“How was the library?” she asked me.
“It was good. Can I go again on Monday?”
“We’ll see,” she said.
“What are you writing?” I asked.
“A novel.”
“You write novels, Mom?” I asked, really impressed.
“I’m trying to,” she said and continued tapping away. I adjourned to the sofa and read one of my Hardy Boys books. Half an hour later Mom stopped writing and told me that she was going to have a bath. I heard her pull paper out from the typewriter. As she disappeared into the bathroom and turned on the taps, I approached the dining table. She had left two manuscript pages facedown next to the typewriter. I picked them up. The first page just contained the title of the book and her name:
THE DEATH OF A MARRIAGE
A Novel
by
Alice Nesbitt
I picked up the next page. The opening sentence read:
The day I discovered that my husband didn’t love me anymore was the day that my eight-year-old son ran away from home.
Suddenly I heard my mother shout:
“How dare you!”
She came racing toward me, tight with rage. She pulled the pages out of my hand and slapped my face.
“You must never, never read my work.”
I burst into tears and ran into my room. I grabbed a pillow off my bed and did what I often did when things got out of hand at home: I hid in the closet, locking the door behind me. With the pillow clutched tight, I sobbed into it, overwhelmed by the feeling that I was all alone in a very difficult world. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes passed. Then there was a knock on the closet door.
“I’ve made you chocolate milk, Thomas.”
I said nothing.
“I’m sorry I slapped you.”
I said nothing.
“Thomas, please . . . I was wrong.”
I said nothing.
“You can’t stay in there all day, you know.”
She tried opening the door.
“Thomas, this is not funny.”
I said nothing.
“Your father will be very cross . . .”
Finally, I spoke:
“My father will understand. He hates you, too.”
This last comment provoked a terrible sob from my mother. I heard her stumble away from the door and head out of my room. Her crying escalated. It became so loud that, even from within my self-incarcerated lair, I could hear her weeping. I stood up and unlocked the door and opened it. Immediately I had to readjust to all the afternoon light cascading through the windows of my room. I followed the sound of Mom’s lament. She was lying facedown on her bed.
“I don’t hate you,” I said.
She continued crying.
“I just wanted to read your book.”
She continued crying.
“I’m going out to the library again.”
The crying instantly stopped. She sat up.
“Are you planning to run away?” she asked.
“Like the boy in your book?”
“That was make-believe.”
“I don’t want to run away,” I lied. “I just want to go back to the library.”
“You promise you’ll come home?”
I nodded.
“Be careful on the street.”
As I turned to leave, Mom said:
“Writers are very private about what they do. That’s why I got angry . . .”
She let the sentence die.
And I headed for the door.
Decades later, during our third date, I remember recounting this story to Jan.
“Did your mom ever finish the book?” she asked.
“I never saw her typing again. But perhaps she worked on it while I was at school.”
“Maybe’s there a manuscript hidden in some attic box somewhere.”
“I found nothing when Dad asked me to clear out all her stuff after she died.”
“And it was lung cancer that got her . . . ?”
“At the age of forty-six. Mom and Dad never stopped fighting and they never stopped smoking. Cause and effect.”
“But your father is still with us?”
“Yeah, Dad’s on his fifth girlfriend since Mom’s death and still puffing twenty a day.”
“And meanwhile, you’ve never stopped escaping.”
“More cause and effect.”
“Maybe you’ve just never found a good reason for staying put,” she said, covering my hand.
I just shrugged and didn’t reply.
“Now you have me interested,” she said.
“Everyone has an old ache or two.”
“True. But there are aches you can live with, and ones that seem to never fade away. Which is yours?”
I smiled and said:
“Oh, I live with most things.”
“And now you’re sounding far too stoic.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I said and changed the subject.
Jan never did learn about that ache—as I always dodged discussions of it. In time, however, she did come to believe that it still impacted on the present and colored so much between us. Just as she also came to the conclusion that there was a significant part of me that was closed off to any real intimacy. But that analysis was reached some time down the road.
And on the next date—the night we also first slept together—I could see her deciding that I was . . . well, different. She was a lawyer, an associate at a major Boston firm. She earned her money representing big corporations but also insisted on handling one pro bono case per year “to salve my conscience.” Unlike me, she’d been in a long relationship, a fellow lawyer who took a job out west and used the move to end it between them.
“You think things are solid, then you discover otherwise,” she said. “And you wonder why your antennae didn’t pick up the fact that all was going wrong.”
“Maybe he was telling you one thing and thinking another,” I said. “Which is often the way these things happen. Everyone has a part of themselves they prefer not to reveal. It’s why we can never really fathom even those close to us. The unknowingness of others and all that.”
“‘And the most foreign place is the self.’ That’s a direct quote from your book on Alaska.”
“Well, I’d be a liar if I didn’t say I was flattered.”
“It’s a great book.”
“Really?”
“You mean, you don’t know that?”
“As I have the usual writerly distrust of anything I’ve ever committed to paper . . .”
“Why such incertitude?”
“It just goes with the territory, I suppose.”
“In my profession incertitude is not allowed. In fact, an uncertain lawyer is never trusted.”
“But surely you have a measure of uncertainty?”
“Not when I’m defending a client or making a closing argument. I have to be indisputable. In private, on the other hand, I’m unsure about everything.”
“Glad to hear that,” I said, covering her hand with mine.
That was the real start of things between us, the moment we both decided to let our defenses down and fall for each other. Is love often predicated on good timing? How often have I heard friends say that they got married because they were ready to get married? That was my dad’s story—and one that he related to me just after my mother died. And it went like this:
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 kn
ew 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.
The Moment Page 3