Biography of X

My 30 highlights

• October 1989—the first of her disappearances, the time she vanished while we were making spaghetti—was the first time we’d been apart for more than a few hours. When she’d first told me how I would need to tolerate these sudden departures, she’d advised I find a project or work to absorb or deflect my worry, and remembering this suggestion, I called my former editor at the paper. I told him I’d cover whatever story no one else wanted, which was how I ended up in suburban New Jersey, reporting on an odd set of murders.

• Connie’s younger brother, Phil, told me she had become preoccupied with the Southern Territory at this time, and the more she read about the famines and prisons and oppression down there, the more pointless life seemed, and the more pointless life seemed, the more she wanted to know about the world’s cruelties.

• I felt the deranged clarity and single-mindedness that jet lag will sometimes bring about, a feeling I’d come to know quite well while traveling with X, as she refused to believe that jet lag was a real thing

• gravitated toward Midori, as she was modest and funny and never made me feel like a fool the way Salif, perhaps unintentionally, sometimes did

• We never reached a conclusion to this disagreement; we simply concluded and re-concluded that there was no use bickering over abstractions, though abstractions continued to be the sole subject of our bickering.

• The New York Post ran a brief summary under the headline “Serial Scammer Says She Did It for Art!”† Art in America ran a dry, somewhat confused piece,

• Tom called, despite a thirty-year silence between us. He’d learned of my wife’s death in the papers and wanted to tell me that he had been thinking about me lately, about our strained and ugly childhood as siblings. His own wife, he said (it was news to me that he’d married), had been given another few months to live, maybe less.

• Eventually, Oleg was mesmerized by the sound of his own voice. He went on without pause for half an hour,

• This is one of the darker, less contested realities of authoritarian governments—that the human animal is a meek thing, easily manipulated. No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.

• Despite her father’s disapproval, Marion and X married only two months after first meeting. Marion was twenty-three but looked like a child. X claimed to be twenty-nine, occasionally admitted to being thirty-three, but in fact she was thirty-eight.

• He told me he was a sculptor and taught art classes in a private school, and later I wondered if I found it easy to speak to him because he was so accustomed to speaking to children, in safe and neutered tones.

• Dave had a somewhat inaccurate reputation as a man with money to spare instead of what he really was—a middle-class courthouse clerk with something of a gambling problem.

• Waits was immediately charmed by Connie, describing her to a friend as “a sort of minotaur … part librarian, part truck driver. She sings like a grandmother telling a dirty joke.”

• Though it is true that not even I always knew where the line was between the facts of her life and the stories she constructed around herself, my wife was no liar. Anyone who was ever fortunate enough to be a part of X’s life had to accept this hazard—she lived in a play without intermission in which she’d cast herself in every role

• Henry only read books that had been unequivocally praised, books wearing gold stickers; since he didn’t read often, he only wanted to read “the best.” After all, he explained, I’m an artist. I spend my whole day making art. How am I supposed to come home and unwind with someone else’s art? Most evenings he watched sports on television.

• and I had gone to see a late showing of The 39 Steps, then for a midnight dinner somewhere in the Village, a low-lit bistro that felt like a diner, a place where real life happened—a couple forever making out in one corner and someone sobbing in another

• On the sidewalk outside the restaurant, Marion hugged me goodbye. I knew it was a sincere gesture, something people at ease in their lives often do to each other, but it startled me. Just before we parted, Marion asked, Do you still feel like she’s controlling your life?

• We met at a Japanese restaurant with high-backed wooden booths, a location I’d chosen purposefully. It was small and busy, but the staff never seemed hurried. Each table was cocooned with wooden panels and thick curtains, lending a lulling sense of privacy. I’d once had lunch there with a magazine editor I wanted to work with, but by the time the check arrived I had divulged so many details about my personal life—stories I rarely told anyone—that I was too embarrassed to ever face him again. In retrospect, I blamed the space itself.

• We’d met the night before, at the birthday party of a colleague. I had not planned to go, but I’d just finished an article about a small massacre in a Manhattan apartment and felt too unsettled to be alone.

• In the diaries I later obtained, Caroline’s hesitance about her husband is more evident than it was to him. “I marry Paul with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness,” she wrote on the morning of her wedding.

• I didn’t like Richard Serra. I didn’t like him at all. He always—without hesitation or caveat—introduced me as “Henry Surner’s wife” and found endless occasions to pat my lower back. When I told Henry about this he seemed flattered, thrilled even, that his hero was apparently “so fond” of me, and he assured me Richard was merely being friendly.

• After the divorce, it seems X had to be half-dead to stay alive. Everything she did was lackluster, empty—the paintings, the drawings, the sculptures, the ideas for later work. A sculpture of a locket, nothing inside. A silent play, no music, no characters; audience is blindfolded, told it is there. Room made of mirrors—no one allowed to see it.* In photographs, her glare is severe. In diaries, she swims in pessimism and mundanity.

• Given the specific variety of fame Oleg had at this time, Brenda’s was one of the few places he could go without being hassled by strangers, reporters, or women who overlooked his exuberant homosexuality and tried to set up this wealthy “bachelor” with their daughters or nieces. Oleg took a late lunch at Brenda’s a few times a week: caviar and blinis, oysters Rockefeller, and a few grapefruit sodas.

• Romance is a closed circuit. Nothing makes a person less comprehensible to others than being in love.

• When Tom was fourteen and I was seven we lived in a clapboard house on a dead-end with our mother and assorted others,

• She led me by the hand as we walked through her house, through a dining room and hallways and a kitchen where a woman in a starched uniform was ironing bedsheets. The woman smiled and called out to Gioia, and Gioia greeted her in Italian with great affection, then announced—We’re going out dancing! Beautiful dancing girls, the woman replied, throwing her hands up as if dancing girls were her only god.

• He was best known for a series of bronze statuettes of young boys, an homage to Degas’s dancers, but according to his artist statement their subject was “toxic masculinity,” a topic that had become popular after men had, millennia too late, become aware of its existence.

• “I’ve been rereading the poetry of W. H. Auden,” she announced, then recited a few lines.*

• One evening, still alive at Penn Station to catch an upstate train, I asked a serious-looking man if he had the time. He had the time, he said, but not the place, as he’d been exiled from Istanbul years earlier but never had the nerve to change his watch, and looking into this stranger’s face I saw my own eyes staring back at me, as I, too, could not un-locate myself from the site of my banishment. We parted immediately, but I have never forgotten him.

• By the time I contacted Marion for an interview in 2003, I’d been a widow for long enough that I no longer feared meeting this first wife, though I cannot say I was looking forward to it. I will admit I was intimidated by Marion’s effortless grace—who wouldn’t be? She is a good deal younger than I am, not so much in years but in the way she carries them, and not only in the way she carries them physically but also in her bright and undiminished gaze, that of someone who seems to know no disappointment.