It was 1957. He’d been out of the Marine Corps for four years, having then gone to Columbia on the GI Bill. He’d just landed a junior executive job at Young & Rubicon. His sister was marrying a former war correspondent turned PR man—a marriage that went south right after the Palm Beach honeymoon but dragged on until her husband drank and raged himself into a fatal coronary fifteen years later. But on the happy day in question, Dad saw a diminutive young woman across a crowded function room at the Roosevelt Hotel. Her name was Alice Goldfarb. Dad described her as the antithesis of the “corned beef and cabbage” Irish girls he knew growing up in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Her father was a jeweler in the Diamond District, her mother a professional yenta. But Alice had gone to the right schools and could talk about classical music and the ballet and Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan. And Dad—being a smart but intellectually insecure Brooklyn mick—was charmed and just a little flattered that this Central Park West cutie was interested in him.
So there he was, the altar boy turned Korean War vet turned young ad exec. Aged twenty-six. No responsibilities to anyone but himself. The world was his for the taking.
“And what do I do?” he told me as we sat alone together in the limousine that followed the hearse en route to the cemetery with my mother’s coffin. “I go for the princess, even though I knew from the outset that I would never make her happy, that she belonged with some Park Avenue ophthalmologist with a weekend place near a Jewish country club on the Island. But I still had to send myself in her direction. And the result was . . .”
But he never finished the sentence, sinking back into the thickly upholstered seat and reaching for his cigarettes while muffling a deep, anguished sob.
“And the result was . . .”
What? Disappointment? Unhappiness? Sadness? Entrapment? Anger? Rage? Disquiet? Despair? Resignation?
Take your pick of any of the above to fill in the blank. As any thesaurus will show you, there are a vast number of synonyms in the language that reflect our grievances with life.
“And the result was . . .”
Can we ever really predict what that result will be? Consider the random nature of an encounter: a look across a room; a casual conversation on a subway train. Consider, a little further on from this initial meeting, the decision to take the hand of this person as she sits opposite you in a restaurant. Your companion may pull away. She may allow you to keep it there. She may take this as a sign of intent or nothing more than a come-on. She may think you’re worth spending a night with and change her mind ten minutes later. She may be wanting something more. She may be wanting something far less. In the aftermath of whatever happens, there is one undisputable fact surrounding the event: when you took her hand, you were after something. Though you might think, at the time, that this “something” is rooted in an obvious need (sex, romance, or other variations on an amorous theme), the truth is: you won’t understand what the true meaning of the moment was until long after it has been stored in that cluttered room we litter with memory. Even then, the hindsight that we bring to this incident will only serve to heighten the conflicting emotions surrounding said memory . . . if, that is, there is any memory to begin with. Everything’s interpretation, after all. As such, we can look back on an action, a gesture, several words uttered without premeditation, and find ourselves wondering:
did everything change because of that?
Or are we simply rendering the past in such a way to explain the uncomfortable realities of the present?
“And the result was . . .”
A bad marriage that lasted twenty-four years, that saw the two players in this melodrama play endless self-destructive games and my mother commit suicide on the installment plan, courtesy of cigarettes. Say my mother—who had finally broken it off with a certified public accountant named Lester Hamburger only a week before—hadn’t shown up at the wedding? Or say she had arrived with Lester in tow? Would that look across the room have ever happened? Would Dad have met someone more caring, more loving, less judgmental? Would Mom have ended up with the rich bohemian she always talked about wanting to marry—though Lester Hamburger and my Nixon-supporting dad weren’t exactly the Rimbaud and Verlaine of Manhattan. But one thing is for certain: had Alice Goldfarb and Dan Nesbitt not have hooked up, their shared unhappiness would have never existed—and the trajectory of their lives may have been completely different.
Or maybe not.
Similarly, if I had not reached for Jan Stafford’s hand on that third date . . . well, I would certainly not be sitting here in this cottage, glancing anxiously at the petition for divorce that still occupied the same place on the kitchen table when I fled from it days ago. That’s the thing about a tangible reality like a divorce petition. You may shove it to one side or walk away from it. But it’s still there. It does not go away. You have been named as the respondent. You are now answerable to a legal process. You can’t dodge this fact. Questions will be asked, answers demanded. And a price will be paid.
My lawyer had been in touch with me by email a few times since I’d been served with the petition.
“She’s asking for the house in Cambridge and wants you to pay Candace’s graduate school tuition, should your daughter decide to go that route,” she wrote in one of her dispatches. “Considering your wife’s income is five times larger than yours—and that yours is completely predicated on what you write—we could argue that she is in a far better financial position to . . .”
Let her have the house—and I will find a way of paying Candace’s tuition. I don’t want costly legal disputes or further rancor. I just want a clean break.
I pushed the petition away. I still wasn’t prepared to engage with it. Instead, I stood up and negotiated the narrow staircase up to the second floor of my house. Once there I opened the door to my office: a long, narrow room with bookshelves covering most available space and my desk facing a wall. Dragging my ankle behind me, I reached for the bottle of single malt Scotch located on the filing cabinet to the left of my desk. I poured a shot into a glass and sat down in my desk chair. As I waited for the computer to illuminate, I sipped the whiskey, its peaty warmth numbing the back of my throat. Memory is such a jumble of emotions. An unexpected package arrives—and the past comes cascading in. But though this rush of remembrances and associations may, at first, seem random, one of the great undisputable truths about memory is the fact that there is no such thing as a random recollection. They are all somehow interconnected—for everything is narrative. And the one narrative we all grapple with is the life we call our own.
Which is why—as the whiskey drips down my gullet and my computer screen bathes the otherwise darkened room in an electronic glow—I’m back again at the drugstore lunch counter on East Twenty-first Street, my book propped up against my egg cream. It’s the first moment when, perhaps, I understood the necessity of solitude. How many times since then have I found myself alone somewhere—in a place familiar or strange—with reading material propped up against a bottle of something, or an open notebook in front of me, awaiting that day’s quota of words. In these instances—no matter how distant or difficult the locale—I’ve never felt isolated or alone. Then, as now, I often quietly think: whatever about the collateral damage that my parents’ unhappiness may have visited upon me, I am enormously grateful to them for sending me off on that November Saturday forty-two years ago, and allowing me to discover that sitting somewhere on your own—outside of the maelstrom of things—has an absolute clean ease to it.
But life, of course, never really leaves you in peace. You can shut yourself away in a cottage on a back road in Maine and a process server will still find his way to your door. Or a package will arrive from across the ocean—and try as you might, you find yourself transported back twenty-five years to a café in a corner of Berlin called Kreuzberg. You have a spiral-bound book in front of you—and the vintage red Parker fountain pen that your father gave you as a goingaway gift is in your right hand, blitzing its way across the page. Then you hear a voice. A woman’s voice:
“So viele Wörter.”
So many words
.
You look up. And there she is. Petra Dussmann. From that moment on, things change. But that’s only because you yourself answered back.
“Ja, so viele Wörter. Aber vielleicht sind die ganzen Wörter Abfall.”
Yes, so many words. But perhaps all the words are crap
.
If you hadn’t attempted that bit of self-deprecation, might she have moved on? And had she moved on . . . ?
How do we explain the trajectory of things? I haven’t a clue. All I know is . . .
It’s 6:15 on an evening in late January. And I have words to write. Having just driven six hours in the snow—and having just been sprung from a hospital—I could make sundry excuses to dodge work for the night. But this rectangular room is the one place in which I can exercise dominion over the shape of things. When I write, the world proceeds as I would like it to proceed. I can add and subtract what I want to the narrative. I can create any denouement I desire. There is no legal process to address. There is no sense of personal inadequacy and crippling sadness looming over everything. And there is no shipping box downstairs, the contents of which remain unopened.
When I write, I am in control.
Except that’s a lie. As I punch out the first sentence of the evening—and tip back the last of the whiskey—I keep trying to excise my anxiety about the box downstairs. And I keep failing.
Why do we hide things from others? Could it be because, at heart, we all have one central fear: the horror of finally being found out?
I was suddenly out of my desk chair and heading up into my attic. Once there I unlocked one of the filing cabinets in which I keep my old manuscripts. The cabinets had been shipped here from my old house in Cambridge—and had remained untouched since my arrival in Maine. But I still knew immediately where the manuscript I wanted was stored. Pulling it out I had to blow off a decade’s worth of dust from the thick folder into which it had been stuffed before I interred it here. Ten years had passed since I’d typed the final word. As soon as I had finished writing it all, I couldn’t bring myself to read it. So in it went, interred in the filing cabinet. Until now.
I came downstairs into my study. After dropping the manuscript on my desk I poured myself the second Scotch of the evening. As soon as the whiskey was in the glass, I was back in my chair, inching the manuscript toward me . . .
When is a story not a story?
When you’ve lived it.
But even then, it’s just your version of things.
That’s right. My narrative. My rendering. And the reason, all these years later, I find myself where I am now.
I pulled the manuscript out of its folder, staring down at the title page which, all those years ago, I had left blank.
So turn the page and get started
.
I downed the whiskey. I took a deep steadying breath. I turned the page.
PART
TWO
ONE
B
ERLIN. THE YEAR
was 1984. I had just turned twenty-six. And, like the majority of people residing in that still-juvenile district of adulthood, I actually thought I understood so much about life and its attendant complexities.
Whereas now, more than fifteen years on from all that transpired, I see how unschooled and callow I was when it came to just about everything . . . most especially, the mysteries of the heart.
Back then I always resisted falling in love. Back then I always seemed to sidestep all emotional entanglements, all big-deal declarations from the heart. We all reenact our childhoods repeatedly during adult life—and every romance struck me as a potential trap, something that would ensnare me in the sort of marriage that drove my mother to death by cigarettes and left my father feeling as if his existence had been limited, circumscribed. “Never have kids,” he once told me. “They just cage you into something you never really wanted.” Granted, he’d had about three martinis in him when he said all this. But the very fact that he could openly tell his only son that he felt trapped in his life . . . bizarrely, it made me feel closer to the guy. He had confided in me, and that was huge. Because during the majority of my childhood he was a man who spent much of his life working out ways not to be at home. When he was there, he was so often enveloped in a cloud of silent rage and cigarette smoke that he always struck me—even when I was very young—as someone who was endlessly struggling with himself. He tried to play the typical dad but couldn’t pull it off, any more than I could play the average American boy. When it came to sports or the Boy Scouts or winning prizes for civics or joining the Marines—all of the all-American stuff that my dad embraced as a kid—I was a strikeout. I was always the last kid chosen for teams at school. I always had my head in a book. By the time I was well into adolescence, I was out roaming the city every weekend, hiding myself away in movie theaters and museums and concert halls. That was the thing about a Manhattan childhood: it was
all there
. I was the sort of kid who went to seasons of Fritz Lang films at the Bleecker Street Cinema, who bought student tickets for Boulez conducting Stravinsky and Schoenberg at the New York Philharmonic, who haunted bookshops and Off-Off-Broadway theaters that always seemed to be run by Romanian madmen. School was never an issue, because I had already begun to develop certain diligent habits when it came to work . . . perhaps because I had begun to figure out that work was the one source of equilibrium at my disposal, that by applying myself and getting on with the tasks at hand, I could keep all the dark stuff at bay. Dad approved.
“I never thought I’d tell my only kid that I like the fact he’s always studying, always reading. But the truth is, it’s kind of impressive, considering the C’s I got at your age. The only thing I worry about—all these movies and plays and concerts you go to . . . you’re always on your own. No girlfriends, no pals you hang out with . . .”
“There’s Stan,” I said, mentioning a math whiz in my class at school who was also something of a movie addict and, like me, thought nothing of seeing four films during a Saturday. He was hugely overweight and awkward. But we were both loners—and very much outside the team player ethic that was such an integral part of the prep school to which we had both been dispatched. We often look for friends who can make us realize that we are not the only person in the world who feels maladroit with others, or who doubts himself.
“Stan’s the fatty, right?” Dad asked. He’d met him once when I had him over after school.
“That’s right,” I said, “Stan’s kind of large.”
“Kind of large,” Dad said. “If he was my son, I’d send him to a boot camp to get all that blubber off him.”
“Stan’s a good guy,” I told my dad.
“Stan’s going to be dead by the time he’s forty.”
Actually my father got that one right. Stan and I stayed friends over the next thirty years. After a brilliant academic career at the University of Chicago, he ended up living in Berkeley, teaching wildly advanced calculus at the university there. We made a point of seeing each other whenever we found ourselves on either of our respective coasts. When I returned to the States in the summer of 1984 we must have phoned each other every two weeks. Stan never married, though there was always a string of girlfriends, most of whom didn’t seem to mind his ever-augmenting weight. He was the only person I ever confided to about all that went on in Berlin in 1984, and I always think about his comment to me after he heard the story:
You’ll probably never get over it.
Jan was never particularly comfortable around Stan, as she knew that he considered her far too cool and distant for me.
“You’ve really constructed an interesting marriage there,” Stan said after the last weekend he spent with us in Cambridge. He was in town to address some conference at MIT. We had dinner after he read a paper on binary number theory. It was a breathtakingly obscurantist lecture. Stan being Stan, the talk also highlighted his pedantic quirks, a performance which, being his friend, I found endearing, but which Jan considered showboating. Over dinner at an Afghan restaurant (his choice) to which we repaired afterward, she dropped one or two hints that she wasn’t impressed by his displays of erudite exhibitionism. When Stan congratulated me on the publication of my most recent book—about venturing into the Canadian Arctic—Jan attempted a witticism:
“It’s possibly the first book written about the interrelationship between dogsleds and a writer’s deep-rooted solipsism.”
Stan said nothing in reply. But afterward, as Jan pleaded an early start in the morning in court, I walked my friend back to his hotel near Kendall Square. Halfway there, he noted:
“You’re a man who runs away all the time, despite the fact that what you want more than anything in life is to emotionally connect with someone. But like the rest of us, you’ve been counterintuitive. You’ve married someone who—as you’ve intimated over the years—has never really let you near her. Which, in turn, has made you travel more and fabricate the necessary distance to protect yourself from her coldness. Funny, isn’t it? She complains that you are away all the time—yet she has always done everything possible to keep you at one remove. And now you’re both locked into a pattern of behavior which only a divorce will break.”
He fell silent for a moment, letting that last comment sink in. Then, with just the slightest hint of irony in his voice, he asked:
“Of course, what do I know about such things, right?”
When his corroded arteries finally exploded a few weeks later—and I found myself crying uncontrollably in the wake of learning about his death—that final conversation en route to his Cambridge hotel continued to haunt me. Because even when others point out an essential verity about ourselves to ourselves we often reinterpret it in a way that makes it palatable. As in: “Jan may be distant and critical, but who else would put up with my absences and my need to live in my own head?” Whereas I now understand what my great and good friend was really telling me: that I deserved someone who loved me for what I was . . . and if that arrived in my life, I might just stand still for a change
Still the pattern of flight was established early on. Once I started getting involved with women, I could never really stick around. If anyone ever came too close to me, if I sensed interest or love, I would find an excuse to duck and dodge. I was expert at detaching myself from all entanglements. This became even more pronounced after I graduated from college and moved back to New York, determined to try to become a writer. What’s that old line of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s about childhood being the kingdom where nobody dies? I was a member of a generation that didn’t know economic deprivation and wasn’t shipped off to a war, so my early twenties were still a time when—outside of my mother’s death—my existence seemed detached from larger realities. I wasn’t thinking about the rapidity of passing time or the need to focus on life’s bigger pictures. Rather, I lived in the moment. As soon as I was handed my college diploma, I was on the next bus to New York and a job as an editorial assistant at a publishing house. It was 1980 and my starting salary was $16,000 a year. I had little interest in the world of publishing—and I certainly never saw myself as an editor. But the job allowed me to rent a small studio on Sixth Street and Avenue C and live a loose, louche life. I showed up for work. I carved my way through huge stockpiles of unsolicited manuscripts. I went to five movies a week and used a still-valid student ID to get cheap seats for the Philharmonic and the New York City Ballet. I stayed up late most nights, trying to write short stories, often heading out of my tiny apartment to catch the last nocturnal set at a jazz club. And I found myself—much to my surprise—involved with a cellist named Ann Wentworth.
She was a young woman who could best be described as willowy. Tall and willowy, with flowing blond hair and skin that was translucent (could skin be that perfect?). I remember when I first met her at a makeshift brunch at a friend’s apartment near Columbia University. Like my own downtown garret, the apartment was small. But it had four picture windows that bathed this one room in almost ethereal light. When I first saw Ann, she was dressed in a gossamer skirt that, in the honeyed glow of a summer morning, showed off her long legs. I remember immediately thinking that this was the New York bohemian girl of my dreams . . . and one who played the cello to boot.
Not only did she play the cello, she was gifted. A student at Juilliard, she was mentioned by even her fellow students as a musician to watch, serious talent with serious intelligence.
But what I remember most of all about Ann at the outset was her mixture of worldliness and innocence. She was wildly knowledgeable about books and music. As such, our conversation was always animated—with me being the intellectual show-off (well, that was my style back then) and Ann always sounding more thoughtful, more considered. I loved that about her. Just as I loved the way her smile was always couched in a certain wistfulness, a hint that, for all her outward optimism (as Ann herself told me, she preferred to see the glass half-full and life as an enterprise full of possibility), she also had a pensive side to her. She would cry easily in bad movies and during certain passages of music (the slow movements of the Brahms sonatas would always get her). She would cry after making love—which we did at every moment possible. And she cried terribly when, four months into our relationship, I put an end to things between us.
It wasn’t as if something had gone terribly wrong, or that we ever had the sort of disagreement that led to this permanent fracture. No, Ann’s only mistake was to let me know that she genuinely loved me. She had organized a long weekend for us in the family cabin way up in the Adirondacks. It was December 30. A foot of fresh snow had fallen overnight. A fire was burning in the grate, the cabin was fragranced with pine, and we’d just eaten a wonderful dinner and had finished a bottle of wine. We were on the sofa, our arms linked around each other. Looking deep into my eyes she told me:
“You know, my parents have been together since they were twenty . . . and that’s over a quarter of a century ago. As my mom told me a few years ago, the moment she saw my father she knew that he was it. Her destiny. That’s what I felt when I first saw you.”
I smiled tightly, trying to mask my unease. But I knew that I didn’t react well to this comment—as sweetly rendered and loving as it so evidently was. Ann saw this and put her arms around me, saying that she wasn’t trying to trap me, that, on the contrary, she was willing to wait if I wanted to buzz off to Paris and write for a year, or didn’t feel like getting married until we were both twenty-five.
“I don’t want you to feel under pressure,” she told me, all quiet and loving. “I just want you to know that, for me, you are the man of my life.”
The subject was never raised again. But when we returned to the city a few days later, I spent an entire night writing a proposal for a travel book about following the Nile from Cairo to Khartoum. I spent the next week punching out a sample chapter, based on a two-week trip I’d made to Egypt in the summer after leaving college. Thanks to my work in publishing, I knew several agents and interested one of them in the proposed book. She shopped it around to several editors—one of whom informed her that she rarely took a risk on a new and very young writer, but he would be able to part with a paltry $3,000 as an advance for the book. I accepted on the spot. I asked for a four-month leave of absence from work. My boss refused, so I quit. Then I broke the news to Ann. I think what disturbed her most wasn’t the realization that I was about to disappear to the far side of North Africa for several months, but the fact that I had been working toward this goal for the past eight weeks and never once intimated to her that I had been plotting my escape.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked quietly, the hurt so evident in her eyes.
I just shrugged and looked away. She reached out and took my hand.
“I mean, on one level I’m so happy for you, Thomas. Your first book, commissioned by a major publisher. It’s fantastic news. But I just don’t understand why you kept it all a secret.”
Again, I just shrugged, hating myself for playing the coward.
“Thomas,
please,
talk to me. I love you, and there is so much that is good between us.”
I let go of her hand.