Samantha and I are on a Boeing 747, thirty seconds out of San Francisco International and headed for Honolulu. The plane is banking to the west, offering us and half the other passengers a perfect view of the shrinking peninsula below.
I can’t look. I already made that mistake several months ago on a flight to Los Angeles. As I discovered the hard way that day, Oyster Point Marina sits just below the SFO flight path, and if you happen to be peering out a port-side window at takeoff, you can’t help but see the goddamn cabin cruiser and its unmistakable blue tarp just as clear as can be.
I won’t fall into that trap today.
I close my eyes and count to ten, then allow myself a quick peek. All the boats on the bay below are now just little toy figures. A few seconds later they are indistinguishable dots. If only I could do the same thing with the hellish vessels that drop anchor in my head—somehow make them disappear with nothing more than some time and distance.
Samantha’s nose is buried in a book, so I close my eyes again and try to think about beaches and palm trees. Instead I see the very aerial image of the marina I was trying to avoid. It is still archived from my LA trip and redevelops like a Polaroid snapshot. Never mind all my efforts today; within minutes, I am again right back to thinking about that day, nearly a full year ago now, when my whole world began spiraling out of control. Right back to reviewing all of Doubt’s what-if? questions about the fate of the surely doomed cabin cruiser. The scenarios make me shiver still, and with the conditioned response of Pavlov’s dog, I replay my tape of the boat mishap for the billionth time, tears welling up in my eyes as I grasp for the illusory pause button. I know the best way, the only way, to stop one tape is to put on another. So I cue up the tape of my pathetic conversation with the guy from the cabin cruiser. Then I switch to the one of Nicole and me on the dock in the rain. Next up, a looped review of the time I inflated a small life raft and rowed it right by the cabin cruiser for a closer look at its bow. There are so many tapes in my growing collection.
Samantha leans over and tugs on my sleeve. “We’re gonna have such a great time,” she whispers with the excitement of a kid at Christmas. Sam is six months pregnant now and years overdue for the Hawaii vacation I’ve always promised her. She’s all but giddy, flipping through the pages of an island guide, scribbling her planning notes in the margins.
You know that old pearl of parental wisdom, Life isn’t fair? Like many parents, Samantha and I often find ourselves reminding our daughters of this. It’s the perfect response, really, when one of them demands an explanation for why she has to, or isn’t allowed to, do something or another.
Sometimes, though, when I watch Sam issue the admonishment with feigned seriousness—hands on hips, eyes narrowed to a squint—I can’t help but wonder if the words sting with truth for her. Life hasn’t been fair for my wife, at least not when it comes to getting what she bargained for with me.
For as long as I’ve known her, Samantha has displayed a rare mastery of the art of fun. No one else I’ve ever met can come close to squeezing as much sheer enjoyment from life. The quintessential kid at heart, she can spend hours playing board games, touring amusement parks, sledding in the snow, or roller skating. Dollar Scoop Tuesdays at Baskin-Robbins, those elusive packages of fresh gummy bears, hard-fought victories in her tanning showdowns with her mother: these are the things that make Sam crinkle her nose in delight. And then there’s her favorite motto, the one shouting from the back of her most tattered T-shirt: “Life’s uncertain. Eat dessert first.”
Fans of TV’s Gilmore Girls would recognize a whole lot of Lorelai in Samantha, especially the genuine playfulness and self-assuredness they share. I often think of that connection when remembering a fancy birthday dinner I’d taken Sam out for one year. “We can go anywhere you want when we’re done,” I’d told her over dessert. “Dancing. A movie. Jazz club. You name it.”
It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds before Sam’s eyes lit up. “You know that super-slide at the fairgrounds?”
We were there ten minutes later.
Our courting days back in the mid-1980s played out well within my “normal years,” and the guy Sam fell in love with was not only normal, but almost every bit as carefree and fun-loving as she was. After countless picnics and camping trips and moonlit strolls on the beach, who could blame Sam for thinking she’d found the perfect match for the rest of her fun-filled life?
Who could blame her for struggling to understand, years later on a plane to Hawaii, that fun was going to be a solo pursuit for the long stretch ahead?
And who could blame her if she began to find this marriage unfair?
Not me.
“So what do you think?”
Samantha is staring at me, waiting for a response, I’m guessing, to some question I’ve missed. This seems to happen a lot these days.
“What’s that?” I say.
“Are you ignoring me again?”
“No, I was just—”
“Yeah, I know what you were doing,” Sam says, tapping her finger on my head. “What I said was, ‘This is your birthday trip—the big three-oh—remember? And you, my dear, have a lot to celebrate. Right?’”
She is right. So much has happened in the few short months since my wasted time and money with Dr. X. The good doctor may have failed to fix me, but all his talk about success must have, in some strange cosmic way, prompted that much more of it to come my direction. Just weeks after our final session, and years after first trying to get even a toe in the door at KCBS Radio, I got a call from the station’s program director, Ed Cavagnaro, asking if I was still interested in working for him. A few weeks later I found myself broadcasting from the palatial Embarcadero Center studios of the CBS Network’s West Coast flagship. And then within days, Cavagnaro called again to offer me double the work. Now I’m a regular weekend anchor and relief reporter at San Francisco’s legendary all-news station, and KSFO seems like small potatoes.
Samantha’s right. I do have a lot to celebrate. But then again, maybe old Dr. X was right as well—maybe I am afraid of my own success. All I know sitting here on this plane headed for Hawaii is that I’d trade my KCBS break and anything else in a heartbeat, just to ascertain once and for all what happened with the boats.
Settling into paradise proves to be no easy task. It’s been years since Samantha and I have gotten away together, just the two of us. No parenting duties. No phone calls. No household chores. There is so much extra space to fill, so much extra time to play all my tapes.
Sam decides I need to keep busy, so we catch a bus to Hanama Bay and rent snorkeling equipment. The water is perfect. The fish are beautiful. But my snorkel is old and battered, and ten minutes into our grand adventure, I realize that the mouthpiece is loose. Did I do that? Break it somehow? Soon my head is filled with visions of the next renter of this equipment choking on a mouthful of water. What if that happens? Doubt reminds me that you’ll never know for sure and that you’ll spend the rest of your life worrying. There’s a virtual snorkeling tape in the making here, and I’m certain I’ll be stuck watching it forever.
I tell Sam it’s time to head back to the shore.
The next morning, we make plans to tour the other side of the island. A rental car offers the only efficient way to do this in one day. But I don’t want to drive, and I find myself hemming and hawing. Samantha understands, even without my explaining. She knows I’ve lost all confidence in myself behind the wheel and she knows I’m scared to death that I might somehow screw up the car. What if somebody else gets killed because I unknowingly broke something?
Sam disappears into the rental car office.
“We’re all set,” she tells me a few minutes later. “But it turns out I’m the only one authorized to drive. That okay with you?” My wife is getting good at covering for me.
I tell her I guess so, dropping my head a bit in embarrassment. Why is it so humiliating for a guy to let his wife do the driving?
The day goes fine until we return our Ford Tempo in the late afternoon. While lifting our bags out of the trunk, I notice the left-rear wheel is missing its hubcap.
“Sam,” I say, pointing toward the wheel.
“Yeah?”
“It’s missing.”
“What’s missing?” My wife is confused.
“The hubcap! Was it there when we started out this morning?”
“I assume not,” she says, without a hint of a care.
“Well, what if it fell off on our watch?”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t you think we’d have heard something?”
“I dunno. What if it just came off?”
Sam narrows her eyes. “Okay,” she says, “let’s assume it came off. Not much we can do about it now.”
My skin is growing cold, despite the tropical heat. I want to retrace our route, make sure that the hubcap hasn’t become some hazard, lying like an unexploded land mine some place in the road. Perhaps a guy on a motorcycle will hit it, sending him flying across the pavement and into a life as a paraplegic. There are so many possible horror scenarios. But as much as I want to go back for a look, it’s simply not an option, so instead I focus on the Tempo.
“Maybe there’s a safety issue,” I say.
“For the Tempo?”
“I dunno.” Logic is not a factor here.
Sam has closed her eyes. She doesn’t know what to say to me. Pregnancy has made her somewhat less patient with all my challenges and quirks.
I break the silence seconds later, conveying the message that Doubt is whispering in my head: “We’ve got to tell the rental office that the hubcap is missing.”
“I’m sure they already know,” Sam says, “or they will know, when they look it over.”
“You’re not hearing me,” I say. “We have got to say something to the gal behind the counter. I am not going to spend the rest of my vacation wondering whether they know.”
I am learning the game. Handle this now or pay the price later with hours of blurry playbacks. I can’t explain this to Samantha, but I can and do again beg her to mention the hubcap when returning our keys. I know if I get involved in the dialogue, I’ll blow things even further out of proportion, so I stand off in a corner of the rental office and watch the confused clerk ask Sam again what she’s talking about. A hubcap? Oooh-kay.
Samantha is still frustrated with me the following morning. I am ruining our vacation. But today is October 21, so she has no choice but to be nice to me. It’s my thirtieth birthday.
We spend the day at Waikiki Beach. Sam suggests I rent a sailboard and play in the waves, like I used to in our college years. But somehow after the whole rental car ordeal, we both know that’s not such a great idea. Instead I get a small raft and join the throngs of tourists bobbing like driftwood in the shallow surf.
Samantha strips down to her maternity swimsuit and stakes out a spot on the beach just in front of me. Within minutes, her eyes are closed. She looks so peaceful. Six months pregnant with a belly the size of a basketball, yet she couldn’t appear any more comfortable, any more at peace. I wonder what that must be like, to relax that way. It’s been so long, I can’t remember.
A nearby couple are in stitches about something, giggling so hard they wind up gasping for breath. They’re doing this in front of me on purpose, I decide. Just to show off. Just to rub it in.
There must be two hundred people around me, all of them showing off how much fun they can have, all of them rubbing it in. This is Hawaii, for God’s sake. How can you not have fun? I close my eyes and try to think happy thoughts. I can’t find any. Only looping clips of everything I’ve ever done wrong in my first three decades on earth. I try instead to think about the future, but for some reason, it’s not there anymore. After years of conjuring up vivid images of my big career in radio, and my house in Tiburon overlooking the Bay, and my precocious kids’ first piano recitals, I simply cannot put myself into a scene from the future.
I shiver the full length of my life raft, wondering just what this new development means.
“A tropical Mai Tai greeting. Scrumptious roasted pig, fresh from the imu. Songs and dances of Polynesia—”
Samantha is rattling off a list of the treats we’re in for at Paradise Cove. We are headed there for an authentic Hawaiian luau, Sam’s plan for the perfect culmination of my thirtieth birthday celebration. The bus trip is long and winding, and by the time we arrive, my stomach hurts as much as my head has for days.
The place is breathtaking. With its lush greenery and coconut palms, there’s no question whatsoever that Paradise Cove is worthy of its name. It strikes me, in fact, that every Hawaiian postcard I’ve ever seen must have been shot on these grounds.
We make our way to the arts and crafts booths and the various game areas. Sam is like a kid taking her first lap around Disneyland. There is so much to do. She wants to take it all in.
“Hey, you want to try the spear throw?” Sam asks me, and I wonder if she’s making a joke.
I tell her there ain’t a chance in hell that I’m going to pick up that spear and send it flying through a crowd. I can’t even walk through a shopping mall without inflicting damage. But it’s too late. Some Polynesian stud with bulging muscles and a string of bones around his neck has appeared out of nowhere and is handing me a spear. I have no choice but to throw it, so I do. It lands safely on the grass. As near as I can tell, no one has died—though I myself am suddenly feeling gravely ill. Our island host retrieves the spear and suggests I try again. I shake my head no, and send him on his way.
“Ooops,” Sam says, scrunching up her face. “Sorry ’bout that. What do you say we just go make a bead necklace for Nicole?”
I dunno. My stomach is all messed up now, and I can’t be sure I’m not coming down with some bug. I probably shouldn’t go putting my paws in that big vat of beads. What if somebody else gets my germs and gets sick?
I tell Sam that she should go have some fun without me. She says that’s ridiculous, that she wants to spend my birthday with me. So the two of us stand around for the next several hours—stand around and do nothing, because I’m afraid to string beads. And afraid to throw a spear. And afraid to rent a sailboard. And afraid to drive a rental car. And afraid to use a snorkel. And afraid to look out my plane window.
Just plain afraid.
Soon the sun is setting and Samantha and I are standing on a beach at the edge of the luau grounds. The sky is a thousand shades of yellow and orange.
“I’m so sorry,” Sam whispers. “I really thought you’d enjoy all this.”
“I am,” I say, but the lie just hangs there in the air between us. We stand in silence for a good five minutes, watching this huge ball of brilliant golden light sink slowly into the Pacific.
The sun setting on Paradise. What a prophetic moment this would prove to be.