In fits and starts—and with the help of regular therapy sessions—I eventually did begin participating in my life again. I started dreaming of an escape in the form of a John S. Knight fellowship at Stanford, which at that time awarded journalists an academic year to study whatever they wanted, and began laying the groundwork with my editors to apply. By the spring I’d begun to feel stable enough to start sharing my ordeal with friends. One day I stood outside City Hall—I was by then the bureau chief in charge of covering the mayor—looking south at the swaying grasses, sprightly flowers, and spray of the park’s fountain sparkling in the sunlight, with a BlackBerry stuck to my ear, and told Jen how Eric and I had let our relationship fray and were divorcing. She listened, asked probing yet sensitive questions, and gave me sympathy and comfort. Conversation stopped for a moment and I heard a sharp intake of breath. “So,” she said, “would now be a bad time to ask you to be one of my chuppah holders?”
I burst out laughing. Of course it was, and yet it wasn’t. I loved Jen, and since she was genuinely happy to be marrying the man who seemed like the right guy to settle down with, I was happy for her. And miserable though I felt, I was thrilled she wanted me to be part of the inner circle of her future.
At Jen’s wedding reception, on a historic farm in Massachusetts, I found myself standing in the dark near a stone fountain with Ben, a friend I’d met through Jen who also lived in Brooklyn. I’d always enjoyed talking with him, but we’d both been married—happily, I wrongly presumed in both cases—and then suddenly, at the wedding, we weren’t.
That night, as I looked up at him in the hazy nimbus of candles and starlight, I noticed how lean and firm he was, the fineness of his features, how his straight light-brown hair swooped down over his brow. The deep, satisfying rumble of his laugh. I could feel a kind of electric nervousness between us, and I had the distinct impression that something could happen that night. But he had to get going, he said, to make the drive back to Boston, where he was staying.
Nothing happened for almost a year, during which I’d see him from time to time at some Brooklyn gathering or other. But after one of them, when we’d run into each other at a book reading and then headed out with a group for dinner, he emailed, suggesting we have a drink. Is this a date? I wondered as I walked from my house to the bar, leaves and branches of the stately oaks and London plane trees gently rustling overhead. My god, he’s cute, I remember thinking as I looked across the cramped little wood table at him. We spent most of the time dissecting our failed relationships, but it wasn’t obvious to me that it was indeed a date until he told me about a recent medical emergency when doctors had had to replace a tube he’d had inserted during college to relieve pressure from a benign tumor near his brain stem.
“So you have—wait, is it a stent or a shunt?” I asked him. “My father had to have one of those put into his heart to keep a valve or something open.”
“That’s a stent,” he said, chuckling. “I have a shunt.”
“And it goes from your brain to where, exactly?”
“Here, I’ll show you,” he said, reaching across the table to grab my hand and trace the tube, surprisingly thick, that ran beneath his skin from his head down into his neck and chest. I was simultaneously taken aback and sucked in by the sudden intimacy of it—here, finally, was man-flesh beneath my fingertips—but I was also so long out of the dating game that I just didn’t know how to respond.
Luckily, I didn’t need to. He walked me home, and in front of my stoop in the sodium glow of the streetlights, he kissed me. It was chaste as kisses go, but so soft, tender, and urgent I almost swooned.
Over the next few weeks we had a number of great dates and progressively steamy make-out sessions. When we eventually did have sex, it was fine—Ben certainly did his part to enhance the proceedings—but I just couldn’t stay inside myself long enough to focus and really enjoy it. It was the first time I’d even been naked with someone other than Eric since my twenties, and it was almost as if I were Annie Hall in bed, persuaded to skip her customary precoital joint—sitting outside my own body and watching the proceedings, thinking, Well, now, fancy that.
Nothing much ever came of our entanglement. We liked each other, sure, but I had gotten the fellowship and was about to head off to California for the better part of a year, which put a damper on things. We stayed friendly after, but the romance was just not to be.
* * *
Two years later Jen was divorced just like I was and had moved to Boston. I, too, had given up my lingering claims on the neighborhood we’d shared in Brooklyn and had sold the townhouse. She was flying into JFK for the East Hampton wedding and staying with me in Montauk. Friday morning, as I sat at the curb of a dingy arrival area at the airport, worrying over a Google Map printout of the maze of onramps and feeder roads and minor arteries that would get us to the highway, I heard a sharp rat-a-tat-tat on the passenger-side window and looked up to see Jen, a big, excited smile on her face that made her mahogany eyes scrunch up and instantly dissolved my anxiety.
“Oh my god, remember when we first met and I almost killed you?” she said, laughing as she climbed in and pulled out her phone to help shepherd us on our way. When we’d met during that long-ago political contest, she had come to pick me up in Brooklyn in the campaign’s rickety eggplant-colored van at the crack of dawn to attend a press conference in Upper Manhattan. We’d had some tricky merges onto the BQE and the Major Deegan Expressway, but I’d never truly felt like my life was in danger. Now we were whizzing out to the End, both with wrecked marriages behind us and no real prospects ahead. But at least the road through Long Island was straight and clear and open, and by noon we’d arrived in Montauk and stopped for lunch at an old family-owned lobster pound overlooking Fort Pond Bay.
“So have you been in touch with Ben at all?” I asked her when we were seated with beers and lobster rolls at a white plastic table on a dock.
“No, I haven’t been in touch with much of anyone lately, but I think he’ll be there tonight.”
“Yeah, I haven’t seen him in almost a year. He picked me up in Bed-Stuy and we drove to some incredibly delicious hole-in-the-wall he knows in Flushing. Little Hot Pepper, I think.”
“Ben always had good taste in food.”
After lunch we headed to the Beachcomber, where I’d stayed at the beginning of the summer. We hung out on our oceanfront balcony and previewed our outfits for the weekend. She was due that evening at the rehearsal dinner, and she called a taxi for the trip to East Hampton so I could have a break from driving. After a nap and a leisurely shower, I drove into town to a restaurant I’d discovered during my week there. Not quite ready to deal with everyone, I hadn’t tried to connect with any of the other early arrivals, preferring to be by myself with a plate of wild striped bass and a glass of roseĢ from a winery a few towns over. I liked the whole group a great deal, a collection of smart, politically engaged progressives whom Jen and the groom had gotten to know through literary, activist, and education networks. But they were all so coupled-up, as I had been when I met them, and I needed to steel myself for the endless conversations about married life and childrearing that by definition, though not intent, excluded me, and to be prepared to answer questions about my postdivorce self with all the hope and cheerfulness the occasion called for. I still didn’t have a very good answer for why my marriage had disintegrated—or whether or how I planned to try to have a kid—and just the idea of talking about any of it deflated me, dredging up the mortifying sense I still carried that it was a grand disaster of my own making. We were gathering to wish the happy couple bon voyage as they set sail on what we all genuinely wished would be a lifelong journey, and it just wouldn’t do to bring along a big sack of shit labeled SELF-PITY.