But a year after we met, the world changed. Our nation came under attack, and Robin started calling everyone she knew in TV news, friends of Digger’s in Istanbul and Karachi. She wanted to go somewhere with a “-stan” at the end, where troops and air support assembled for the war.
And while she never did manage to get to the Middle East, over the next six years she worked for a couple different newswires and later Japanese, Kuwaiti, and British agencies, sometimes shooting a story for a few days, other times gone for a week or two, on the road 180 or 200 days a year. This was back when no one gave a shit about Latin America, when coverage down there was still a rinky-dink operation, and even a phone call was sometimes difficult, and satellite hookups were sketchy and slow. Her assignments took on a familiar pattern: gang murder, prison riot, kidnapping, coup. She covered dire poverty, guerrillas, narco-trafficking and cartels in Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, and Honduras. The ups and downs of Haiti, Aristide, Duvalier, mudslides, fires, FARC, Chávez, some horrible plane crash in Paraguay, body parts hanging in a tree. After a childhood marred by divorce, illness, sibling tragedy and death, she’d gained some resistance to human suffering, or maybe had a greater appetite for it.
And then she went corporate and learned to handle the blow-dried West Coast bosses of a vast public media company, while fending off the flattering advances of one Danny Katavolos, grandson of television pioneer Johnny Katavolos, and for a while she ran the Nature Channel’s moneymaker on sharks—she came up with the idea to stick a guy in the ocean off the coast of Somalia wearing underpants made of chum. She faced the irregular participation of her dad, and her mother’s steep decline, and didn’t ask for my advice on how to raise our kids. I wasn’t prepared for her to blossom into womanhood.
It was easier to be around her during the hours of the day when our kids were awake; it was safer and more fun, as we cleaned the kitchen while Kaya dragged her little brother around, saying, “Hey, look! Baby Beanie can walk!” Then I’d go to the basement while Robin did her yoga tape in the living room, her lady yogi’s Southern drawl burbling through the ceiling above me, her feet pounding the rug as if to flatten, to pulverize me. I’d come to bed hours after her, turning the doorknob like a safecracker, crawling past the crib on my hands and knees so the floorboards didn’t creak.
I liked to hear Beanie snore, and the quieter sounds of Robin sighing in her sleep, soft high sweet sounds like a secret baby was hiding inside her. Tiptoeing beside the bed to find my pajamas, I’d study the mess of our blankets, tracing beneath them the contours of her body, staring down into the husk of her discarded jeans at my feet, the soft-looking, brightly colored underpants still inside them, so that I stood naked where she’d been naked, as though an echo of our once-naked selves intermingled on some alternate plane. Then I’d climb in beside her, calling up the ghosts still resonating in the air between us, and remember something better.
What was better was this: a receptive, neglected accomplice in the well-groomed horse country of Connecticut, suffering a similar fate, transporting herself over e-waves of desire through the magic of her cellphone, down the East Coast, to find me hiding under the blankets, texting with one hand. Someone who needed bodily updates, and remained curious and enmeshed, and kept the bloom on our flirtation, and cut it off for reasons I hadn’t yet understood—matters of life, death, and the supernatural.
It was too late, I was too far gone, I’d spent too much time thinking up filthy stuff I planned to do when I finally got the chance, knowing I’d be sprung for a week in July, at my annual summer arts conference. There had to be someone else out there. I couldn’t let it go. Despite the lack of communication since mid-March, despite the long silence, my feelings for Amy had grown even more intense, because I didn’t need to filter or censor them, didn’t need to shove them in an email and wait for the response to know they were real. In my loneliness I had to resist going back to study every word she’d ever sent, although I did, about four times a day, but it was more the knowledge that someone out there waited, trapped in her life, thinking of me.
I went into town and rented a bicycle. Pedaling through the village, I fell in with other cyclists as we dodged tourists bumbling off sidewalks in floppy hats, crowding Main Street, trampling the town green, which overlooked the harbor. A sinewy man, shiny with oil, stood beside an old cannon, eating a caramel apple, in nothing but a shimmering green Speedo. A lady with a gray mullet played guitar on a bench, singing “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” The town had a history as a noisy, unconventional haven. A window displayed T-shirts with slogans: I MASTURBATE AND I VOTE; MY PARENTS ARE GAY. Art galleries, a side street paved in cobblestones, rainbow pinwheels strapped to lampposts. Not a cloud in the sky, bright blue hydrangeas, white boats sailing by.
Even though my phone didn’t get a signal, I kept checking. I had a feeling she might call. And in the bay a single motorboat, a line of white foam behind it, an airplane above it in a mirrored dome of continuous blue. Old stone church, bait and tackle, a kids’ playground in the sand. Riding out of town there was nothing, no coverage at all. The weight of the phone in my pocket was a nameless erotic impulse. It had always been the only way in.
I passed tiny clapboard houses, sharp green lawns, blooming rosebushes. Across the bay to the south I saw the tall bridge you took to reach the interstate, to leave this place forever, a bridge I’d be crossing soon enough. I thought of Amy, bleary-eyed and trembling, facing backward in that chair they used to roll her off the field, staring ahead at nothing. I figured her conference was over.