Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (22 page)

Two weeks later, on the day after President Clinton’s election, when I was unwinding, knowing that my Brazil story was scheduled to come out in the next issue of the magazine, my editor there called. He had heard that the
New York Times Magazine
was coming out with a cover article on Collor de Mello that Sunday. He sounded tense and annoyed. My mind scrambled, my heart thumped. I knew my story was dead. We could not be seen as trailing the
Times.
This was exactly what I had feared. I called Elizabeth, told her my story was dead. It was my fault—that’s all I could think of. She tried to sympathize, but I wouldn’t listen and hung up. “This happens all the time,” an editor friend at the magazine assured me, shuffling papers on her desk while keeping an eye on me. I kept pacing, smoking, speaking loudly, making quite a spectacle of myself in her office. Fuming, striking out at everyone but especially myself, I left her office and walked into a lashing rainstorm, one of those hellish downpours in which umbrellas turn inside out and people hang on to the side of buildings, mashed like fallen leaves by the wind that rails on the city. I was drenched. By the time Elizabeth got

home I had been lying on the couch for a couple of hours, staring out the living room windows into the flashes of lightning in the black sky, running my hand on Boom’s furry back, the softest surface around.

She came in quietly carrying a dozen red roses and placed them—the only bright color in the

room—in a glass on top of the television set. I looked up, without a smile, and mumbled thanks and flopped back into a dead stare, a familiar downward spiral. She sat across from me, not near enough to touch me, and tried to reassure me. “It is not your fault. You had a great story.” But I was intransigent, and juvenile, saying nothing, looking away from her. Finally, exasperated, she pleaded, “What do you want from me?”

With that she left the apartment for a cocktail party. I stayed on the couch all night, in the jeans and shirt I had worn all day. “You don’t get it,” she blurted out the next morning. “You still don’t understand what you do to me, to yourself.” She was disconsolate; my apologies, too late, too lame, were flicked away with a cold shrug. Too quickly she was gone to work. She walked down Broadway, her eyes fixed on the sidewalk, a wispy figure disappearing into the mob in Times Square, so invisible that, like anyone else in New York City, she could cry and no one would notice.

Incredibly, I had to go back to Brazil. The interview with President Collor de Mello came through, finally. Overnight I was on my way to Rio. I would wait days in Rio for word that the president would see me in his villa in Brasília. It was during that wait in my hotel room in Rio, late in the afternoon, talking to Elizabeth on the phone, when I heard in her voice the ice burn I knew too well. Still smoldering from those last awful nights in New York, she was curt, impersonal. For the first time in all our years, the warmth in her seemed entirely gone. She was saying the words I had dreaded.

“We need to talk when you get back.”

Her tone gave me no hope. I stared at the walls of my room, and her voice seemed very far. I felt myself sinking and my hands started to shake. My voice dropped, a quiver. I didn’t eat or sleep that night or the next or the next, and three days after that call, after I had finished the interviews I had to do, I took the first plane to New York. She was not at the airport, and I took a taxi into Manhattan. The city was just emerging from the early-morning haze, the sky a lavender bruise. She was waiting in the apartment, seated on the edge of the sofa, looking down on the scuffed carpet. She had been crying, I could see the red-rimmed eyes, and not daring to touch her, I took a chair, my hands trembling when I lit her cigarette. We sat looking at each other and away from each other for what seemed a long time. “If you don’t change,” she said slowly, each word stinging like a hard slap to the face, “I will leave you.” I cannot remember if I said anything or made a noise, but I remember that I had to gulp back tears but they rolled down my face, down my chin, and onto my lap.

She was tired of our fights, my moods and depressions. “I can’t rescue you anymore.” That was not all. She felt I was choking her, stifling her. She winced, saying she no longer felt safe with me.

She was groping for words, her head lowered, her voice grave. I nodded but had no response. My ears were roaring from the blood rising to my head. I could not hear her words but felt each of them. I don’t know if I spoke—surely I did—but I knew I couldn’t defend myself. I had run out of things to say.

We know how passion disintegrates. There are thin cracks, coded words. A distance that we cannot quite measure grows silently, steadily. Sometimes, too often, it happens when we are most comfortable, when life becomes routine, and the touch that once burned no longer stirs our blood. I have had loves that died when I wasn’t looking, when I had forgotten, when the love became something I had misplaced.

That is not what came to us.

Our life had its own wild rhythm, unchoreographed, uncharted. We moved into our new brownstone the day before New Year’s Eve, finally ending nine months of waiting to have a

permanent home and have our furniture and pictures and books with us again. But nothing was quite the same. I was worn out from work, from travel, from the fear that our relationship was so frayed and tenuous that it could snap in an instant. The Christmas holidays gave us no comfort, and no time. All the recognition I had received, whatever success, had cost me—had cost both of us.

Without even a day to get us settled in our apartment, I had to fly out on a last-minute assignment to Florida and do a story on a Cuban defector that didn’t interest me much but mattered to the magazine. I was leaving Elizabeth with all the annoying irritations of moving, alone in that large place, boxes still unpacked. I left at dawn on New Year’s Day, 1993. She saw me off from the front window, Boom in her arms. Throwing my bag in the back seat, I had the wrenching sensation of loss, and the trip was miserable.

There were weeks in January and February when I was away most of the time, working, spending agonizing hours in hotel rooms, Elizabeth’s voice on the phone no longer my tether to the world. In between we had moments of peace when life seemed to recover a semblance of joy, when we strolled up Amsterdam Avenue and drank copious amounts of wine at Louie’s Westside Café, where they saved a back table for us and left us alone but overheard everything.

“You are changing,” she said approvingly, grateful that I wasn’t pushing her or poking at her to analyze what had gone wrong. I seized on those encouraging words, lighting up, and we walked home arm in arm. I had been trying to change, appeasing her, minding every word I said, going to therapy to sort out my head. It was an irony that just as we were breaking apart, we were at the same time more open about our relationship. But I could not tamp down the sorrow threading through it all, fearing

that it was already too late to change anything, that she was smoothing the way to leave me. I sensed it in her casual touch, in the turns in her life that she did not talk to me about, when her mind drifted off and her eyes clouded.

Her life was moving somewhere else. That much I knew. Her words were not the old words of hers, something odd to me, words that rang hollow and seemed borrowed, as if they came from someone else. “I need space. I need boundaries.” These were clichés, so unlike her. She had come to these decisions well before I fully grasped their implications. How serious she was about this, how deadly it all was. She needed to find her way, she kept saying. “I have told you I need time alone.”

“Is there someone else?” I blurted out, noticing her reddening face and twisted, angry mouth. “No! Damn you! It is not someone else. That is not the issue. We are.”

Often she would just sit in the armchair by the fireplace and cry quietly, her arm clutched against her chest. She knew the hurt she was inflicting on me, and she knew she was hurting herself, too. But she wanted understanding and harmony despite it all. She wanted to save something of us.

It couldn’t be that simple.

We had an excess of passion. Everything about us was born out of it: our writing, our nights, our fights, our silences, and finally her desperate escape from me and the desperate loneliness that swept me when at last I came to see that I had lost her.

We had our requiems. How many burials could we stand? Those dirges, talks dissolving into recriminations, revisions of history, tears. There were no wounds we left untouched. I would find her collapsed on the sofa, her mind roaming, her face drawn, so far from me that I no longer could reach across the room. She would try again and again to explain, to bring reason to what was intrinsically irrational: “I haven’t had a moment to myself, to find out who I really am, in ten years.” I retaliated absurdly, throwing back at her our early years, when she had needed me because all she had had before me was that—loneliness.

We had those circular talks for so long that years later I see us fixed in place, a frozen scene, she on the corner of the sofa and I listening so intently that I noticed everything about the room as if it were new, the slanted light from the living room window casting shadows on the planes of her face, the dents in our Manila furniture, the words of a song she played over and over.

I knew what she wanted. She wanted me to walk out, to put a blade to it, neatly. But I would not. I had more tormenting ways. I stayed, carrying my pain for her to see. I had a fantasy, that she would come to me with that innocence and frailty I had known and take me by the hand and let me smooth out the folds of her shirt where it sloped over her shoulders.

I lied like that to myself.

What she said was “I don’t love you the way you want me to.”

We were having dinner at Louie’s Westside Café. I heard her words in a chamber inside my mind that was all echoes. “I don’t love you the way you want me to.” I stared at her, suddenly deaf, stunned into silence.

I left for Washington the next day, more interviews to do, and a life to contemplate. Forlorn as one can only be in hotel bars, even in the best hotels, I would leaf through magazines and newspapers, pretending I was not a lonely guest longing for a chair to be pulled up to my side. I would sit the evening through, waiting for the night.

The time had come when almost anything I said irritated her, even on the phone. “I can’t talk now. Have to go.” She was setting down rules. I no longer had any right to ask about any part of her life, which reduced our conversations to dead air, quick cuts. I would hang up and lie on the bed in my hotel room, smoking, choking back a scream, and by two in the morning I wanted nothing more than to hear her voice. Somehow I would get up the next day.

Friends looked at me with that helpless and pitying expression that people assume when someone is breaking all around them. Tim, now living in Washington, was at a loss, and tried to find a middle point between me and Elizabeth, shaking the ice in his Scotch, fidgeting in the bar’s chair. I saw him half a dozen times in Washington and New York, maybe more, during that period.

Once I asked him straight out, “Will she leave me?”

He came at that question with a direct reply rare for him: “Yes,” he said. His bulbous eyes bored into mine. Before he could elaborate, his girlfriend joined us, and I knew he couldn’t help me out this time.

“You’ll get over it,” people would say kindly, but it was a refrain that seemed entirely off the point, meaningless to me.

This was not an affair, a chase of mine, fires burning and then a sweep of ashes. And it was not quite a marriage, white dresses and veils and pieces of paper. This was a life, my life. How could I get over a life or the loss of my life? I was insufferable, obsessed, the object of what I so abhorred, pity and sympathy. I think at times I was truly insane.

Toward the end, I would spend days alone in the house, a bottle of wine within reach, cigarette ashes spilling on the rug. I would finally go to bed and stare at the page of a book I was reading, flipping pages regularly, and after an hour I would notice that I hadn’t absorbed a single word. I would listen for her footsteps on the stairs, then the click of the bedside lamp in the guest room that she now occupied. For several periods during the last months she was not there at all. She was visiting friends, finding sympathy and consolation, or out of town on stories, finding places and distractions to get away from me.

Those were my worst days, sitting on our sofa all day long, blotting out my life, too dispirited to move, to read, to write. In the late afternoon, when the solitude became intolerable, I would go down

to Louie’s and pass the time propped up on a barstool, talking with the actor bartender and the comedian waitress, who, being New Yorkers, connoisseurs of the human condition, could easily read the meaning of the lines on my face.

July, and the city was thinning out, people going away for the summer, to the Cape or the Hamptons. It seemed half the town was gone, and I was looking for a place to live, dreary walks up and down Amsterdam and West End Avenue and Riverside, everything I saw square and dark and reeking of lonely nights. I would go out day after day, trying to find something to cheer about but instead finding myself crying in the middle of the street, dreading the aloneness, the finality of it.

I knew I had to move out when she did not come home one night until two in the morning, something she had never done before. I overheard a car slow down, a door open and close, and the key turning in our front door. I waited at the top of the stairs. She looked wretched, from tears perhaps. Her linen jacket was wrinkled as if it had been balled up and thrown, and her eyes were glazed. But she was steady, composed.

“Where have you been?” I demanded. She looked at me as if she had never seen me before. Her facial structure completely changed, her face chiseled foxlike, a gesture of disdain around her mouth. “I don’t have to tell you anything,” she snapped right back, pulling away from me. I shouted back, followed her into the guest room, groping for words, wanting to wound her. “Get out!” she shouted. Her scream sent a shock wave through me.