The Moment Read online

  This document. This definitive statement.

  How can we let go that which we once held so essential?

  On this January morning I had no reply to such a question. All I had was a petition telling me that my marriage was over, and the relentless disquieting question: could we—I—have found a way through this dark wood?

  “Mom once said that you never really loved her, that your heart was elsewhere.”

  It wasn’t as facile as that. But there’s no doubt that the historic so informs everything in our lives, and that it is so hard to break free of certain immutable things that continue to burden us.

  But why look for answers when none will balm anything? I told myself, glancing across the table at the petition. Do what you always do when life gangs up on you. Run.

  So while waiting for a pot of coffee to percolate I worked the phones. A call to my lawyer in Boston, who asked me to sign the petition and send it back to her. She also gave me a fast piece of advice: don’t panic. A call to a small hotel five hours north of here to find out if they had a room available for the next seven days. When they confirmed they had a vacancy, I told them to expect me around six that evening. Within an hour I had showered and shaved and packed a bag. I grabbed my laptop and a set of cross-country skis, then loaded everything into my Jeep. I called my daughter on her cell phone and left her a message that I would be away for the next seven days but would see her for dinner two weeks from Tuesday. I closed up my cottage. I checked my watch. Nine a.m. As I climbed into my vehicle snow had begun to fall. Within moments the conditions were near-blizzard. But I still forced my vehicle out onto the road and carefully navigated myself toward the intersection with Route 1. Looking in my rearview mirror, I saw that my cottage had vanished. A simple climatic shift and all that is concrete and crucial to us can disappear in an instant, whited out from view.

  The snow remained heavy as I turned south and stopped at the post office in Wiscasset. Once the now-signed documents were dispatched, I drove on, heading due west. Visibility was now nonexistent, making any sort of speed impossible. I should have abandoned ship, finding a motel and holing up until the blizzard passed. But I was now locked into the same ornery frame of mind that would overtake me when I found myself unable to write: you will push your way through this . . .

  It took almost six more hours to reach my destination. When I finally pulled into the parking lot of my hotel in Quebec City, I couldn’t help but wonder what I was doing here.

  I was so tired from all the events of the day that I fell into bed at ten. I managed to sleep until dawn. When I woke up, there was the usual moment of befuddlement, followed by the arrival of anguish. Another day, another struggle to keep the pain tolerable. After breakfast I changed into the appropriate clothing and drove north along the St. Lawrence River to a cross-country skiing center I’d once visited with Jan. The temperature—according to the gauge in my car—was minus ten. I parked and climbed outside, the chill lacerating and vindictive. I pulled my skis and poles out of the hatchback door and walked over to the trail head. I stepped into the skis, my boots slotting into the bindings with a decisive click. Immediately I pushed off into the dense forest through which the trail had been cleaved. The cold was now so severe that my fingers stiffened. It was impossible to close them around the poles. But I forced myself to gain speed. Cross-country skiing is an endurance test—especially in subzero temperatures. Only when you have gained enough forward propulsion to warm your body does the unbearable become acceptable. This process took around a half hour, each finger gradually thawing with the buildup of body heat. By the third mile I was actually warm and so focused on the push-glide-push-glide rhythm of the ski movement that I was oblivious to all around me.

  Until the trail turned a hairpin bend and suddenly sent me charging down a vertiginous hill. This is what you get for choosing a black run. But my past training clicked into gear and I carefully raised my left ski out of the rutted track and positioned it on the groomed snow. Then I turned its tip inward toward the other ski. Normally this maneuver should reduce your speed and allow you to control the dips and dives of the track. But the trail was so frozen, so slick with the travails of previous occupants, that I simply couldn’t slow down. I tried dragging my poles. No use. That’s when I suddenly pulled my ski back into the track, lifted my poles, and let go. I was now on a ferocious downhill trajectory—all speed, no logic, no sense of what was up ahead. For a few brief moments there was the exhilaration of the free fall, the abandonment of prudence, the sense that nothing mattered but this plunge toward . . .

  A tree. It was right there, its massive trunk beckoning me forward. Gravity was sending me into its epicenter. Nothing to stop me slamming into oblivion. For a nanosecond I was about to welcome it . . . until I saw my daughter’s face in front of me and found myself overwhelmed by one thought: she will have to live with this for the rest of her life. At which point some rational instinct kicked in and I threw myself away from sudden impact. As I crashed into the snow, I skidded for yards. The snow was no pillow, rather, a sheet of frozen tundra. My left side slammed into its concrete surface, then my head, the world went blurry, and . . .

  I was aware of someone crouching down beside me, checking my vital signs, speaking fast French into a phone. Beyond that, all was hazy, vague. I wasn’t aware of much, bar the fact that I was in pain everywhere. I blacked out, waking again as I was hoisted onto a stretcher, loaded onto a sled, strapped down, and . . .

  I was now being dragged along undulating terrain. I regained consciousness for long enough to crane my neck and see myself being pulled along by a snowmobile. Then my brain began to fog in again and . . .

  I was in a bed. In a room. Stiff white sheets, cream walls, institutional ceiling tiles. I craned my neck and saw assorted tubes and wires emanating from my body. I began to gag. A nurse came hurrying toward me. She grabbed a pan and held it in front of me as I retched. When everything was expunged, I found myself sobbing. The nurse put an arm around me and said:

  “Be happy . . . you’re alive.”

  A doctor came around ten minutes later. He told me I’d had a lucky escape. A dislocated shoulder—which, while I was unconscious, they’d managed to “relocate.” Some spectacular bruising on my left thigh and ribcage. As to the state of my head . . . he’d run an MRI on my cranium and could find nothing wrong with it.

  “You’d been knocked cold. A concussion. But you evidently have a very hard head, as there was no serious damage whatsoever.”

  Would that my head was so hard.

  I subsequently discovered that I was in a hospital in Quebec City. I would remain here for another two days as I underwent physiotherapy for my battered shoulder and was kept under observation for any “unforeseen neurological complications.” The physiotherapist—a Ghanaian woman with a rather wry take on everything—told me I should thank some divine force for my well-being.

  “It is evident that you should be in a very bad place right now. But you came away with very little damage, so someone was watching over you.”

  “And who might that ‘someone’ be?”

  “Maybe it’s God. Maybe it’s some extraworldly power. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s all down to you. There was a skier behind you . . . the man who called for help . . . who said that you were racing down the hill, as if you couldn’t care less what happened to you. Then, at the very last minute, you jumped away from the tree. You saved yourself. Which evidently means that you wanted to see another day. Congratulations: you are back with us.”

  I felt no exhilaration, no pleasure in having survived. But as I sat in that narrow hospital bed, looking up at the pockmarked ceiling tiles, I did keep replaying that moment when I threw myself into the snow. Up until that split second, I was in thrall to the declivitous, as there was a part of me that welcomed such existential purity, an immediate cure to all that plagued me.

  But then . . .

  I saved myself, ending up with nothing more than some bruising, a sore sh
oulder, a sore head. Within forty-eight hours of being admitted to the hospital I was able to make it out to a taxi, return to the ski area, and collect my abandoned Jeep. Though I wasn’t in a sling, my shoulder hurt every time I had to turn the wheel sharply all the way down to Maine. But the journey back was otherwise uneventful.

  “You may find yourself becoming depressed now,” the physiotherapist told me during our last session together. “It often happens in the wake of such things. And who can blame you? You chose to live.”

  I reached Wiscasset just before dark—in time to collect my mail at the local post office. There was a yellow slip in my box, informing me an oversized parcel was being held behind the main counter. Jim, the postmaster, noticed me wincing when I picked up the package.

  “You hurt yourself?” he asked.

  “That I did.”

  “An accident?”

  “Something like that.”

  The package he handed over was, in fact, a box—and came from my New York publishers. I made a mistake of tucking it under my left arm and winced once more as my weakened shoulder told me not to do that again. As I signed the form acknowledging that I had collected it, Jim said:

  “If you’re feeling poorly tomorrow and can’t get yourself to the supermarket, call me with a shopping list and I’ll take care of it all for you.”

  There were many virtues about living in Maine—but the best of all was the way everyone respected each other’s privacy, yet were also there for you if needed.

  “I think I’ll be able to push a cart around the vegetable aisle,” I said. “But thanks for the offer.”

  “That your new book in the box?”

  “If it is, someone else must have finished for me.”

  “I hear ya . . .”

  I walked to the car and drove on to my cottage, the January darkness augmenting my gloom. The physiotherapist was right: escaping death turns you more inward, more alive to the melancholic nature of being here. And a failed marriage is also a death—a living one, as the person you are no longer with is still sentient, still walking among us, very much existing without you.

  “You were always ambivalent about me, us,” Jan said on several occasions toward the end. How could I explain that, with the exception of our wonderful daughter, I remain ambivalent about everything? If you’re not reconciled with yourself, how can you ever be reconciled with others?

  The cottage was dark and drafty when I arrived. I carried the box in from my car and placed it on the kitchen table. I cranked up the thermostat. I built a wood fire in the potbellied stove that took up one corner of the living room. I poured myself a small Scotch. As I waited for all three forms of central heating to kick in, I shuffled through the handful of letters and magazines that I had retrieved from the mailbox. Then I turned my attention to the package. I used scissors to cut through the thick tape that had sealed it shut. Once the lid was pried open I peered inside. There was a letter from Zoe, my editor’s assistant, positioned on top of a large, thickly padded envelope. As I picked up the letter I saw the handwriting on this envelope—and the German postmark and stamps. In the left-hand corner of this package was the name of the sender: Dussmann. That stopped me short. Her name. And the address: Jablonski Strasse 48, Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. Was this her address since . . . ?

  Her . . .

  Petra . . .

  Petra Dussmann.

  I picked up the letter from Zoe.

  This showed up here for you c/o us a few days ago. I didn’t want to open it in case it was personal. If it’s anything questionable or weird, do let me know and we’ll deal with it.

  Hope the new book goes well. We all can’t wait to read it.

  My best . . .

  “If it’s anything questionable or weird . . .”

  No, it’s just the past. A past that I had tried to entomb long ago.

  But here it was again, back to disturb an already troubled present.

  “Wie bald ‘nicht jetz’ ‘nie’ wird.”

  “How soon ‘not now’ becomes ‘never.’”

  Until a package arrives . . . and everything you have spent years attempting to dodge comes rushing back into the room.

  When is the past not a spectral hall of shadows?

  When we can live with it.

  TWO

  I’VE ALWAYS WANTED to escape. It’s an urge I’ve had from the age of eight onward, when I first discovered the pleasures of evasion.

  It was a Saturday in November and my parents were fighting again. There was nothing unusual about this. My parents were always fighting. Back then we lived in a four-room apartment on Nineteenth Street and Second Avenue. I was a Manhattan kid, born and bred. My dad worked as a midlevel executive in an advertising agency—a “business guy” who wanted to be a “creative guy,” but never had the “word talent” to write copy. Mom was a housewife. The apartment was cramped. Two narrow bedrooms, a small living room, and an even smaller dinette/kitchen, none of which could contain the frustrations that both my parents vented on a daily basis.

  It was only years later that I began to comprehend the strange dynamic that existed between them, a profound need to combust over anything, to live in an endless winter of discontent. But at the time all I knew was: my mom and dad didn’t like each other. On the November Saturday in question, an argument between them escalated. My father said something hurtful. My mother called him a bastard and fled into the bedroom. The door slammed behind her. I looked up from the book I was reading. Dad was gripping the front doorknob, no doubt wanting to pull it open and walk away from all this. He fumbled in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes and lit one up. A few deep inhalations of smoke and he got his rage under control. That’s when I posed a question I’d been wanting to pose for days.

  “Can I go to the library?”

  “No dice, Tommy. I’m heading into the office to catch up on some work.”

  “Can I go alone?”

  It was the first time I’d ever asked to leave the apartment by myself. Dad thought this over.

  “You think you can walk there all by yourself?” he asked.

  “It’s only four blocks.”

  “Your mom won’t like it.”

  “I won’t be long.”

  “She still won’t like it.”

  “Please, Dad.”

  He took another long drag on his cigarette. For all his tough-guy bluster—he’d been a Marine during the war—he was in thrall to my mother, a diminutive, angry woman who could never get over the fact that she was no longer the princess she’d been raised to be.

  “You’ll be back here in an hour?” Dad asked.

  “I promise.”

  “And you’ll remember to look both ways when crossing the street?”

  “I promise.”

  “If you’re late, there’ll be trouble.”

  “I won’t be late, Dad.”

  He reached into his pocket and handed me a dollar.

  “Here’s some money,” he said.

  “I don’t need money. It’s a library.”

  “You can stop at the drugstore on the way back and get yourself an egg cream.”

  Egg creams—milk and chocolate syrup topped up by soda water—were my favorite drink.

  “They only cost a dime, Dad.” Even back then I was always cognizant of the price of things.

  “Buy yourself some comics or put the change in your piggy bank.”

  “So I can go?”

  “Yeah, you can go.”

  As I was getting into my coat, Mom emerged from the bedroom.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked me.

  I told her. Immediately she turned on my father.

  “How dare you give him permission to do that without first consulting me.”

  “The kid is old enough to walk a couple of blocks by himself.”

  “Well, I’m not allowing it.”

  “Tommy, run along,” Dad said.

  “Thomas, you’re to stay here,” she countered.<
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  “Scram,” Dad told me. As Mom began to shout things at my father, I made a beeline for the door and was gone.

  Once outside I felt a moment of fear. For the first time ever I was on my own. No parental supervision; no outstretched hand to guide, restrain, or discipline me. I walked to the corner of Nineteenth and Second. I waited for the light to turn green. I looked both ways many times. I crossed the street. When I made it to the other side, I didn’t feel a great sense of accomplishment or freedom. I was simply aware of the promise that I made to Dad to be back within an hour. So I continued north, exercising great prudence at every street crossing. When I reached Twenty-third Street, I turned left. The library was halfway up the street. The children’s section was on the first floor. I browsed the stacks, finding two new Hardy Boys detective books I’d yet to read. I checked them out, then hurried back to the street, retracing my steps home. Halfway there, I stopped at the drugstore on Twenty-first Street. I took a stool at the lunch counter and opened one of my books and ordered an egg cream. The soda jerk took my dollar and gave me ninety cents change. I looked at the clock on the wall. I still had twenty-eight minutes before I was due home. I nursed my egg cream. I read my book. I thought: this is nice.

  I made it home five minutes before the deadline. In the time that I was absent, my father had stormed out—and I found my mother sitting in the kitchenette with her big Remington typewriter in front of her. She was smoking a Salem and clattering away on the keys. Her eyes were red from crying, but she seemed focused and determined.