1) Adult ballet classes
2) Two tickets for myself and my husband to see the Van Gogh Immersive Experience in NYC

I’m going to get right to the punch line and say that I am 0 for 2.

Let’s start with the ballet classes. Once, a long, long time ago, I wanted to be a ballerina. I thought this was my destiny. My mother, as a girl, also envisioned herself as a dancer and even choreographed a few productions in her college days. Neither my mother’s dream nor mine, as dreams go, became reality. It would be so good for me! she exclaimed, regarding the adult ballet classes. Of course, of course! was my response. Time passed. She kept asking me if I’d found a class. I had, there was one right around the corner from me in the Flatiron, but I didn’t tell her that. I told her that the classes were on Zoom, it was the pandemic, etc. I’d wanted to go, really I did, but then I would envision my fifty-six-year-old sardonic self leaping jetes across the dance floor in a tutu… She finally stopped asking me.

Moving onto Van Gogh.

I’d already read about the “experience” and had thought seriously about going before she’d mentioned it. I love Van Gogh. The exhibit was at South Street Seaport and would have been easy for me to get to. But after a cursory reading, I began to picture the experience as if someone had turned Van Gogh into Micky Mouse and I was going to his Disneyland. What is an immersive experience anyway? Do we have to add movement and song to everything? Shouldn’t we be going to the museum and observing his paintings in contemplative silence, which I’d done on many occasions in different parts of the world? Would Van Gogh’s tortured soul have wanted us to view his work in this way? Will we soon not be going to museums at all, once art turns into digital assets and we’re living in the metaverse, where nothing is real?

My mother kept asking me if I’d booked my tickets—she’d booked hers for January, seven months out, in L.A. I finally lied and told her that yes, I’d booked them for August. August rolls around. How was it? She wanted to know all about it! I described this imaginary version of what I’d anticipated the experience to be like, with rides and interactive exhibits in a sprawling outdoor space. People wandering around eating popcorn and peanuts and taking selfies.

Fast forward six months. It is January. I am in L.A. on an extended visit with my mother. It is a quiet Sunday, I am hanging with her dogs, and she and her husband are set to go to the exhibit that afternoon. As the hour approaches, his chronic back pain settles in and he can’t go. She is almost relieved when she asks me if I will take his place, which would mean she won’t have to drive, that she can take in the sites and not have to worry about the chaotic freeway interchanges that have recently become more disorienting for her, that she won’t have to pre-empt every little journey mishap so that her husband’s discomfort won’t cause frustration or ill feelings—this is supposed to be fun, after all.

Do you mind seeing it again? She looks at me with those eyes.

It was a beautiful, sunny, warm day; a touch of the Santa Anas. No traffic. We cruised a breezy thirty minutes up the 110 to Hollywood, where my mother grew up and where the exhibit was. We passed by the Catholic elementary school she attended for eight years, drove down the streets she and Mary Tyler Moore traipsed to get to their dance classes, or to Mary’s aunt’s bungalow, where they played dress-up in her fabulous gowns. Some of the stories I’d not heard before, those she regaled to me with such awe and delight as I’d not seen from her in a while. She’d been under some stress recently.

Parking was easy, near the old studios. (She knew every inch of this town.) We stood at the corner of Sunset and Vine and she pointed at The Palladium, where her mother, a nurse, had worked as a volunteer helping returning war veterans find places to stay. She even brought one home once. An Air Force pilot, my mother’s eyes swooned as she told me.

The exhibit venue couldn’t have been more relaxed. An old converted warehouse that used to be Amoeba Records. Neither sprawling nor outdoor, the show streamed in a continuous loop on unadorned walls, floors, and ceilings in two, big rectangular rooms. There were only a handful of people, and we walked in as the Starry Night sequence rose up all around us to the sound of Bach’s Prelude Cello Suite #1. Like the others, we stopped, stood still, and became entranced at once. My mother standing behind me, beside me. Everywhere. So close.

Tasteful. Not overdone. Forty minutes. We found a bench to sit on. I could feel the hairs prickling up on the back of her neck.

On the way home, she asked me how this one compared to the New York version. I said that, while they were very similar, there was something about this one, I couldn’t put it into words, that was better.

Experiences come to you; you don’t always go to them. I was destined to see the Van Gogh immersive experience like I’m probably destined to stretch a leotard over my aging body and take that adult ballet class. Yes, the world is changing, we are changing, but art is always beautiful no matter how we take it in, especially when we open our hearts and minds and are sharing it with someone we love.

__________

Jackie Townsend is the author of four novels, including, Riding High in April (August 2021, Spark Press).

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Network engineers are not the inventors of iPhone Apps or Energy drinks. These are the guys, and a few gals, growing obsolete as network software providers like SolarWinds take over more and more of their tasks. Tasks—something you can’t imagine—they often still perform manually. Like switching a network router actually means physically replacing a piece of hardware. Like configuring a network actually means pressing keys with fingers. In other words, a firewall is breached because of a typo, someone fat-fingering an erroneous command. A lot of network engineering issues are a result of process breakdown, and limited automation leads to gross inconsistencies. Automation tools like SolarWinds’ Orion are supposed to make the network MORE secure. And in most cases they do, unless the network software provider themself is insecure. Forget about fat fingers, Cyberterrorism is the enemy now.

Who cares about the plumbers now?

A lot of people.

Including me. I wrote about one in RIDING HIGH IN APRIL (August 2021, Spark Press). Fictional Stuart, also a white male over the age of thirty-five, has been working on network automation since the early 2000s. The story begins in 2010 and, with the advent of cloud, the world is at last starting to catch up to the vulnerability of networks. Networks have grown exponentially complex, and enterprises are finally paying attention to their tech infrastructure, their plumbers, their network engineers, the Stuart’s of the world. Beyond the evangelists, the unicorns, the press focusing on the few but not the many, these are the people fighting to keep the nuts and bolts of technology churning, growing, changing, evolving. Under the radar, from all corners of the world, these are the engineers and coders dedicated, day in and day out, to making technology work.

“Imagine what we could do with automation based on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, in terms of developing predictive analytics capabilities in identifying and shutting down diverse rogue network attacks BEFORE they do any real damage.”—This is Stuart’s BIG IDEA. One might think a million companies are already doing this in real life, but the reality is it’s 2021 and, as the Russians have shown us, they are not. Or, if they do have predictive analytic solutions, what they don’t have is network data. A vast and deep treasure trove of enterprise network data representing various industries stretching across the globe. The kind of data Stuart and his team have amassed through their managed network services offering. When one of the fastest growing cable companies in the world gets hacked, and Stuart and his team are called in to get to the source, they use this treasure trove of data to find patterns in the topology. From different point of view, they can see and infer how the trolls are trying to penetrate the network—it is amazing how many people like to screw around with corporate networks just for kicks—patterns they’d not known to look for before. Stuart’s team starts building machine learning algorithms onto that data, and soon they’re allowing for the identification of specific patterns—this is the center of the growing cyber security space, at least in the fictional world. In real life we will see what comes of this Orion debacle. If anything, we should at least take away this: the plumber is not the plumber anymore. The plumber is the guy, or gal, with the keys to the castle.

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I went to urgent care on a whim last Thursday. I’d heard the antiviral tests had just become available and I had an inkling—my ‘flu’, while not debilitating, had come with a strange heaviness, as if an alien being had taken up residence inside me with no plans of leaving until it found a door deeper in. I walked one block to City MD on 23^rd Street and Fifth, masked and gloved and shaming myself for being self-indulgent, for wasting the doctor’s time, etc. But it wasn’t like that. The waiting room was empty. The staff were super welcoming. It was like they’d all taken happy pills. They listened. They answered my questions thoughtfully. Tiffany, the doctor who took my blood, was a pretty blond in her thirties who looked like she could use a hair wash. Her gown had a ragged tear at the chest. Since we both wore masks, we did a lot of communicating with our eyes, which held, when she told me she was hanging in there.

When I read the results via email three days later, I wasn’t sure what I was reading. I showed them to my husband. He got out his glasses. Yep. That’s what it says. What came next were a few hours of wandering around our apartment pretending to do other things until we found ourselves facing each other again asking: when, how, where, and above all who? Until this moment Covid had not touched us directly. How does my immunity change things? Can I fly to California to see my eighty-two-year-old mother? Can my husband, if his test comes back positive, go see his parents in Italy? What does it mean to be immune? Can I sell my blood on the dark web? Should I give blood? Is my blood a cure? How many thousands of others are immune and don’t know it? Doesn’t this change everything, to have this kind of information? Can a segment of us go back to work? Or can I still infect others even though there’s a strong chance I can’t get infected myself. So many threads to unravel and yet I can’t stop thinking of this one thing: who did I kill?

Here’s the list I came up with:

The Eataly checkout person. The pharmacist at CVS. This was the beginning of March, before they’d put up the plastic shields for the check-out workers, before NYC had reached Defcon 5. My cleaning lady. The people at my yoga studio. Tommy and Hayden. My nephew. The fresh trout old timer at the Farmers’ Market who never looks very healthy anyway. The Martin’s pretzel guy. The grey-haired person who sat in the theater seat after I did. Mitchel, my neighbor. Anybody I might have walked by. Back when masks were discouraged. Back when there was so much we didn’t know. Still don’t know.

“I hope I’m positive,” my husband told me a few days ago. A weird thing to say but it’s true, I suppose. “We’ll travel the world,” I kidded. He didn’t laugh. “Why is it we feel this incessant need to travel so much anyway?” I said. “Because we can,” was his uncharacteristically feeble answer.” It’s who we are.” I looked at him and said that maybe those weren’t good enough reasons anymore.” He did not disagree.

I’m not asking for much, I just want to go outside and not hate everyone.

On Saturday, before knowing the results, we walked to the Freedom Tower, taking West Broadway all the way down what I like to think of as lower Manhattan’s bumpy, crooked spinal cord, to avoid the rivers and parks, knowing that the sun would incite a prison break. We left early to run into as few people as possible. Not too much of a problem, though with all the darting and zig-zagging my mask was wet with condensation fifty-two minutes later when we stood at the ghostly juxtaposition of the Oculus, Freedom Tower, and Reflecting Pools. The sky a perfect blue, a few fluffy white clouds. “I never understood the Oculus,” my husband said to me as we stood staring at it. I said that I had always loved the Oculus. The way the ribs of its reptilian spine shot orthogonally out across the stout, slanting angular shapes around it. But what we couldn’t get over was the silence. I could count the number of people who trickled throughout these sprawling few acres on one hand. You could hear a pin drop, the breeze rustle through the trees, their leaves an unpolluted green. We wandered around, pausing every so often to stare deep and way down into the pools where no water fell. A lone security guard was fervently polishing the names carved into the plaque framing the pool. Polishing and polishing, we watched him work his way down one side of the south tower. “The footprint never seems large enough,” my husband said finally. I said, “Nope, it doesn’t.”

END

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These apparatuses are what keep the tenants of these buildings, both office and residential, coop and condo, from being asphyxiated from the chemicals and waste we create with our dryers and stove tops and cigars, our furnaces and A/Cs—some of which dangle perilously out grime-caked back windows that no one ever looks out of except for a few dead plants. Large ducts run up the sides of the buildings, sending the brown exhaust from restaurants, dry cleaners, and other ground floor establishments billowing into the sky. Drains stacked ten pipes deep pour dirty water down from leaking rooftop water tanks. Thick cable wires dangle down from nowhere, plugging into nothing.

On one of the buildings, a weed has sprouted up the dirty white brick facade, it’s brown and yellow tentacles swirling in and around the windows and pipes and jutting surfaces and sills like a specter.

I have stared into this crevice for the past thirty-one days. It is the view out our east facing window under which we have set up my makeshift work desk in the back corner of our loft which also serves as our bedroom. To the right of my desk are two, large south facing windows, a running leap from those of the commercial office space in the building behind ours. Next, beside our bed, are solid double doors that lead out to our building’s fire escape from which, five flights down, you’ll find yourself trapped in a nine-by-five-foot walled-in space with no egress.

Between the hours of ten-thirty and eleven a.m., if the sun is out, it streams through our east facing window and onto my desk with a blinding ferocity. From there, it spills onto a stretch of hardwood behind me and on which I can often be found sprawled out as if I’d just washed up on shore, soaking it in until it is gone fifteen minutes later.

The compressors rumble on and off at different points of the day and into the evening and then throughout the night, one of them sounds like a hovering helicopter. For many nights, in fact, I thought this was what it was, a natural assumption in this city that never sleeps and in which terror haunts. I don’t know which compressor it is, where the noise is even coming from; what I know is that it has gotten inside me. At night, I turn on and off when it does.

I stare past my laptop at the rain that has settled into a swirling wind. The torn tarp over one of the larger fans is flapping wildly. The cables wires slap back and forth. A pigeon dives down from above. I do not see it dive back up again. A blue patch of sky has opened above the crevice, spreading a rare dappled light down the black iron fire escape that scales down the twelve-story brick building across the crevice from me. But just as quickly a yawning grey cloud moves in, engulfing the blue. Eating it alive. Until we are in the mouth, where it is dark and grim. And then it spits us out and it is blue again. Dappled. All morning like this.

“What’s wrong?” he yells from the front of our loft, hearing my scream. Our loft is a large rectangle of mostly open space but for a few walls that don’t reach the ceiling. He works at our dining table that we have pushed up against our loft’s front windows, the furthest possible distance from me so that, and only if I play music at a certain decibel, I can almost not hear his eight hours’ worth of Zoom calls.

“I’m fine,” I yell back. “A bird landed with a bang on my sill.”

“What?” he yells.

“A bird,” I yell. “It scared me, that’s all.”

He yells, “What kind of bird?”

The bird, who is still there, thrusts its beak to the side so that its beady amber eye can get a square look at me. “What do you mean what kind of bird there is only one kind of bird back here!”

“There was that blue bird,” he yells. “Then there was that hawk that one time remember?”

I sigh, remembering the hawk. One afternoon, when this desk was not here, what seems like a thousand years ago, my husband had gone to the east window and spotted the hawk, sitting regal and unmoving on the tenth floor of that black-iron fire escape, the one that also serves as a launching pad for the twenty or so pigeons that nest in an adjacent duct and that were, in this moment of the hawk, at once absent. We quickly concluded that it was the hawk that had been sighted living in the trees at Madison Square Park and that we had seen there on one occasion. A beautiful, gorgeous bird that must have taken a wrong turn and found itself down here with the rest of us poor beasts. My heart began its own fluttering. The hawk’s only possible escape route would be a direct flight upwards, or to take an elevator, of which of course there were none. “Don’t worry. He knows what he’s doing,” my husband assured me. Then, as if the hawk had heard us, he launched into a slow-motion flight off the ledge, swooping down to where we couldn’t see him, and then one breathless moment later swooping back up and into that tiny crevice between our south facing windows and the office building, landing on our own fire escape. One floor above us, my husband confirmed, unlatching the double doors and poking his head out to confirm its location. Then he poked his head back in and we held eyes. This must be good luck, I told him, and he agreed that surely it must be. The stories we tell ourselves. After the excitement had died down we went back to what we were doing and never saw the hawk again.

“Pigeon,” I call back now in latent answer to his question about which kind of bird. It’s still there on the sill, five feet from me, on the other side of my window. I force myself to look at it—to acknowledge its existence. Flecks of violet sift through its black satin coat, beads of turquoise adorn its ruffled neck. I suppose it’s not entirely ugly. I close my laptop. Rub my eyes—all this preposterous amount of screen time.  When he takes flight again, some five minutes later, I cry out but this time my husband doesn’t say anything. I startle easily. Even if I know he is coming up behind me (I have trained him to warn me) it is not unusual for me to still shriek when he arrives.

I swivel my chair to face the south windows. In the past two decades, the tenant of that office space has turned over a variety times, attorneys mostly, the kind of gruff and worn dress shirt wearing guys that suck money from co-ops and other small businesses that need guidance through the inexplicable number of city ordinances with which they/we are required to comply, like Local Law 11 for instance, the tax abatement law. But last year, suddenly, young white hipsters with beards moved in, a flying hacky sack, flat screens, Aeron chairs, and one standing desk. Let me guess. The guys who are supposed to be climate conscious, and yet they refuse to turn off their lights when they leave at night. The yellow glare screams out the sides of our blackout shades. I told my husband that I wanted to make a big sign, TURN OFF YOUR FUCKING LIGHTS AT NIGHT DON’T YOU CARE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT. He said, “Go easy.” At one point, they had positioned a life-sized cardboard Elvis at the window, his back to me. I halted and gasped when I first saw it; at night, Elvis became a black shadowed predator. “Are they trying to torture me?” A rhetorical question, the answer was no. The fact of the matter was they didn’t know I existed. Even if I’d jumped up and down naked, they would not have seen me because I am over fifty. I am beyond being seen. Which was why I had wanted to make the sign.

It was when those office lights went dark that I knew. Dark for good. A month before things got, well, you know. Then the hovering helicopter stopped hovering. And as the ground floor restaurants closed, the dry cleaners and salons, one by one, the ducts stopped spitting out foul air and our bedroom stopped smelling like pinto beans at nine a.m. The nails-on-chalkboard drilling from the renovation below us ceased. The patches of light on distant high rises that poked up beyond my view of the crevice began to turn off, as people disappeared, or fled. The pigeons grew small and there were less of them. The crevice grew quieter. Darker. There was a day when I would have prayed for nothing less. To see no one. Hear nothing. Then it grew quieter still. Only a few pigeons left now, the stalwarts. But I’m most worried about the fuck-you guy. Every night at around nine p.m., like clockwork for the past fifteen years we have heard his faint muffled screams through our back-bedroom walls. I’ve never figured out from which exact apartment his howls were coming from, every one of them, it seemed. Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you. Ten minutes of fuck you. And now? Just the words, a haunted echo in my mind.

“How are things going up here?” Every so often I’ll stumble, bleary-eyed, into the front of our loft, where everything feels loftier, warmer, more pressing and essential, all those calls and meetings and virtual lunches and cocktail hours. He is in the middle of one now. I walk past him to the couch that frames the front windows, those that look down onto the closest thing to civilization we city dwellers have, a STREET. I kneel on the couch and prop my elbows on the sill, press my face against the glass. Down below, what our humanity has been reduced to, man and his dog—God spelled backward, my mother, a savior of dogs, recently informed me. I watch God lift its leg at the iron-fenced bed that houses one of the half dozen stark and silent trees adorning our otherwise cement and glass street, their spring buds in a state of arrested development. I lift my gaze. The girl on the sixth floor, home from college, sits perilously at her open window reading a book. All day like that, my husband tells me. Her mother comes to the window and proceeds to do what I am doing; we don’t look at each other, but for the first time in nearly twenty years I believe we might understand each other. I follow the floors up to where the top of the Met Life Tower sticks out behind them. Eleven-forty-two, its hands read. Hours feel like months. He is still on his call.

At seven the light fades to dusk. I strain to open the thousand-pound window, eighteen inches at best, and bend over and clap. He claps absently from his position at the dining table (unless he’s in a mood, in which case he’ll stand hollering on the edge of the couch with his arms stretched out like Jesus). Each night there are more and more of them, coming out of their crevices and cubby holes, people I never knew existed, at their windows banging pieces of wood together, metal, the two middle-aged men with their horn, the young couple in the penthouse with their baby, the whistles and whoops. The bell. Tonight, as a bonus, we are accompanied by a wildly barking God. When my husband told his father, who lives in the Piedmont region of Italy, about the clap, he said, as if knowing something we didn’t, that they had clapped in Italy too, for a few days, until they’d stopped. A dead silence followed this statement, and so naturally we thought our clapping, too, would stop. But it hasn’t stopped. We are going on day twenty and the clapping is growing, not so much louder but broader, deeper, richer, circling up and down and all around us, one long endless fuck-you virus roar.

END

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Episode 1, March 16, 2020

The bars are shuttered. We drink at home, where we have modeled our kitchen after a restaurant-bar we used to frequent before it closed like all the restaurant-bars in this city eventually do, if you live long enough.

Johan and Marianne are a happily married couple with two young children. He is a successful engineer and she is a divorce lawyer. Their best friends, a married couple, are over for dinner. The evening begins convivially, but after many drinks the couple spirals into a brutal and cruel exchange about their growing disgust and hatred for one another. Marianne and Johan watch on resignedly, both numbed and disturbed. There is no background music to alleviate the uncomfortableness of this ugly scene, just the couple’s drunken voices, their lashing tongues. After an apology, the couple depart for home, where they will finish their argument that the husband says wouldn’t be fit for public consumption.

As Johan and Marianne clear away the dishes, they revel in the relief that their relationship is not like their friends’. A few weeks later, Marianne tells Johan she is pregnant, there is a long discourse about whether to keep the baby, they already have two young children. Johan expresses his indifference to the idea but is willing to go through with it if that is her wish. After much back and forth they decide to abort the baby. When he comes to the hospital afterward, in her eyes that the camera has plunged into, you see horror, the question of whether she and Johan have just tempted their own fate.

As the credits scroll over the desolate beauty of Faro island, I tell my husband, situated on the opposite end of the couch from me, that it’s going to get bad.

He stares straight ahead and says that he wants to keep going.

I have seen this film before, he has not.

But one episode a night, we agree, is all either of us can take. (The original film was shown in 6 episodes.)

We go to bed, where there is a squabble, not all that uncommon as we grow old and repetitive together. In the early morning, my hand rests on his hip as we spoon inches apart. In a dream, my fingernails dig into his flesh. When we wake up, he shows me the marks.

Episode 2, March 17, 2020

I stare at the news. And then I stare at it again. I go back to my short story. I change a word. A spelling. I disparage. I query a literary magazine. I have never once been accepted by a literary magazine, but every so often I get the gumption to try again. I’ve committed to one query a day, but I’ve already broken my promise.

I hear him pontificating at the other end of our loft, where we have positioned him at the farthest distance possible from where I work in our back bedroom. I play music to drown him out but there is residual. I don’t mind. Intent, engaged, ironic but steady, I like listening to his defiance. That laugh. There is no one else I would rather be with.

Tonight, the bar is serving Harry’s martinis. We engage in both deep and meaningless conversation as if there were only us in the world.

We clean up, assume our positions.

Johan, the engineer, has been secretly writing poetry and he has given his work to a close and very respected colleague for feedback. In brutally honest form, she tells Johan that the poetry is not bad. In fact, it is much worse than that, it is good. In other words, there is nothing exceptional about it. It’s the worst news she can give him, according to her. Johan, who’d been excited to send his poetry to publishers now puts it away and never speaks of it again.

Marianne, the divorce attorney, sits in her office across from a nice looking, grey-haired woman of about fifty years of age. She is dressed in a prim dark suit and is explaining, very dispassionately, why she wants a divorce from her husband of twenty years. There is no love, she says, there never has been. And that lack of love has made all the love in her atrophy, including the love for her children, whom she has never loved. She has been good to them and her husband has been good to her, but she cannot live without this love and must leave the marriage because she must at least try to have this love. Marianne presses her forehead with her fingers.

The credits fall over Faro island.

I look at him looking at the windswept coast. “Are you going to be okay?” I ask.

“Are you?”

Episode 3, March 18, 2020

People in Italy are dying. The coffins are lining up. The country is going up in flames and they are singing from balconies. I wonder if this will be us soon.

Johan tells Marianne he is leaving her for Paula with the kind of excruciatingly brutal honesty you don’t see often in film. She disgusts him, frankly. It is her fault, she agrees. She’s never been interested in sex. She wants to know what she can do. How she can change. He wants to live an honest life, he tells her, no matter the consequences. He has driven to their house in the country, where she is staying with the children, to tell her this news. That he and Paula are going away to Paris together. And he is tired. She begs him to stay, to rest. Not to leave her. They lay down together. The discourse continues, she won’t let him go, and he continues to delineate everything about her that he despises. After much back and forth, their conversation falls into a tender repose, as Johan begins to have second thoughts. But those quickly dispel, and he gets up and prepares to leave. Marianne tearfully lugs his suitcase out from under the bed and begins packing it for him as if by rote, as if he is going on a business trip. After all, the failure of their marriage is her fault, it is the least she can do.

It always takes us a few moments while we watch the credits to put a sentence together. “I don’t understand why he’s got to be so honest,” he says finally.

“He wants to live an honest life.” I say.

“Yes, but does he have to be so cruel about it.”

Some moments pass.

“Why are you looking at me like that,” he says.

“I’m not looking at you like anything.”

Episode 4, March 19, 2020

At breakfast, still disturbed, he says, “It’s as if the characters are projecting all their anger, frustration, and disappointment with their life and marriage onto their spouse.” He looks as if through me, where it is pitch black. “Do people really behave like this?”

“Yes, I believe they do.”

The day is long, but I feel calmer. I’ve let go of things. The monotonous self-flogging. I write in this journal and read and stare out my bedroom window at the black iron fire escape scaling down the side of the building adjacent ours. Each day it is a little more silent. The condensers, fans, vents, pigeons, one by one they all go off (or swan dive off). An altered state arrives. The world has stopped. I’m no longer the only one under achieving. No one is achieving what they have set out to achieve. No one is doing anything.

People ask what we are watching. Everyone wants to know what everyone else is watching. We don’t tell them. They wouldn’t understand.

Johan returns from a one-year absence and comes to Marianne’s house for dinner. He is hungry for her, makes advances but she has been altered while he’s been away and resists. She is seeing someone else. They are warm and congenial with each other. Happy to see each other. They drink. Eat. He and Paula fight viciously, Johan confides in Marianne, and that he is tiring of Paula. After dinner they move to the couch with a bottle and end up talking about their lovemaking. Their dialogue oscillates between hate but also the deep love they continue to feel for each other. Their bond remains convoluted and strong and it has not to do with the children. Johan barely asks about them. At one point, Marianne reads to Johan from the diary she has been keeping since she’s been in therapy. She very eloquently and perceptually articulates what she has learned about herself during her separation from Johan. The camera zooms in on her pale and faintly freckled face. So fearful was she of not doing exactly what was expected of her as a child, growing up under the tenant of guilt. She never acted of her own will and so grew up to be submissive, passive, wanting to please and unable to express her true desires. After she is done reading from her diary, she looks over at Johan to see that he has fallen asleep.

The credits roll.

“Don’t you see?”

He startles me.

“Guilt is what it always comes down to.”

I look at him. The muscle in his cheek is pulsating.

Scenes from a Marriage (1973)

Episode 5, March 20

“Loneliness,” I say, at breakfast—coffee and sliced apple.

I tell him that while he identifies with Marianne, I identify with Johan, particularly about his feelings about loneliness, those he’d expressed to Marianne at one point in last night’s episode. “Once one figures out that loneliness is the backdrop of our existence, that we cannot run or hide from it, that is when we arrive. All the other things—desire, happiness, contentment, peace—are clouds that float by on the clear blue backdrop of that loneliness, and once we understand this life won’t be so devastating.”

“Loneliness is pervasive,” I add, when he doesn’t say anything.

He can only stare at me like I am an enigma.

“And there’s a difference between being lonely and alone. I am not alone when I am lonely because I am with my loneliness. And in my loneliness, I know that I am not alone.”

He tells me that he would say this social distancing thing is getting to me, if he didn’t know me better.

Another year has passed. Marianne comes to Johan’s place of work, a dank and sterile closet in a nondescript building, with divorce papers. She is in a heightened state, almost giddy. Johan remains dark and brooding. She wants to make love and they lie on the floor. It goes quickly and she achieves some level of pleasure and they get up and he opens a bottle of Hine cognac. They sit on a worn grey couch and catch up on their lives. He is miserable. His university is no longer sending him to the U.S. as he had hoped. He is forty-five, old, and has become obsolete. He holds no interest in what the future will bring. He regrets Paula and wants to return to his marriage where there is some semblance of meaning left for him. Marianne is shocked. She has a man at home, a newfound sense of freedom and independence. She is about to go on a trip. She has moved on from Johan and is infuriated to learn about his reservations. They battle. Oh, how they loathe each other—and yet she weakens, oscillates, considers staying with him, imagines it, them staying married, but she can’t and begs him to let her go. He, too, should move on and see what true freedom will bring him once he lets go of her for good. But there is nothing out there left for him, he insists. She tries to leave but he locks the door. He is no longer himself, his is vengeance personified. He beats her. She tries to fight him at first but then lies on the floor while he kicks her. Afterward, he falls back onto the couch stricken in despair. She goes to the bathroom and cleans up. When she returns, wordlessly, they sign the divorce papers.

We stare at the credits, each pondering with no small amount of concern what could possibly happen next.

Episode 6, March 21, 2020

The bar is serving Old Fashioneds.

“Are you ready?”

We head to the couch, where I cross the chasm to his side. “I’m ready.”

It wasn’t how we expected the final episode to go, after all the blows, cruelty, and blackness, for Marianne and Johan to find redemption in each other. They have come to form a deep, tender, passionate love for each other, honest in a way they had never been before. Unmasked. They are both married to other people now, but still sneak away once or twice a year and maintain an affair. They find in each other a comfort that comes from going through everything they’ve gone through together, I suppose, it’s hard for me to remain unbiased, to want their relationship to continue. I’ve seen their innards and guts, watched their shit spill out all over the floor. The smell doesn’t go away, but then I remind myself that I am not Johan and he is not Marianne and we are not them. So, I will form some sort of generalization to wrap things up, and I suppose honesty is much of what it came down to. Marianne has the confidence to express herself now, and he has grown relaxed and less serious with himself. They are real with each other. For the first time in their relationship they enjoy sex. I should have more to say about it but enough is enough.

There are over ten thousand COVID cases in New York City as of March 21. We have been sheltering in place for five days. I will always identify these first days of our solitude with Bergman. The beginning of an endurance test that will, honestly, go on to feel not much different than our normal life, which is also an endurance test. How long can we go on living like this?

FINE

The post Scenes From a Pandemic Marriage appeared first on Jackie Townsend.

We’d paid extra for a private boat, a “junk” boat they literally called it, because that’s what it looked like, a piece of junk floating on the water. Petrol fumes wafted in our wake as we puttered off into the layers of placid grey, the soft outline of a jutting archipelago.

As we moved out further into the water, in a direction away from the other tourist boats, very soon we came to be alone and the world around us began to crystalize. The silvery water turned into the purest of jades, the rocks, massive and towering, burst up as if from the center of the earth, verdant, luscious, full of life.

My husband and I climbed to the upper deck and took seats in two hard-backed chairs that resembled thrones. Awed and wordless is how we sat for hours while our boat snaked through the towering creatures (made from the fire of dragons, so the myth goes), their shadows moving as if through us in a silence that had become profound.

The Absence of Evelyn is a book about love, filial and amorous, healing and destructive, and while I had the luxury of choosing from an array of wonderful cover options thanks to the talented artists at Spark Press, covers which often depicted women, young-adult women, middle-aged women, ageless women, their obscure, shadowed faces, or no faces at all as they looked off into distant waters, there was something about this cover with the absent woman on it that struck me. Its mystical quality, the elusive nature of the love that we all, whether we’re willing to admit it or not, search the ends of the earth for.

The book will be available April, 2017

Pre-Order on Amazon

Get a sneak peak at Chapter One

The post A Word About the Cover appeared first on Jackie Townsend.

I came for the moments-in-between…

Sometimes soft, fuzzy moments—when all the world was asleep but us, or so it seemed. Rustling about at three a.m. “Go to sleep,” you say. “I can’t,” I say. All that cuddling and clawing, the reading and slapping down of books, the whispered murmurs and so on, deep into the morning of those jetlagged nights.

Obscure, random moments—like when we’d gone to the Tokyo Fish Market. You’d set the alarm for six a.m., but I was up at five waiting for your eyes to pop open. We dressed in the dark and then found our way to the riverside, a maze of alleyways cluttered with hawker stands selling just-off-the-boat delicacies, counter only sushi restaurants with queues already three hours long. We watched a fisherman slice apart an eight-foot tuna with what looked like a Samurai sword, the fish’s chopped off head displayed proudly on the table. You fed me chunks of the just cut meat with a toothpick from a wobbly paper plate, and I said to you, salivating, that this was it. And your eyes agreed. Whatever this was:

—An oyster so big that we had to share it, me sucking down one half, you the other.

—A steaming hot, brick-sized tamago that we devoured in a nanosecond.

—You saying you were sorry for dragging me around the world like this as the warmth of that tamago was still sliding down into my soul, and I’d said, “Yes. I’m really suffering.”

—In the background, vendors calling out to us in a language we didn’t need to understand.

[But you hadn’t been facetious about the “dragging me around” part—I’d understood what you’d meant. Our lives had morphed and changed over the years into this, and who knew if it was all okay, me following you around the world, if it would ever be okay.]

—A fisherman plunging his meaty, calloused hand into a bucket of oxygenated seawater to retrieve a scallop the size of his palm. He shucked and diced it, then placed the pieces back into its shell, set the shell on a makeshift grill and commenced searing it with two blowtorches. We stared, fascinated, as the vinegar and soy juices he’d poured on top of it bubbled over. When the paper plate holding the steaming hot crustacean was at last in our hands, neither of us was willing to let go, so we just stood there holding it together.

When we’d finally made it back to our hotel room, we fell face first onto the bed, where I dreamt of the strange flavors and tastes of our beginnings, where we’d started out together, from the deepest and darkest of oceans.

It was only nine-thirty a.m. when we’d woken again.

You put on a suit and went to negotiate a deal with a Japanese partner.

I slept until the maids kicked me out (noon), and then went in search of the obscure because that’s how I was feeling—dragged around, the way you’d said it, as if my choices weren’t my own, as if I was only doing this for you. On a vague hunt for a bathhouse turned artist studio in the Yanaka district, I found myself wandering through streets that felt of another place and time—the film director Kurosawa came to mind, and all his movies you insist I watch with you—Yojimbo, Rojimbo, Akimbo—bastardising the names made me smile, was there ever a moment without you in it? Before I knew it I found myself lost deep inside the bowels of a cemetery, where dilapidated tombs loomed large and insignificant and engraved wooden slats signifying swords were stacked everywhere. I kept looking behind me thinking that there was someone there, but it was just those swords, slapping against each other in the wind.

That night, you returned from a ten-course Kaiseki business dinner awash in a waft of intoxicating scents to find me seated on the plush, windowed-walled couch of our hotel room staring out at the jewel speckled skyline, dark shadows of a river snaking below, a vast garden built by some shogun or samurai, eating rice triangles, and drinking from a bottle of convenience store sake.

“Are you happy here?” you came over, kneeled beside me, and wanted to know. “I want you to be happy here.” I narrowed my eyes so that you couldn’t see into them. You’d never asked me this question before. “If I’m not happy here,” I said, moving my arm to indicate our plush surroundings and still the tremble in my core. “Then I have a problem.”

Jackie Townsend is the author of Imperfect Pairings. Her new book, The Absence of Evelyn, comes out in April. 

The post The Traveler’s Wife—Episode One appeared first on Jackie Townsend.

Circa 1980

My mother recently called me to discuss resigning as board chairman of the ambitiously scaled non-profit start-up she’d been championing pro bono for the past two years. A younger, self-made man with all the qualifications, connections, and savvy, not to mention a private jet and direct line into the Dalai Lama, wanted the position for himself.

“As well he should,” I told my mother. Petite, with an ageless innocence, my mother is a dancer at heart, an educator by trade, and lives off her hard earned pension. Her direct line is into her dog groomer.

“It’s the right move, the right time,” I assured her. She had accomplished what the visionaries had brought her in to do: build the foundations of an organization and foster partnerships that would propel their vision forward. Now, with hundreds of millions of dollars to be raised, it was time to bring in the big guns with the big egos. “It’s a man’s world,” I hated myself for saying. “If you were a man, the hits would bounce off you. But you internalize, Mom, and I’m worried about your health, your sanity.” This was not my mother’s only job.

“Me too,” she said. My mother has weathered many stages of personal and professional flux, what comes with life’s forward motion, change, both wanted and not. But there was something in her voice this time, something she wasn’t saying.

“You feel pushed aside,” I said cautiously.

“Well, maybe,” she responded.

A few nights later we spoke again. She’d been unable to sleep or eat. “Until you officially hand over the reigns, Mom, this anxiety will not pass.”

Was she sensing impending obscurity?

One might think her resumé of past achievements would soften the fall—all the students and teachers she’s mentored, the schools she’s run or founded, the cities that have honored her, the arts programs to which she’s directed funds, the boards she’s served on, the newspaper articles she’s been profiled in, the seven grandkids she’s been a role model for…

We are the sum of our experiences, both our successes and our failures, and we are who we are because of those experiences. Still, when you are a born achiever like my mother is, in your non-achieving state (or your impending non-achieving state), it’s like none of that other stuff ever happened. You pace your bedroom at night, unable to eat or sleep, you scour clean your kitchen and barbeque, you fret and think and punish yourself for everything and anything. Then you punish yourself for punishing yourself, because, why are you punishing yourself? Your mind in a spiral, you see your therapist and practice deep breathing exercises, none of which work.

Two weeks later, she still hadn’t resigned, or slept.  

“It’s unfeasible to live without sleeping or eating, Mom,” I said.

She remained silent. Both of us thinking the same thing, that if she was thirty, or even fifty, we would be having an entirely different conversation. Man’s world my ass.

But my mother is seventy-eight.

“You could stay and fight,” I said, reaching far down into my depths to muster some enthusiasm for this idea. My mother is a people pleaser, not a fighter. Nor is she a game player, political maneuverer, or “member of the club.” And as far as money goes, totally beside the point, she gives it away the minute it’s made. She’s whimsical and spontaneous, tenacious and indefatigable, with ideas so wise in their innocence I’m reminded of Forrest Gump. Thus, these situations she keeps finding herself in, positions meant for Presidents and Kings.

She set out to be a dancer, became a teacher out of necessity to pay for my father’s doctorate and, in inspiring others, found her calling. Over the next fifty years her career in education would tentacle off into a variety of unchartered directions—film production, global shipping, performing arts, a charter school, and this latest endeavor, ocean sustainability (two years ago my mother’s knowledge about the ocean consisted of how to carefully wade your way into it without getting your hair wet), always in the realm of mentorship, vision building, and leadership. She has a way, with her box of chocolates, of getting everyone on the same page.

“But why fight,” I said finally, responding to my own question.  

“No, it’s time to resign,” she agreed.

“You’ll still be on the board,” I said, because I could hear the air leaking out of her. “He can’t do this without you. You just won’t be the one.” I winced, visibly, upon saying this. Obscurity is my mother’s greatest fear. “How about magnificent obscurity?” I quickly offered, thinking of my own motto.

A strangled laugh escaped her.

The next day she sent me an email saying that she’d resigned. The new chairman had been awed by her professionalism, passion, and work ethic, and she was already overwhelmed with her new, albeit subordinate role. “I’m learning so much!”

Off she goes. Last I heard from her, she was boarding a ship to meet with the guy who discovered the wreckage of the Titanic.  

Meanwhile, I sit here scratching my head. “I’m learning so much!” A phrase I’ve heard from her countless times over the years. The more you learn, the more you want to learn, a phenomena that snowballs with age, apparently, as if she were a sponge wanting to suck up the universe with her last breath. Apparently, what drives us when we are sixteen and twenty-five drives us when we are sixty-one and seventy-eight, and it will be driving my mother when she is ninety-three.

Curiosity. Thirst. I’m convinced it’s what’s keeping her not just alive (for isn’t it enough to be smelling the roses at her age?), but bursting with profound life. Not just making a difference, but a magnificent difference.

The new chairman was at one point enamored enough to ask her about her genes, her DNA, as if he were in the market for some. “Still being determined,” was her response. My mother was adopted. She knows nothing of what might be in store for her in her seemingly elusive twilight, and she prefers it that way. 

The post About My Mother’s Resignation appeared first on Jackie Townsend.

Forget who has won or lost. As of Sunday, July 13th, 6pm EST, the football lover in your life has fallen into a state of deep depression. And it’s not because their Nation went home without the trophy, once again. (The majority of us have ended up losers.) The real issue here is that there is no more football. No cemented twelve and four o’clock appointments, no leniency from employers about two-hour lunches or questions about your health, what with all the “doctor’s visits.” Even their home leagues don’t start up again until September. What, baseball? Not in my house. Here are a few tips on how to ease the transition for the poor, football bereft soul.

1) Every day for one week, at noon and four, send him a new link to The Guardian’s brick-by-brick summary of the World Cup. They replay the game highlights with Lego figures—the scenarios are oddly accurate, adorable, if not sad at times. Childish? Perhaps, but this is the pace with which we are working.

2) As he stares off into space at random, don’t ask him what he’s thinking about, as we women like to do, ask him why Brazil cratered defensively against the Germans. Why the Dutch didn’t switch goalkeepers in their second round of penalties. Why Messi had a sub-par World Cup. Don’t bring up his National team, redirect the focus to his local team, how their roster looks for the season… With each question will come a response that brings him one step closer to consciousness, perhaps even some eye contact. If you’re lucky, he might even SEE you.

3) If that doesn’t work, walk around the house wearing nothing but his favorite football team jersey.

4) Take him to the nearest ethnic restaurant where there is a bar. Order something straight up from the bartender and ask for his thoughts about the World Cup. Odds are, his analysis will be more insightful than anything you’ve seen on television or read on Twitter. Therapy at it’s best.

6) Go to a travel agency, find a glossy brochure that describes how gorgeous Moscow is in the summer, and leave it under his pillow.

7) Remind him that four years is really not that long. This year is practically over, and don’t forget the Champions League next year, the Euro the year after that in which certainly his team will find retribution, the Women’s World Cup (okay maybe don’t mention that one), the U-20, then there’s always that silly Confederations Cup. But then one year later you’re on a plane to Saint Petersburg because you’ve spent all the down time saving your pennies like you said you were going to do for Brazil but didn’t. See! See how it’s really only like one year, two at most.

8) Rearrange the furniture, move the big chair he’s been sitting on to the other side of the room to shift his mental paradigm slightly, slap a colorful pillow on it and make that empty chair seem, well, not so empty.

9) Rent him The Damned United, one of the best football movies ever made. Then, on the next night rent Big Fan, a dark, sardonic portrait of a man obsessed with his football team (the other kind of football), a man who still lives with his mother…

10) Repeat #3.

11) It is really important that he be with people from his own tribe in times like these. Note: you are not from this tribe. Don’t ever think you are. Invite a couple of his football buddies over (note: these buddies are probably different than his regular buddies), and leave the house.

Do these things, for him, because think of all he’s done for you over these past four weeks.

Jackie Townsend’s second novel, Imperfect Pairings, was released in May of 2013. Her new novel, I’ve Loved You So Long, will be out in the fall. Find out more about her books at https://jackietownsend.com.

The post No More Football? appeared first on Jackie Townsend.

This was the text message I sent my husband towards the end of final match between France and Italy in the 2006 World Cup Final in Berlin. He was sweating it out live there; I was sweating it out before my television here. It was a burst of brilliance on my part, I thought then, and still think today. It just hit me all at once. We’d been to Germany the first two weeks of the tournament, been to all the Italy games, sat in the midst of all the chants and cheers about Carnavaro and Buffon and Totti and the aging Del Piero, but by the end I was like no, no, it’s about Pirlo! I felt like I had discovered this amazing creature. Sure, maybe everyone else knew he was one of the best, but did they really, like this?

I don’t claim to be an expert on the intricacies of soccer, a player’s strategies and techniques, what goes on in his head, but one gets a sense for these things after spending one’s formative adult years peering over the shoulder of one’s husband on what are supposed to be those lazy Sunday mornings but are actually periods of extreme tension and biting silence intermixed with that rare, explosive outburst, either positive or negative, it’s hard to tell unless I’m watching the action myself.

I didn’t fall in love with Pirlo simply because he was handsome, in that Italian way, (hell, they’re all handsome, in that Italian way). What ultimately charmed me was his subtlety, his lack of flamboyance or self-aggrandizement. He was exacting, matter of fact, fearless. Always on the ball, dribbling the ball, stealing the ball, protecting the ball, moving the ball, passing the ball; he was the ball. Simply put, he got the job done. He’s one of the main reasons Italy ended up winning.

He was twenty-six back then. Thirty when he was traded from Milan to Juventus. I remember the day my husband told me the news, somewhat despairingly, that Milan was getting rid of Pirlo. He was old, past his prime, his years numbered, and Juventus was picking him up. He spoke flatly, without inspiration; he’d wanted so-and-so, or so-and-so. I put up a hand without hesitation and looked him straight in the eye. “This trade is going to be the best thing that’s happened to Juventus since…,” I stumbled here. Since what, I didn’t exactly know. All I could manage was a “You’ll see.”

I so love being right. Especially when I’m dealing with a lifetime aficionado of a sport for which I will only ever be an interloper. Juventus is about to win its third straight Seria A title. I so love being right.

Pirlo’s autobiography is out, “I Think Therefore I Play.” The word think isn’t the first word that comes to mind about a Play Station fanatic, which Pirlo admits to being in an excerpt I read. But alas, the idea of him curled up on the couch battling it out with his teammate Nesta is kind of adorable, and makes me worry less about my football fanatic nephew. Apparently, Pirlo’s played three times as many fantasy games as real games (I’m pretty sure my nephew’s got him beat), his dream team always Barcelona, the team that once tried to recruit him, unsuccessfully. If Pirlo has one career regret, this would be it. (For me, it would be the beard. Does he need the beard?)  

From the pitch to the Play Station and back, two hours on the field, two hours on the couch, a man in his thirties. My nephew, at eighteen, has maintained a similar routine with his dream team, Liverpool; from the pitch to the couch to the pitch, an endless cycle. His dream, still and unforgiving, is to be a professional football player, and sometimes when I watch him on the field I’m wondering if he thinks he’s inside the game on Play Station, as Pirlo had once described it, manipulating his feet with the dials, seeing the play from behind a screen, outside looking in. Or was he inside looking out, waiting for his master to press the right buttons so that his feet would dance and spin the way he wanted them to. Were his thumbs quivering out there? Is it hard for him to distinguish the difference? Fantasy or reality, does it all start to blend together after a while?

Purchase a copy of Jackie’s novels, Imperfect Pairings and Reel Life, at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iTunes, or Kobo.

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