Hourglass

by Dani Shapiro

  One rainy afternoon, an invitation to a high school reunion leads me to the discovery that my first boyfriend is the math coordinator at a prep school less than a half-hour from my house. Surprisingly little information is available about him beyond this fact. I peer at the stamp-sized photo on the school’s website, searching for the boy in the man. I close my eyes and inhale the scent of damp earth, the mossy bark of trees in the woods where we hung out when we cut school. The sounds of a basketball game—bank shot echoing through the gym. A long shrill whistle. He has no Facebook page, no LinkedIn profile. This makes me wonder whether he’s isolated and unhappy, though it may signify the opposite. I can’t tell if he’s married or has kids. I hope he does. I wonder if he’s ever looked me up—I am nothing if not visible online.

  Without moving from my spot on the chaise in my office, I embark on a virtual tour of my romantic history. My first husband lives in New Orleans with his wife and young daughter. He runs a World Music record label. No surprises here. I knew all this before running into him in the corridor of the Mark Twain Museum. There is a kind and gentle light in his eyes. I’ll bet he’s a good family man.

  The toxic married boyfriend with whom I spent my early twenties is recently dead. His face peers out from an obituary notice that fills my screen. Dead! He died just around the time I began writing this book. A few swift clicks lead me to the discovery that he split with his wife—the one he cheated on with me—and married a much younger woman with whom he has a boy around Jacob’s age.

  I look up my second husband. He’s a financial adviser in New York City and is married—but leaves virtually no digital footprint. It takes effort to lead such an untraceable life. I find him only because his stepdaughter is a prima ballerina. I do manage to figure out that he and his wife live in a very nice Park Avenue building. Judging from his campaign contributions, he continues to be a Democrat. I can discern nothing in the way of his happiness, his level of contentment. Did I leave a trace on him? Did he leave one on me? This man once told me he had never made a mistake in his life. You’re looking at her, I thought at the time.

  There are various flings. Keith, Gary, William. I certainly remember them better than the names scrawled in my red cloth journal, names from the years that seem to seesaw backward. The actor now sells residential real estate in South Africa. The television writer is listed on Wikipedia as a folk artist. The photographer is still a photographer.

  In the jumble of memory, I see flashbulbs. A New Year’s Eve dinner around a table in Southampton; a late-night motorcycle ride down a dark stretch of lower Broadway; being backed against a wall for a first kiss. Near the end of Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” a minor character turns to the twenty-one-year-old narrator of the story and chides him: “You can’t carry on like this, it is not right, you will find that out soon enough, everything you do matters too much.”

  —

  The years. They ran through my open fingers like a trickle of water, streaming faster, faster. On my twenty-fifth birthday, I wept in the outdoor garden of a café on West Seventy-First Street that no longer exists. I was sure my best years were behind me. At thirty, my second husband threw me a party in our apartment high above Madison Avenue. I wore a blue sparkly minidress. I left him two months later. At thirty-four, I walked into the crowded party near Gramercy Park. At thirty-seven, I gave birth by emergency cesarean section. At thirty-nine, I left New York City. At forty, my mother died. And then a long, merciful stretch of ordinary days. What will be next on the list? There has always been more time.

  —

  The woodpecker has returned. I see him as I get out of the shower. He’s latched onto the gutter, his small head hammering away at the very siding we had replaced months ago.

  “Honey!” I call from the top of the stairs.

  No response from down below. M. has lived with a high-pitched ringing in his ears ever since a Hot Tuna concert in 1975. Lately it seems to have grown worse.

  I walk halfway down the stairs and call again. As I’m toweling off, I hear his footsteps. I know those footsteps well. The slow, plodding ones when he’s tired. The staccato ones when he has some sort of news. These contain a measure of apprehension. What now?

  Together, we watch as the bird pecks away at a small hole in the siding.

  “I can’t believe he’s back,” I say.

  “It’s probably not the same one.”

  “Oh, it’s the same one.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  M. has given up on the pellet gun. He probably wishes he had his Kalashnikov. Nail the fucker. But by now I know that we’re in a dance with the woodpecker that will continue as the seasons turn. We can’t catch him, and he’s not going away. He’ll hammer his holes into our house. We’ll patch the holes, or replace the siding, repaint, depending on what’s called for, and what we can afford. And then he’ll hammer them again.

  —

  M.’s manager reads the new television pilot he’s been working on for the past six months—a subtle, dark comedy—and suggests that it would benefit from “more noise.” M. is not sure what “more noise” means. The manager proposes adding a transsexual to the mix. This news comes the same week that the shooting schedule for M.’s next film is postponed because a) the money hasn’t been raised, b) the female lead hasn’t been cast, and c) the famous comedian attached to the project will now not be available until next year.

  What next? What next?

  I pore over online listings for academic teaching jobs. It has been years since I’ve taught in universities. Instead, I’ve created a life in which I teach in far-flung places—Taos, Aspen, Provincetown, Stockbridge, Positano—which often double as vacations for my family. It’s a lovely life. You might even say it’s a work of art. But in the middle of the night, when the ticking clock, the snoring husband, the restless dogs become cacophonous, my mind tilts and whirls as old terrors take on new forms.

  “______ is advertising a position for a distinguished writer in residence,” I say to M. “And ______ is looking for a full professor. Then there’s ______, which is for only one year, but I’ve heard there’s a possibility they may extend it into a permanent position.”

  “Is that what you want?” M. asks.

  “Is that what I want?”

  We stare at each other across the kitchen table. Morning light filters though the leaves of the old Japanese tree out back, creating a strobe effect. I think of one of my dearest friends, a Buddhist teacher in her late seventies—contentedly married for sixty years—and a favorite mantra of hers: It isn’t what I wanted. But it’s what I’ve got.

  “I’m just thinking about the long run,” I say to M. after a beat. I need to choose my words carefully. When we finish this conversation, he will go back into his office and begin the work of unraveling his meticulously written television pilot in order to provide more “noise.” The process is a bit like taking apart the inner workings of a well-made Swiss watch and spreading the pieces all over the table until they become something else entirely, something that perhaps no longer tells time.

  “You know. Things like pensions, health insurance. We can’t keep living this way forever.”

  M. takes a long sip from his mug of coffee. It displays a whimsical, hand-drawn mermaid—one of Odysseus’s sirens—the symbol of the writers’ conference we started in Italy ten years ago. We made the conference. We made the mug. We made this life.

  “Everything will be fine in the long run,” M. says. “We just have an immediate problem. I have to fix this fucking script. That’s what’s right in front of me. Today. If I think about the future—”

  “But somebody has to think about the future,” I blurt out.

  I’ve now entered dangerous territory. Our morning is in jeopardy. Our days require our minds to be clear, unconfused, free of anxiety or anger.

  “Let’s not do this now,” I say. I scrape my chair back, startling one of the dogs. “Let
’s just get to work.”

  —

  “The constitutional disease from which I suffer,” wrote the philosopher and psychologist William James, “is what the Germans call Zerrissenheit, or torn-to-pieces-hood. The days are broken in pure zig-zag and interruption.”

  —

  Lately I’ve been hearing a whispered admonition in my ear as I go about my business. Or perhaps admonition isn’t quite right. It seems more of a quiet, urgent instruction issued from a place in the deep interior that holds within it everything I still need to know: dense matter, a dark star.

  Be careful, the voice says.

  I’m walking down Madison Avenue with a friend on a beautiful spring afternoon when my stupid platform shoe hits a divot in the pavement, and I go down hard—the flat of one hand, a knee, my cheekbone slam into the asphalt. Oh my god, are you okay? I don’t stop moving, even though I’m not at all sure I’m okay. I stand up again and limp to the corner to assess the damage. My knee is bloody. My hand is scraped. My cheekbone stings. But it’s the feeling, more than anything—I am flooded with a sense of frailty and shame. How could this have happened to me? How could I have tripped so clumsily? And most of all: How could I have gone down so fast? The whole episode took an instant. A heartbeat.

  Be careful, the voice says.

  I meet another friend for a glass of wine at our local watering hole that turns into two, maybe even two and a half glasses. Driving home, I notice a car trailing me. The country roads are quiet. The way to my house is meandering. The car is still behind me at a safe distance, twin beams of headlights in my rearview mirror. Did someone follow me home from the bar? The paranoid thought makes me grip the wheel harder. Or wait: Is it a cop? I drive carefully, and my breath returns to my body only after I’ve pulled into my driveway and the car continues on. There are so many ways a life can get messed up. So many wrong turns from which it is difficult to recover.

  Be careful, the voice says.

  A man flirts with me at a party. From time to time, a business card offered, pressed into my hand. A cocked eyebrow. A sweeping glance. A suggestive e-mail. An invitation. The husband of a friend. A writer at a conference. It has been easy to shut down even a whiff of an offer. But then there are the ones—I’m sure M. has them, too—who would have caught my interest in another life. Around these men I am even more cautious. I wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. Eighteen years.

  The stumbles and falls; the lapses in judgment; the near misses; the could-haves. I’ve become convinced that our lives are shaped less by the mistakes we make than when we make them. There is less elasticity now. Less time to bounce back. And so I heed the urgent whisper and move with greater and greater deliberation. I hold my life with M. carefully in my hands like the faience pottery we brought back from our honeymoon long ago. We are delicate. We are beautiful. We are not new. We must be handled with care.

  —

  I used to tell my students that in order to write memoir—or at least good memoir, the kind that will be of value to the disinterested reader—the writer has to have some distance from the material. I was quite certain that we could not write directly from our feelings, but only the memory of our feelings. How else to find the necessary ironic distance, the cool remove? How else to shape a narrative but from the insight and wisdom of retrospect?

  But like every fixed idea, this one has lost its hold on me as years have passed and the onrushing present—the only place from which the writer can tell the story—continues to shift along with the sands of time. Our recollections alter as we attempt to gather them. Even retrospect is mutable. Perspective, a momentary figment of consciousness. Memoir freezes a moment like an insect trapped in amber. Me now, me then. This woman, that girl. It all keeps changing. And so: If retrospect is an illusion, then why not attempt to tell the story as I’m inside of it? Which is to say: before the story has become a story?

  —

  A few years after we moved to Connecticut, we awoke early one autumn morning to a world blanketed in snow. A freak storm had descended upon us overnight. The ground was not yet frozen, and the weight of the heavy, wet snow on leaf-covered branches pulled whole root systems from the soft earth. Bits of russet and golden yellow could be seen here and there, remnants of a dead season. In the quiet of our meadow, we stood still, listening to the sound of the splitting, cracking, toppling forest in the distance.

  We lost power, of course, and we had no generator. Trees had crashed into power lines all over the county, making many roads impassable. We had no heat, no water, since our well is operated by an electric pump. Using the little battery power we had left on our cell phones, we called friends who had a guesthouse with a generator and made the decision to try to make our way over there.

  “I’ve driven in worse,” M. said as he maneuvered our four-wheel-drive truck down our long driveway, making fresh tracks in drifts that were several feet high. Jacob was strapped into the backseat. Our new puppy whined in his crate.

  The driveway narrowed and suddenly tree branches were directly in front of our windshield.

  “Shit.”

  Jacob started to laugh.

  “Fuck.”

  We sat there for a moment, motor idling. There was no going forward and no going back. My mind raced with what to do. Before we left the house, M. had tossed his chainsaw into the way back of the truck. The chainsaw—one of his earliest purchases when we first moved to the country—was a bone of contention. I saw it not as a useful power tool, but rather as an instrument of potential carnage. In a flash I imagined M. losing control of the thing—blood seeping into snow.

  “I’m going to take a look.”

  “No!” I put a hand on his arm.

  If we had to, we could abandon the truck and hike back up to the house. But then what? We could be stranded up there for days.

  “Okay. Let’s do it this way, then.” M. gunned the gas and we crashed through the low-lying branches. We skidded onto the road, the back of the truck shimmying. I’ll take care of it. An electrical pole hung diagonally above us, resting against some power lines that looked ready to snap. Our neighbor’s ancient apple tree was on its side, its gnarled roots exposed. The natural world was a cemetery full of pillaged graves.

  We drove in silence. I gripped the sides of the passenger seat and tried to breathe. What if we slid off the road and down an embankment? What if no one found us? I hadn’t seen a single other car. What if we were electrocuted by a power surge from a loose wire?

  M. turned onto a street that didn’t lead to our friends’ house.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I want to see what’s going on. Just get a better sense of what’s out here.”

  “Could you please just not?”

  But M.’s response to crisis had taken over. I could feel every nerve in him bristling and alive. He fiddled with the radio dial, listening for the latest report on the storm. Eyes darting everywhere. We could have been in Mogadishu. We could have been stopped at a checkpoint, surrounded by guns. M. once told me he had always carried a pack of cigarettes when he was overseas so that he could defuse a situation by offering one to a jumpy rebel soldier. I pictured him now, holding out a Marlboro, hands steady. Making a life-or-death educated guess.

  “Turn around,” I said.

  “Wait, let’s just go a little—”

  “Turn the fuck around.” My voice was shaking.

  He glanced at me and did as I asked. Felled frozen branches ground under our wheels. The radio crackled with warnings from the governor, pleas from law enforcement to stay off the roads, stories of terrible accidents and stranded motorists. I swiveled to look at Jacob, who had fallen asleep in his booster seat: his blond curls, eyelashes dark against his soft cheeks. Didn’t M. know me? This kind of danger set off in me an avalanche of old terrors.

  That afternoon—Jacob and I ensconced in the warmth of our friends’ guesthouse—M. headed back out into the tundra. Armed with his chainsaw, he rescued a family whos
e car was wedged beneath a fallen tree. He cleared a path so an elderly woman could take refuge in a nearby home. He made turns down blocked roads with no one to tell him to please stop, don’t do it, it’s too dangerous. He sidestepped electrical wires and spoke with emergency crews. When he returned to the guesthouse, he was exhilarated, his cheeks ruddy, eyes bright. I hated him.

  “It’s like a war zone out there,” he said.

  —

  During rush-hour traffic, I hear an advertisement on the radio for something called letsmakeaplan.org. A worried-sounding male voice asks the listener: Are you prepared for major life events? Have you considered your retirement goals? Alone in the car, I contemplate my answer. When I arrive back home, I look up the website, which turns out, unsurprisingly, to be run by an organization of certified financial planners. Amid advice about lifelong financial strategies, steps to financial confidence, and the new financial realities, the title of one particular article catches my eye: Uncertainty Is Inevitable. It’s a catchy phrase. But I’m not sure it’s quite right. Inevitable would seem to imply that uncertainty will at some point assert itself. Whereas it seems to me that uncertainty is a permanent condition—in fact, the only thing about which we can be certain.

  That night, I lie in bed next to M. in the darkness, his face illuminated by the glow of his iPad as he works on his daily crossword puzzle. His glasses are perched on the tip of his nose. Twenty-five across: Professor Borg in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. Fourteen down: Major U.S.-Spanish language daily. When did doing the crossword become part of his routine? If I had to pinpoint it, I’d say it was seven or eight years ago, around the time his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

  In a children’s book by Michael Foreman called Fortunately, Unfortunately, a young boy named Milo is charged with taking his grandmother’s umbrella back to her house. Fortunately, he liked going to Granny’s house. Unfortunately, it began to storm. Fortunately, he had the umbrella. Unfortunately, he slipped and fell off a cliff and into the sea. Fortunately, the umbrella acted as a parachute. Unfortunately, there was a whale. Fortunately, inside the whale there was a pirate ship. Unfortunately, the pirate wasn’t a nice guy. And so forth. This being a children’s book, after hurricanes, volcanoes, dinosaurs, spaceships, and huge aliens, Milo makes it safely to his grandmother’s house with a dented umbrella (unfortunately) fortunately full of pirate treasure.