The cab screeched away, and we walked back to the train station. We sang “The Way We Were” off-key and imagined Redford with his blue, sparkly eyes and angled jaw, flashing teeth and dropping anecdotes on the Tonight show . Well, Johnny, there was a funny time with these girls once, in New York…. It didn’t occur to us that he had thousands of these stories, that this one would be instantly forgotten.
Years later I tried to remember that moment when a man came to life from a poster in my stairwell and what it aroused in me. I attached to him all the utopian illusions of my sixteen-year-old self about boys, fame, love. I tried to remember what that afternoon was about. The rush of power we felt that day when we willed a thing to happen and it did.
I remembered how once I felt a giddy sense of invincibility that has gone almost unmatched in the years since that afternoon with my two girlfriends, skipping carelessly through the city. I tried to remember Redford and that it wasn’t personal. We weren’t chasing the man, after all, but the poster, a caricature. A caramelized, glittery concoction of Jeremiah Johnson and Bob Woodward and Gatsby and Sundance. Of horses and beaches and Katharine Ross and white teeth. Of windless days of sun shining on an ageless face. We knew him intimately without ever speaking a word to him.
This was my first glimpse of mania—of crazy, blind desire for a stranger with a well-known face. A stranger who unwittingly represents something for the adorer, entirely personal and unpredictable. A stranger who is so completely formed in the minds of others that one wrong move, a sentence spoken or not spoken, an expression or gesture, can excite extreme emotion.
It was my first glimpse of losing yourself and hanging every heightened emotion on another human being’s shoulders. A human being in the sense that he walks standing up. In every other regard not human, but godlike, able to clear a New York sidewalk simply by stepping on it.
I’d like to think I had a nagging sense of embarrassment that day, that somewhere before the train back to Suffern I realized how silly it was to chase after a stranger like that, a man with his own life, trying to get home after work. I’d like to think I felt bad about it. It seemed so harmless, three teenagers acting silly. But then years later I was on the other side, going to the opening of the ballet. I went out with John sometimes before he and Carolyn were married, so she wouldn’t have to. There were rows of photographers facing us, walking backward and shouting out, “John, this way. John, over here.”
Photo assassins, I called them. They tried to be familiar, yelling out things they thought they knew about him. “Hey, John. Who’s the girl? Hey, Sunshine, over here! Look over here. What’s your name?” All against a loud backdrop of rapid-fire camera clicks.
I suppose it’s not acceptable to protest the travails of fame, even when it’s unsought. I witnessed it from the sidelines. You have to remove yourself to stand in the middle of it, smiling.
When I was dating Anthony but before many people knew, I had dinner with Linda and Maria. We were catching up—we were all in different lives, and by then a year or two might go by between dinners. Linda brought up Redford, and we laughed. “Maria and I went to Hyannis last summer, to see if we could find John Kennedy,” Linda said. They giggled a little, exchanged sheepish looks, because we were older now. They didn’t know about Anthony, that I was dating John’s cousin, and I didn’t tell them that night. “I thought maybe we’d get lucky again,” Linda said with a laugh. I laughed, too, nervously.
It hadn’t occurred to me what it might be like from Redford’s view, to be inside the cab.
8
After the summer of ’99, the summer they all died, I took a Walk-man with me everywhere. I read the Philosophers in 90 Minutes series, and I discovered Mary Cantwell. She wrote Manhattan, When I Was Young, and I don’t think there’s a better love story or tragedy about the city anywhere. I found it when I was living in other people’s houses when I was afraid to go home to an empty apartment. I marked it up and took it with me, trading Cantwell’s thoughts for mine, tracing her journey from Bristol, the small town on the coast of Rhode Island where she grew up, to her magazine career in New York in the fifties.
I took her on my long walks. I went to her places. Her 21 Perry Street, her 232 Hope Street. These are my 969 Park, my Madison Hill Road. Like me, she seems always misplaced, running away, then looking behind her. We’d be a terrible pair, the two of us, both looking for a thread to follow, both grabbing the loose ends. She, too, is escaping.
I walked along Perry Street one morning looking for the most secret of all the Village’s secret gardens, which Cantwell said was between West Eleventh Street and Perry. When she lived here in 1962, you could get a key to the garden only if you were renting one of the houses from St. John’s Church. I was thinking of her apartment, with the concrete urn and Paul McCobb couches, looking for the garden, when I came abruptly upon Sant Ambroeus restaurant on the corner of West Fourth.
I hadn’t been to Sant Ambroeus since the night before Anthony died. We ordered takeout, and I left him alone to pick it up, pasta pomodoro and a tricolor salad with parmesan.
It was the same place, but our Sant Ambroeus wasn’t here; it was on Madison Avenue, and it was old and well-mannered, with white-satin walls and fake geraniums. The coffin, we used to call it, because of the puffy satin walls, the waiters solemn in jackets. It was our place. Now I stumbled across it in its new downtown location, cheery with large windows, the waiters in pink button-down shirts. The geraniums were still here, but not fake. It was a strange feeling, the past reshuffled, memories rearranged.
When I think of Cantwell’s Bristol, I think of Suffern. I think of a butterfly flapping its wings in a jungle in Brazil and creating an earthquake on the other side of the world. I think of what might not have happened if I’d stayed there. When I think of Suffern, I think of longing for something else. I think of Chris Nucci sitting on the hurdy-gurdy in Kingston, after I have just started an internship at ABC, asking, “Who do you think you are, Barbara Walters?” The question was rhetorical and wrapped in a sneer that suggested a girl from Suffern had no business being there. I was embarrassed but I thought he was probably right. Who do you think you are?
Suffern was a fenced-in, cheerful town, where not much happened, and a lot of people were happy with that. I never was. By the time I was in high school, I felt a sort of low-grade panic about my future and a gnawing embarrassment about my past. I was at an age at which I thought I should have a picture of an adult life in my mind. I longed to see the world on the other side of the fence, my nose pressed up against the town limits sign.
The city held, I thought, every adventure I hadn’t imagined. I thought it might be a place to reincarnate, to pull a whole new existence from the chatter of crowded streets. I fell in love with it when I was small and my mother used to take us on weekends to Tante’s apartment. It captivated me—the noise, the grit, the busy, crazy flow of it all.
I loved the same things then that I do now about the city—walking along Madison Avenue to Central Park, watching the lights in other buildings, soaking up energy from the people in Union Square. Listening to the buses out the front living room window of Tante’s apartment.
She lived in the same fifth-floor railroad flat for fifty years. Her apartment had a smell of old things—piles of yellowed newspapers, pictures and letters wrapped with rubber bands. Layers of paint so thick none of the doors closed shut. The musty odor of a life lived and then boxed up. It was a safe smell, comforting. It said, I have managed it all this long.
I could sit sometimes as a little girl on the stoop of her building and watch the people walk by with their stories. In bed at night, I listened to the steady, soothing sounds of the street. Everything was moving; something was going on behind all those doors stacked on top of one another.
I loved the procedure of those weekends—watching the tall brick apartment buildings that lined the drive from the George Washington Bridge to the East Side along the FDR snapping by through the car window, pressi
ng my face up against it, searching for the Seventy-First Street exit. My father let us out in front of the building and disappeared to find parking. The rest of us raced one another up the stairwell to the fifth floor, elbowing for the lead. Tante was always waiting for us in the hallway, peering over the rail as we ran up.
When Anthony and I moved into an apartment on Park after we were married, we got into a fight the first night. A silly fight that was really about things that were bigger than we wanted to talk about—marriage, a new mortgage on Park Avenue, cancer. I left angry at midnight to walk around the city, and I ended up on Seventy-First Street. I walked out because I wanted to feel the city on my skin. I still do that, walk around aimlessly at odd times of the night. The feel of the city comforts me.
You’re lucky if you have a place like Tante’s apartment, a place where you can remember the time when you were safe. I found myself in Tante’s foyer—the small room inside the front door before you get buzzed through the second—because I knew it would look the same as it did to me when I was five. Like two people watching the moon from opposite ends of the world. My five-year-old self and my thirty-one-year-old self staring at the same cracked pink-and-black tile, smelling the same mildew mixed with smells of old cooking.
There had been times in the city at Tante’s, or dancing in Linda’s basement, or fishing off the dock in Kingston, that I was excited with what life had given me. Times I felt perfectly complete. Then I left all of that. I went too far to go back, but I didn’t know that until I was grasping for something familiar and safe and there wasn’t anything for me to hold on to.
Discoveries
We used to drink it at the Radziwills’ when I stayed with them for the shooting. You should have seen those Polish princes putting it away…. Good blood, of course; aristocrats to the tips of their fingers…. Oh, how it brings back the old days! You people who never stayed with the Radziwills don’t know what living is. That was the grand style.
—W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, The Razor’s Edge
1
We create narratives for people, because they are simpler than the complexities of real lives. Everyone wants a good story, with a prince and a princess and a villain. When narratives change, it’s unsettling, because whether or not they’re our own, they help to define us, and we don’t want to let go of them. In my own narrative my husband was brave and I was selfless, the two of us dancing a tragic dance of love. Cancer was our villain. It wasn’t so simple, of course, but this was our story.
The hardest part of moving on is cleaning up and collecting the scattered bits and pieces, the noise, the buzzing in the head. Making decisions about what to keep, what to give away. I kept a box of odd things. Anthony’s belt still bent at the notch where he wore it, his bike shorts and a wrinkled T-shirt, his good-luck cuff links, a gold locket, and our wedding bands. I kept the framed photo of John and Carolyn’s dog, Friday, that she hung up at every hospital and a book of poems with John’s doodles in the margins. I kept the amethyst ring from Carolyn, a tape recording of her phone greeting, and the gold Cartier toe ring she surprised me with one night in the city our last summer together.
And then I packed them away one by one as they worked free from the memories attached to them.
Ultimately what remains is a story. In the end, it’s the only thing any of us really owns. Some people write to explain their lives, others to escape them. I write partly out of a compulsive habit to keep things organized. Partly because our story is all that remains of our lives together, and I was afraid of losing that, too. But this is a story of my life, not the story. Who could ever begin to tell it all?
I looked for God and meaning in all the usual places: the Bible, a yoga retreat, a mountaintop in Peru. I had my numbers and my cards read and went to see Beatrice the psychic, who said I’d meet my next husband in Europe and I’d be wearing a floral dress. But the closest I came to solace was in philosophy and in fiction: logic and truth. I was a permanent step behind and at constant risk of falling further. It took me a certain time, for instance, to understand what had happened to Anthony—that he was gone and I had lost a husband, that I was a widow—because I kept backing up to the phone call that night in the Vineyard. They’re not here yet and I was just wondering, are they there? With you?
Among the voices in my head was one that chided me for calling the coast guard, the air force, for saying it out loud. In my fantasies, if I hadn’t been so quick to think it, maybe we would have found them—John wandering the property, Carolyn asleep upstairs. She would be sheepish, I imagined, at putting me through all of that, and he would laugh it off. Oh, Carole, you’re so dramatic!
I kept only one eye on the details when Anthony died three weeks later, making sure I got them right—the music, the guest list, the ashes delivered by sunset. The other eye trailed behind, trying to figure out, still, how this had happened. Playing it over and over to see how it could be fixed.
There are days I feel as though the interesting part of my life has happened to me. The curtain has come down, the guests have gone home, and I am here alone, waiting for a ride. This life, the one I made for myself through varying amounts of design and chance, seems to have started and stopped between twenty-five and thirty-five. I moved to the city. I found a career. I married a handsome man. I met Carolyn.
2
Before I was a wife or a widow, I was a journalist, and that started in Annette Kriener’s office at ABC, on Sixty-Seventh and Columbus. Really it started ten months before on an ordinary January morning, watching TV in my parents’ kitchen. The space shuttle Challenger exploded, and an entire life occurred to me. From a thirteen-inch black-and-white television I saw a completely different world develop, beyond Suffern. I watched the coverage and became absorbed with the network news anchors, and I made up my mind. As far-fetched as it seemed, I wanted somehow to be there. I wanted to tell the story, not watch it.
I began going to job fairs for college students interested in media careers. There had been months of these fairs, to no avail, and this one, I’d decided, would be the last. I was tired and on my way out but handed a résumé to an older man from ABC-TV who said he would pass it on to the right person and who also wondered whether I’d like to get a drink sometime. I didn’t have the drink, but there was a phone call anyway, and then a moment in which I picked out what I thought a woman in New York would wear to an interview at ABC News. I chose a black-wool skirt and a matching peplum jacket, and I fixed a pearl pin to the collar, because I had seen Holly Hunter wear a pin like it in the movie Broadcast News. I pulled my hair back neatly in a ponytail. I took the Red and Tan Lines bus from Suffern to the Port Authority on Eighth Avenue, and then the subway to Sixty-Seventh Street and an elevator to the tenth floor.
The young girl in Broadcast News organized her life early in the direction of journalism, writing to pen pals, cultivating an almost disturbing obsession with language and facts. I wish I could say that as a child I sat each evening captivated by Walter Cronkite. That I hoarded newspapers in my room and collected the big stories in scrapbooks. I wish there were a defining moment in my childhood I could pick out—my family huddled around the TV watching the Watergate hearings, maybe. Instead I can instantly summon any given episode of M.A.S.H.
I am nervous in the subway in my black suit on my way to Annette Kriener. She is the budget controller for the news show 20/20 with Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs, and she has an enormous amount of power. She is rumored to have started and stopped careers with a phone call, and she is known as the dragon lady around the office, though I don’t find this out until I am working there. Had I been armed with this information, I might not have taken that subway ride, and this story would have worked out differently. I was quite successful, for some time, getting from point A to point B on what I didn’t know.
I have an interview that isn’t stunning or awful, but just good enough for her to offer a nonpaying internship. I snatch it up like the Golden Ticket. Forty hours a week filing video
tapes, making dubs, and taking phone messages for 20/20.
“Can you start Monday?” she asks. Though it’s more a directive than a question.
Oh, my God, I think, and answer, “Yes.”
“You can get an ID across the street at Forty-Seven West.” I am dismissed. Then, she adds as I walk out, “Oh, and we don’t really dress up that much around here.”
I have a moment of panic after I leave her office that repeats itself intermittently for the first two years I am here: the irrational certainty that when I get in the elevator Peter Jennings will be inside, that he’ll eye me suspiciously and then ask a question about a congressional race or what I think of the shift in Middle East policy. I will freeze and then blurt out something ridiculous; he’ll see I’m overdressed and know instantly I am a fraud. He’ll make one quick call from his office and I’ll be gone. The questions vary. Who are the nine Supreme Court justices? What did you think of Gorbachev’s speech to the UN? Where did you say you went to college? But this day the elevator is empty.
A woman in the security office tells me to stand in front of a white screen. She takes my picture, presses it into a plastic badge, and now I am Carole DiFalco, Intern, ABC News.
I’m a third-year English major at Hunter College, living at home with $300 in the bank, student loans about to come due, credit card bills, and a car payment for a brand-new Datsun. I sell the car right away and buy an old Toyota from my new boss, Mike Drucasian, for $150. It is rusted, and the driver’s seat doesn’t have a back, so he rigs up a wood brace with a seat cushion. I have to open the door with a screwdriver, but the engine runs well enough to get me to and from the city. I have a copy of How to Talk with Practically Anybody About Practically Anything, by Barbara Walters. This is what I’m equipped with to make my way through ABC.
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