The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  “You had me worried,” she said. “Such grief.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said in a half-voice.

  “Was there a death in the family?”

  “I lost somebody . . . yes.”

  Back in my seat, I stared ahead of me and kept hearing a line of an Oscar Wilde’s poem over and over again in my head: “All men kill the thing they love.”

  But she betrayed me.

  And then you betrayed yourself.

  It was like a death. During those early days back—after collapsing with exhaustion the first night—I hardly slept, hardly ate, and never left Stan’s apartment. Even after spending an entire night with him talking it all out, there was no sense of purgation, no chink in the grief and the guilt I possessed. On the contrary, all I felt was a deepening of the despair, the sense that Alaistair nailed it when he said that I had ruined my life. I kept replaying those final moments in the apartment, when she pleaded with me to listen, and I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if I had heard her out. Yes, the fact that she was clearly working for the other side would have precluded her from entry into the US. But—and this was the ongoing but—there would have been some way through this. Especially as everything she said, everything that her grief showed me in those final moments, confronted me with the fact that, yes, she did love me.

  And yet, how could she love me and so deceive me? How could she profess I was the man of her life, tell me these horror stories about her time in a Stasi prison, the way they cleaved her son away from her, and then turn out to have been one of their people all along? Were love and betrayal always so closely allied?

  Writing the book was a diversionary tactic—a way of keeping occupied, of accomplishing something, of pushing time forward in the hope that its onward momentum would balm the wound or, at least, allow me to reach an accommodation with it all. I worked like a man possessed—which, I suppose, I was. I went for a run along the lakeshore every morning. I found time to bike into town most afternoons and buy a newspaper and kill time in a café. Once or twice a week I went to the local art house cinema and watched a movie. Otherwise, I stayed inside Stan’s cottage and wrote. When my tenant left my apartment in Manhattan, I dropped down to the city for a few days and met with a teacher friend who was looking for a short sublet. So I tossed him the keys, my rent covered until the end of November. Stan was true to his word when it came to letting me stay in the cottage for as long as I wanted. So I hung on there until Thanksgiving—when a first draft was finished. Stan showed up on Thanksgiving Eve with a turkey in tow.

  “You’ve lost weight,” was his first observation. He was right, as I had dropped fifteen pounds since returning from Berlin.

  “And I’ve gained four hundred pages,” I said, pointing to the manuscript now stacked neatly on a shelf.

  “The consolations of art.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “What next?”

  “New York. Delivering the manuscript. Another draft or two, given my editor’s predilections to get me to rewrite everything. And then . . . well, I was thinking about a book on Alaska.”

  Stan thought that one over.

  “Well, that place is about as extreme as they come. And if it continues the distancing process . . .”

  I said nothing. Getting all the subtexts behind my silence, Stan simply gripped my arm and said:

  “You will find a way of living with the sense of loss.”

  There was some truth in that comment. My editor thought the Berlin book “very accomplished, very Isherwood-esque” in its portrait of modern Berlin as a rakish city of shadows, and “full of larger-than-life characters.” (Alaistair was reinvented in the text as Simon Channing-Burnett, and I made him a sculptor from English aristo stock.) But she also found it “curiously detached” and “emotionally distant” and wondered out loud in our editorial sessions whether the book could be given more heart.

  “It’s Berlin,” I argued. “And Berlin is about decadent surfaces.”

  “I sense there is, lurking behind all your decadent surfaces, a story you don’t want to tell.”

  “We all have stories we don’t want to tell.”

  “And I want to see more emotion in the book.”

  I did attempt to meet her demand by building up the relationship in the book between Simon and his married Greek Cypriot lover, Constantine, using much of the Alaistair-Mehmet breach that never healed. But my editor was right about the book’s inherent detachment, the way the “I” in the book was very much an onlooker: wry, ironic, closed off from the larger human dramas going on around him.

  “You are one hell of an actor,” was Stan’s take on the book when he first read it, whereas the majority of the reviews noted that it was diverting, readable, and just a bit shallow: a verdict with which I couldn’t argue.

  Yes, I did follow that book up with one based on the three months I lived in Alaska. When that came out I ventured immediately into the vast open spaces of the Australian bush, then spent a few months in western Canada writing my outback book. Of course, there were other women, other adventures. A photojournalist in Sydney with whom I spent three months—but who, toward the end of things, told me that I was always “elsewhere.” A jazz singer named Jennifer whom I met during my stint in Vancouver—and who, when she announced she was in love with me, sent me running back to Manhattan. A stockbroker in New York who thought that sleeping with a writer was exotic for a while, but eventually said she didn’t want to be with someone who seemed to be always thinking about the next flight out of town.

  Then I met Jan. Smart. Confident. Sexy in a controlled way. Well read. My age. Willing to deal with my frequent absences. Wanting a life with me. Telling me that, yes, I was so different from anyone she’d been with before, but she liked the challenge that was me. Just as I was intrigued by her intellectual cogency as a lawyer, her organizational rigor, her need to exercise control over life’s inherent messiness. We’d met at a reading I’d given in Boston, and she’d been brought along by a college classmate who was a partner at the law firm where she was still an associate. We all went out to dinner afterward. I was impressed with her smarts and her dry wit. Just as she seemed genuinely interested in everything to do with me. Before I knew it, she’d convinced me to come live with her for a while at her very nice apartment on Commonwealth Avenue. Then I invited her down on a trip to the Atacama Desert of Chile. And then on an assignment to the Tunisian island of Djerba. Around six months into our romance, she forgot to put her diaphragm in one night when we were having a weekend at some Cape Cod inn, and when she discovered she was pregnant, she did tell me that, as much as she wanted to keep the baby, if I strenuously objected . . .

  But I didn’t object. Though I told Jan that I did love her, I quietly knew that the love I felt for her was qualified, perhaps because it seemed like a pale shadow of all that I had once known with Petra. And though I never mentioned Petra’s name to her, Jan still knew that ours wasn’t the great love story of the century. When she was five months pregnant, we rented a house for two weeks in August on the Maine coastal island of Vinalhaven. One night, sitting on the deck that faced the ever-choppy waters of the Atlantic, she turned to me out of nowhere and said:

  “I do know, Thomas, that your heart is elsewhere.”

  “What?” I said, thrown by this out-of-left-field statement. Jan trained her sights on the breaking waters of the Atlantic, never once looking toward me, as she said again:

  “I know you may care very much for me. And I sincerely hope that you will adore the child that I am carrying right now. But I also understand, deep down, that I am not the love of your life. As hard as it is for me to say it, I do accept that.”

  This comment was spoken with no lethal edge. It was just a cold, hard statement of fact. And it caught me so unaware that my reply was a lame one.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do. And if you’d like to tell me all about her . . .”


  I looked over and saw that Jan’s eyes were brimming with uncharacteristic sadness. I reached out for her hand, but she pulled away.

  “What was her name?” she asked.

  “There was no one important.”

  “Please don’t try to placate me, Thomas. The truth I can handle. Bullshit I cannot.”

  But to tell her about Petra, to admit the fact that, even when we made love, I saw her face superimposed on hers, would be to invite grief. So all I said was:

  “I want to spend my life with you.”

  “Are you certain about that? Because . . . and this is the truth . . . I can handle raising this child largely on my own.”

  “I want this child more than anything.”

  That was the truth. Because I was tired of the shifting nature of perpetual motion. Because I thought that being a father was one of those things in life you really regretted not doing. And because I instinctually understood that I needed to put down roots and try to properly build a life with someone else. Here was a hugely bright, intelligent, capable woman who wanted the same thing, who grasped so much about me, and seemed to want to accommodate my wanderlust while also providing me with the domestic ballast I needed. She also saw in me (I sensed) a man who wasn’t intimidated by her intellect (as so many others were) and could handle the flinty side of her nature.

  Stan didn’t like her from the outset—warning me that there was an inherent coldness to Jan, and that he could see that, while I admired her, I was not wholly in love with her.

  But, like Jan, I was at a stage in life when I no longer wanted to be adrift. Moreover, there was cognitive and domestic compatibility between us. We could talk books and interesting movies and current affairs and what we heard that day on National Public Radio. We shared the same aesthetic. And we weren’t outwardly competitive with each other, never forcing each other into roles we didn’t want to play.

  Though everything on paper made us seem like the stuff of a very good match, there was one huge disconnect between us: a lack of true love.

  I now see that at the time, I was willing to talk myself into a position of compromise about all this. All right, your heart never sings when you see her. All right, there is companionship, but no sense of complicity or shared destiny between you. But surely, that will come in time.

  It was a way of papering over all the silent doubts that I was unwilling to confront. Are so many marriages forged this way—hoping that the fundamentals you know are missing will eventually arrive, desperately accentuating the positive to close the deal, because you feel somehow that you really should be grounding yourself at this moment in time?

  In November of 1989, with my wife now eight months pregnant, I headed off solo to a movie theater at Harvard Square to see a new print of “The Third Man” (Jan having to work late at her office on a case that she was determined to close before our baby arrived in the world). After the film, I dropped in to one of the few good old-fashioned dingy saloons that still remained in this increasingly gentrified corner of Cambridge. While I was sitting at the bar with three drunks, a news bulletin came on the overhead television. And I watched static-laden images of the Berlin Wall being breached, the correspondent from CNN standing at the now wide-open gates of Checkpoint Charlie as thousands of East Germans swarmed Westwards, getting choked with emotion as he stated: “The Berlin Wall has finally fallen down today . . . and the world is a different place.”

  I remember being so overcome by this statement—and the images of Berliners from both sides of the frontier embracing and crying—that I stepped outside into the darkened night and found myself in a mad reverie, wondering how long it would take to get myself from here to Berlin. Then, if I could somehow find Petra in East Berlin, how I would take her in my arms and tell her that not a day had gone by in the past five years when she had not loomed large in my life, when I had continued to blame myself for letting my rage kill my compassion, and how if I could turn back the clock . . .

  But the clock can never be turned back. What had happened had happened, and I was now a married man with a child due momentarily. Anyway, even if I had been free, why would she want anything to do with me after what I had rained down on her? With any luck she had met somebody over the past few years and was now a mother again. And here I was . . . haunted. Overshadowed. Never unburdened by all that was unresolved.

  The Wall might have come down, but it still enclosed my heart.

  Certainly, when Candace finally arrived in the world, my love for her was overwhelming, unconditional. And because we shared responsibility for this wonderful person, Jan and I were able to evade, for a time, the growing realization that ours was a relationship lacking the essential propulsion that love provides.

  Thinking back to that night on the deck of that cottage on that offshore island in Maine, when she said she knew she was not the love of my life, when she showed greater perception than me about the emotional landscape between us and what were to be its increasingly profound limitations . . . why didn’t I tell her the truth? Why did I not admit that—seven years on from my ignoble departure from Berlin—the loss of Petra had never really dulled? Yes, I had reached an accommodation with it all—the way you eventually accept the death of someone central to your life. But its lingering presence—the fact that no romance since then had ever come close to matching the absolute and profound certainty that Petra and I shared—served as a quiet but persistent reminder of all that was lacking in my marriage . . . and, most tellingly, of all that I had lost.

  Still, I reassured Jan that night that I loved her, that I would be there for her and our child, that we had a great future together. For the first years of Candace’s life, we did manage to have a sense of shared purpose. We bought a house in Cambridge. I found a part-time teaching post at Boston University—from September to December every year—and scaled back travel during the other months to no more than eight weeks per year. I continued to turn out books. During the ten months I was home I very much shared, and enjoyed sharing, responsibility for everything to do with Candace’s daily life. Watching her discover the world was so interesting and pleasurable that it compensated for the ever-growing distance between her mother and me. Increasingly, Jan’s controlling nature, her flintiness, her inability to nurture—the root coldness I always knew was there but could never bring myself to properly consider—pushed me deeper into my own shell. According to Jan, I was the sort of man who lived most of the time in my own head, who was far too singular, too much the loner, to be able to accept “the sense of mutuality” that must accompany a good marriage and that, in truth, my love for her was never anything more than a fragile veneer with no real substance to it whatsoever.

  Still, we soldiered along, making increasingly passionless but ongoing love with each other at least twice a week, very much a team when it came to Candace’s needs and her future, but otherwise increasingly estranged. Things fall apart, the center will not hold. And once Candace hit adolescence and began to need us less on a full-time basis . . . that’s when the real drift began.

  It was also in the year 2004 that—following a book I wrote about the theoretics of travel and the very human need to escape day-in, day-out reality—my editor suggested I consider a memoir of a life spent ricocheting around the world. This proposal arrived at a moment when I was pretty certain that Jan was having an affair with a colleague—a truth that was admitted some years later during the endgame moments of our marriage—and I had fallen into an occasional thing with a magazine editor in New York. She was a most independent woman named Eleanor who was pleased to see me whenever I was in Manhattan. She would accompany me two or three times a year on a weeklong trip somewhere and was very clear about the fact that she wanted nothing more from me than this “collegial arrangement” (her exact words). Eleanor was forty, hugely smart, funny, clever, and exceptionally passionate. But she had been badly singed in a relationship prior to meeting me, and had decided to erect a barrier around her heart, even though she once admitt
ed that we were so right for each other. But the man who had so hurt her had also been married. On a trip together to Costa Rica, six months into what she described as “our erotic friendship,” I admitted that I was in love with her. Her response was to slam on the emotional breaks.

  “Don’t go there,” she said, turning away from me in bed and reaching for a postcoital cigarette.

  “But it’s the truth. And I sense that you yourself feel the same way about—”

  “What I feel,” she said, cutting me off, “is that you are very married and living in a city two hundred miles away with a teenage daughter who, from everything you’ve told me, is clearly crazy about you.”

  “She will still love me—and she will still see a very great deal of me—even if I am living in Manhattan.”

  “You want to move in with me?”

  “I would not be so presumptuous. But I want to be with you, yes. And not once every six weeks for a weekend, with the occasional interesting trip thrown in. I want a life with you, and would be willing to rent a place in Manhattan.”

  “This can’t be,” she said, sitting up and actually getting slightly agitated in her body language.

  “I love you. I know that.”

  “And I know that you are a wonderful man, and one who deserves to be happier than you are. But I’m not the person with whom to collaborate on such a project.”

  “But we’re so great together, so right for each other.”

  “And there are limits beyond which I am not willing to venture.”

  “Wouldn’t you be willing to, at least, see how things developed if I were nearby?”