The Year of Magical Thinking

15

A few months after John died, in the late winter of 2004, after Beth Israel and Presbyterian but before UCLA, I was asked by Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books if I wanted him to submit my name for credentials to cover the Democratic and Republican summer conventions. I had looked at the dates: late July in Boston for the Democratic convention, the week before Labor Day in New York for the Republican convention. I had said yes. At the time it had seemed a way of committing to a normal life without needing actually to live it for another season or two, until spring had come and summer had come and fall was near.

Spring had come and gone, largely at UCLA.

In the middle of July Quintana was discharged from the Rusk Institute.

Ten days later I went to Boston for the Democratic convention. I had not anticipated that my new fragility would travel to Boston, a city devoid, I thought, of potentially tricky associations. I had been with Quintana in Boston only once, on a book tour. We had stayed at the Ritz. Her favorite stop on this tour had been Dallas. She had found Boston “all white.” “You mean you didn’t see many black people in Boston,” Susan Traylor’s mother had said when Quintana got back to Malibu and reported on her trip. “No,” Quintana had said. “I mean it’s not in color.” The last several times I had needed to be in Boston I had gone alone, and in each case arranged the day so as to get the last shuttle back; the single time I could remember being there with John was for a preview of True Confessions, and all I remembered of that was having lunch at the Ritz and walking with John to Brooks Brothers to pick up a shirt and hearing, after the picture was shown and the response evaluated, this disheartening assessment of its commercial prospects: True Confessions could do very well, the market researcher said, among adults with sixteen-plus years of education.

I would not be staying at the Ritz.

There would be no need to go to Brooks Brothers.

There would be market researchers, but what bad news they delivered would not be mine.

I did not realize that there was still room for error until I was walking to the Fleet Center for the opening of the convention and found myself in tears. The first day of the Democratic convention was July 26, 2004. The day of Quintana’s wedding had been July 26, 2003. Even as I waited in the security line, even as I picked up releases in the press center, even as I located my seat and stood for the national anthem, even as I bought a hamburger at the McDonald’s in the Fleet Center and sat on the lowest step of a barricaded stairway to eat it, the details sprang back. “In another world” was the phrase that would not leave my mind. Quintana sitting in the sunlight in the living room having her hair braided. John asking me which of two ties I preferred. Opening the boxes of flowers on the grass outside the cathedral and shaking the water off the leis. John giving a toast before Quintana cut the cake. The pleasure he took in the day and the party and her transparent happiness. “More than one more day,” he had whispered to her before he walked her to the altar.

“More than one more day,” he had whispered to her on the five days and nights he saw her in the Beth Israel North ICU.

“More than one more day,” I had whispered to her in his absence on the days and nights that followed.

As you used to say to me, she had said when she stood in her black dress at St. John the Divine on the day we committed his ashes.

I recall being seized by the overwhelming conviction that I needed to get out of the Fleet Center, now. I have only rarely experienced panic but what set in next was recognizably panic. I remember trying to calm myself by seeing it as a Hitchcock movie, every shot planned to terrify but ultimately artifice, a game. There was the proximity of my assigned section to the netting that held the balloons for the balloon drop. There were the shadowy silhouettes moving on the high catwalks. There was the steam or smoke leaking from a vent over the sky boxes. There were, once I fled my seat, the corridors that seemed to go nowhere, mysteriously emptied, the walls slanted and distorted (the Hitchcock movie I was seeing would have to be Spellbound) ahead of me. There were the immobilized escalators. There were the elevators that did not respond to the push of the button. There were, once I managed to get downstairs, the empty commuter trains frozen in place beyond the locked glass wall (again, slanted and distorted as I approached it) that opened to the North Station tracks.

I got out of the Fleet Center.

I watched the end of that night’s session on television in my room at the Parker House. There had seemed about this room at the Parker House when I first walked into it the day before something déjà vu, which I had put from my mind. Only now, as I was watching C-SPAN and listening to the air conditioner cycle on and off on its own schedule, did I remember: I had stayed in just such a room at the Parker House for a few nights between my junior and senior years at Berkeley. I had been in New York for a college promotion Mademoiselle then ran (the “Guest Editor” program, memorialized by Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar) and was returning to California via Boston and Quebec, an “educational” itinerary arranged, in retrospect dreamily, by my mother. The air conditioner had been cycling on and off on its own schedule even in 1955. I could remember sleeping until afternoon, miserable, then taking a subway to Cambridge, where I must have walked around aimlessly and taken the subway back.

These shards from 1955 were coming to me in such shredded (or “spotty,” or even “mudgy”) form (what did I do in Cambridge, what possibly could I have done in Cambridge?) that I had trouble holding them, but I tried, because for so long as I was thinking about the summer of 1955 I would not be thinking about John or Quintana.

In the summer of 1955 I had taken a train from New York to Boston.

In the summer of 1955 I had taken another train from Boston to Quebec. I stayed in a room at the Château Frontenac that did not have its own bathtub.

Did mothers always try to press on their daughters the itineraries of which they themselves had dreamed?

Did I?

This was not working.

I tried going further back, earlier than 1955, to Sacramento, high school dances at Christmastime. This felt safe. I thought about the way we danced, close. I thought about the places on the river we went after the dances. I thought about the fog on the levee driving home.

I fell asleep maintaining focus on the fog on the levee.

I woke at four a.m. The point about the fog on the levee was that you couldn’t see the white line, someone had to walk ahead to guide the driver. Unfortunately there had been another place in my life where the fog got so thick that I had to walk ahead of the car.

The house on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

The one to which we brought Quintana when she was three days old.

When you came off the Harbor Freeway and through San Pedro and onto the drive above the sea you hit the fog.

You (I) got out of the car to walk the white line.

The driver of the car was John.

I did not risk waiting for the panic to follow. I got a taxi to Logan. I avoided looking, as I bought a coffee at the Starbucks franchise outside the Delta shuttle, at its decorative garland of red-white-and-blue foil strips, presumably conceived as a festive “convention” touch but instead glittering forlornly, Christmas in the tropics. Mele Kalikimaka. Merry Christmas in Hawaiian. The little black alarm clock I could not throw away. The dried-out Buffalo pens I could not throw away. On the flight to LaGuardia I remember thinking that the most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes. The way the American west opens up. The way in which, on a polar flight across the Arctic, the islands in the sea give way imperceptibly to lakes on the land. The sea between Greece and Cyprus in the morning. The Alps on the way to Milan. I saw all those things with John.

How could I go back to Paris without him, how could I go back to Milan, Honolulu, Bogotá?

I couldn’t even go to Boston.

A week or so before the Democratic convention, Dennis Overbye of The New York Times had reported a story involving Stephen W. Hawking. At a conference in Dublin, according to the Times, Dr. Hawking said that he had been wrong thirty years before when he asserted that information swallowed by a black hole could never be retrieved from it. This change of mind was “of great consequence to science,” according to the Times, “because if Dr. Hawking had been right, it would have violated a basic tenet of modern physics: that it is always possible to reverse time, run the proverbial film backward and reconstruct what happened in, say, the collision of two cars or the collapse of a dead star into a black hole.”

I had clipped this story, and carried it with me to Boston.

Something in the story seemed urgent to me, but I did not know what it was until a month later, the first afternoon of the Republican convention in Madison Square Garden. I was on the Tower C escalator. The last time I had been on such an escalator in the Garden was with John, in November, the night before we flew to Paris. We had gone with David and Jean Halberstam to see the Lakers play the Knicks. David had gotten seats through the commissioner of the NBA, David Stern. The Lakers won. Rain had been sluicing down the glass beyond the escalator. “It’s good luck, an omen, a great way to start this trip,” I remembered John saying. He did not mean the good seats and he did not mean the Laker win and he did not mean the rain, he meant we were doing something we did not ordinarily do, which had become an issue with him. We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn’t we do this, didn’t we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.

This trip to Paris was the one over which we had fought.

This trip to Paris was the one he said he needed to take because otherwise he would never see Paris again.

I was still on the Tower C escalator.

Another vortex revealed itself.

The last time I covered a convention at Madison Square Garden had been 1992, the Democratic convention.

John would wait until I came uptown at eleven or so to have dinner with me. We would walk to Coco Pazzo on those hot July nights and split an order of pasta and a salad at one of the little unreserved tables in the bar. I do not think we ever discussed the convention during these late dinners. On the Sunday afternoon before it began I had talked him into going uptown with me to a Louis Farrakhan event that never materialized, and between the improvisational nature of the scheduling and the walk back downtown from 125th Street his tolerance for the 1992 Democratic convention was pretty much exhausted.

Still.

He waited every night to eat with me.

I thought about all this on the Tower C escalator and suddenly it occurred to me: I had spent a minute or two on this escalator thinking about the November night in 2003 before we flew to Paris and about those July nights in 1992 when we would eat late at Coco Pazzo and about the afternoon we had stood around 125th Street waiting for the Louis Farrakhan event that never happened. I had stood on this escalator thinking about those days and nights without once thinking I could change their outcome. I realized that since the last morning of 2003, the morning after he died, I had been trying to reverse time, run the film backward.

It was now eight months later, August 30, 2004, and I still was.

The difference was that all through those eight months I had been trying to substitute an alternate reel. Now I was trying only to reconstruct the collision, the collapse of the dead star.