Nina and I used to like sitting on summer evenings in the backyard of Flatbush Farm, a good setback from the busy three way intersection of the St. Mark's Triangle, since laid waste by the Barclay's Center, then several years in the future. We were drawn there, both of us charmed by an unevenly-spaced arrangement of soft yellow incandescent bulbs. The owners had strung these above the clapboard fence bounding the property, suspending them from fire escapes, draping them down those strange Brooklyn backyard totems—wooden rods with iron spools at the top. We later learned these were washing line anchors, vestiges from when New Yorkers or Brooklynites, at least, hung their laundry out to dry. The spools had something to do with the reeling in and feeding out of washing lines, as if unconsciously recalling the nautical backgrounds of city settlers past, a fossil memory of a gesture. We never could figure out precisely how they were meant to work.
Mostly we liked how the lighting enchanted a prosaic restaurant patio, otherwise filled with boring people—much wealthier than us—drinking beer, eating expensive "steak cut" french fries and hamburgers at glorified picnic tables, having tedious conversations about money, property values, and where their kids would get into private school. On the other side of the fence, a jungle of empress trees and tall weeds expanded in an untended lot. When the evenings turned warm and humid, fireflies rose up from this wilderness and winked at us. Limned by all these glows, we felt in that moment we were sitting at the edge of an open field. Boundaries dissolved, wonder entered. Simple but powerful illusion. Our life together then was all before us; we toasted our shared future with Campari and soda.
We'd fallen in love with the help of a different set of string lights, not too long before: Christmas lights I'd bought at a local hardware store, the old kind—chains of tiny, yellow, tear-drop shaped light bulbs, real ones, not digital blueish-white the way they are now. I'd hung these not around but over the six casement windows of a small, solarium-like room in the Philadelphia apartment where I was living—a divorced father of a three year old girl—when we met. The windows were the room's glory and salvation. Each of them was formed from six individual panes. What this meant was that— depending on where you sat in the room—you perceived wholly different patterns light reflected from glass to glass. The lights shone in an infinite and revolving dance, a series of small galaxies, expansive and intimate, a home inside a universe and a universe inside a home.
Nina was the first person I met who understood why I'd hung the lights that way; she understood better than I did, and took their magic more seriously. For me the lights always felt like an illusion, a patch on a circumscribed life that seemed to have gone haywire somewhere back along the line. But for her, she told me, when she entered that apartment that first time, they felt like a promise, a whispered message from the better possible world that existed at every second inside our more ordinary one, flickering between being with its own being. Even though that better world could be eclipsed by a harsh word, a thoughtless gesture, a cruel word, a casual act of violence against an innocent object, like a wall or a glass, or indifference, that world was also indestructible, enduring, the best of all possible worlds—in fact—and the one she would ultimately live in without me.
All of this was happening in 2008, a little before these lighting stunts became just another cliché gesture of neo-rustic, faux-organic interior design, like Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess with her maids for the sort of people who would shortly render small towns in the Hudson Valley as unaffordable as most of Brooklyn. Flatbush Farm was a forerunner of what would soon be a ubiquitous trend, and so was my apartment, though never to the glorious extent my inspired accident had achieved. Nina and I later tried recreating the string-light effect in the kitchen of a different apartment that we bought in 2011 and lived in almost for the rest of our marriage. But the quality of the lights declined, a single bad bulb in a string and the rest would start to go, burning hot white like stars going supernova before flickering out. That first batch from the hardware store had lasted two years, uninterrupted, but we found we were replacing the new ones annually, sometimes more, resorting to Amazon deliveries from Chinese suppliers. It was expensive. Then the switch to LEDs happened and we gave them up.
I am remembering all this many years later, one morning in a foreign city, in a bright, daylit bedroom with slanting walls, recalling simultaneously the way, the previous evening, another woman's hand rested on my thigh as we sat, knees touching, on stone steps leading down to a river, watching boats pass at twilight. One of them, an old riverboat steamship refitted as a party boat, had a little tent of string lights above its deck.
As it turned out, those evenings at Flatbush Farm proved instrumental to a great change in my life that brought me to the foreign city. Among the regulars at the bar was a sometimes charming, sometimes brilliant, sometimes belligerent, often drunk, though always elegantly dressed, older British man. Nina and I knew him only as Peter. He had introduced himself to me that way at the Café Regular (I'm told it still exists), a few blocks from the Farm, when I'd made the mistake of reading the London Review of Books while waiting for an espresso. He sized me up as a potential intellectual sparring partner and pounced, engaging me on the disaster of the Treaty of Versailles and the rise of Nazism, which he blamed on the United States of America's imperial ambition.
Despite Peter's evident intellectual dexterity, I came to regret talking to him that morning, since he took our conversation as permission to enroll me among the small circle of acquaintances he cultivated at the Farm. He'd often ask us to stand him for drinks, then, once he'd reached his fourth or fifth, when he started calling various people "cunt" or "slag" (irrespective of gender) and abusing the waitstaff for cutting him off, I felt he'd made me an accomplice to his shame. There were people kind enough to walk him home and settle the rest of his tab, but I never felt committed to him like that. Nina couldn't stand him; so, if we were out together and Peter spotted us, we'd flash him a dismissive wave, keep walking, seeking out whatever table in the garden offered the greatest distance from his antics and took us closest to the lights.
I hadn't thought about Peter in more than a decade, not until I met Dana Vachon and he invited me to a garden party at the brownstone he was sharing with another mutual friend. It was the summer of 2021—the first "normal" summer after Covid and people were trying hard to step back into the rhythm of routine joys. "Peter Foges will be there," Dana said, as if I ought to know who this was, "He's dying of cancer. You'd like talking to him. He's the son of Viennese Jewish refugees and became the US bureau chief of the BBC at one point. He was friends with Lewis Lapham and Hitchens and hung out with the Rolling Stones. He interviewed Albert Speer." I was freelance editing at the time, still trying to make a living in New York after my contract with n+1 was unceremoniously not renewed—which, incidentally, happened shortly after the publisher of n+1's small book series brushed aside my recommendation that we go all out to publish a certain novel that went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and fill the coffers of a more ecumenical magazine-associated small press that had the good sense to buy it for pennies on the dollar. I know about the fallacy of the predetermined outcome, but a lot of things might have turned out differently. In any case, I was hungry for good and interesting clients, and Dana mentioned sending me Peter's memoirs.
He was the same Peter from the garden bar, still elegantly dressed, seated or maybe stationed is a better word, on a dining chair on the brownstone's back deck in the one spot of late afternoon shade. He enjoyed my second-hand cigarette smoke while we talked—about what, precisely, I can't remember—a good, long conversation as the partygoers drifted around us. He had witty things to say about dying and hospitals, and, yes, talking to Albert Speer. I think I met his daughter. Dana told me she had come back to help take care of him in his dying moments. I was at that time estranged from my daughter. My mind turned Dana's news into an entire fantasy that Peter's daughter had also been estranged and had returned to forgive him and care for him. If there is hope for Peter, I thought...any glint of potential reconciliation moving me beyond words. I set aside the obnoxious drunk I remembered in favor of the man I saw before me, trying to die with the best grace possible and also joie de vivre. Things had changed for both of us since evenings in the garden.
"You were kind to him," Dana said to me later, although what might have started from kindness had been kept alight by self-interest: It's an old habit of mine to look for models in dying well as others look for models in how to live well, a habit formed by watching my father dying slow and angry for most of my adolescence. Every dying man I speak to with compassion and interest is the dying father I lacked the compassion and words then to solace; every dying man I speak to is also myself, even as I fear my last moment will occur untended in a hospital stuck before a screen showing CNN or Fox News.
Peter's memoirs "Citizen of Nowhere" were eventually published posthumously by the now extinct publishing arm of a small New York multimedia production company, "The Press and the Public Project," although I did not get the editing commission. He and Dana also did a series of podcasts in November of 2021, while Peter further declined, preserving some of the high moments of his life at the high point of a vanished age of journalism Dana and I had once believed we'd inherit. You can hear his distinguished BBC-trained voice, preserved until the end of days on Apple play.
I had assumed for a while that it was partly because of that conversation with Peter that Dana wangled an invitation for me to join him at the Lisbon-Sintra Film Festival in November of 2022. He'd been invited to discuss the satirical celebrity anti-memoir he had co-written, "Memoirs and Misinformation." He called me up to say that he hadn't wanted to go alone and didn't want to be a mere mouthpiece for his celebrity co-author, so he'd sent an email to the person in charge saying he would only come if he could bring me and we'd do a joint panel on truth and make-believe in the art of memoir writing. For reasons unclear to both of us at the time, this ultimatum was accepted. You used to be able to watch the video of our panel, and maybe you still can, but not under European data privacy laws. Maybe it has been suppressed for our own good: someone asked us later if we were stoned, but we were actually just having a good time. In retrospect, I might have pushed harder on the ego being the biggest but most necessary fiction of all.
Apart from the festival, which had its own string of encounters—the only one which I'll record here was being remarked by Roberto Perpignani, a legendary Italian film editor, talking to my food at the restaurant where we sat across from each other—something in the city, its way of life, called to us. We were able to extend our stay thanks to the festival's resourceful assistant to the producer, the same one, it turned out, who'd read Dana's initial email, googled me, and decided I might be worth bringing on board. My girlfriend at the time came out to meet me; we went south while Dana explored the city and made new friends. Everyone wrote a lot, more than we would have back in New York, with more freedom, greater imagination and ease. Even during the shortening November days, the light was beautiful.
Dana decided to move to Lisbon in February of 2023, urged me to visit and think about moving there myself. The idea stuck with me. My girlfriend and I were coming apart slowly without yet realizing it. She also really did want me to keep working on the novel I'd begun during our time in the Algarve, back in the fall, and had struggled with since our return to New York. New York too kept losing so much of what had made me think of it as home.
I had wanted so badly for the city to be changed for the better by its pandemic years. When it returned to business as usual only angrier, uglier, and more expensive, but just as tribal and cliqueish as ever—especially among the new guardian class of the literary, intellectual, and cultural non-profit world where I used to spend most of time—I got depressed.
Nobody really wants to live with me when I am depressed, even if I can still shine at parties. So, in April of 2023, my girlfriend encouraged me to visit Dana again for a few weeks and revive the spark of the novel. Then, after our final breakup, to give us space as she moved out of the apartment we'd shared for about two and a half years, I returned to Lisbon for the first few weeks of 2024. I then took over another friend's lease, arrived again in June to the space where I woke up one morning thinking about string lights, the boat on the river, the hand on my thigh, and the ways that we are tricked by our own lives.
Even my sense that Peter was somehow instrumental to my good fortune turns out to be partially or wholly wrong. When I mentioned it to Dana, he told me that my conversation with Peter in the brownstone garden had not been on his mind when he sent his impetuous email to the Portuguese producer. It had been my association, not his. What I am forgetting about that party could be an entire book, he said, no less relevant to the story of our emigration. "That party was an entire bouquet," he added in a text, a revolving cast of characters and desires, projections and aspirations, a full array of sparks. It might have been that the dancer Dana was trying to impress at the party recognized me from an n+1 panel at Columbia many years before, when she was still in college, and my girlfriend recognized the dancer because she loved modern dance and followed the dancers, and so all of us—in a warm circle of admiration for grace unevenly distributed but somehow balancing—would gather months later to watch the dancer in her farewell performance in Twyla Tharp's "Upper Room"—she was battling back from a chronic knee injury and wanted to go out at the top of her game, a final blaze of light. And it turns out she was the person who urged Dana to send the email to the festival—and I had had no idea, encased in my own thoughts, concerned only about how others' affected me and not my effect on them.
Fairer to say that it was more probably Dana's care for Peter that made me decide to trust him on the Lisbon adventure. Here was a person who saw the good in people and around whom the disparate and dissipated fragments of my life promised to coalesce, a type of kintsugi for human relationships. I had latched onto Peter in my reconstruction of events because any somewhat abusive and somewhat kind older man, both needy and expansive, could be catalyzed into an image of my father. We look for meaning the way drunks search for lost keys under a streetlamp, because the light is better there—the meaningful is separate from—though sometimes adjacent to—the truth.
My daughter returns my messages now, sometimes. Over the months since I started to write this, and after three years in which Nina and I had no relationship to speak of, we began to talk again and reckon with the specific ways our marriage failed each of us. It is a literary exaggeration to say, as I very much wanted when I began writing this, that my random encounter with Peter Foges proved more meaningful—more important—than the ritual around the lights that she and I—together—had made. This writing is continuous with that ritual, just not in a way anyone anticipated. There are nights when it feels like we have never left that small room in Philadelphia that contained a multiverse; we are still there, just sitting in different corners, looking at different stars. Other times, the lost years flicker like fireflies arising from a vacant lot at dusk.
—For Harvey Swados, of blessed memory
