The Magical Stranger (15 page)

Chapter
Twenty-Three

I
'd finally
found something that I was good at with magazine writing. Stories about
everything from John Kerry to teenage killers to New Kids on the Block reunion
tours tumbled out of me. The rats disappeared, but Boston never felt like home.
I was lonely and Boston was full of eggheads and indie rockers on the make. If
you weren't part of their scene, you didn't exist.

Then a friend told me she had someone she wanted me
to meet: an Australian woman of Lebanese descent, dark-haired and olive-skinned.
Like me, she came from nowhere. She was at Boston University on a Rotary
scholarship and was wide-eyed and ravenous for her new country. We made each
other laugh, but that was it. I walked her home after our first dinner and
nothing happened. (Her sisters called me No Zing for years because of our
initial lack of chemistry.) This went on for a couple of weeks until we went to
see
The Piano
. I'm not sure if it was the antipodean
story or Harvey Keitel's dangling member, but something happened that night.

After that, we were inseparable. She was
charismatic and would go to any extreme to sell a joke, once stuffing an entire
orange into her mouth and then trying to speak. This mattered. We walked home on
a December night and leaf-size snowflakes began dropping from the sky. She began
dancing and skipping down the sidewalk. “I know I'm acting like a girl in a
douche commercial, but I can't help it,” she told me through happy tears. It was
her first snow. An hour later, we lay on the ground and made snow angels.

We fell in love. We were both essentially
fatherless, broken people, but broken in the same way. Her dad had walked out on
his wife and five children. He only gave money to his one son. Her mom tried to
make a living the best she could by working at bars and restaurants. Somehow, my
girlfriend earned a degree while working collecting debts for a department
store. Her three sisters had proven less adept at throwing off the family
trauma. One was married to a sketchy businessman; the other two were permanently
single. I was the first man in the family's history not to be seen as a total
asshole.

I can honestly say I never gave her personal
history and the impact it might have on our relationship a single thought in the
first six years we were together. Our past was not prologue. But her dad's
abandonment and my father's death had left understandable scars; any attempt by
either of us to negotiate our relationship was met with accusations that we were
trying to take things away from the other. She said the thing she loved most
about me was that I never let her go to bed mad. It was true. No matter what the
dispute, I'd be there with a joke or an elaborate gag to make her laugh before
the lights went out. These were skills I learned as a boy.

B
oston
became our battleground. For her, it was manageable and offered a sense of
security that she lacked as a child. I was bored senseless. I was freelancing
for national magazines and my home and work life separated at a ridiculous rate.
On the road, I had great adventures with no-hope presidential candidates and
boxers on their fourth comeback.

At home, I was a regular at the 10:50 a.m. Friday
showings of every new movie that played on the postage stamp–sized screens at
Boston's Copley Place. The Navy brat in me grew restless. Things got bad enough
that I moved for work first to Philadelphia and then to New York and commuted
home on the weekends. I told myself the moves were for better jobs, but I was
now thirty and repeating Dad's life in another way: 100 percent faithful in a
part-time relationship.

So we decided to get hitched. Why? That was my
bright idea. I was a good Catholic boy. And I guess I thought once we were
contractually bonded she would understand my commitment to her and would be
amenable to moving somewhere else. We were married in an Australian Navy chapel
with giant windows on a bluff overlooking Sydney Harbor. (Her father wasn't
invited.) We exchanged vows as a military jet passed outside the windows and,
according to the Harrisons, waggled its wings as we said “I do.”

It seemed meant to be. But she had just been
offered a job at
The Boston Globe
; it was too great
an opportunity for her to pass up. I moved back to the town I loathed, but we
agreed it was just for a year or two. That was at the end of 1998. Within a
year, she was covering John McCain's presidential campaign. We both thought this
was somewhat hilarious since McCain was a Naval Academy grad of my dad's era and
she had only a tenuous grasp on American politics. I wrote her up a 3,500-word
annotated history of the New Hampshire primaries, helped her pack up our Sentra,
and she headed north.

She spent most of the next year on the road
covering McCain; this made me alternately miserable—I missed her terribly—and
ecstatic—her absence allowed me to flee Boston for friends in Los Angeles and
Chicago. But even the 2000 campaign eventually ended. She was now a star at the
paper and all talk of moving to New York or Los Angeles ceased. And she wanted
to start a family.

Our arguments left me bitterly reflecting on my own
childhood. Dad had given up nothing for his wife and children. Not his dangerous
profession, not his career climbing. And now, having endured that, I was
supposed to be the postmodern man, sinking my own ambitions for a wife and
unborn child? I faced some of the hardest decisions of my life. As usual, I felt
unprepared and alone.

T
here
are turning points in life that you don't notice at the time. The dissolution of
my marriage wasn't one of them. I can tell you exactly when it imploded. It was
in a third-floor room of the New Orleans Ritz-Carlton. I was profiling a
seventeen-year-old jockey and we had just flown in from San Francisco for the
Eclipse Awards on an interminable flight where we took turns stealing liquor
bottles off the airline cart. At the airport, a horse owner picked us up with an
open case of Coors on the backseat of his Cadillac. An hour later, I had just
fallen into a hard, drunken sleep when the phone rang. I heard the Australian
accent that still killed me eight years after falling in love with her. She was
excited.

“I found the perfect house.”

I expected to hear the tale of another overpriced
condo we could barely afford in the Back Bay or the South End.

“It's in Nahant.”

Nahant is a lovely town on the north shore of
Massachusetts, surrounded on three sides by the Atlantic Ocean. It was home to
our best friends and their two kids whom I desperately loved. Often, I would
make the thirty-minute trek from Boston to soak up their food, play on their
backyard tire swing, and have a swim. But I had no desire to live there. Nahant
is nearly all white, houses one pizza joint, and is fifteen miles through
horrible traffic and strip malls from the limited possibilities of Boston. I saw
a Stephen King existence in my future: not that of the wealthy writer but of a
man driven slowly insane by isolation.

“Nahant? I thought we agreed I didn't want to live
there.”

A forty-five-minute monologue followed. I don't
remember the particulars except for a repeated phrase: “If you don't want to buy
the house, you were never committed to this marriage.”

I could have said no, but I was never good at that,
not in that relationship, not in my life. I could feel her slipping away from
me, so I did what I always do with loved ones who threaten to slip away. I
surrendered. I said okay and hung up.

I
flew
home the next night on a red-eye that was caught in a blizzard, so I didn't land
at Logan until 10:00 a.m. We had to make an offer that afternoon. In a haze, I
walked through the wood floors, saw the distant sea view, noted my wife's
enthusiasm, and signed the papers. I just wanted her not to be mad at me
anymore.

We moved in two months later. Shortly after the
moving truck arrived, a friend stopped by and found me wandering aimlessly
through the rooms. “Dead man walking,” he quipped. It wasn't too far from the
truth.

I spent the next year in a deep depression. I lived
a double life there. I'd jet off to wherever and interview a quarterback or a
murder suspect or the occasional Colombian rebel. In some ways, I was living the
big life I always wanted. But at home, I struggled to get out of bed before ten.
On a good day, I'd fall into my rusting Honda and drive three miles to the YMCA
in nearby Lynn, a dying industrial town. The Y on a weekday morning was
populated with retirees in their sixties from a nearby General Electric plant.
They were a rough bunch—there was a sign in the shower that read “Cleaning
habits that may be acceptable at home may be considered offensive by other
patrons”—and the regulars would blast CNBC and trot on treadmills without
bothering to change out of their flannel shirts and deer-hunting orange hats.
I'd move quickly toward the pool where I'd share a lane with a mildly retarded
man who eagerly awaited my arrival with a lopsided smile and a propensity to
scissor-kick me in the ribs every lap or so.

But in the water I'd lose myself. Swimming lap
after lap, I'd envision an escape to Los Angeles or New York. No more lunches at
Wendy's on the Lynnway, no more being awakened by the lobsterman's backfiring
truck as he headed off to tend his traps at four in the morning. My fantasy
woman was a lot like my wife, but without the picket fence fetish. She would be
a slightly bohemian type with an artsy job who wanted to raise boho kids in a
shambling, run-down apartment in Brooklyn or Santa Monica.

Every day, I wrote for a couple hours, called
friends across the country, and then slipped into a two- or three-hour nap. Some
days, I wandered the deserted roads of our town. Nobody walked there, so this
led to my being hassled by the cops. This did not improve my attitude. By the
time my wife arrived home, I wasn't fit company for anyone. Surly and sarcastic
became my default settings. There were ultimatums and timetables given for my
improvement. I entered therapy. I took Paxil. She became convinced that I wasn't
going to be a fit husband or good father until I came to grips with the death of
my own father.

I agreed, but how?

T
hen
9/11 came. The planes that destroyed the World Trade Towers took off from Boston
Logan, passing over our little town before making a U-turn and heading south.
When it became clear what had happened, she headed into work. For some reason, I
drove to the T and took it to Logan. The once bustling terminals were now quiet
except for a woman sweeping the floor while crying quietly to herself.

The
Globe
sent my wife
to Pakistan a few weeks later. I returned to Flint for Thanksgiving. The
country's buildup to war triggered something long buried. The night I arrived,
Mom and my sisters watched the news and footage of planes taking off from
faraway carriers. I lay on the couch and felt a physical weight crushing my
chest. I stared at Dad's planes on the mantel and his portrait on the wall. I
wanted to scream, “He died!”

But I said nothing. Still, it was the first hint of
an awakening. I went to bed and woke up at 5:00 a.m. with a fear I had never
felt before, not while on dangerous assignments with Colombian narco-terrorists
or while riding in BMWs with suspected murderers. I stumbled outside and walked
through our neighborhood until dawn. I told Mom I had to get away. We sat in her
car at a gas station before I left and I asked her why we never talked about
Dad.

“I thought it would be too painful for you,” she
said. “People told me we should move on and look forward, not back.”

I left an hour later. I wandered the country,
visiting friends from Chicago to California. I watched the network news extol
the bravery of our pilots as footage of their red taillights heading off to
Afghanistan played in the background. I changed the channel.

Things between my wife and me deteriorated. When
she came back from Pakistan, I met her at Logan in a driver's cap with her name
written on a piece of cardboard, but she didn't laugh at all. That's when I knew
I was screwed.

Then I got an email from the Navy. I had tried
getting on board an aircraft carrier for a magazine story earlier in the year
after my wife's urging, but it fell apart after 9/11. But then the Navy changed
their mind; this was going to be a long war, and maybe some good publicity in a
glossy mag was not a bad thing. I was invited to spend three weeks deployed with
a Hornet squadron. When I saw what carrier they were on I lost my breath; it was
the
Kitty Hawk
, Dad's last boat.

If this wasn't dealing with his death, nothing
short of orchestrating my own plane crash would do. I departed for Hong Kong to
meet the carrier two weeks later. We promised not to make any decisions while I
was away.

I saw Dad's ready room. I saw where he prayed. On a
murky night off Singapore, I wandered onto the deck of the
Kitty Hawk
in an Ambien haze and walked the few hundred feet in the
tracks of the catapult that launched him to his death. I stumbled to the edge of
the boat, nearly pitching over the side into a sea of darkness. And I wept.

I returned three weeks later, tan and ten pounds
heavier from too many midrats corn dogs—and with a new understanding of my
father. It didn't pay immediate dividends. That Sunday, in a Gap parking lot, my
wife told me she was leaving me.

“It's just not working.”

For once in my life, I said nothing. My first
thought was, “In a Gap parking lot? Are you fucking kidding?” We rode home in
silence. It turned out I was going to be doing the leaving. At the house, I
threw some clothes into two giant duffel bags and laughed bitterly at the
wallpaper I had been peeling off our bedroom walls—prep work for a renovation
that now would never happen. I tossed my CDs into a crate and packed up my Honda
for a trip to see the Harrisons in Chicago.