While her husband was reporting in Iraq, Ana MenA[c]ndez received a letter that sent her marriage into turmoil.
I no longer remember the exact date I received the letter. I only remember the month and the yearJune 2004and that my sister and her boyfriend had arrived that day to visit me in Istanbul. My parents were already in town, and that night we all went to dinner at Pano Wine Bar, a taverna that had recently reopened after being damaged the previous November in one of the bombings.
We returned to my apartment late, but wanting to take in the stunning views of the Bosporus, we gathered on my terrace for a nightcap. On his way in, my sister's boyfriend had handed me a FedEx package that had been propped against the door. As the others sat around the teak table drinking wine, I opened the package and absentmindedly started sorting through the mail, which had been forwarded from New York. Most of it was junk, but one piece caught my attention. It was a thin airmail envelope, and it was addressed to Mrs. Filkins, my husband's name, which I had never taken. A hidden part of me already knew what it contained. But I opened it anyway, and as the others laughed and teased one another, I read all about how my husband had a girlfriend in Iraq and how he had been unfaithful throughout our marriage. The writers, who identified themselves as "Max and Mira," were blunt: "Why can't the asshole keep his pants zipped?"
Nestled among the details of my husband's supposed infidelities were a few barbed comments directed at me and my career as a novelist. "So, first, congratulations on the book. Are you happy with the reviews? I only saw a few and thought they did not do justice to you," the letter offered by way of greeting. "I know you don't care about those things so I won't either." "Mira" then alluded to my first book, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd : "By the way, Max heard that Queens College has a course on ethnic writers and that the prof is considering including German Shepherd, which is great, don't you think?"
I folded the letter, put it away, and joined the happy conversation. That night I lay awake on a foldout couch in my office. I don't think I cried. I was too stunned for that. There was a rare electrical storm, and I just watched it sweep across the city until it was morning.
My husband was in Iraq, covering the war for
The New York Times. I was embarrassed that he hadn't come home for my family's visit. But by then my family had become as used to his absence as I had become to excusing it. He called the next morning, but I didn't mention the letter. I felt the need to tell him in person. I didn't tell my parents either. I come from a family where men who express their anger are respected; women who do the same are caricatured as hysterics. My coolness was my pride. So I buried all the feelings the letter stirred in me. The anger and sorrow. But also the guilt. Every marriage grows into the sum of its betrayals, and ours had survived its lot. Mixed with my fury at Dex for putting me in a position to even get such a letter was a sliver of uncomfortable self-knowledge, a reminder of my own selfishness and cruelty.
Dex and I met in 1991. I was still in college and had just started working as a clerk in an outlying bureau of The Miami Herald. He was a dashing courthouse reporter almost a decade older than I. It wasn't love at first sight. I thought him aloof and a little arrogant. But then one day we rode with two others to lunch, and as we sat in the backseat, I fell suddenly, and hard. It was like someone turning on all the lights at once.
I could not stop thinking about him. But he had a girlfriend, and I was engaged to my high school sweetheart. The wedding was less than a year away. And I was miserable. I saw Dex everywhere, felt his presence in the newsroom even when I couldn't see him, lived for the sound of his voice. In those years, faxes came in on one long roll of thermal paper, and I took to lovingly cutting and stapling those addressed to him before putting them in his box. It was a platonic love, unrequited as far as I knew, but the force of itmore than I had ever felt with anyonetormented me. A few months later, I broke off my engagement.
Almost the moment I stopped wearing my ring, word flew through that gossipy newsroom. A few days later, Dex called. Was I free for dinner?
From the beginning, we shared a love of writing. On our first date, he recited the last lines of The Great Gatsby. For Christmas, I gave him a collection of the great speeches of the twentieth century. He gave me a telescope: the moon and the stars.
He left for Baghdad, where he would stay for months at a time. In interviews, he took to calling it "home"
He was the most exciting man I had ever known: Oxford graduate, world traveler, erudite, and impossibly sexy. But the first fault lines were emerging: He could vanish for days into a story. Most nights, he came home past 9:00, exhausted and grumpy. I was strident and critical. And untrustworthy. Less than two years after we met, I had a brief affair with a colleague. I still don't know why I did itwhether out of fear for the intensity of my feelings for Dex or despair that his feelings might never match my own. Whatever the motivation, the affair left me sick with guilt. I confessed. Dex forgave me, and we went on a bike trip through the Loire River Valley. But I had introduced a cloud into our idyll. His quiet sadness on that trip still haunts me. I was ashamed of how much pain I had caused him, and how coldly I had inflicted it.
We married in 1995, and straightaway he moved us to California to take a job with the Los Angeles Times. I was upset that he didn't wait for me to line something up. But I went along, still feeling guilty, as if I had lost the right to assert myself into our story. The truth is, I had been raised in a sheltered, conservative household. Life with Dex was turning out to be a fearless, glorious adventure. And I was not going to miss any of it.
In the course of our marriage, we lived in India, trekked in Bhutan, and traveled through war zones in Kashmir, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan. Early on, I quit journalism and went to grad school: A fiction career would better accommodate Dex's increasingly peripatetic life. On school breaks, I followed him to the wars. I thought I was happy. But in Afghanistan, at a public execution in 1998, all the differences we had buried came starkly to the surface. He wanted to get closer to the spectacle; I wanted to go home. That night, I cried in bed. Over the years, I had watched Dex spin ever farther from me, seen his gaze dim when I complained of my isolation. I could no longer ignore the distance.
I wanted outa normal life, a partner I could count on. But at the same time, I couldn't let go. And then, just when we had returned to the States and the promise of stability, war followed us home. Military jets woke us on the morning of September 11, 2001. We were living in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the river from the World Trade Center. We made love. And then Dex disappeared again into the story. First to lower Manhattan, then to Afghanistan. He returned every few weeks, but each time the space between us was greater, the circle of his interests ever narrowing into war and work.
Meanwhile, I was changing also, moving deeper into another life dictated by the writing that I was beginning to take more seriously. Yet, when The New York Times moved him to Istanbul a year later, I went along. Loyalty, yes. Also self-interest. I adored the city and knew it would be exciting to live there. And, of course, I kept hoping we could return to what we used to be. Then came our last war. For the first time, we argued bitterly about politics: He thought the Iraq invasion was a good idea. I thought it would be a disaster. He left for Baghdad, where he would stay for months at a time. In interviews, he took to calling it "home."
By then, our marriage was little more than a legal technicality. We didn't really live together, had few mutual friends, and shared little of each other's daily struggles. As the war dragged on, I remained alone in Istanbul in a magnificent apartment that didn't belong to me. I sat by the open windows for long hours, the silence so complete that I could hear the beating wings of the seagulls that flew past.
For years, I had been one of the boys, tagging along with Dex from war to war. But Iraq was different. Still, I struggled to put up a good face, denying problems to everyone else and especially to myself. Part of me just didn't want to face painful insights. Maybe that's why instead of confronting the issue of the letter's veracity, I became obsessed with who could have sent it.
The letter wasn't originalwomen had been getting such things for generations. Still, it was chilling, its malice nearly perfect. Except that the writer had allowed herself one vulnerability. Unable to resist the pleasure of knowing her punch had connected, "Mira" had included an E-mail address where I was instructed to write if I wanted more information. After mulling it over, I finally wrote something to the effect of: "Who are you and why are you doing this?" I never heard back.
As a wife, I was devastated by the letter. But as a writer, I was fascinated by the character behind it. From the beginning I suspected a single person, most likely a woman, had written it. What kind of person would go to these lengths? And why put a perfectly good scheme in peril by including an E-mail address that opened a small window of error?
On the day that Dex was to arrive, I cooked an elaborate dinner. Ms. Cool to the end, as if heartbreak were no match for individual cheesecake tarts. He came up the stairs, handsome and smiling. "My beautiful wife," he said, his first words of greeting. We ate out on the terrace, and afterward I got the letter and showed it to him. He was furious. He denied that he was having an affair. The anonymous writer, he said, was not motivated by the truth but by envy and a desire for revenge. Someone, he said, was out to get him. He immediately got on the computer and wrote back a blistering message that read something like: "I'm coming after you and God help you when I find you."
From the start, he suspected a female colleague at the Times with whom he had clashed in Baghdad. But he had no proof. He and I would sort out our problems later. But trying to unmask the writer would be our last act as a team. It was a predictable response for a pair of journalists who had labored for years to tamp down emotion and opinion in favor of cool fact.
We came up with a plan. There was an on-line service that, for a fee, could electronically tag a sent message. All the recipient had to do was open it, and we would get back a detailed report from the server he or she had used. I wrote to the address three times. Several weeks went by. Then one day, I checked my inbox to find that the E-mail had been traced to a Times server in Greece.
Only a few people had access to the server, among them a clutch of sports reporters there to cover the Olympics, a few writers, and Dex's suspect. The Times conducted its own investigationthey never publicly revealed the detailsand shortly afterward fired her. (She protested her innocence, challenged her dismissal in settlement talks with the Times, and reportedly passed two polygraph tests.) Did she write the letter? I'll never know, just as I'll never know if its claims were true. The writer and the credibility of her story will always remain a mystery. But they brought me, in their own way, to a more elusive truth.
There was a brief media uproar over the letter and the firing. Dex and I were firmly on the other side of the story now, and it was unnerving. On April 8, 2005, our troubles were the top item on a New York Daily News gossip column, just above the latest Pitt-Jolie revelation. A few days later, the Herald' s gossip columnist followed suit. When I complained, the Herald' s executive editor told me we were "public figures," and presumably fair game. Then, most tragically of all, the woman named in the letter as Dex's girlfriend was killed in an attack in Baghdad. Although he continued to deny any relationshipand still doeswhen he called me in New York to tell me, among my first reactions was pity for whatever he must be feeling. I still loved him enough to feel for him, even if she was, as he insisted, just a friend.
I had been working on a novel, set in Istanbul, about a burned-out war correspondent with a past: In Afghanistan he had been responsible for a boy's death. After I got the letter, I found I could no longer write. The real story kept crowding out the fictional one. Months went by. Then one night, I just started to write the story of the letter. I meant it as exorcism more than anythingI needed to get it out of my head so I could get back to work. But the more I wrote, the more I learned about miscommunication, complicity, and betrayal. I'd lived as if the only choice that mattered was between excitement and safety. If Dex was addicted to the thrill of war, I had been addicted to the thrill of Dex. His flawed ambitions were the mirror image of my own.
As the real details of my story gave way to the fictional demands of the novel, I understood that our marriage had been an attempt to write a heroic, outsize narrative for ourselves. As if the stuff of life were contained only in grand epics. But war without is nourished by the war within, and every great conflict begins as a collection of small, individual acts of cruelty.
My novel does not have a happy ending, and neither did our story. I filed for divorce in 2005, shortly before our tenth wedding anniversary. The blame, like our memories together, is something we will always share. For the next few years, though, we tried to return to what we had. We talked on the phone, traded E-mails. We continued to be each other's first reader and most trusted editor. I sent him funny anecdotes from the paper. He quoted Milan Kundera. Every few months we would talk about starting over. But something would always get in the way.
Last year, when I won a Fulbright to Egypt, I invited Dex to the orientation in Washington, D.C., to talk about what a new future for us might look like. We made plans. I wondered what it would be like to live in Cairo with him. I was, despite all our complicated history, optimistic. I still loved him. But at the last minute, Dex didn't show. Instead, he flew to Baghdad.
Part of me was incredulousafter all his pleading to be together, he vanishes at the last minute? But part of me knew it had always been like this and always would be: His need to be at the heart of the action would always take precedence. He assumed I'd always wait because I always had. But this time I was bowing out of the dance.
At the beginning of the wars, when Dex was away for weeks, The New York Times used to send me flowers with a note thanking me for my forbearance. By the end, I was fed up with the gesture, which reeked of cynicism. I sent a note to the foreign editor telling her as much.
I came across the note the other day. In it, I accuse the paper's editors of failing to grasp how Dex was headed on a terrifying path of self-destruction. I closed with a plea that the paper save him by refusing to send him back into the war zone.
I received a polite note in return. It was, the editor gently reminded me, my husband's decision to go in or not. She was right. It took me a few more years to understand. But I realize now that it wasn't Dex who needed saving.
