Hourglass

by Dani Shapiro

  But the delicacy of the operation has taken a lot out of me, and by the time we’re at the airport, I’m pretty well depleted, and nearly in tears myself. My students’ stories linger inside me. And now, M. and Jacob are flying off in one direction, and I’m flying off in another. There are storms in Denver, high winds. The whole thing feels impossible. M. and I take a walk around the airport. I don’t want Jacob to see me cry.

  “I don’t like this. I wish we were all flying together.”

  “Me too.” By which I know M. simply means he wishes we didn’t have to part—not that he has visions of one of our planes crashing into the Rockies.

  “I need to get back to my writing,” I say to M.

  “I know, baby.”

  “Tell me everything’s going to be okay.”

  M. hates it when I ask him this. But I am childlike, borderline petulant, needing any kind of reassurance, even the false kind.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” he echoes.

  I’ll take care of it.

  We pass an airport spa—a twenty-first-century invention. Travelers are being massaged, their faces in cradles, backs vulnerable, suitcases by their sides.

  “You’re doing really good work.”

  My mood lifts slightly. I show M. pages in process, even these. He’s stingy with praise, my toughest critic.

  “I do have one comment,” he says.

  Now I gird myself. M. has told me he’s fine with my writing about him—about us—but I don’t know. Maybe all this is getting a little too close for comfort.

  “You’re making me out to be too good a guy,” he says. “I mean, I’m okay. But you need to be harder on me.”

  —

  How did you meet? A favorite question among couples who are getting to know each other. Ask any longtime couple and they will launch into their routine. We met through friends. At a party. In school. On Match.com. Over years, these answers tend to become as synchronized as dance moves. Honey, do you want to tell the story? Or shall I? Still, the question continues to be asked. Perhaps it’s our unconscious way of urging one another to revisit that distant, shimmering moment in which we first began.

  “At a Halloween party,” M. says.

  We’re out with new friends. Instead of waiting for the inevitable next question, I jump in.

  “We weren’t in costume.”

  “We aren’t costume people,” M. says.

  “It was the day after Halloween, actually. Down near Gramercy Park.”

  In the dim clatter of the restaurant, I am for a moment transported back to that crowded party. The introduction made by a journalist friend: Dani, have you met M.? I suppose M. and I shook hands. He was wearing a black sweater. Our eyes met and—neither years nor memory have altered this fact—I thought: There you are.

  “It was a literary party,” M. says airily.

  I feel a flash of annoyance. Is he trying to impress the couple across the table? What does it matter that it was a literary party? An almost imperceptible layer of fear has slowly settled over M. like a thin net. I have been watching him carefully, too carefully. How is he going to contend with these last few years of disappointment? He’s nearly sixty. When we first met, a jumble of awards for his war reportage occupied a corner of his desk. Then he changed course and became part of a long tradition of journalists-turned-screenwriters. Neither of us was expecting that this was what sixty would look like.

  “M. had just gotten back from Somalia that day,” I rush on. I leave out the fact that he had been ambushed on his way to the airport in Mogadishu.

  “I walked around the block three times,” M. says. “Finally I bought a bottle of scotch and went in.”

  “And I was supposed to be in L.A.,” I say. “I decided at the last minute to cancel the trip.”

  We continue this way, revisiting and revising the myth of us. Marveling at the odds that the whole thing could have been a near miss. There you are. My mother-in-law told me, years later, that M. had called the next morning and told her he’d met the woman he was going to marry.

  After dinner, we bid our new friends good night on a street corner, then walk to the garage where our car is parked. Eighteen years. It hadn’t been a great evening. M. seemed out-of-sorts, flat and disaffected. There are times when I look at him, and it is as if he has fled the premises. I can read his mood like the weather in a wide western sky. When I ask what’s wrong, his responses vary: “I’m working,” he’ll say. “I can’t just turn it off the way you do.” On occasion—feeling cornered—he’ll snap. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The couple had asked M. a question that often comes up when we tell the story of how we met. Do you miss Africa?

  “Sure, I miss it. But I met Dani and never went back.”

  “Never? Were you tempted?”

  “One time, after we were married. An editor called from Outside magazine. They wanted to send a writer into the Congo.”

  “On a Red Cross plane,” I interjected. “Nobody else was flying in.”

  “To report on missing Rwandan refugees.”

  He glanced at me. “It’s no job for someone with a family. A lot of my friends were killed. I was getting too old for it.”

  What he doesn’t say is that I didn’t want him to go. When he hung up the phone after talking to the editor I could see his eyes lit with excitement. What did he see reflected back at him? Fear. He saw fear. A fault line within me trembled—it felt impossible—as I imagined him alone, in danger, away from me. Out of reach.

  He survived the ambush. Circled the block. Bought the bottle of scotch. Told himself he’d stay five minutes. I canceled my trip to L.A., along with a blind date with a Hollywood agent. Dani, have you met M.? We are a middle-aged couple driving home to Connecticut. Two hours to the north, a boy sleeps on his bottom bunk in a room that smells of dirty socks. We hurl through the darkness listening to NPR. I don’t ask what’s wrong. Or if everything’s okay. I don’t fill the car with chatter. I know that everything is both okay and not okay.

  —

  A quick perusal of my e-mail: twelve publicity pitches have come in overnight. These have subject lines such as Interview Opportunity! or Following Up! The exclamation point is the new period. Everyone is always circling back, reaching out, checking in. There are notes about travel plans, teaching gigs, a fellowship competition I’m judging. There are notes from Jacob’s school, from his upcoming tennis camp. I just move down the list and respond to each one with no sense of priority or order.

  My childhood best friend’s mom has sent a photo attachment. I was driving by the old neighborhood and thought you’d get a kick out of this. A redbrick house with white columns fills the screen. The second-floor window on the left was my bedroom. The girl who grew up behind the closed door of that room, madly scribbling in her journals, looking for some way out—she left that house and its contents behind like a discarded chrysalis. I stare at the photo for a long moment, trying to see inside.

  Another e-mail: a $600 bill for a decade of semen storage from a fertility clinic M. and I visited during a long-ago attempt to have a second child. I forward it to M., who is downstairs working. Did we intend to store your semen? A reply comes back a second or two later. God, no. An instance in which an exclamation point would be justified.

  I know better than to start my day in this manner. What am I supposed to do with these tiny time bombs as they wedge themselves invisibly inside me, ticking, ticking? My childhood home. My husband’s frozen semen. I imagine today’s missives lining up on some interior shelf. They join all the others, waiting to be understood. At times, the sheer accumulation threatens to overwhelm me. I delete the e-mails or move them into folders. But they hardly disappear.

  —

  Jacob laughs when he sees ex-spouse under M.’s picture. I tell him we’ve tried to fix this and have given up. It seems some indifferent algorithm has determined the fate of our marriage. M.’s theory is that my previous marriages must have morp
hed somehow and created this information. Or misinformation. We can’t get rid of it. It relieves me that Jacob isn’t perturbed—to the contrary, he thinks it’s funny.

  Lately, a number of our friends have split up. Families he has grown up with have fractured. The first time it happened, I worried about how to break the news to him.

  “I have some sad news,” I told him as we drove along a dirt road not far from home. “The ———s are getting a divorce.”

  He was stunned to hear it—the couple outwardly made a pretty picture—and asked what would happen next, what it would mean for the kids, to whom he was close.

  “I guess they’re figuring it out. They’ll do what’s best for the kids,” I answered, then rushed on: “You know everything’s okay with Dad and me.” Hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. “You know we’re always going to be together.”

  “Of course,” he said. “You guys are a power couple.”

  I looked over at him, surprised. “Yeah, right.”

  “You are! Like Frank and Claire Underwood from House of Cards. Except you’re not killing anybody.”

  I think about what Jacob sees—the public and the private. M. and me at readings, screenings, conferences. M. and me, each of our office doors closed, trying like hell to make a single scene, one sentence, come right. He’s seen whole days in which we haven’t moved from our chairs. He’s seen us fight more than once—both of us red-faced, ugly, our claws out like animals. He’s seen tears course down my cheeks. Once, M. threw a dish, then slammed his fist into the wall. Sometimes he’ll ask M. how a particular project is going. It’s going, M. will answer. He’s seen us hugging. Come on, stop it, guys. In our guest bathroom, framed movie posters, newspaper articles, magazine covers—images of our most burnished selves.

  Now he types a note into the app on his phone. I want to assure you, he writes, that my parents are very much together.

  —

  The pharmaceutical company has an office in New York, where its creative department is housed on the twelfth floor of a warehouse building. The offices seem dreamt up by a set designer: a vast, open floor plan of workstations at which hives of young men wearing thick black glasses, women with asymmetrical hair sit in front of large video screens. A standard poodle—the pet of the boss—bounds across the floor, or sleeps nestled up against a wall-sized collage dotted with impeccable miniature versions of the company’s most famous products.

  At meetings with the boss and her team—team being a word we have come to use—M. and I sit around a shiny, oval conference table and discuss concept and workflow. We nod and take notes as the boss shares reams of research with us, charts full of arrows and bubbles based on thousands of pages of interviews in the field. Empathy, it seems, can be graphed.

  M. does most of the work on the play we produce, approaching this project with the same intensity and focus he brings to his own screenplays. Besides, it’s personal. He hardly needs the charts full of arrows.

  We hire neighbors of ours—a husband and wife with a long list of Broadway and movie credits—and turn our library into a makeshift film studio, shelves of books covered with a backdrop of black cloth held up by masking tape. The company sends an executive to our house to supervise the shooting of the video, a preliminary step for in-house use. They want to be sure we know what we’re doing—and who could blame them?

  But M. does know what he’s doing. He’s taken the lead on this project—something he knows he can start and finish without drama or heartbreak. As M. directs the video, I stand off to the side with my clipboard, our script in hand. I give the actors notes, scribble small revisions. But all the while, a gauzy sense of unreality hovers. I wonder if our lives have swerved off course when I wasn’t looking. What the hell is going on? What are these people doing in our house?

  I shuffle through the images the pharmaceutical company plans to project behind the actors during the live event. Magnified neurons from the somatosensory cortex float, green and purple, like something out of a Jackson Pollock painting. Neurons from the hippocampus spread out like a field of wildflowers. Beta-amyloid plaques gleam like stars in a twilight sky. All shockingly beautiful. “This is how it goes,” one of the actors is mid-monologue. “He acts like everything is okay, and his wife pretends the act is fooling her. I don’t think there’s any way to prepare a family for what this is ultimately like.”

  —

  In July of 1939, Virginia Woolf was thinking, as she often did, about time: “The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths…But to feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary. The present must be smooth, habitual. For this reason—that it destroys the fullness of life—any break…causes me extreme distress; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into hard thin splinters. As I say to L[eonard]: ‘What’s there real about this? Shall we ever live a real life again?’ ”

  —

  Once a week, sometimes more, I make the two-hour trip into New York City. The city still feels like mine. It hasn’t yet churned past me in a blur of cranes, construction, new traffic patterns, whole neighborhoods springing up from abandoned train tracks, navy yards, and railway beds. Wherever I go—in every neighborhood—I catch younger versions of myself disappearing around corners.

  I emerge from the subway on Seventy-Second and Broadway, a hot breeze blows my hair back, and suddenly my father is holding my hand as we cross the busy street on our way to visit my grandmother on a Sunday afternoon. I stop at a juice bar for a smoothie. It was once a shoe repair shop where I failed to claim a pair of brown suede boots. I buy a Times at a newsstand beneath what had been a dance studio in Chelsea, and here I am, at twenty-two, climbing the narrow steps. I am part of a parade of women carrying our gym bags, changing in the cramped bathroom into leotards and leg warmers. Pinning up our hair. Comparing our taut bodies, finding fault with ourselves in the mirror. Some are probably grandmothers by now.

  Oh, child! Somewhere inside you, your future has already unfurled like one of those coiled-up party streamers, once shiny, shaken loose, floating gracefully for a brief moment, now trampled underfoot after the party is over. The future you’re capable of imagining is already a thing of the past. Who did you think you would grow up to become? You could never have dreamt yourself up. Sit down. Let me tell you everything that’s happened. You can stop running now. You are alive in the woman who watches as you vanish.

  —

  Each fork in the road: the choice to stay home, to go out, to catch the flight, or cancel it, to take the 1 train, to stop at the bar on the corner. The chance encounters, split-second decisions that make the design—that are the design. “For it is, always is, however we may say it was,” wrote Thomas Mann. Back home, I search through my shelf of journals until I find the first one: a tattered red-cloth-covered book decorated with little white flowers. I am sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. I begin to page through it, skimming, really, afraid to look too closely at the words I wrote long ago.

  The journal is filled with a stream of endless boys. Names upon names: Neil, Alex, Scott, Eddie, Gil, Dan, Matt. Who were they? Who was I? I was a girl—I had always thought—who believed that men would save me. But perhaps it was darker than that. Perhaps it wasn’t being saved that I was after.

  The restaurants, street corners, synagogues, university classrooms, distant cities, coffee shops, phone booths, pressurized cabins high above the turning earth. The marriages. Marriages! The stories—both the ones that happened and the ones that didn’t. The ones eternally bound into the spines of books. The ones that I have polished until they gleam like jewels—until I can say this is it, precisely it—that is, until they change on me once more. And then, the ones that are not yet stories: loose fragments within me, sharp as fishhooks. They impale me when I least expect it.

  —

  M. knocks on my office door. I’m on my chaise, journals spread all over th
e floor, trying to gather my whole lost tribe of selves around me.

  “What are you doing, honey?” His voice is gentle.

  I hold up the tattered red one. It’s only by the way he looks at me that I realize my face is streaked with tears.

  He sits on my desk chair and swivels toward me. “This is why I burned every journal I kept from when I was that age,” he says. “I didn’t want to remember.”

  I attempt to offer him proof of my fucked-up girlhood in the form of a few choice sentences—but as I read them, I realize they could have been written by any pained, precocious teenager who can’t possibly imagine the woman she will become: I want nobody, I want everybody. I want a stable man in my life. One who will be there, but will give me enough room to be free, to breathe, to live. And one I can love, but not sacrifice my soul for.

  I cannot bring myself to even idly wish any of it—not even the most painful parts—away. Eighteen years. Change even one moment, and the whole thing unravels. The narrative thread doesn’t stretch in a line from end to end, but rather, spools and unspools, loops around and returns again and again to the same spot.

  Come closer now and listen. Be thankful for all of it. You would not have walked into that Gramercy Park apartment. You would not have looked into the eyes of the war correspondent just back from Mogadishu. A coup de foudre: a bolt of lightning. You would not have your bright and sunny boy. There is no other life than this. You would not have stumbled into the vastly imperfect, beautiful, impossible present.

  —

  “Be who you needed when you were younger,” someone called Momastery posts on Instagram.

  —

  In an extraordinary photographic series, Imagine Finding Me, the Tokyo-born, London-based photographer Chino Otsuka uses digital technology to insert images of her adult self into existing images of herself as a girl in the 1970s and ’80s. Here she is—a grown woman in a dark peasant blouse and denim skirt—walking beside a solemn child of perhaps five or six, on a windswept beach in Kamakura, Japan. Their shadows glisten behind them in the smooth wet sand. And here they are again, the two of them, sharing a park bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg, facing in opposite directions. Now the girl has made a dirty snowman. She stares unsmilingly at the camera in her striped socks, one hand draped protectively over its melting shape. Her future self stands nearby in a fur-lined parka.