In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love. Joseph Luzzi

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СКАЧАТЬ the only one eviscerated by Katherine’s death. She was unlike the other women I had brought home to meet my family. She did not have a fancy college degree or silver nose ring; she knew not a single band of alternative music or misunderstood, avant-garde foreign filmmaker, as Katherine’s tastes ran toward the all-American and wholesome, from Top-40 pop to Ellen DeGeneres stand-up comedy. The coeds from the Rhode Island School of Design and Oberlin and fissured nuclear families had rankled my mother and sisters with their arch comments and indifferent hygiene. They regarded my family as loveable Martians, quaintly inscrutable creatures beholden to passé virtues like marital fidelity and the severest home economics. In Katherine, my family finally had someone who did not disdain big-box retailers and suburban raised ranch houses. She was a woman without irony, the slightest tinge of snark.

      “Joe, I really hope you don’t screw this one up,” my younger sister, Tina, had said to me the first time she met Katherine. Her look was as grave as her tone of voice: this could be a grown-up relationship, her eyes suggested, you’ve had your fun; now get real.

      Mogli e buoi dei paesi tuoi, the Italian expression goes—wife and oxen from your hometown. Katherine was from my metaphysical village.

      A few years before I met Katherine, I had been engaged in graduate school to a brilliant woman who promised me a life I had dreamed of, a world of affluence and high culture, everything I had lacked growing up. The night after passing my oral PhD exams, I met Amanda for the first time in an Ethiopian restaurant just off campus. Her graceful gentleness and guileless blue eyes, framed by wire glasses, arrested me. The next morning, in rough shape from a night of celebrating, I made a point of waking up early to hear her eight thirty a.m. paper on Brazilian history; within a few months we were basically living together, editing each other’s papers, planning trips on graduate student stipends to her parents’ properties in London, Saint Croix, and Princeton. One night, her father, a vigorous bon vivant who had built a thriving law practice, took us to a restaurant near his home in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

      “Try the python,” he prodded, “or the kangaroo.”

      The exotic menu was filled with the wildest game, and as I stared across the table at Amanda the world felt like an endless banquet of all the foods I could never have imagined or afforded. She was taking me to a new village, one far from the one where I had grown up in Rhode Island, and it was filled with kindness, respect, and love. I ordered the kangaroo.

      In 2000, two months after receiving my doctorate and three years into our time together, I asked Amanda to marry me on the beaches of Watch Hill, the wooden carousel cresting on the horizon behind her. In tears, she said yes. I didn’t tell her that I had only bought the ring the day before, and that I had been wracked with doubt on the walk to the jeweler, a trip I had taken after months of wavering. Something deep inside me was saying, Stop, don’t do this. I tried nonetheless to love Amanda the way that she deserved, and I felt like a fool for even thinking of giving up the magical possibilities that life with her held. But my admiration and affection for her refused to blossom into true love. As the wedding approached, my misgivings began to manifest themselves in petty remarks and outbursts, as though I were goading her into fights that she knew neither of us believed in. Perhaps she could sense my ambivalence, and it made her usually low-key self become tetchy and irritable. Soon enough we were fighting nonstop. I became annoyed at how, in the manner of academic liberals, she found so many things “offensive” or “unjust,” even though she had benefited from American capitalism in every conceivable way. She began to lose patience with the company I kept: guys like me, laddish and uncouth boys who had not spent their lives in the polished worldly institutions that had been the air she breathed. The day we went to pick out our wedding invitations—a tasteful but outrageously expensive medley of sylvan designs on heavily bonded paper—we had a blowout fight over nothing in particular.

      “What’s happening to us?” she asked.

      “Are we making a mistake?” I replied.

      That April, six weeks before our wedding and with the invitations already mailed out, we called things off.

      A thought flashed across my mind that first night in the hospital after Katherine’s death. I would go home, back to my metaphysical village, to the place where more than any other I could be myself, with no need to impress—a longing Katherine understood viscerally. Katherine and I were both a bit lost in the new lives we’d chosen and the comfort of familiarity we’d left behind. I missed my home state, its beaches and weather-beaten shingles, the old-world wealth and new-world eccentricity. “Welcome to Rhode Island,” I recall our longtime cartoonist Don Bosquet writing, “where we can pronounce ‘Quonochontaug’ and ‘Misquamicut’ but can’t say ‘chow-duh’ [chowder].” I had left the state at eighteen, one of the few from my high school to venture out of South County, as most of my classmates landed at the nearby University of Rhode Island (URI, or Ewe-Ah-Eye in the local accent). Part of me was envious. The frat houses and keg stands of URI, the house parties in Bonnet Shores, the surfers with ropey bracelets and suntanned athletic girls with long limbs—I would know none of this in my bookish world. The turf farms and ocean breezes surrounding the local college seemed to promise a simpler life.

      Katherine had been suffering from a similar homesickness. She was never fully at ease in our college town and missed her family in Michigan, the Midwestern sincerity, the strong Republican values of her father and his political circles. I could feel the tension radiate from her at dinner parties as friends of ours, over couscous and ciabatta, excoriated Cheney and Rumsfeld. She knew that she could not speak her mind in these circles. And she knew that I disagreed with her on almost all political matters. But I had learned to live with our opposing viewpoints and even found it exhilarating to hear her tell me, in private, why she rejected the principles governing my world. The part of me that had grown up in a blue-collar family light-years from the liberal chatter of the ivory tower also relished her unabashed embrace of the family values and enterprising spirit that had helped my own family climb out of centuries of Calabrian squalor and make it into the American middle class.

      The morning of her accident, she had been driving to the State University of New York at New Paltz for a final exam in one of her humanities courses. She had a 3.75 grade point average and was majoring in history, after having been accepted into the college’s honors program the year before. But she was struggling to balance her pregnancy, her work as a Pilates instructor, and her life in a world far from her family in Michigan and actor friends in New York. At the end of the day, there were term papers to write and oral reports to prepare for, but there was no clear sense of where it was all heading, as she had not decided what—if any—career she wanted for her post-acting life. And then there were all those brainiacs to deal with. Once in North Carolina she told one of the fellows at the Humanities Center, a well-known Slavic poet, that she hated the film Pulp Fiction because it was, in her words, “immoral.” She certainly could have chosen a more politic term, but that was just how she was: transparent, emotional, direct, not given to abstractions and open-ended arguments. The poet gave her a vacant, confused look. My wife was breaking a sacred rule of the chattering classes: never make an unsubtle point about a major cultural phenomenon. And never hold art to the same standards as life. I wonder how he would have reacted if he found out her dirtiest secret of all: this lithe, artsy Midwestern girl was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican.

      Unlike Katherine’s, my own career path had been a clearly defined one, even when I briefly stepped off it for some fun as a bartender or backpacker in Europe. Her return to college seemed logical enough to me: she was smart, would do well, and would get a decent job for her efforts. I wanted to have my domestic cake, with Katherine as stay-at-home mom, and eat it too, with her also going out and earning some money in a job that wouldn’t overly tax or distract her. Please, God, just let her earn $50,000 a year, I prayed, sometimes loud enough for Katherine to hear. I never imagined a life of financial hardship for us, not after all those years of study and sacrifice. Faced with the reality of our one-income household and my modest professorial salary, СКАЧАТЬ