“Don’t get me wrong, your grandfather was a good provider. He was a good provider, and he trusted me with everything. I never had to show him the receipts from the grocery store. My sisters still do this with their husbands. Your grandfather gave me my freedom. He let me play cards on Quinnipiac Avenue and never told me I had to be back at a certain time. When his brothers came over, Ernie would sit at the table and watch us play. He didn’t like to play, but he would sit and watch and talk with us.
“Eleanor and Sal were doing well. They stayed married right up until the end. I have no regrets. Your grandfather can be a little distant, but he is a good man. I hear Eleanor has Alzheimer’s disease, and it gets progressively worse. I say, ‘You know, Ernie, I think I will call Sal to tell him I am sorry about his wife—invite him by for coffee.’ ‘Sure,’ Ernie says, not listening. So one day when your grandfather is at work, the doorbell rings. It is Sal. Eleanor is by now in a home, and he comes in. We talk, reminiscing of when we were sixteen years old, walking down the main boulevard in Hamden. I tell him I’m sorry about his wife, and we finish our coffee. He’s on the way to the hospital. I walk him to the front door, and in the foyer before we reach the door Sal grabs me. He grabs me and kisses me like I haven’t been kissed since those golden days when he would walk me home from work down the main boulevard. ‘I have been waiting over fifty years to do that, Antoinette,’ he says. ‘I know,’ I said, and I walked him out.
“His wife died three days later, and I didn’t call him. I felt funny. Before a kiss I could reach out without the slightest bit of tension. It all ended with a kiss. Even a phone call was too much.
“But you know,” Nina said to me, “I had forgotten the passion of a kiss like that. When a man grabs you and kisses you like he means it. It felt good. Don’t get me wrong, your grandfather is a hard worker, and a good provider, but it was nice. What would it have been like? All those years with passion? I cook, and Ernie doesn’t eat. I say, ‘Ern, let’s have coffee,’ and he drinks it, but he’ll never ask. We drive home from the doctor’s, and I say, ‘Ern, let’s stop and get a cup of coffee at Dunkin Donuts.’ He says we can drink it at home.”
I never forgot that story. And I never wanted to regret the kisses I missed.
? ? ?
THERE WAS A LIGHTNESS and spontaneity and romance to my relationship with Uxval, something I’d never felt before. When I wasn’t on assignment outside Mexico City, we slept in late until we couldn’t possibly stay in bed any longer, or went for long walks, or loaded our mountain bikes onto his car and rode them up the steep, treacherous hill to La Virgen, a giant statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I loved him painfully and did anything to please him, even if it meant learning to ride a mountain bike fifteen miles uphill twice a week.
The only thing I could not give him was my photography. I was publishing pictures on the front pages of newspapers, but I had so much more I wanted to accomplish: to immerse myself in longer assignments, to work for magazines, to start shooting regularly for the New York Times. I wanted people to recognize my photographs, to be affected by my work—just as I had felt looking at Salgado’s work in Argentina. This was just the beginning. I hadn’t even set foot in Africa! The more I worked, the more I achieved, the more I wanted.
Photography drew me away from Uxval like a lover, and this was a simmering source of tension between us. Each time the phone rang he pulled away, protecting himself from my inevitable departure. He knew he couldn’t ask me to forgo my work. There was no way to do my job without traveling, without physically being away from home. I never said no to an assignment—not ever.
One morning in September, as Uxval and I lingered in bed, my roommate Michael banged on my bedroom door. I knew something was amiss—none of us would ever deliberately wake the others in the morning, and rarely did anything in Mexico City require urgency. We didn’t have a television with cable, so we darted up the stairs to Marion’s apartment. I sat down in front of her television and saw the Twin Towers on fire. Half-asleep, I didn’t realize the planes had smashed into them on purpose.
People were jumping. My mind flashed to the women in wedding gowns I had once photographed on the roof of the World Trade Center for the annual wedding marathons on Valentine’s Day, where young couples, radiant with love, steeled themselves in the wind tunnel on top of the world, the brides clinging to their veils. I started crying.
Michael broke the silence. “You know what this means?”
I didn’t.
“We are at war.”
We spent the entire day glued to Marion’s television. The words “Afghanistan,” “training camps,” “terrorists,” and “Taliban” started getting thrown around by news anchors, analysts, and politicians. I felt the familiar knot of excitement and dread in my stomach: I would have to leave again for South Asia. I would have to leave Uxval. The story was taking root in Afghanistan and in neighboring Pakistan, and they were countries I knew.