We went back out and that did it. By the time we were done I’d gotten two solid rides, swooping along the wave toward the shore, standing on the Big Green Monster long enough to look up and see the line of oceanfront homes getting closer as I went. I was elated.
I was also exhausted. “I’m not sure I have the strength to get this wetsuit off,” I told Kevin, laughing as we walked up the beach.
“That’s how you want to feel,” he said. “You never want to leave a session looking back at the ocean.”
Words to live by. We got to the neoprene pile, and as Kevin began packing up, I slowly pulled off the wetsuit, noticing that even though it was heavy with water, it felt more pliant than when I’d put it on. Shivering in the damp air, I wrapped my towel around me and headed up to the boardwalk, figuring it would be easier to change out of my bikini on the benches, their wood warped and dark-green paint blistered by the elements. I brushed the sand from my feet and dried off as best I could—which is to say not well—and then, loosely swathed in the towel, pulled off my bathing suit and pulled my underwear and clothing over my moist, grudging flesh, imagining that I was inadvertently giving the good people of Arverne a late-morning show with the occasional flash of boob or butt cheek. Finally decent, I put on my socks and shoes, feeling the grind of sand granules between my toes, packed up my bag, and made my way back to the A train.
As we clattered through Queens, I felt a soreness settling into my body that I could tell wasn’t from any kind of damage. Instead it was the hard-won, righteous soreness from going all-out chasing after something that I’d decided, entirely on my own, I wanted to do. I was proud of myself for not chickening out, for not, as usual, letting the fear of failure stop me.
The train headed back into Brooklyn, shaking, rattling, and rolling through the tunnels, speeding past the tile-clad stations named for some of the city’s early leaders and landowners, and I clung to that feeling even as I sensed it slipping away. I had made some progress during the lesson—not much, but some. I was seeing just how big an effort surfing would require, and I was trying not to get disheartened. We pulled into Nostrand Avenue, and I slowly stood up from my seat and walked to the platform. As I climbed the stairs into the still-gray afternoon, feeling the strain in every overtaxed muscle, tendon, ligament, and joint, I realized that if I wanted to surf, I would need to unlearn my father’s lesson: failure would have to be an option—again, and again, and again.
3
Run Aground
September 2010
A few weeks later, just over the cusp into fall, I was about to get another shot at improving my surfing. A friend who’d been part of the old life in Brooklyn that had so painfully slipped from my grasp was getting married over the weekend at the family estate of his bride-to-be in East Hampton, so I’d booked another surf lesson for the day after the wedding in Montauk, where I’d be staying. I’d taken Friday off from work so I could drive out early with another friend, Jen—my original connection to the groom, with whom she’d grown up in New England—and have a little time to chill before heading out for drinks with the other early arrivals and folks coming from the rehearsal dinner.
In my bedroom Thursday night, I stared at the fancy clothes strewn across my bed, contemplating what to choose for the wedding. I’d had few recent opportunities to wear any of them—the swingy featherweight black silk shift, the shimmery champagne-colored number you could wrap in several ways, the beaded, sugary pink dupioni minidress I’d bought at a vintage shop in college, which still fit—and I was full of mixed emotions. I was excited to go surfing again, happy for the bride and groom, and looking forward to reconnecting with Jen, whom I’d gotten to know a decade earlier when she was the press secretary for a public advocate candidate in New York City and I was a baby political reporter at the New York Times covering the race. But I was also a little mournful, yearning for the robust, built-in social life I’d had when I was part of a couple.
When Jen and I first met, I was less than a year into trying to transform myself professionally from being a magazine editor tied to an office desk to being a reporter who spent her time out in the world. I wanted to gather and tell stories myself rather than midwife other people’s explorations—but I also wanted to wrap my work life more easily around Eric’s, since he was hell-bent on a career that involved foreign travel and potentially relocation.
I was lucky enough to get the chance to make that transformation at the Times, but it was such an intense, public undertaking that I was terrified I might not be able to pull it off. Both older and less experienced than most of my reporting colleagues, I felt like I was starting out all over again, tossing aside the reputation I’d built up over the years as an editor. I knew I’d never recover from the humiliation if I wasn’t successful—I couldn’t imagine continuing to work at the Times wearing the scarlet F of failure—so I threw myself at the job with everything I had. As a result, I was often wrapped up in work, overwhelmed with stress, and in the throes of a freak-out over how to approach strangers on the street, write a story in forty-five minutes or less, and handle the relentless intrusions of my editors, known simply as the Desk. At the same time, Eric had become the foreign policy director at Bill Clinton’s post-presidential foundation, a dream job after years of toiling away at a series of small international nonprofits, but one that kept him overseas much of the time and practically sucked him inside his BlackBerry when he came home.
I sensed yet couldn’t face that something between us was withering, that there was an ineffable emotional connection that we weren’t tending. But as we floated atop the Brooklyn housing bubble, trading one beautiful brownstone apartment for another, it all looked so right that I kept convincing myself I could make it be right, that we would find a way back to the closeness and intimacy we’d once had. Eric seemed committed to us, too, and after ten years of dating, in the fall of 2002, we finally wed.
Not long after, our real estate machinations allowed us to buy a brick townhouse in Carroll Gardens, the culmination of a dream of gracious living I’d had since childhood. The block was relatively charmless—it was nearly barren of trees and dead-ended in an oil depot that sat on a polluted and moldering canal—but inside, the house was lovely. It had hundred-year-old floors the color of maple syrup, white stone mantels, pressed-tin ceilings, and a big garden out back. Living there was to be the beginning of a homier life together. It was a place we could fix up, and one where maybe we could start a family. One night, over wine in the front parlor, which we hadn’t yet figured out how to use, much less decorate, we decided I should go off the pill and let nature take its course.
I’d hit the jackpot, I thought. I had somehow landed a handsome, charming husband who liked the same things I did—a garden filled with vegetables and flowers, vintage-modern furnishings, high-end food and wine—and wanted to stay with me forever. I’d never need to date again, I crowed to myself, to go out there in search of a man who’d actually be attracted by my nerdy, gawky ways.
We spent weekends in the suburbs or Manhattan, prowling for furnishings and kitchen notions, or out in the garden, hacking away at misplaced juniper bushes and awkward trees, replacing them with roses and vegetable beds. Jen, a tiny, whip-smart, hilarious brunette, was part of that, too. She and I had become fast friends during that 2001 campaign and later neighbors when she moved in with a boyfriend around the corner from Eric and me. We saw them regularly, out in the neighborhood or at our place or theirs, often with a coterie of the interesting and connected literary, political, and nonprofit folk who populated the area.