There were other oddities I mistook for lovable eccentricities, prediagnosis, that I would later come to understand were obvious signposts of high-functioning autism as well. His encyclopedic knowledge of armaments was so precise that when I spotted tanks rolling down Gorky Street on the first morning of the Soviet coup, and I yelled, “Oh my god! Tanks! Run!” his immediate response was to stand still in Red Square and correct my inaccuracy. “No, they’re not tanks. They’re APCs. BTR-60s, to be exact. Why would you call them tanks?” When peak oil was suddenly in the news, he became so obsessed with reading and talking about it, I would have to make excuses to the friends upon whom he’d meticulously unload his doomsday scenarios as they tried to change the subject.
All of these personality quirks and empathy-challenged moments I would have been able to accept in the name of keeping our marriage together, I tell our autism therapist, had our marital bed, which should have been our raft, not, instead, become our Titanic.
Other women married to Aspie men speak of similar daily struggles, in which their partners view intimacy through a utilitarian lens or their needs become misaligned. “Whenever I tell him that I am too tired for an encounter,” one said, “he tries to convince me that I don’t need to do anything. He says, ‘You can even go to sleep,’ as if that would make it easier. Usually, I’m too tired to explain to him why this reasoning makes me sick to my stomach.”
Trying to keep the peace and keep my marriage intact, I would periodically give in to my husband’s needs in lieu of my own: the worst response, in retrospect—albeit textbook as well—as it created both frustration on his part and porous boundaries on mine. These porous boundaries, which I fully own and regret, only fueled his insistence on continuing to cross them, creating a vicious circle of despair instead of connection.
In most marriages that fail, including mine, the off-course grooves marking these circles become so deep and entrenched that the turntable keeps skipping, ruining the song. At that point in the discord, when only dissonance and repetition remain, both partners are to blame for keeping it going. Chicken, egg, it doesn’t matter who started it. The sound of that skipping record is now untenable to both, the needle stuck forever in the same spot. The unkind actions of one keep leading to the angry and defensive reactions of the other, creating an infinite negative feedback loop, which in our case looked something like this: His lack of empathy, absence from the home and its responsibilities, and constant attempts to assert control led to my tears and tantrums; my tears and tantrums made him less likely to come home and more likely to want to assert control. Rinse, repeat. Ad infinitum.
Lost in this maelstrom was love.
Because I could not come up with an exit strategy that did not involve the dissolution of our marriage; because ending our marriage, I knew, would inflict pain on our children; because marital vows, to me, were still sacrosanct; because no one in my family had ever divorced except Great-Aunt Ruth, one week after her wedding, and that was only because her husband had brought his mother along on the honeymoon; because until that fateful lunch at Nora’s, when I finally spoke the words out loud, I’d been too ashamed to open up about the more troubling matters of intimacy to friends and family; because making ends meet as a married couple in America was already a challenge with one partner on the spectrum, the other with all of her professional eggs in media’s shrinking basket, and a middle class dissolving faster than you could say “subprime mortgage crisis”; because our health insurance was tied to my husband’s job, not mine; because single motherhood, I rightly assumed, would be financially and emotionally challenging; because homelessness and bankruptcy were not the irrational fears of a doomsday catastrophist but rather both real and imminent; because my bed had become a place of fear and sadness instead of one of safety and love; because of all of these things, I kept embarking on mini escapes from the marriage. Many of which I hid, even from myself, in the guise of professional pursuits.
“Why didn’t you just leave?” people will often ask today, as if that thought hadn’t occurred to me several times each day or multiple times in a single hour. But like most women in similar relationships, where it takes seven attempts, on average, to finally pack it up and leave, my first forays into flight took the form of these temporary departures.
SIX
Escape
2001–2003
A few weeks after 9/11, I convinced O, The Oprah Magazine to send my then six-year-old son and me back to my early stomping grounds, Peshawar, Pakistan, to deliver aid to Afghan refugee children at the start of the U.S. ground war. I’d traded war photography for TV news, followed by book publishing and magazine journalism, wanting to minimize my children’s exposure to a dead mother. But in those anthrax-filled weeks following 9/11, when staying in New York felt as risky as covering a war, parents in my son’s first grade class had suddenly begun questioning why our children’s teacher had launched a class humanitarian project of selling the students’ handmade bookmarks to raise money for Afghan refugees. “Why are we raising money for Afghan refugees, isn’t that like raising money for the enemy?” I heard one of them ask, which is when something inside me snapped.
I’d covered the end of the war in Afghanistan in 1989, the one to which the U.S. had sent Stinger missiles in the name of containing Soviet communism, when I was a twenty-two-year-old cub reporter on her second big assignment. I knew the damage we’d left in our wake, the moral corruption of our aid, how all of it eventually came back to haunt us via the attack my daughter and I had witnessed from our roof. “We’ll get the money there ourselves,” I rashly promised my son’s teacher, explaining that we could do so in relative safety if we stuck to the camps in Peshawar, miles away from the ground war in Afghanistan.
Over the course of ten days, this was what we did, adding toys, fruit leathers, school supplies, and whatever sports equipment we could carry, while also going from school to school and refugee camp to refugee camp with a missionary zeal, hoping to convince a bunch of war-traumatized kids that not all of us in the U.S. wanted them dead.
One day, in the lobby of the Pearl Continental Hotel, I befriended Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl, one of the only other journalists who stayed behind in Peshawar after the start of the conflict. My son had been in the men’s bathroom off the lobby for too long, so I asked Danny to please check in on him. “He’s fine!” said Danny, returning with a smile. “He’s doing his thing and singing show tunes.” As we waited for my son to emerge, I asked Danny why he hadn’t run off across the border like everyone else. The hotel, once overbooked and teeming with journalists, was now nearly empty. “My wife’s pregnant with our first child,” he said. He didn’t want to put himself in undue danger. He was covering a different side of the story, he said. A relatively safer side.
“Same,” I said, telling him of our exploits.
Three months later, Danny was beheaded by al-Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who would later claim personal responsibility for wielding the knife. I was on my paperback book tour when I read the news. In some hotel somewhere, bawling.
Some of my friends and family members had expressed concern and, in a few cases, horror over my bringing a six-year-old to Peshawar. I obviously understood their finger-wagging, but I do not regret our trip. In fact, my now adult son still remembers our daily visits to refugee camps, if vaguely, as a seminal moment in his own understanding of the world and his place in it. He’d brought his own Legos to give the children, but instead of playing together, each tried to hoard and hide pieces in hands, pockets, and mouths. “No!” he’d said. “Don’t do that. We have to build something together. Look, like this…” The kids immediately understood and started cooperating on a single structure.
On the night after our return, when his little sister whined about being deprived of a second cupcake after dinner, he stood up on his chair, pointed his finger at her, and said, “There are places in the world where
there are no cupcakes!”
Viewing our trip now, however, through unfogged goggles, it’s clear that providing aid to refugees and showing my child his obligations as a human toward other humans were not my only motivations. Much less romantically, we needed the money. My husband had lost both his physical office building and his job in the wake of 9/11, and O, The Oprah Magazine, for whom I was both writing and shooting the accompanying photos, paid well on both fronts. One of my primary motivations, however, was a ten-day reprieve from my marriage. Which begs the obvious question: How unhappy at home must a woman be to bring her young son to the borderlands of a war?
Kachagari Refugee Camp. Peshawar, Pakistan, November 2001, © Deborah Copaken
Soon after arriving home from Peshawar, suffering from clinical depression and seeking further escape, I rented the cheapest office I could find, in a former fabric factory on lower Broadway that had not yet been sold to developers, where I would retreat every day to write my second book, the novel Suicide Wood (later retitled by my publisher to Between Here and April*). That this unheated, filthy room, for which I was paying $179 a month, was dark, drafty, and in disrepair, with a view of an air shaft through a blackened window, felt apt for the task at hand: mining the blackest coals within me.
I based the novel on the true story of my best friend from first grade, Connie Hummel, whose mother had killed her, herself, and Connie’s two siblings in 1972 by attaching a vacuum hose to the tailpipe of the family car. I then forced my stand-in protagonist, the book’s narrator, Lizzie, to live through many of the pains and miseries at the heart of my own marriage, only tempered: In the margins next to one particular scene, later excised, my agent had written, “Too much. Too horrific. Strains the bounds of credulity.” I left that scene in the novel when I turned it in, only to be chastised again in red ink by my editor’s hand. “No,” she said, when I called her on the phone and asked her to keep it. “I’m sorry. But I don’t buy it. No woman would ever put up with that kind of abuse in a marriage. Not even a weak one, and Lizzie’s not weak.” I wasn’t capable yet of telling either of them—or anyone—that I knew an allegedly strong woman who had and would: me.
Though I’m less ashamed to admit this today than I would have been back then, there were many days, during the decades-long, drawn-out death spiral of my marriage, when I, like my protagonist, craved the escape of nothingness. My kids, at particularly low points, were the only anchors keeping me from taking out a shovel and digging my own grave.
“The overwhelming majority of non-Asperger’s syndrome partners stated that their mental health had significantly deteriorated due to the relationship,” writes Tony Attwood, a clinical psychologist who specializes in the field. Moreover, many reported a deterioration in physical health as well.
Fearing that I might harm myself, I sought treatment under the care of a psychiatrist, in whose office, week after week, the continual pattern of pain and escape, action and reaction, suddenly became clear, stretching all the way back through childhood. Volatility? Be the straight-A student beyond reproach. Assault, rape? Run off to war and enmesh yourself with abusive lovers. Pain? Escape it. By any means necessary.
I even escaped, periodically, back into cigarettes, after having quit in my late twenties, sneaking one every so often between the kids’ bedtime and mine, blowing smoke through the security bars on my kitchen window like an inmate in solitary. I escaped, too, into every piece of literature of marital discord I could get my hands on: Roth and Updike, Tolstoy and Flaubert, Woolf, Plath, and yes, Ephron, whose Heartburn, upon rereading, made my heart ache with recognition. I also escaped in the late ’90s—I’m ashamed to admit this as well—into an inappropriately close relationship with a neighborhood father, who was dealing with his own downward marital trajectory: a freemasonry of fellow sufferers, as Dickens might have called it.
My therapist called it an emotional affair.
At the time, I justified our constant email and phone contact, in the twisted synapses of my mind, as a necessary corrective. For both of us. Here was a man, I told myself, equally unhappy in his own marriage, who actually heard and saw me as I heard and saw him; whose empathy and attentions were not only dependable but sometimes too much so. The more I examine those months and words from the distance of years and language, however, the more I see the mirage of us for what it was (two drowning people pulling each other under) and what it was not (love).
The neighborhood dad and I cut ties when he separated from his wife and started bringing up a different marriage: ours. I wanted to fix what was broken in the marriage I had, I told him, not jump into another catastrophe. He needed to leave me alone—stop emailing, stop calling, stop making me mix CDs and inviting me out dancing, stop showing up at my office, uninvited—so I could do the necessary work of repair, unburdened by extraneous complications. His constant attentions were becoming both millstone and liability. So when he called on the morning of 9/11, a few months after I’d asked him to please respect my wishes and leave me alone, the conversation went something like this:
Him: “Turn on your TV.”
Me: “I told you to stop calling me.”
Him: “I know, but…a plane flew into the World Trade Center.”
I pictured a small aircraft, a wayward gust of wind. “That’s no reason to contact me. Please, leave me alone.”
“Jesus Christ, just turn on your TV!”
I turned on my TV just in time to watch the second plane fly into the towers. You know the rest, except what I left out, in my earlier telling, was that the neighborhood dad who showed up at my apartment and offered to watch my daughter while I fetched my son across town was him. Part of me was enraged that he’d used the excuse of a terrorist attack to reconnect. The other part was both grateful and on stone-cold autopilot: My six-year-old was far away and frightened during an unfurling tragedy, and I needed to bring him home. Now, every time anyone mentions where they were on 9/11, or how they found out—meaning often, particularly for those of us who live in New York—I am forced to reconcile not only with the national pain of that day and grief over lost friends, but also with my moral shortcomings.
It would take another twelve years, a third child, the death of my father, and two more moving vans for me to finally admit, first to Nora, then to myself, that there was not enough bubble wrap in the world to protect our family.
Skip Notes
* I wanted to keep Suicide Wood but was told, once again, I had no say in the matter. My publisher felt a Dante reference in the title might harm sales. The novel is an allegory of The Inferno.
SEVEN
Lunch with Nora, E.A.T.
DECEMBER 2011
“You’re not eating,” says Nora. We are sitting at our usual table at E.A.T., a restaurant around the corner from Nora’s apartment, but today not even the cucumber and dill is doing it for me. Stress has eaten my appetite. Anemia from my worsening adenomyosis has eaten my red blood cells. The Red Book, my new baby, is coming out in April, with all of the pre-publication responsibilities this entails: a book trailer, essays, a new website, social media promotion—anything and everything to get the news of its birth out there, now that local newspapers are dead. My human babies are sixteen, fourteen, and five, with all of the responsibilities that they entail. My father’s death has left an empathy hole in my life where once he stood.
“I had a big breakfast,” I say. “I’m not hungry.”
“No. Sorry,” says Nora. “You are not allowed to add anorexia onto adeno…whatever it’s called. Did you schedule that surgery yet?”
“Adenomyosis. And no. I have not scheduled the hysterectomy yet. I can’t have a major operation right now. It’s not a good time. I’ll do it after my novel comes out. Where can I get a yahrzeit candle around here?”
Nora laughs. “On the Upper East Side?” She gestures out the window to Madison Avenue, bustling with holi
day shoppers. “I’m sure even the dry cleaners have them.”
Jews light commemorative candles—yahrzeit candles—every year on the eve of the anniversary of a parent’s death. Yahrzeit is a Yiddish word that means simply “time of year.” It is early December, 2011, that time of year, which is to say one day shy of three years since my father’s death.
I laugh. “True.” Then my bottom lip starts to quiver.
Nora, unusually, takes her hand and places it atop mine. Though I’ve come to rely on her these days more as surrogate mother than mentor, she’s not the touchy-feely kind. Her maternal love takes the form of unsentimental, direct truths, spoken plainly but with humor, encouragement, and a brush-yourself-off-and-keep-going practicality. But not today. Today she’s fine wallowing along with me. “I know,” she says, seeming to tear up as well. “He was a special guy.”
At the book party for my novel in 2008, Nora and my father, Richard Copaken—a lawyer, weekend artist, and self-proclaimed movie buff who, in his final years had started a company that used algorithms to predict the future success of films—had spent most of the night together huddled in the corner, chatting. They were the same age, sixty-seven, born a month apart. They were both dealing with cancer diagnoses, although only my father had gone public with his—pancreatic, stage 4, prognosis: imminent death. At that point, Nora hadn’t even told her sons about hers.
Which is weird, as she was the self-proclaimed Queen of Indiscretion. Years before it was public knowledge, she told me and anyone else who would listen that Deep Throat was Mark Felt. At one of my dinner parties, when my good friend and downstairs neighbor Marco, a journalist for Italian Vanity Fair, asked Nora if she was working on a new movie, she said yes, but it was a secret, and she was sorry, but she wasn’t allowed to talk about it. Then she proceeded to tell him every last detail about Julie and Julia, including the fact that she’d just spoken to Meryl Streep that afternoon about coming on as its lead.
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