An hour before I stood with Katie’s family in the funeral home in her hometown, I took two small, white, oblong pills. I was terrified to do the wrong thing in front of so many people. Rather than break down in public, I wanted to feel nothing. I meant to become the indistinct mourner, onto whom hundreds of well-intentioned strangers could project their well-meaning comfort. In this way I did not have to feel anything myself. I could stand dumb and silent, smiling at everyone, trying to say something polite about the best parts of Katie’s life.
2.
Katie and I married on a Saturday, at the beginning of spring, during the first weekend of apple blossom season. We hired covered wagons for hayrides and took wedding photos on a giant show tractor, walking under a trellis, in a lofted barn strung with tea lights. Friends and family ate freshly baked cookies, dancing to a sing-along of Dylan’s “Forever Young.” We walked down the aisle to Iris Dement’s “Let the Mystery Be.” Our wedding party was our three nieces, my brother, Ed, and my cousin Wayne. Friends hand-made invitations and ran the sound system. Another friend took photographs. The meal was buffet style, a do-it-yourself burrito bar with homemade guacamole and salsa, a keg of Leinenkugel’s, and a Rubbermaid bin filled with sangria. Toward the end of the night a friend topped an empty 7Up two-liter bottle with sangria and ran around the dance floor, insisting everyone take swigs. Ed wrote new lyrics to “Sweet Violets,” one of Katie’s father’s favorite songs, and sang it with his kids.
Katie and I had no particular connection to the County Line Orchard in Hobart, Indiana. It was a good middle point for guests arriving in Chicago and Indianapolis, near an airport, with decent hotels. The previous night, after the rehearsal, my father had held court in the hotel lobby bar, buying rounds of drinks for our guests. A friend from high school told stories. Another friend made toasts. Table to table, cheers went up as Katie and I crossed each other, seeking out still other friends to greet and thank. We were festive. Here was the end, I thought, to that part of our lives we had made separately, the last time we would tend to some part without each other. We gathered everyone we loved to one place, with all of their good wishes, to witness it.
Katie’s friends from college were married now. Some had babies. Others were just pregnant, or trying, or looking into adoption programs, filling out forms, waiting. A few owned apartments or houses. Would we settle down now? they asked. We said we were traveling light and seeing what came our way. We would pack boxes that next week, load up the moving truck, and head out for a new home in Florida. We thanked everyone as we continued to pass through.
In wedding photos Katie’s face is smooth and bright. She rarely wore makeup, so the effect is the startling and unfamiliar exaggeration of her features. We look like any white, midwestern, middle-class couple, and I suppose this is how we meant to present ourselves for posterity: smiling and poised. After our kiss at the end of the ceremony, Katie hugged me tight, and when she pulled away there was a pale stain across the front of my suit jacket.
3.
By a coincidence of missed buses and late flights Katie and I spent the evening of September 11, 2001, watching television in Dhaka. A friend called from another room in the hostel to say the Pentagon and World Trade Centers were on fire. For the next twenty hours we only watched television. We could not leave the capital until we received the all-clear from the Peace Corps office, which was busy leaving phone messages for volunteers in all of the other cities, then calling our families back home to say we were safe. We waited to hear that we were all accounted for, the embassy was secure, and we might soon return to the place where we had worked and lived for two years. We spoke to each other in reassuring tones. We waited for direction.
Everything, the commentators on the television keep explaining, will now be very different.
In our small room no one seemed exactly certain how to measure either the quality or the scope of the impending change. When we could not keep watching television, we watched movies. The cable movie channels did not interrupt their programming, so we caught the end of a comedy, then a war epic, then a musical. We did not want to sleep. How could we? Our country was in immediate peril. HBO was showing a Robert De Niro marathon. When we could not stay inside our room any longer, we tried to decide together whether it was safe to leave the hostel. Were terrorists waiting in the lobby to kill us? If not, could we buy chicken schwarma at this hour? Dhaka seemed suddenly hostile to our presence. As we walked through the neighborhood, life was distinctly unaware of us: the price of rice unchanged, televisions turned to cricket matches.
A few weeks later, the night before we were evacuated from Bangladesh, Katie and I packed what we could fit into our backpacks and left our sites on the last night buses. Whoever came to find us that next morning arrived at half-abandoned rooms strewn with papers and stacked with clothes, photographs, cassette tapes, and books. We hoped it seemed, for a while at least, only that we had forgotten to take out our trash and clean our kitchens.
We left Bangladesh for Bangkok. We flew from South Asia to Korea, took a discount tour of China, and finally landed at my parents’ home for the holiday. After Thanksgiving we flew one last time, to Chicago, where we both found work. I was a middle school social studies teacher. Katie managed the office of a green-development nonprofit. I slept most nights at Katie’s studio sublet in Lincoln Park, until after a while I had my own key, laundry pile, and grocery list. Evenings, we ran along the lakefront to one of the beaches and back. We came home, showered, made dinner, and played chess, cribbage, and rummy.
Wasn’t this our new, ordinary, and immodest life? Everything in America seemed luxuriously indulgent. We took buses and trains that ran on time and arrived a few blocks from heated offices. My Chicago public school classroom had its own telephone line and internet connection, a mobile computer lab in the back of the room, and several five-pound bags of candy in a locked storage cabinet. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, I sent Katie an instant message on the computer, and she wrote instantly back.
I like my job!
I like my job, too!
For the first time in either of our lives, we saved money. We opened checking accounts and savings accounts. We subscribed to magazines and theater seasons, took dance lessons, and traveledweekends to visit our families. Tuesdays and Saturdays the diner across the street served four pancakes, a fried egg, and three sausage links, with pie and coffee, for six dollars. Movie rentals were two-for-one four nights a week.
Those evenings we spent in the apartment, Katie wore fleece sweatpants and made tea. She curled herself onto the ridiculous yellow-leather loveseat we inherited from previous tenants, to read books and magazines. I put my head in her lap, or we lay on the bed with the windows open, the cat teetering on the sill as we listened to the traffic, turning our pages. When it was hot in the city, we pulled the mattress under the window or set up the laptop to watch hours of television into the afternoon and evening. We liked to argue about whether the cat’s indifference to the traffic below meant she was charmed or incredibly stupid. I defended the cat vigorously. Survival of the fittest, Katie liked to say, when her time is up, her time is up.
4.
It is a warm June evening in Bucharest. The beer gardens and pizza shops around Bucharest’s enormous Lake Herastrau, which one side of our apartment building overlooks, are just open for the season. Someone is selling flowers from an umbrella stand: neon carnations mixed with weeds and grasses.
We walk the loop again and again around the lake.
Bucharest is by far our favorite city yet, and like every other city in which we have lived together, we intend to leave it with a sense that we have only just begun our explorations. We are excellent planners, even when we have no goal. Katie is starting yoga classes again and going with her friend to the gym. She is exercising to manage work-related stress. Membership in a private gym is a status symbol among the city’s elite. Bucharest is filled with families that have profited wildly and handsomely after Communism,
privatizing industry, franchising corporations, dumping Western Europe’s toxic waste in parts unknown of the Carpathian Mountains. Much of Katie’s work puts her in daily contact with terrible people who have real power and speak fluent English. Katie swims laps with their charming families in the morning and then walks past their offices on her way to work.
Katie will die in six weeks, but of course we cannot know this. We do not plan for it. We walk nearly every night around Lake Herastrau, complaining that we are bored, restless, and eager to explore still more beer gardens, park benches, trees, dams, and apartment buildings on either side with the avenues and the traffic circles between them. What else can we do until it is time, finally, to leave? We entertain ourselves. We people-watch. Romanians out walking, mostly kids, intermix family with youthful, libertarian élan. We have neither community nor zeal. It doesn’t really matter. We find the end of one conversation and begin the next. We repeat our conversations as we circle the lake. Every few hundred yards we pass a restaurant blaring British rock music: the Rolling Stones and Queen, Sid Vicious singing “My Way” and David Bowie singing “Young Americans.” It is the music of liberation and exhaustion, and we are lost.
5.
I stand in a small field at our Peace Corps training site. The coordinator has chalked an outline of Bangladesh onto the grass. As we each receive our assignment, we take the placard on which it is written and straddle our city. I get “Tangail,” a city the travel guide calls “the singularly least attractive place in Bangladesh.” It is a transportation hub across which the local crime syndicate taxes buses and cars as they make their way north from and south to the capital. Tangail’s de facto leader is recently imprisoned for beating a police officer to death with the leg of a stool, at the police station, while in police custody. He is reputed to have a violent temper. After his release, at his request, I teach his wife English.
The afternoon I receive my assignment, I smile like everyone else as we take a group photograph. Katie is fifteen, maybe twenty feet away, with five volunteers stationed in the cities between our cities. In the photograph I can just make out her dark hair and blue head scarf in the middle of the group. The coordinator walks across the map to congratulate each of us. He explains that he has picked me for Tangail because the Peace Corps needs someone really large there. It is a hard assignment, he says, but he knows I will do it well.
I think, All of that training, and here is the criteria for my advantage, relative size.
Even now I consider the choice again and what I think it means my time in Bangladesh might become. I try to imagine the life that follows, getting every part of the sequence wrong. How does falling in love with Katie start with this moment? How can our meeting here end years later in Romania with her death?
If I am ironic, then I say the next two years will contain the useless and immensely gratifying skill of smashing dying cockroaches, of learning when they are at their most vulnerable in my small cement room or already almost dead.
If I am earnest, then I speak thoughtfully about how a tragedy in one part of the world magnified our sense of need and commitment, until suddenly Katie and I were traveling the world together.
How can I not want to enter that sequence again and again, so that I might disrupt it?
I tell this part of the story because it hedges against larger and less certain speculations—boredom, order, meaning—and misses, always, the improbabilities of coincidence and scale.
I can walk our life together back this far: I am well-intentioned, naïve, and unambitious. I can find my life in the consequence of one decision and very little before it. I hardly think about the decision, over which I have control and influence. My role is consequent and representative. I’m not sure I have a right to contest it. I do not want to seem disagreeable. I thank the country director as he walks across the country to congratulate someone else.
6.
Is it resignation, then, that ends my witness of the beginning of our marriage? Confusion? A certainty of arriving at, then becoming acted upon and overwhelmed by, a repeating pattern of circumstance and place? How closely that story follows my witness of Katie’s death, her funeral, and my continuing life in Indiana, where everyone quickly learns some version of that sequence. I move to Indiana with the celebrity and mystery of yet another country visited, and once again, I assemble a life in the aggregate and from a distance.
What should I do, then, with these last parts of the memory of our life together? The disparate pieces that seem to no longer belong to the whole? Picking Katie up at the last bus from campus. Working a Bon Jovi concert to raise money for a charity. Eating tacos at the truck by her office in Chicago.
Can I assemble them into anything worth saying?
One spring we trained together for a marathon. We ran six, eight, twelve miles a day, and when Katie turned her ankle and stopped running, still she followed me sometimes on her bike, calling out my split times, making small talk.
Can’t I prove we were in love, happy, committed, special?
I see no contract with our past selves. It was too easy to arrive in a new city and begin the process of restarting a life. Unpacking boxes. Mapping out the route to work. Finding grocery stores and learning the words for chicken, apple, rice, coffee. No part of our life then says we teetered on any brink. Why should it? We were volunteers, teachers, and young Americans. We were married, and soon we would work abroad again. We had graduate degrees, ambitions, résumés. When Katie died, we were traveling into the mountains, on vacation, between cities.
I will resist the lie that both story and affection must entirely transform in order to survive after her death. I will try again to tell the beginning, as I might have told it before Katie’s death, a beginning that is false and irrelevant and that perhaps stretches too easily its surfaces across a life. Isn’t this the consolation I seek from anecdotes: to suggest, in the place of feeling, reverence? To adapt a practice of faith, confession, to the secular realm? In devotion to see Katie more clearly and our marriage in its former, more perfect light?
7.
The new country director, arriving from Boston, held a welcome party for all of the volunteers at his rented home in Dhaka. There was a deejay, fried American foods, cold beer, and cake. Everyone made toasts. At the end of the night, Katie and I danced together, and when the song ended, she looked up at me. We were both a little drunk.
John Evans, she said, how come we don’t spend more time together?
I smiled. I loved moments like this.
Because, Katie LaPlante, I said, you can’t stand me.
The Legend of a Life
1. The Jesus Rock
Katie had arranged a surprise for my birthday the next week. All during the hike, she enjoyed teasing me about it. Playing along, I asked for a hint.
It is something that you don’t enjoy until you see it, but then you are very happy.
She pushed ahead to find Sara.
I take five short videos of our group that day. In no particular sequence we stand in front of a waterfall a third of the way up the trail. We hold our breaths a moment; our faces are lean and full of hesitation, our voices higher pitched than I remember. When we relax into ourselves the image captures a certain fleeting bonhomie of the day, the good intentions of our being together. We alternately smile and clown, joking that we hope the photo looks good.
Of course, these are not photos. Each time I press the wrong button. We pose. Someone says there is no flash; the green light isn’t blinking. Our camera records thirty frames per second: 180 to 300 photographs with each failed take. Each video is so broad and inclusive as to emphasize nothing. The frame is too grainy. There is some kind of delay in how the camera pans that makes the image choppy. Perhaps, in more capable hands, the potential for extraction would exceed the wealth of data. To me it is all a blur.
This is our group in every lost photograph: Katie, me, Sara, and three strangers we met that morning at the base of the mountain, who agreed to
join us for the long hike and with whom we become fast friends for the day. The Israeli couple on honeymoon has backpacked across Eastern Europe all summer. Friendly and very fit, seeming very much in love, they chose Busteni for its easy access into the Carpathians. She is a doctor who works at a hospital in Tel Aviv. He has some vague association with the military that no one seems eager to clarify. I tease Sara about it constantly, knowing she is paranoid about such things. The Romanian, the last member of our group, is hiking, at least in part, to kill his massive hangover. We have all talked a bit that morning, sitting together in the small waiting room next to the cable cars that never begin—high winds, early morning rain—the day’s run up the mountain. Now, we have all agreed to set off together up the nearby hiking trails.
These videos are the last record I have of Katie’s voice. She will die in six hours, and she does not mean to be recorded. She is saying nothing in particular, and later I will think, This is how I remember the sound of her voice now. I cannot exactly recall it. I hear it in echoes, always just before or after the thing I am remembering, as though she is not talking to me.
Katie hikes ahead with Sara for a while and then falls back with the Romanian. He struggles to keep the pace. Katie is a natural athlete and leader, she has a terrific capacity for empathy—all of this is true—but she also understands that he is slowing down the group, so she hikes with him to keep us moving together up the mountain. We wait at river crossings and outcrops. He is overweight, winded. He explains to Katie that he works for an electronics firm in Bucharest and was out the night before partying at a club. The hike is more strenuous than he imagined it might be, as it was, more and more, for all of us.
Young Widower Page 5