![]() ![]() We had been married for 12 years, together for 15, and the kind, generous, mild-mannered man I knew became a stranger.īut did it matter? I was living in a place without anger or demands. He changed lawyers, from one trained in collaborative divorce to a litigator. He wanted the wedding china and a photograph taken by my uncle and the royalties from my new book. He wanted the house and more time with our children. Sitting with my laptop at the table on Christopher’s boat, the words of my novel flowed.Īs the final book took shape, my divorce worsened. This was a place away from children, dirty dishes, bills to pay, decisions to make about finances and mortgages and custody schedules. The boat offered me an escape from the overwhelming uncertainties of my life on land. The essential items of life, I realized, were few: two plates, two cups, a frying pan, a coffee pot. But a boat offers condensed space, a sense of completeness and ease. It was moored at the end of a long dock in a busy marina with views of rocks bristling with cormorants, seagulls screeching overhead, and a bevy of ducks that arrived each morning for their share of the toast.Ī house is a place of many different moods, with superfluous corners, places to hide, closed doors. Sometimes I wrote at my kitchen table, sometimes in a coffee shop, and sometimes I wrote on Christopher’s boat. The new book took shape slowly at first, then all in a rush, much like falling in love itself. In the months before I met Christopher, I had started to write the third version of my novel about love. His smile transformed his face-which was forbidding and tough, a fighter’s face-into something altogether different. He was a carpenter who played the violin and cooked a mean fish taco. He had tattoos and large muscles and stories about his eight siblings, his engineer father, his political activist mother, his four grown children, his first wife. On our first date, we drank three Manhattans each and made out inside my minivan until the windows fogged and I said the babysitter needed to go home. The boat man’s online name was EpoxyMe2U. It was about how we cannot save each other. It was about the ways we show love and how those demonstrations can be sublime and beautiful but also fundamentally inadequate. It was about the failure of love to offer salvation. The story was inspired by the life and death of my uncle. Or rather, I had written two novels about love, both of which were rejected by my editor. Perhaps my entire life.Īt the time I was writing a novel about love. I felt more at ease in his presence than I had in years. Yet everything about this man as he stood before me on any given morning or afternoon or night felt familiar and perfect. In that bed, I could lie in any direction, at any angle, like the needle of a compass or the hand of a clock.Įverything about this man’s past-his time in juvenile hall, his lack of a formal education, his vast and varied sexual experience-differed from mine. It was a motorized cruiser with a small kitchen, a table and couch, a top deck, and a large semicircular bed nestled in the bow. When I was 45 and recently separated from my husband, I fell in love with a man who lived on a boat. ![]()
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