Numerous crushes and flirtations, but only two big loves in your early life, the cataclysms of your mid-teens and late teens, both of which were disasters, followed by your first marriage, which ended in disaster as well. Starting in 1962, when you fell for the beautiful English girl in your tenth-grade English class, you seemed to have a special talent for chasing after the wrong person, for wanting what you couldn’t have, for giving your heart to girls who couldn’t or wouldn’t love you back. Occasional interest in your mind, flashes of interest in your body, but none whatsoever in your heart. Half-crazy girls, both of them ravishing and self-destructive and deeply exciting to you, but you understood almost nothing about them. You invented them. You used them as fictive embodiments of your own desires, ignoring their problems and personal histories, failing to grasp who they were outside of your own imagination, and yet the more they eluded you, the more passionately you longed for them. The one in high school went on a secret hunger strike and wound up in the hospital. The word anorexia was not in your vocabulary at the time, and so you thought cancer or leukemia (which had killed her mother a few years earlier), for how else to account for the dwindling of her once lovely body, the horrid emaciation, and you remember trying to visit her in the hospital and being turned away, every afternoon turned away, out of your mind with love, with fear, but in the end she was not made for boys, and even though she drifted back into your life a couple of times when you were in your early twenties (ending with the crab louse debacle), she was essentially a girl made for other girls, and therefore you never had a chance with her. The second story began in the winter of your first year of college, when you fell for another unstable girl who both wanted you and didn’t want you, and the more she didn’t want you, the more ardently you pursued her. A sick troubadour and his inconstant lady, and even after she slashed her wrists in a halfhearted suicide attempt a few months later, you went on loving her, the one with the white bandages and the fetching, crooked smile, and then, after the bandages were removed, you made her pregnant, the condom you were using broke, and you spent every penny you had to pay for an abortion. A brutal memory, another one of the things that still keep you awake at night, and while you are certain the two of you made the correct decision not to have the baby (parents at nineteen and twenty, a grotesque thought), you are tormented by the memory of that unborn child. You always imagined it would be a girl, a girl with red hair, a wondrous firecracker of a girl, and it pains you to realize that she would be forty-three years old now, which means that in all probability you would have become a grandfather some time ago, perhaps a long time ago. If you had let her live.
In the light of your past failures, your misjudgments, your inability to understand yourself and others, your impulsive and erratic decisions, your blundering approach to matters of the heart, it seems curious that you should have wound up in a marriage that has lasted this long. You have tried to figure out the reasons for this unexpected reversal of fortune, but you have never been able to come up with an answer. You ran into a stranger one night and fell in love with her—and she fell in love with you. You didn’t deserve it, but neither did you not deserve it. It just happened, and nothing can account for what happened to you except luck.
From the very start, everything was different with her. Not a figment this time, not some projection of your inner fancy, but a real person, and she imposed her reality on you the moment the two of you began to talk, which was one moment after the single acquaintance you had in common introduced you to each other in the lobby of the 92nd Street Y following a poetry reading, and because she was neither coy nor elusive, because she looked you in the eye and asserted herself as a wholly grounded presence, there was no way for you to turn her into something she was not—no way to invent her, as you had done with other women in the past, since she had already invented herself. Beautiful, yes, without question sublimely beautiful, a lean six-foot blonde with long, magnificent legs and the tiny wrists of a four-year-old, the biggest little person you had ever seen, or perhaps the littlest big person, and yet you were not looking at some remote object of female splendor, you were engaged in talking to a living, breathing human subject. Subject, not object, and therefore no delusions permitted. No deceptions possible. Intelligence is the one human quality that cannot be faked, and once your eyes had adjusted to the dazzle of her beauty, you understood that this was a brilliant woman, one of the best minds you had ever met.
Little by little, as you came to know her better in the weeks that followed, you discovered that you saw eye to eye on nearly everything of any importance. Your politics were the same, most of the books you cared about were the same books, and you had similar attitudes about what you wanted out of life: love, work, and children—with money and possessions far down on the list. Much to your relief, your personalities were nothing alike. She laughed more than you did, she was freer and more outgoing than you were, she was warmer than you were, and yet, all the way down at the bottom, at the nethermost point where you were joined together, you felt that you had met another version of yourself—but one that was more fully evolved than you were, better able to express what you kept bottled up inside you, a saner being. You adored her, and for the first time in your life, the person you adored adored you back. You came from entirely different worlds, a young Lutheran girl from Minnesota and a not so young Jew from New York, but just two and a half months after your chance encounter on February twenty-third thirty years ago, you decided to move in together. Until then, every decision you had made about women had been a wrong decision—but not this one.
She was a graduate student and a poet, and in the first five years you were together you watched her finish up her course work, study for and pass her oral exams, and then go through the arduous slog of writing her dissertation (on language and identity in Dickens). She published one book of poetry during that time, and because money was scarce in the early days of your marriage, she worked at several different jobs, editing a three-volume anthology published by Zone Books for one thing, secretly rewriting someone’s doctoral dissertation on Jacques Lacan for another, and also teaching, most of all teaching. The first class was for low-level employees at an insurance company, ambitious young workers who wanted to improve their chances for promotion by taking an intensive course in English grammar and expository writing. Twice a week, your wife came home with stories about her students, some of them entertaining, some of them rather poignant, but the one you remember best concerns a howler that appeared on the final exam. Midway through the semester, your wife had given a lecture on various figures of speech, among them the concept of euphemism. By way of example, she had cited pass away as a euphemism for die. On the final exam, she asked the members of the class to give a definition of the word euphemism, and one vaguely attentive but challenged student answered: “Euphemism means to die.” After the insurance company, she moved on to Queens College, where she worked as an adjunct for three years, a grinding, badly paid job, two courses per semester with classes in remedial English and English composition, twenty-five students per class, fifty papers a week to correct, three private conferences with each student every semester, a two-hour trip from Cobble Hill to Flushing that began at six in the morning and entailed two subways and a bus, then another two-hour trip in the opposite direction, all for a salary of eight thousand dollars a year with no benefits. The long days wore her out, not just because of the work and the travel but also because of the hours spent under the fluorescent lights at Queens, the rapidly flickering lights that can induce headaches in people who suffer from migraine, and because your wife had been saddled with that condition since childhood, it was the rare evening when she didn’t walk through the door with dark circles under her eyes and a head bursting with pain. Her dissertation was advancing slowly, the weekly schedule was too fragmented for concentrated periods of research and writing, but suddenly your finances began to improve somewhat, enough for you to persuade her to quit the teaching job at any rate, and once she w
as free, she knocked off the rest of her Dickens thesis in six months. The bigger question was why she was still so determined to finish. Graduate school had made sense in the beginning: a single woman needs a job, especially if that woman comes from a family with no money, and even though her ambition was to write, she couldn’t count on writing to sustain her, and therefore she would become a professor. But things were different now. She was married, her money situation was becoming less and less precarious, she was no longer planning to look for an academic job, and still she battled on until she had earned her doctorate. Again and again, you asked her why it was so important to her, and the various answers she gave you all go straight to the heart of who she was then, who she still is today. First: because she couldn’t bring herself to quit something she had started. A question of stubbornness and pride. Second: because she was a woman. It was all very well that you had bailed out of graduate school after one year, you were a man, and men control the world, but a woman who wears the badge of an advanced degree will gain some respect in that man’s world, will not be looked down upon as much as a woman who does not have that badge. Third: because she loved it. The hard work and discipline of intense study had improved her mind, had made her a better and more subtle thinker, and even if most of her time would be spent writing novels in the future (she had already started her first), she had no intention of abandoning her intellectual life once she had her Ph.D. These were discussions you had with her more than twenty-five years ago, but it was as if she had already begun to squint into the future and see the outlines of what lay in front of her. Since then: five published novels and a sixth in the works, but also four books of nonfiction, for the most part essays, dozens of essays on an enormous range of subjects: literature, art, culture, politics, films, daily life, fashion, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, the philosophy of perception, and the phenomenology of memory. In 1978, she was one of a hundred students who entered the graduate English program at Columbia. Seven years later, she was one of only three who had made it all the way to the end.
By marrying your wife, you married into her family as well, and because her parents still lived in the house where she had grown up, another country was gradually absorbed into your bloodstream: Minnesota, the northernmost province in the rural kingdom of the Upper Midwest. Not the flat world you’d imagined it would be, but an undulating land of small peaks and dipping curves, no mountains or hilly extrusions and yet clouds in the far distance that simulate mountains and hills, an illusory bulk, a mass of vaporous white to soften the monotony of mile after mile of undulating land, and on days when there are no clouds, the alfalfa fields that stretch all the way to the horizon, a low and distant horizon overarched by an enormous, never-ending sky, a sky so large that it comes all the way down to your toes. The coldest winters on earth, followed by broiling, humid summers, torrid heat bearing down on you with millions of mosquitoes, so many mosquitoes that T-shirts are sold bearing pictures of those homicidal dive-bombers with the legend MINNESOTA—THE STATE BIRD. The first time you went out there, for a two-month stay in the summer of 1981, you were writing the preface to your anthology of twentieth-century French poetry, a longish piece that ran to forty-something pages, and because your future wife’s parents were out of town during your visit, you worked in your future father-in-law’s office on the St. Olaf College campus, cranking out paragraphs about Apollinaire, Reverdy, and Breton in a room decorated with pictures of Viking helmets, driving each morning to the mostly deserted campus, which suddenly came to life one week when the college rented out some of its buildings to the annual Conference of Christian Coaches, and how you enjoyed seeing those coaches walk by when you parked your car in the morning, dozens of nearly identical-looking men with their crew cuts, potbellies, and Bermuda shorts, and then on to your room in the Norwegian Department, where you would write another couple of pages about French poets. You were in Northfield, which advertised itself as “The Home of Cows, Colleges, and Contentment,” a town of about eight thousand people, best known as the place where Jesse James and his gang met their end during an attempted holdup (the bullet holes are still in the walls of the bank on Division Street), but your favorite spot quickly became the Malt-O-Meal factory on Highway 19, with its tall smokestacks pouring out white clouds of the nut-scented grain used in the recipe for that tawny, farina-textured breakfast cereal, located midway between your in-laws’ house and the center of town, just a few hundred yards before the railroad tracks you stopped in front of with your wife one afternoon that summer as a slowly moving train passed by, the longest train you have ever seen, somewhere between one and two hundred freight cars, but you didn’t have time to count them because you and your then future wife were talking, chiefly about the apartment you would be looking for when you returned to New York, and that was when the question of marriage first came up between you, not just living together under the same roof but bound by matrimony as well, that was what she wanted, that was what she insisted upon, and even though you had decided never to marry again, you said of course, you would gladly marry her if that was what she wanted, for you had loved her long enough by then to know that whatever she wanted was precisely what you wanted as well. That was why you paid such close attention to everything around you that summer, because this was the country where she had spent her girlhood and early womanhood, and by studying the details of that landscape you felt you would come to know her better, understand her better, and one by one, as you came to know her mother and father and three younger sisters, you began to acquire an understanding of her family as well, which also helped you understand her better, to feel the solidity of the ground she walked on, for this was a solid family, nothing like the fractured, provisional family you yourself had grown up in, and it wasn’t long before you became one of them, for this, to your everlasting good fortune, was now your family, too.
Then came the winter visits, the turn-of-the-year homecomings, a week to ten days in a frozen world of silent air, of windborne daggers piercing your body, of looking at the thermometer through the kitchen window in the morning and seeing the red mercury stuck at twenty below zero Fahrenheit, thirty below zero, temperatures so inhospitable to human life you have often wondered how anyone could live in such a place, your head filled with images of Sioux families wrapped from head to toe in buffalo pelts, pioneer families freezing to death on the tundralike prairie. No cold like this cold, an impossible cold that stuns the muscles in your face the instant you step outdoors, that pummels your skin, puckers your skin, that coagulates the blood in your veins, and yet once, not many years ago, the entire family went out into the dark to look at the northern lights, you saw them only that one time, unforgettable, unimaginable—standing in the cold and gazing up at an electric green sky, a sky flashing green against the black wall of night, nothing you have witnessed has ever come close to the hectic grandeur of that spectacle. On other nights, the clear nights without clouds, a sky crammed with stars, packed full from horizon to horizon, more stars than you have seen anywhere else, so many stars that they merge into dense liquid pools, a porridge of whiteness overhead, and the white mornings that follow, the white afternoons, the snow, the snow that falls endlessly all around you, up to your knees, up to your waist, growing like the sunflower that shot past your head in your mother’s garden when you were a boy, more snow than you have seen anywhere else, and suddenly you are reliving a moment from the mid-nineties, when you and your wife and daughter had made the annual Christmas pilgrimage to Minnesota, and there you are behind the wheel on the night of a blizzard, driving from the house of one of your wife’s sisters in Minneapolis to her parents’ house in Northfield, just under forty miles away. Sitting in the backseat are three generations of women (your mother-in-law, wife, and daughter), and up front with you, sitting in the passenger seat to your right, is your father-in-law, a man who has treated you with kindness during the years of your marriage to his oldest daughter, even if in many ways he is a remote and shut-down person, much as your o
wn father was, both men having endured rough and impoverished childhoods, and in your father-in-law’s case there was the added ordeal of having served as a young foot soldier in World War II (the Battle of Luzon, the Philippines, the jungles of New Guinea), but you are a lifelong expert in the art of communicating with shut-down men, and if your father-in-law sometimes resembles your father, you feel that there is a larger reservoir of warmth and tenderness in him, that he is more knowable than your father ever was, more fully a member of the human race. You are forty-six or forty-seven years old, in excellent physical condition, still youthful in the middle of your middle age, and because you are still known as a good driver, the female contingent in the backseat has absolute faith in your ability to deliver them safely to the house in Northfield, and because they trust you, they are not alarmed by the potential dangers of the storm. All during the ride home, in fact, the three of them engage in animated talk on any number of subjects, acting as if it were a mild evening at the height of summer, but the instant you start the car and pull away from your sister-in-law’s house, both you and your father-in-law know that you are in for a hellish ride, that weather conditions are bad to the point of impossible. Once you reach the highway and begin traveling south on I-35, the snow is lashing onto the windshield, and although the wipers are working at full speed, you can see almost nothing, since the snow starts gathering on the glass again the instant the wipers complete their arc. There are no overhead lamps on the highway, but the oncoming headlights of the cars traveling toward you in the opposite lane illuminate the snow as it falls onto the windshield, so that what you are seeing is no longer snow but a shower of small, blinding lights. Worst of all, the road is slick, as smooth and icy as a skating pond, and to go more than ten or fifteen miles an hour would rob the tires of their traction and render the brakes useless. Every fifty or a hundred yards, both to your left and to your right, you pass another car that has skidded off the road, lying half-overturned in a mountainous snowbank or drift. Your father-in-law, who has lived in Minnesota all his life, is all too familiar with the hazards of driving in a storm like this one, and he is entirely with you as you inch the car along through the night, sitting in the navigator’s seat and peering into the spangled clouds of snow that continue to pour down onto the windshield, warning you of upcoming curves, keeping you calm and focused, driving with you in his head, in the muscles of his body, and so it is that you finally make it to the house in Northfield, you and the old soldier in front, the women in back, a two-hour trek instead of the customary thirty or forty minutes, and when the five of you enter the house, the women are still talking and laughing, but your father-in-law, who knows what a trial this has been on your nerves, since it has been a trial on his nerves as well, pats you on the back and gives you a little wink. Fifty years after he hung up his uniform, the sergeant has saluted you.