I Lost My Love in Baghdad (9 page)

NEW YORK, OHIO, VERMONT

Two months. We had just over two months—October 17 to December 27—before I was scheduled to go back to Baghdad. Two months of the holiday season, two months of dinners every night and double features every weekend in New York. Of doing all the romantic and maybe corny things people do in the city, inspired by the images from our movie-watching childhoods—late autumn walks in Central Park, the lighting of the tree at Rockefeller Center, and Macy's Christmas window displays. I was keenly aware of our time together, the self-consciousness of our romance, as if we were living on film, playing the roles of a correspondent back from the front, his beautiful love at home waiting for him.

There's so little time. If we only have two months, we can't go our separate ways for the holidays. We have exactly sixty-seven days. That's practically no time at all. You must come to Ohio to meet my parents. You have to come to Vermont to meet my family. We can do it all, no problem—the first weekend to Cleveland, back to work for a few days, then a JetBlue flight to Burlington with a day or two to spare for shopping on Church Street. My parents even say they'll wait to decorate the tree.

But first we had to last to the holidays, first we had to survive getting to know each other again. All the worries and concerns we'd suppressed over the phone calls and instant messages resurfaced. And this was when I made a mistake. There are events in any relationship you regret, things you wish you could take back, and for me, it was a dinner with a female friend that I didn't tell Andi about. I was just going to have dinner and go back to my apartment, and that would be it. I was going to be faithful. I was just going to enjoy the attention, share my war stories, an ego thing. Didn't I deserve a little glory?

Andi called right before I was about to leave for dinner. It was the first night since I'd returned that we hadn't been together. She was in a good mood. I told her I was going to dinner with a friend; she said it's not So and So, is it? No, I said, it's not. It's Such and Such.

The dinner was uneventful, no big deal, harmless.

The next week, Andi wanted to put her work number in my cell phone, using her initials, ASP. I told her she couldn't look at my phone, that it was private—which screamed guilt—and within moments she was looking at the text messages, the one from So and So, saying she would meet me for dinner soon. It took Andi a few minutes to put the dates together, but when she did, the rest of the night was spent in repairing damage—her in tears, me begging and apologizing. The next day I sent flowers and asked for forgiveness, saying I wouldn't do it again. The days that followed were efforts to overcome our insecurities, push-me-pull-me, cautiously letting our guards down, then putting them up again, then easing them back down. And like all of our emotions, our fights and reconciliations were magnified by the ticking clock, and the knowledge that we were together now but Iraq was closer each day.

We spent Thanksgiving together at her Upper West Side apartment, still struggling to get past the bad vibes. Anything could trigger them (on that day it was the fire alarm I accidentally set off after a mishap cooking pancakes at breakfast; I'd put too much butter on the pan). But we finally pulled it together and went downstairs to watch the Macy's parade. That night, we ate at Tavern on the Green, the landmark restaurant on the west side of Central Park. I hadn't eaten there since I visited New York as a kid. Andi chose the place, having never been there. We sat at a table under the glass ceiling and white lights of the garden. I pointed out where Louis in
Ghostbusters,
played by Rick Moranis, was consumed by a devil hound; he presses up against the tavern's window, screaming for help, amusingly ignored by the diners inside. I called over the house photographer and he took a photo, making us stand to pose. I knew she had some anxiety about making a scene in public, and I asked the photographer over just to get a rise out of her, but at least now we had a picture, one that she said showed off her “big eye”—a left eye she insisted was larger than the right, though it was imperceptible to almost all other humans.

With each day, the deadline approached and the sense of urgency increased. The visit to her family, the visit to mine, then it's done, I'm back to Baghdad. As much as I tried to push it out of my mind, Iraq had changed something in me. I wanted to keep covering the war. I liked it. And I wasn't sure how to respond when Andi kept bringing up how she would feel once I left. I preferred not to worry about how I'd feel until I was already gone.

Andi's home was Perry, Ohio, a forty-minute drive along Lake Erie from Cleveland, population 1,195. She'd left five years ago. Her father, Andre, was a schoolteacher and football coach. Her mother, Vicki, was a nurse at a Cleveland hospital. Always working, always paying bills. Her older sister Marci got married at twenty-four and moved down the street to her husband's childhood home. She had two daughters, Kayla and Abby. Andi hoped to mold her nieces in her own image. She bought the girls the “Presidential Barbie”—why can't a woman be president?—and filled their heads with feminist ideas and liberal talking points. She also filled their stomachs and bloodstream with candy and chocolates, a cocktail of hyperactivity. She was cool Aunt Andi from New York, sending packages purchased from the Toys “R” Us in Times Square, hundreds of dollars' worth of the newest toys.

Then there were her two younger brothers—the Twins, Cory and Chris—who she insisted took all the attention away from her when they came along. “I was eleven years old!” she would say. “The middle child. I had to fight for attention. I was a straight-A student, and look at the Twins—they got in trouble all the time! I've never even smoked a cigarette!”

“Why are there no baby pictures of me,” she would demand. “Just pictures of the Twins! I'm adopted, I'm almost positive I'm adopted.”

“I've seen pictures of your family, you look like them…”

“No, I'm adopted!”

She left for Cleveland on Friday. I was going to meet her there on Saturday. I had postponed my flight until later because I had to work longer than I expected that day. She told me to forget it, don't come, you're too busy. I said, no, I'm coming, I'll be there, don't worry about it. She said no, don't come. I said I'm coming, baby, and I hope you're there to pick me up at the airport.

She was there. We drove through Cleveland, where I'd never been, and she gave me the tour—the Jake, or Jacob's Field, where she went to Indian games with her dad, the Key Bank building, the hospital where her mom gave birth to the twins. We stopped at the Outback Steakhouse in Mentor for dinner (pronounced “Mentir,” she corrected me). We arrived at her sister's home at 11
P.M.

“Marci, can you please get rid of those cats,” Andi announced as we walked through the door. Marci and her husband and the girls lived in a two-story white home on the grounds of a tree farm. Rows of baby pine trees stretched in all directions around the house.

Andi introduced me to Marci. “Beautiful Christmas tree,” I said, looking at the tree in front of the picture window, its white lights casting a holiday glow on the peaceful and quiet living room.

“Marci, why aren't there any baby pictures of me?”

Marci shook her head. “Oh, Andi.”

We slept on the two couches in the living room. Around 4
A.M.
, I awoke to coughing—heavy, constant coughing that sounded like it was coming from a radio.

“What's that?” I asked in a daze.

“The baby monitor.”

“The baby monitor? For who?”

“Kayla…”

“Should someone do something? I mean, she sounds sick…”

“She is sick. I think it's the nuclear plant.”

“Can't we change the channel to get the other kid?”

We fell back asleep.

In the morning, we were greeted by the nieces, Kayla, a feisty blond four-year-old, who looked like a miniature Andi, and Abby, who at age six was already Andi's political protégée.

That afternoon we took the kids to a movie,
The Chronicles of Narnia
(I fell asleep during the film, much to Abby's astonishment) and Andi gave me a tour of Perry.

She wasn't joking about the nuclear plant. It didn't fit with the flat, rural landscape. The steam it was billowing came out in large white clouds and seemed to drift over the town. The scene reminded me of the opening credits of
The Simpsons
. I began to think she might have a point about the possible high rate of cancer in her town. (Admittedly, she had only anecdotal evidence: Her father had recently recovered from leukemia, miraculously keeping his full head of hair, a Parhamovich trait.)

The weekend was a milestone for Andi. She was twenty-seven years old and had never brought a boy home for Christmas. But this was only the second serious relationship she had ever been in.

Months after we started dating, she told me about the first guy. She had lived with him briefly during her early twenties after she moved to Boston, where she worked for Jane Swift, the governor of Massachusetts. He could be abusive, she said. He hurt her so badly, she told me, that one day when he was out at work she found the strength to leave. She packed up all her things and never told him where she went. Soon after that she left Boston and moved to New York.

After that, she said, she put up walls. She wouldn't let anyone get close. She did not date anyone for almost three years, until the summer we met, when she was finally starting to think that life held possibilities, perhaps even the possibility of love, though this was a shocking notion to her. She told me that I had broken through the walls. Her parents had a saying: “God help the man who loves Andi Parhamovich.” After spending the afternoon in a local shopping mall, where Andi did not find anything she wanted, I grabbed her hand and said, “That man, God help me, is me.”

That night, Marci cooked a Christmas dinner for us. Andi's parents, Vicki and Andre, came over.

“So you write for
Newsweek,
” her father stated.

“Yes, I do.”

“I have to be honest, I don't read
Newsweek
very much. I like the
Sporting News,
though.”

“The
Sporting News
is a good publication,” I said.

Andre told his favorite Andi stories. When she was in second grade, there was a competition to see who could read the most books in a month. The winner would get a certificate for a Personal Pan Pizza at Pizza Hut and a private dinner with the teacher, Ms. Barth. On the first weekend of the competition, Andi's parents wondered where she was; she had disappeared. Her dad peered in her room and saw her reading next to a stack of books. At midnight he woke up, not sleeping well, and checked in on his daughter again. She was still awake. “Don't bother me, Dad, go away, I have sixty-two more books to read before Monday.” She was determined to win. By Monday, she had somehow read all eighty books on the list, sealing her victory, and claiming the Pizza Hut certificate and the dinner with Ms. Barth.

Other stories her family told: the cats! Andi claimed she was allergic to cats; she accused her parents and siblings of not taking her allergy seriously, despite, as she remembered it, nearly being hospitalized after a visit with Andre to her grandmother's house, a house with closed windows and at least three felines. Andi also boycotted a field trip to Washington, D.C., held during the girls' softball season, saying that it was an equal rights issue. The school would never have scheduled the trip during the boys' baseball season. She boycotted the senior prom; sexist, silly. At the age of fifteen, she refused to wear a red dress in her sister Marci's wedding because she didn't want to condone such a patriarchal and antiquated institution. (Finally, protesting the whole way, she put on the red dress and walked down the aisle for her sister.)

Injustice. Her entire life she couldn't tolerate injustice.

The pre-Christmas dinner was a success; I bonded with Andre, with Vicki, with Marci, even with the Twins. Andi joked that finally Joe, Marci's husband, would have an ally to ward off the crazy Parhamovich clan. On Monday morning, Vicki dropped us off at the airport and we flew back to New York. Five years earlier, when she left Perry for Boston, Andre and Vicki had followed her (she was driving with her soon to be roommate) to the Massachusetts state line, eight hours from Perry. Then they turned around and drove back. As we were sitting on the runway, heading back to New York early Monday morning, I realized I was glad to have met them—thinking what kind people they were and how deeply they loved their daughter.

We arrived in Vermont two days before Christmas, five days before I was scheduled to return to Iraq. We shopped at the last minute on Church Street and bought presents. A popcorn maker for my parents, books and DVDs for my brothers. (She had already given me three framed prints from photographer Ropert Capa: one of Israel's 1948 war, another of bombers in the air taken in 1944 on June 16 [her birthday], and another from the landing on D-Day.)

I had given her a digital camera. Andi napped on the couch while my brothers and I played the board game Heroscape. She wrapped presents in the guest bedroom while I talked about life in Iraq with my younger brother, Jeff, who had just completed Ranger school training and was scheduled to deploy to Iraq the following August. Jeff joined the army as an officer in November 2004. Our grandfather had served in the Pacific theater in World War II; our father spent eight years as a doctor in the Army Reserves and the National Guard. Jeff is the youngest of three boys, and I felt he wanted to distinguish himself from his older brothers—I was the writer, and our oldest brother Jon was always the intellectual, the valedictorian. Jeff was the athlete, a member of a fraternity at college. He didn't want to waste his postcollege years working at video stores; he wanted to test himself, be a patriot, and see history firsthand. Our parents, both physicians, had raised us to be independent thinkers, to pursue the careers we wanted. That's what we were doing, and that had brought us both on a path to Baghdad.