by Dani Shapiro
—
How do you suppose time works? A slippery succession of long hours adding up to ever-shorter days and years that disappear like falling dominoes? Near the end of her life, Grace Paley once remarked that the decades between fifty and eighty feel not like minutes, but seconds. I don’t know yet if this is the case, but I do know this: the decades that separate that young mother making her lists from the middle-aged woman discovering them feel like the membrane of a giant floating bubble. A pinprick and I’m back there. But is she here? How can I tell her that her lists will not protect her?
—
Between us, M. and I have taken on a lot of jobs: screenwriting, journalism, television writing, book reviewing, freelance editing, ghost writing, corporate writing, teaching, leading retreats, public speaking. Together, we wrote an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” for an animated HBO series. We were hired to write an adaptation of my first memoir for a young movie star that landed us on the front page of The Hollywood Reporter. As a team, we have taken lots of meetings about lots of projects with lots of people who always appear to be very excited. There were some early years when we would fly home, dreaming of building a swimming pool. There were some years we took our little boy to resorts in warm places. There were some years things worked out. Other years, things didn’t. We didn’t know that “yes,” in Hollywood parlance, meant “maybe” at best. Use that war reporter shit, M.’s manager recently told him. Write what you know, man. I can sell the hell out of that.
—
A seventy-year-old student, a retired professor of literature, asks me if I know Wendell Berry’s essay “Poetry and Marriage.” I do not. The next day, a copy, neatly stapled, is waiting for me on the workshop table. Berry is interested in “the troubles of duration” in the forms of both poetry and marriage. “Form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
—
M. has been documenting our family life since just after our son’s birth. In those early months, he made a few short films, and they’re loaded on our television along with Netflix and everything else. He’s also set our TV so that it plays all of our photos from the last decade—thousands of them—in random order. It’s the randomness that’s mesmerizing. Just five more, we’ll sit, transfixed. Okay, really, now just seven. Ten, and we’ll stop. The jumble of images! At times I’ll turn to M. and ask what I’m looking at. Where were we? What was the moment? That’s the roadside place on the way to Taos, he’ll say. Or that’s Judy and Doug’s backyard.
When chronology is eliminated, when life is shuffled like a tarot deck, it’s hard to keep track. Was that the summer before last? Whose dining room, what candlelight? I can locate us in time only in one way: by watching our boy growing up.
Tomorrow, Jacob turns sixteen. This is the year that he has changed and grown in ways that have me standing back, gasping with pride, my empty hands aching. He is taller than I am. He’s funny and kind. He’s strangely good at math. He has a mean backhand. An easy confidence. A shy smile. He still hugs me.
We’re deciding on a movie when instead, I ask M. to play one of the early family films. We sit side by side on the sofa in our library, an iced coffee for him, a glass of wine for me, a bowl of pistachios between us. Upstairs, I hear a teenaged boy’s laughter as he video chats with his network of friends.
The one M. chooses takes us from our Manhattan apartment to the Brooklyn town house. The soundtrack is bad orchestral baby music that we used to play over and over in an endless loop. Friends stop by. A couple who is now divorced. My mother visits. She will be dead in three years. There is a close-up of two lasagnas bubbling in the oven. Another close-up of the front page of The New York Times: TWO YOUTHS IN COLORADO SCHOOL SAID TO GUN DOWN AS MANY AS 23 AND KILL THEMSELVES IN A SIEGE. Now what? Our dog—we put him to sleep the following year—barks and runs around the lobby in slow motion. Then there we are. We both look younger, of course, but it’s my baby I’m focused on. My perfect, beautiful baby boy. My eyes sting as I wrap my fingers around M.’s.
The following night we will take Jacob out to a favorite restaurant for his birthday. Sixteen. We will give him a video camera—he takes after his father—and at the end of the meal, the owner of the restaurant will bring over a chocolate molten cake pierced by a single candle. Make a wish. I watch my son think long and hard. His whole life ahead of him.
“When you see pictures from back then, do you think about what was about to happen—how close we came to losing him?” I ask. “When you see him—”
“Always,” M. says quietly.
—
I often give my students a writing exercise based on a poem titled “Could Have” by the Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska: “It could have happened. / It had to happen. / It happened earlier. Later. / Nearer. Farther off. / It happened, but not to you.”
The poet goes on to contemplate the nature of luck. “You were in luck—there was a forest. / You were in luck—there were no trees. / You were in luck—a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake, / a jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant.”
—
Write about what could have happened, I tell my students. What could have happened, but didn’t.
—
Things we brought home from our honeymoon: a watch, two Agnès B. shirts, three bottles of olive oil, four pieces of faience pottery from a small village in Provence. I rarely wear the watch. The shirts shrunk in the laundry and have long since been given away. We waited for a special occasion to open the olive oil. No occasion seemed quite special enough. After all, we had brought the bottles home with us in our carry-on. You could do this back then. Finally, preparing dinner for friends one evening, we opened one. Of course, it had gone rancid.
The faience pottery is still in perfect condition. A creamer, a small bowl with scalloped edges, a platter, a vase—all glazed white, delicately painted with flowers and vines. I take extra care whenever I handle them. I remember the sunny day, the Provençal village: Around Mont Ventoux and along a very intense gorge (no rails, insane French drivers) then through the young lavender fields of Sault and up to Brantes, where this potter works. We really felt as if we had stumbled onto something beautiful. Someday—perhaps late at night, tired, washing dishes—one will slip through my soapy fingers and shatter. It’s only a matter of time.
—
M. and I are walking down a long empty corridor in the Mark Twain Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, when I hear my name being called from behind us. I turn to see a tall man with a halo of gray hair. He’s smiling at me, expectantly. His eyes—it takes me a moment—his eyes are so familiar. Do I know you? I can feel M. looking at him, then at me. Back at him, back at me. Suddenly wary. Who is this guy? Old boyfriend? High school friend? Ex-boss? Time contracts, and, in an instant, thirty years vanish. I kiss my first husband hello on the cheek. How is it possible that he’s in this corridor, in this small museum, a place I have never been before and will likely never be again?
I was just a few years older than my own son is now when I walked down the aisle that first time. I recited vows I couldn’t have begun to comprehend. I wore a ring on my finger for just under a year. And then I left. We had no kids, no dogs, no real estate, no shared financial lives. We slid away from one another as easily as two kayaks gliding along the surface of a lake, barely leaving a ripple behind.
“Well, how are you?”
“Good, good. And you?”
The inanity feels like a solid thing, an object we’re tossing back and forth like a football. What can we possibly say to each other? Nice day. Long winter. I feel M. next to me, waiting to be introduced. So I do. I introduce my two husbands. When he hears the name, M. reacts in a way only I would notice: the quick bl
ink, a slight nod, but otherwise impassive, giving nothing away. He hates surprises. Especially surprises that include ex-boyfriends, ex-lovers. Most of all, surprises that include ex-husbands.
They shake hands, and all my past selves stretch between them like a fragile chain of paper dolls. The nineteen-year-old girl pirouettes over to the fifty-two-year-old woman, her cheeks flushed, arms chubby from the ten pounds she gained freshman year. She has all the self-knowledge of a Labrador retriever. She just wants to grow up, that’s all. And she figures marriage will make that happen, as if adulthood is an A.P. course, an item on a to-do list. The fifty-two-year-old has put in the time, but she doesn’t have much patience for the girl. She wishes she’d get on with it. Which, of course, is precisely what she did.
—
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” wrote Joan Didion in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” “whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, and who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”
—
Husbands. There was not one but two, before M.—another improbable yet incontrovertible fact. I married twice. At nineteen, at twenty-eight. Each marriage lasted less than a year, but there they are. If you type my name into a search engine, you’ll eventually find the wedding announcements. The first took place at a country club in Westchester. The second at a rented mansion on the Upper East Side. I walked down the aisle in two big white gowns. I said the vows, wore the ring, sipped the wine. I wanted to be married. Being married was the point. Deep down, in a place no less real for being concealed, I carried the knowledge that I could always get out of it.
—
When M. and I were first together, I was afraid to break this news to him. He knew about my second marriage. But the first marriage—the two marriages—was hard to explain away. Twice divorced! M. had not exactly been sitting around waiting for me. There was the French Sorbonne student, the Polish translator, the long-suffering semigirlfriend who took care of his cat when he was off on assignment, the gorgeous Somali woman who had modeled topless for Peter Beard. He’d lived with a painter for seven tumultuous years—way longer than I’d been with both of my husbands combined.
But there were no wives. He hadn’t married. Something had stopped him. Or else why wouldn’t he have married the painter? It seemed the sacred vows, the solemn commitment—for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, in health, until death do us part—had felt more momentous to him than they had to me.
Now—ashamed of my own complicated past—I waited until we were away for a weekend, and mustered up my courage to tell him during a long walk. I’ve been married before. He looked at me, puzzled. I mean, twice before. We stopped walking. We were miles from our cottage. He took a long while to respond. I never thought I’d get married, he said. But I guess I thought that if I did, it would be just as special for both of us.
—
I didn’t know how to express to M. that this—us—was different. Special had nothing to do with the slip dress by the Belgian designer that I would wear that June, nor the flower-bedecked chuppah draped with my father’s tallis. Special was not the Prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite no. 1, nor the loin of lamb in the private dining room of the old-school French restaurant. It was not the delicate pavé diamond band of leaves and flowers, nor the Provençal honeymoon. Special was that I had no exit strategy. Special was that I understood I was in it for life, come what may. For better, for worse.
—
After we say goodbye to my first ex-husband, M. and I walk down the empty corridor of the Mark Twain Museum and into the daylight. We drive to the market to pick up groceries for dinner. We’re on a familiar route, doing familiar things, but the landscape feels alien. The past—my past—has become present. We head home without saying much. I know M. would respond with a shrug if I try to get him to talk about it. What’s there to talk about? I want to tell him I’m sorry, but that would be ridiculous. M. has always been jealous of my exes. Would you want me to stop being jealous? So instead I tell him I love him. To which he responds: I know.
—
I take a selfie in the back of a cab as we idle at a red light on the corner of Fifty-Sixth and Sixth. I raise my arm, angle my phone from above so that the selfie will be flattering. I do this perhaps a half dozen times until I come up with an image I can live with—one in which I don’t look too old, too serious, or like I’m trying too hard. I’ve learned that I look best from the left. Glasses are good, too. And then there are Instagram filters: perpetua, willow, ludwig. I can soften the image, or sharpen it. Remove shadows, create warmth. When I’ve achieved an effect as photoshopped as a women’s magazine cover, I post the selfie on my Instagram feed. City day. Lunch with an editor, then a friend’s book party. It joins the others: a barn at sunset; a favorite lake; Jacob hitting a forehand; the big fluffy white dog lying on a bathroom mat; an empty lecture hall an hour before I give a reading; the view from a balcony on the Amalfi Coast where I teach each spring; M. and me in a dark restaurant in Barcelona.
—
You’ve been traveling a lot, friends will say.
Or: Well, you’ve had a great summer.
How was Europe?
Seems like you’ve been everywhere.
—
On Twitter, the Literary Hub posts a black-and-white photo of William Faulkner, tanned, bare-chested, a pipe in his mouth. He’s wearing fashionable sunglasses and is sprawled outdoors on a deck, reading a paperback. His typewriter is in front of him on a low table. The accompanying tweet: On this day in 1932, Faulkner moved to Hollywood to become a screenwriter; his life looks super chill but it wasn’t.
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What doesn’t go on Instagram: our bank statements; past due notices; quick glances exchanged when our son isn’t looking. Hangovers; sleepless nights; tuition bills. E-mails bearing disappointing news; life insurance forms. Last wills and testaments. Great heaving sighs. The way sometimes we put our arms around each other early in the morning—bleary-eyed, the coffee brewing—and bury our heads in each other’s shoulders. It’s going to be okay, right? The arms tighten. It’s going to be okay. A shared vocabulary—like a soundtrack to our lives—so familiar that we hardly even notice which of us is speaking. Eighteen years.
—
Not that many years ago, these words I have just used—Instagram, selfie, tweet, feed—would have made no sense at all. Just the other day, M. said: “The boy tried to Facetime me while I was I.M.-ing with Trevor.” This abbreviated language is the norm. Tweet. Snapchat. Vine. Adjectives have become verbs: I favorited it. Verbs have become nouns. How many likes do you have? Time is moving at such an accelerated rate that completing sentences now seems baroque. My agent’s assistant calls to arrange a lunch date. She’s circling back to set. M. leaves word for a producer who is out of the office and will therefore have to return.
My father-in-law remembers horse-drawn carriages on the streets of Boston. My mother once spoke of the sky changing color above her New Jersey farm as the Hindenburg exploded into flames. I have students who have never mailed a letter, and will never own a watch. When working overseas, M. used to carry a typewriter in a backpack and filed his stories by handing pages to a hotel Telex operator.
At the moment of this writing, I am typing into a laptop keyboard the way I have since I first learned to touch-type the summer of seventh grade on an IBM Selectric. Apparently, using two spaces after a period has become anachronistic. But tell that to my right thumb.
—
Winter. I am alone in a wooden cottage in the swamplands of eastern Florida, a brief walk from an arts center where I’m spending three weeks as a master artist in residence. When the invitation arrived, I imagined a cottage on a sandy beach, a porch with a hammock, a
nd me in that hammock, swaying slowly in the ocean breeze, a tall glass of iced tea by my side. Perhaps I would read the first two volumes of Knausgaard. Perhaps I would reread In Search of Lost Time. I would get a lot of work done. I would find the thread again.
The walk from my cottage to the arts center where I meet my students each afternoon is along a narrow wooden boardwalk. We are decidedly not on the ocean. The tropical jungle on either side of the boardwalk rustles with wildlife. Later—at the end of my residency—the man who drives me to the airport will tell me about the eighty varieties of snakes he’s seen on the property, only two of which are poisonous. But I’ve managed not to think about snakes. An infestation of carpenter bees at my cottage has my attention. The size of small fists, they swarm each time I open my door. Bees set off in me a seismic reaction, primal, ancient, unreasonable. I’m certain that, if stung, my throat will close up and I will die.
After determining that the insect was not a bee and D. would live, we detoured to Aix-en-Provence for lunch (M.’s idea).
Several years into our marriage, we were at a family picnic with friends in Prospect Park. Juice boxes strewn across a blanket, string cheese softening in the sun, glass containers of baby carrots, bags of healthy chips, toddlers and their plump, sticky hands. The grown-ups sipped wine. I noticed a bee hovering near the rim of my glass. I jumped up, arms flailing, wine spilling, and M. calmly said—as he had many times—but you aren’t allergic to bees. I became incensed. I couldn’t let it go. He was playing with my life, being irresponsible, I thought in a white-hot flash. How do you know? I snapped at him. Furious. In front of our friends. In front of the children.