by Mark Lukach
Two days later, we flew to San Francisco to start our new lives. We rented the upstairs of a house ten blocks from Ocean Beach, the four-mile stretch of beach that is San Francisco’s western boundary. I bought a new wetsuit and a new surfboard, as well as the prerequisite flannels and hoodies. I taught high school and commuted down the peninsula; Giulia worked in online marketing for a fashion company and scootered across the city.
Next we got an adorable little English bulldog—Augustus, Goose for short—who had so much excess skin that he had wrinkles on his legs.
Our families came out to visit our new California lives. We took my mother in-law to the LoveFest on Market Street, a rave-style parade that celebrated all things quintessentially San Francisco, and she couldn’t stop laughing at the naked men in the parade. My parents were in town for Fleet Week, and we perched atop a view on Telegraph Hill and my dad put his arm around my shoulders and said, “You’ve got yourself a good life set up here.”
Cas, Leslie, and the boys had moved to the Bay Area the same time we did, planting their roots in the dreamscape of West Marin, ninety minutes north of the city, in a haven of organic, crunchy living. We drove up there about once a month to spend the weekend hiking, gardening, eating good meals, and watching movies.
While Giulia was at first a bit wary of a couple who were noticeably older than us, and nothing like her hip friends in New York—Cas often picked up one of his sons as if he were a guitar while we rocked out after dinner—she quickly fell into the pack just as I had in Baltimore. We even adopted a few of their family quirks, and we began to blast loud music of our own after dinner to dance our way through doing the dishes together.
We made other friends in San Francisco, people who met us as a married couple. I made some buddies out in the water. Giulia had her work friends. And together, we connected with a group of young couples who were our age, some married, others living together, and we’d meet for potlucks and concerts and Frisbee in Golden Gate Park.
Chris, my closest friend from our group, wanted the group to go paintballing for his birthday, so we all drove off to Vallejo to shoot one another up in the woods. We were all first-timers, and terrible. The facility organized our group against other groups of people in various games. We lost the first five games well under the time limit. By lunch, we had learned how to at least last long enough to make it until the clock expired on the game, so we could tie.
Giulia wanted nothing to do with getting shot. She spent each game hiding behind trees near the back of the course, far from the action. She sat and did nothing and hoped no one would find her.
The last game was one-sided capture the flag. We were on offense, trying to steal the flag from a circular base that the defense guarded.
Chris and I planned a coordinated attack and steadily snuck closer and closer to the base. When we were about thirty yards away, a few of our teammates made a reckless move around the back of the base and the whole defense turned to fire at them. For the moment, the side of the base we were approaching was unguarded.
Out of nowhere, I saw Giulia. She had been following behind my slow creep, and with the defense distracted, she pounced. She ran at a full sprint right past me. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. She had essentially boycotted paintball the entire day, and now here she was, brazenly going after the flag.
Giulia grabbed the flag and barely slowed her stride as she turned and rushed back into the trees to escape.
The defenders realized what had happened only after she was already running off with the flag, and they collectively turned and aimed their paintball guns on her. Giulia was only a few feet away from me when they pulled their triggers. It felt as if it were happening in slow motion, straight out of a Hollywood movie. Pellets flew at Giulia and erupted in orange and green and yellow all over her back. She yelped and fell to her knees, the flag flying out of her hand as though it were spring-loaded. She stayed on her knees and they kept shooting, her body taking each shot, refusing to go down. I could hear her laughing and taunting the other team as they kept shooting.
I didn’t think. I had to finish what Giulia started. I dashed out of my hiding spot and grabbed the flag from where it had fallen. I zigzagged off into the woods to avoid the onslaught of pellets that were now targeting me, the flag held triumphantly above my head. I made it to the referee and he rang the bell, and we won the game.
Giulia ran to greet me and we danced and hugged, her back an explosion of color, the welts already forming under her clothes, and the rest of our group circled around us in a frenzy of primordial victory, hooting and hollering and beating our chests. We had won our first and only game of the day, and it was all because of Giulia, the unexpected hero.
After a few years at her first California job, Giulia grew restless with the slow pace of career advancement in the company and traded it in for a more engaging and higher-paying job at a beauty start-up. Her new boss loved her. He promoted her from marketing manager to senior marketing manager within the first year. Giulia welcomed the challenge of finding an audience for an unknown brand, rather than tapping into a globally recognized label as she had at her last job. Giulia thrived and found herself not only honing her marketing skills, but branching out into other aspects of the business. At the holiday party, her boss pulled me aside to gush over Giulia’s invaluable contributions to the company.
A year and a half into the job, the Great Recession hit. The company’s funding dried up almost overnight, and they had to shutter its doors. Giulia, like everybody else, was told to pack up her desk and head home.
Giulia had never faced this kind of setback before. She took great pride in a job well done and believed that it guaranteed security as the reward. But now, all the hard work ended with the company closing up shop.
Giulia didn’t know what to do with herself. Her work had been the center of her identity since I had first met her, and now she was without it. I kept telling her to take a break. There was no need to rush into another job. We had been married three years and had saved aggressively since the first day, putting almost half our paychecks into saving. San Francisco was still affordable back then, and we dreamed of owning a home. Her dad, Romeo, echoed my suggestion and encouraged Giulia to take a break. He looked back on a full career of too many long hours away from his family and told her to slow down, not rush, enjoy some time off; and besides, we were only a month away from my summer break, and my sister was getting married in Delaware.
We decided to drive cross-country for the wedding. We’d leave right after my last faculty meeting of the year: the two of us and Goose in our Honda Civic with sleeping bags, a tent, a laptop, and all five seasons of The Wire on DVD. It took some convincing, but she agreed. We gave ourselves three weeks to get across the country.
The trip was dreamy: $5 rotisserie chicken from Safeway, $5-a-night campsites with hot showers in Oregon, bears in our campsite in Wyoming. Along the way, we stopped at free Wi-Fi spots, and as I read, Giulia searched for jobs. True to form, she got an offer in only our second week on the road. They didn’t care that she was traveling. Just be in the office after the Fourth of July.
Somewhere around Iowa I said that I was ready to have kids. By Indiana, Giulia agreed. We were twenty-seven. I knew that life wasn’t supposed to be perfect, but this felt pretty close.
two
July 2009
I met Giulia at the door after her first day of work. I had been anticipating her return home all day. This new job felt special. She had certainly liked all of her previous jobs, but one was at a giant corporation and another at an unknown start-up. Now she was employed in a company with a reputation for being young, hip, and edgy. The company was, in a word, cool.
She came up the stairs and was as beautiful as I had ever seen her. Giulia had shocked me with her beauty from the first moment I saw her—her graceful poise, her classy style, but most of all her casual way with it all, a beauty that was flawless and effortless. She almost never wore makeup, but she
had put some on for today, along with her most chic sweater and pants. Her cheeks had the slight blush of red from her scooter ride home across the city and into the cold fog of our neighborhood.
“How did it go?” I asked her enthusiastically, wrapping my arms around her before she could even get in the doorway.
“It was . . . good,” she said, avoiding eye contact, looking beyond me into the house.
“‘Good’?” I repeated. “What does that mean?”
“It was just the first day, Mark, there’s not much to say,” Giulia said. She scooched past me into our room to dump her stuff in our bedroom. “It’s just, I guess, everyone is so smart and cool there.”
“Nice. So you should fit right in,” I said, flirting with her.
“No, but seriously. They are really smart. And really cool. . . .” Her voice trailed off. “I hope I can keep up.”
I had known Giulia for nine years, and she had always exuded confidence. I could always count on her thriving at work. I’d seen her do so across four internships and two jobs. She left each one to glowing recommendations and even brighter opportunities. Even though I’d never seen her in a single meeting, I was certain of her work success, more than my own.
But this insecurity was new. I had seen her panic about that paper while we were in college, but that was supposedly because she was afraid her computer might crash and with it her work would be lost. It had nothing to do with her. This anxiety expressed itself differently, more personal, as though she were afraid she might not fit in.
“Well, it’s just the first day,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it. It’ll be great.”
Giulia went to work, each morning taking a little bit longer to get herself ready, as if the right outfit or hairstyle would help her rediscover her confidence. I still had a month left of summer vacation, so I stayed at home and mostly futzed around the house. Our two-bedroom house was spacious for San Francisco but fairly typical of the Outer Sunset, where the extra space was written off by most, given the neighborhood’s reputation as one of the foggiest places in the Bay Area and one of the sleepiest, most suburban-like parts of San Francisco. We kept the second bedroom for guests, but mostly in anticipation of turning it into a nursery. Our friends always wanted us to host dinner parties because we actually had enough space, compared with their hipper but much tinier places in the Haight or Pacific Heights.
The bedrooms were adjacent to each other at the end of a long hallway. The house revolved around an open-air atrium that cast natural light throughout all the rooms. Surrounding the atrium were our living room, dining room, kitchen, and hallway, which had the bedrooms at one end and the front door at the other.
The house always needed tidying because neither of us was especially neat, and Goose tracked sand back into the house, so there was always sweeping and cleaning to do.
Giulia and I talked and texted throughout the day as she struggled to find a sense of place at the new company. She needed me constantly for reassurance.
She called one day while I was eating lunch and reading a book. I could immediately hear the uncertainty in her voice.
“Hey, honey, would you do me a favor? I just sent you an e-mail I’ve been working on for a little while. It’s to my boss, and I want it to sound, you know, just right. Can you read it and make sure it’s okay?”
“Yeah, of course, no problem. What’s it about? It is something sensitive?”
“Just read the e-mail, and let me know,” she said impatiently. “Call me when you’re done.”
I logged on to my e-mail, found her message, and opened it.
Dear Jill
I wanted to follow up from our meeting about forecasting for the next quarter. As I’m still new to this company and position, I’m struggling a bit to keep up with the assignment. I hope this isn’t a problem, and that we can find more time to talk about it.
Thanks
Giulia
“Did you read it?” Giulia asked hurriedly, in a whisper, when I called her back.
“Yeah, I read it,” I said. “It’s fine, Giulia. It’s polite and totally fine. It doesn’t sound like a big deal.”
“You don’t think it’s too much? Like, I’m not capable of doing my job? I don’t want her to think I can’t handle this.” She was impatient and cold, as though she were interrogating me.
“No, not at all, it’s totally fine, Giulia. You should go ahead and send it.” I tried to keep my voice calm and patient. I could sense that she needed support but also didn’t want to be needy.
She sighed. “You sure? I worked on this for the last hour. I want to make sure it’s right.”
“It’s a great e-mail, Giulia.”
“Okay.”
And then she hung up.
Giulia’s calls became more frequent and more frantic. She forwarded me several e-mail drafts a day, most only a sentence or two. They took her hours to write. Her anxiety about what to say in an e-mail monopolized her day. She was assigned projects, and didn’t know where to start, and labored all day over how to write an e-mail of a few sentences long to ask a question about the assignment.
“Come on, Giulia,” I begged her over dinner, as she sat sullenly, picking at her food, not saying much. “What’s going on?” I had been asking her this every day for a week, each time sounding more exasperated, and each time, Giulia shut down. She didn’t say anything and kept her eyes down, so I filled the silence. I wasn’t sure if she was unwilling or unable to talk about what was happening, so I doled out a litany of clichés. “Don’t beat yourself up so much. That’s the problem, not the work itself. You are amazing. Everything I’ve ever heard about you at work is how incredible you are.”
She continued to sit quietly.
“You can do the work, I’m sure of it.” More unmoving silence, so I continued with the positive affirmations. Whether or not they impacted Giulia, they at least helped to keep me calm and from slipping into frustration with her. “You have so much to be proud of. You’re doing better than you think.”
She didn’t react to anything I said, but I couldn’t stand the defeat of the silence, so I compulsively kept talking about letting bad thoughts go, being in the moment, staying positive, not giving up, all the weary platitudes. I cleaned the kitchen as she watched in silence. Only a few weeks earlier we had blasted music for our dishwashing dance parties, one of our favorite chores together. Now she was a nonparticipant, a silent, isolated spectator. Even our favorite songs couldn’t bring her back to me. She sat and tolerated my lectures, stoic and poised to hide whatever thoughts were racing in her head.
With nothing else to do, we got ready for bed. I followed her into the bathroom and slowly rubbed her neck as she brushed her teeth and took out her contacts. When she finished, we got under the covers together and I cradled her body, my fingers caressing her earlobes, one of her favorite ways to be cuddled. I felt her breathing slow down and the muscles in her body relax, and I thought that maybe I had gotten through to her, with my words or my touch, and that she was calming down, and tomorrow would be better after a night of sleep.
But she couldn’t fall asleep.
Three weeks into her job, I jolted awake in the middle of the night to hear Giulia shouting in Italian in a different room. I rushed out of bed to see what was going on. Giulia was in the kitchen, Skyping with her mom in Italy, who at nine hours ahead was in her midmorning routine.
“What’s going on in here,” I mumbled, squinting at the fully lit kitchen. It was two a.m.
Giulia craned her neck to face me. “I can’t sleep. I’m just talking to my mom.”
“Come on, Giulia, let’s get to sleep,” I said, waving vaguely at the camera. “You must be so tired. You haven’t been sleeping well, let’s go to bed.”
Giulia’s mom backed me up: Giulia needed sleep. Giulia protested but consented, signed off, and went back to bed with me.
In our bedroom, I pulled her close under the covers. I asked yet again what was wrong, trying
to coax out the words that might help give shape to what was happening. I forced myself to be gentle, to mask any hint of frustration, but she still had nothing to say, as if accused. “I’m tired, I want to try and sleep, not talk.” She was becoming too lost in the anxiety to step back from it to examine it.
I instinctively began to rub her neck and earlobes again, while whispering that she was doing a great job, and tried to get her to focus on her breathing.
The truth is, I didn’t know what else to do. Her anxiety had been brewing for a few weeks now. Each day felt like a steady escalation of tensions, and I was losing my patience and energy. Her barrage of forwarded e-mails and desperate phone calls over trivial work matters was dominating my life. At home, she wasn’t interested in dinner. At night, she was restless and agitated, and I didn’t understand why she couldn’t just relax and sleep. We downloaded guided meditations, lit scented candles, played the sound of waves. None of it worked.
In the quiet of the night, the only sounds in our room were a calming playlist, Goose’s snoring, and my whispers to Giulia about how beautiful, smart, and competent she was and that life would work out like it always did. Through my affirmations, I felt helpless with worry. How scary this must feel to her: to lose sleep to the intensity of thoughts that you didn’t have words for. But even my worries lost out to exhaustion, and eventually I drifted off to sleep, such a guilty indulgence. Giulia inevitably stayed awake as I slept, twisting and turning well after my whispers had quieted to nothing, and the playlist ran out of songs, and the only sound left was our snoring bulldog. As I slept through it, grateful for the rest, it left me empty inside when I awoke to see her eyes wide-open.
Four weeks into her new job, my school year started. I was teaching five history classes and coaching the varsity water polo team, which made it impossible to respond to all of Giulia’s phone calls and texts.