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
BERLIN. 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 existe
nce 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.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. Ann was now looking at me, wide-eyed.
“Can’t do what?”
“This, us.”
“But I am not asking you to marry me.”
“Even though it’s what you want.”
“Yes, it is what I want . . . but only because I think you are a wonderful man.”
“You don’t know me.”
She stared at me as if I had slapped her face.
“How can you say that, how . . . ?”
“Because it’s the truth. Because you’d be much better off with a nicer guy who wants the little life that you . . .”
As soon as the words little life were out of my mouth, I regretted them. Because I could see the effect they had on Ann. It was as if I had punched her.
“Little life? Is that what you think I want for us?”
Of course, I knew that Ann wasn’t a reproduction of my mother. Just as I knew that she would never press me into the sort of domestic hell that so enraged my father (even if he was the co-architect of that hell). No matter how many reassurances she would give me about not pressuring me into an early marriage, the thing was . . . she had told me she loved me. She had told me I was the man with whom she wanted to spend her life. I simply couldn’t cope with such knowledge, such responsibility. So I said:
“I’m not ready for the sort of commitment you want or need.”
Again she reached for my hand. This time I wouldn’t let her take it. Again the hurt and bewilderment in her eyes was vast.
“Thomas, please, don’t push me away like this. Do your three, four months in Egypt. I’ll wait for you. It won’t change anything between us. And when you come back we can—”
“I’m not coming back.”
Her eyes filled up. She began to cry.
“I don’t understand,” she said quietly. “We’re . . .”
She paused for a moment, and then said the word I knew she’d say, the word I’d dreaded all along:
“. . . happy.”
A long silence followed as she waited for a response from me. But none was forthcoming.
Some months later, I woke up in a cheap hotel room in Cairo, very much alone, the solitude and sense of dislocation enormous. I found myself replaying that final conversation with Ann, over and over again in my head, wondering why I had so pushed her away. Of course, I knew the answer to that question. I tried to tell myself that it was better this way. After all, I had made the less conformist, more daring decision. I was a man without all those damn
able ties that bind. I could float my way through life, have adventures, flings, even run off to the ends of the earth if I felt like it. And I was just in my early twenties, so why tie myself up with someone who would keep me tethered to a life that would limit the proverbial horizon?
But the question that so gnawed at me that night in that Cairo hotel room was: But did you actually love Ann Wentworth?
And the answer was: had I been open to the idea, the love would have followed. But as I had an abject terror of what it meant to love and be loved . . . best to detonate the relationship and kill off all possibilities of a future together.
So after that painful nuit blanche in Cairo, I decided to put all such difficult sentiments out of my head. I threw myself into my Egyptian travels with a vehemence that surprised even me. Every day I sought out the new, the strange, the extreme. This being Egypt I could find all of the above. I spent time in the City of the Dead—a vast ghetto made up of families so impecunious, so unable to find dwellings in a city of sixteen million citizens hemmed in by the desert, that they had to rent tombs in Cairo’s vast necropolis. I took a train down to Assyut—a university town that was Egypt’s primary breeding ground for Islamic fundamentalists—and loitered with intent among members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. I hitched a ride with two felucca men, floating down the Nile from Luxor to Aswan, sleeping on a mattress and a plain sheet every night on the deck of the boat, purifying Nile water to drink. When I reached Aswan I met a French anthropology student named Stephanie, who was heading south to Khartoum. So we traveled down the Nile to the Sudanese border, and then spent a mad week on a series of buses that never traveled more than 150 kilometers a day. They deposited us in nowhere villages with primitive hotels that cost, on average, two dollars a night. I remember making love with Stephanie on a series of straw mattresses, in mud-brick buildings that frequently adjoined an outhouse, in nighttime temperatures that were never lower than ninety degrees. When we reached Khartoum, I had economized so rigorously during the five months on the road that I insisted we splurge and check into the fanciest hotel in town: the Grand Holiday Villa, best known as one of those sunstruck spots where Churchill holed up against the English winter to paint those mediocre watercolors for which he was less than famous. The desk clerk looked at Stephanie and me with suspicion, as we hadn’t bathed for days and were both covered in a thin film of dust. But after some dickering I managed to bargain us into a large, airy room with a king-sized bed and a huge bathtub for $35 per day (one of the few things that I liked about the Sudan was its cheapness). Stephanie was a small, sinewy woman with excellent English and a worldview that could be best described as sardonic. She was pretty in a severe sort of way and very passionate whenever we made love. But there was also something clinical to her worldview; the physical heat between us turning into detached dispassion afterward.
The Moment Page 4