Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ment we broke up her life had improved. After all, she'd begun getting regular work in
television and the movies; she'd met a man she could love
and
live with, she'd created a
home and a family. She showed me pictures of her six-year-old son.
I thanked her for helping me quit smoking. In the weeks after I'd gotten the letter
about her engagement, my habit cranked up to more than a pack a day. I was smoking
unfiltered Camels in those days, and I developed a cough so persistent that my
shrink—my shrink!—to whom I was venting despair about my mother and Catherine
twice a week, insisted I go for a chest X-ray. I threw out my cigarettes after that ses-
sion—March 21, 2001—and haven't had one since, but over the early months, marking
the days without a smoke was positive reinforcement for a guy whose self-esteem was
pretty shaky. Every minute I spent congratulating myself for not smoking was time I
didn't spend in guilt-ridden self-loathing over the two women I had just lost.
It had been quite a while since I'd been actively angry at Catherine, since I'd had the
regular, agitating dreams that made me obsess for hours about that moment in front of
my apartment building, since I'd anguished over whether Catherine or the years I spent
with her was the more unsettling loss. Still, it felt as though I had a score to settle: Why
did she fly across the country to be with me at my mother's funeral if she was no longer
in love with me?
“I thought we were going to have another chance together,” I said to her.
She looked at me very evenly and said that she had thought the same. She'd wanted
to be there for me when my mother died, she said, but also, before she went ahead with
her marriage to someone else, she wanted to give me one last chance to ask her myself.
But I hadn't done it, she said.
It ached a little bit to hear that, of course, another inner bruise in a day of them.
She drove me back to my crummy motel and we stared at each other in the car, one
more potent moment for me to think about over the next twenty or thirty years.
We talked a little bit about not having seen each other in so long and agreed that
having to say good-bye again so quickly didn't seem quite fair, even though it was un-
deniable that both of us are probably happier now than we ever were with each other.
We were both thinking the same thing, I think, that if we hadn't missed that connection
ten years ago the last ten years would have gone differently.
What would that have meant? That we would be married to each other? That we
would be divorced? That we'd have resolved our painful difficulties and been happy? Or
that we'd have had ten more years of scratching at our neurotic wounds? At this point
would we be bitter and grudge-ridden, unwilling to communicate, incapable of the mu-
tual gratitude and goodwill that had suddenly dawned on us? Or would we somehow
have gotten here anyway, to this precise point in our lives and in our relationship, by
