Hourglass

by Dani Shapiro

My aunt asks after Jacob, and I give her news of my boy, all of it good. He’s on the honor roll, in the school play, playing varsity tennis. He’s genuinely happy and engaged by his life. As I’ve lately been saying, It’s good to be Jacob. These years are ones I don’t think he’ll long to dismiss someday. They are building blocks—solid steps he’s taking in becoming his next self, and his next.

  This morning Jacob posted a photo of the three of us—along with his birthday wishes to his father—on Instagram. He chose one of my favorites. We’re sitting on the stone steps leading to our house, my head on M.’s shoulder. Jacob—perhaps he is four—has his little arms slung around M.’s neck. And M. is looking straight at the camera with a small smile.

  Now my aunt is asking about M., and I hear my own voice quaver as I strive for equilibrium. She loves M., and I don’t want to burden her. I tell her about M.’s struggles—his third rewrite of the television pilot, the postponement with the comedian—and can feel her listening carefully on the other end of the phone. And then she asks: How are his spirits?

  Before I know what’s happened, tears are rolling down my cheeks. That gentle question—how are his spirits?—has unleashed in me a sorrow so intense that I am unable to contain it. Because the answer is that M. is injured and I can’t fix things for him. No, it’s more than that. I’m part of his injury, a perpetrator of it. Sometimes it feels like his leg is caught in a trap. If he hadn’t left Africa. If he hadn’t become a filmmaker. If he hadn’t become a father. If he hadn’t met me. I’m sure he wonders every single day whether—in the end—he will have missed his mark. But the infinitely more troubling question is whether—having missed his mark—he will also have lost himself.

  “You know,” my aunt says, “I once had a terribly difficult period that lasted twenty-four years.” Wait. Twenty-four years? “And it was so important to realize that I didn’t know what was on the other side of the darkness. Every so often there was a sliver of light that shot the whole world through with mystery and wonder, and reminded me: I didn’t have all the information.”

  —

  “An honorable human relationship in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love,’ ” Adrienne Rich wrote, “is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”

  —

  Driving home from Woodstock, New York—alone in my car—I crank the volume on the satellite radio. I’m tuned into my regular station, the Bridge, which seems to play Fleetwood Mac every five songs, Jackson Browne every six, with a smattering of Jim Croce, Elton John, and Neil Young in between.

  The narrow road takes me past horse farms, orchards, a herd of cows grazing in a pasture. Ever since moving to the country, these kinds of drives are my favorite time to think. When Jacob was a little boy—even up until this year when he got his learner’s permit—the car was where we had our best conversations. Hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. And M. and I have spent countless companionable hours together—M. driving, always—on our round trips to the city early in the morning, late at night. But this solitary time is like a meditation. Thoughts, feelings, rise to the surface, fall away.

  The voices of Carly Simon and James Taylor fill the car. It’s 1978 and they’re singing “Devoted to You.”

  Darling you can count on me

  Till the sun dries up the sea.

  Until then I’ll always be

  Devoted to you.

  I choke back the tears that seem to be close to the surface these days. They were so young. So in love. Weren’t they?

  When I get home, I watch a YouTube video of the two of them singing the song on The Dick Cavett Show. She’s wearing white pants and a simple pale sweater. He’s in a plaid button-down shirt and cradles his guitar. She’s holding a microphone, leaning toward him, singing to him. He’s looking straight ahead, strumming the guitar.

  Why isn’t he looking at her? It isn’t until the end of the song that he meets her eye and blurts out a couple of words I had to play back again to be sure I heard correctly. Sobering sentiment. Were they already in trouble? Was he wasted? Had he started cheating on her? They divorced six years later. The first viewer comment in the chain below the video reads: She was so beautiful. If I was James, I would have looked at her and sang it like I meant it.

  —

  A friend writes me a note about a book she’s just finished. It’s an academic treatise on female memoirists, and she assumes I’m familiar with it. I am not. “But you’re in it,” she tells me. “There’s a whole chapter about you.”

  I find the chapter and read it with interest. The author explores my first memoir through a feminist, politicized lens, describing it as “a formidable journey toward self-reliance.”

  But then it all falls apart. She is bitterly let down by the wording of my acknowledgments, which casts the book in a “not just dubious but downright disappointing” light by suggesting a fairy-tale ending in which I have found my handsome prince. This is a first. I had never considered acknowledgments up for review. The disappointing words—the final paragraph after I thank friends, family, agents, and editors—were these: “Most of all, my husband, M., who helped me feel safe, read every word, and made me believe in happily ever after.”

  Le Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat is very grand in the impossibly luxurious manner of the Côte d’Azur. We lounged by the gorgeous pool with its infinity edge overlooking the Mediterranean. I read Falconer. M. was reading Arundhati Roy’s novel. Got a bit sunburned. We spent most of the afternoon in bed. Later, we went to the bar (named after Somerset Maugham—no one knows why) and hung out with the pink-suited, pink-cheeked, snowy-white-hair brigade. Then we ordered a club sandwich from room service and kept doing what we had been doing all afternoon.

  —

  On the day Jacob will be taking his driver’s license test, I’m making coffee in the kitchen when I hear a little boy laughing. I know that boy’s laugh. I will know it forever. M. calls me up to his office, where he is continuing his archival project that began with the scans of our wedding photos—though the album has yet to materialize—and has now moved to hundreds of hours of video.

  Here’s my tiny boy on M.’s computer monitor, picking the marshmallows out of a plastic bowl of Lucky Charms. He has a head of blond curls and the biggest eyes I’ve ever seen. He’s wearing blue flannel pajamas. His lips are rosebuds. And here’s M., turning the camera so both of them are in the frame. Who’s that? M. asks. His voice is so patient and kind. Who are those two guys? Jacob isn’t having any of it. He’s reaching for the camera. I want to put my eye there, he says, pointing to the viewfinder.

  I stand just behind M. as we watch the screen. I feel as if I might explode with tenderness. Then, now. Here is Jacob in our basement before we renovated it, riding around on a plastic tricycle. I’m a run-around, run-around, run-around kid. I’m a fly-around, fly-around, fly-around kid. The song lyrics are as indelible as the prayers I learned at my father’s knee. And here I am, lighting the Hanukkah candles in our kitchen, Jacob in my arms.

  And here is our handsome, young man in his corduroys and Patagonia, aching for the moment of freedom today represents. I’m a drive-around, drive-around, drive-around kid. After passing the test with ease, he takes our car to a nearby town to meet friends for dinner and a movie. M. and I watch as the taillights recede down the driveway, past the rope swing, past the best sledding hill, until we can no longer see him.

  It’s a cold, early winter night. M. will light a fire in the fireplace. I will open a bottle of wine and boil some ravioli. Our plan is to read applications for our conference in Italy: a third thing. We’ll sit by the fire and talk about language, intention, talent, generosity, openness, courage. Listen to this line, one of us may say. How about this?

  What we will not talk about: that young woman lighting Hanukkah candles, that dark-haired man holding his toddler aloft, and the dreams they have both built and broken together. We will not ask
each other about the truths we have yet to refine. We understand that suffering and happiness are no longer individual matters. Tonight, we will stay at the edge of the dark forest until—together—we are brave enough to go back inside.

  —

  M. and I pay a visit to Donald Hall in the New Hampshire farmhouse where he lived in “double solitude” with Jane Kenyon for most of their marriage, and where he has remained for the past two decades since her death. Don is eighty-four. He stopped shaving some years after Jane died, on the suggestion of a young lover who thought he would look Mephistophelian—which he does. He has written that he enjoys being grubby and noticeable.

  The third things he shared with Jane Kenyon are all around. The volumes of Keats on the sagging bookshelves; Chekhov; Elizabeth Bishop; the manuscripts, literary journals piled to table height. The peak of Mount Kearsarge is visible in the distance. Across Route 4, a two-lane country road, is Eagle Pond, where they spent late-summer afternoons on a small private beach under the shade of white pines and ghost birches, reading, swimming, taking notes.

  Eagle Pond was a third thing they lost to leakage from a landfill that turned the pond stinky and orange. Sometimes you lose a third thing. As M. and I sit with him in the waning afternoon light—his house lit by a single lamp, shadows falling across the darkening rooms—I bring up Eagle Pond. I wonder aloud what happens when something so integral to a couple is lost.

  The poet’s eyes twinkle and he smiles at me.

  “Well, sometimes you get it back.”

  —

  M.’s manager calls. The pilot is genius. The famous comedian’s schedule has opened up. Financing is imminent. M. is not so interested in the praise. He knows that Hollywood is a place in which it is entirely possible, as Dorothy Parker put it, to die from encouragement. But there is some reason for hope—fortunately, unfortunately—and so I do. I hope. We’ve been here before, M. says. But no. The very sentence is an impossibility. We’ve never been here, before.

  —

  After M. and I finish the play for the pharmaceutical company and it has been vetted by attorneys, scientists, doctors, and several marketing teams, it becomes the centerpiece of a day-long program designed to create empathy for Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers. M. and I are invited to take part in a project conceived by a geriatric specialist called the Virtual Dementia Tour.

  In a large conference room at their suburban New Jersey headquarters, we each take off our shoes and are given a pair of sandals, soles fitted with sharp plastic spikes. Alzheimer’s can cause neuropathy—a constant pinpricking sensation in the patient’s feet. I think of the way my mother-in-law used to shuffle.

  We’re asked to put on several pairs of plastic surgical gloves. The disease slows motor function and dims vision. Over our eyes, goggles with scratched lenses the color of urine. But the calling card of the disease is, of course, that it steals memory. A lifetime’s cache of images, stories, experiences, deleted one pixel at a time, as if a virus were erasing a hard drive. What can I tell you? I’m still crazy about the sonofabitch.

  Massive headphones are placed over our ears. Blaring bits of static, music, snatches of dialogue, random, electronic sounds: a car door slamming, a ticking clock, a siren, all overlaid as if by a maniac spinning a radio dial. M. stands next to me, but I can barely make out his expression through the scratched yellow goggles. I reach for his hand but can’t feel it through the layers of surgical gloves.

  We are each given a separate set of instructions—a list of five simple tasks. We’ve been strictly prohibited from asking for the list to be repeated. As hard as I strain to listen through the din of the headphones, I’m able to make out only three of my tasks. Sort pills, I hear. Write note to family. Fold blanket. M. is then led away from me. I can do nothing but watch him go. We are not allowed to take the Virtual Dementia Tour together.

  —

  Sometimes I think I have organized the inner crowd. For a brief, breathtaking moment, I feel completely whole. I understand that I am composed of many selves that make up a single chorus. To listen to the music this chorus makes, to recognize it as music, as something noble, varied, patterned, sublime—that is the work of a lifetime.

  “Let the young soul look back upon its life and ask itself: what until now have you truly loved, what has raised up your soul, what ruled it and at the same time made it happy? Line up these objects of reverence before you, and perhaps by what they are and their sequence, they will yield you a law, the fundamental law of your true self.” These words, from Nietzsche’s Unmodern Observations, are the last in my latest commonplace book.

  —

  Sort pills. Write note to family. Fold blanket. I am alone. Alone in a dark, unfamiliar room filled with piles and piles of stuff, reminiscent of a neglected storage locker. I know researchers are observing me from behind one-way glass—that this is an experiment in empathy, that we are, in fact, on the sprawling campus of a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey, that I can rip off the headphones at any moment and return to my present life, my real life—but this offers me no comfort. I can barely see through the goggles. My feet hurt. Every step is agony, the sharp plastic spikes digging into my soles. Sort pills. Write note to family. Fold blanket. I try to make out the shapes around me. I see an ironing board, a stack of sweaters. A ball of twine. My determination to cross items off any to-do list—always a strong suit of mine—feels slippery. Suddenly, I am a child playing hide-and-seek in the dark. Counting. Eyes squeezed shut. Terrified. Wondering if anyone will ever find me.

  Blanket. Pills. Note. I keep repeating the words like a prayer so I can remember them through the terrible din. The inside of my head is a needle against a scratched record, skipping, skipping. I feel my way around a cluttered table. A pill case! I try to pick it up. I barely feel it in the palm of my hand. After several tries, I get it open. Then I begin to sort the pills as best I can. Most of them spill to the floor, and I am suddenly, irrationally furious.

  I move around the table, supporting myself on my hands to take the pressure off my feet. I push an iron out of the way, a magazine, a wooden hanger. The notebook. I find the notebook. My gloved fingers won’t close around a pencil, so I hold it the way a child would, in my fist. By now it all feels nearly futile. I’m on the verge of tears. What is the last task? Through the static, I remember: the blanket. I have to fold it.

  By now I’m dizzy, depleted. What difference can it possibly make? Who cares? I do a shitty job of folding the blanket and then—then I just sit down in a chair and wait for M. to rescue me.

  —

  The letters M. and I had exchanged before our wedding seem to have vanished. I empty the contents of drawers and folders, but the cream-colored envelope—I remember it so clearly—is nowhere to be found. It isn’t like me to misplace something so important.

  “Would you look again?” I ask M. “I’m pretty sure you put it somewhere.”

  “I remember we read them to each other on some anniversary,” M. says. Seventh? Twelfth? Fourteenth?

  “Check wherever you keep our marriage license.”

  An hour later, M. comes upstairs to my office, envelope in hand. Indeed, he had slipped it into a file in his office closet that also contained our marriage license, as well as both secular and religious divorce papers from my two earlier marriages.

  “I haven’t opened it,” he says, handing it to me.

  I don’t open it either. I’m not quite ready to meet that bride and groom at the start of their lives together. Instead, I leave it on my desk atop a small pile of commonplace books. Two days later we were off on our honeymoon. Day One: Took a walk around Saint-Germain, wound up in a small pizzeria off Rue de Seine. Pretty zonked. Went on search for le Tums.

  Our rabbi had given us an assignment I no longer remember. We had hardly known the rabbi. I had wanted a woman to officiate at our wedding, and we chose her out of a directory. In a few years, I will visit her when my baby is mortally ill. Later, she will bury my mother.
Still later, I will be on bed rest, desperately trying to hold on to a second child whose heartbeat is already faint inside me. I will weep on the phone to her and she—who had just adopted a child from Guatemala—will listen hard and provide a sisterly compassion I will never forget. What promises did M. and I make to each other on our wedding day? What promises have we broken? And what promises have we kept?

  —

  Finally, on a quiet morning—the dogs snoring at my feet—I slide two pieces of paper from the envelope. M.’s is on proper stationery. He must have bought it especially for the occasion. Mine is a ripped-out page from my datebook.

  Dearest M., I treasure you for your kindness, for your wisdom, for the fact that everything you have been through in your life has only made you a better person.

  It all comes back to me. The rabbi had asked each of us to write what we treasure in the other. (Treasure verb: cherish; hold dear; prize; value greatly; adore; dote on; love, be devoted to, worship, venerate.) I treasure you for the way you open me up, and the way I know we will only keep opening up, keep growing with each other all our lives.

  A few moments later—my father’s yellowed tallis draped above us—I shook from head to toe as M. and I exchanged our vows. My heart was pounding so hard I thought I might die at my own wedding. I kept my eyes on M. There you are. “I have been taken by surprise by the recent events of my life,” Anne Truitt wrote at the age of sixty-five, “but this can only be because I have not been alert to the signs that in retrospect intimate their direction. If I could tune in now, the future would be as legible as the past.”

  Dani, The moment you first looked at me I saw our future in your eyes. I felt the presence of an extraordinary force, something solid yet light. I treasure the way you say to me, “This is just the beginning.” I want to hear you say it in ten years, in twenty, and thirty.

  But I can no longer say to M. that we’re just beginning. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. That solid yet light thing—our journey—is no longer new. He identified my mother’s body. We took turns holding our seizing child. We have watched his mother disappear in plain sight. We have raised Jacob together. We know each other in a way that young couple couldn’t have imagined. Our shared vocabulary—our own language—will die with us. We are the treasure itself: fathoms deep, in the world we have made and made again.