Her Beautiful Brain Page 11
I was thirty-seven years old. Claire was four and was already “writing” her own stories and plays and Nick was not quite two and always ready to throw on a cape and be in her shows. It had been nearly seven years since I said yes to Rus in Haiti. We didn’t get to work together very often any more, but we loved being parents together and we loved helping each other make our creative dreams come true. I was writing a book. Rus was making a movie. And he had a good cast. We were both sure that Tami would bring Spree to life.
I was only able to visit the Spree set a few times during the five days of shooting, since my main job was to be with the kids and answer the phone at home. Rus had a cell phone, but it was a 1994 cell phone that weighed about six pounds and had an anemic battery and very little range in hilly Seattle.
I remember arriving at the first location, an abandoned industrial site full of wooden pallets stacked twenty high alongside rows and rows of empty orange oil drums, where Rus was shooting a chase scene. Even though I’d seen the crew list and the shooting script, I remember how startled I was by the bustle of it all: the lights and the cables and the guys in black with all kinds of equipment hanging off their belts. And then I was surprised by the quiet. They were in the middle of a shot. I stayed back, behind them, behind Rus and Lars, the director of photography. Lars’s camera was aimed at the nearest stack of pallets.
And then, there was Tami, rounding the corner of the stack, her fake gun pointed right at the camera. Her brown curls dusty. Her eyes dark with armed-robber intensity. There she was, walking right towards the lens, then stopping ten feet shy of it, frozen, as if she were sighting a target.
“Cut!” Rus yelled, and all at once conversation hummed.
I remember feeling very—wholesome. Blue-eyed. Like I was Florence Henderson and I’d just strolled over from the Brady Bunch set. Tami had that power I didn’t have, that unstudied sultriness, like she just couldn’t help it, like even in dirty sweats she would still be just naturally intriguing, whether she wanted to be or not.
I didn’t perceive Tami’s look, on that day, as a personal threat.
Indeed, I had no suspicions at all, no idea that, the minute I took off on my week-long, novel-related road trip down I-5 to snoop around towns like Yreka and Red Bluff, she and Rus would fall into bed, acting on the powerful attraction they felt for each other, like so very many green directors and fresh starlets have done before them. No idea. Not for more than a year.
I take that back. I did feel something that I hadn’t previously felt from Rus, something I couldn’t quite identify. He was—distracted? Of course. This was something he’d never done before. Everyone else on the set had one job; the director had to know and track them all. He was—obsessed? Naturally. This was his lifelong dream, to make a real movie. I was—invisible to him? Yes. But just temporarily, I told myself, while he’s doing this all-absorbing thing. Even though I’d never been invisible before. Even though for seven years our love—our particular love, our own humming, sparking mix of lust and friendship and mutual admiration—had felt as certain as gravity, as certain as the very ground itself, unshakeable through the big quakes like childbirth and through all the little daily tremors too. Our love was in the same category of total seismic unshakeability as my Mom’s love for me, or my love for Nick and Claire. There was no need, ever, to question it, just no need.
I don’t know all the details—the when, where, how many times—of what happened between Rus and Tami. What Rus told me, more than a year later, was that it was an infatuation that went too far. A two-way attraction born of working together intimately and creatively: not unlike what had happened between us at the TV station. He said it was brief, that he ended it, that he thought he’d put it behind him, that it was over, that not telling me was the right thing to do because he would never let it happen again.
He wasn’t going to tell me. He had hoped I would never know. As if it made any sense to have secrets from each other.
But then something unexpected happened. A small production company in Los Angeles saw Spree, liked it, and wanted to back a feature-length version with the same cast. Could Rus expand the storyline and reassemble the cast and crew in the summer of 1995?
The L.A. people were in such a big hurry that Rus had to finalize the contract while we were up at the Crystal Mountain ski area near Mt. Rainier, spending a weekend with my sister Lisa and her family and Mom, nine of us crammed into a ramshackle condo that the kids loved because it had a loft with triple bunk beds. The weather was icy and the children were all so little they could barely walk on the slick snow, let alone on skis, so we grownups spent a lot of time playing poker while Nick and Claire and their cousins turned their bunks into forts. But Mom kept forgetting the rules (“Now are aces high or low?”) and Rus kept having to answer his six-pound cell phone, shouting contract details to the production company executive, who was in Israel and wanted him to fax back signed pages from the ski area’s office to him, in Israel, right away.
This time, the shoot would be ten days instead of five. This time, as we got closer to shooting, the radar signals I was picking up were a little more psychotic. But I thought I was the crazy one. Why was I so needy? Why couldn’t I just focus on my writing and on the kids?
Maybe I should get more involved, I thought. Be more supportive. I offered to do publicity. I wrote and faxed press releases and made phone calls, inviting local papers to visit the shoots and interview Rus and Tami. I also agreed to play a small role as a trashy clerk at a convenience store where Tami shoplifts a few items. I had to wear a lot of makeup and a really tight T-shirt in order to make my TV mom self look trashy enough.
But I still felt weirdly invisible to Rus. And, unbelievable though it seems to me now, I still wasn’t even close to guessing why.
On the last day of the shoot, I left for the Squaw Valley Writers Conference. I was so excited. It would be an opportunity to get feedback, go to lots of readings, maybe even meet an agent or an editor who might, just might, take a look at my manuscript. I told Rus I was sorry I’d miss the wrap party, but he assured me it was OK.
When I called home from Squaw Valley, Rus didn’t seem terribly interested in talking to me, even though I was having a good week and had lots to tell him about the workshops and parties and the agent who liked my first chapter and the famous authors arriving each evening by helicopter. This hurt. I felt like I was boring him. It unnerved me; I wasn’t used to it. I scolded myself: All this silly, neurotic neediness I was feeling! Rus was being such a good dad while I was gone; so focused on the kids. What was my problem? Besides, as my grandma would have said, being needy is so unattractive: the surest way to drive your man away.
When I got home, Rus let me feel alternately boring and frantic for about a week or so, while he spent his days in an editing room with the screen version of Tami.
Then he told me he wanted to separate.
When he told me, I had just walked in the door after a day-long freelance gig that included a flight into the Mt. St. Helens blast zone.
Later, much later, I got some mileage out of this.
At the time, despite the blips of radar, despite the neediness, hearing him say such a thing truly felt as unexpected and catastrophic as a volcano erupting. But not Mt. St. Helens: this was a volcano that wasn’t expected to erupt, at least not in our lifetimes. Mt. Rainier, maybe, suddenly burying Tacoma and Seattle in a highway of hot mud. Mt. Fuji. Mt. Everest. I couldn’t even take it in. It was like volcanic lava had just poured through my brain and instantly rendered thinking, as I had previously known it, impossible. Thinking now made me want to throw up. I remember starting to shake all over, like I had a violent, feverish, heroin-addict-style chill, even though it was a warm August night.
First he tried to say it was all about me. I wasn’t passionate enough about my writing, for example. Which is the only item I remember clearly from his list of my shortcomings, because it was the one that really stung, coming so soon after the high of Squaw V
alley.
But then Tami’s name finally came up, and the truth, and the sick realization that while I was off being as passionate about writing as I was able, given that I am more of a Florence Henderson kind of a person than a Tonya Harding or a Tami—meanwhile, back at the ranch, Rus and Tami were busy stoking their passion for each other.
I have to say I am having a hard time, right now, getting passionate about writing the rest of this. But I also know that it’s a part of the story I can’t just leave out. So I’m going back to my journals for some help, though it feels a little like going back to the part of the blast zone that’s best left roped off forever.
“If only I were suicidal,” I wrote on August 21, 1995. “Unfortunately, I think I’m stuck with this life I apparently have managed to fuck up beyond belief.”
We did separate that summer. It was surreal and horrible. Nick said, years later, that his enduring memory of that time is seeing me cry a lot, even though I thought I was doing so well at not sobbing in front of him and Claire. Maybe what he remembers is hearing me after he and Claire went to bed, and I went downstairs to cry.
We went to marriage counseling and I cried a lot there too and so did Rus. The counselors said it was clear we both cared a lot about each other, even though I threw a water bottle at Rus during one session. They said, and Rus said, that he was the miserable and confused one and that I was the “grounded” one, which made me feel like a reliable electric plug.
By October, Rus was encouraging me to hope, though I was wary. In mid-November, he finally said, I want to come home.
Four days later, I ventured into an actual church one Sunday morning for the first time in twenty years, feeling some of the same mix of hope and wariness around religion that I felt around Rus. Either I was lucky that day, or God was paying attention to my ripped-up life. I had stumbled into a church where the main themes seemed to be open-armed tolerance, unconditional love and that central, most deeply counter-cultural message of all: forgiveness.
Rus vowed that he was over his obsession. He and Tami were done, and I forgave him and believed him and he came home.
But, damn it all, they weren’t done.
For a year and a half, we lived in what I thought was sort of a healing, post-Irish-peace-talks kind of happiness. Nick and Claire were thrilled to have things back to normal. And that’s how it felt: normal. We were all reveling in re-discovering Normal, which for us meant routines like our old Saturday morning ritual of getting in bed with giant chocolate and poppy-seed muffins and watching cartoons together: it had become our own little four-person, weekly protest against the puritanical healthiness that ruled the world of young families in Seattle and for us it was the epitome of our Normal.
There were some landmines. We had to walk carefully. For example, we used to joke openly about Rus’s reputation around the TV station as an artistic prima donna, but that wasn’t very funny any more, at least not coming out of my mouth. Just as it wasn’t funny if Rus joked about my love of sleeping a good seven or eight hours a night—which at the time was about two or three more hours a night than he was sleeping—since he had recently named this need for sleep as one of my weaknesses.
But being careful required a constant tenderness that kept us aware that we were repairing something important. We were nursing our relationship the way you nurse a child recovering from the flu. We rested a lot. We served each other comfort foods.
I even made Rus a big, corny Valentine’s Day collage about how happy I was to have us back together. I photocopied some pages from my journals and cut the copied pages up—I was going for little snippets of ordinary happiness: place names that meant something to us, funny things the kids said—and then I mixed the scraps with red and orange tissue paper torn into heart shapes and glued it all onto cardboard—and this thing was big, poster-sized.
I remember well how big it was, because one night in the summer of 1997, I carried it out to the driveway, set it down, poured lighter fluid all over it, threw a match on it, and watched it burn.
The summer had started off so well. I had an agent who was confident that she would sell my novel. Mom had agreed to some more tests that might help us figure out what, if anything, could be done to help her with her memory problems. Rus and I would soon be celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary. Claire was turning eight and hosting her first big slumber party. Nick was five and in love with Pokémon. I was starting to work on a second novel inspired by my Finnish-immigrant roots.
I was in Minneapolis, spending a precious two days doing research at the Immigrant History Research Center, on my way to New York for a reunion with my best college friends, when Rus told me on the phone that he was losing it again: he didn’t think he could stay married, but hey, no hurry—we’d talk about it when I got home from New York.
This time, it was more like being doused by a random shower of toxic space garbage than slammed by an erupting volcano. This time, I described myself in my journal as “sad as a bowl of oatmeal, but with a few dangerous bubbly hot spots,” which may not sound great but was a step up the old self-esteem scale from “I wish I was suicidal.”
This time, oatmeal-sad or not, I had some fire in me, some of Mom’s pluck, her sisu; some hot spots, like the flames that leaped up from that sappy collage.
I flew home from Minneapolis as soon as I could, which was early the next morning. I told Rus there was no way I could just zip off to New York knowing he was about to blow up our marriage again. But I don’t know why I thought that I could instantly fix things, because of course I couldn’t. What could I do about Rus declaring that he couldn’t fight it anymore—he was still obsessed with Tami? If he couldn’t fight it, how could I?
Maybe this time I’ll leave, I thought. Let him take care of the house all alone. But then I thought of Tami and her children being in our house with Rus.
He moved out a few days after my mom was diagnosed with probable Alzheimer’s disease and a few days before my agent called to tell me she was running out of editors to whom she could pitch my novel. Many of them wrote the nicest things about it in their rejection letters, but then they all came down to—No. The agent suggested that I really get going on my second book, and maybe she could sell the second one and then the first one.
But I no longer, or not for much longer, had a husband to support my writing. And Mom, we now knew, had Alzheimer’s disease, so the days of writing and freelancing with her as my casual babysitter were officially over. I had a new fear: what if I was now unemployable? I had a few friends who were trying to get back into the working world after some time off for motherhood and they were having a hard time. I started job-hunting as fast as I could.
I landed a job at what my family and I now refer to as the Scary PR Firm, though that is not quite fair, historically speaking, since there were many good people there who helped me a lot. Like Dave, the computer guy, who helped me hide how far behind I was technologically until I was able to catch up and hold my own. And Deb and Jackie and Liz and Melissa, the youngsters I worked with whose dark humor kept me going and whose later connections, in their own post-scary-PR-firm lives, helped Rus and me build our post-Troubles filmmaking business.
Because we did, finally, in the fall of 1997, get past the Troubles.
I viewed it then and still view it now as a kind of miracle, though at the time, most of my good friends and family members were very skeptical.
There’s a CBS angle to how it ended, just as there was to how it began, with the Tonya Harding newsathon. This time, CBS asked Rus to be part of the first American news crew to visit North Korea in forty years. It would be a long trip, with a stopover in Tokyo and a two- or three-day wait for visas in Beijing.
In my memory, the call where he just pretty much cried for several very expensive minutes came from North Korea, but Rus thinks it might have been Beijing. Maybe I like the idea of that call coming from a country that had been closed to visitors for as long as he and I had been alive.
Either way, the timing was, from my point of view, right before the point of no return. I had gotten a job. I had joined that small, liberal, Presbyterian church where I felt at home. My friends and family had been there for me all summer, taking me for hikes, inviting the kids and me over for dinners. Even Mom, though she was not retaining the details, was always ready with a hug and a glass of wine and an invitation to stick around and watch West Side Story. I was ready to face a future without Rus, or at least without him as my husband.
But there was something about that phone call. Something real, something I trusted, something that said, This is the Rus you said yes to in Haiti, not the Rus who’s been half-there these past few years. In his tears—there weren’t a lot of words—I wasn’t hearing some Belfast-style armistice love; I was hearing his beating heart. Not “I’m going to try” but “here I am.”
It wasn’t like he came home right away. I didn’t want him to come home right away. I had to be sure. Because I had changed: I felt strong and clear, not grounded like a damn plug but grounded like a tree planted near a good stream, grounded like my Finnish great-grandparents, who staked a homestead claim in Montana when they were well past forty and raised six children there.
Back at the Immigrant History Research Center in Minneapolis, I had read that most of the Finnish settlers got along well with the local tribes. The Native Americans admired the Finns’ tradition of always building the sauna first and living in it while they built their house. A good practice, the Native Americans thought, a spiritual practice: to purify the family with fire and hot rocks and steam before settling into what would be their home for a long time.
And thirteen years later, here we are, in our same home, though the house has grown. The basement is no longer a concrete tomb: it is the studio where we edit our documentaries and the TV room where we observe important family holidays such as the post-Thanksgiving Friday all-day film festival, which starts with a breakfast of giant muffins. We can’t quite all hang out in our bed anymore, now that Nick and Claire are grown up.