by Dani Shapiro
All the woman can do is hover like something spectral, otherworldly. The sense is that she’s watching over the girl from a benign distance. She passes by her on a staircase to a Buddhist temple. In a Tokyo train station, she stands behind her and appears to be carrying her bags. Otsuka’s technical skills are such that no doubt she could have allowed the woman to reach out and rest a hand on the girl’s small shoulder, as if to say: Don’t worry, I’m here. But in none of the ten photographs do they ever touch.
—
Sometimes M.’s father is charming—a flirtatious, funny, generous character—but other times a darkness emerges from a coiled place within him, as sudden and vicious as a rattlesnake. All his children adore him, but they also know that he can turn on just about anyone. The worst I’ve seen him is when he lashes out at M.—his firstborn son, the one who left.
A few winters ago, M. set out to make his own movie. As he wrote the script, which he planned to direct himself, I watched his disappointment fall away in layers. Over the course of an intense, high-risk year, he raised the money. It was the same year his hair went completely white. He found his way into the offices of some big Hollywood agents and had actors vying for the starring role. He wasn’t playing by the rules—in fact, there was no rule book. The actors were cast believing the money was there. The investors came on board assured that the actors were cast. The clock was ticking. Every day was dangerous. This renegade, rogue approach seemed to serve and feed him. He was alive—in combat mode—bristling with energy.
Finally, finally.
The heart of the film—my favorite part—centered on the long marriage of an elderly couple, a slightly kinder, gentler version of my in-laws. It was a son’s love letter, a darkly comic paean to his parents. As M. was making the film, I prayed his father would live long enough to see it.
Just before the film was to open in New York, the whole family was together—about to go out to dinner for my in-laws’ anniversary—when M. pulled a DVD out of his briefcase and suggested showing a scene or two. It’s always loud in my in-laws’ house—even when they’re the only ones there, the television blares at full volume—but at that moment it was quiet enough to hear M.’s father’s voice rise above all the others.
“I don’t fucking want to see that piece of crap,” he said.
I watched M.’s face slacken and absorb the blow.
“Your mother’s furious about it,” my father-in-law went on.
My mother-in-law sat there staring into space, not looking furious about anything.
“What are you talking about?” M. asked.
“You show her no respect—I’ve read interviews. You make fun of her Alzheimer’s.”
The cousins—ranging from ages ten to twenty—looked back and forth between M. and his father.
“I do no such thing, Dad.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
“You haven’t even seen it.”
“Yeah, and I’m not going to.”
Nobody said another word as we left the house and got into our car—the three of us—presumably to caravan to the restaurant. M. started the engine but didn’t move. He was doing that rapid-blinking thing. We sat there in the darkness of his parents’ driveway.
—
From Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”
—
A photo of M. has surfaced on a private Facebook page for a group of journalists who had covered the famine and conflict in Somalia in the 1990s. The page—called The Sahafi Rooftop Club—is named after the hotel where all the journalists stayed when in Mogadishu. There are thirty-eight members in the closed group. Many of the photos are of their dead colleagues. Carlos Mavroleon, who died in Peshawar, Pakistan, while preparing to cross the border into Afghanistan to find and interview Osama Bin Laden. Dan Eldon, Hansi Kraus, Anthony Macharia, and Hos Maina, who were stoned and beaten to death by a mob on the streets of Mogadishu.
In the photo, M. sits cross-legged on the tile floor of a dim hallway at the Sahafi. The year is 1993, three years before we met. With him are the Nairobi correspondent for The New York Times, a reporter for CBS, and a few Somali assistants and fixers. M. is smoking a cigarette, as he is in just about every image I’ve seen of him from that time. He’s tanned, his hair is long, and he’s skinnier than I’ve ever known him to be. Notably, he is the only journalist in the photograph not wearing a flak jacket.
They had gathered in an interior corridor because there was heavy gunfire on the streets. High-powered bullets will rip through concrete blocks. One morning M. woke up in his room at the Sahafi, the usual pitch-black bisected by a bright beam of light streaming through a bullet hole in the wall near his bed. So why wasn’t he wearing a flak jacket? He looks exposed and vulnerable next to the other journalists who are protected by forty pounds of body armor.
“The people who worked for the major news outlets had to wear them. No one at The Village Voice gave a shit,” M. tells me as we scroll down the page for The Sahafi Rooftop Club, past image after image of handsome, dead young men. “I had one, but I didn’t like it,” he says. “I wore it for my first three or four days and never again.”
I return to the photo of M. and his colleagues and examine my future husband’s face. He knew how to move like an alley cat through the streets of a war zone in which ambushes, kidnappings, car crashes, and stray bullets were to be expected. The more dangerous the situation, the slower his pulse. In the photo he looks relaxed—strangely at peace, at home in a world in which he was unprotected and bullets were flying.
—
On a promotional video for a skin-tightening ultrasound procedure called Ultherapy on a cosmetic dermatologist’s website—the kind of thing a web-surfing, middle-aged writer might find herself exploring on a rough morning—a clay model of a woman’s head commands my attention. The caption reads: Face Aging—30 Years.
One click and electronic music with a heavy beat—think Moscow nightclub—begins to blast from my laptop. The clay woman’s head fills the screen. The Young Face. We contemplate the lovely planes of her cheeks, her high, smooth forehead—she looks to be in her twenties—when suddenly two hands wielding a sculptor’s modeling tool enter the picture and begin working on her face, which, it turns out, is made not of dry but of soft, wet clay, and is subject to revision.
The film speeds up, the music pounds, the hands with the tool move at a dizzying pace, faster than the eye can track. Her cheeks are slightly flattened, lines etched into her forehead, her neck softened. We now share another long moment with her more weathered self. She appears to be a person who has lived awhile. She has a few wrinkles around her eyes and looks like she could use a nap. Early Changes.
Just as we are getting used to these changes, the music kicks up a notch—the sound is like the loud, sped-up ticking of a clock—and back come the hands at warp speed, and the modeling tool, now carving deeper lines, moving faster and more carelessly, extending the tip of her nose, tugging beneath her eyes, pulling down her earlobes, pinching under her chin. When the hands are finished, she is slowly rotated back so she is directly facing the viewer. Now she’s an old woman. Later changes.
The sculptor’s strong, fine hands have completed their work. The final moments of the video are in triptych form. We see all three faces close-up—I can’t stop looking at the one in the middle—as the music continues its ceaseless beat.
Breakfast arrived on a tray—fresh fruit, yogurt, croissants, etc. We decided to explore a bit, aided by Hector (the owner) and his maps. We drove to Vaison-la-Romaine and then on to Crestet—a tiny, magnificent town perched on the top of a hill. We parked and walked to the top. There was a little café —Le Panorama—where we had lunch. Then we got lost. We went back to Crillon le Brave. That night we went to Le Bontoy for dinner outdoors next to their swimming pool. A great country dinner. M. had incredible langoustine. Went back to Crillon for dessert and café overlooking the hills of Provenc
e.
—
M. and I go see a couples therapist. Eighteen years. Things come up in the course of eighteen years. Together we’ve weathered Jacob’s illness, my mother’s death, his mother’s decline. We’ve fought each other’s battles: my bad reviews feel even worse to M. than they do to me. A friend’s betrayal of him makes me want to come out swinging. We’re each other’s first readers. We have always been on the same side. When people ask if we’re competitive with one another—two writers under the same roof—the question itself seems absurd. We’re together. All in. Deep inside the us of us.
So why—the therapist wonders—are we here?
M. sits silently, so I begin.
“I’m frightened,” I say. And then I start to cry.
I feel M. next to me on her sofa. His body is my home. Yet lately, I have had flashes, unbidden moments in which I wonder who the hell he is. I secretly fear that I’ve been wrong about him.
While M. was making the movie, he let things slide. Bills piled up. I trusted he knew what he was doing. Then our Writers Guild health insurance lapsed, and he didn’t tell me. Ever since I found out, I’ve been in a panic. It feels like every step I take is fraught with danger. As if the earth’s crust might just open up and swallow me whole. What if something happened to one of us? Just yesterday I didn’t let Jacob go out for a bike ride. I was afraid he’d fall and break his leg.
I’ll take care of it.
M.’s head is in his hands. He knows just how badly he’s fucked up. His voice is low, muted.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
I’m not interested in sorry.
“I didn’t want to disappoint you. I just wanted to fix things.”
My voice, too, sounds different to my ears. Reedy, shaking with rage.
“You put our family in danger,” I say.
“What are you most afraid of?” the therapist asks.
Just a short while earlier, as we walked to our appointment on West Ninth Street—a pretty block just off Fifth Avenue—I had noticed an elderly homeless woman pushing a cart filled with all her worldly belongings. Who had she been? How had she gotten there? It seemed a possibility that I could become that elderly homeless woman someday. That this life M. and I have built together is flimsy, the world merciless, and time, time unrelenting.
I see M. in my peripheral vision as I stutter out my worst fears. He flinches at my mention of the homeless woman. The therapist tilts her head to one side. She hardly knows me and has no reason to believe what sounds like histrionics of the creative class. Really? That’s what you’re most afraid of? As if it were ridiculous. As if it were simply out of the realm of possibility.
—
Late summer. At our local farmer’s market, I wait in line for goat’s milk yogurt, green roses, sourdough bread, fresh eggs while M. picks up some beef to grill. It’s a bright, sunny day—with just a hint of autumn in the air—but I’m not feeling bright or sunny. It has been a difficult stretch. I usually find the ritual of the farmer’s market cheering, but today it is as if a pane of glass separates me from the crowds of tanned, fit shoppers carrying their eco-friendly mesh bags. Well, you’ve had a great summer. Seems like you’ve been everywhere!
A woman we used to know stops me to ask if it was M. she just saw—“I thought it was him but nearly didn’t recognize him with that big white beard.” Does M. have a big white beard? I don’t think so. When I find him on the other side of the market, I look at him the way an outsider might. His hair is wild. His shirt untucked, the hems of his jeans frayed. Get a grip! I think, but don’t say. You look like the Unabomber! It’s true. He hasn’t shaved in days.
We’ve been working all morning—Jacob had a sleepover and we’re taking advantage of our empty house—each of us hunched over our laptops. M. is putting the finishing touches on a television pilot about which he has once again mustered high hopes. I’ve been on social media promoting an upcoming writing workshop. I post a photo of myself seated in lotus position on a small platform, in deep conversation with a student. And another: a panoramic view of the Berkshires. Come join me for an inspirational, generative retreat! I am not feeling like someone who knows how to inspire anyone or generate anything.
I stop into the bookstore before we head home. I’ve been searching for a particular poem Richard Wilbur wrote about his wife. I scan the Ws, but there is no Richard Wilbur. In its place is a mis-shelved slim volume called The Country of Marriage. Again, Wendell Berry.
In the car—waiting for M. to pick up our dry cleaning—I turn to the title poem: “Sometimes our life reminds me / of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing / and in that opening a house, / an orchard and a garden, / comfortable shades, and flowers / red and yellow in the sun, a pattern / made in the light for the light to return to. / The forest is mostly dark, its ways / to be made anew day after day, the dark / richer than the light and more blessed / provided we stay brave / enough to keep on going in.”
—
Our first date: M. picks me up at my apartment on a blustery Friday afternoon in early November. The plan is to take a walk—perhaps stop into a museum or two—and end up downtown for dinner. He’s made a reservation at a small, dark Italian place in the East Village, near where he lives.
I invite him in. In the week since we met at the Halloween party, I have wondered if the powerful magic between us might have been a figment, a cruel illusion—but as soon as our eyes meet, there it is, unmistakable. It winds its way around us, pulling us together. We’re all over my apartment—in the wing chair in my office, the sofa in the living room—our hands, our mouths, ravenous. It isn’t just desire—though there’s plenty of that—but something else underneath. A sense of recognition. A sense of inevitability. It will turn out that we won’t leave each other’s sides all weekend long—or practically ever again.
We head out into the brisk afternoon. We’re walking down Broadway when M. tells me he needs to make a quick stop way west on Fifty-Seventh Street—the studios for CBS News. M.’s last trip to Somalia had been for 60 Minutes—as one of the only American journalists who knew the territory, he had been hired to help produce a piece for Christiane Amanpour—and now that he is back home, he needs to pick up his paycheck.
An envelope has been left for him at the reception desk. Beneath the watchful portraits of Morley Safer and Lesley Stahl, he stuffs it into the back pocket of his jeans. I don’t stop to wonder about any of this. It makes perfect sense. The check is large, and it can’t wait the weekend. He’s been out of the country for a month. His bills are overdue. It’s important that he deposit the check into his account before the end of the business day.
Back on the street, we find a nearby Citibank. He removes the check from the envelope, endorses it, and inserts it into the ATM. If he’s nervous—or relieved—at the close call, I am unaware of it. None of this seems precarious to me. It’s the most natural thing, part of the job.
And that it may be true, at least in poetic terms, that beginnings are like seeds that contain within them everything that will ever happen.
We walk—arms wrapped around each other—downtown. The romantic dinner, candles dripping, his East Village apartment, the two of us tangled up in his bedsheets. The tiny wedding; the Provençal honeymoon; the birth of our baby; the close call. The raising of him, the reveling in him. The Brooklyn town house, the Connecticut saltbox. The lung cancer, the Alzheimer’s. The bar mitzvah. The triumphs; disappointments; terrors; risks. The books; films; teaching; travel. The smart moves; the idiocy. The sheer velocity of it all. I want to bless that young couple as they cross Union Square. I want to deliver some kind of benediction upon them as—drunk on love—they meander the narrow streets of Alphabet City. I want to suggest that there will come a time when they will need something more than love.
—
On the Valentine’s Day 1998 episode of This American Life, Ira Glass interviews Cornell Professor Emeritus of French Literature Richard Klein. They’ve been discussing D
ante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura. In the thirteenth century, Petrarch encountered Laura as he walked by a fountain in the south of France. He looked into her eyes, and in that instant, his life was transformed. He wrote the first lyric love poem ever written.
But eventually the conversation takes a semidepressing turn: “Psychologists have estimated that you can only stay in love for eighteen months,” says Klein. “That’s the limit. After that it becomes admiration, respect, affection, but—”
And here Ira Glass interrupts him: “The dream of it dissolves and it becomes something else.”
—
For nearly two decades I have become almost synonymous with M. I can hardly attend a party or gathering solo without the question being asked: Where’s M.? We have formed ourselves over the years as two branches form, twisting, rooting, growing, stunting, pushing, budding, stagnating, reaching ever farther, together. Who would I have become without him?
Until M., I was good at leaving. If you find yourself in the wrong story, leave—a piece of online folk wisdom. I wasn’t so skilled at avoiding getting into the wrong story to begin with—but once there, I knew how to extricate myself. Houdini-like, I would test myself to see just how far I could go. With hands and feet bound together, I would slither and slip my way out of mess after tangled mess.