Man in the Empty Boat Read online

  “OK,” I said to Jessica, and on only two conditions: I didn’t want to change diapers, and I wanted to rent an office outside the home so I could work there five days a week. I could almost see myself in the old-fashioned dad role—coming home from work at dinnertime, reading to the kids before bed, taking them to the park on weekends—but I could not see myself as a modern, involved dad. I’d seen those guys at the farmers’ market with diaper bags slung over their shoulders and defeated expressions on their faces, and it just didn’t look right.

  Jessica agreed to these terms, and nine months later (on time and under budget, that’s how Jessica works) a delivery room nurse handed our daughter to me, and when the baby’s tiny hand closed around one of my fingers and squeezed, I changed my mind about the diapers. And I never mentioned getting an office outside of the house again.

  If anguish is like a software virus, then the feeling you get when you hold your own baby for the first time is like a software vaccine. It’s self-replicating, and it spreads through your mind faster than the speed of thought, but instead of making you feel sick, it makes you believe you will never feel sick again. It makes you feel immortal. Not in the clichéd sense of I will live on through my child! That’s for amateurs. I’m talking about a feeling of protectiveness, love, awe, purpose, and delight so intense that it overwhelms not only your sense of yourself or your surroundings but even your sense of time. This, surely, is what is meant by the phrase the eternal present. Maybe only a person who had turned the thought of having children into a decades-long arm-wrestling match with himself could feel the mixture of astonishment and humility I felt when I experienced that feeling for the first time.

  Our first night in the hospital, after baby Ava had nursed at around five in the morning, I took her so that Jessica could get a few minutes of sleep. I put the baby, swaddled tightly in her blanket, next to me on the foldaway bed and lay there in the darkness on my side, with one hand cradled around her so she couldn’t roll away and fall on the floor and break like an egg. The sky outside our window began to get light. I stared at Ava’s sleeping face and here, more or less, are the words that passed through my mind at that moment: I cannot believe that I just spent forty-one years worrying about insignificant bullshit like being short or having a bad back or writing niche-y novels, when the obvious reason that I exist at all is to be lying here right now, making sure that this knit cap doesn’t slide off our baby’s head. She could catch cold!

  Not everyone enjoys taking care of infants—some parents can hardly wait until their children can think and talk and begin to differentiate between self and other. I, on the other hand, hoped Ava would never grow up. In my eyes, the fact that she didn’t yet know what words meant, and had no concept of herself as something distinct from anything else, made her the greatest show on earth. She was conscious, but her consciousness was as clear as a pond on a windless day. It was all awareness without any ideas churning inside it or blowing across its surface. Her mind was a work of nature, not yet of culture, and the thing about works of nature is that they can seem perfectly still even when they are moving. Being around her stilled my own mind in a way that deliberate exercises like meditation never could; the sight of her shone so brightly in my mind that ideas and inner conflict all got lost in the glare.

  Quiet can mean a lot more than the absence of sound. Imagine that you are in a concert hall, in your seat, waiting for the program to begin. You had to fight through traffic for over an hour to get there. You had a long, hard day even before making that drive. The hall is filled with the sound of the audience as friends greet each other, couples chat, and ushers guide latecomers to their seats. One man is laughing way too loudly; a woman is coughing; some jerk is talking on his cell phone. Their voices bother you; the sound almost hurts your ears. Then the lights dim, and the featured performer walks on stage. He takes his seat at his instrument, makes a few adjustments, and then goes still. The audience does the same and becomes completely silent. This silence isn’t empty; it is so rich with anticipation and wakefulness and joy that you feel as if your heart might burst. That is what I heard and felt whenever I held my pre-verbal child, so I found reasons to hold her a lot.

  Diapers, bottle feedings, burping, baths, dressing, tickling, tummy time, singing, reading aloud, stroller walks, park visits, checkups, driving around at midnight because the movement of the car put her to sleep—anything that didn’t require nipples, I did it, and it was the best job I ever had. No book or class could have prepared me for this, nor could I have imagined the transformation that occurred in terms of my everyday habits and routines, right down to the tiniest detail. The moment the baby was born, everything changed, except the fact that I had to breathe. All of a sudden, Jessica and I were busier than we had ever been in our lives, performing a seemingly endless array of tasks that neither of us had ever performed before—and purchasing, assembling, and disinfecting equipment that we had never even heard of. We learned to examine every object and surface around us for signs of potential danger; we worried about the baby’s jaundice and umbilical hernia and the v-shaped birthmark on her forehead; we realized, with a baby in the car, that driving on any freeway in Los Angeles is about as smart as playing Russian roulette; and we did our best to adjust to a schedule that only astronauts preparing to descend to the moon’s surface might recognize.

  Our emotions were amplified to their limits. We were in a state of high alert, euphoria, and exhaustion all rolled into one. And so much was happening all at once! One morning, when Ava was about two weeks old and I was so sleep-deprived that I couldn’t remember my own name, I was making oatmeal, when suddenly the baby started crying and the phone rang at the exact same time. I rushed over to pick up the baby first, then grabbed the phone with my free hand. It was my mother, calling to check in. As I was speaking to her, I heard an ominous noise. The pot of oatmeal was boiling over. Instinctively, I rushed over to get the pot off the stove. At that moment, Jessica appeared in the kitchen, saw me with the baby in my left arm and a pot of scalding water in the other, and shrieked, “What are you DOING?” and yanked the child out of my arms. I felt so ashamed that I nearly poured the oatmeal over my own head to show remorse.

  Then, five minutes later, Jessica and I were on the couch listening to Ava make bubbling sounds with her mouth, and all was forgiven.

  They say that the best way to learn a foreign language is to enroll in an immersion course. The idea is to place yourself in an environment where only the new language is spoken and heard, day in and day out. It’s confusing and exhausting, but it works. Taking care of an infant is an immersion experience. Almost no aspect of your former life remains intact: You cannot read even a newspaper article without being interrupted, much less a book. You cannot finish a sentence when you are talking to your spouse. You cannot sleep for more than forty-five minutes at a time. Your center of gravity shifts from the area in your chest where your heart lies to the midpoint between your child’s heart and your own. You dissolve, whether you like it or not.

  Ten

  I DIDN’T EVEN TRY TO WRITE during that first month of parenthood. Then I did try, during Ava’s naps, but it didn’t go well. Just before Ava was born, I had started a book about teaching at juvenile hall, but when I tried to pick up where I’d left off, I found that I couldn’t concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. But I didn’t mind—I had a baby, for goodness’ sake; I had a perfectly good excuse for not writing. After my experience in New Hampshire, I’d learned my lesson: When I try to force myself to write out of a sense of duty or fear, nothing comes out. Meanwhile, Jessica wanted to nurse Ava for at least a year but couldn’t afford to withdraw completely from professional life, so when she started working again, I followed her around on film and television sets and to film festivals—baby in one arm and diaper bag in the other—where I shared gossip with the nannies-to-the-stars and read a lot of Little Golden Books aloud in trailers, hotel rooms, and airports. I became a modern, involved dad.
/>   Physicists claim that more happened, in terms of interactions between fundamental particles, in the first second following the Big Bang than has happened in the fifteen billion years since—something to do with time and space being compressed. Same with having a baby. It feels as if more happens to you in that first year than has happened in your whole life up until then and probably will ever happen after that first year ends. Then you come out of it, and you start to decompress, but you’ve been changed. You have an impressive set of new skills, but most of them have already become obsolete (assembling the travel crib, mixing formula, anchoring the infant car seat, disinfecting the breast pump components without melting them) and many of your old, pre-child life skills have deteriorated. Meanwhile, your child is beginning to talk and think and invent. She’s not just a helpless animal anymore; she’s a little person.

  At this point, what you would most like would be for everything to slow down for a while, just to give you time to catch up. Instead, when you emerge from the infant-care compression chamber, you find yourself with a toddler on your hands, and then life hits you with all of the stuff you’ve been ignoring or putting off for the last year, and it all seems to demand your attention at once.

  After Ava’s first birthday, Jessica pointed out that if we were going to move to a district with a good public school system, we had better not wait until the last minute. We began visiting neighborhoods and attending open houses, but before we could put our old house on the market, my father called from Tucson to say that he had news for us. “I’m afraid it’s not good,” he said. Then he put my mother on the phone.

  “We just came from the doctor’s office,” she said. “I have lung cancer.”

  Jessica, Ava, and I flew out to Tucson that weekend. My mother was still waiting for the report from her CT scan, so everyone was feeling anxious. This is where having a baby comes in handy. Ava was the miracle child; she entertained my parents for the whole weekend. We flew home on a Monday, and that Thursday, Mom called again with the results of her scan. The cancer was inoperable and could not be irradiated. Her prognosis: six to eighteen months of life.

  Jessica was away on a job, so I took Ava with me to Tucson the next day. That night, after Mom had anesthetized herself with a few gin and tonics and then staggered upstairs to bed, my father and I were sitting in the kitchen, unable to think of a word to say, while Ava sat in a corner and “read” one of her board books aloud. My father suddenly stood up, went to the freezer, and took out a pint of ice cream. He put some of it on a spoon and said, “Ava’s going to walk tonight.” He got her attention and held out the spoon toward her. “Come on, Ava. Walk.” Ava was able to stand at that point, but had not taken any steps yet. She took one look at the ice cream on that spoon, closed her book, stood up, and then walked across the kitchen to get it. “That’s my girl,” my father said. He had tears in his eyes.

  A week after that visit, we got another call. This time it was from Connie, my mother-in-law. My father-in-law, who had retired only a year before, had just had a stroke. His left arm, left leg, and the left side of his face had been affected, but he could still walk. He could understand what you said to him but couldn’t read or write, and when he tried to speak, the words came out all scrambled. Connie insisted that we not fly up to San Francisco to see them, because she knew how much travel we’d just done flying back and forth to Tucson. Instead, she and John flew down to visit us only a week after his stroke. When I met John at the airport, he smiled and said, “When I preach the door, everything that is up where coffee is dog letter.” I had not yet been able to cry over my mother’s news, but when I heard those words come out of my father-in-law’s mouth, I choked up and had to turn away.

  Jessica and I put our moving plans on hold. Instead, she came up with a bold idea: We would take all four of our parents to Italy. My mother had visited there once to give a recital in Florence and had often said she’d like to return. And Jessica’s parents had taken all three of their kids to Italy twenty-five years earlier and had loved it. Jessica convinced her sister Jennifer, my brother Erich, and my sister, Rachel, to join us, along with Rachel’s husband, Daniel, and their one-year-old daughter, Isabela. We had a terminal cancer patient, a stroke victim, two toddlers, and a pair of single thirty-somethings in our caravan, and somehow it all worked.

  My mother savored that trip down to the last bite of pasta. Every meal she had there, she said, was the best meal she’d ever eaten in her life. John was recovering steadily and could already speak in short sentences. Another benefit of that journey was that I got to spend some time with my siblings. They both lived in Connecticut, where we’d grown up, and in the fifteen years since I’d moved west I’d probably seen them only three or four times. I talked to Erich on the phone fairly often, but Rachel and I only called each other on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and our birthdays. She and I were four years apart, and I’d left home for college when she was only thirteen. Then I went to China for two years, and then I’d moved to California. We loved each other, but in truth, we hardly knew each other as adults.

  She’d married a human dynamo, a Romanian immigrant who escaped from that country during the dark years of the Ceausescu regime. Once he got to this country, Daniel learned how to install tiles and had a clear goal in mind: He wanted to own the company he worked for. He showed up one day in 1994 at Rachel and Erich’s shop, showed them photographs of his work, and got himself hired on the spot. After a few months, when he had shown them what he could do, he made them an offer they couldn’t refuse: “I don’t want to be an employee of this company,” he said. “I want to be one of its owners. Make me a partner and you won’t regret it.”

  Daniel was optimistic, confident, and had real-life skills—what Salzman can resist that combination? Erich and Rachel were both won over, but Rachel took it to another level: She fell in love with him. They were married in 1998, and Isabela, their first child, was born two years later.

  Having children finally gave my sister and me something to talk about. Our first opportunity to see each other’s kids came in October 2001, just a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Jessica had to travel to New York City for a job, and she didn’t want to be separated from Ava, who was only five months old at the time, so the three of us made the trip together. During our visit, Rachel drove down from Connecticut with Isabela to have lunch with Ava and me. We picked up some food at a deli and took our strollers and diaper bags out to Central Park for a picnic.

  Rachel and I watched Isabela chase butterflies while Ava napped in her stroller. The ruins of the World Trade Center were still burning only a few miles away, but we didn’t want to think about the end of the world that day. Instead, we talked about onesies and sleep aids and diaper malfunctions. At one point she said, “Since having a baby, I don’t feel so guilty about not making art anymore. It’s a big relief, actually.” She made a sweeping gesture with her arm, as if clearing a stack of unpaid bills off a desk in front of her, and then she tossed her head back and laughed.

  In Italy we got to talk some more. By then, Ava and Isabela were old enough that they could play together. We’d brought along Ava’s collection of Little Golden Books, and Rachel and I took turns sharing a pair of reading glasses (these books aren’t called “little” for nothing) and reading them aloud to the girls. One night in Lucca, after watching our mother struggle to climb the flight of stairs to her bedroom, gasping for breath on every step, Rachel sighed and buried her face in her hands. “I feel really ashamed to say this, Mark,” she said, “but I’m really glad I have Isabela right now. It gives me a reason not to think about Mom.”

  I told her that I felt the same way. That was the secret we shared on that trip. We agreed that parenthood had made us both feel that the human condition was more fragile and more terrifying than either of us had imagined, but also more beautiful.

  When our mother declined, it happened quickly. I rode with her in the ambulance on her last ride to the hospital, with Erich following in his p
ickup truck. As soon as Mom had been diagnosed, Erich had quit whatever job he had at the time, driven from Connecticut to Arizona, and moved in to help take care of her. For all of his defiance as a child, Erich turned out to have the softest heart of all of us—and, as an adult, the deepest sense of connection to our parents. Mom could see him through the back window of the ambulance, and that put her at ease. She waved at him from the gurney, then smiled and said, “I’ve had so many adventures.”