by Rob Spillman
My Normandy would be Zambujeira do Mar, a small Portuguese fishing village on the Atlantic coast two hours south of Lisbon. We had stumbled upon it a year and a half before, on our honeymoon. We had flown to Lisbon, driven down the coast, and at the dead end of a six-mile-long dirt road we fell in love with the rugged little town that wasn’t even on our map.
The November night the Wall fell, as we walked past the homeless camps in Tompkins Square Park to our tiny apartment on East 8th Street between Avenues B and C, I told Elissa, “I have to go there.”
“We will, we will,” she said. “Soon.”
She was imagining a visit. I was envisioning dropping out and living there. But no way was she walking away from her dream job as a reporter at Spy magazine. And no way would I want her to. She was surrounded by wickedly clever peers, and her own wicked cleverness was fully embraced. These were her people, and they were paying her to be a wiseass. This tapped one part of her creative self. Her wilder, storytelling self she fed by writing stories, late at night on yellow legal pads and a sticky old Olivetti typewriter. I was freelancing as a writer and fact-checker, while also attempting to write fiction, but not with the same intensity as Elissa. We were doing what we had vowed to do together—live for art in the creative capital of the world. We were scraping by with an exuberant, drunken group of writer friends willing to put up with high rents, low pay, and shaky prospects.
I, however, was restless. With steady work and a steady domestic life, I felt like I was locked into the publishing-industrial complex and marriage. Is this how true artists lived? Even though I wanted to transform myself as Berlin was transforming itself, I was resigned to watching Berlin from afar. Then, over the winter, Spy fell apart. The owners put the magazine up for sale and core staffers jumped ship. So I once again said, “Let’s drop out, let’s live the dream, go to Europe and be expat writers with a capital W.” When she said yes I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been; we were both besotted with romantic visions of our literary forebears, from Fitzgerald to Stein to Baldwin, who had run off to Europe to live large and write novels. So why not us?
Elissa, unlike me, was more than just in love with the continuum of art. She was really writing and risking herself on the page. I was dipping my toe in from the riverbank, afraid of dark waters. I was in love with my ideas, but was afraid to risk, to fail. I was working on a novel called Coffee and Absinthe, which was about two competing spirits—wild, in-the-moment Coffee and soulful, dreamy, idealistic Absinthe. These were, naturally, my two competing spirits—the social one who wanted to live to the fullest, in the moment, and the artistic one who wanted to create. I burned with desire to write and read as much as I could. I would crank out ten handwritten pages a day while working as a freelance fact-checker and researcher.
At the time I was doing research for the Spy Who’s Who, which meant compiling salacious details about Spy’s favorite celebrities, so I was reading a dozen celebrity biographies a week, plus hundreds of gossip-column items on the likes of Michael Jackson and Donald Trump. It was a paycheck. And morally I justified this work to myself as part of Spy’s greater mission to stick it to the powers that be. I balanced my steady diet of crap celebrity bios with Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, in which he connects the Sex Pistols back through the Situationists and Dadaists all the way back to the Gnostic Gospels. I carried Lipstick Traces around like a bible, hoping to inoculate myself against the celebrity fluff.
I read hungrily, desperately, and likewise felt insatiable for visual art. I repeatedly dragged Elissa to Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 series at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery. Richter’s Baader-Meinhof paintings were based on police photos taken in the prison cells of three Red Army Faction leaders who were either murdered or committed joint suicide on the same day. The slightly blurred black-and-white paintings felt realer than real, all the more immediate in the face of the fall of the Wall. I was obsessed with the painting of Andreas Baader’s jail-cell record player (what did he listen to in isolation?), while Elissa spent hours in front of the painting of teenage Ulrike Meinhof, the journalist turned Red Army Faction soldier, the good girl who went from reporting on terrorism to being a terrorist. I wanted to be Richter and Marcus, to be at the crossroads of art and politics. Politically engaged art—that’s what I was after.
I thought of myself as fearless, but reckless and voyeuristic are not the same as fearless. Elissa was fearless, both in her work and out in the world. I joked that she had a “psycho magnet,” that the crazies, the slightly off, the unfiltered, the socially challenged were drawn to her wherever we went. But she never flinched; she always engaged and was fully present with them. While I threw myself into any social situation, could put on any mask—punk, preppy, artist—I also put masks on everyone I met, instantly judging them. I inhabited my masks, adopted the personas. Perhaps it was self-preservation, and stemmed from my itinerant childhood, which had forced me to form friendships quickly, potential allies or foes judged in an instant. Elissa, on the other hand, was open to the universe. While she also had masks, she used them to put others at ease. I marveled at and was frequently jealous and resentful of her willingness to talk, really talk, to anyone.
Even with my limited self-awareness, I was completely confident about Elissa’s passion and creativity. It wasn’t just that I was in love with her, or that she was the first person to ever challenge and deeply engage me—she once threw her engagement ring at me outside CBGB’s after I had ducked an argument (she’d called me an elitist snob after I bit a can of beer at her rich college friend’s loft, spraying her immaculate white Shabby-Chic sofa) and we spent an hour digging through the Bowery gutter looking for the modest ring. No, it was obvious that as in real life, in her fiction she would say the things that people were afraid to say out loud. I knew that if we could get away and she had time to write, she would produce miracles.
While a romantic, I wasn’t completely delusional—we had saved up three thousand dollars, and I did have a solid lead on work abroad. After I wrote a piece for Sports Illustrated about running across the Grand Canyon—North Rim to South Rim in five hours, twenty-three miles with eight thousand feet of elevation drop and gain—my editor there told me that I could do some stringing for them from Portugal, especially about Portuguese track and field stars. Rosa Mota and Carlos Lopes had recently won the Olympic marathons. I’d run track in college and was a student of the sport, so I knew I could do the job.
I told Elissa that we could live in Portugal for nothing. We would work on our Great American Expat Novels and I would do enough stringing to establish myself. As soon as we were set up we would visit Berlin. That’s what I said, but in the back of my mind I was hoping that we could find a way to stay in Berlin, that it would welcome me back like a long-lost native son.
How easy it is to upend your life. To restless, heedless me it was nothing. To Elissa, it was everything. While we packed, sweating over which cassettes to include, Sonic Youth or Mudhoney, Elissa kept asking if this was the right thing to do, if we would be safe, if I really could get work overseas, if we’d be able to jump back into the hamster wheel when we returned to New York. “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” I would reply, increasingly impatient and annoyed that I would have to worry if she could handle living off the grid. For me, this wasn’t a big leap—our fleeing known New York for the uncertainty of life in Europe was within the continuum of leaps I had been making my entire life. What if this adventure failed spectacularly? Oh, well. There would always be other adventures. “Remain true to your art, be open to the world” were two of my mantras. This optimism, this faith that the world would provide for us made me insensitive to the leap Elissa was making. I could intellectually understand why she was nervous, but I had little empathy for her bourgeois, nonartistic attachments and baggage.
4
“If I’m free, it’s because I’m always running.”
—J
imi Hendrix
Soundtrack: Jimi Hendrix, “Crosstown Traffic,” 1968
MY FATHER AND I were regulars at New York Pizza, a Lichterfeld neighborhood bar and pizzeria that catered to American soldiers from the nearby Andrews Barracks. Black-light psychedelic posters on every wall, the jukebox blasting Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Stones, Janis Joplin. We started going there at the end of the summer when my parents split. It was the time of Woodstock and collective hope, but with the flip side of Manson’s Helter Skelter murders. Now, months later, Hells Angels had stabbed a kid to death at Altamont with the Rolling Stones onstage. Gimme shelter, indeed.
The nearby tables were filled with clean-cut guys in their late teens and early twenties, many of whom were being cycled in and out of Vietnam. The jukebox pumped out the music of the social revolution and the antiwar movement happening across the ocean. I liked the beat and energy, but didn’t know the social significance; the sounds reached me on a primal, cellular level. Mitch Mitchell’s unnerving drumming underneath Hendrix’s blues wail was vibrant and sloppy and made me want to jump and scream. Basically, it was everything that classical music wasn’t. It was a fitting soundtrack to what was the only news that mattered to me—my parents were living apart.
There’s a disconnect between my memories of the time and the photographic evidence of the era. I see myself as a kid with the run of concert halls and opera houses. I was the equivalent of Eloise in the Plaza: unsupervised, skedaddling backstage, through the dressing rooms, up into the catwalks, then back down through the set-building shops, oblivious to being at the center of the Cold War and thrilled to be in the wake of my indulgent father. But shortly after we married, I showed Elissa the few photos I have from that time—one where I am clutching a worn-down brown teddy bear and battered book on a beige sofa, another where I am startled next to a thin, undecorated Christmas tree, and one where I am holding and peering through an empty picture frame.
“Jesus, I want to give that poor kid a hug,” Elissa said. Through her eyes, it was hard not to see a sad, frightened child. He looks lost, staring past the camera as if there are answers to questions somewhere out there, questions that would haunt him well beyond Berlin.
As my father shuffled our Gothic German playing cards, I wondered, not for the first time, when he or my mother were going to tell me why they had been living apart. But they rarely acknowledged the other’s existence. When either of them did, usually during a discussion about the logistics of getting me between homes, something unpleasant and unspoken lurked below the thin façade of civility. Or maybe this was me projecting my desperate need to understand why they were apart. Maybe they had both processed their split and didn’t want to talk about it. I, however, did want to talk about it. Yet, at the same time, I was too afraid to ask.
My mother stayed in Berlin for two years after they split, then returned to the states, to New Orleans to get her master’s degree at Tulane. This would allow her to teach and to get herself emotionally and financially back together after the separation from my father. I could say that I stayed behind with him, but that would imply volition on my part. You could say my mother left me behind with him, but that would imply blame on my part. I knew nothing of their arrangement except that she disappeared. Her absence was a void, an unexplained vacancy. It was always there, but never acknowledged. Not by my father, and not by me, for fear of driving my father off as well. I felt responsible for her absence. And if she could disappear, so then could my father.
I tapped my feet to “Crosstown Traffic,” concentrating on our game of Crazy Eights. Some alchemical mix of Coca-Cola and Hendrix made me blurt out, “Dad, why isn’t Mom living with us anymore?” My father looked up from his slice of pizza, a rarely seen flash of anger in his eyes. I flinched. He pursed his lips, then slowly exhaled, regaining his usual Buddha-like calm.
“We couldn’t live together anymore,” my father said. He paused. I waited for more. “Want another Coke?”
“Sure, Dad.” Subject closed. Terrified, I wondered, Is he mad at me? I vowed that I would never ask again.
My father went to the bar and came back with a tall Berliner Weisse beer for himself and a tall, curved glass of Coke for me. He shuffled the cards and dealt out another hand. I was trying to be careful with my top-heavy glass of soda, to not spill it like I frequently did. I was a good boy. I’d never give my father an opportunity to ever be mad at me. I was a little adult with impeccable manners and a genius for social camouflage. I was safe with my father. I was safe in Berlin. When I reached for the discard pile I once again knocked the glass over. My father sighed, then helped me clean up the mess. After another trip to the bar, Dad said, “Still your play.”
5
“Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”
—Gustave Flaubert
“Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”
—Rob Spillman
Soundtrack: Erik Satie, Gnossiennes No. 2, 1890
WHILE ON THE SUBWAYS in Berlin, my father and I would spot Americans and whisper to each other, “Die meisten Amerikaner sind . . . ,” German for “Most Americans are . . . ,” and we wouldn’t have to finish the sentence. Many, if not most of our countrymen whom we saw on the U-Bahn, were variations of the Ugly American—loud, overweight, oblivious to the intelligence of the natives. They would mock the Germans’ dark, neat clothes and their harsh-sounding language, not realizing that almost every German on the train could understand every single word that was being said about them. From my father, I learned how to blend in, to disappear in a crowd. He and I spoke German in these situations and never engaged with or acknowledged our fellow citizens.
6
“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
—Herman Melville
Soundtrack: The B-52s, “Roam,” 1989
WE FLEW A RED-EYE to Lisbon, picked up a cheap, tiny Le Car, then drove the two hours down the coast to Zambujeira, its bright white stucco houses perched on the red and purple lava cliffs above the rough ocean. At the Café Atlántico, one of the two tavernas on the square, we asked if there were any apartments to rent. For thirty thousand escudos (less than three hundred dollars) we paid up front for two months in a small house behind the home of a couple that ran the town’s newsstand. I negotiated in German, he having been a Gastarbeiter—a guest worker—in Emden for two years, where he worked on the last German-made original Beetles before production was moved to Mexico. The low, cool house had its own wine cave and a wild, overgrown garden that you had to cross in order to get to the bathroom, which was in its own tiny house. Food and wine cost pennies. We had actualized our dream: We were off the radar.
Freed from the hamster wheel, we slid into the slow rhythm of the Alentejo region, the poorest region of the poorest Western European country. A morning double espresso in the café, then Elissa would start writing, not leaving her desk for eight or ten straight hours. It was as if a switch had been thrown in her. In New York only a few close friends knew that she was writing fiction on the side. In Zambi, she gave herself permission to commit.
While she wrote, I would bike or run up the coast, then maybe get in some reading, a little bit of writing. The character of Absinthe felt more tangible in Portugal, there in the land of the Green Faerie, but the urgency to write wasn’t as pressing as back in New York—time seemed to expand, so that it felt like I had more of it, and why write when you can live? After applying some brushstrokes to Coffee and Absinthe, it would be back to the Café Atlántico for cocktail hour, which was more like cocktail three hours, coinciding with the prolonged sunset: infinite shades of lavender against the lava cliffs, out across the water, and up into the late-afternoon clouds. We ate caramujos, tiny sea snails cooked in seawater with olive oil, which we pulled from their shells with straight pins, and washed them down with cold pitchers of crisp Sagres beer, then moved on to the local fish soup with bread in the bottom of the bowl, accompanied by bubb
ly Vinho Verde.
After sunset we headed to a bar run by a glamorous, worldly Lisbonite named Xica (pronounced Shee-ka), where we drank absinthe cut with syrupy passion fruit juice and, along with Andreas, Xica’s German boyfriend, stayed past what should have been closing time arguing about Gerhard Richter, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nick Cave, and Fernando Pessoa, about what makes an authentic artistic life, about creating timely versus lasting work, about whether art should be political, about how your life could and should be art. Andreas favored interiority while Xica advocated for total engagement, both on and off the page. Elissa said we were pretentious blowhards, that there was no right way.
Miraculously, we were doing what we had set out to do. We were Paul Bowles in Tangiers. We were going to go native, write strange novels, and then our artist friends would make pilgrimages to visit us, to get our blessing. My worry about Elissa being able to handle living off the grid shifted to worrying that she was getting too into our new life. When not writing, she read Jane Bowles and Virginia Woolf, and would cry over her copies of Two Serious Ladies and Mrs. Dalloway. She was open and vulnerable to the universe, her emotional highs and lows amplified in our simplified new life. She fixated on Brownie, one of the village’s numerous stray dogs, an old female mutt, splotchy brown with distended teats. “How many litters has that poor dog had?” she would ask nearly every time we saw her. “No, we cannot take her in,” I would invariably have to say.
