I started to get e-mail from men Jordan decided were desirable suitors. Looking back, I have to question whether that museum choice had given him a warped impression of whom I might be interested in. Still, these cyberdates brightened up many lonely nights I spent locked in a hotel in Albania because of a shoot-to-kill curfew, or trapped in Belfast waiting for the Irish to throw more petrol bombs at each other. My favorite cyberromance was with a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon.
SCREEN NAME: LKoplin
LOCATION: Beverly Hills
BIRTH DATE: 9/18/50
SEX: male
MARITAL STATUS: divorced (almost)
HOBBIES: family, friends, music, the Beatles, ragtime guitar,
skiing, reading, learning, life
OCCUPATION: Plastic surgeon
PERSONAL QUOTE: “To love another person is to see the face of God.”
Dear Siobhan,
I thought I’d start by sending you my AOL profile, which forced me to compress a lifetime into an obscenely short list. I understand you are doing some terrifically exciting stuff overseas and am very anxious to hear about your international life and times. My quote of the day (just the first half; if you like it more to follow):
“So through the eyes love attains the heart; for the eyes are the scouts of the heart, and the eyes go reconnoitering, for what it would please the heart to possess.”
L
Dear L,
How brave to send a blind e-mail to some strange woman overseas. Loved the verses you sent me and would love another installment, although in our case it is not eyes but words in cyberspace that must do the reconnaissance. How very modern and old-fashioned at the same time to be courted by words alone.
I don’t have a computer profile but I guess if things get bad enough and I resort to joining a computer dating service my profile would go something like this:
NAME: Siobhan (shi-von)
BORN: 10/10/59
HABITAT: airplanes, hotels in places nobody in their right mind wants to be
FAMILY: one Tibetan terrier (Max)
OCCUPATION: professional snoop, voyeur, troublemaker, storyteller, witness to man’s genius and folly (TV reporter)
THINGS I LOVE: my family, friends, yoga, reading, writing, nature, walks, the ocean, animals of all kinds, Italy, food, epiphanies, scuba diving. (I like skiing too, and what I lack in style I make up for with a fearless approach to slopes.)
PERSONAL QUESTION: Wondering what almost divorced means. Is that A: getting divorced and the paperwork hasn’t gone through yet, B: bored with wife, thinking about divorce, C: none of my business?
Look forward to hearing from you,
S
Dear S,
How thrilling to receive a message from a beautiful war correspondent flung far across the Atlantic Ocean.
I loved your computer profile. In getting my e-mail today there were two different e-mail ads for “How to get a date with a beautiful woman: what to say, how to get their phone number, how to build your self-confidence, and what conversation is appropriate on the first date.” Well, now, let me tell you, as a guy newly released on the dating scene (more later) this seems kind of interesting to me. But then I realize, “Hey, wait, look who I’m writing to at this very moment!” So the messages were deleted. I did not order anything and will just have to wing it like the rest of us.
About your multiple-choice question, papers filed last fall, temporary settlement done, final terms of money and custody of children (I have two) is scheduled for December. Sounds very clinical but what lies at the deeper unspoken level is that the marriage is well over; we are living separate lives.
I like to be around people who love and appreciate nature, walk through it, touch it, smell it, and embrace it. I love people with big brains, full of interesting stories and facts, inquisitive and well-read. Even more fun if they get to write about it, share it with others: that’s how we get to look inside each other, right?
Larry
Dear L,
Thanks for your honest answer to my somewhat impertinent question. Sounds like it’s been a tough year. Speaking of people’s insides, I’ve just spent the week at War School. It’s a sort of survival course for war correspondents run by former SAS guys.
They operate pretty much as TV reporters do. Small mobile groups with no backup are dropped into hostile environments to gather information; only difference is they’ve been trained to survive and we just seem to know how to find trouble. I was looking forward to a relaxing week off work lolling about in the Welsh countryside but instead it was serious boot camp. We were shelled, shot at, forced to drag big bleeding bodies across muddy fields and stuff their fake oozing guts back inside them.
What has been really frightening about this is realizing how unprepared journalists generally are when they go into war zones. I feel 1000 percent more confident now knowing that I could actually stop someone’s arterial bleeding instead of standing idly by and watching a colleague die in the field. How the hell did you survive medical school?
Besides general triage medicine they also taught us useful urban skills, like how to move a land mine or disarm a grenade. Never know when this could come in handy.
S
I started to think that this kind of cyberdating was much easier than having to wash my hair and get dressed and actually go out on a date. Tired after a day’s work covering bombs or riots, I could at stay home in my pajamas and weed out the undesirables much more quickly. I could also get lost in a fantasy and avoid the real-life pitfalls.
Dear S,
Glad to hear you went to medical school, even if only for a few hours. I, for one, am very interested in moving a land mine, as I’ve never known anyone well versed in the subject. I wonder how difficult it must be for you to sustain any meaningful relationships when you are so often on the go, in dangerous locations. Exhilarating, yes, but a crimp on sharing a cup of coffee and croissant with an important person on a Sunday morning?
My dear Cyber Surgeon,
You raise a sore point. I have been privileged to see history-making events on a daily basis. What I see in a week, most won’t see in a lifetime. But I have paid a heavy price in the relationship department. I have such constant input that nothing seems to sink in or get absorbed. I jot things down in my journals, fragments that I promise to make sense of later, epiphanies shoved down and forgotten as some new experience gets packed on top. I want to stop, stay still, and travel the rugged internal terrain. I’m tired of wars, riots, and other people’s misery. I feel like hiding under my desk when news breaks so I don’t have to cancel another dinner party or miss my yoga class.
S
It was oddly reassuring to think of this man, whose life was all about order, going to the same office every day and trying to chisel perfect-looking humans. My life was the opposite as I went out each day into chaos to expose humanity’s flaws. His efforts at creating perfect noses and thighs seemed futile to me. I thought of moving to Beverly Hills and putting up a shingle next to his office, SOUL DOCTOR, capturing some of his customers as they emerged. Clearly their souls must have been hurting to need so much rearranging of their exteriors.
My cyberromance with Larry trundled along for a number of weeks. We even spoke on the phone once, but somehow the more disembodied he was, the better I liked him. In one of his e-mails, Larry quoted Dylan Thomas on the importance of defying death by living a big life. Days later, Princess Diana did just that.
When Diana’s car crashed in Paris, the London bureau chief woke me up at one in the morning. I couldn’t sense how huge a story it would become; perhaps no one could. All I felt was another intrusion in my life. I had to drag myself out of bed and figure out who was going to walk Max. I interrogated the taxi driver for his opinions on the way to the bureau.
“I’m stunned, love, just stunned,” he said. “But running around with that playboy trustfunder with four Ferraris, I’m not surprised that she ended up in trouble.” Taxi drivers were sometime
s the only source I had time to talk to before being thrown on the set and turned into an expert on what the “people” thought. I knew the second I walked in the bureau that I would be live on television for endless hours answering questions to which I didn’t always know the answer.
Interest in the Diana story was so intense that my producers put me on the air every fifteen minutes for updates, keeping me on standby for hours at a time. At first we were looking for anything concrete to report: reactions from Buckingham Palace, feelings of the people who came to drape flowers all over the gate outside, anything. Only after many hours of frantic reporting did I have a chance to take a breath and think about Diana’s death. I had covered her closely for nearly a year, reporting when she went public about an affair, an eating disorder, her suicide attempts, her unhappiness in her marriage. The British media endlessly dissected her every utterance, some arguing that she was mentally unbalanced, while others found her openness refreshing.
Just about any woman who is plagued by low self-esteem, who worries about her weight, who has trouble with men, who tries to find herself at the gym or with psychic healers—any woman with everyday problems in the modern world—found a spokeswoman of sorts in Diana. She communicated an image of caring with which ordinary people could identify. She took her sons to McDonald’s and to amusement parks. She was into aromatherapy. She was a woman loved by many but who still felt alone. I felt like a soul sister.
I stood outside Buckingham Palace doing live shots all day when she died. Before the sun rose we had set up a satellite truck to broadcast indefinitely. When the first trickle of people started bringing their flowers and grief to the gates, we had no idea that so many would eventually come that they would bury the gate in a mountain of flowers. They were all kinds, the quintessentially reserved English old ladies, new Labour businessmen, mothers with children. It was as if all the repressed emotions of centuries erupted on the streets that week. Diana’s death was like a lightning rod for unresolved loss in this country. It was a chance for virtual grieving. All those who couldn’t cry for their own hurts and losses joined in this communal torrent of sorrow.
I often called my mother when I was desperate for background information, since she was often quicker than getting information from CNN’s library in Atlanta, which was hampered by the time difference. She is an expert on everything, with an innate predilection for accumulating knowledge. No matter how obscure the topic or location I called about, she always seemed to have something to tell me from her encyclopedic mind. Sometimes, being mortal, she puts the phone down to consult her Encyclopaedia Britannica, with me holding on in a hotel room in Ashkhabad or Tirana. Whatever she told me went from her mouth to ears around the world. When Diana died, it was my mother’s finest hour. It was the middle of the night when I called desperate for something to say about Westminster Abbey, a rumored site for the funeral. My mother, from her bed, listed the poets and noblemen buried there and rattled off other fascinating details about obscure relations and protocol. Her knowledge of the royal family was vast. And what she didn’t know, my stepfather, Tim, did.
My mother had remarried, this time to a man who had much in common with her. Tim, with his shaggy beard and curly gray hair, looks like Karl Marx and has socialist sensibilities to match. He is kindhearted and will do anything for anyone in need. One winter evening he arrived home barefoot, having given away his shoes to a homeless man. Another time he brought home an abandoned boy, John, whose drug-addict mother had left to live in the bus station in New York. John ended up living with Tim and my mother for a couple of years, along with his temperamental pet parrot, Iggy. Anyone who sat under the bird’s cage was bombarded with bird shit or cherry pits. Both my mother and Tim loved birds and wildflowers and would spend hours walking and pointing out all manner of weeds to each other. Tim would bring back offerings from the woods to her. I came home one holiday to find a dead mole tucked away in the freezer as though asleep among the ice-cream cartons and coffee tins; another time a baby fox was in deep-frozen slumber, and a wasp’s nest adorned the hallway. And, just like my mother, Tim is a voracious collector of facts. So with twenty-four-hour coverage of Diana, those two helped fill a lot of airtime on CNN.
Since my mother is British, she had her own opinions about Diana, and the least I could do, as a price for the instant reference library, was listen to her rant. She felt it inappropriate for Diana to have gallivanted in public, and to have aired the royal family’s linen in such an aggressive way. She was also appalled by the outpouring of emotion after Diana’s death. “I don’t even recognize the British anymore, wailing in the streets like that,” my mother said. She called it the “Oprah-ization” of the entire world. Americans were vulgar enough, with their feelings constantly on display, my mother felt, and now the British were becoming just as bad.
My mother disliked Diana for all the reasons I adored her. What I saw as an effort to know herself, my mother labeled self-indulgence. I thought baring her soul to her public improved her image. My mother branded it as weak and shameful, a kind of promiscuity of emotion. My mother is one of the most giving and caring people I know, doing anything for a complete stranger, rescuing the Bosnians or feeding the homeless. But, like many of her countrymen, she is more comfortable with other people’s pain than her own.
My mother’s disdain for emotion reflects her generation and culture. She was born late, to Victorian-era parents. My grandfather ran Belfast’s poorhouses, orphanages, and hospitals. He often took his young daughter on his inspections, so concern for the underprivileged was drummed into her psyche from an early age. Her elder brother, Brian, joined the navy during the Second World War. When his ship, which was bringing supplies to the Soviets in Murmansk, was temporarily believed to have sunk, it was not discussed in my mother’s family. Secrecy and tightly contained emotion were not just family traditions, they were part of the national character of the time.
On the day of Diana’s state funeral, a week after her death, I was outside Westminster Abbey with a cameraman, Todd, with whom I had worked for years in Russia and in London. He is one of the few people in television news who understands where to draw the line between capturing human emotion and tragedy and allowing people their privacy. He is sensitive to one of the hardest parts of our job, which is sticking the camera in the faces of people in pain. I was always uncomfortable with this aspect of my job, feeling like an intruder. Diana’s funeral was one of those rare moments when, as a journalist, I stopped observing, analyzing, and poking and instead got swept up in the moment. Todd put down his camera and I put away my notebook and together we wept with the bikers, punk rockers, old men, taxi drivers, and tourists who gathered in the streets. It felt good to share a glance or a hug or a tear with so many strangers who had let down their guard. It felt good to be part of the human race and not just an observer.
To me, Diana’s death was also a resounding reminder not to drift through life. I had this coveted job and glamorous career, meeting world leaders and history makers regularly. But I often felt empty at the end of a day. The price was getting too high. I would go home each night to my elegant London apartment full of treasures I had collected from around the world. Max was always dutifully waiting for me, and pleased to see me, but it wasn’t enough. I lay in bed at night, stroking his furry head, and wondered how I had ended up alone in my late thirties, with no family of my own. I wanted my own tribe, my own people. In Chechnya I saw that I had to get out of Russia to save my life. Now I knew I had to get out of reporting to save my soul.
The Orangemen
It was time to find a man and start a family. That phrase was becoming like a broken record in my head. But I found myself unable to quit. Every time I started to talk with one of my bosses about taking some time off, news would break somewhere else and I would be off on the road again. I complained to my friends about the burden, but the equal truth was that I was secretly relieved when news broke, because it diverted me from thinking about myself and my
dilemma.
Getting sent to Northern Ireland was a welcome distraction. When I went back to Belfast, my birthplace, I was most concerned about avoiding my mother’s indoctrination. Her identity as Ulster Protestant defines her to this day. Her home is full of Union Jacks and bulldogs and commemorative plates depicting the royal family. She hates the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York, especially the dyed green beer. When I was a child, on every St. Patrick’s Day, she defiantly put orange ribbons in my hair while all the other children at school, whether Jewish, Italian, or Irish, wore green. I recited to anyone who would listen how a Protestant king had defeated a Catholic king three hundred years ago, and the Protestants need to wear orange in protest of this Irish Catholic holiday. I repeated the stories like a robot to the other girls at school, and I was so absorbed by my mother’s prejudice that I actually felt contempt for the Catholic Irish-American children decked out in green and shamrocks. I felt betrayed if my close friends wore green on that day and didn’t take my side and wear orange. It made no difference that she lived in New Jersey; my mother felt unseen. She felt nobody understood her identity in this Kennedy-worshiping country. So I grew up hearing only one side of that story. It wasn’t her fault. People naturally tell their version of events. But it was another way that I learned about the roots of ethnic hatred in my own home.
When I went to Belfast as a reporter, I was easily accepted by Catholics and Protestants. Siobhan is a very common name in the Catholic community. Gerry Adams and his Sinn Fein party, the political wing of the IRA, welcomed me, assuming I was a sympathetic Irish-American Catholic. The Protestant Loyalists just needed to hear which street I was born on to assume I was one of theirs. The fact of the matter was that I was neither. I was some mixed-up half-Jew, half-Protestant who felt at home everywhere and nowhere and certainly didn’t belong to any tribe. I can feel linked to another person through the shared human experience of tragedy or beauty or kindness but rarely along some superficial accident of shared geography. I’m more likely to feel kinship to a Bushman touched by the beauty of a sunset than a fellow Northern Irishman burning tires on Guy Fawkes Day.
Flirting with Danger Page 13
