Diving into Glass

by Caro Llewellyn

  I also knew once he was gone and Jack was old enough, which he would be in a few years, there would be nothing else holding me in Australia. I began to hatch my plans. A year later, I was gone.

  Thirty-two

  Shortly after the funeral, I travelled to New York to invite a delegation of New Yorker writers to visit Australia as guests of the writers’ festival. It was on this trip – my father just dead, my marriage in tatters, and my heart tuned to a married man – that an inspirational greeting card changed my life.

  The message called out to me from a spinning display rack at the overcrowded Universal News & Magazine shop on Eighth Avenue, near Columbus Circle. The store sold thousands of magazines, seemingly all on display except for the more hardcore pornography, which a little notice said was available on request. ‘Who reads all these?’ I wondered, straining my head to make out the titles near the ceiling. A ladder with wheels had been hooked to a railing that ran along the top shelf.

  I wanted to look put together for my meeting the next day, so I wandered into the shop in search of a felt-tip pen and a Moleskine notebook. I was about to go to the counter to pay when I saw the greeting card.

  Written on a black background, the words ‘Leap and the net will appear’ spoke a truth different to the other motivational mumbo jumbo on that rack. Old ways won’t open new doors, dance like no one is watching, love like you’ve never been hurt, sing like no one can hear you, live like heaven is on earth.

  We take notice of what we want to hear. Leap and the net will appear. I simply had to have it. I added the card to my purchases and when I returned home to Sydney I stuck it to my refrigerator with a yellow NYC taxi magnet. A few days later, motivated by a final quick reassuring look at the greeting card, I called a meeting with my boss to tell her I’d succeeded in securing the New Yorker writers for the next festival – and gave a year’s notice on my wonderful job.

  ‘I’m moving to New York,’ I said once my boss had recovered from the shock and asked what I was doing next.

  ‘Wonderful! What’s your new position?’

  ‘I don’t have one.’

  ‘What do you mean you don’t have one?’

  ‘I don’t have a job yet.’

  ‘Okay …’ she said dubiously. ‘What about a green card?’

  ‘I don’t have one of those either.’ The plucky arrogance drained from my voice. Her questioning made me realise I had nothing in hand but a dream.

  My friends advised me against it. There was Jack. I had big responsibilities. I also had a perfect-fit, high-profile job and wonderful friends. There was plenty to keep me right where I was, but I wanted to leap and never questioned that the net would appear.

  I was born into restlessness; I learned from my father to keep my eyes set to the horizon, to plot a scheme for what was next. I didn’t understand the idea of contentment. I had to strive for more, push myself harder. Goals weren’t met simply for their own sake. I turned my back on my successes like they were cast-off lovers and went looking for the next, like a true addict.

  Sometimes my actions did look like those of a reckless addict, even to me – quitting university, flying to London with a one-way ticket, having a baby at twenty-three! This was not the first time I’d given up security and comfort for some risky big idea or fairytale dream. But usually I was successful. Doubt from others fuelled my commitment. The harder, the better.

  Three months after the festival finished, with Sydney Town Hall packed to hear the New Yorker writers talk about life at the magazine, the stars aligned. I was on a plane to New York for a job interview.

  Every convincing lie comes with a core of truth. It was true that I was looking for the next step professionally and that I wasn’t sure that was on offer in Australia. It was also true that, a decade earlier, when I went to New York with my best friend Sophie, I had declared, hugely hungover while waiting in line for bagels, ‘One day I have to live here.’

  And it was also true that I was very aware that the clock was ticking. There’s a use-by date on a woman reinventing herself from scratch in another country, and mine was fast approaching. At forty, I guessed I had one or two more years before my dream of living in the city that never sleeps would be well and truly out of reach. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t the same for men, but much in life isn’t.

  With those three things clear and true, my ruse was unshakable. But the carefully omitted fact was that it would bring me closer to the American writer, and I believed I could make him love me enough to leave his wife.

  Of course, that was not something I could share openly. Professionally, I couldn’t afford a reputation as a festival director who ran off with married writers. Nor did I want the story of my divorce to be that I had left my husband for another man.

  Whenever it came up, I said I had resigned and was planning to move to America because I was ready for the professional challenge of my life, to make a mark in the epicentre of the publishing world. Which was true, but not the whole truth.

  Even more than I wanted others to believe it, I wanted to convince myself. How could I justify leaving my life behind – leaving Jack – for anything other than professional reasons?

  I was ambitious. I had looked, but couldn’t see a clear career progression in Australia. Perhaps I would have realised my dream to live in New York anyway, but the American writer certainly put gas to my flame. We often fool ourselves into thinking we’re making a carefully considered choice by tallying the evidence that supports an already-made decision.

  That first night at dinner with the writer, I was only halfway through my entrée when I thought, ‘I’m in trouble.’ By the end of the meal, I knew my marriage was over. A week later, I was sleeping on my friend’s couch.

  Through my work I’d met and dined with any number of wonderful writers, but this one was a prize-fighter on the page. Over the course of the coming few days, in our time together, he told me such carefully and kindly observed stories about human frailty, his own included, that I often found myself holding back tears. He spoke in perfectly constructed sentences, usually with a coded message lying right under the surface. He was someone who warranted paying attention to.

  I felt like I was being read to and once we stopped talking, when it was just our heat and sweat and his breath in my ear, he was the first man from whom I held nothing back.

  Our initial time together was only a clutch of days, but it was what happened when he left that gripped me most. After he flew back to his home in America, all we had was our words and we held on tight through those, no matter the implausibility of our continued romance. I told him everything and he whispered back to me.

  I imagined being wrapped around him, which sent a shiver up my spine and made the hairs on my neck stand on end, all the while telling anyone who asked I needed a new challenge.

  Thirty-three

  PEN stands for poets, playwrights, editors, essayists and novelists. It’s the oldest human rights organisation in the world and defends freedom of expression. Its US membership included Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag and Toni Morrison, as well as almost every other US-based literary luminary. Under the presidency of Salman Rushdie, PEN America had established an international literary festival, called PEN World Voices.

  In a post 9/11 environment, the US was closing itself off from the rest of the world, looking inward when it really needed to look outward. Americans were not reading the works of foreign writers – less than 3 per cent of books published in the US are translations. Salman resolved that PEN should bring those important voices to the US. His thinking was that if Americans weren’t going to go out and read the world, then they would bring the world’s writers to America. The job interview I had was to become the director of this festival, in 2007 still only in its third year.

  Over the course of a week I had eleven hours of face-to-face interviews with staff and board members. We talked about books, writers, freedom of expression and how we could put the festival on the map. My final appointm
ent was with Salman himself at his home. I arrived early and walked around the block to kill time despite the almost 40-degree scorching heat. I felt nauseated, not so much from the temperature, which was sick-making, but from nerves. Finally, a perfectly planned few minutes early, I walked up the stoop and knocked on the front door of his brownstone.

  Salman greeted me warmly and showed me up the narrow staircase to the first floor, where we sat together on a large cushioned couch in his living room.

  ‘My inbox is clogged with emails from writers all over the world telling me to hire you,’ he said, laughing. ‘Every time I log on there’s someone else, somewhere in the world, singing your praises. I’m tempted to give you the job just to shut them all up so I can get on with my work.’

  ‘I paid them all, you know,’ I said, jokingly. But as the words came out of my mouth, I wished I could pull them back in. I knew I shouldn’t be fooling around when so much was at stake. But it was too late, I had no option but to continue with my folly. ‘Fifty bucks. That’s all it took.’

  ‘Ha, that’d be right!’ he exclaimed. ‘Writers! So easily bought.’ And that was it. I think he knew then that we’d get along, and we did.

  The evening before I was due to fly out of Sydney to begin my new life, Jack broke his hand. I was kneeling on the floor, cramming a jar of Vegemite into a sock to add to my suitcase, when he walked into my bedroom with his right hand raised, blackened and twice its usual size. He’d got into a fight and, rather than hit the person tormenting him, he punched the reinforced glass of a bus shelter.

  Jack was no fighter. He had never hit anything or anyone before. When he was three, being teased by a boy at day care, the teacher told me his solution was to gently but firmly lay the bully down and sit on him.

  We were in the emergency room for six hours. It looked like he would have to have surgery.

  Of course, I had considered Jack in my decision to get all this in motion. I’d tied myself in knots worrying about the right thing to do. I’d asked him over and over whether he was okay with me leaving and he’d say, ‘Of course. It’s your work, you’ve got to go.’

  But what choice did he have? What choice did I have?

  Despite my pleas to delay my arrival until after Jack’s HSC exams, PEN told me I had to start work at the office by the beginning of October or not at all. I had left it as long as I could and booked a flight that arrived on the Friday evening, the weekend before I started work.

  Carefully timed plans were put in place. My friend Tanya, who’d known Jack since he was born, agreed to look after him for the weeks before Becky was able to come and take over. Becky had been a teacher and had more patience than anyone I knew, so I thought she might actually be able to help Jack with his exams better than I could.

  Jack and I had never had serious conflict, but the past year had been a battle to get him to focus at school. One day, arguing about his homework, I threw a heavy candle at him. Thankfully he ducked, but we were both shaken. It was a violent act. For the first time in his life we were at odds and the confident parenting that had come so easily to me – even at twenty-three – seemed to have deserted me. I was completely at a loss.

  But the arrangements were put into place and it was agreed that he’d come join me after he’d completed his exams.

  To meet PEN’s deadline, everything had to happen fast. I had a month to secure a visa for an ‘alien of extraordinary ability’ – notoriously difficult to get – and begin work. I hadn’t had time to stop and really think. But as Jack and I waited in the emergency room for the results of his X-ray, sitting in the cold plastic seats with a tiny television blaring above our heads, the enormity of what I was about to do hit me like a baseball bat in the stomach. I sat on my hands so Jack wouldn’t see them shaking. I thought about how to call the whole thing off, cancel my flight and tell Salman and PEN they’d need to find someone else for the job.

  Eventually the doctor determined surgery wasn’t required. He wrapped Jack’s hand and forearm in gauze, slopped wet plaster of Paris over it, and forty-five minutes later, the cast set, we drove home. It was after midnight when I tucked Jack into bed, his arm resting on his Simpsons duvet cover. I stroked his hair and kissed him goodnight for the last time in six months.

  A few hours later Jack was standing on the footpath, dressed in his school uniform, waving me off with his good arm. My friend Peter was driving me to the airport, and as we pulled away from the kerb I watched Jack get smaller and smaller in the side mirror. Then we went around a bend in the road and he disappeared from view altogether. I put my head in my hands and could hardly believe what I was doing. I thought about telling Peter to turn the car around. But I didn’t.

  What I should have done was wonder what kind of job doesn’t allow a mother to see her kid through his exams. I knew the work could be done from anywhere. I didn’t need to be in the office in New York to start inviting writers to the festival. I knew what I was doing and how to do it. All I needed was a computer and the internet.

  A friend who worked at Qantas organised an upgrade on my ticket, so I was in business class from Sydney to New York, which was a blessing for more than just the extra leg room. I was a mess. Even with the additional luggage allowance in business class, at the check-in counter I had to jettison things from my suitcase into the trash.

  Suddenly I was one of those chaotic travellers I’d always derided, down on the floor to open their overstuffed cases with its privacies for all to see as they determined what they could discard. None of what I threw out mattered. I’d left my beautiful son behind; losing a few possessions was the least of it.

  I arrived in New York with the ephemera of my life in two large suitcases. Some of the rest of it was making its way across the sea in the hull of a large container ship. I felt ripped in half by two equal hands. On the one side I had left Jack, the one person who had focused and driven my life. But on the other, against no small odds, I had set this dream alight.

  When I was in town for the interviews, I met with a writer who mentioned that he and his wife were subletting a one-bedroom apartment in their building while renovations were being done on their own. They’d be leaving their temporary accommodation around the time I was due to arrive. Real estate is notoriously difficult to secure in New York, so the timing of this was seamless. When I got the job and they offered to help make the complicated arrangements to take over their lease, I jumped at it. It didn’t matter that I would move into the apartment sight unseen, I’d have my own place right away.

  From JFK airport I went straight to their freshly minted Upper West Side apartment on the thirteenth floor, where I was greeted with a bottle of French champagne. I could tell from their place that my new digs were going to be better than I could have dreamed. A few glasses of champagne later, I wheeled my suitcases into my beautiful new parquet-floor apartment, six flights down from theirs. The writer’s wife, Lisa, had prepared a blow-up mattress in the bedroom, towels in the bathroom, a couple of pots and pans, and enough crockery to get me started.

  I can’t say I wasn’t excited about all this. Since Jack would be following me once his exams were over, our separation seemed temporary and bearable. I stuck the ‘jump and the net will appear’ card to my new refrigerator in my new apartment in my new city and thought – all things considered – I’d made a magical leap.

  The next day I caught the subway to the Whole Foods at Columbus Circle. I had heard that Whole Foods stores were laid out according to the principles of feng shui, which I thought sounded like a joke, but, in fact, I was oddly calm as I took my place at the back of the long line. I’d walked through the supermarket twice. The first time filling a large cart with all of Jack’s favourite things, then, remembering it was only me, reversing back along the aisles, returning items to their shelves, swapping the big cart at the entrance for a small plastic basket instead.

  After clearing the check-out I made my way past the glittering stores of the Time Warner Center, where everything pr
omised luxury and prestige. I realised just how effective that feng shui had been when my arms started feeling like they were detaching from my shoulders from the weight of the brown paper shopping bags.

  As I waited for the subway in the bowels of Columbus Circle, I watched a busker dancing as though he was inside a child’s music box. He was a tall, elegant black man, with his face painted white with theatrical makeup. He wore a pair of loose black breeches with braces and a stiffly starched white shirt. He stood with his feet together on a block of smooth white formica just bigger on each side than his worn-down shoes.

  He twirled a thin baton between his fingers in time to the twinkle of the children’s nursery rhyme ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’, which played from a small boom box strapped to a portable trolley behind him. He spun and swayed with his eyes closed as people put dollar bills into the bowler hat on the ground in front of him.

  I was transfixed by his grace. He was such a sad and beautiful sight there on the subway platform, I let three trains go past. He swivelled around so smoothly on the soles of his shoes atop the formica block, I wondered if there were little wheels in them. I bent over to see, but there was no trickery. He deftly glided around on his tiny stage, flopping down and dancing back up again – a perfect doll in a music box.

  I had put down my shopping and watched him for about fifteen minutes, until I remembered my peas would be defrosting. I placed three singles in his hat and he swirled up, like a ballerina nailed to her spot inside the music box, and winked at me. I mouthed a soundless ‘thank you’ back, put my hands together in prayer, bowed in respect, and got on the wrong train.

  When I finally got home I put my groceries away, opened a bottle of wine, put my headphones in my ears, turned my iPod up loud and practised swivelling around seamlessly in one spot. I imagined the busker looking at me through a distant window, seeing me dance and then slowly realising that I was the woman from the platform, now trying to imitate his act. I couldn’t get the perfect glide of his feet and instead rotated with little shuffles, but I just about managed his fall from the waist. I lurched my torso up again with a mechanical jerk before making another slow spin on my heels.