by Dani Shapiro
In a life made up of fortune and its flip side, M. and I have never had a plan. We’ve made it up as we’ve gone along, and for the most part, we’ve made it work. But what if it stops working? What if we run into a wall too high to scale? What if life throws something at us that we can’t solve with the sheer force of our wits and wills? The great adventures and unexpected joys have outweighed the sleepless nights—fortunately. Happy accidents, I’ve called them. My emphasis—always—on happy.
—
Nearly twenty years ago—at work on my first memoir—I packed all my journals into a box and brought them with me to an artists’ colony where I had been granted a fellowship to spend the month of August. My intention was to reread the journals in chronological order. My hope was to jog my memory, or perhaps even capture something of the voice of my younger self.
That first morning, I climbed upstairs with my coffee, settled myself at my desk, and opened the red-cloth-covered journal decorated with the little white flowers. The rest of the journals were piled by my side. My room was large and ornate, with mullioned windows, built-in bookcases, and a fainting couch upholstered in faded velvet.
My work was cut out for me. I began to read as the early-morning light crept across the room, dust motes like translucent pillars in the air. I’m not sure how far into that first journal I read that morning. The next thing I knew, it was early afternoon and I was on the fainting couch. Hours had gone by. The journal was on the floor. I had entered some sort of fugue state that came upon me like a sudden fever. The journals—I understood at once—were dangerous. If I read further, I might never write the memoir. I had no sympathy for the girl I once was. She was boy-crazy, insipid, ridiculous. I was certain she didn’t deserve a book. I didn’t want to capture her voice. I packed the whole lot of them back in the box, taped it shut, and hauled it down to my car. I pushed her as far away from me as possible.
—
But now she’s back—she won’t leave me alone. Twenty years. The red-cloth-covered journal has yielded its tarnished treasures. The next in order—and the last handwritten one—is improbably large. An unwieldy square shape with a hard spine, it is designed by someone named Cinzia Ruggeri and has an epigraph written in Italian: Questa agenda e l’espressione di una grande ambizione. This journal is the expression of a grand ambition. And indeed, it seems to be. Each page is artfully illustrated: a bird, a spatter of blood, a key, a broken heart. It opens with a line drawing of a Roman column.
Hangover to start 1986. Last night, Château Margaux ’75 and Cristal at midnight. Like a scene from a Michelob commercial. Why are these things never that way when we are living them? Resolutions? Millions, all boring. Spent the day wondering why I’m depressed, determined that this year will be different.
That first page of the elaborate Italian diary ends with a quote that I must have meticulously transcribed from the diary of Anaïs Nin: “Oh how many pleasures, of what a sweet life she has deprived us, I said to myself, by reason of this savage obstinacy to deny her inclination.”
—
Five weeks after I wrote those words—on a snowy February night—my father passed out at the wheel as he drove with my mother on a wide stretch of New Jersey highway. Their car barreled across the divider into oncoming traffic and made three entire solitary loops before crashing into a concrete embankment. By the time they were pried from the wreckage, both were near death. On the other side of the country—deep in the practice of my savage obstinacy—I slept through the night as my parents were raced to the nearest hospital. It was morning before my phone rang. Twenty-four hours before I was able to get a flight home in the blizzard. Two weeks before my father died. It was not the education I wanted, but it’s the one I got.
—
A student at a weekend workshop gives me a book. He tells me it practically fell into his hands earlier that day in a used bookstore in town, and he wanted me to have it. I leaf through it and discover an underlined passage: “Rabbi Zusya said, ‘In the coming world, they will not ask me: “Why were you not Moses?” They will ask me: “Why were you not Zusya?” ’ ”
—
In cleaning out my office one afternoon, I discover a dusty folder that contains M.’s report cards from grade school through graduate school that my in-laws must have sent home with us after a visit. Teacher after teacher expresses profound disappointment, even anger, at his lack of interest and performance.
M. has been an outsider most of the time in this course. I’m not sure he’s done much of the reading.
M.’s daily work has been very poor. He has frequently not done his homework.
M.’s writing is not entirely adequate for his age. Organizing his thoughts to write a story is apparently quite hard for him.
He is reluctant to express himself both orally and in writing—but I am hopeful that he will change as he gets older.
I leaf through the tissue-thin, typewritten reports, feeling concern for this boy who I don’t yet know or love. I’m afraid to read on, as if I don’t know what will happen next. But then the folder—by his senior year in college—begins to tell another story:
M. was one of the most intellectually gifted of the participants in class. He was generous with his thoughts and put his ideas on the line. M. has writing ability and a keen sense of humor. He led a discussion of The Brothers Karamazov and held fast for the best in Ivan Karamazov and the intellect against the spiritualists and Dostoyevsky.
What happened? And when—and why? Was the man evident in the child? How did that disaffected and underdeveloped boy become M.? Perhaps my future husband was just slumbering, waiting to be woken up by an explosion. I picture the two of us—M. and me—each blind to our own potential selves, a generation and several states, even continents, apart. Twin messes. Each of us shocked into adulthood.
—
At the end of the first evening at a large retreat, an old man approaches as I’m packing up my books and papers for the night. He looks at me with such warmth and love. Startled, I glance down at his name tag. I raise a hand to my mouth, then stand and hug him hard, wordlessly. He had been my first piano teacher.
“I read a book review of yours in the Times,” he tells me. “Which led me to read all of your work. I had to come see you.”
I was perhaps in second grade when I first began to take lessons from him. My mother would drive me to his studio, where I would diligently perform my scales and arpeggios as he paced the room. He was a serious pianist and expected commitment from his students. He gave me music before I found words. For a while, I lived to please him. As my abilities grew, I secretly taught myself a Mozart sonata considerably beyond my reach and surprised him one day by sitting at the piano and playing the first movement. The light in his eyes! The sense that I had accomplished something! What year did I stop practicing? Fourteen? Fifteen?
He has traveled hundreds of miles to see me. He tells me of the loss of one of his adult children, tears standing still in his eyes. What’s left? he wonders aloud. What’s left? He asks the question as if he believes I may know the answer. At first, I feel a wave of fear. What do I know? What can I possibly offer this man who saved me every Wednesday afternoon of my childhood? “My life has accumulated behind my own back while I was living it, like money in the bank, and I am receiving its accruement,” writes the artist Anne Truitt in Turn, one of her published journals. I fight back my own tears as the first measures of Mozart’s Sonata No. 11 in A Major begin to play in my head. Be who you needed when you were younger. He reaches out a trembling hand, and I take it.
—
A group of us are on a friend’s pontoon for an annual floating party during which their pontoon hooks up with another friend’s pontoon in the middle of a lake. It’s the golden hour, just before sunset. Prosecco is being poured—or tequila—take your pick. In this soft, summer light, everyone on the boat is as beautiful as they will ever be. It is impossible not to feel the good fortune of being here at this moment. The boat gently
rocks. The hills surrounding the lake are glowing.
This friend—one of my nearest and dearest—has just bought a home on the lake on property that is distinguished by a long, private stretch of beach. As her husband steers the pontoon within view of the property, she points it out to me.
“Our grandchildren will play together on that beach,” she says.
If I squint, I can see them. Three, four, five of them—our grandchildren—running in the sand, crouched down with buckets, collecting pebbles at the water’s lapping edge. She has the vision of it, I realize. She and her husband imagined that future when they decided on the house. Their kids are still in high school, but they are preparing for a time down the road—a time that will be here before we know it.
I look across the boat at M. He’s wearing a blue button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His white hair is whipping in the breeze off the lake, and he has on a pair of vintage Persols he once told me had been swiped from a dead Somali warlord.
Will we ever think much beyond tomorrow? Our lives are lived in increments of days, weeks, months—certainly not decades. What’s on our calendars between now and Christmas? Has the check shown up at the post office? When will I finish my book? Is the famous comedian losing interest? Will the television pilot get picked up? Does M. need to make a trip to L.A. to show his face?
I cannot envision our old age. I wouldn’t dare even hazard a guess. I think of couples we know who have been together for forty, fifty, sixty years. One such couple travels the world to attend performances of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Another couple goes to just about every Off-Broadway show: their third thing. I wonder whether M. and I will have the luxury of a third thing—a passion beyond our work and our boy. “I trim myself to the storm of time,” Emerson wrote in “Terminus,” a midlife poem in which he reflected on aging.
Our world will narrow as the storm of time washes over us. It will bleach us, expose our knots, whittle us down like old driftwood. It is this narrowing—not uncertainty—which is inevitable. The narrowing will not happen today, nor tomorrow. Not this year, nor next. Not this decade, nor—perhaps—the one after. There is luck involved, of course. But not only luck.
The pontoon continues to glide past the beach, leaving behind our future grandchildren and their small, curved backs as they forage for treasure. I want to call out to them. I wish I knew their names. I want to let them know that I intend to be on that beach, watching them from a spot in the shade.
—
When my father regained consciousness after their car crash, he had only one question: Where is my wife? Sometimes he recognized me or my half sister. Other times, he threw his bedclothes across the room, exposing himself. He yelled at nurses and orderlies. Though he had broken no bones in the accident—it seemed he’d had a stroke at the wheel—he was completely altered, a stranger. Where is my wife?
My parents were on different floors of the hospital. The doctors expressed grave concern that seeing my physically shattered mother might be too much of a shock to my terribly confused father. So we waited. Each day I alternated between my parents’ bedsides. My mother asked about my father, too, but only questions to which there were answers she could bear. He’s going to be fine, she would say, chin jutting determinedly beneath her fractured cheekbones and nose. We’re both going to be fine. You’ll see.
After a week, the doctors gave me permission to wheel my father down to my mother’s room. When I let her know he’d be coming, she asked for a mirror for the first time since the accident. She looked at her ravaged face without saying a word. And then she put on lipstick.
I brought my father to her. In the elevator, he pressed every button within reach. He clutched a Polaroid I had taken of her so he could be prepared for the extent of her injuries. Where is my wife? I moved his wheelchair right up to the rail of her bed. Her eyes were huge as she looked at him.
Tears streamed down his face as he grabbed her hand.
“We’re fucked,” he cried.
It was a word I had never heard him say.
“No, Paul. Everything’s going to be fine.”
“We’re fucked,” he cried again and again.
—
On the nineteenth anniversary of the night we met, I’m upstairs in my office when M. starts to send me e-mails from his office downstairs containing scanned black-and-white photos taken at our wedding. First scan. Second scan. Third scan. The photos have been in a box for all these years.
In the first, we are under the chuppah. The smallest bit of fringe from my father’s tallis is visible above us, and the rabbi’s hands, holding open a prayer book, can be seen in a corner of the image. I am holding a goblet of wine to M.’s lips. The second photo looks like it was snapped late in the evening. M. is no longer wearing his jacket, and my hair has come loose from its updo. We’re both looking away from the camera, and my guess is that we’re cutting the cake.
Then another image comes through. This one M. has labeled Private Moment in the subject line. I open it and am transported back to the minutes before our wedding. We’re upstairs at the small inn, where a handful of guests—a total of eighteen—are gathering below. The rabbi has asked us to write each other a letter, and M. has just given his to me. I am looking down at it—either taking it out of the envelope, or returning it, and my face is full of simple joy. M. leans toward me with his whole being. He’s saying something. What is he saying? What did we write?
I forage through my entire office looking for those letters, which I recall putting together in a single envelope for safekeeping. I still have the dried flowers from my wedding bouquet in a vase on top of a bookcase. The white linen napkin containing the shards of broken glass from the end of our ceremony is tied with a ribbon and tucked into a drawer in our dining room cupboard. Our ketubah—our Hebrew wedding vows—is framed and hangs in the hall outside our bedroom.
I walk downstairs and find M. sitting in front of a scanner, our wedding photos spread across his desk.
“I’m making a wedding album,” he says. Nineteen years.
“Do you have any idea where those letters are?” I ask. “The ones in the photo?”
“You have them,” M. says.
I don’t tell M. that I can’t find the letters. Instead, I keep rooting through drawers and closets. I find the eulogy I wrote for my mother; Jacob’s old report cards; my father’s wallet. I find a stack of envelopes containing resolutions that M., Jacob, and I have written for the past six New Year’s Eves. Not much has changed: Jacob wants to be taller than his dad. M. is intent on weighing one hundred and seventy-five pounds again. I want to live more fully in the moment.
I find notes from a phone session with a psychic referred to me by my literary agent during a time when I was scrambling and one of M.’s projects was falling apart: You need a hug. No certainty. Gonna settle down. The truth is, you’re scared. Caught up in what you think should happen. Everybody needs to take a breather. Wondering what is next?
And finally, a note I made during a long conversation with my dear friend the Buddhist teacher who has been married sixty years: The future—even minutes from now—is an actuarial guess.
—
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror,” Rilke wrote. Nearly a century later, the poet Elizabeth Alexander explores this in the wake of her husband Ficre’s sudden death. “When we met those many years ago, I let everything happen to me, and it was beauty. Along the road, more beauty, and fear and struggle, and work, and learning, and joy. I could not have kept Ficre’s death from happening, and from happening to us. It happened; it is a part of who we are; it is our beauty and our terror. We must be gleaners from what life has set before us.”
A two-hour drive to Saint Rémy, where we then spent an hour finding the hotel. M. refused to ask directions. We had been fifty yards from the hotel the whole time. We got a room in a renovated carriage house—really renovated—and switching rooms became too difficult. We had a lovely time together but, we
ll, the place bugged me. That night we went into town and had dinner at Bistrot des Alpilles, where there was an American family of four. I became transfixed by them. Father, mother, brother, sister? Or boyfriend, girlfriend? Or was the mother really the stepmother? I wanted to know. They were staying at our hotel—but still, I never found out. I was struck by how well they all got along.
—
M. seems very tired. Granted, the dogs wake him up early—sometimes far too early. Yesterday, before dawn, the big fluffy white one took off after a deer in the darkness and M. had to chase him all the way down our driveway. The upside, he told me later, was that the sunrise was magnificent. Fortunately, unfortunately.
But I wonder if more than sleep deprivation is going on. His Boston accent has been rising up within him, as if some earlier version of himself is gaining ground. As if—exhausted, depleted, disappointed—he might just let the tsunami of time wash over him and carry him away. Are you here? I sometimes want to take him by the shoulders and shake him until he wakes up and I see the light in his eyes. You can’t do this. You can’t leave me alone.
It’s not that I’m afraid that he’ll die. It’s not that I’m worried—as I know he is—that he will inherit the Alzheimer’s that runs through his mother’s side of the family. It’s that I’m frightened that he will vanish in plain sight. That he will lose hope. That his hands will grow too stiff and heavy to roll the dice once more. The man I met twenty years ago had already lived more than one life, and he carried a world of pain inside him. Somalia, Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan. The battles, explosions, famines, deaths. The line of fire—and all the reasons he put himself in the line of fire.
