The Moment Read Free Page B

privacy, yet were also there for you if needed.
“I think I’ll be able to push a cart around the vegetable aisle,” I said. “But thanks for the offer.”
“That your new book in the box?”
“If it is, someone else must have finished for me.”
“I hear ya . . .”
I walked to the car and drove on to my cottage, the January darkness augmenting my gloom. The physiotherapist was right: escaping death turns you more inward, more alive to the melancholic nature of being here. And a failed marriage is also a death—a living one, as the person you are no longer with is still sentient, still walking among us, very much existing without you.
“You were always ambivalent about me, us, ” Jan said on several occasions toward the end. How could I explain that, with the exception of our wonderful daughter, I remain ambivalent about everything? If you’re not reconciled with yourself, how can you ever be reconciled with others?
The cottage was dark and drafty when I arrived. I carried the box in from my car and placed it on the kitchen table. I cranked up the thermostat. I built a wood fire in the potbellied stove that took up one corner of the living room. I poured myself a small Scotch. As I waited for all three forms of central heating to kick in, I shuffled through the handful of letters and magazines that I had retrieved from the mailbox. Then I turned my attention to the package. I used scissors to cut through the thick tape that had sealed it shut. Once the lid was pried open I peered inside. There was a letter from Zoe, my editor’s assistant, positioned on top of a large, thickly padded envelope. As I picked up the letter I saw the handwriting on this envelope—and the German postmark and stamps. In the left-hand corner of this package was the name of the sender: Dussmann . That stopped me short. Her name. And the address: Jablonski Strasse 48, Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. Was this her address since . . . ?
Her . . .
Petra . . .
Petra Dussmann.
I picked up the letter from Zoe.
This showed up here for you c/o us a few days ago. I didn’t want to open it in case it was personal. If it’s anything questionable or weird, do let me know and we’ll deal with it.
Hope the new book goes well. We all can’t wait to read it.
My best . . .
“If it’s anything questionable or weird . . .”
No, it’s just the past. A past that I had tried to entomb long ago.
But here it was again, back to disturb an already troubled present.
“Wie bald ‘nicht jetz’ ‘nie’ wird.”
“How soon ‘not now’ becomes ‘never.’”
Until a package arrives . . . and everything you have spent years attempting to dodge comes rushing back into the room.
When is the past not a spectral hall of shadows?
When we can live with it.

TWO
I ’ VE ALWAYS WANTED to escape. It’s an urge I’ve had from the age of eight onward, when I first discovered the pleasures of evasion.
It was a Saturday in November and my parents were fighting again. There was nothing unusual about this. My parents were always fighting. Back then we lived in a four-room apartment on Nineteenth Street and Second Avenue. I was a Manhattan kid, born and bred. My dad worked as a midlevel executive in an advertising agency—a “business guy” who wanted to be a “creative guy,” but never had the “word talent” to write copy. Mom was a housewife. The apartment was cramped. Two narrow bedrooms, a small living room, and an even smaller dinette/kitchen, none of which could contain the frustrations that both my parents vented on a daily basis.
It was only years later that I began to comprehend the strange dynamic that existed between them, a profound need to combust over anything, to live in an endless winter of discontent. But at the time all I knew was: my mom and dad didn’t like each other. On the November Saturday in question, an argument between them escalated. My father said something hurtful. My mother called him a bastard and fled into the bedroom. The door