Comeback Love
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For my son, Ben,
And my wife, Annis,
With love and gratitude beyond measure
For winter’s rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten …
—ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
Part I
Present
Chapter 1
TWO DAYS AFTER Christmas, the snow was still falling.
I should have been at my older sister’s outside Boston, visiting with Elaine and her husband, but the snow had started on Christmas Eve, closing the airports, and by morning the world was white and silent.
I decided to drive to Elaine’s from DC and make a couple of stops on the way. Traffic was light and the plows were out on I-95, but with the storm it was slow going, so I didn’t get to the Mt. Lebanon Cemetery in New Jersey until early afternoon.
The snow had piled up between the long rows of carved granite, and after tucking the cuffs of my corduroys into my boots, I high-stepped through the drifts to the Meyers family plot. My father had bought these dozen graves in 1951. Around then, my mother was bugging him to buy a house in Jersey, like his brother, but my father had refused to leave Brooklyn, saying he had plenty of time to go to Jersey—when he was dead.
Now he was there, with mom, my aunt, and uncle. There was even space for me. Someday. And probably sooner rather than later, since the men in my family weren’t notable for their longevity.
I cleared the snow from the footstones with a windshield brush, then stood in the pale gray light, talking to my parents, Aunt Lil, and Uncle Jerr until tears were freezing in my eyes.
Then I drove to Manhattan and checked into the Grand Hyatt.
Much of my life has been passed alone in dilapidated hotels and guesthouses in the peskier backwaters of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East—not necessarily places you’d go unless, like me, you had been a civilian consultant to a handful of intelligence agencies.
Yet even in the most genteel cities, when the accommodations were five-star, the rooms filled me with loneliness.
Television helps. So does vodka. And after turning on the news and pouring a Stoli from the minibar, I sat on the bed and reread the page I’d printed from the DoctorFinder on the American Medical Association website:
Glenna Rising, MD
Location:
289 W. 51st St
New York, NY 10019
Office Phone:
212-555-0422
Residency Training:
NY AND PRESBY HOSP
Primary Specialty:
PEDIATRICS
Medical School:
COLUMBIA UNIV COLL OF
PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS
NEW YORK, NY 10032
I doubt the cold warriors who initially funded the Internet suspected it would become a popular method for tracking down ex-girlfriends. I hadn’t seen Glenna in over thirty years, and given my career collecting and analyzing intel on foreign armies and paramilitary groups, I could have used my skills to uncover far more about her. But I didn’t want to ruin my vision of Glenna: beautiful, available, and willing to concede that she, too, was subject to this strange power that had kept us connected across so many years.
Reaching into my daypack, I took out a photograph of her. Long ago, I had sealed it between laminated sheets: the edges were curled with age, but the image had remained as detailed as an etching. Glenna is standing in the golden autumn light outside a hotel in Bennington, Vermont, with leaves falling all around her. Her long hair is the color of maple syrup with sun shining through it. A breeze blows it off the shoulders of her sweater, swirling it around her face, but you can still see the cameo perfection of her features. She is smiling, and yet doesn’t seem happy, appears suspicious instead, and to this day I don’t know if it was happiness she didn’t trust or me.
Perhaps it was both.
Someone once said a photograph is a far cry from a memory. I’m not so sure this is true because I remember looking through the viewfinder of the Minolta on that breezy, sunlit Saturday, smelling the woodsmoke rising from the white-brick chimney of the hotel, and thinking that no matter what became of us, I would love Glenna—and be haunted by her—forever.
I put away the photo, then picked up my iPhone and went through the saved voice mails until I heard the last one from Alex: “Hey, Dad. Thanks for dinner and the advice about Julie. Things’re up and down, but I’m trying. I’ll be in touch. Love you.” Alex started laughing. “And, Dad. Stay out of Dorkville!”
I loved hearing my son laugh—in part, because his mother and I had split up when he was in fifth grade, and I’d taken away an enduring guilt-curdled image of him on his bed sobbing into his pillow. When Alex was fourteen, my ex remarried and left DC for Potomac, Maryland, and Alex decided to live with me in Georgetown. From the day he moved into my town house, Alex had been trying to fix me up—with a few of his teachers, some divorced soccer moms, and once with a woman who struck up a conversation with him in the cereal aisle at Safeway. Eleven years later and living in his own apartment in Baltimore, he was still playing matchmaker, but I wouldn’t cooperate, which, according to Alex, made me a distinguished resident of Dorkville.
The dinner Alex mentioned was three weeks ago at Bourbon Steak. We were splitting a porterhouse when Alex told me that for months he’d been fighting with Julie, the young woman he’d been seeing for two years, an auburn-haired beauty who worked at the State Department and spoke half a dozen languages. Alex said the fights were over nothing and came out of nowhere. I suggested he listen more and argue less; perhaps he’d discover what was really bothering Julie. He said, “Dad, I’m scared. When I imagine losing Julie, I can’t imagine ever getting over her.” Alex had some red in his hair, courtesy of his mother, but the greenish-brown eyes, cleft chin, broad shoulders, and thick chest came from me, and as I looked at him across the table, I felt as if I were watching a dismal rerun of my own life. I comforted my son with a lie. I told him these things worked themselves out, but whatever happened, time took care of every wound. He smiled at me, a sign, I thought, that he believed me. But outside after dinner, before Alex got into his car, he hugged me, holding on longer than usual, and remembering that now, drinking by myself in a hotel room, I was convinced that I’d failed him as a father.
I finished my vodka and glanced at the television, where the newscaster was announcing that two soldiers had died fighting in northern Iraq, killed in an ambush outside the city of Mosul. Sadness and disgust rose up in me, and I shut off the TV and went to take a shower.
Standing under the hot spray, I considered calling Glenna, but odds were her receptionist or answering service would pick up, and I’d have to leave a message, which might not be returned.
Of course, Glenna might not be at her office when I showed up. She could be on vacation with a husband or lover or seeing patients in the hospital.
I dismissed these possibilities for the best and worst of reasons: I didn’t want them to be true, because even though I knew that my reunion plan was ridiculous, I also knew that if I didn’t feel as though my life were splitting at the seams, then I would never have stopped in New York to see her.
Chapter 2
IT WAS DARK when I exited the Hyatt and walked past Grand Central Station. The snow had let up, but the plows were working overtime, and the streetlights sparkled on the ice-crusted peaks that ran along the curb like arctic mountains.
Crossing Madison Avenue, I glanced downtown and saw the office building where my father and Uncle Jerry used to work in public relations for Danzig Pharmaceutical. An ache of loss went through me like the icy snap of the wind, but thinking about my dad and his brother, usually locked in a ferocious debate over something—which way the rivers flow, for instance—always made me smile.
My father, Alex, was seven years older than Uncle Jerr. Their parents died young, and Uncle Jerr was in Eastern District High School and living with my mother while Dad was off fighting with the Fourth Infantry Division in the Hürtgen Forest, where he won the Silver Star. My father kept his medal in his dresser, and I remember coming into his room when I was a kid and seeing him, big and broad-shouldered, standing in his boxer shorts and staring at the ribbon and medal cupped in his hand, his handsome face as hard as stone and his sepia, gold-flecked eyes filled with a grief and rage I didn’t understand. He showed me the Silver Star a few times, and Uncle Jerr told me that he’d won it for taking out three Nazi pillboxes by himself, but my father seldom spoke about his war.
As I headed north on Fifth Avenue, the city felt deserted in these lost, snowbound days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Turning up the shearling collar of my coat to keep the cold off my neck, I was curious why I couldn’t stop thinking about my father and uncle, and then it struck me that they had been responsible for my meeting Glenna.
It was the summer of 1968. I was working in the public-relations department at Danzig because I had recently earned some of the lowest grades in the history of Brooklyn College and failed to graduate after four years, which led my father to insist that I get a real job. Since he was head of PR, and either traveling or in a meeting, Uncle Jerr showed me the ropes. Banging out press releases and proofreading direct-mail pieces was a cinch, and it was a gas working for Uncle Jerr, who took PR a little less seriously than the fate of the Mets, Jets, Knicks, and Rangers. He wasn’t exactly a degenerate gambler, since he avoided money trouble, but in the mornings when I went to get my assignments from him, my uncle had several sports sections opened up on his desk, and we would spend an hour going over the day’s starting pitchers before he called his bookie.
Sometimes, my father would drop in to see me. Once, he stopped by while I was reading Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy. Fall had been killed in Vietnam on patrol with the Marines, and evidently, from the concern on my father’s face, he was familiar with Fall’s obituary.
My father asked, “How’s the book?”
“Interesting.”
He eyed me suspiciously. “There’s things more interesting than war,” he said, lighting a Lucky Strike. “I thought you’d like coming to work here. It’s no great shakes. But we’d be together. And you gotta work at being something.”
A tremor of guilt rolled through me. I hated disappointing him. “I’ve been thinking about being a writer. Like those stories I wrote for the lit mags.”
“Gordon, that writing was fine for high school and college. But how you gonna support yourself?”
I shrugged. Truth was, I didn’t have a clue of what to write about. Nor did I have any knowledge of how one becomes a writer, and I was convinced that I had no experience worth recording, which partially explained my attraction to Vietnam. Even if the war was shaping up into a grotesque mistake, I still wanted to see it for myself, though I was enough of a middle-class kid to be ashamed of feeling thrilled by the idea of going.
My father crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray on my desk. “We’ll talk about the writing,” he said.
We didn’t talk about it again until August. Aunt Lil and Uncle Jerr had been to another peace rally in the city, and afterward they drove to Brooklyn. We were at the redwood table in the backyard, and my father was barbecuing steaks and knocking back Chivas on the rocks when he said, “Gordon, this writing plan is bullshit. You got better things to do.”
I took a slug of Michelob. “Like public relations?”
Uncle Jerr said, “Alex, you gotta give the boy room to grow.”
“What is he?” my father said. “A plant?”
Uncle Jerr said, “Gordie, so you want to be a writer?”
“Butt out,” my father said. “Quit tryin’ to raise my son. You don’t have any kids, so you got no idea what you’re talkin’ about.”
With their thick bodies, intense, dark-eyed stares, and the Yardley pomade in their wavy, graying black hair, my father and uncle looked so much alike it was as if one person were arguing in a mirror. I drank my beer and listened. Once those two got going, there was no percentage in my getting involved.
My uncle said to me, “You wanna write, you can try journalism; I got contacts with some papers.”
My father snapped, “He’ll do it on his own.”
Uncle Jerr ignored him. “I’ll help you, Gordie. But you gotta buckle down in school and hold on to that student deferment.”
“I told you to butt out,” my father said.
“I’m tryin’ to keep your son out of a goddamn war.”
“Go back to your peace march, Jerr. Don’t tell me about war.”
Aunt Lil walked out the back door of the house with a wooden bowl of salad. Under her bleached, brassy bouffant, her face was as round and sweet as a cider doughnut. Her miniskirt didn’t flatter her stubbiness, though it did testify to her abundant courage.
“Darling,” she said to me, “you stay in college till you’re a hundred and seven. That Two-S can save your life.”
My mother, small and slender in an ivory summer dress dotted with sunflowers, came out right behind my aunt with a platter of corn on the cob. “What’s this deferment talk?”
“Relax, Renée,” my father said.
He must have mentioned my reading Bernard Fall to her because my mother glared down at me, her light blue eyes suddenly as cold and colorless as frost.
“Gordon,” she said, placing the platter on the table, “I sat home worried sick while my husband went to war. I don’t want to do it for my son.”
All these years later, it was still painful for me to recall the fear and resentment in my mother’s eyes, and as I cut across Rockefeller Center, passing the glass angels blowing trumpets and the Christmas tree shining like a pillar of flame, I was grateful for the wind whistling through the dark spaces between the skyscrapers, the wintry blast proving that I was no longer at a summer cookout in Brooklyn.
Glenna’s office was only a few blocks away, but as I stopped on the terrace above the enormous gilded statue of a reclining Prometheus and watched the skaters in brightly colored knit caps gliding through the lights of the ice rink below, I had a disquieting moment of sanity and asked myself two questions: What was I doing here? And what could I possibly accomplish by seeing Glenna?