental. He isn’t mourning his mother, or at least he doesn’t seem to be. He is barely sitting still. He is on fire. Is he glad to see me? I can’t tell. Am I glad to see him? I’m not sure. All I know is that we need to be together.
He has two plans for this weekend. He is already a licensed pilot. He tells me about a time when, flying alone in just such perfect weather, he was swallowed up by a sudden and unexpected storm. He flew lost and frightened for at least fifteen minutes completely enveloped in fog and rain, unable to tell east from west or even, at times, up from down. He never wants to do that again. He is going to learn to fly by instruments, and he is going to do it NOW. Not only that, while he is here he is also going to become a helicopter pilot. A contact here has offered him some helicopter time in exchange for business leads in China. He is determined to get both licenses before he leaves.
That night, Terence sits with a four-inch binder on his knees. He is switching back and forth between the rules for planes and those for helicopters.
“I’ve got to book it. Hard,” he says, barely stopping for a quick dinner. “I may have to go all night.” There are hundreds of pages of rules, instructions, technical terms to learn in order to pass a written and an oral exam with a Federal Aviation Administration instructor. He is frantically taking notes. What’s more, he’s going to need at least forty hours of helicopter flight time. Most people take a year or more to get each license.
He’s going to do it in four days.
“That can’t be done!” I protest. Why can he not see that? Four days equals only ninety-six hours. It won’t work.
His face clouds. He sees something entirely different. Ten
hours of flight time a day for four days equals forty hours. That leaves fifty-six hours for study and the exam. He and I have already spent two hours in the Cessna and, before I arrived, he spent two hours with an instructor mastering the controls of a Robinson R22 helicopter. It’s tricky, he says, more three-dimensional than the fixed-wing planes he is used to flying. But it’s not impossible.
Not impossible? It’s lunacy!
“You’re undermining my self-confidence.” He’s shouting. This isn’t a joke or a game. Nothing about this is funny to him, or odd. “If I’m going to do this, I need to stay focused.” I am bewildered. Angry that he is ignoring me. Frightened at his intensity, his obsession. I realize once again that we don’t just see the world differently. In many ways we don’t live in the same world at all. He is going to become a helicopter pilot in four days? Is the man truly mad? Am I mad for thinking about twining my life with his?
Just over a year later, on May 26, 1987, we are married at Christ and St. Stephen’s Church on West Sixty-ninth Street in Manhattan. It is pouring rain.
Terence’s soybean contract expired, he packed up his apartment in Beijing, and the two of us have now crammed our belongings into a tiny studio near Central Park.
At our wedding, we have: a red and white horse-drawn carriage. I have: a champagne-colored tea dress, an Ingrid Bergman hat, and arms filled with peonies. He has: his buddy Sean, a Marine Corps colonel, standing up for him in his dress blues. My mother loses the rest of the group between the hotel and the church and must lace her way, street by street, in the downpour until she recognizes the church. Alone with Sean back in the nave, Terence knows none of this. All he knows is that he is hearing the trumpet player begin to improvise, and it is half past the hour.
“She has changed her mind,” he says to Sean. “They’re afraid to come back here and tell me.” Yet my mother finds the church, the trumpet launches into a voluntary, the rain stops as suddenly as it began, the sun bursts out, and we are married.
In fact, by Chinese custom, if not law, we’ve been married for quite some time now. A Chinese legal marriage is a dull bureaucratic event—papers and chops in a government office. There is no tradition of church weddings. Even a house of one’s own can be hard to get in Communist China. Many couples consider themselves actually “married” by their wedding photo. Just before I leave China, Terence insists that we have one taken.
We line up at the photo studio where a shop assistant is handing out what I can only think of as costumes. There are a dozen one-size-fits-all-dream-of-an-American-pouffe wedding gowns. Girls of all shapes wait to don them. We drop them over our street clothes, the dresser pins them in back and gathers up the train. We stand in line, twelve of us in a row, the bundled fabric in our arms. One at a time we step onto the set, a Greco-Italian
Gone with the Wind
painting with columns and a half-nude statue and painted red-carpeted steps rising up behind us. The dresser drops the train, swirls it around me, lifts the veil from the previous girl’s head, and sets it on mine. He ignores Terence, whose own tailcoat and top hat are far grander than anything the studio can provide. The photographer snaps, we move out of the scene, and I turn the gown over to the next girl in line, who immediately dons it.
I mock the campy fun of the photo shoot. My flyaway hair in the photo speaks more of carelessness than elegance; the look on my colorized face in the photo is more smirk than dewy-eyed. Terence is all romance. We fight about that too.
After the dreary bleakness of Beijing, New York is a riot of color and sound and energy. Behind us, the Wall Street barbarians are
already massing at the gate, but we don’t know that yet. Right now all we can hear are the drums and the cymbals. The Street is a fun career for young people, and they are leaking money out into all the other streets of the city. The old groceries with faded linoleum floors are being displaced by stores with “Emporium” in their names and sushi bars inside. Korean vendors parade pyramids of fruit—oranges, pomegranates, dozens of varieties of apples—on nearly every corner. At work, technicians hand out clunky electronic boxes that we can actually use for writing stories. ATMs grow less likely to eat our plastic cards and quickly become reliable enough that we can begin to count on them for weekend money. Prosperity creeps out from Broadway. Warehoused buildings along Amsterdam Avenue and Columbus sprout bars, restaurants, and condos. Break dancers cavort on corners.
For all our fighting, we like being married. We settle into the one-room apartment around the corner from Lincoln Center. We run in Central Park. We see movies with subtitles. We climb all the way up to the top balcony at the Metropolitan Opera and watch
La Bohème
and
Rigoletto
. We linger on the traffic island between Broadway and Amsterdam to kiss and pat before parting. We laugh at the downstairs neighbor who complains about our footsteps above his head. At first we are sympathetic, until he explains we are disturbing his séances. Within a few months, our 452 square feet of space is as stuffed as his apartment in Beijing. Books. Notebooks. Trombones. Trumpets. He is a musician at heart, who can play any instrument invented. Tubas piled on our bed. Every night we must relocate them so we can sleep; every morning they go back on the bed so we can walk around the room.
By Christmas, I must walk sideways down the narrow entry corridor to the room where we actually live.
Yet neither the photo marriage nor the real one magically transforms us. To the contrary, the tighter we are bound together, it seems, the more we struggle against it. Our fights take on a
Manhattan feel. We court death nearly every day as, crossing the street, I list to the left and he to the right. Jamming into each other in the middle of the street and refusing to back down. Do we want the check now? Simultaneously: “Yes.” “No.” After I slam the door, I can mentally rehash our argument at a movie theater down the street or show up full of righteous ire at my friend Deb’s door ten blocks away. When he storms away, he can wait it out at a jazz bar around the corner. We both have words at our command and powerful, unyielding personalities. From the safe distance of time, in our warm kitchen in Philadelphia, Terence’s explanation of that era will be the mirror image of mine: “You were crazy back then,” he says shaking his head. “A real nut case.”
So why do we stay together?
I honestly don’t know. I think we can’t help ourselves. In addition, from the beginning I think we each have seen in the other the parent for the children we want to have. He is forty-seven. I am thirty-five. For reasons neither of us can explain, we both desperately want children—with each other. Yet even in this we clash. After a miscarriage, I am laid low by grief; he finds refuge in a manic cheer.
Yet, when Terence Bennett Foley is born on October 26, 1988, under a fat harvest moon, it is immediately clear that we are both very good parents. Terence sits up all night arranging movie marathons for me.
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. White Heat
. A run of Edward G. Robinson:
Key Largo. Double Indemnity. Brother Orchid
. Feeding our son, I watch the movies. Terence watches us.
A father for the first time at age forty-eight, he radiates the belief that there has never been another such perfect child born into this world. He freely admits hostility to other people’s offspring. He lives for discussion, for argument, for intellectual debate. Children, with their fingers and noses and whining and lap-climbing feints for attention, are the natural enemy of such adult discourse. Yet little Terry has but to chirp and conversation
stops. Terence frets over Cheerios and apple juice, wraps Terry like a papoose against the smallest wind, takes note after note after note on his progress on the index cards that he keeps in his breast pocket.
Our friend Isabelle from Paris gives a Gallic shrug about her own such besottedness. “I felt so sor-REE for ze ozther mozthers who had such u-GLEE bay-BEES,” she says. Terence smiles politely. She may have been mistaken. He is not.
Nothing our little boy touches can be thrown away. Years later, I have only to go over on any Saturday afternoon to the storage unit on an old pier on the Delaware River that divides Philadelphia from New Jersey and open the door to our twelve-foot-by-fifteen-foot unit to see the outcome. One whole wall of the unit is stacked floor to ceiling with boxes marked “Memorabilia.” I open them and find the sedimentary layers of a family at its beginning. The quacking pull-string duck. Chime bird. A sailor suit. A train set.
Cars and Trucks and Things That Go
. A crayon scrawl.
When our daughter Georgia arrives nine years later her childhood layers begin. A green velvet dress with a lace collar. A pair of white gloves.
Brown Bear, Brown Bear
. A pressed rose bouquet. Everyone saves such things. Terence saves EVERYTHING. He throws himself at recording his children’s lives with the same energy he pours into trying to pilot helicopters.
The late 1980s and early ’90s are not easy years, and Manhattan is not an easy place, for a nearly fifty-year-old man to be looking for work. Not even six months after we marry comes Black Monday. The stock market crashes a breathtaking five hundred points and the Manhattan party comes to a screeching halt. There is probably never a good year for anyone with a lifetime in agriculture to be looking for work in Manhattan. He is offered a job in his field. In Pierre, South Dakota. We consider it. For a moment.
Meanwhile, the topic of my book, the downsizing of American corporations, is playing out in our living room. Terence’s degree. His China connections. His lifetime of experience. His sheer dogged intellect. They all drive him close to nearly every job. But there at the top there is always someone better. Someone just perfect. Someone whose entire life has prepared him or her for just that job. He comes heartbreakingly close time after time after time.
He reinvents himself once, twice, three times. We recast his résumés. Agriculture. China. Marketing. Teaching. Food. He gets a job with an organization promoting China to business. He leaves it, unable to bear working side by side with people who know so much less than he does. He gets a job marketing gourmet food products to department stores. Long, exhausting days take their toll. He takes a class and learns to become a real estate appraiser. He goes into neighborhoods where it can be fatal to be simply standing on the wrong corner at the wrong time. He reassures me.
He has figured out the system. He makes appointments at 7:00 a.m. All the bad guys are sleeping it off by then, he says. Every day I hold my breath till he calls me, safely back in the office.
We send out letters by the dozens. Hundreds. If any answer comes back, it is disappointing. Underqualified. Overqualified. Not qualified at all. Out go more letters. Back come more answers. Or no answer at all.