Stan didn’t like her from the outset—warning me that there was an inherent coldness to Jan, and that he could see that, while I admired her, I was not wholly in love with her.
But, like Jan, I was at a stage in life when I no longer wanted to be adrift. Moreover, there was cognitive and domestic compatibility between us. We could talk books and interesting movies and current affairs and what we heard that day on National Public Radio. We shared the same aesthetic. And we weren’t outwardly competitive with each other, never forcing each other into roles we didn’t want to play.
Though everything on paper made us seem like the stuff of a very good match, there was one huge disconnect between us: a lack of true love.
I now see that at the time, I was willing to talk myself into a position of compromise about all this.
All right, your heart never sings when you see her. All right, there is companionship, but no sense of complicity or shared destiny between you. But surely, that will come in time.
It was a way of papering over all the silent doubts that I was unwilling to confront. Are so many marriages forged this way—hoping that the fundamentals you know are missing will eventually arrive, desperately accentuating the positive to close the deal, because you feel somehow that you really should be grounding yourself at this moment in time?
In November of 1989, with my wife now eight months pregnant, I headed off solo to a movie theater at Harvard Square to see a new print of “The Third Man” (Jan having to work late at her office on a case that she was determined to close before our baby arrived in the world). After the film, I dropped in to one of the few good old-fashioned dingy saloons that still remained in this increasingly gentrified corner of Cambridge. While I was sitting at the bar with three drunks, a news bulletin came on the overhead television. And I watched static-laden images of the Berlin Wall being breached, the correspondent from CNN standing at the now wide-open gates of Checkpoint Charlie as thousands of East Germans swarmed Westwards, getting choked with emotion as he stated: “The Berlin Wall has finally fallen down today . . . and the world is a different place.”
I remember being so overcome by this statement—and the images of Berliners from both sides of the frontier embracing and crying—that I stepped outside into the darkened night and found myself in a mad reverie, wondering how long it would take to get myself from here to Berlin. Then, if I could somehow find Petra in East Berlin, how I would take her in my arms and tell her that not a day had gone by in the past five years when she had not loomed large in my life, when I had continued to blame myself for letting my rage kill my compassion, and how if I could turn back the clock . . .
But the clock can never be turned back. What had happened had happened, and I was now a married man with a child due momentarily. Anyway, even if I had been free, why would she want anything to do with me after what I had rained down on her? With any luck she had met somebody over the past few years and was now a mother again. And here I was . . . haunted. Overshadowed. Never unburdened by all that was unresolved.
The Wall might have come down, but it still enclosed my heart.
Certainly, when Candace finally arrived in the world, my love for her was overwhelming, unconditional. And because we shared responsibility for this wonderful person, Jan and I were able to evade, for a time, the growing realization that ours was a relationship lacking the essential propulsion that love provides.
Thinking back to that night on the deck of that cottage on that offshore island in Maine, when she said she knew she was not the love of my life, when she showed greater perception than me about the emotional landscape between us and what were to be its increasingly profound limitations . . . why didn’t I tell her the truth? Why did I not admit that—seven years on from my ignoble departure from Berlin—the loss of Petra had never really dulled? Yes, I had reached an accommodation with it all—the way you eventually accept the death of someone central to your life. But its lingering presence—the fact that no romance since then had ever come close to matching the absolute and profound certainty that Petra and I shared—served as a quiet but persistent reminder of all that was lacking in my marriage . . . and, most tellingly, of all that I had lost.
Still, I reassured Jan that night that I loved her, that I would be there for her and our child, that we had a great future together. For the first years of Candace’s life, we did manage to have a sense of shared purpose. We bought a house in Cambridge. I found a part-time teaching post at Boston University—from September to December every year—and scaled back travel during the other months to no more than eight weeks per year. I continued to turn out books. During the ten months I was home I very much shared, and enjoyed sharing, responsibility for everything to do with Candace’s daily life. Watching her discover the world was so interesting and pleasurable that it compensated for the ever-growing distance between her mother and me. Increasingly, Jan’s controlling nature, her flintiness, her inability to nurture—the root coldness I always knew was there but could never bring myself to properly consider—pushed me deeper into my own shell. According to Jan, I was the sort of man who lived most of the time in my own head, who was far too singular, too much the loner, to be able to accept “the sense of mutuality” that must accompany a good marriage and that, in truth, my love for her was never anything more than a fragile veneer with no real substance to it whatsoever.
Still, we soldiered along, making increasingly passionless but ongoing love with each other at least twice a week, very much a team when it came to Candace’s needs and her future, but otherwise increasingly estranged.
Things fall apart, the center will not hold
. And once Candace hit adolescence and began to need us less on a full-time basis . . . that’s when the real drift began.
It was also in the year 2004 that—following a book I wrote about the theoretics of travel and the very human need to escape day-in, day-out reality—my editor suggested I consider a memoir of a life spent ricocheting around the world. This proposal arrived at a moment when I was pretty certain that Jan was having an affair with a colleague—a truth that was admitted some years later during the endgame moments of our marriage—and I had fallen into an occasional thing with a magazine editor in New York. She was a most independent woman named Eleanor who was pleased to see me whenever I was in Manhattan. She would accompany me two or three times a year on a weeklong trip somewhere and was very clear about the fact that she wanted nothing more from me than this “collegial arrangement” (her exact words). Eleanor was forty, hugely smart, funny, clever, and exceptionally passionate. But she had been badly singed in a relationship prior to meeting me, and had decided to erect a barrier around her heart, even though she once admitted that we were so right for each other. But the man who had so hurt her had also been married. On a trip together to Costa Rica, six months into what she described as “our erotic friendship,” I admitted that I was in love with her. Her response was to slam on the emotional breaks.
“Don’t go there,” she said, turning away from me in bed and reaching for a postcoital cigarette.
“But it’s the truth. And I sense that you yourself feel the same way about—”
“What I feel,” she said, cutting me off, “is that you are very married and living in a city two hundred miles away with a teenage daughter who, from everything you’ve told me, is clearly crazy about you.”
“She will still love me—and she will still see a very great deal of me—even if I am living in Manhattan.”
“You want to move in with me?”
“I would not be so presumptuous. But I want to be with you, yes. And not once every six weeks for a weekend, with the occasional interesting trip thrown in. I want a life with you, and would be willing to rent a place in Manhattan.”
“This can’t be,” she said, sitting up and actually getting slightly agitated in her body language.
“I love you. I know that.”
“And I know that you are a wonderful man, and one who deserves to be happier than you are. But I’m not the person with whom to collaborate on such a project.”
“But we’re so great together, so right for each other.”
“And there are limits beyond which I am not willing to venture.”
“Wouldn’t you be willing to, at least, see how things developed if I were nearby?”
“I’ll be blunt here, Thomas. I love seeing you when I do. I love sharing a bed with you. I love walking a beach with you. I love talking into the night with you, but only on the basis that you then vanish for a few weeks. Perhaps that might strike you as self-limiting. But I believe the reason we have such a good thing between us—besides the fact that you never complain to me about your wife, even though it is clear to me how unhappy you are—is that we are not in each other’s lives all the time.”
“But if I did move to New York, we wouldn’t have to see each other every night.”
“But I might want that, and that spells trouble for me. There is only so far I’m now willing to travel romantically with you, or anyone else for that matter.”
“Even though you have just intimated to me that you might want that life together?”
“That’s right. And if that sounds like a major contradiction . . . well, it is. And so it goes. But as a real traveler, surely you know there are certain places you refuse to venture.”
“I did once turn down an assignment to Lagos.”
“Very witty. But I know that you understand what I’m talking about. Because I sense, like me, you were so hurt by something, or
someone.
You have spent much of the years since then in mourning for her, because you also realize that what you had might never come your way again.”
“Am I that transparent?” I asked with a sad smile.
“Intimacy does that, doesn’t it? And yes, when we are together—and especially when we make love—I feel that loss you carry, and your desire to have it erased by the love of someone else.”
“My love for you.”
“I know. I see it in your eyes all the time. But, sorry, I just can’t cross that line. I have my reasons, and I am also going to reserve my right
not
to explain them. Except to say I wish it were otherwise.”
Nothing more was said about this during the forty-eight hours we had left in the Costa Rican rain forest. When we returned to the States, and I kissed her good-bye at JFK before jumping a connecting flight back to Boston, her eyes welled up, she buried her head in my shoulder, and she said three words:
“I’m so sorry.”
The next morning I woke to an email written by Eleanor in the middle of that night, informing me that she had decided to “call time on us before it gets too serious, before it cuts too deep.”
I wrote back, telling her that love was always a risk but, in our case, so worth taking. I never received a reply. As this flash of possibility, this willingness to risk my heart again, was extinguished right at a moment when I knew that Jan was sleeping with a hard-driving mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer named Brad Bingley (in all American stories there is always a guy named Brad), I felt the loss even more acutely . . . even though, as someone who had also stepped beyond the “forsaking all others” boundaries of my marriage, I couldn’t exactly feel manic jealousy at the thought that Jan was twice a week in the arms of another man.
In the wake of Eleanor ending things between us, Jan informed me that she had been offered a two-month transfer to her firm’s Washington office. “Maybe it would be a good idea if we had a small break from each other, a period of reassessment,” she said. I spent that time she was away playing Dad to Candace. When she was at school or doing the half-dozen extracurricular activities that filled her afternoons, or spending half the weekend with a friend, I wrote the Berlin memoir that I had been ordered by Bubriski not to write all those years ago. I wrote it with a speed and a need that surprised me. Reading through all the notebooks again, what so amazed me was not just what a younger man I was back then—young not just chronologically, but also in terms of my understanding about life’s larger questions—but also just how, in my day-today accounting of the love that Petra and I shared, I never once expressed a doubt about the veracity of our feelings toward each other. Yes, the notebooks were filled with worries about the shadows in her past. Yes, I often articulated my fear of losing her. And yes, I detailed—with an almost forensic attention to detail—that horrible final night in Berlin, when my rage and hurt destroyed everything.
But most of all what emerged so profoundly from these notebooks, which I hadn’t opened in the eighteen subsequent years, but which I also kept locked up in the big fireproof cabinet I had in my office, was the sense of wonderment at the love I felt, the love I received, the belief that everything together was possible, the sense of hope permeating so much of our time together, and then the way it all just imploded in the most appalling and tragic of circumstances.
As I now reconstructed on the page all those extraordinary months in Berlin, I was very conscious of looking upon this time with the more weathered eye of a man in his forties—who, like anyone who has made it into his middle years, has been both bruised and deepened by everything that life has tossed in his path.