by Dani Shapiro
Once—years ago—at dinner in New Haven with a South African friend, we listened as she told the story of her father, a concert violinist, whose car ran off the road in a remote part of South Africa while on his way to play at a gig. He was badly injured, alone, and no one discovered him for a couple of days. His legs had to be amputated. Just after she finished telling the story, M. excused himself and went to the men’s room. He was gone a long time. When he returned to the table he looked pale, unwell, but he shook it off and said he was fine.
It wasn’t until much later—weeks, maybe months—that he told me he had felt the world spinning as our friend told the story. That he’d felt faint and vomited in the men’s room. Something in the barrenness of the landscape; the solitary, grave injury; the staggering aloneness of a man bleeding in the desert for days had triggered a flashback to the horrors he had experienced but never let himself feel.
—
“Maybe I should have kept doing it,” M. recently said to me, during a rare moment of looking backward. He reminded me of the first year of our marriage, when he was offered magazine assignments in the Congo and Iraq. CNN called often and invited him to appear as a talking head. He testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Now he is no longer in anyone’s Rolodex. Now there are no longer Rolodexes. We talked about the interest in a book proposal that would have required him to spend months in West Africa. Where would we be now if he had taken the assignments, chosen to write the book? It could have happened. / It had to happen.
Instead, he has walked a long way down this road with me. The house, the yard, the wife, the boy, the dogs, the schools, the quiet countryside. I believe he doesn’t regret it. But still, has being with me stopped him from being him?
—
Two, three, four in the morning. I turn on my side and watch M. as his chest rises and falls. I’ll take care of it, I silently tell him. I’ll take care of it.
—
The Business, an inside-Hollywood radio show, ran an episode ten years ago in which a screenwriter spoke with the show’s host about his career. The episode is titled “The Almost Guy.” The screenwriter had enjoyed a quick and unusual ascent when he first arrived on the scene. He signed with a powerful agent, was offered blind script deals with multiple television networks, and then—after a few years in which a lot got written but nothing got made, a “painful succession of high-level near misses”—his career vaporized. “How far can talent, good looks, and connections take you in Hollywood?” The producer asks a rhetorical question during the show’s opening teaser. “All the way to limbo.”
“You’ve had more success than 99.9 percent of people who come to Hollywood,” the producer muses. “But you haven’t succeeded. Why? Is it you?”
“Yeah,” the writer responds, his voice sounding worn thin. “You start to wonder.”
—
M. and I listened to the episode shortly after it aired as we drove into the city early one morning. He had just turned fifty and things were looking pretty good. A script had been picked up by a major studio. The contracts were with the lawyers. An in-demand young director was attached. M. and the director had just returned from L.A., where they had lunch with Jim Carrey.
The two of us sped along the Saw Mill River Parkway. Every word the screenwriter said resonated: “I’ve given up on creative satisfaction, and now I’m just trying to pay the rent.”
The business is cruel. We knew this. There are no guarantees. We’d been there. We felt bad for the guy. But we were going to be okay. We were going to get to have creative satisfaction and pay the rent. M. wove in and out of traffic, my hand on the back of his neck. Later that afternoon—on our way home from the city—we pulled into a Starbucks so M. could take a call from his agent.
“You know I don’t say things like this—” she began.
And it was true. She didn’t.
“—but you’re going to win a statue for this script.”
—
Some things that definitely won’t happen: We won’t have more children; we won’t host big family reunions; we won’t own a compound where generations will spend summer weekends playing badminton and roasting s’mores. Jacob won’t grow up in the city. I won’t enroll in a doctoral program to become a psychoanalyst, nor will I go to rabbinical school. M. and I will not move to Nairobi, where he will be based as a correspondent. He will not accept a job offer from the CIA, or the World Bank.
—
From fifty to eighty, Grace Paley said. Seconds, not minutes.
—
More difficult to contemplate are the things that may not happen. M. and I have each spent our lives doing work that—even when it succeeds—is subject to failure. (“Every novel is a failure,” a great mentor once told me. At the time, I found this heartening.) Neither one of us chose an easy path, and that young couple wandering around the East Village may not get the results they were counting on, the life they bargained for, the one that seemed to spread out before them like an orchard full of fruit ripe for the taking.
A friend wins the Pulitzer Prize.
Another wins a MacArthur.
A Golden Globe, an Emmy, an Oscar.
Is this what we dared to hope for—these grand ambitions? And if we dared—dare we still? Books, essays, stories, films have built us a beautiful life, like an image projected onto a screen, both real and unreal, interruptible. For years, we gambled. Our stakes were our very selves. You were in luck—a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake, a jamb, a turn, a quarter inch, an instant. For years we had the persistent sensation in our life and art—John Updike’s phrase—that we were just beginning.
—
I am pleased, if startled, to see that M. and I have been reunited as husband and wife. Right there, just beneath my date and place of birth, he is listed as my spouse. I search under his name and see that the problem has been completely rectified. I wonder what finally got Google to change its mind about our marriage. Perhaps it was the words of a sixteen-year-old boy? I want to assure you that my parents are very much together. Or maybe all that data—thousands of bits and bytes rearranged themselves to tell the story of two people whose fates are so bound, each to the other, that there is no untangling them.
—
M. continues his scanning spree. He’s rigged several old pieces of computer equipment together and has created a scanning station in his office. The wedding photos continue to crop up in my e-mail. Oh, how young we look! If I close my eyes, I can still hear the cello music—a friend of a friend from Juilliard—drift up the inn’s stairs. My mother is there, looking regal in midnight-blue lace. Had malignant cells already begun to form a tumor deep in the soft tissue of her lung? A dear friend is hugging me. She and I will have a falling-out five years later and never speak again. The rabbi knocks on the door with the ketubah for us to sign. Ani l’dodi v’dodi li. I am my beloved, and my beloved is mine.
More photos keep pouring in. Hidden among the endless Alps captured on my parents’ vacation slides is an image I have never seen before. On a glistening white beach I am a little girl beaming with unbridled joy on the lap of her father, a deeply tanned young man who looks at home in the world. I stare at the photo of my beautiful, lost father and the unself-conscious child whose whole self presses against him with the ease of knowing how absolutely she is loved. What happened? Where did that simple love go? As the calendar’s battered pages flew by in a steady wind, sorrow overtook us both. That love was buried between us—and then buried with my father—but if I grow still, I can sense it as surely as I can hear the Prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. and feel the hug of the woman who is no longer my friend.
“My life is a museum,” says my ninety-one-year-old aunt. “I can walk through any of the galleries at any time.” My eighty-year-old Buddhist friend talks of receiving a digital picture frame as a gift—a device onto which thousands of images can be loaded. “I’ve seen the sun rise over Haleakala. I’ve been to the Dalai Lama’s palace in Dharamsa
la. But I think that at the moment of my death, I’d like to be looking at those pictures of everyone I have ever loved.”
—
M.’s mother is now a permanent resident of the memory unit in an assisted-living facility north of Boston. A few months ago she fell and broke her hip. The one-two punch of broken hip plus Alzheimer’s is disastrous. She has been disoriented, in agony, drugged into a stupor. She will never get out of bed again.
The memory unit is housed in a sun-filled modern building by a lake. Its denizens are well-taken-care-of elderly people in the mid to late stages of Alzheimer’s. The doors are locked, and a code is required to enter or exit. A group sits in a circle with a social worker, playing memory games:
“What is an underground train called?” she asks.
“The subway!” one of them calls out.
“How do you say ‘sir’ in Spanish?”
“Señor!”
Hardly anyone ever visits their relatives in the memory unit. Anyone, that is, except for M.’s family. In the ninety-four days since she fell, my father-in-law has been there ninety-three times. At first, he thought she’d get better. Get up, sweetheart! You have to walk again! I need someone to make me breakfast! But as the months have ticked by, now he simply comes and holds her hand. Sixty years.
It’s Father’s Day, and somehow I’m expecting this day to be different. I imagine the place will be full of families, but today is like any other. There’s a skeleton staff, and the bright halls are eerily quiet. A man named Ralph sits in his khakis and soft burgundy cardigan, staring benignly into space. A woman is wheeled by, clutching two tattered Cabbage Patch dolls. But around M.’s mother’s bed, a party is going on. We’re there, as are M.’s brother, M.’s sister, M.’s brother’s ex-wife. Jacob has come, and two of his cousins.
Just as it always was in my in-laws’ house, it’s loud. There’s laughing and cursing and roll-your-eyes impropriety. In the midst of it, my mother-in-law struggles through her methadone haze. She is being spoon-fed by her ex-daughter-in-law. Her husband is by her side. She mumbles, so for a moment it’s hard to make out what she’s saying: Everyone I love is all around me.
—
According to the English moral philosopher Mary Midgley, “We are each not only one but also many. Might this fact deserve a little more philosophic attention? Some of us have to hold a meeting every time we want to do something only slightly difficult, in order to find the self who is capable of undertaking it…We spend a lot of time and ingenuity on developing ways of organizing the inner crowd, securing consent among it, and arranging for it to act as a whole. Literature shows that the condition is not rare.”
—
Dig deep enough and everything that has ever happened is alive and whole, a world unto itself—scenes, words, images—unspooling in some other dimension. I am not referring to memory, but rather, to a galaxy that exists outside the limited reach of memory. It can be understood, perhaps, as the place where neurobiology ends and physics begins. The law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant—it is said to be conserved over time.
All those selves—that inner crowd—clamor inside me. The girl who believed men would save her. The young woman who made harsh and quick work of herself—savage obstinacy—and nearly succeeded in her blind, flailing quest for self-ruin. The one who said I do, and then didn’t. The one who kept journals despite it all. The one who turned over the shovelful of earth and heard it hit the plain pine box six feet below—once, twice. The one who said I do, then did. The one who wrote books as if her life depended on it. The one who held her baby to her breast and sang Hush little baby, don’t you cry. The one who was going to save him or die trying. The one who fled the city after the towers fell. The one who grew up. The one—now—with her boy on the verge of manhood, her man struggling with his own wounded spirit, who is consumed with a sense of urgency. From fifty to eighty.
Somewhere, a clock ticks. Sand pours through the hourglass. I am no longer interested in the stories but rather, what is underneath the stories: the soft, pulsing thing that is true. Why now? What is this insistence? All of me—the whole crowd—wants to know.
—
I rarely walk into the room I cleared out. The futon sits on its simple, elegant frame. A standing paper lantern that belonged to my mother occupies one corner. I thought I needed an empty room—a room of my own, not cluttered with matters of work and family life. A space in which I could just be, not push myself in this direction or that one. I was certain I would meditate each morning on that futon, that I would practice yoga in the silence, behind a door that was mine and mine alone.
Instead, I hover at the threshold of the room and admire it. So clean! So spacious! Not a dust mote, nor a smudge, a small fingerprint mars its pristine emptiness. Once, I longed for such emptiness. We were young, and in the reproductive years. Now part of me longs for the chaos: the call of my name across the house in a high, piercing voice: Mom! The weekends jam-packed with games, matches, recitals, school plays. In the silence, I hear beyond the immediate: a siren a mile away; the caw of a crow; M. making a fresh pot of coffee downstairs. Oh, and our friendly woodpecker, of course. Rat-tat-tat.
“You do not know the road,” offers Berry. “You have committed your life to a way.”
Tacked to the wall in the empty room, opposite the single lamp, is a piece of brown construction paper that stretches from ceiling to floor. On the paper is the outline of a woman, life-sized, crudely traced in black magic marker. The lines show where her hair fans out, shoulders, arms, fingers. Her torso, waist, thighs, legs, and feet. Some women writer friends outlined each other one night after dinner at an artists’ colony—it began as a lark but turned into something powerful: a sense that we were showing each other where we begin and where we end.
Sometimes I wander into the room and contemplate my outline, floating as she does, a few inches off the ground. She reminds me of a grown-up version of the paper dolls I used to play with as a girl. I used to dress those paper dolls in preparation for their future lives, the selves they might someday become. There were so many options! An evening gown, surgical scrubs, a wedding dress, a bikini. But this life-sized drawing is unadorned, just a swooping, unbroken line encircling all of me. If I laid her flat on the floor, she might look like a chalk outline from a crime scene. Or a snow angel. She might look like anything at all.
That night at the artists’ colony, each of us took turns resting on the cool, damp floor of the barn as the others knelt by our sides as if performing a sacred rite. There were seven of us. We ranged in age from forty to eighty-four. Among us, we had written twenty-nine books. Had seven children. Ten marriages. We were single, widowed, divorced. We lived in cities and on remote islands. We were struggling, contented, bewildered, joyful, full of longing, grief-stricken, fearful, searching, at peace.
When we had finished all the outlines, we dragged them out of the barn and placed them in a row in a field. It was a cool night, the setting sun low in the sky. Some of us took out our phones and snapped pictures. What had happened here? What were these shapes on the brown paper, on the grass? What did it mean—we wondered—to have become us?
—
A few years ago, a graphic designer named Maya Eilam created a colorful infographic in blue, black, and orange tones, inspired by a rejected graduate school thesis written in 1947 by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut contended that there are four basic plots in life which can be given shape by graphing them. His illustrations were dry and linear, but in Eilam’s interpretation, the basic plots become curvy, playful dances between happy outcomes and sad ones. The symbols for happy outcomes are butterflies, babies, angels, trophies, treble notes, shining suns. The symbols for somewhat-less-happy outcomes are thunderclouds, syringes, hospital beds, bombs, skulls.
The four basic plots as shown in Eilam’s infographic: Man in Hole, in which the main character gets into trouble, then gets out of it again and ends up better off f
or the experience; Boy Meets Girl, in which the main character comes across something wonderful, gets it, loses it, then gets it back forever; From Bad to Worse, in which the main character starts off poorly, then gets continually worse with no hope for improvement; and finally, Which Way Is Up?—the plot most difficult to graph—in which the story has a lifelike ambiguity that keeps us from knowing if new developments are good or bad.
—
As a young writer I became friendly with the author and naturalist Peter Matthiessen, who at the time I met him was in his late seventies and had written twenty-two books. He was about to publish a new novel, a book of which he was particularly proud. “The early books aren’t worth reading,” he told me with a wave of his hand, as if swatting away a few pesky flies. At the time, I had written the same number of books—three—that Matthiessen was dismissing. I couldn’t imagine ever feeling that way. My whole self had gone into those books. But sure enough—a few books later, I found myself saying something similar to my students. “Don’t read the early work,” I’d tell them—shrugging off a decade. Even my more recent books present me with some small measure of embarrassment.
The span of years! The selves we shed and shed—only to have them rise within us once more. When Philip Roth retired—telling the world he had put down his pen for good—he set out to reread his entire oeuvre in order to decide for himself whether any of it had been worthwhile. I wonder if he did this. And—if so—I wonder what he found.
—
My ninety-one-year-old aunt (ninety-one and a half, she says) calls on the morning of M.’s sixtieth birthday. We’re laying low—no big party, no forced celebration. M. has been sitting all morning in his white bathrobe at the kitchen table, scrolling through birthday wishes on Facebook. I had woken up thinking about M.’s fiftieth. That script had just sold. His agent told him he was going to win a statue. I threw him a big party at a friend’s Tribeca loft—the mood buoyant, bordering on triumphant. Finally, finally.