The Moment Read Online Free PDF Page B

But this rectangular room is the one place in which I can exercise dominion over the shape of things. When I write, the world proceeds as I would like it to proceed. I can add and subtract what I want to the narrative. I can create any denouement I desire. There is no legal process to address. There is no sense of personal inadequacy and crippling sadness looming over everything. And there is no shipping box downstairs, the contents of which remain unopened.
When I write, I am in control.
Except that’s a lie. As I punch out the first sentence of the evening—and tip back the last of the whiskey—I keep trying to excise my anxiety about the box downstairs. And I keep failing.
Why do we hide things from others? Could it be because, at heart, we all have one central fear: the horror of finally being found out?
I was suddenly out of my desk chair and heading up into my attic. Once there I unlocked one of the filing cabinets in which I keep my old manuscripts. The cabinets had been shipped here from my old house in Cambridge—and had remained untouched since my arrival in Maine. But I still knew immediately where the manuscript I wanted was stored. Pulling it out I had to blow off a decade’s worth of dust from the thick folder into which it had been stuffed before I interred it here. Ten years had passed since I’d typed the final word. As soon as I had finished writing it all, I couldn’t bring myself to read it. So in it went, interred in the filing cabinet. Until now.
I came downstairs into my study. After dropping the manuscript on my desk I poured myself the second Scotch of the evening. As soon as the whiskey was in the glass, I was back in my chair, inching the manuscript toward me . . .
When is a story not a story?
When you’ve lived it.
But even then, it’s just your version of things.
That’s right. My narrative. My rendering. And the reason, all these years later, I find myself where I am now.
I pulled the manuscript out of its folder, staring down at the title page which, all those years ago, I had left blank.
So turn the page and get started .
I downed the whiskey. I took a deep steadying breath. I turned the page.

PART TWO

ONE
B ERLIN. THE YEAR was 1984. I had just turned twenty-six. And, like the majority of people residing in that still-juvenile district of adulthood, I actually thought I understood so much about life and its attendant complexities.
Whereas now, more than fifteen years on from all that transpired, I see how unschooled and callow I was when it came to just about everything . . . most especially, the mysteries of the heart.
Back then I always resisted falling in love. Back then I always seemed to sidestep all emotional entanglements, all big-deal declarations from the heart. We all reenact our childhoods repeatedly during adult life—and every romance struck me as a potential trap, something that would ensnare me in the sort of marriage that drove my mother to death by cigarettes and left my father feeling as if his existence had been limited, circumscribed. “Never have kids,” he once told me. “They just cage you into something you never really wanted.” Granted, he’d had about three martinis in him when he said all this. But the very fact that he could openly tell his only son that he felt trapped in his life . . . bizarrely, it made me feel closer to the guy. He had confided in me, and that was huge. Because during the majority of my childhood he was a man who spent much of his life working out ways not to be at home. When he was there, he was so often enveloped in a cloud of silent rage and cigarette smoke that he always struck me—even when I was very young—as someone who was endlessly struggling with himself. He tried to play the typical dad but couldn’t pull it off, any more than I could play the average American boy. When it came to sports or the Boy Scouts or winning prizes for civics or joining the Marines—all of the all-American stuff that my dad embraced as a