W
hich brings us happily and finally to the present. Havana, Cuba, 2006. Not the end but nearing the final chapters of my life with Tolstoy. I didn’t bring him with me this time but, then again, he is somebody you never quite leave behind. Once infected, never cured. And like Proust, Tolstoy changes not just the way you see the world, but occasionally even the way you experience it. Sometimes, in fact, I feel I’ve come to lean on Tolstoy rather too much, have seen him in too many of my own life’s events (Oh! Just like that moment in—), have quoted him too often (as I do with the Beatles when I try to inspire my son’s sporadically deflated musical aspirations). I remember once, when I was working in television, a producer raised her head in indignation from a script I’d written about a Manitoba violinist and snapped, “No more Tolstoy, okay!”So—a last Tolstoy moment before I go. It’s a sunny day in Havana, the wind high and whipping through the power lines outside my hotel window; the ocean is bluer than yesterday but still wild and white-capped. Many years have lapsed since Bangkok. I have remarried, but I have left my wife at home this time, have come for a holiday in my own company, something I have not done for many years.
Yesterday I took a walk along the seawall. A wedding procession roared by; it looked like a scene from The Godfather: Part II, when Michael Corleone goes to Cuba. Later I had a coffee on the terrace of the Hotel Inglaterra in the old city. (What does one do with all this time on one’s hands I can’t quite remember.) Another wedding procession, beribboned cars from the fifties, a white bride and a black groom perched on the back of a convertible. A Frenchman at the next table tells me Havana is a big town for public weddings.
Which makes me think about my own wedding only a few years ago. We had it in the living room of our new house (my starter home at age fifty-six) in Kensington Market. My second ex-wife, H, stood with our son, both of them lanky and lovely. How lucky I am, I thought, looking at them, that they are still here, still part of my life. After a certain age losing people is like losing teeth. They don’t grow back. And there’s M, my first ex-wife—the one who gave me Tolstoy all those years ago—laying out the food and bossing the help around (she wants the food table against the wall, “not in the middle of the goddamn room”). Our daughter, all grown up now, tall and blond and somehow extravagant even at rest, calls the room to order. She is the Master of Ceremonies tonight and begins to read, stopping a sentence in. “I hope I can get through this without bursting into tears,” she says. The room falls silent. She continues:
Prince Andrei loved dancing...and chose Natasha for a partner because Pierre pointed her out to him, and because she was the first pretty girl who caught his eyes. But he had no sooner put his arm around that slender, supple waist, and felt her stirring so close to him, and smiling so close to him, than the intoxication of her beauty flew to his head.
Looking at my daughter and then at Tina, my wife of only a few minutes now (so pretty in her black dress), I feel a wave of almost unendurable good fortune and think, Yes, that’s right, I’ve always known it—love really is the only game in town. And when Tolstoy was at his best, he knew it too.
