The registration of a baby’s birth at the U.S embassy in Sofia had to be completed soon after the child was born, and so Nikolai did all the paperwork right away. But when the Certificate of a U.S. Citizen Born Abroad came back in the mail some weeks later, Nico’s name was different from the one we had agreed upon. Printed on the birth certificate was the name Nico, then Nikolai’s family name and my family name. The middle name had been left out entirely. He had in essence inserted his name alongside mine, giving her two family names. The name was all wrong, an awkward mistake. I wanted to think that it was an accident and that he had in a moment of distraction written the wrong words on the registration. It couldn’t be possible that he’d done it intentionally. That would mean that our deal had been turned on its head: Instead of valuing my identity as an equal, he had purposely devalued it.
Then it happened again, this time with Nico’s vaccinations. Bulgarian children were required to have a BCG tuberculosis vaccination, a shot that leaves a knotty scar on the upper left arm. I objected to the inoculation: It isn’t required in the States, and Nico, as a U.S. citizen, didn’t need it. Nikolai and I talked it over, and he agreed with me: Nico stayed home and wasn’t exposed to other kids, so she wasn’t at risk of getting TB. She had all of the other vaccinations and would receive the rest on the recommended schedule. And besides, the two-year requirement to stay in Bulgaria would be over in just a few months. We were going home soon. There was no need to subject our daughter to something that would leave a scar. But when she came home from her next visit to the pediatrician—Nikolai and Yana had taken her, while I stayed home with Alex—she had a bandage on her arm and swelling all the way to her shoulder. He had gone ahead with the vaccination, despite what we had agreed.
“Did we decide against that?” Nikolai asked. “I thought we came around to the idea in the end. Well, it’s too late now.”
When I tried to talk to him about these incidents, he said he’d acted in my interest (feeding Nico formula instead of breast milk), or he’d forgotten what we’d agreed upon (Nico’s name), or he’d misunderstood (the vaccination). He acted as if it were all perfectly normal behavior to say one thing to me and do the exact opposite. But it wasn’t normal behavior. We had different ideas about how to parent, yes, but there was something else, a deeper problem, that I was only beginning to fully understand. The birth of our child allowed me to see a side of my husband I hadn’t known before.
There’d been other warnings. One day, not long after Nikolai and I had moved in together in Iowa City, he saw a red suitcase in my closet and asked what was inside. The suitcase was where I kept my journals, about fifty or so notebooks filled with stories and poems, bits of this and that I’d glued onto the pages: a note from my first boyfriend, a rejection letter from the New Yorker magazine, a receipt from the coffee shop where I’d written my first awkward short story. The pages were filled with disfigured self-portraits, twisted and half-real reflections of me at sixteen, at eighteen, at twenty. Much of what was inside these notebooks was badly written and embarrassing, but I felt too attached to the efforts—the deformed beauty of my ungainly sixteen-year-old handwriting—to throw them out. As a result I’d lugged these notebooks with me from apartment to apartment for years. I never opened the red suitcase but slipped it into the closet of whatever apartment I was renting.
I had unlatched the brass clasps of the red suitcase and shown Nikolai the rows of neatly arrayed notebooks. He picked one up and began to open the cover. I eased it from his fingers and replaced it in the suitcase, snapping the clasps closed.
“They’re private,” I’d said, and although nothing in the notebooks was exactly a secret, the collection of them together created my own bible of sacred texts.
“I can’t read them?” he asked, hurt.
“Nobody has ever read them but me,” I said. “And I want to keep it that way.”
A week or so later, I came home from class to find him sitting cross-legged in the middle of the living room, stacks of my notebooks spread at his side. There was a cup of tea steaming on the floor next to him, and as he looked up, he gave me a big goofy smile, an awkward I didn’t expect you back this soon grin. The suitcase was open at his side. I was so surprised I could hardly speak. “What are you doing?”
“Reading,” he replied as he closed the journal and set it aside, as if he had been glancing through the New York Times style section.
“But I asked you not to read these,” I said, taking the journal and hugging it to my chest. A subtle shift had developed in my perception of him, a wavering of my confidence, the first doubt.
“Did you say that?” he said, a look of consternation crossing his features.
“Yes,” I responded, but part of me didn’t want to acknowledge that I had said it. A hopeful part of me wished that there’d been a mistake, that I actually hadn’t told him, that he had not broken my trust.
“Well, maybe you did,” he admitted. “But you didn’t actually mean it, did you? You want to share everything with me. So there are no secrets between us.”
He took a long sip of his tea, still smiling, and I realized that he didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. But for me it was an enormous surprise, this invasion of privacy, this lack of respect and the absence of remorse. I tried to rationalize Nikolai’s betrayal of trust. I thought maybe he didn’t understand me when I’d told him it was private. Maybe it was a cultural misunderstanding, and he assumed I wasn’t serious when I’d made the red suitcase off-limits. I took my journals and replaced them in the red suitcase, and I stashed it away again. But somewhere, at the back of my mind, a loud buzzer was going off. This buzzer, I later realized, is called instinct. My instincts were telling me something important about this charming, handsome, brilliant man, but I didn’t listen. I knew, deep down, at a visceral level, that something wasn’t right. It was the first of my many errors about love: I thought the heart more prescient than the gut.
—
WHEN I LANDED in Chicago with Alex, Sam met me at the airport. I turned on my phone and found it filled with voice messages from the previous nine hours. Nikolai had texted or called about every fifteen minutes. The content of the messages wasn’t memorable, or at least I don’t remember it. What I remember is the quantity. There were dozens of texts, a deluge of messages pouring forth from my phone.
Later, when I checked my e-mail, I found the first of his many love letters to me. His Christmas letters, as I came to think of them, were beautiful and tender, but most of all they convinced me that despite our growing problems, Nikolai loved me. The letters were filled with references to his writing and our life together. I saw how funny he was, how smart, but also how needy he could get, how badly he craved my attention. In every letter he made it clear that he was struggling without me. At one point, he said that he couldn’t write unless I was nearby, and that his days felt empty. I didn’t feel that way at all. We had become symbiotic, he and I, and while losing myself in him had once made me feel strong and hopeful, now it felt good to have some space. I needed room to breathe.
There was one passage in particular in these letters that was seared into my memory, just a few sentences about the pain he’d felt when I left Sofia. It was the first and only time he would be honest with me about the emotional baggage he carried around with him. When he was with me, he wrote, he forgot the scars of his past. When I was gone, all the pain came rushing back to him. I was an anesthetic, a drug that numbed him. He wrote that he wanted to forget the scars but couldn’t unless I was there. Later I would ask him what he meant by this passage, but he wouldn’t explain in any real depth. When I tried to go deeper into his past, he shut down. I wondered if this pain came from his time as a pianist or if there was some deeper secret, something he was too ashamed to tell me. I would reread these letters years later, looking for ways to reach him. I would find his voice, his humor, his intelligence, and his need for me. His letters gave me a way back to the man who, over time, had become a stranger.
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—
I’D WAITED FOR months to see pages from Nikolai’s first book in English, and when he finally gave them to me, I read them all in one sitting. The book was brilliant, with all his customary humor and energy, his stream-of-consciousness sentences, and his wild and funny characters. I was sure that he was ready for the next step, and so I suggested that he apply to M.F.A. programs in the States.
“It will be great,” I said. “Getting an M.F.A. will help you perfect your English, and you can also teach one day, if you want.”
“But I’ve written two bestsellers,” he objected. “I’m overqualified.”
“I know,” I said. “This is a way to get your foot in the door.”
“My academic history isn’t good enough,” he said. “I never graduated from high school.”
“You didn’t?” I said, taking this in, one more surprise in a year of surprises. “You told me you went to college in Boston.”
“I did.”
“So how did you get into college if you dropped out of high school?”
“They let me in after hearing a tape of my music,” he said. “They waived all the requirements and gave me a full scholarship.”
“Wow,” I said, impressed. I had to admit—why finish high school if you get that kind of treatment?
“And then I dropped out of college,” he added, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to throw away a free ride at one of Boston’s more prestigious universities. “And went to India.”
This I knew. He’d told me that he’d left in the last semester of college for Dharamsala, to study Tibetan Buddhism. And still, I was amazed that he’d been so rash, so ready to give up on his degree. I had struggled through my undergraduate years, taking loans and working full-time while going to school, graduating with thirty-five thousand dollars in student-loan debt. Nikolai had been given a free education, and he’d just walked away from all of it.
“Creative-writing programs don’t care much about transcripts,” I said. “They tend to focus on the writing itself.”
“Will they hold India against me?” he wondered, warming up to the idea. “I can say it was good material for my writing.”
“It was good material,” I said. “Don’t worry. You’re talented. You’ll get into a program. I’m sure of it.”
This was a particularly American belief, that with hard work and talent one will inevitably succeed, and Nikolai eyed me with suspicion when I said it. I knew he was thinking of the Chopin Competition, where it had been connections, not talent, that paved the way to victory. I could feel how difficult it was for him, to put his work out for judgment, to be vulnerable. I wanted to help him get past that fear. I wanted to help him trust the world again. I wanted his future to be brilliant.
There was more at stake than just finding a good writing program. If Nikolai wanted to live in the United States, he would need a job. He couldn’t arrive on American soil unemployed and directionless. As it was, Nikolai was qualified for very little. He had no work history, no degree, and no clear plan as a writer. He wrote beautiful books in Bulgarian and played Chopin that could make me cry, but these skills weren’t easy to translate professionally. His parents had raised him to be a hothouse flower, one protected behind glass, but he couldn’t survive like that away from home. If he could get into a graduate program, he would be on a path toward sustaining himself. If he had a degree, he would find his way. I was sure of it.
Never before had I been so practical-minded. Usually I was the artistic one, my head in the clouds over some new project. But after a year and a half in Bulgaria, I understood what it meant to be really poor. While my parents had never had money for luxuries, we’d always had enough food and clothes and cheap entertainment. But Nikolai and I lived—like so many other people in Eastern Europe—on very little. Yana gave us 250 leva, the equivalent of about $125, each Friday, and we supported a family of four on it. This worked out to about $18 a day, or $4.50 a day per person.
We developed a program to make our leva last through the week. On Friday night, when we were flush, we might go to a movie, spending 20 leva on tickets and paying a babysitter to stay with Alex and Nico. For the rest of the week, we scrimped. We bought cheap vegetables from the market—potatoes and leeks and cucumbers and tomatoes—and rationed them. Nico’s formula was expensive, and so Yana sometimes dropped off a container midweek, along with cute baby clothes, but we didn’t have money to buy clothes or shoes for Alex. We didn’t go for a drink in the bars in the center of Sofia, and we didn’t have lunch at the pizza place near Alex’s day care. By the time Friday came around again, we were scraping for change to go have a coffee at the neighborhood café, where a cappuccino was 2 leva. I would sip my coffee, grateful to be out of the apartment, happy that we would soon be leaving Bulgaria.
—
BEFORE LONG, THE two-year homestay requirement ended, and we were free to go home. Nikolai had been accepted to Brown University’s M.F.A. program, and so we moved to the East Side of Providence, Rhode Island, filling a two-bedroom Cape with all the furniture, books, and toys we’d left in Iowa City three years before. After we’d settled in, we chose a day care for Nico and enrolled Alex in the neighborhood public school. We made new friends, went to dinner parties and book readings. We threw ourselves into our writing projects, hoping we would find success.
We were on our way. My first book, a memoir about my relationship with my father, was going to be published. It had sold to a publisher in New York City in 2004, just months after my thirtieth birthday, when Nico was less than a year old. For the first time in my life, I would be published, a goal I’d worked toward since I was a freshman in college. I found profound happiness in this achievement: My work—and my self, which was so deeply bound up in my work—was being taken seriously for the first time. My writing had been rejected in the past—a five-hundred-page novel I’d written as a graduate student had been turned down by over twenty publishers in 2002—and these rejections had pushed me to write another book, to try another approach, to keep rewriting and experimenting. Now, finally, it had paid off. The advance had allowed us to buy airline tickets back to the United States from Bulgaria and put a down payment on a used Toyota RAV4. The advance had put us back on track from (what I considered at the time) our detour in Bulgaria. Now our real life could begin.
Nikolai began classes at Brown. The M.F.A. program was small and consisted of a collection of young, talented, and primarily “experimental” writers. One student in his program wrote a story in Morse code, for example, and flicked the lights of the classroom on and off to “read” it. Nikolai came home after that particular class and demonstrated the short story to the kids, flicking the lights on and off until we were all laughing. Eccentricity was accepted at Brown’s M.F.A. program. In fact, Nikolai told me, eccentric was the norm, and he felt he belonged there. His work was unusual, experimental, and this program gave him a community in the United States. It also gave him some professional clout: He got an agent after he began his master’s at Brown, and he sold his first book in English—a memoir about his time in India as a Buddhist monk—a year later.
Now we were both memoirists, two people who used our own lives to create story, people who fashioned characters from living and breathing human beings. We both understood the moral risks of writing about people we’d known and loved. We didn’t want to hurt anyone we wrote about, but we also wanted to represent our own experiences, the way we lived and felt them. In between the objective and the subjective, we needed to find truth and make that truth our own.
I had been trying to write about my father for many years before my memoir was accepted for publication. My dad knew I was writing the book, and had allowed me to interview him, but I didn’t ask his permission, and I didn’t share drafts with him. I gave him a copy of the final book, and he read it in one long sitting. He told me he was proud of me, but I knew that my book was surely not the book he would have written about himself. It was my book, with my
perspective of our relationship. He understood that. He knew I had told our story from my limited, emotionally colored, and singular point of view.
It couldn’t have been otherwise. I had adored my father as a child, but this love had not always been good for me. He was a charming, damaged man, who never fully came to terms with his own destructiveness. As a kid I’d loved him despite—and even because of—his flaws, glorifying his wild and reckless behavior, elevating him to a legend in my heart. No one was quite as charming, quite as crazy, as my dad. But when I became an adult, this adoration ended. I left home. I formed my own opinions. I wanted to be free of him.
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