October 14, 2001

Love in the 21st Century

By Matthew Klam

It was Saturday, four days after the World Trade Center attack. It was a new world. My wife, Lara, and I, for better or worse, were the same old us, doing what we typically do when the world shakes us up — we were ignoring each other. Lara is a psychologist, and it had obviously been a big week for feeling crazy, and she was worn out, she had that excuse. As for me, I had been throwing out everything I had ever written and was uselessly, ceaselessly revising. Through overwork and now tragedy, we had fallen into a rhythm of mutual avoidance. We had closed down.

That was us. I called everybody I knew, and other couples were having totally different reactions. For some, raw emotions had begun poking through their skin like pimples. Others seemed weirdly normal. Four days after the United States was attacked by suicide hijackers, my buddy Armando was sawing through a bike lock while his wife, Dana, took care of their 3-year-old, Luis, whose squeaky voice was the first happy sound I had heard in days. Luis was running around in just his underwear; Dana said that he had declared a jihad on his pants. They had this kid of theirs to keep them distracted, and I envied them. Or maybe they were just a happier couple? Then I called Mark and Cathy. They might divorce soon because his life is a mess; he's a nice person, but he's a musician and a perfectionist. He invented this certain type of music, but it's no good. He is already a very isolated type and is also broke and irate. Even though she's a yoga teacher, Cathy can't soothe him anymore. She recently moved out — temporarily, they both explained, for a job. When I reached Cathy at her new place, she told me that she had never felt so lonely. She was spending the day watching the news on TV and crying.

Pablo and Lisa left the TV off. They both had people close to them who had died when they were younger, and for them their domestic life is a haven; they and their three adopted Korean kids stayed home and played games and spoke very little of the friend still missing from a New York trading firm.

Phil and Connie were just married but live five hours apart and don't see a solution in the near future. They are incredibly tight when they're together; they feast and lie in bed for days but go it alone for weeks in between. Despite everything, they had a great time Friday night in corny Annapolis eating at an expensive seafood restaurant, finding comfort in the elegant and familiar.

I talked to Karen and Ed, who have been talking about adoption while trying without success to get pregnant, sad but charging on. Ed lives to please Karen — he'd already planned a birthday celebration for her two months ago — and he was giving her the party that night; he refused to change a thing because of the attack. Robert and Jonathan, another couple I know, stay sane in times of difficulty by walling themselves off; they got out of D.C. and headed to the beach.

Colby and her boyfriend, Karim, sat around his pool with friends who were Syrian, Egyptian and Lebanese and talked about terrorism. Since they met two years ago, Colby had been "receiving an introduction" to Karim's culture, and sometimes it seemed as if there were too many bridges to cross: strange misunderstandings, parts of his behavior he refused to explain. Now Karim and his friends plainly laid out the ways irrational violence affects civilian life. Colby was grateful to listen. One of Karim's friends, she told me, had met Osama bin Laden in Lebanon.

All week, Lara and I stayed busy and kind of ground out some work while flipping channels, crying a little, cooking a putrid fish recipe and going to bed early. This worked for us. Those other people, all week, had their systems that worked for them. That's all you can say about other couples: not how I'd like to live, but that's fine! A relationship has its own intelligence, its own predilections. It's like a plant, or a fire. It knows what it needs to survive.

Lara and I have a way of going headfirst into our worries when we finally face them, stomping them into dust by talking them to death. When other people get a load of how much we hash out every single smidgen of minutiae — well, it can bring innocent bystanders to their knees. After days of not really talking, we couldn't avoid the need to let it rip.

"Did you see the woman on TV," I abruptly asked, "who refuses to believe her husband is dead?"

"She thinks he's in the elevator," Lara said.

"It's so sad. Would you be hysterical if I died?"

"I'd be hysterical if I wasn't sure you were dead." She paused. "Do you think we'll always be together?"

"Maybe not."

"Do you think we'll live to be old?"

"We might just die tomorrow."

"We might be together for the next 70 years," Lara said.

"We might get nuked," I said. "We might grow old. And if we get Alzheimer's, we won't know each other anymore, and we'll be in diapers and nobody will know who we were. We'll just be old poops."

"We certainly won't remember how much we loved each other. We won't remember anything. I mean if there is a heaven, we'll probably be busy marveling at the face of God. We won't remember anything."

"Right."

"If things go badly we'll be in hell forever."

"I think you go to purgatory first."

"Let's try not to die in a terrible way."

Some couples like to have less chopped conversations; they collude in their silence, in what they avoid discussing. This gives them a sense of security, draws a boundary around their comfort zone. But our willingness to stumble in the dark is, for us, a symbol of our loyalty. This is our rhythm — we invented it.

This week's issue of The New York Times Magazine is dedicated to capturing the unique rhythms of modern couplehood. Some of these couples are, like me and Lara, man and wife; others are not. Some are happy; others are miserable. Some of these relationships you'll admire, maybe to the point of jealousy; others may strike you as strange or unhealthy. The diversity of these portraits underscores how deeply Americans have fractured traditional definitions of couplehood. But what unites them all is the sense that sharing life with a partner requires daily struggle — an endless series of compromises, arguments, silences, kindnesses and cruelties.

That night, Lara and I drove across town to Karen's birthday party, the one that had been planned months in advance. Ed was buying 30 of us dinner at Marrakesh, a Middle Eastern restaurant in downtown Washington. The dinner was in honor of Karen's 35th.

We were all in a state of coping, all a little shaken. Couples generally need to feel that the world is a secure place; a couple is a state of suspended disbelief, an insistence that the world is benign. It's a bit of a fantasy, but a sustaining one. Lara and I have been married for two and a half years, and we'd been through some bad things. But compared with last week, the mosquitoes and paper jams and sore necks we'd been crying over seemed pathetic. By comparison, we'd never withstood anything. The continuity of our world had been secure.

At dinner, we pretended that we had other things to talk about, until the husband of a friend who worked in the Pentagon arrived. "We were in the halls, evacuating slowly, we thought it was a bomb," he said. "But in the stairwell you could smell JP-4. If you were in the Air Force, you know what jet fuel smells like, and we were really scared."

Marrakesh serves a set seven-course dinner, so as the night goes on you're drinking and getting stuffed and going numb, waiting for the belly dancer, but the vodka and red wine and lamb shank couldn't slake the need to air the questions that had come up — those nagging ones particular to couples.

"If you were in a building and you were trapped," Jon said to his wife, Lisa, "would you make the cellphone call to me before it was too late?"

Jon and Lisa have a very calm way of speaking — possibly because they moved to Kensington, Md., which is in the middle of nowhere, or possibly because he has lost most of his eyesight, so that she has to be ready for anything. "Would you want me to call?"

Jon thought about it for a minute. He seemed pretty removed and unemotional. "Yeah, I think I'd want that."

Then Lisa said, "If it was the other way around, I'd want it too."

Nobody was crying or upset here. Marrakesh has these big, soft pillows you sit on instead of chairs. You eat with your hands. It's dark and quiet with lots of candles. We had already put away a ton of food, and Jon and Lisa were reclining, and they seemed satisfied with their joint decision. Another guy I didn't know so well said, "That's crazy!" He turned to his girlfriend. "I love you, honey," he said, "but if the building was falling down, I'd be busy trying to get out."

She nodded without blinking. "There's no way I'd call," she echoed back.

That made sense to me. I hate using the phone — it's always so staged. And I would never want to deal with remembering a call from some inferno, running a single panic-stricken conversation through my head till the day I died. And what if they left a phone message? What do you do with the tape, frame it? I looked at Lara and asked, "Would you want me to call you from a burning building?"

"Absolutely."

"Well, I couldn't. I'd be busy escaping."

"If you knew you were going to die. If you were trapped behind an inferno and had no way out."

"But why would you want me to call you?"

"Because the last thing that you hear from a person who dies is very important. It's an unambivalent statement."

"But it's not realistic. It's not any indication of the real relationship."

"There's a reason why they invented the word 'goodbye'! It adds a finality to things. It gives closure. People need that."

So when the time finally came, she would wait for the call I would never make. Or she would call while dying, and I would refuse to pick up. Jesus.

Finally the belly dancer came through, and maybe it was all that pressure that had built up this week, but when she beckoned, a lot of people at my table started running. Now, I've been to Marrakesh a couple of times. I know that when the belly dancer beckons, it's just a general hand gesture meant to set the mood. You're not supposed to get out of your seat and start competing with her and start shoving her off the dance floor. But that night she had a lot of competition during her show. I'm not a great belly dancer, normally.

The corridor beside the bathrooms is dimly lighted, and I was somehow extremely, almost catatonically drunk, and after going to the bathroom, I stood in the hallway looking at old photos of dignitaries who had eaten there: Karen Black, Wilt Chamberlain, Yasir Arafat. Everybody who passed me in the hall appeared drunk as well — zonked — and then I felt somebody tap me on the shoulder. It was Lara.

She looked at me curiously. I was curious too. Since the lead-up to this night had been so hectic, and because we'd become hysterical in the days before, because I was afraid I'd become sad and not be able to stop being sad, because I was afraid Lara would crash too, because we were afraid of our potential closeness or enablingness or some other psychological pathology — a thousand things, we had been trembling around each other like overbred poodles — this event at the World Trade Center had caused us to stay away from each other. It was too scary to be close, so we'd grown distant. And there had just been this cellphone disagreement. But then we saw each other, and it was totally natural. In the back of the restaurant, we came together, kissing and staring into the other person's face and being overwhelmed, excited, surprised, whatever, because the love part was suddenly so clear.

Everybody has these moments of recognition. Lara and I are not at all unique. When things are right with us, it feels like the strongest bond in the world, that we're the only truly happy couple on earth. So you get these little glimpses of bliss, and you wrap your whole life around them. They don't last, not for long, and there's not much to them. But they make you feel eternal.

The attack on Sept. 11 makes it brutally apparent that such visions of permanent togetherness are delusions. People die; people break up; people end up alone. Yet humans will always push the fantasy of couplehood to the limit. That's why people call each other to express eternal love two seconds before they burn up. Coupling is a primal human urge. People team up because they need other people to watch their backs. We look out for each other. People stay hooked together despite scheduled or unplanned events, separation, death. Whatever happens. Bonding with someone is the best — sometimes, the only — defense we have against life's contingencies and randomness.

For years, these very old neighbors of mine had this crazy love theme going on at their house. There were red hearts on their front door, red hearts around the license plate of their white Honda, a red heart on the tree outside their house with their names written in white. They had grown up together on this street, in that house and another like it down the block. They ran the electric mower together, swung in tandem on the porch swing, held the mailman up every day chatting. At first, I thought the love theme was sweet, then I thought it was silly and then, when he passed away at age 80, I started to worry. They had thrown so much energy into the fantasy — these gentle, domesticated rituals that come to stand for love. Now that he was gone, what did she have to live for?