Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Hmmm, what is the appropriate background here? There are a few salient facts. Cath-
erine and I met at a dinner party at Christmastime in 1993, three months or so after I
returned from my first cross-country ride. At the end of the trip there had been a pic-
ture of me in the paper on the George Washington Bridge, and at the party—or maybe it
was on our first date a week or so later—Catherine said she'd seen it, read my last story
about the trip, and asked herself why she could never seem to meet a guy like that. She
was fetching, flirtatious in the Southern manner—she'd grown up in Louisiana—curious,
bright, verbally deft, no pushover. She was an actress, a struggling one at the time; I was
covering the theater for the
Times
.
The relationship quickly became serious but somehow never certain. Our mutual feel-
ings were strong; so were our apprehensions. We fought, sometimes over consequential
matters, sometimes over trivialities that fanned our frustrations to a boil, interestingly
never about the theater, which we attended together a lot. I never criticized her acting.
She was talented, especially fun to watch in a role that called for high dudgeon. I was
smart enough to know not to give her notes. Partly I learned this from her because now
and then she would make a suggestion about something I was writing, and sometimes I
would take it, sometimes not. If I didn't she'd be insulted and we'd end up in a brouhaha.
It was the kind of fight we had often no matter what started it—obviously not about
whatever it purported to be about.
We chased each other around the country. She went back and forth from New York
to L.A. I moved to Chicago for a
Times
job that kept me traveling. And we chased each
other around a Mobius strip of emotions: she was in agony for me when I was cool, I
couldn't bear to be without her when she was in independent mode. In our separate mo-
ments of desperation, each of us proposed marriage and was turned down. That became
a bit of a joke between us. “Will you marry me?” one of us would say. “Not today,” the
other would reply.
But finally none of this was a joking matter. You know how it is: you want it to work,
you badly want it to work, but it doesn't. It feels as though your own psyche, your own
brain, is working against your own contentment, but the fact is you're not content. We
went to therapy together, and we went separately.
Therapy wasn't new for me. I'd been going to a shrink since the late 1980s for periodic
bouts of depression, but the extended strain of the relationship was triggering episodes
more frequently. The bedroom became an anguishing place more than a consoling one,
where things got worse instead of better. There was a tense, awful weekend in New Or-
leans for the wedding of one of her brothers. Finally, in 1998, as we were getting ready
to take a vacation together in Istanbul, I fell apart. Catherine was in L.A. I was in Ch-
icago. I began panicking each time we spoke on the phone, and then for a day or two
