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that seem to never fade away. Which is yours?”
I smiled and said:
“Oh, I live with most things.”
“And now you’re sounding far too stoic.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I said and changed the subject.
Jan never did learn about that ache—as I always dodged discussions of it. In time, however, she did come to believe that it still impacted on the present and colored so much between us. Just as she also came to the conclusion that there was a significant part of me that was closed off to any real intimacy. But that analysis was reached some time down the road.
And on the next date—the night we also first slept together—I could see her deciding that I was . . . well, different . She was a lawyer, an associate at a major Boston firm. She earned her money representing big corporations but also insisted on handling one pro bono case per year “to salve my conscience.” Unlike me, she’d been in a long relationship, a fellow lawyer who took a job out west and used the move to end it between them.
“You think things are solid, then you discover otherwise,” she said. “And you wonder why your antennae didn’t pick up the fact that all was going wrong.”
“Maybe he was telling you one thing and thinking another,” I said. “Which is often the way these things happen. Everyone has a part of themselves they prefer not to reveal. It’s why we can never really fathom even those close to us. The unknowingness of others and all that.”
“‘And the most foreign place is the self.’ That’s a direct quote from your book on Alaska.”
“Well, I’d be a liar if I didn’t say I was flattered.”
“It’s a great book.”
“Really?”
“You mean, you don’t know that?”
“As I have the usual writerly distrust of anything I’ve ever committed to paper . . .”
“Why such incertitude?”
“It just goes with the territory, I suppose.”
“In my profession incertitude is not allowed. In fact, an uncertain lawyer is never trusted.”
“But surely you have a measure of uncertainty?”
“Not when I’m defending a client or making a closing argument. I have to be indisputable. In private, on the other hand, I’m unsure about everything.”
“Glad to hear that,” I said, covering her hand with mine.
That was the real start of things between us, the moment we both decided to let our defenses down and fall for each other. Is love often predicated on good timing? How often have I heard friends say that they got married because they were ready to get married? That was my dad’s story—and one that he related to me just after my mother died. And it went like this:
It was 1957. He’d been out of the Marine Corps for four years, having then gone to Columbia on the GI Bill. He’d just landed a junior executive job at Young & Rubicon. His sister was marrying a former war correspondent turned PR man—a marriage that went south right after the Palm Beach honeymoon but dragged on until her husband drank and raged himself into a fatal coronary fifteen years later. But on the happy day in question, Dad saw a diminutive young woman across a crowded function room at the Roosevelt Hotel. Her name was Alice Goldfarb. Dad described her as the antithesis of the “corned beef and cabbage” Irish girls he knew growing up in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Her father was a jeweler in the Diamond District, her mother a professional yenta. But Alice had gone to the right schools and could talk about classical music and the ballet and Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan. And Dad—being a smart but intellectually insecure Brooklyn mick—was charmed and just a little flattered that this Central Park West cutie was interested in him.
So there he was, the altar boy turned Korean War vet turned young ad exec. Aged twenty-six. No responsibilities to anyone but himself. The world was his for the taking.
“And what do I do?” he told me as we sat alone together in the limousine that followed the hearse en route to the cemetery with my