“Yes, seriously.” At the end of our first heady weekend together in Paris, he’d insisted we each walk around the Pompidou on different sides of it, so we could feel the pain and loneliness of being apart again, after forty-eight straight hours of uninterrupted time together. I hadn’t wanted to do this—why masochistically impose an artificial rom-com trope of separating the new lovers before bringing them back together when you didn’t have to—but I went along with it.
Our subsequent reunion hug, in front of a line of moviegoers, was, indeed, cinematic and indelible, but not in the way he might have planned. It took years, in fact, of reliving that moment in my head, over and over again, to understand that the story of us was not the story of a couple who happily reunited with a public hug in front of a queue of moviegoers after an artificial separation. It was the story of a woman who agreed, against her better judgment and desires, to engage in an unnecessary moment of imposed pain for the sake of another’s pleasure.
Nora is shaking her head, confused. “You mean he studied what men did in rom-coms and then…copied it?”
“More or less, yes,” I say, “but here’s the thing: Rom-coms always end with a wedding, right? Or just before it. Or just after, with maybe a montage of the happy couple a year later with their brand-new baby, like at the end of Four Weddings and a Funeral. But without a road map for the after part of happily ever after, he’s had to learn on the job. Deprived of a model for fatherhood, he’s had to create his own. Yes, he loves his children, and unlike his own father, he stuck around, and he ‘loves me’ ”—I make air quotes—“in his own way, sure, okay. Because I take care of him. Ease his way. Deal with the kids and our home and earn money and help him translate the world through my neurotypical eyes. But he has no idea how to reciprocate care, and aside from that one week before the Jdate fiasco, he hasn’t seemed particularly interested in learning how to fake it, as so many people with Asperger’s learn to do. He himself was relieved at the diagnosis: It made him understand the giant disconnect between who he thinks he is and how others see him.”
I give her one more example, the one that always comes to mind, simultaneously breaking my heart and making me laugh in equal measure: I’m sitting with our two older kids on an Amtrak train on the Sunday night after Thanksgiving, waiting for him to show up. He’s wandered off again to explore. My daughter is eight months old, her older brother just turned two. They are appropriately squirmy, apoplectic, and exhausted after the long weekend at my parents’. From the stench of it, each needs a diaper change. “Yes, this seat is taken,” I say, for the hundredth time, as frustrated and angry passengers on the standing-room-only train glare at me. The train doors shut. We start to move. Oh, well, I think. He didn’t make it. I give away the empty seat to a kind older woman, who engages my toddler with her compact mirror while I feed the baby. A few minutes later, my husband appears at the far end of the aisle, beaming his guileless smile—a smile I will always love, despite everything—and carrying a large cylindrical duffel bag on his shoulder, perpendicular to the aisle. As he walks toward us, overjoyed at having finally spotted his family on the crowded train, he bonks every single aisle passenger on the head with his bag, one by one. Each passenger cries out, “Ow!” or “Hey!” or “What the fuck, man?” to no avail. My husband doesn’t hear them. Doesn’t see them. Doesn’t notice the destruction in his wake. He has one goal, us, and he keeps walking toward it with that million-watt smile, oblivious.
“Okay, fine. I’ll stop,” says Nora. She gives me the dreaded Nora Stare™: a raised eyebrow, chin down, crooked mouth rebuke. “But that doesn’t mean I think you’re right.”
I laugh. “I wouldn’t want you any other way.” I look across the table at this daughterless woman who has all but adopted me, my friend Meg, and several other women as well: Rebecca Traister, Lena Dunham, Meghan Daum, Natasha Lyonne. Who never judges my actions but rather tries to understand and, if necessary, redirect. Who listens to what I have to say and adjusts her response accordingly. Who champions my work, even when it’s not going well, and loves my children as if they were her own. “Saw that adorable son of yours on the street,” she’d recently written in an email, “or rather, he spotted us. He is divine. We had a big hello and a conversation about your new apt and then he crossed the street and was embraced by another group of people entirely. How’s the apt?” I’m suddenly overcome with teary gratitude for her continuing presence in my life; for her constant reaching out with kind words and gifts; for her sense of humor and joie de vivre; for her love of food and entertaining; for her fierce intelligence and strong opinions; and yes, even for her pushbacks. I say, “I love you, you know. Even though you don’t believe my husband has Asperger’s.”
“I know,” she says, rolling her eyes. Raw sentimentality unnerves her. “And I love you right back. But whether he has Asperger’s or not is immaterial. He is who he is, and you married him for whatever that was, so I’m asking you please: Give him one more shot. For me, okay? Not for you. That Jdate thing was, well, it was just idiotic. But it’s not reason enough to get divorced.”
“Fine,” I say, picturing at least a hundred other reasons. “I promise. I’ll give him one more shot.”
And for the first and last time, Nora lets me pay for lunch. “Oh! You know who has yahrzeit candles?” she says, as we walk out. “Eli’s. Go there. In the back. You can’t miss them.”
“Perfect,” I say. To get to Eli’s, I have to drive right past Nora’s apartment. “Wanna ride?” I say, gesturing to my Vespa. I’m joking, of course. She would never. Plus she lives one short block and two long blocks away: a five-minute walk, if that.
“I hate that you ride that thing,” she says, not for the first time. But in an expensive city, where I don’t own a car, and taxis are unaffordable, and the crosstown bus is slow, and I have three kids who need to be shuttled east and west across a city with north and south subways, it has been a lifesaver. Plus, I got it for free, in exchange for shooting six years of Christmas card portraits of a wealthy acquaintance who’d bought it as a fortieth birthday present for her soon-to-be ex-husband. Nora knows this, so she usually doesn’t push it, but today she does. “You know, one wrong turn, and boom. No more Deb,” she says, shaking her head.
“I promise,” I say. “I’m really careful when I ride it.”
“It’s not you I’m worried about.” She flags down a taxi. On cue, it nearly crashes into two other cars while screeching over two lanes without signaling. She holds out her hands. “I rest my case.”
I laugh and hug her goodbye. “Wait, where are you going?” I say. She always walks back home after lunch at E.A.T.
“Home,” she says, getting into the taxi.
“Are you feeling okay?” This is so unlike her.
“I’m fine,” she says. She shuts the door and rolls down the window. “Schedule that surgery, already, please! And be nice to your husband. One more shot, okay? For my sake.”
“Okay, okay,” I say. I watch the blur of yellow that is Nora disappear up Madison. Then I put on my helmet and zoom off to buy a memorial candle for my dead father.
EIGHT
Where’s the Husband?
JUNE 2012
I schedule the hysterectomy for the last week in June 2012, after my book tour is done. My surgeon asks me what kind of hysterectomy I want: full, partial, or supracervical? I have no idea what those things mean, I tell her, so she takes me through the options like a waiter presenting the daily specials. With a full hysterectomy, which includes the removal of the ovaries, I’d lose hormonal benefits. Since my mother didn’t go through menopause until she was much older than I am, and there’s no history of ovarian cancer in my family, we decide the benefits of keeping the ovaries and their regulating hormones outweigh the potential risks. As for the cervix, I am told, “It is believed to play a role in sexual pleasure.” Huh? I am wary of passive voice conjecture. Particularly with rega
rd to the mechanics and proper functioning of my body. It is believed? Who believes this? Is there proof? A study? Hello? Anything? I get a second opinion, and the second doctor tells me the same thing: “We don’t know,” she tells me, “but there are theories that the cervix is somehow related to female orgasm.”
“We don’t know?” I say. “We’ve landed men on the moon, but we don’t know the basic physiological roots of female pleasure? How is that even possible?”
She sighs. “I know,” she says. “It seems nuts. But most studies of human anatomy and disease have been done on men. For example, if you get a hip or knee replaced, you’re getting a hip or knee designed for a man.”
“Great,” I say. “I’ll keep that in mind if my five-foot-two female body ever needs a new hip built for a six-foot-tall man.”
It will take another four years—until 2016!—for an accurate 3D model of the clitoris to be created and for any lingering theories of cervical participation in orgasm to be debunked. Following the 2012 advice of these two doctors, however, and not wanting to give up my one surefire shot of pleasure in a life so often short on it, I choose the supracervical item on the hysterectomy menu: the removal of just the uterus, leaving the cervix and ovaries intact.
“I’m dying to see you,” I write Nora, the morning after my surgery, at the precise moment when she, unbeknownst to me or to any of her other surrogate daughters, is the one doing the hard work of dying.
The last time I’d seen her—an unusually long interval because of book tour responsibilities—was at my forty-sixth birthday dinner in March. The next morning, over email, she’d sent me a photo she’d taken from her vantage point as the cake emerged candlelit behind her. The photo was in color and shot with her iPhone in extremely low light. She was unhappy with how dark it was, so I’d lobbed it back to her, brightened and transformed into black-and-white. “Look what I did with it,” I wrote. “Love it. I even have cleavage in it. Which makes you a magician.”
Two hours later, seeing how I was able to pump light into the darkened image, she sent me one more: “Bruce at the Apollo,” she wrote, just before midnight. “What can you do with this?” Indeed it was Bruce Springsteen, up close, his face darkened by shadow, in the aisle of the famous Harlem theater two nights prior. I lightened the dark side of his face as best I could with Lightroom and sent her back the image once again in black-and-white.
“Amazing shot, Nora,” I wrote. “So Christ-like. Brava.” The images were nothing alike and yet somehow, side by side, they were exactly alike: two humans, caught on the right side of a well-composed frame in an act of joy. Nora always derided her photography skills, but she was wrong. Just because she was shooting in low light didn’t mean she hadn’t captured perfect luminance or herself. Every artist, in whatever medium, is always communicating the same message, over and over again: This is how I see the world.
March 11, 2012, © Nora Ephron
Bruce Springsteen at the Apollo, March 9, 2012, © Nora Ephron
I loved how Nora saw the world.
The last time we’d spoken on the phone was the day in mid-April when The Red Book had hit The New York Times bestseller list, and she’d called me on my book tour stop in D.C. to congratulate me. “See! I told you,” she said. “We’ll celebrate when you’re back.”
The last time we’d corresponded over email had been a few weeks prior, when I’d sent her an article I’d published on Erich Segal’s The Class in The New York Times Book Review, in which I’d quoted an old essay of hers from Esquire. She’d written back, “Terrific. It came out great. Xxx.” Of course it had. She’d helped edit it. From her sick bed, as it turns out, though I did not know this then.
I continue typing from my own bed: “Just back from my hysterectomy, which is now complicated by a surgery-induced hernia that may have to be repaired ASAP. Meaning, god knows when I’ll be on my feet again, but wanted to see what your summer looks like so we can plan something in, I dunno, late July? Silly, I know, but I miss you. xx, D.”
Unusually, she does not write back. Or even call. I’m unnerved by this, particularly since she’s been badgering me to get the surgery now for over a year, and she always responds to my emails within an hour or two, max. I shut my computer, take a painkiller, and fall asleep.
The hysterectomy—which, just as Nora had predicted, was done with robot arms—had lasted a little over eight hours. I’d woken up in recovery to the sounds of the nurses whispering: “Where’s the husband? Has anyone seen the husband? We can’t reach him. Is there another number?”
“What?” I said, suddenly cogent if groggy and in pain.
“We can’t find your husband,” said the unfamiliar faces now hovering over my head. “Is there anyone else we can call at this time?”
“Ahhhhhhhhh!!!!!” I screamed, feeling the hernia pop out. “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!”
I started thrashing along with my screaming, trying to pull out various IVs and tubes, until suddenly I was being strapped down to the gurney with restraints. “Lorazepam!” said a voice off to the left of my head. Postoperative delirium, they would later call it. A common side effect of anesthesia, particularly in elderly patients. But I was not elderly. I was forty-six years old and, aside from the bum uterus that had brought me there, in otherwise excellent shape. Perhaps the anesthesia had exacerbated my agitated postoperative state, but if delirium is defined by mental incoherence, then I was most certainly not delirious. I was 100 percent fucking coherent. And out of my coherent fucking mind. “Where is he?” I cried out. “Where is he where is he where IS HE? Ahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!”
Then tears, leaking out fast and strong. Of course he wasn’t there. He never was. “I miss my dad…I miss my dad…I miss my dad…I miss my dad…” I said, gulping air between words.
“Do you want us to call your father?” said the nurse.
“No!” I said. “He’s dead. Call Nora, please.”
“Who’s Nora?” said the nurse.
“Nora Ephron. She’s listed. Call 411. That’s E-p-h-r-…”
“Nora Ephron…the filmmaker? The one who did When Harry Met Sally?”
“Yes! She promised she’d come help me if my husband flaked. Please call her.”
“She’s delirious,” I heard the nurses whisper. Then, out loud, to me, “Are you in pain?”
“Yes,” I said. “A lot.” If you only knew how much.
She explained how the morphine button worked. “Press right here, but only when you need it,” she said. Define “need,” I thought. A sudden godly warmth gushed through my blood. No wonder people get addicted to heroin. Am I allowed to take this button home with me?
When I awoke from the morphine haze, my husband magically appeared, clutching a bouquet of flowers. In the eighth hour after my planned eight hours of surgery, he’d gone out in search of blooms and food. I started weeping anew. It was like a bad O. Henry plot: an act of love, those flowers, when the only present I actually needed, then or ever, was his presence.
“You don’t like them?” he said, looking hurt.
“No, they’re beautiful,” I said. “Thank you. It’s just…no one knew where you were. I was all alone.”
“No you weren’t,” he said. “You had the nurses.”
“But I wanted…my husband in the room when I came to. They couldn’t find you. You weren’t answering your cellphone.”
“I didn’t hear it. Plus, I’m here now,” he said. “What’s the difference?”
The difference, I wanted to tell him, was too vast to explain if I had to explain it.
Back home the next morning, I awake in my bed after a long nap. I check my inbox once again for an email from Nora. Nothing. Weird. It’s been hours since I sent her my missive from my hospital bed. She’s normally so prompt with her replies. My stomach grumbles. I’d had to fast the night before surgery, and the first
solid food they’d tried to serve me this morning, the day after surgery, was so unappetizing, I’d asked the nurse to please take away the tray before throwing up. In other words, I have not eaten any food in three days. “Hey, sweetie, could you please bring me some food?” I say. My husband is rocking back and forth in the nursing chair we still keep around, even though our youngest is now six. He likes to rock in it while he talks on the phone—“stimming,” this is called, short for self-stimulation, which we all do to some extent. I’m a hair-twirler, for example. You might be a nail-biter or a pencil-tapper. Frequent rocking, however, is, more often than not, a symptom of ASD.
He holds up his finger: Hold on. He’s on a work call. He’s found work again, after another hiatus, and I’m glad for this, so I wait patiently for another hour or so until he hangs up. When he does, I ask, once again, for food. “I have to make one more call,” he says, and proceeds to dial the phone.
“Please!” I beg. “I’m really hungry. Can you bring me a sandwich first? Or anything. I don’t care.”
“No,” he says. “It’s a conference call.”
“So be on the call while you get the food. Wear headphones. Put yourself on mute. They’ll understand! Your wife just got out of surgery.” Multitasking, I know, is not his strong suit, but I am now so hungry I’m not thinking straight.
“Shhh!” he snaps, trying to listen in on the conference call and respond. “No. No, we can’t do that…” he says. “That would require…” In a few weeks, I will understand his stress. This company, too, will go belly up, and he will lose yet another job through no fault of his own.
I lift the bottom of my shirt, exposing a bloated, sliced up belly with several pieces of medical tape covering various stitches. They had to pump air around the uterus in order to remove it, I was told. It will be a while until I deflate. I don’t have the mental capacity yet to mourn what’s missing. The pain where the organ that used to define me as female once lived has become untenable, so I pop another Percocet and wait for my husband to get off the phone. Another hour passes. Maybe two. I pass out. I wake up. I pass out and wake up again. At this point I’m so delirious with pain and hunger, I’m losing the thread of time. “Food!” I scream. “Please! I need food!” He’s answering email now. Or I don’t know what he’s doing, but he’s not getting up to bring me food. I call Nora’s cellphone. No answer. Where is she? Why isn’t she answering her phone? “Please!” I shout from my bed. “Please, I need food!”
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