Helena pulls up to the Bungalito, engine idling.
“Do you want to talk?” I say, because I love Helena, and because I’ve had my heart broken, so I can’t stand breaking hers.
“Is there anything you haven’t said?”
“You must feel it, too.” I hear the pleading in my own voice: absolve me. “It’s not right between us. But we could be friends.”
“Be a big girl, Meredith,” Helena says. “This is your decision, not mine. Own it.”
I imagine my life without Helena in it. It doesn’t look good. I know I have to do this, start all over again, again. I know I’m going to miss her and I know it’s going to be a long, slow slog from where I am to feeling good. Again.
Decades ago, when my brother and I were both leaving our first marriages, breaking up our children’s families, both of us racked by ambivalence and guilt, he said to me, “We’re both so desperate for love, we can’t leave when there’s even a scrap of it left on the table.”
That was thirty years ago. I want more than scraps now.
Helena pushes a button on her gleaming walnut dashboard. I hear the trunk pop open. “I’m pretty sure you’re making a big mistake,” she says.
Six months ago—six weeks ago, maybe—Helena’s words would have chilled me to the bone. I would have rushed to call Hannah, Celia, a few other trusted advisors. If they thought I should stay with Helena, I would have stayed with Helena.
“You might be right,” I say.
I don’t need to call anyone now. I get out of Helena’s car and I take my backpack out of her trunk and I walk into my own house by my own self.
I want a drink, of course, by which I mean I want to start drinking and keep drinking until I fall asleep. But I don’t have a drink and I don’t eat a pint of ice cream. I take a hot bath and I close my eyes and sink into the soothing water and I pray to God that I’ve done the right thing, ending it with Helena, and I pray to God that someday I’ll love someone wholly and passionately again.
NINETEEN
For the past two decades I’ve spent a few weeks each year at one of my favorite artists’ colonies—little bits of heaven where the earthly needs of musicians, visual artists, and writers are handled by the talented, dedicated staff, leaving the artists with only two things to do: make art (or nap while dreaming of making art) and show up for dinner.
On a dare from Helena, I’d applied to a prestigious Vermont colony for the summer session. A few days after our breakup, I find a thick acceptance packet in my mailbox.
This is great news for my book deadline. For my anxiety management, not so much. Sitting down to dinner on the first night of a colony residency with Guggenheim fellows and Pulitzer Prize winners and MacArthur geniuses reminds me of walking into my junior high prom without a date, all eyes on my Brillo-pad hair, pimply face, and oh-so-wrong dress. After dinner most nights the residents gather in one another’s studios for concerts, readings, dance performances, art exhibits, and film screenings of works destined for Carnegie Hall, the Tate, Cannes, the bestseller lists. Intimidating? Just a bit.
Making friends at a residency can go really, really well, as evidenced by my enduring colony friendships with Emily, Dana, and others. Or it can go really, really badly, as evidenced by the lonely residencies I’ve struggled through, writing in solitude all day, feeling like literature’s greatest loser by night, soothed only by my frequent calls to my wife, who read me my mail, paid my bills, blew me kisses, and sent me back to my studio to do what I was there to do. When my social situation was particularly dire, she’d send extravagant care packages whose arrivals sparked curiosity and whose contents—Belgian dark chocolates, plump Turkish apricots, Japanese snack mix, French cheeses—provided instant cures for my unpopularity.
This time around I’ll be walking that tightrope without a net. I instruct the post office to hold my mail, wish myself a fun, productive summer, and lug my seventy-five-pound suitcase to the airport in an eighty-dollar Uber, instead of sitting in the passenger seat of my wife’s car.
Ten hours after takeoff from LAX, I take a deep breath and step into the colony dining room. Thirty strangers stop eating and talking and turn their eyes to me.
“I’m Meredith.” I twist my face into a welcoming grin. “What’s for dinner?”
Incredibly, everyone in the room smiles back at me. A raven-haired young woman with brilliant blue eyes jumps up and gives me a hug. “Welcome,” she says. “I’m Marta. Novels and short stories. From Arizona.”
“Tandy,” says a woman who seems to be almost as old as I am. “Composer. Connecticut.”
“C.J. Performance artist. Cairo.”
“Justin. Painter. Williamsburg.”
“Dawn. Playwright. Ann Arbor.”
“Elaine. Filmmaker. Fort Greene.”
“Miguel. Poet. I’m from Buenos Aires.”
“Can I fix you a plate?” Marta asks me. “Would you like a glass of wine?”
It’s been four months since alcohol has crossed the barrier between my longing and my lips. I have much to show for that time and that experience: a new awareness of what I use alcohol for (when drinking alone, to dull the loneliness; when drinking with others, to accelerate the fun) and the benefits of life without it (less insomnia, more productivity, and improved memory, a benefit whose value cannot be overstated for a woman my age whose father had Alzheimer’s).
One of the slogans Helena brought home from SoulCycle was “How you do one thing is how you do everything.” Despite the pleasure I take from skewering SoulCycle’s pop-psych jargon, I’ve found this particular ditty to be true. The same way I struggle for balance between thinking long-term versus diving into the pleasures of the moment—settling for casual sex versus holding out for true love; breaking for fun on weekdays even when deadlines loom; planting perennials in my garden versus showy, instant-karma annuals—I struggle for balance between the pleasures of drinking and the benefits of not.
Yes, I’d prefer a lifelong relationship to a few hot nights in bed. Yes, I’d rather live on in the literary canon than hear live reggae at the Bowl. Yes, I’d rather maintain my rep as a meeter of deadlines than inhale a noseful of orange blossoms. But I’ve learned this about medium-term living: being sixty means never having to say you’re sorry for wanting it all, and going for as much of it as you can.
If I’d been planning on lifetime sobriety, I would have passed on the late-night boozy bonding sessions that make colony life what it is. But now that I know I can live without alcohol for months at a time, I feel ready to rejoin the party.
“Wine would be great,” I say. “Thanks.”
My first post-abstinence sip is at once anticlimactic and satisfying. It’s just wine. It’s just a slight boost to my mood, my confidence, my smile. Maybe I’ll make it through the evening after all. Maybe I’ll even make it through the summer without making the homesick kid’s call home to wife/mommy. I hope so, since I’m all out of wives/mommies at the moment.
—
“ARE YOU SETTLING IN OKAY?” colony staffers ask each artist for the first few days after we arrive. “Is there anything you need?”
It’s all I can do not to answer, “Are you fucking kidding me?” My studio has a bathtub in the bedroom, a leather chair facing a stone fireplace, and a loft with a sweeping view of the deer, foxes, and wild turkeys frolicking in the wildflower meadow that surrounds my own private aerie.
My book-in-progress is behaving itself, new pages stacking up day after day. I’m a member in good standing—good swimming—of the swim team, five very different women from three different countries who meet at four each afternoon to swim across an idyllic local pond. Driving there, packed into our subcompact rental car like half-naked clowns, Phoebe, Marta, Riya, Elaine, and I talk and laugh about our thickening bodies, our sex lives past, present, and imagined. Paddling through velvet water past loons and kayakers and jagg
ed rock outcroppings, we continue the conversation. As the sun sinks, we swim back to shore, disembarking at the colony dripping wet, with dark wet breast spots blotching our sarongs, just in time for yet another sumptuous meal.
This is progress. This is a triumph. This is the best colony experience of my life. Without a wife or girlfriend playing backup, connecting me to the life I’ll return to, I’m living the life I’m in, right here, right now. When my brain starts its minesweep for explosive thoughts, I take a breath, look around, and notice what a waste it would be to put my attention anywhere else.
Knowing that I’m here because the admissions committee valued my writing makes my writing better. Uninterrupted from dawn to dinnertime, I sink deep into the book I’m writing, finding its steady pulse each morning, right where I left it the night before. People here like me—they really, really like me! So there’s no need to perform frantic circus tricks in hopes of winning their affection.
—
DURING MY SECOND WEEK in writers’ paradise, I’m eating lunch at my desk when I get a text from Hannah.
“Michael just died,” it says. “My world is over.”
I stare at the words. They swim in front of me. I read them again.
Michael? Dead? That simply cannot be.
I dial Hannah’s number. When she answers, I don’t hear Hannah’s strong, upbeat voice. I hear the ghost of Hannah, a stranger’s whisper.
“Michael rode his bike to work this morning,” she says in a low, halting monotone. “When he got there, he had a heart attack and fell onto the hospital steps. They worked on him and worked on him, but they couldn’t—”
Hannah gasps, sobs, gulps.
“The doctors are—were—his coworkers. So they didn’t want to stop trying. But there was nothing they could do.”
“Honey.” I can hardly speak myself. “How are you?”
I hear Hannah’s panting breath: Gasp-gasp-gasp. Pause. Gasp-gasp-gasp. “Numb,” she says. “Michael’s boss is here, taking care of me. He gave me some pills.”
“I’m glad you’re not alone.”
“My kids are coming.”
“That’s good.”
I hear it again. Gasp-gasp-gasp. Pause. “We just started renovating the house. I’m sitting here in a construction site. By myself.” A single sob bursts from her mouth. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Three years ago, when I said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” to Hannah, she said, “You’re going to get through this, I promise you.”
“You’re going to get through this, I promise you,” I say to her now.
“I don’t see how,” she says.
I remember how comforting Hannah’s solid presence was to me, her big-boned body and goofy outfits and unglamorous dog, when we went for our hikes and threw our brunches and she showed me that my life in L.A. could be survivable, even good.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I say.
“Stay where you are,” Hannah says in that same flat, muffled voice. “There’s nothing you can do. You have the whole summer ahead of you. Write your book.”
“I can’t be on the other end of the country while you’re going through this.”
“The pills . . . I’m falling asleep,” Hannah mumbles, and hangs up.
I sit staring out my studio window. A family of wild turkeys pecks and struts its way across the meadow: an adult, a second, slightly smaller adult, and six identical chicks, in single file. I wonder if the big turkeys are mom and dad, mom and mom, or mom and a supportive friend. I wonder how the chicks know to walk that way, in perfect single file.
Didn’t I have a conversation like this with my friend William a few weeks ago, while Armando was still in the ICU?
And another one, a couple of months ago, with the brother of my lifelong best friend? Cori and I walked to and from junior high together every day of seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. Over the next fifty years, whenever I came “home” to New York, my first stop was Grand Central, where Cori and I met to dream up our next adventure. Cori took the cover photos for three of my books, and loved me and fought with me and was there for me, and then she had routine surgery and stopped breathing on the operating table and died.
There was the call from the new boyfriend of my fifty-year-old colony friend Maggie, telling me that Maggie went out to walk their dogs through the woods near their Woodstock home and had a heart attack and died.
Not long ago, there was—and then there wasn’t—my dad.
This was promised, and now it’s happening. I’m older, and my people are older, and we’ve started dying off. Yes, we all feel like we have a whole lot more living to do, but tell that to the rotting temples of our bodies. There’s a reason our grandmothers never uttered the word menopause. A hundred years ago, life expectancy for American women was forty to forty-five years. To our bodies, sixty is sixty. And for some of us, clearly, sixty is all we get.
Michael and Hannah just moved to their dream house, their dream life. Michael is—was—fifty-seven, a doctor, the healthiest living person I knew. He frowned when I sprinkled salt onto Hannah’s thoughtfully unsalted chicken. He shook his head when I poured myself a martini from my BYO gin. He actually left the room when I took a spoon to my BYO Ben & Jerry’s.
Michael’s food intake never varied. His was a heart-healthy women’s magazine diet, faithfully followed. Original Cheerios, sliced banana, 1 percent lactose-free milk for breakfast. Low-sodium sliced turkey on whole wheat, no mayo, for lunch. For dinner, roast chicken or broiled fish, steamed carrots, green salad with red bell pepper—always minced by Hannah into perfect tiny squares. No booze, no sugar, no salt, no exceptions. Michael’s only vice is—was—Coke Zero. He carried a liter bottle with him wherever he went. There was an extra fridge in the garage just to keep those bottles chilled.
And Michael died? Of a heart attack?
My phone rings. It’s Todd, Hannah’s and my editor and Hannah’s closest friend, calling from L.A. “Un-fucking-believable,” he says.
“I know.”
“Here’s the plan,” Todd says. “I’m driving up to their house—Hannah’s house—today. I’ll work from there till I can find someone to take the next shift. We can’t let her be alone till she’s ready to be.”
“I’m checking flights,” I say.
“Don’t. Hannah won’t have it. She wants to talk to you every morning when she first wakes up, before she gets out of bed. Can you do that?”
“But I want to be with her now.”
“For you?” Todd asks. “Or for Hannah? Because she’s clear on what she wants.”
Not for nothing is Todd everyone’s favorite editor. He wastes no words. “Okay,” I say. “I’ll stay here. And I’ll call her every morning.”
“Think about it before you agree. An hour, maybe two on the phone every morning. With a woman whose husband just dropped dead. You worked hard to get that residency. This isn’t what your time there is for.”
“I don’t have to think about it.”
“All right,” Todd says. “I’ll tell her to call you first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Or sooner, if she needs to.”
“She won’t interrupt you. You know how stubborn she is.”
“I know how stubborn she was,” I say, thinking about who I was before and who I am now. Hannah will never be the same person who said, “See you tonight, honey,” when Michael kissed her good-bye and left for work this morning.
—
THE NEXT MORNING Hannah calls me at seven her time, ten a.m. mine. I close my laptop and take my phone to the Adirondack chair on my porch and put my feet up on the porch railing.
“I’m listening,” I say.
“I can’t believe it,” she says, her voice thick and low.
“I know, honey.”
“I can’t believe i
t,” she says again. After a long silence, she says it again. And again.
—
THE NEXT MORNING Hannah calls me at four a.m. her time.
“You’re up early,” I say.
“The doc . . . they gave me something to put me to sleep. But it doesn’t keep me asleep.”
Hannah can’t say the word doctor. Michael was her doctor. I feel the magnitude of what she’s lost beginning to seep into her consciousness.
“I’m lying here looking at my hands,” Hannah says. “It’s so weird. They look the same as they did yesterday. How can my hands be the same when nothing else is the same?”
My heart hurts. “I know exactly what you mean,” I say.
“If I had a cut on my hand, I could look at it every day and see how it was healing,” she says. “But I’m looking at my fingers right now and they’re all still there and there’s no measure of how I’m actually doing.”
—
THE MORNING AFTER that Hannah calls me at noon my time, nine a.m. hers.
“I slept late. I was up till four a.m. I’m so lonely.”
“Of course you are.”
“Todd’s here. We watched TV in bed last night. He read my e-mail for me this morning. It’s so good that he’s here.”
Shouldn’t I be there, too? “You know I’ll come if you need me,” I say.
“I don’t. These phone calls, that’s what I need from you.”
“Todd loves you,” I say. “We all love you.”
“I hope I’ll be able to write again someday.”
“You’re on heavy meds, honey. When you’re feeling a little better and sleeping a little better, you’ll go off them and then you’ll be able to write again.”
“That’s not it. Michael was my foundation. He’s the reason I could go so far afield in my mind. I was safe to roam around in my imagination all day because I knew when I shut my computer down at dinnertime, Michael would be there, and he’d say, ‘Hi, honey,’ and then we’d eat the same dinner we always ate and watch the same shows on PBS and go to sleep at our normal time. He was my world. My connection to the real world.”
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