We talked nonstop all the way back to Cairo. Truth be told, we hadn’t stopped talking since we woke up together that morning. There was an immediate ease between us—not just because we had so much professional terrain in common, but also because we seemed to possess a similar worldview: slightly jaded, fiercely independent, with a passionate undercurrent about the business we were both in. We also both acknowledged that foreign corresponding was a kid’s game, in which most practitioners were considered way over the hill by the time they reached fifty.
“Which makes me eight years away from the slag heap,” Tony said somewhere over Sudan.
“You’re that young?” I said. “I really thought you were at least ten years older.”
He shot me a cool, amused look. And said, “You’re fast.”
“I try.”
“Oh, you do very well . . . for a provincial reporter.”
“Two points,” I said, nudging him with my elbow.
“Keeping score, are we?”
“Oh, yes.”
I could tell that he was completely comfortable with this sort of banter. He enjoyed repartee—not just for its verbal gamesmanship, but also because it allowed him to retreat from the serious, or anything that might be self-revealing. Every time our in-flight conversation veered toward the personal, he’d quickly switch into banter mode. This didn’t disconcert me. After all, we’d just met and were still sizing each other up. But I still noted this diversionary tactic, and wondered if it would hinder me from getting to know the guy—as, much to my surprise, Tony Hobbs was the first man I’d met in about four years whom I wanted to get to know.
Not that I was going to reveal that fact to him. Because (a) that might put him off, and (b) I never chased anyone. So, when we arrived in Cairo, we shared a cab back to Zamalek (the relatively upscale expatriate quarter where just about every foreign correspondent and international business type lived). As it turned out, Tony’s place was only two blocks from mine. But he insisted on dropping me off first. As the taxi slowed to a halt in front of my door, he reached into his pocket and handed me his card.
“Here’s where to find me,” he said.
I pulled out a business card of my own, and scribbled a number on the back of it.
“And here’s my home number.”
“Thanks,” he said, taking it. “So call me, eh?”
“No, you make the first move,” I said.
“Old-fashioned, are we?” he said, raising his eyebrows.
“Hardly. But I don’t make the first move. All right?”
He leaned over and gave me a very long kiss.
“Fine,” he said, then added, “That was fun.”
“Yes. It was.”
An awkward pause. I gathered up my things.
“See you, I guess,” I said.
“Yes,” he said with a smile. “See you.”
As soon as I was upstairs in my empty, silent apartment, I kicked myself for playing the tough dame. “No, you make the first move.” What a profoundly dumb thing to say. Because I knew that guys like Tony Hobbs didn’t cross my path every day.
Still, I could now do nothing but put the entire business out of my mind. So I spent the better part of an hour soaking in a bath, then crawled into bed and passed out for nearly ten hours—having hardly slept for the past two nights. I was up just after seven in the morning. I made breakfast. I powered up my laptop. I turned out my weekly “Letter from Cairo,” in which I recounted my dizzying flight in a Red Cross helicopter under fire from Somalian militia men. When the phone rang around noon, I jumped for it.
“Hello,” Tony said. “This is the first move.”
He came by ten minutes later to pick me up for lunch. We never made it to the restaurant. I won’t say I dragged him off to my bed—because he came very willingly. Suffice to say, from the moment I opened the door, I was all over him. As he was me.
Much later, in bed, he turned to me and said, “So who’s making the second move?”
It would be the stuff of romantic cliché to say that from that moment on we were inseparable. Nonetheless, I do count that afternoon as the official start of us—when we started becoming an essential part of each other’s life. What most surprised me was this: it was about the easiest transition imaginable. The arrival of Tony Hobbs into my existence wasn’t marked by the usual doubts, questions, worries, let alone the overt romantic extremities associated with a coup de foudre. The fact that we were both self-reliant types—used to falling back on our separate resources—meant that we were attuned to each other’s independent streak. We also seemed to be amused by each other’s national quirks. He would often gently deride a certain American literalness that I do possess—a need to ask questions all the damn time, and analyze situations a little too much. Just as I would express amusement at his incessant need to find the flippant underside to all situations. He also happened to be absolutely fearless when it came to journalistic practice. I saw this firsthand around a month after we first hooked up, when a call came one evening that a busload of German tourists had been machine-gunned by Islamic fundamentalists while visiting the Pyramids at Giza. Immediately, we jumped into my car and headed out in the direction of the Sphinx. When we reached the sight of the Giza massacre, Tony managed to push his way past several Egyptian soldiers to get right up to the blood-splattered bus itself—even though there were fears that the terrorists might have thrown grenades into it before vanishing. The next afternoon, at the news conference following this attack, the Egyptian minister for tourism tried to blame foreign terrorists for the massacre . . . at which point Tony interrupted him, holding up a statement, which had been faxed directly to his office, in which the Cairo Muslim Brotherhood took complete responsibility for the attack. Not only did Tony read out the statement in near-perfect Arabic, he then turned to the minister and asked him, “Now would you mind explaining why you’re lying to us?”
Tony was always defensive about one thing: his height . . . though, as I assured him on more than one occasion, his diminutive stature didn’t matter a damn to me. On the contrary, I found it rather touching that this highly accomplished and amusingly arrogant man would be so vulnerable about his physical stature. And I came to realize that much of Tony’s bravado—his need to ask all the tough questions, his competitiveness for a story, and his reckless self-endangerment—stemmed out of a sense of feeling small. He secretly considered himself inadequate: the perennial outsider with his nose to the window, looking in on a world from which he felt excluded. It took me a while to detect Tony’s curious streak of inferiority since it was masked behind such witty superiority. But then I saw him in action one day with a fellow Brit—a correspondent from the Daily Telegraph named Wilson. Though only in his mid-thirties, Wilson had already lost much of his hair and had started to develop the sort of overripe fleshiness that made him (in Tony’s words) look like a wheel of Camembert that had been left out in the sun. Personally, I didn’t mind him—even though his languid vowels and premature jowliness (not to mention the absurd tailored safari jacket he wore all the time with a checked Viyella shirt) gave him a certain cartoonish quality. Though he was perfectly amiable in Wilson’s company, Tony couldn’t stand him—especially after an encounter we had with him at the Gezira Club. Wilson was sunning himself by the pool. He was stripped to the waist, wearing a pair of plaid Bermuda shorts and suede shoes with socks. It was not a pretty sight. After greeting us, he asked Tony, “Going home for Christmas?”
“Not this year.”
“You’re a London chap, right?”
“Buckinghamshire, actually.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Amersham.”
“Ah yes, Amersham. End of the Metropolitan line, isn’t it? Drink?”
Tony’s face tightened, but Wilson didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he called over one of the waiters, ordered three gin and tonics, then excused himself to use the toilet. As soon as he was out of earshot, Tony hissed, “Stupid little prat.”
“Easy, Tony . . .” I said, surprised by this uncharacteristic flash of anger.
“‘End of the Metropolitan line, isn’t it?’ ” he said, mimicking Wilson’s overripe accent. “He had to say that, didn’t he? Had to get his little dig in. Had to make the fucking point.”
“Hey, all he said was . . .”
“I know what he said. And he meant every bloody word . . .”
“Meant what?”
“You just don’t get it.”
“I think it’s all a little too nuanced for me,” I said lightly. “Or maybe I’m just a dumb American who doesn’t get England.”
“No one gets England.”
“Even if you’re English?”
“Especially if you’re English.”
This struck me as something of a half-truth. Because Tony understood England all too well. Just as he also understood (and explained to me) his standing in the social hierarchy. Amersham was deeply dull. Seriously petit bourgeois. He hated it, though his only sibling—a sister he hadn’t seen for years—had stayed on, living at home with the parents she could never leave. His dad—now dead, thanks to a lifelong love affair with Benson & Hedges—had worked for the local council in their records office (which he finally ended up running five years before he died). His mom—also dead—worked as a receptionist in a doctor’s office, located opposite the modest little suburban semi in which he was raised.
Though Tony was determined to run away from Amersham and never look back, he did go out of his way to please his father by landing a place at York University. But when he graduated (with high honors, as it turned out—though, in typical phlegmatic Tony style, it took him a long time to admit that he received a prized First in English), he decided to dodge the job market for a year or so. Instead, he took off with a couple of friends bound for Kathmandu. But somehow they ended up in Cairo. Within two months, he was working for a dodgy English language newspaper, the Egyptian Gazette. After six months of reporting traffic accidents and petty crimes and the usual trivial stuff, he started offering his services back in Britain as a Cairo-based freelancer. Within a year, he was supplying a steady stream of short pieces to the Chronicle—and when their Egyptian correspondent was called back to London, the paper offered him the job. From that moment on, he was a Chronicle man. With the exception of a brief six-month stint back in London during the mid-eighties (when he threatened to quit if they didn’t post him back in the field), Tony managed to drift from one hot spot to another. Of course, for all his talk of frontline action and total professional independence, he still had to bite the corporate bullet and do a couple of stints as a bureau guy in Frankfurt, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. (a town he actively hated). But despite these few concessions to the prosaic, Tony Hobbs worked very hard at eluding all the potential traps of domesticity and professional life that ensnared most people. Just like me.
“You know, I always end up cutting and running out of these things,” I told Tony around a month after we started seeing each other.
“Oh, so that’s what this is—a thing.”
“You know what I’m saying.”
“That I shouldn’t get down on one knee and propose—because you’re planning to break my heart?”
I laughed and said, “I really am not planning to do that.”
“Then your point is . . . what?”
“My point is . . .”
I broke off, feeling profoundly silly.
“You were about to say?” Tony asked, all smiles.
“The point is . . .” I continued, hesitant as hell. “I think I sometimes suffer from ‘foot in mouth’ disease. And I should never have made such a dumb comment.”
“No need to apologize,” he said.
“I’m not apologizing,” I said, sounding a little cross, then suddenly said, “Actually I am. Because . . .”
God, I really was sounding tongue-tied and awkward. Once again, Tony just continued smiling an amused smile. Then said, “So you’re not planning to cut and run?”
“Hardly. Because . . . uh . . . oh, will you listen to me . . .”
“I’m all ears.”
“Because . . . I’m so damn happy with you, and the very fact that I feel this way is surprising the hell out of me, because I really haven’t felt this way for a long time, and I’m just hoping to hell you feel this way, because I don’t want to waste my time on someone who doesn’t feel this way, because . . .”
He cut me off by leaning over and kissing me deeply. When he finished, he said, “Does that answer your question?”
“Well . . .”
I suppose actions speak louder than words—but I still wanted to hear him say what I had just said. Then again, if I wasn’t very good at outwardly articulating matters of the heart, I’d come to realize that Tony was even more taciturn on such subjects. Which is why I was genuinely surprised when he said, “I’m very pleased you’re not cutting and running.”
Was that a declaration of love? I certainly hoped so. At that moment, I knew I was in love with him. Just as I also knew that my bumbling admission of happiness was about as far as I’d go in confessing such a major emotional truth. Such admissions have always been difficult for me. Just as they were also difficult for my schoolteacher parents—who couldn’t have been more supportive and encouraging when it came to their two children, but who also were deeply buttoned-down and reserved when it came to public displays of affection.
“You know, I can only once remember seeing our parents kiss each other,” my older sister Sandy told me shortly after they were killed in an automobile accident. “And they certainly didn’t score big points on the tactile front. But that really didn’t matter, did it?”
“No,” I said. “It didn’t at all.”
At which point Sandy broke down completely and wept so loudly that her grief sounded something like keening. My own displays of raw public grief were few in the wake of their death. Perhaps because I was too numb from the shock of it all to cry. The year was 1988. I was twenty-one. I had just finished my senior year at Mount Holyoke College—and was due to start a job at the Boston Post in a few weeks. I’d just found an apartment with two friends in the Back Bay area of the city. I’d just bought my first car (a beat-up VW Beetle for a thousand bucks), and had just found out that I was going to graduate magna cum laude. My parents couldn’t have been more pleased. When they drove up to the college to see me get my degree that weekend, they were in such unusually ebullient form that they actually went to a big post-commencement party on campus. I wanted them to spend the night, but they had to get back to Worcester that evening for some big church event the next day (like many liberal New Englanders, they were serious Unitarians). Just before they got into the car, my father gave me a big uncharacteristic hug and said that he loved me.
Two hours later, while driving south, he nodded off at the wheel on the interstate. The car veered out of control, crashed through the center guard rail, and careened right into the oncoming path of another car—a Ford station wagon. It was carrying a family of five. Two of the occupants—a young mother and her baby son—were killed. So too were my parents.
In the wake of their deaths, Sandy kept expecting me to fall apart (as she was doing constantly). I know that it both upset and worried her that I wasn’t succumbing to loud, outward heartbreak (even though anyone who saw me at the time could tell that I was in the throes of major trauma). Then again, Sandy has always been the emotional roller coaster in the family. Just as she’s also been the one fixed geographic point in my life—someone to watch over me (as I have watched over her). But we couldn’t be more disparate characters. Whereas I was always asserting my independence, Sandy was very much a homebody. She followed my parents into high-school teaching, married a phys ed teacher, moved to the Boston suburbs, and had three children by the time she was thirty. She’d also allowed herself to get a little chunky in the process—to the point where she was crowding one hundred and seventy pounds (not a good look on a woman who only stood fi
ve foot three), and seemed to have this predilection for eating all the time. Though I occasionally hinted that she might consider padlocking the refrigerator, I didn’t push the point too hard. It wasn’t my style to remonstrate with Sandy—she was so vulnerable to all criticism, so heart-on-her-sleeve, and so damn nice.
She’s also been the one person with whom I’ve always been open about everything going on with me—with the exception of the period directly after the deaths of my parents, when I shut down and couldn’t be reached by anybody. The new job at the Post helped. Though my boss on the city desk didn’t expect me to begin work immediately, I insisted on starting at the paper just ten days after my parents were buried. I dived right in. Twelve-hour days were my specialty. I also volunteered for additional assignments, covering every damn story I could—and quickly got a name for myself as a completely reliable workaholic.
Then, around four months into the job, I was on my way home one evening, when I passed by a couple around my parents’ age, walking hand-in-hand down Boylston Street. There wasn’t anything unusual about this couple. They didn’t resemble my mom or dad. They were just an ordinary-looking husband and wife in their mid-fifties, holding hands. Maybe that’s what undid me—the fact that, unlike many couples at that stage of a marriage, they seemed pleased to be together . . . just as my parents always seemed pleased to be in each other’s company. Whatever the reason, the next thing I knew, I was leaning against a lamppost, crying wildly. I couldn’t stop myself, couldn’t dodge the desperate wave of grief with which I had finally collided. I didn’t move for a long time, clinging to the lamppost for ballast, the depth of my sorrow suddenly fathomless, immeasurable. A cop showed up. He placed his big hand on my shoulder and asked me if I needed help.
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 66
