An Exercise in Uncertainty

An Exercise in Uncertainty

1.

It was one of those lousy late-fall New York evenings, cold and dark and sort of half raining and half sleeting. I walked out of my office and slipped on a patch of ice. It wasn’t much of a slip. I just twisted my left hip, then caught my balance. I went on my way. This was in November 2002.

The next morning, my hip hurt. I’ve had sports injuries over the years, and it felt like that—a torn ligament, maybe. I figured I’d rest it and it would go away. Then a few weeks went by and then another few weeks, and it still hurt. In January, I went to see my orthopedist. He took X-rays but didn’t see anything wrong.

My hip kept hurting, but I didn’t go back to the doctor. I was thirty-seven years old and healthy. A sore hip didn’t seem important.


2.

Before I slipped on the ice that night, my life was about as good as I could have hoped for, maybe better.

My wife, Didi, and I had gotten married five years earlier. We had met in 1993 in San Francisco, where we were both starting our careers as journalists. For a short time, we worked at the same magazine. I thought Didi was cute, smart, and funny, and she later said she thought the same about me, but we were both seeing other people. After a few months, Didi moved on to a new job.

About a year and a half later, Didi and I ran into each other at a mutual friend’s party. My previous relationship had ended, and Didi’s, she let on, was teetering. We had a good time talking, and as we were saying good night, I mentioned that it might be nice to get together again sometime. The next day, we had lunch. That night, we went to dinner and saw a movie. Later that week, Didi broke up with her boyfriend, and she and I began dating.

Didi is tall and thin, with brown hair and a warm, welcoming smile. She is strong, determined, independent, and preternaturally energetic. She is passionate and unguarded; what you see is what you get. She can be serious and goofy, sometimes in the same sentence. She has more friends than anyone else I know. Although Didi was born and raised in the United States, her mother and father are from Buenos Aires and Berlin, respectively. She speaks fluent Spanish and loves to travel. She also loves music, everything from opera and musical theater to eighties alternative rock. I defy you to name a Smiths or Simple Minds song she does not know. She has a strong interest in fashion and beauty, with a charming high-low personal style. No one pairs an H&M sundress with a Saint Laurent bag more attractively. She and I share a sarcastic sense of humor. We like many of the same books and movies. We both swear a lot.

Not long after we started dating, Didi and I fell into a ritual of having coffee and bananas together every morning for breakfast. At a ceramics class she took, she made me a mug and saucer with a message painted on it: a perfect union. coffee and bananas . . . and you and me. I shared the sentiment.

One of the first things Didi and I bonded over when we started dating was that we were tired of San Francisco. We missed our families back east, we missed the change of seasons, and San Francisco offered limited opportunities for journalists.

We decided to move to New York.

In our early days living in the city, Didi and I led the kind of life many young people starting out in New York hope to lead. We had good jobs. We made new friends. We went to concerts, museums, and plays. We ordered cheap take-out food and haunted late-night dive bars. We had our favorite pizza place, bagel shop, and neighborhood pub. If we complained about our bosses, the smell of the subway platforms in the summer, and how high our rent was, it was all part of the adventure. Our apartment, a studio on East Twelfth Street in Greenwich Village, wasn’t really big enough for the two of us, but we made it work. For a time, we stored one of my suitcases in the oven.

In May 1997, I proposed to Didi on top of the Empire State Building. It was supposed to be a surprise, only I didn’t count on the security checkpoint on the way to the observation deck. Didi was kind enough to pretend she didn’t see me take a little blue box with a silk ribbon tied around it out of my jacket pocket and stash it in my backpack before I sent the bag through the scanner and passed through the metal detector. A few minutes later, looking north toward Central Park, I asked Didi to marry me, and she said yes. A pair of German tourists were the first people to know we were engaged.

That fall, Didi and I got married in Amherst, Massachusetts, a picturesque New England college town. I had gotten my undergraduate degree there, and Didi, in what we took as a sign, had grown up there. I was thirty-two, Didi was twenty-six.

A month or so before our wedding, the rabbi asked us each what we loved most about the other; then during the ceremony she told the congregation what we had said. Didi said she loved that I always considered other people’s perspectives, that I was thoughtful. I said I loved that Didi was “real.” I meant that she isn’t afraid to see things as they are, that she doesn’t shy away from problems.


3.

That was my personal life. I was also doing well professionally. In San Francisco, I had started out as a fact-checker at a parenting magazine and worked my way up to senior editor level. After I moved to New York, I worked at Men’s Journal magazine, editing long-form feature stories about everything from ill-fated mountaineering expeditions to environmental disasters and eventually serving as deputy editor. I had a close-knit group of colleagues there. We worked hard and stayed out late. We were like college friends but with paychecks.

In July 2000, I took a job as the cofounder and editor in chief of a startup magazine for young lawyers and law students. Launching a publication from scratch is one of the most challenging and exciting things you can do in the magazine business. I was fortunate enough to land several well-known contributors, and the publication went on to be nominated for a National Magazine Award, the industry’s highest honor, in its first year of eligibility.

On the night the other editors and I finished the inaugural issue and shipped it to the printer, I walked home through Washington Square Park. It was almost midnight, but the park was full of people. A busker played “All Along the Watchtower.” Couples sat around the park’s iconic fountain holding hands. The lights of the Empire State Building, visible uptown, worked their magic. I had grown up in a small former mill town in upstate New York. For years, I had dreamed of coming to New York City, but the truth was that I wasn’t sure I could succeed there. As I walked through the park that night, I felt like I maybe kind of sort of had. I let out an embarrassing little yelp of joy.

As East Coasters, urbanites, and Jews, Didi and I felt at home in New York. Because both sets of our parents had lived in the city as young couples, it felt like we had come full circle. Even after 9/11—in fact, especially because of it—we felt a deep connection to New York. In July 2002, with help from my parents with the down payment, we bought an apartment not far from the one we had been renting. We wanted to make the city our permanent home.

About a month after we moved in, I was doing the dishes one night when I heard a scream from the bathroom. It was Didi. Because this was New York, I assumed she had seen a cockroach. Didi came running into the kitchen. She was holding a telltale plastic stick.