Floor Sample

Mark’s writing ability was a hook for me, and I knew it. As with Martin and even as far back as my high school boyfriend John, I fell for talent, not just for looks, and Mark had both. “He could use a little encouragement,” I caught myself thinking, and then I thought, “Julia! Be careful!” My relationship with Martin had begun with my thinking he needed a little help with his bumpy script. In my experience, a little help could very quickly become a whole lot more, and I was wary of another overwhelming involvement. Besides, weren’t Domenica and I doing well enough on our own? We had the stability of family and sobriety to anchor us. What was a little loneliness? Small price to pay for safety.

Mark felt anything but safe. By his own pen he had described his checkered past with women. Married once as a teenager with an unplanned pregnancy to contend with, Mark was sadly estranged from a teenage son, Scott, to whom he wrote long, unanswered letters. In his pages he wrote brilliantly and bitterly of his dashed hopes, the Ivy League education gone glimmering when faced with the grim realities of teen fatherhood. No, Mark did not want to be “captured” again. He wanted to be footloose and free and he had a whole bevy of women willing to be Miss Thursday or Friday or Saturday. “Count me out,” I told myself firmly. Besides, there was the movie to think of, and it was time to start looping.

Daniel and Laura traveled back to Chicago from New York. I reassembled the cast of Chicagoans. Early every day we would travel to the Cokins’ studio, where they would project the film I had cut onto a large screen. The actors would stand at microphones and, line by line, recreate their performances. Most of the time, the lines they had to say were the lines as scripted. Occasionally an ad-lib would intrude. “Oh, dear God, what did I say?” the actors would groan. We would piece together what they had said. From my hours in the cutting room, I was adept at reading lips. To everyone’s amazement, little Domenica was crackerjack at reconstructing her lines.

Where we were getting was a finished movie, with every single sound in it, from the rustle of a silk dressing gown to the “thwack” of a golf club, artificially created. Ric Cokin was obsessive in his drive to get the sounds right. His wife, Keri, worked by his side. Producer Pam Moore was a quiet and thoughtful presence, calm at all times despite her concerns that we might not be able to find distribution for a looped picture.

Meanwhile Mark came back from the Orient. His business there had been frustrating to him. A man of ambition and potential, he had repeatedly endured dashed hopes. He was at loose ends, and that worked to my advantage. To begin with, I told him that he could “really” write.

With a bit of prying, I got Mark to tell me the details. They were sordid. He had once been encouraged by a writing teacher as a teenager, only to have that teacher reveal a covert agenda of getting him into bed. No wonder he was so suspicious. He wanted to believe my assessment, but he wasn’t sure he could trust my character. I felt confident that I would never misjudge bad writing for good—but as to my character? Mark was attractive and I was tempted despite my good judgment.

The hook was set both for me and for Mark. He wanted to be taken seriously and I took him seriously. He was both smart and hard-driving. What he needed, I thought, was a focus for his considerable energies. Then, too, I craved a little more fun and Mark was nothing if not fun. We each had what the other wanted. He came on board to help with God’s Will. Pam’s tireless work got us accepted into the Chicago International Film Festival and Mark’s networking got us the largest crowd in the history of the event. Domenica and I went to Neiman Marcus and bought mother-daughter outfits to wear to opening night. Our big event was screened at the Music Box, an art deco gem of a theater, well suited to the thirties comedy style of the film. We wanted to look our part.

My brother Christopher, known in music circles as “Chicago Hambone,” had worked long and hard to craft an excellent original score for the film. The theater was jammed with his well-wishers, with Mark’s wide-flung network of friends, with Pam’s and the Cokins’ business associates, and, most important for me, with my father, who had bankrolled the film’s postproduction but declined to view the film “until it is actually in a theater.” Now it was.

From start to finish God’s Will had taken two years and cost about $100,000 with many costs deferred against future profits, if there were any. With the film being looped, we had scant hopes for American festivals or distribution. A period-style comedy, and looped, we weren’t Sundance’s cup of tea. We were pleased when the film was accepted into both the Munich and London film festivals. “God’s Will Hit in Munich,” ran the Variety headline. In London we garnered fine reviews along the lines of “Julia Cameron is not Noël Coward, but she is funny.”

Our American reception was much harder to take. In Chicago, our hometown, we received no major reviews. In Washington we opened at the Kennedy Center to a dire review by a youthful reviewer from my old alma mater, The Washington Post. Despite the review, the film played well to a standing-room-only audience. As one viewer remarked to me, “I thought this wasn’t supposed to be funny! Is this the same film they reviewed?” Yes was the answer. I had been hoping for a hometown-girl-makes-good reception, but that I didn’t get—at least not in print. My unfavorable press made me crave a drink. I felt humiliated and despairing.

“Dear God, please keep me sober,” I prayed as I walked for an hour in Rock Creek Park, hoping that the flora and fauna would soothe my ego and calm my spirit. Something did. Despite cravings for alcohol, I didn’t pick up a drink. “There has to be more to life than me and my brilliant career,” I prayed. “Please give me some equanimity, some strength, and some resilience.” My prayers were answered.

Pam and Mark were very disappointed by the Washington reception of our film. Pam was graceful and quiet. Mark was angry. He hated to lose a bet, and he was betting on me. The Cokins remained steadfast and determined. One morning they phoned me to say they had found distribution, a tiny but upwardly mobile company named Double Helix. Although it wasn’t the level of deal we had hoped for, we were thrilled to have a deal at all. So many fine independent films never acquire distribution. Even looped, ours had. This was a real, though small, victory.

“You’re not George Cukor,” Martin told me, viewing the film. “But this film should get you your second directing job. What you really need for the style of comedy that you’re after is a cast of those great thirties’ character actors, and they’re gone. Domenica is the best thing in the film.”

I agreed with Martin about Domenica, but we disagreed what to do about it. She seemed to me, her doting mother, to be an artist to her fingertips. She loved to draw, write, and act, and I thought she should be free to try all three. Martin was horrified by the idea of her becoming a child actor. He would cast her in small parts in his own movies, but he didn’t want her to have a real career. “There’s no future for too many child actors,” he explained his position. “And there’s too much rejection.”

Domenica, meanwhile, had attracted the attention of the estimable Geddes Agency. They signed her up with my parental proviso that her parts would be very carefully chosen. Little did I realize that Martin was quite right and that there could never be enough “protection” for the bruises of a child’s acting career. Then, too, there was the fact that I was not ideal casting as a stage mother. It was my clash with Francis Ford Coppola that cost Domenica her part in New York Stories.

As the veteran of Martin’s artful sets, I was horrified by Coppola’s treatment of his actors. He blared at them over a loudspeaker. He kept them waiting for hours. This was intolerable to me. This judgment showed on my face, I am certain. With my “the emperor has no clothes” attitude, I was simply much too obtrusive a mother to have on the set. Domenica suffered as a result, and soon she was let go.

Now we really were adrift. Martin was extremely upset by Domenica’s loss of face. Domenica herself was rattled and did not know if she wanted to keep on acting. Wanting her to be able to put her miserable experience behind her, I enrolled her in Evanston’s famed Piven Theater Workshop, home to the talented Cusacks, Joan and John. I hoped that work itself would heal her creative wounds.

Meanwhile my own life was turbulent. Just as I had feared, I did fall for Mark. He fell for me, too, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be monogamous. I might be his girlfriend, but there would be other casual flings. Mark was a player, and I didn’t want to play.

If we were both agreed that we were young and vibrant—an attractive idea—then Mark didn’t need to settle down because we were too young for all that. What we weren’t too young for was some good, productive work. I believed in Mark as a writer, and I innocently suggested he might want to try taking my creative unblocking class and see if that didn’t get him back to the page.

Against his better judgment Mark agreed to take the course. He was already taking graduate courses at Northwestern, and my course seemed at first to be mere frippery on the side. I had assembled a diverse class that included others as volatile and high-powered as Mark himself. We were to meet once a week at my town house and proceed as I had proceeded for nearly ten years, unblocking through the use of Morning Pages and a series of carefully calibrated exercises.

And so I did class notes. Every week before we would gather, I would think about what material I wanted to cover that week and then I would think about Mark. What did that bastard need to know in order to unblock? I would ask myself. Essay by essay I assembled my thoughts. Mark became quite the taskmaster, given to coming over several hours early on class day just to make sure I had written something up that he could put on the computer and then print out for his classmates. For the first time in my years of teaching, handouts became a regular part of class. I no longer simply taught off the top of my head. I had formal notes, and even if no one but Mark appreciated them, I enjoyed the process of writing them up. It was actually pleasurable putting my theories on the page.

The class that Mark was a part of was particularly high voltage. I was excited by their potential and very pleased when they all buckled down to work. I found using the weekly essays to be grounding. True to his word, Mark missed a class or two due to out-of-town travel, and I had class notes to give him to help him make up the work. Little by little, week by week, the class began to loosen up, energies were freed from long-standing blocks, and everyone began to take on modest new projects. For his part, Mark began to write again, and it became a question of what he would settle on to write next. He began with a series of monologues, which he read at Chicago’s ubiquitous open mics. His work met with great reception, and both he and I were encouraged.

And so, as much to please and seduce Mark as for any loftier reasons, I wrote on. Based on my long teaching experience, I divided the course into twelve weeks. Experience had taught me that was the amount of time necessary to “cook” a class. At Mark’s urging, I sent a copy of my manuscript to my agent.

But I didn’t want to go back to writing movies. A born entrepreneur, Mark had convinced me that I was on to something with my little book, which I tentatively titled Healing the Artist Within. I began mailing packets of my class materials off to blocked artists who needed them. I mailed packets to Los Angeles. I mailed packets to Switzerland. Everywhere I sent the work, requests for more packets came back to us. Mark and I began to photocopy “the book” in batches, sometimes fifty or a hundred copies at a time. It wasn’t cost effective. We had to charge twenty dollars for a manuscript, but students were not complaining about the price. There was a real hunger for the information I had to share.

“I see you becoming very successful with this work,” Sonia encouraged me in a reading. “I see you becoming renowned as a teacher. I see you teaching large groups of people. You’ll move to the Southwest. Your own creative work will continue to flourish.”

The snare? I was the one who felt snared. Mark continued his bachelor ways and I began to feel trapped. How could I love a man who didn’t love me back or, if he did love me, fought loving me? We would have great stretches of romantic and harmonious time and then, just as we were particularly close, Mark would stage a fling.

Addicted? I did feel hooked. “Addicted” did not seem like too strong a word. I knew what to do about addiction, I thought. Quit it cold turkey. And so I packed my suitcase and booked a flight to New Mexico. I would go to Taos and shake it out. Leaving Domenica in the custody of one of my sisters, I got on the plane. Maybe sagebrush and mountains would hold enough romance for me.

Where I had gone was an old adobe motel called El Pueblo. It lay on the north outskirts of Taos and was walking distance to shops, galleries, and the town square. On one of my first days in town, I found a small metaphysical shop called Merlin’s Garden. The bulletin board outside the door held cards for astrologers, massage therapists, Reiki practitioners, channelers, and a psychic named Lois West. I took her number and called for an appointment. She would see me that night at nine. Meanwhile a tremendous storm moved in from off the mesa. Lightning walked on pronged legs. Great sheets of rain swept in. Undaunted, I drove five miles north of town to the bed and breakfast where Lois rented herself a room.

I thanked Lois West and with lightning still crackling on the horizon, I drove back into town. Maybe, I thought, I would grow into the spinster I feared, or perhaps a wise old crone. My future as a writer seemed assured and my future as a woman seemed not to matter very much to anyone but me. Still, I was determined not to be addicted, and so despite every craving to the contrary, I did not contact Mark. Instead, I spent long days walking the dirt roads out toward the pueblo.

I wrote and I prayed and I walked some more. I asked God to restore me to sanity, by which I largely meant “about Mark.” I did not want to be the further victim of what felt to me—despite all psychic reassurances to the contrary—to be unrequited love. What I was asking for was the gift of detachment, a renewed faith that life would unfurl as it should unfurl, that the universe was a user-friendly endeavor. I prayed more casually too: “C’mon, God. I don’t rebound easily. Martin took me more than ten years to get over. Don’t let this be a repeat.”

And then the phone at the El Pueblo rang. It was Mark. I found myself talking to him with the detachment I had prayed for. “I’m in a withdrawal,” I explained to him. “I don’t want to be addicted to you. For right now I have to say all bets are off.”

“It’s an addiction for me.” I explained to Mark my theory that he was addicted to multiplicity and I was addicted to him. He could do whatever he chose to do, but I knew that I had to withdraw. I couldn’t really give him any assurances about the future. I would need to play my cards as they lay.

And I went. As gratifying as it was to get the call from Mark, I knew that our relationship had no future if he continued to play the field. I had discovered through self-inventory that sexual triangles got me instantly hooked. If a relationship with Mark meant anything, it meant constant triangles as the games played out between me, Mark, and Miss Flavor of the Week. No, I could not afford it. Mark might be right that there was much that was good about our relationship, but I was also right that there was much wrong. No, as things stood, I could not afford Mark.

Meanwhile, although I didn’t know it, Mark was deciding his bachelor days were over. “Julia’s different. She’s changed,” he told our friends. “There’s something about her now. It seems she can take me or leave me. I’ve got to have her.” I continued my time in Taos, walking and praying. Mark called again.

And so I sent Mark a book that detailed sex and love addiction. I had diagnosed myself as hooked on him. He could choose to see himself or not in the book’s pages. With me as a declared addict and him as the object of my addiction, all bets were off anyway. For both of us to form a healthy, nonaddictive relationship, we would both need to come to the conclusion that there was true love hidden in our addictive bond. Such a conclusion seemed like much too much to hope for and so, speaking for myself, I wasn’t hoping. I considered Mark a part of my addictive past. He was free to do as he chose.

“I respect your choice,” he told me long distance. What he did not tell me was that he was making some choices of his own. He, too, would reconsider his sexual conduct. He sensed my newfound freedom and he respected it. He wanted that freedom for himself.

“I don’t think you should throw the baby out with the bath-water,” he told me. “I think you should consider that there were many healthy and nonaddictive elements to our relationship. I think you should consider that we just might be good for each other. Think about it. I am in withdrawal too.”

Could he be right? I asked myself. Was it true that our bond held as much health as addiction? I thought of Mark’s talent as a writer and the way that his gifts had drawn me in. Perhaps there was a sober artist hidden beneath his freewheeling ways. Perhaps I should give him—and us—another chance.

Mark got sick. He had a bad case of the flu. My heart went out to him and I decided to be an angel of mercy. I would take him chicken soup and ginger ale. Surely I could do that much? I got to Mark’s house to discover I wasn’t the only female who had hoped to play Florence Nightingale. He was well stocked with supplies. There was practically a line out the door of young lovelies hoping to help him. Far from experiencing a saintly spirit of service, I was sick with jealousy. My hard-won emotional sobriety teetered and then collapsed. I was hooked again and I knew it.

He had a point. I thought not only about his writing and the talent I dearly hoped he would develop; I thought also about all the help he had been to me on the movie God’s Will. There was also the not-so-little factor that Domenica seemed to adore him. Her cat liked him. Even her picky dog, Calla Lily, seemed to be besotted. Could they all be wrong?

Mark wanted to see me. He had reached a few decisions and some of them might be of interest to me. I told myself that if I were very careful, I could see him. I wanted to hear what he had decided and what, if anything, it had to do with me. We arranged to meet.

Encouraged by Sonia, egged on by Mark, I placed a call to Unity Church. The Reverend Sara Matoin was in charge of programming, I was told. I made an appointment to speak with her. At the scheduled hour, I took Mark with me. Nothing if not a persuasive salesman, his rapport with Reverend Matoin was immediate.

“Julia teaches a great course,” Mark told her. “She uses a spiritual tool kit. I am sure many of your congregation would be very interested. I’m a graduate of Julia’s course myself.” He went on to enumerate the writing he was doing, the way he felt more clearly guided in his choices, more empowered in his life. Reverend Matoin was interested.

“I could. The course lasts twelve weeks. And I would ask Mark to teach with me.” This last was a brainstorm. I suddenly saw that it would be much healthier to teach large classes with a male-female team. Those with mother issues could relate to Mark. Those with father issues could relate to me. Together we would split the “magic teacher” projection in half and the class might emerge far healthier.

And so it was set that Mark and I would begin teaching at Unity Church. I was an old hand at teaching, although not in such large groups. A newcomer, Mark was firm in his opinions about how classes should be taught. Our students now received the hand-bound “book” of class notes as well as weekly handouts that tracked their progress and told us how well certain favored tools of the course were working. In front of the class, Mark and I soon found our feet as a teaching team. Like Desi and Lucy, we swapped humor and some gentle barbs. Although I sometimes felt a little stifled, I generally enjoyed teaching with Mark. From the front of the class it was easy to see who related best to a male teacher and who to a female teacher. “Good job,” we often told each other when the class went particularly well. Although I had been teaching for years, “teacher” was a new identity for me. I had more often thought of myself as an artist among artists.

“Let’s go to Ann Sather,” Mark would say as we drove home after class, and so we would make our way to the famous old Chicago restaurant that specialized in Swedish cooking: large bowls of homemade soup, cinnamon rolls dripping frosting, friendly waiters.

Both Mark and I could be keyed up on teaching nights. Until we caught on—“teaching nerves”—we had terrible arguments in the car riding to the church. Burned-out from our fight, I would arrive to teach frazzled and fuming. Mark would be serene and chatty, having simply blown off steam with our tiff.

“God guide me. Show me what to teach,” I would pray. Far more than Mark, who loved a lesson plan, I tended to teach from the seat of my pants, listening for guidance and improvising as I went. Between the two of us and our divergent styles, the classes seemed to thrive.

Domenica, too, seemed to be thriving. In Mark she found a ready ear for all of her troubles at school. At his suggestion, she entered therapy, a happy decision as it turned out. She liked having “her” therapist. Once a week I would drive her up to Evanston, where Sheila Flagherty-Jones maintained her practice. With someplace to vent, Domenica became less volatile. Her native high spirits returned to her and her creativity flourished. Again at Mark’s instigation, her father flew in from New York to do some Daddy-daughter sessions. It seemed to me that Mark was a born parent. With Mark and Martin so actively on the scene, I felt a little left out. I was “just” the mother. I told myself, correctly, that all of the masculine attention was good for Domenica. I could also see that Domenica was good for her father and Mark.

Although we still lived separately, increasingly, Domenica, Mark, and I functioned as a unit. Sometimes they would gang up on me, as when they decided my beloved old Chevy Blazer was too shabby and that what they wanted was a Jeep Cherokee. I began to settle into the idea that we were a sort of family—until Mark got a call from his own family that sent him hurrying back to the East Coast.

“I need you,” I felt like saying but didn’t. It seemed clear to me that Mark was fleeing the life we were building together. He saw it differently and thought it perfectly possible to pursue a long-distance relationship. His was an army family, and long separations came with the marital territory. He would be back, Mark told me, every month or so for a long weekend.

I hated Mark’s decision to go east. I thought he was abandoning both me and Domenica. I thought he was doing a creative U-turn on his gifts as a writer. If I had had things my way, he would have remained in Chicago, faithful to his unfolding as a writer. What did real estate have to do with anything? I fumed. By “anything,” I meant “Art.” Mark felt it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He wanted to see his brothers make good and he felt that he could help them. And so he left.

Without Mark I felt more than ever adrift in Chicago. Although I kept in touch with my West Coast friends, I didn’t really feel I belonged back there. I didn’t know where I belonged. I felt rootless. Restless, irritable, and discontent, I tried to console myself by stepping up my spiritual practice. I read widely and I prayed. I was seeking the courage to change the things I could.

“What you need to change is your own profile,” announced my friend, lawyer Michele Lowrance. She suggested I teach a creativity course at her swank downtown loft. She would fill the class with the crème de la crème, Chicago’s movers and shakers: let me try teaching at the top.

And so convened one of my favorite creativity classes, filled with judges, lawyers, and stockbrokers. Highly ambitious and equally frustrated by their elusive dreams, this class tried the spiritual tools with skepticism. As one broker explained, “I don’t believe in any of this kind of thing, but since I have paid good money for this course, I am going to give it my best shot.” That turned out to be more than enough.

By the time the class was half completed, my stockbrokers were trying their hand at writing. My favorite judge had taken up sculpting, and my most verbal lawyer had decided to try some stand-up comedy. On the phone to Mark, I would talk about the class. I wanted him to feel my life was glamorous without him.

“We need page numbers for this book of yours,” one stockbroker complained, and so I turned my hand to shaping the class notes into something more overtly bookish. I added quizzes and fill-in-the-blanks. I began to see that the class itself held valuable stories to be used for others.

On nights that I wasn’t teaching, I felt lonely in Chicago. Then I hit on the idea of taking a night course and signed up to study the works of Carl Jung with a renowned Jungian scholar, John Giannini. I saw immediately how Jung’s concept of synchronicity fit in with my own experience as a teacher. When students used the tools of Morning Pages and a weekly Artist Date, they had the support of synchronicity working on their behalf. More and more often they were in the right place at the right time. I told them they could count on it. Giannini was a mesmerizing teacher. I found myself strongly attracted to his ideas, concepts I tried to share with Mark long distance.

“This is a bit hard” was all Mark would allow about the progress he and his brothers were making. Domenica and I undertook the long drive east to go visit him. “I’ve been writing something,” Mark told me when I arrived. I saw with excitement that it was a screenplay, The Light Rangers. Thrilled with what I read, I knuckled down to help Mark in shaping his script. As we spread papers across the floor and juggled scenes, Mark’s brothers hovered nearby. They were both threatened and interested by Mark’s “other” life. If real estate sounded like pie in the sky to me, show business sounded that way to them. Mark was caught squarely in the middle, believing in both.

Visiting with Mark, I began to doubt that he and I belonged together. His family was large, loud, and boisterous. His nieces and nephews were plentiful and lovable. They welcomed me and Domenica with open arms, but we still felt like aliens among them. One night at twilight we went for a crowded car ride through an evening lit by fireflies.

Back in Chicago, still living on a shoestring—my teaching money and child support—Domenica and I moved from our town house to a small but inexpensive shotgun-style apartment. With many small rooms opening one onto the other, it was almost like a doll’s house, miniature but well suited to me and Domenica and my diminutive father, who would stay with us when he came north from Florida for visits.

My classes at Columbia College were going well. My creativity courses were flourishing. I missed involvement in theater and satisfied this itch by writing plays, but I saw scant hope of getting them put up in Chicago. “God, please guide me,” I would pray, feeling that both Domenica and I were increasingly out of place. Her father was a source of renewed notoriety for her. He had crafted a film, The Last Temptation of Christ, that was met with controversy. At school Domenica faced the prying and prodding of her classmates, who knew her father was controversial or, worse, ungodly. Some even threw rocks at her, jeering at her from bus windows. Chicago was no longer such a safe backwater for her to be raised in. Her father’s fame—or, as some said, his infamy—touched Chicago as well.

Mark came home for a weekend visit. He set foot in the new apartment, and it was immediately apparent that it was the wrong scale for him. A graceful man, he nonetheless tripped over our velvet Victorian furnishings. The household was too feminine to suit him. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“People become as intoxicated with money as they do with any other addictive substance,” I went on. “It’s like the different kind of drunks. Some people are Big Deal Chasers. Some people are Maintenance Money Drunks. Some people are Poverty Addicts. Mark,” I said excitedly, “I think we should explore this. I think this should be a book!”

I didn’t see it at the time, but I was throwing Mark a lifeline. His deal back in Maryland was increasingly going sour, spoiled by the intricate local politics they had stumbled into. Despite their intelligence and their drive, Mark and his brothers were being foiled at every turn. Local developers were used to having a monopoly, and they were determined not to share a piece of the pie.

As Mark’s real estate deal unraveled, he would travel back to Chicago once a month, increasingly discouraged. I refused to hear his discouragement. The world of writing lay ahead of him, I believed. In writing it was a meritocracy. Surely with his talent he would succeed. In the meantime, we had the new book to work on, and I was excited by the ideas we were exploring.

“Let’s go for coffee and do some writing,” I would say. And so, sipping at cappuccinos in a series of sidewalk cafés, we would lay down page after page of our money theories. Mark had long been fascinated by the world of high finance. As I had in Hollywood, he had watched many high rollers crash and burn. He was eager to help people be “money sober.” Elbow to elbow, we wrote page after page, chapter after chapter. I had no doubt the book we wrote would be published.

At first I balked. I wanted the creativity book to be like an owner’s and driver’s manual. I wanted it to be straightforward and factual, as simple as “Try doing it this way. It works.” Mark convinced me that a more personal book might help more people, and so I went carefully through the manuscript, adding stories to illustrate my points. This was a lengthy and painstaking process. When I finished, I mailed the manuscript back to the agent. After a month or more, I heard back from the agent again, but the news was not what I had hoped.

I was stunned and saddened. I knew Natalie Goldberg’s work and didn’t think it really bore much resemblance to my own. I said to the agent, “Natalie herself would be generous in a case like this. I think she would say there was room enough for all of us on the shelf.”

I got off the phone daunted and discouraged. Mark handed me a business card with another agent’s name and number, Susan Schulman. He explained, “I was in Transitions Bookplace about a month ago. Howard, the owner, asked me if you had a good agent. I got the card from him. Call her.”

Bent on helping other people, Mark did not see what I did—that he himself needed help. Back in Maryland, the shenanigans of local politicians put him and his brothers out of business. What began as a great opportunity turned into a high-risk situation where they were lucky to escape with their reputations and personal finances intact. Dismayed and disillusioned, Mark moved back to Chicago—“back to us,” I thought—and focused his ferocious entrepreneurial energies on the two books we had in hand. “Let’s just be writers,” I told him, little recognizing that for Mark writing would never really be enough.

One cold January day the phone rang in my Chicago apartment. It was Susan Schulman, the literary agent. “It happens every year,” she said gleefully. “I get one great book every Christmas and this year it is yours. I’d like to represent you and I’d like to send your book to Jeremy Tarcher.” Schulman went on to explain that Tarcher was a creativity press, perhaps America’s most noted one. She thought the book would be a match.

And so we sent off a first draft of our second book, Money Drunk/Money Sober. I was eager to get back to fiction from nonfiction and immediately began work on a screenplay. Mark, meanwhile, goaded me to call Northwestern’s film department to see if perhaps I could join their faculty rather than teaching at Columbia. Northwestern replied that they were seeking a writer in residence. With my résumé, I was just what they were after.

For my part, I loved the Northwestern campus with its towering trees and graceful buildings. My own classroom featured tall windows and a very long trestle table for students to gather around. I convened my first class and found my students to be bright, ambitious, and discouraged. They found the faculty highly critical and nonsupportive. They were learning a great deal about how to take films apart but very little about how to make them. I had my work cut out for me.

The first thing I needed to do was get my class emotionally sober, restored to a sense of optimism. I would teach them both the tools of creative unblocking and of screenwriting, I decided. We would start with our daily quota of three pages and proceed from there. What I was after was actual feature-length scripts. I believed my students had talent enough to write them. They just needed to find a way to write that was nonpunitive and nonselfconscious.

To my delight, my students flourished with this “into the water” agenda. Three pages a day, no more, no less, they began writing out their tales. Although it sounds like a modest amount, three pages a day is actually a very fast writing clip. It means ninety pages in a month. It means a finished first draft in six weeks.

Egged on to write freely, my students began writing very well. Freed to write rough drafts, they found a new ease in all of their academic writing. Ripples began to spread through the film department. What was I up to with this creative unblocking? My students became a spirited lot, hardworking and hard-writing. They began to win contests with their work. Something was going right.

In addition to my Northwestern teaching, I began teaching weekly writing circles as well as creativity courses. I rented an office on Belmont Avenue and I began to feel a bit like a one-woman school. The classes I taught on Belmont were small but intense. My students were middle-aged but highly motivated. Their work was often quirky and surprisingly powerful, as for example the essay that mother-of-two Cokie Evans wrote about her love of speed.

If my students were speeding along, I, too, was speeding. In addition to Northwestern and my classes on Belmont, Mark and I cotaught a course at Chicago Filmmakers. As I had at Northwestern, I grounded the class with creativity tools. One more time I found myself able to awaken in my students a passion for their work. Feature-film scripts poured forth. “What is it that you do? We’ve been trying for years to get people to write like this.”

Still, I was teaching too much and too often. There was no time for the well to fill, little time for me to do my own writing. I began to get cranky and irritable. “I need to make things,” I complained to Mark. “I need to write something that’s just my own.”

The phone rang constantly. Teachers, it seemed, were meant to be on tap. Students wanted more than I felt I could give. Mark was baffled by my balkiness. He loved teaching, thrived on teaching, and loved any and all human contact that came from it. There was no such thing as “after hours” for Mark. He would take a call at any hour of the day or night. He loved helping people. By comparison, I began to feel like a real misanthrope. Mark’s heart seemed to me to be larger than life. He wrote long letters to his son, Scott, letters that were never answered. “That’s not the point,” Mark would say. “This isn’t about what kind of son Scott is, it’s about what kind of father I am.” This stance seemed to me to be both idealistic and brave.

Spring, in Chicago, comes after a long, hard winter and is a glorious time. Fruit trees blossom in the parks. Tulip beds catch fire and blaze with beauty. It is a time for long bike rides along the lake, meandering walks through Lincoln Park Zoo. It is almost impossible to be depressed during a Chicago spring, and yet I was managing it.

As soon as my teaching year at Northwestern ended, I booked a flight to Albuquerque. I was out at O’Hare Airport, sitting in a boarding lounge, when a man’s voice began to speak to me. I grabbed a pen and paper. I began to scribble along, chasing the voice. It belonged to a homicide cop named Elliot Mayo. It spoke with confidence and great individuality. They called my flight and I hurriedly boarded. All during the several-hour flight, the voice talked on. By the time we landed in Albuquerque, I had filled a notebook. In the airport’s gift shop I bought another, wondering if the voice would pause long enough for me to get to Taos, a two-and-a-half-hour drive north. The voice did pause and I drove north feeling exhilarated. At last I was writing again, really writing.

Arriving in Taos, I checked into the El Pueblo. My lodgings held a small sitting room, a small kitchen, and a neat bedroom. Through my windows I could see Taos Mountain. I was right next door to Dori’s Café, a favored haunt of Taos writer John Nichols. I could go there and both eat and write. The voice started talking again, and I took a notebook with me to Dori’s, where I ordered red beans and rice and kept on scribbling.

I wrote until Dori’s closed. Exhausted but happy, I went back to the El Pueblo. I was hoping the voice would let me sleep. Before I went to bed I called Domenica and Mark. “I am writing!” I reported happily. They sounded a bit grumpy and abandoned, but I was determined to ignore any negativity. I was writing!

Booked for a week’s stay, it became clear to me that I was writing something larger than the time allotted. I woke daily, went to Dori’s, settled in at a table, and wrote all morning. At lunch I was joined by my girlfriend Ellen Longo, an astrologer and accountant whom I had lived next door to on my very first stay in Taos. Ellen loved Elliot Mayo. She couldn’t wait to hear his daily adventures. “What happens next?” she always wanted to know. I told her I would have to write to find out.

After lunch with Ellen, I would write all afternoon, pausing about four for a longish walk out toward the pueblo. The air was fragrant with piñon and sage. The walks gave me time to pray and to mull. My life back in Chicago was lopsided, I realized. I was doing too much for other people and not enough for myself as an artist. My writer was starved for exactly the kind of time it was enjoying in Taos, long hours with nothing to do in them except write, write, write.

By then I knew that I was halfway through a crime novel. I was determined that when I got back to Chicago, I would not abandon it. Taking one last, long walk out toward the pueblo, I prayed, “Dear God, please give me the strength to be true to myself.” And then I went home.

Once we agreed to get married, we set about consolidating our households. We had two separate apartments to fold into one house. We would need writing room as well as living room, and Domenica, on the brink of adolescence, would need space of her own as well. I thought it would take a long time to find agreeable housing, but on my very first day of looking, I found a snug yellow coach house with room for all three of us. Mark and I decided to marry at midsummer. That gave me a scant two months to prepare.

With Laura’s help, I planned a country wedding. Guests would picnic on fried chicken, cole slaw, baked beans, potato salad, and pies, lots and lots of pies. Of course, my bridesmaids were anything but countrified. They were a clutch of urban beauties swathed in hyacinth blue. Mark and I decided to get married at Unity Church, where we were teaching our creativity course, and we decided to invite our students to the wedding. It was to be a big, casual, heartfelt affair, a community celebration. The details of planning it threatened to inundate me. I panicked.

And so, with Mark’s grudging blessing, I began to write every day at our local coffee shop, the Half and Half. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Laura writing across the table from me, I would race page after page, following my detective hero, Elliot Mayo, through his increasingly dark and labyrinthian sorties into Chicago’s underworld. I do not recommend this, but I was writing flat-out. With the wedding looming, I had a deadline. I did not think that Mark would appreciate having a novel unfolding in the middle of our honeymoon, most especially as dark and violent a novel as mine was shaping up to be.

My family was excited by my impending nuptials. They were relieved that I had found someone who would take me on with all of my “intensity” and all of my “ideas.” Although they loved me, my family thought of me as just this side of crazy. To be honest, I thought of myself that way and was constantly monitoring myself to be more “normal.” With Mark in the picture and my life taking on increasingly solid associations like my job at Northwestern and my teaching duties at the church, my family heaved a collective sigh of relief. Maybe now Domenica would be “okay.”

Mark’s family was more shocked than mine at our union. To their eyes I was more suspicious, a divorced woman with a child, and the product of time in Hollywood. They found it exciting that Martin was famous. They found it exciting that Domenica was semifamous. They knew that Mark had big, glittering dreams and they wanted him to have them. If I was part of what it meant to Mark to be successful, okay, then, let him marry me. But make no mistake, Mark’s was a military family, in which the men wore the pants and gave the orders. I was just a little too uppity to be good casting as wife material. They hoped Mark knew what he was doing.

June gave way to the heat of July and I was now in the home-stretch on my novel. Amid fittings for dresses and decisions about flowers, I continued to rendezvous daily with Laura and my book. A few final plot twists and the book would be finished. A few more weeks and I would one more time be a married woman. My father and Mark seemed to get along well, and this mattered to me. Mark and my brother Christopher shared an ironic sense of humor. I was glad for any and all the ways that Mark and I seemed to be a good fit. A lingering symptom from my time with Martin was that I did not trust my own judgment when it came to men.

Our wedding day dawned bright and blisteringly hot. I thought I would melt clinging to my father’s arm as we walked down the aisle. Mark and I said our vows in front of a large congregation. Many of our students were grinning with jubilation. They had felt us to be a match, watching our chemistry as we taught together. “I told you so,” their victorious winks and high signs seemed to say. In our wedding pictures Mark and I both look exhausted but happy. Domenica, in a grown-up apricot silk gown, looks happiest of all.

For our honeymoon Mark and I traveled to Taos. As we drove in down the Rio Grande canyon, three beautiful rainbows arched overhead. I was ecstatic with this little bit of art direction from the Higher Power. I wanted Mark to love Taos as much as I did.

We had a scant week for our honeymoon, hardly time to walk and drive the beautiful landscape. I would have stayed on, but Mark was due back in Chicago and then off to Russia. He had been invited to be one in a group of entrepreneurs asked to help bridge the knowledge gap in the new Russia. It was an exciting business opportunity for him. He planned to teach our creativity work on a boat trip on the River Volga. For my part, I planned to miss him and finish my novel.

As it turned out, finishing the novel was much easier than missing Mark. My hero, Elliot Mayo, was faced with the known dangers of the netherworld. I found myself faced with the unknown dangers of my own paranoia. For the weeks that Mark was gone, I spent my insomniac nights twisted with insecurity. Was Mark running away from our new marriage? I wondered. Would he, like James Bond, meet with curvaceous temptation? His business associate knew Mark as a bachelor playboy. Would it matter to him that Mark was now a married man? For that matter, would it matter to Mark? Where had my trust gone? I asked myself.

After my time in Taos, I felt claustrophobic back in Chicago. The little coach house felt tiny. Domenica and I were both let down after the wedding to have Mark gone one more time and this time so very far away. I knew that for my daughter, having a real, on-the-premises, live-in father felt very important. I felt the same way about having a live-in husband.

Mark came home to banked anger. I resented having missed him. I was relieved to learn that his sexual temptations had been successfully navigated. “I told them my wife was a poet,” Mark explained. “They love poets and I shared some of your poems with them.”

But if Russia was behind Mark, it was not out of his system. He wanted to put together entrepreneurial opportunities. He rented an office on Belmont, where I taught, and set to work making phone calls to the men he knew from the board of trade. Mark was filled with enthusiasm. He worked long days and longer nights.

Susan Schulman was trying to place the creativity book, and she had hopes Tarcher would publish it. Additionally I had written a small cop film called Closer Than You Think. We planned to produce it in Chicago, but writing books and making movies now seemed like small potatoes to Mark. He was involved in world politics. Movies paled by comparison.

Summer simmered into fall. I finished my novel and sent it off to Susan Schulman to put it up for sale. I returned to my still-too-heavy teaching load at Northwestern, Chicago Filmmakers, and Unity Church and on a private basis. It was now like pulling teeth to get Mark to do a writing session with me. I insisted that we finish polishing our money book. I couldn’t bear to see our promising projects abandoned, but his passions lay elsewhere.

“Oh. All right,” Mark said, settling into the harness of joint writing again. Despite his reluctance, he was writing better than ever. Struggles with solvency spoke to his compassion. It wasn’t too long before we had a finished draft of Money Drunk/Money Sober. We sent it off to Susan.

It was a brilliant autumn that year. The trees in Lincoln Park were a deep crimson flared with gold. On chilly fall nights I would drive to the Green Mill, Al Capone’s old bar, and there I would participate in something called the Poetry Slam, in which poets went up against other poets like boxers. It was a real Chicago-style beer-and-brawl environment. To hold the boozy crowd’s attention, you had to be good. Week after week, I tried out new material. My colleagues were poets Tony Fitzpatrick and Mark Smith, well-known fixtures on the slam circuit. Their work was macho yet sensitive. I hoped my own was tough-minded as well.

I was working on a book of poetry that Mark Bryan would collate and publish for me called The Quiet Animal. Among his many roles for me, Mark was a superb muse. Something about him set the writer in me off and running. It was very efficient of me, I sometimes kidded, to have married my muse.

With Mark hard at work on his Russian endeavors and me hard at work teaching and writing, one might think that the little coach house would settle into happy productivity—but that was not to be. One night, as we were settling in for a quiet evening, Mark got a phone call from his sister. She was distraught—and who wouldn’t be? Her husband of many years stood suddenly accused of child abuse. She loved him and she didn’t know what to do. Were her children at risk?

Mark got off the phone tremendously upset. He could not in good conscience leave his sister alone to fend for herself with such a terrifying problem. There were four children involved, Mark’s nephew and nieces, whom he loved. “What are we going to do?” Mark asked me. “They can’t stay with him. The kids need counseling.”

Whether Mark said it first or I did, the answer seemed obvious. Mark’s sister and the children would need to come north and get help. Within days we had found them an apartment two houses down from the little coach house. It was, I hoped, just enough distance for them to have a separate household and yet feel safe.

When Lorna and the children arrived, they were shell-shocked. Used to living in the beautiful West Virginia countryside, they were suddenly thrust into the urban heart of Chicago. They missed their dog. They missed their friends. Mark swung into action. He got the children qualified counselors and he got a good therapist to work with his sister.

There was no magic wand that we could wave to ease the pain of Mark’s family. Reeling from the shock of the accusations, they tried hard to reach a grounded sense of truth. Could the accusations be true? The vote on this ran one way one day and the other way the next. The accusations had come from more than one source. It seemed they had to have some validity.

Mark worried that there would be a vendetta. Lorna’s husband was foreign, and foreigners weren’t easily accepted under any terms in the hill country where they lived. His work as a night watchman was both solitary and dangerous. Mark feared the worst and then beat himself up for fearing it.

But Mark’s feelings weren’t crazy. They were premonitions. Late one night the phone call came that Lorna’s husband had been murdered—castrated and then burned to death as the hill people took justice into their own hands, declaring him guilty as accused.

It was probably inevitable that with Mark’s focus on Lorna and her children, Domenica would choose to act out. For several years she had safely gone to spend schoolday afternoons at the stable. Now, suddenly, there was trouble in the form of an older boy who had a crush on her. The boy drove one of the carriages that were a tourist attraction on Michigan Avenue. He invited Domenica to ride with him. This meant leaving the safety of the stable. It was an adventure Domenica could not resist—and she was flattered to have caught the eye of a handsome older boy.

Mark drove to the stable to pick up Domenica for dinner and quickly sniffed out the situation. He did not want his stepdaughter hanging out with any carriage driver. For one thing, the boy was too old. For another, Mark had his suspicions that the carriage drivers smoked dope.

“He’s too strict,” she complained but without much conviction. Mark meanwhile was squarely focused on her again and now he had bigger fish to fry. Domenica belonged in private school, Mark felt. He took his case to Martin, explaining the advantages of the private school, scholastically and socially.

“All right. Count me in, I’ll pay for it,” Martin said, and so Domenica transferred to Francis W. Parker, a fine, arts-oriented school, where she was slightly more at home among her classmates. Socially they were more advanced than she was, and this initially made her feel shy, but before long she found a few kindred spirits, whom I called “baby artists,” and so school and the social whirl became easier for her.

If Domenica’s life was growing a little easier, Mark’s and mine was growing more difficult. One more time I was over-teaching and under-writing. One more time the cost was depression. For his part, Mark was having a hard time finding investors for his Russian enterprises. To those he approached, the Russian economy still looked too risky. As the rejections piled up, Mark, too, became disheartened.

Instead of being a snug haven from worldly woes, the little coach house began to feel like a pressure cooker. I missed Mark’s help on creative projects and I began to have the sinking feeling he was on a wild-goose chase with his Russian venture. Mark wanted the family to have financial stability, and to him teaching looked like one way to accomplish it. When I would talk about needing more writing time, he would point out that he himself was putting in long days. We lacked sympathy for each other’s perspective. As the little coach house was blanketed with heavy winter snows, Mark and I suffered from dispirited moods.

As it happened, Domenica had a particular horse in mind, a small, showy chestnut Arabian with four white stockings and a blaze. The horse was named Captivate, and he belonged to an NBC newscaster who had won him on a bet. Captivate was spirited and much too much horse for the novice rider to handle. He was up for sale at what can best be described as a steal. I bought him.

Now Domenica and I both went to the stable in the afternoons. We both took turns in the ring working the kinks out of our “ponies.” Around and around we went. Such riding was better than nothing, but it made me yearn for the luxury of trails and the great outdoors. The addition of a horse made Chicago feel even more claustrophobic to me.

It was true that I was increasingly uncomfortable at Northwestern. Unlike Columbia College, where the faculty had largely been composed of working filmmakers, Northwestern leaned heavily toward film theory. Many of the faculty knew a great deal about how to take a film apart but precious little about how to put a film together. There I was in the midst of them, a working screenwriter who had just shot a feature film and looked likely to shoot another. My students appeared to be fountains of creativity. Feature scripts were pouring out of them and they were beginning to win national attention. No, I did not fit in. I couldn’t face it squarely, but I was envied and resented. My lack of academic credentials were held against me. “All” I had was my résumé as a working filmmaker.

The winter in Chicago is always long and dark, but the winter that year seemed to be colder and darker than usual. Bundled in scarves against the wind, I would walk to my classes on Belmont. In a small, cozy room my students would pile the wooden table with the writing of the week. They were becoming ever stronger and more daring. The pieces they wrote were suitable for publication and for literary contests. Every week we would stir the pot deeper still. Some of my most timorous students grew bold on the page. It was very rewarding.

At the same time, my movers-and-shakers creativity class moved on to ever more adventurous endeavors. The judge who wanted to sculpt began to study with a master sculptor. The lawyer who loved comedy began hosting her own radio show. The socialite who wrote “on the side” now tried her able hand at how-to beauty books.

On cold winter afternoons, when evening fell by four thirty, I would meet Domenica at the riding stable and together we would take our turns going round and round. Domenica had shaped Walter Mitty, her gray Arabian, into a fine model hunter. With the help of my sister Libby, an equine portrait artist, she had also acquired Ing, a bay Thoroughbred jumper. I would work with little Captivate, whom I had renamed Jack Merlin, after my friend Ed Towle’s detective hero. Domenica would work with her jumpers. We did well spending our mommy-daughter time with the horses.

By six we would head home, usually to find Mark still hard at work. I enjoyed cooking and we would often invite friends to dinner. After dinner it was homework for Domenica and private time for Mark and myself. As much as we hated to admit it to each other, our days were productive but unrewarding. Mark was disappointed by his Russian work. For him it was one more worthy dream gone glimmering. I missed having a creative peer group. Being the teacher meant I was supposed to be the one with answers, and I found I had many questions, chief among them “Why am I not more happy?”

Spring came and with it my predictable rejection for a tenured faculty position at Northwestern. The very attempt was a nightmare for me. I explained my creativity theories to a room full of skeptics. The department chair noisily ate all the way through my presentation. Instead, they chose a young woman with a dearth of professional credentials, though she did hold a master’s in film studies. Cynically, I felt the game had been rigged. Mark, on the other hand, was shocked by my rejection. He had not seen it coming as I had. I had learned my lesson in rejection from the Chicago Tribune. The Chicago message seemed to me to be: be good but not too good. Do not rock the boat and do not make your colleagues uncomfortable. When I directed a feature film, I was too uppity for life as a reporter. When I developed my own creativity theories and practiced them on my students, I was too uppity for an academic.

I wasn’t sure what else I wanted. I had grateful students. An ample enough income. My very own Arabian horse. My husband was tall, dark, and handsome. Not to mention smart, kind, and generous. What was my problem? Where was my gratitude? As spring turned toward summer, I began taking long bike rides along the lakefront. As I pedaled, I prayed, “Dear God, please give me a sense of direction. Please show me what it is you would have me do.”

I took the news calmly. I always take good news with an absolutely flat affect—something that can hurt and puzzle people until they come to expect it. I found myself pleased but not precisely surprised. Mark, by contrast, was over the moon. “I knew it!” he crowed. “I knew it should be a book! How great!”

Susan explained that there would be an editorial call from Jeremy “just to make sure you are on the same page,” and then there would be editorial notes and rewrites. “It will go fine,” Mark promised Susan. He was determined that I should make a success of the book.

When Jeremy Tarcher called, I found him tart, astringent, amusing, and inspiring—an invigorating mix of a man. He explained that he would be sending me a memo that gave his overview of the book and that he had certain questions and areas where he wanted me to elaborate.

With this brief conversation Mark stepped comfortably into what would be a managerial role regarding what would become The Artist’s Way. I might have written the book, but he had “seen” it. In a very real sense, it was his brainchild and he had ambitions for it.

Susan Schulman rang us again. She had more good news. She had placed Money Drunk/Money Sober with a good small press. There was just one problem: both of our books were due simultaneously. Would we be able to handle doing two books at once? We both thought yes.

When my memo from Jeremy Tarcher arrived, it was very long and detailed. He had thoughts on every chapter. I was going to have to really buckle down to work to give him what he wanted and needed. In order to work in such a concentrated fashion, I felt I needed an office, somewhere out of the house if Mark was going to be working at home.

We quickly decided that the best way to work on two books simultaneously was for each of us to take one and see it through. In this way, editors would not be confused by whom they had to deal with. And so I left the house every day and walked two houses down to a small apartment I had rented as office space. Mark settled in at his desk and we both tackled the chapter at hand. At lunch we would ask, “How’s it going?” We would each hope that the other might answer, “Fine.” At night we would talk over the day’s work. We both wanted to be current on each of the books, although we really had to keep our focus on just one.

Working with Jeremy’s memo, I would occasionally take offense at the way something was phrased—and Jeremy could be quite picky. Mark was wonderful at defusing my defensiveness. “Maybe this is what he meant,” he would say. Somehow, coming from Mark, I was able to hear what was intended. Sometimes I had to laugh at my own volatility. For a professional writer, I could certainly be thin-skinned.

Day by day and page by page, I responded to Jeremy’s notes. I explained and clarified. I lengthened and elaborated. After a month or more of this, my little manuscript had nearly doubled. Mark was making similar progress. Unlike Jeremy and myself, who tended to work on the page, Mark and his editor forged an active phone relationship. They hammered out the final draft of the money book with many lengthy conversations. I would come home from my office and hear Mark on the phone hard at work with his editor. She was as tenacious as a small terrier, and the book was a healthy tug-of-war between their two sensibilities.

In addition to my writing, I had my teaching to contend with. It was difficult to show up for work at Northwestern feeling like a persona non grata. It took all of my professionalism to continue to carefully mentor the talented students I had there. Meanwhile there were scripts to read for Chicago Filmmakers and the ongoing writing and creativity courses I was teaching. Mark seemed to have endless stamina, but I felt myself flagging.

Our phone rang constantly with calls from our many students. Mark seemed to thrive on the hubbub. He loved being dead center of a swirling melee. Not for me, all the commotion. I craved quiet and space. Our little coach house seemed overstuffed with life. I felt there was no space for my dreams.

Taos became the carrot I held in front of my exhausted nose. Finishing up at Northwestern, I comforted myself with images of sage fields rolling to the horizon. Reading through my students’ scripts, I told myself that soon I would catch the scent of piñon on the wind, soon I would see mountains and hike out near the sacred land of the pueblo. But “soon” did not seem soon enough.

I would go to the stable to ride, only to find that the stable felt claustrophobic as well. Piloting Jack around the ring, I would catch myself thinking, “This isn’t working. I am riding in circles. I am thinking in circles. I am living in circles.” I would come back from the stable frustrated and sad. This in turn frustrated and saddened Mark. Desolate—and for what seemed to be no good reason—I went to see Sonia Choquette.

As he did every summer, my father came north from his winter home aboard the sailboat on Long Boat Key, Florida. I was very glad to see him. He always helped me to parse things out. This summer he felt, as I did, that I needed some time in Taos. “Just go,” he told me, and so I did.

Oh, the relief of being back in Taos! I had finally finished the creativity book and my long and tiring year of teaching. With Mark watching Domenica, I was free again to walk and to write. I settled into the El Pueblo and began my daily regime of walking and prayer. “Please guide me,” I prayed. “Please show me the way. Please guide me. . . .”

My prayers seemed to be unanswered. Or they seemed to be answered in an impossible way. Every day I fell more deeply in love with Taos, the sight of the silver-green sage, the scent of the piñon. A sudden rain would wash the valley. A rainbow would arch overhead. It all seemed impossibly beautiful: the changing face of Taos Mountain, the walking rain stalking in across the mesa. I particularly loved the black-and-white magpies that would balance lightly on a fence post. “I want to live here,” I realized on one long walk. “It is just so beautiful.”

Mark, Domenica, and my father were back in Chicago, waiting for me to return, but I didn’t want to return. The more I walked, the more I prayed, the more clearly and certainly I knew that I was “home.” On the phone with Mark I heard his puzzlement. What was wrong with Chicago? We were surrounded by friends and opportunities. He loved Chicago. True, he had been unable to interest Chicagoans in his Russian venture, but there were other fish to fry. Chicago was the city of big shoulders, the land of opportunity. Mark loved it there.

My final days in Taos were spent dreaming. What would it be like to live here? God felt so close when I was out walking. Praying for guidance seemed natural, no mere exercise. The more I prayed for guidance, the more I knew that I needed to move to Taos. But what about Mark? What about Domenica? Would it be right for them as well?

When I got back to Chicago, I again immediately felt trapped. I told Mark I had to talk with him, really talk with him, and when we sat down, I laid out the case for Taos as best I could. “We have two books coming out,” I told him. “We are writers and teachers and we can write and teach in Taos. We don’t have to stay in Chicago. Maybe we have outgrown it.”

The days with Mark gone were days of pins and needles for me. Every day I would wait for his check-in and I would say, “Well? What do you think?” I did not know if Taos would be able to work its magic on Mark. Viewed objectively, it was just a small town. Whatever romance it had might speak just to me. And then, one summer evening, Mark called and said, “It was a good day today. I see what you see here. Is your dad there?”

Mark had spent the day looking at Taos real estate and he had come to the conclusion that with my father’s help we might be able to buy. This was one rung above my dreams come true. I had assumed that if we moved to Taos, we would be looking for yet another rental. To my surprise, my father agreed with Mark that we should buy, not rent, and he further agreed to put up the down payment. Now it was up to Mark to find a property where we could have horses and yet be close enough to town for Domenica’s school friends to be able to stop by.

“You’d better come out,” Mark’s next call ran. “I think I’ve found it.” And so I went back to Taos to look over the properties that Mark thought were suitable and one in particular which he felt should be ours. I was hoping for a romantic old adobe, but Mark had found a stucco house with a barn and paddocks, a scant mile from Domenica’s high school just on the edge of town. The property had five acres, room enough for a whole herd of horses, and a large covered porch that looked west and north toward Taos Mountain and the sunset.

“You have to picture it fixed up a little,” the real estate agent said apologetically as she showed me through the house. Indeed, the furnishings were terrible, the draperies worse, and the paint job a terrible mess. “Don’t buy me” the house all but announced, and still, if I stood in the heart of the house long enough, I could sense what Mark had sensed there, a happy future life for the three of us.

Whisk! Mark and my father swung into action. “We’ll take it,” they told the broker, eager to take the house off the market. Papers were faxed. Money was wired. It was settled. We were buying the Taos house and moving there. We could take possession right after Labor Day. Mark and I came back to Chicago with a clutch of photographs to show Domenica and my father. In the photos, the little ranch looks ramshackle but charming. We knew just how we would fix it.

Our Chicago friends were desolate. They planned a huge and elaborate going-away party. The guest list was enormous, reflecting the size of our Chicago life as teachers and community members. The night of the party, Mark and I found ourselves swept up by two emotions: anticipation and regret. Our Chicago life had been rich and our friends were beloved. The excitement of the party didn’t entirely mask the sorrow underneath. We were really going.

All of the belongings from the little coach house fit into one large U-Haul truck. Mark would drive this truck and I would follow in the Jeep. We bought walkie-talkies to stay connected, but they would prove to be useless on the open highway. We drove convoy fashion, slower than Mark would have liked, as fast as the unwieldy truck would allow. The trip took three days. Mark and I each drove alone with our own thoughts.

Domenica had gone out a week early to be the guest of my friend Ellen Longo, whose son Erin would be her guide at her new school. Each night on the road, as we pulled into our lodgings, Mark and I would check each other’s emotional temperature after the day’s drive, then we would call Domenica.

“It’s weird, but I am okay,” Domenica bravely responded. She was actually in shock and soldiering through. Her new school was one-third Hispanic, one-third “Anglo,” and one-third Native American. It was a far cry from posh Francis W. Parker back in Chicago.

After the city of Chicago, the quiet of Taos was very noisy. Coyotes howled in the darkness. At dawn songbirds burst into song. A searching wind jangled the wind chimes that we hung on our large covered porch. It seemed there was music everywhere. Church bells tolled frequently across the countryside. Taos Valley was predominately Catholic and the bells called worshippers to mass. Added to all of this was the singular sound of water. Taos Valley was irrigated by an acequia system, ditches and gates hundreds of years old that carried water from icy mountain streams to the fields where it was needed. The rush of flowing waters pried through windows and accompanied conversations.

The first thing for me was trying to find some sober alcoholics to talk with. Fortunately this proved easy. When I had first lived in Taos, sober alcoholics were few and far between. Now I quickly found several people with whom I enjoyed an easy rapport. Mark made friends even more easily than I did. Seemingly from out of nowhere he found a group of men who helped us with the moving in and the setting up of our household. Their laughter boomed through the house. It made Taos feel less like a terrible risk and more like an adventure.

September sped past. Domenica joined the volleyball team and reported that her teammates were cutthroat competitors. The horses arrived, their shipping paid for by Martin’s generosity. We bought a load of hay and several bags of feed. Mornings began now with feeding the horses and getting Domenica off to school. A writing day then loomed ahead of me. Mark took a job working with troubled adolescents at a mental health clinic. He had to commute to work, but his drive took him along the flank of the Rio Grande River, and he enjoyed the views.

One of Domenica’s first school science assignments was to make a bug collection. Taos Valley was filled with creepies and crawlies of all sorts, ranging from seldom seen tarantulas to the more common and more deadly brown recluse and black widow spiders. Finding these creatures was a quick baptism by fire into the realities of where we were now living. I am happy to say that Domenica’s bug collection was large and impressive. We may have felt squeamish, but it didn’t show in her exhibit.

Autumn in Taos Valley is glorious. The cottonwoods flare yellow. The aspens shine bright gold. Evenings turn chill and the smell of piñon fires begins to scent the air. In the mornings, plumes of smoke can be seen curling up above the adobes. Our house featured two fireplaces and a woodstove. We laid in a supply of firewood and began to enjoy the business of laying a morning fire. Mark was good at building fires. It was wonderful to lie in bed weekend mornings with a fire crackling in the fireplace a few steps away.

After going through many possibilities with Jeremy Tarcher, it was decided to call the creativity book The Artist’s Way. The first books off the presses were beautiful, and for the first time I had real books from which to teach. As I had in Chicago, I placed a notice in the local paper advertising a creativity workshop. I offered a set fee or reasonable barter. My phone rang off the hook and our first class was assembled. We had painters, musicians, clothing designers, writers, and photographers. We offered them a weekly class held right in our living room with a crackling fire for commentary. Our living room windows looked north to Taos Mountain, whose summit was often wreathed in clouds. It looked lofty and mysterious, a suitable home for the Great Creator. Our class thrived.

The previous owners of our property had allowed the fields to fall into disrepair. Mark spent much of that first autumn supervising the digging of new ditches and the laying of pipe where needed. We would be rewarded in spring by green and verdant fields, but just then the work of restoration was costly and difficult. Mark found an old Hispanic man who remembered the best placement of ditches for the flow of our land. Half in Spanish, half in English, the work progressed. There was a sense of urgency because soon snow would be on the way.

“Take time to ride with us,” Domenica and I would plead. Rides, to us, were a source of wonder and adventure. On our very first trail ride, Domenica and I had been walking placidly down a narrow dirt road on Walter and Jack, when suddenly Domenica piped up, “Look, Mommy! Tarantula!” Sure enough, a large bow-legged tarantula was strolling across the road just ahead of us. Yes, we loved riding.

We would saddle and bridle our three horses and take off as a family, first riding the dirt roads through the sage fields and then, higher up, the twisting trails leading through the mountains. Mounted on surefooted Arabs, Domenica and I had no difficulty with the terrain. Mark was riding Ing, a long-legged Thoroughbred for whom the going was tougher. Add to that the fact that when Ing spotted a straightaway, Mark had his hands full. Still, the rides were glorious. We would surprise flocks of wild bluebirds. Magpies would keep pace with us, teasing the horses along. Sometimes we would spot large hawks riding the thermals—even eagles. There was always the danger of flash floods, and we had to take care, as we sometimes rode the bottoms of twisting arroyos, always alert for snakes.

Winter comes early to northern New Mexico. The first snows blanket the peaks in October, while the leaves are still ablaze. By November the fiery colors are gone and the beginnings of a winter wonderland are taking form. Mark was determined that we should enjoy the long winter. Early one Saturday he snuck out of the house and attended a ski swap. There he acquired ski paraphernalia for himself, myself, and Domenica.

Taos is famous among skiers for its formidable mountain. Intermediate runs at Taos are said to be as hard as expert runs elsewhere. Mark determined that if we were to learn to ski, we should not be frightened or injured. And so, one snowy Saturday, he announced that we were all going over to Angel Fire, a more gentle ski resort some twenty-five miles away through beautiful twisting canyons of fir trees. Mark was in his element as we drove the canyons. He loved being the leader and having a new adventure to share with his “girls.” Domenica and I were both more than a little intimidated. Mark was a natural athlete, and by day’s end he was plunging down the slopes. We were more timorous, sticking to the beginners’ runs. The beauty of the Angel Fire Valley was breathtaking. As we rode the lifts, Domenica was enchanted, “Mark! Mommy! Look!”

As winter deepened, the canyons became more impassable. Skiing remained a special occasion, and we went as often as we could. Meanwhile, on a daily basis, Mark was driving the treacherous canyon that cradled the Rio Grande. On his daily commute, which took an hour each way, he navigated rock slides and mud slides and sudden dense snowfalls. It was during one such snowfall that I heard a knock at my front door. I opened it to find a stranger holding a tiny, wriggling black puppy. “Is this your dog, ma’am? I found it in the road.” I reached my arms out to take the puppy. Although I faithfully trekked through snow to ask all the neighbors if they had lost him, that little dog was instantly mine. Maxwell Perkins, I named him, after the legendary editor.

“I know we don’t need another dog, but we do need an editor,” I told Mark when he arrived home wreathed in snow and gloom from his hard day’s work. He wanted the clinic to be far more than a glorified baby-sitting service for difficult youth. He wanted it to offer genuine therapeutic help, a tall order.

Looking back, it seems we should have seen that Mark’s job was a danger to all of us. He had spent his own years as a troubled teen and now he was counseling youngsters more troubled than he himself had been. He took his work with them very seriously and their cases would weigh on him well after the long drive home. With our horses and our skiing, Domenica and I were living in wonderland. Mark was living in an increasingly dark terrain, where it seemed no amount of strength or wisdom was sufficient.

Mark didn’t really have an answer. While I thought of his counselor’s job as something that would lend credibility to his future dust jackets, Mark was feeling less and less like a writer. More and more, he felt defined by his ill-paying work. He began to internalize the turbulence of his wards. His optimism was leached away.

I was accustomed to Mark’s strength and resilience. He was so clearly an artist to me that I could not understand his identity becoming confused. He had a wonderful idea for a new book, The Prodigal Father. In it he would argue for a return of fathers who had abandoned their children. He felt he had abandoned his own son.

Increasingly Mark became absorbed in the subject matter of his book. He found Taos to be a town filled with abandoned children. Single mothers were everywhere. Fathers were few and far between. It wasn’t long before Mark, with his characteristic charisma, had attracted a small band of bright, fatherless boys who looked to him for guidance.

So Mark would teach the boys how to wax a car. He took an interest in their stories. If they craved a father, Mark himself craved fathering. He was Pied Piper to a band of adolescent boys. The writer in him would hear their stories of abandonment. The counselor in him would try to help.

I wanted to say, “But we just got here! We’re home! We can make a life here through writing and teaching.” Instead, I listened to Mark’s dreams with a growing sense of unease. He wasn’t happy and I didn’t know how to make him happy. Listening to his dream of further education, I wondered if it wasn’t too late for that. He had been president of his class, a brilliant young man bound for the Ivy League, when he got his girlfriend Patty pregnant. They married in disgrace. His dreams of Harvard had been buried under the reality of teen fatherdom. He had lost that early marriage and with it contact with his son. Patty had soon remarried and Mark was displaced by the new father.

Couldn’t he accept these terrible losses and move on? I wondered. Couldn’t he try to make a new life with me and Domenica? I was blind to the depth of Mark’s yearning, his deep-seated desire to make something of himself and in terms that meant something to him. Where I had my artist’s identity, Mark had a deep respect for academia. Where I had Domenica, Mark had the haunting absence of his own son, Scott.

And then Scott reentered Mark’s life. He turned eighteen and his mother gave him the long-accumulated letters. In them he read of Mark’s desire to know him, to be a real father and not just some shadow from Scott’s childhood. After grappling with his deep distrust, Scott, like Mark, reached out. A link was forged. Scott came west for a weeklong visit. In the photographs of that visit, Scott and Mark look almost like brothers. Mark was that young when he fathered him.

The bond that was forged by that visit was quickly tested. Scott was a troubled young man who needed every pinch of guidance Mark could give him. Mark, for his part, longed to be able to give more than mere guidance. He wanted money, lots of money, enough to pay for Scott’s education, enough to somehow make up for the years apart.

Domenica took to her stepbrother with an open heart. In some ways she seemed older and wiser than Scott, certainly more settled in a stable identity. Mark worried that the two young people would fall in love. He feared a repeat of his own teen years for Scott. Domenica, happy with the boy she was dating, was baffled and offended by Mark’s concerns. She was glad to have a brother. She didn’t need another boyfriend.

Winter closed in. We were in a snowy world that seemed a million miles from Chicago. I missed my friends Laura and Sonia, while Mark missed his friend Gary, who had been our best man. Domenica missed Dan Evans, a neighborhood boy who had been such a good friend to her back in Chicago, but she did something about it—she invited Dan to join us in Taos for Christmas break.

It was on a snowy morning just after Christmas that Dan came inside to find Domenica and say, “Your horse Walter is lying down in the snow. Is that normal?” It was not normal. Walter was in the throes of a bad, potentially deadly colic. Mark rushed to his side and heaved Walter to his feet. “C’mon, boy. Walk with me,” he pleaded. “Walk with me.” Walter took a few unsteady steps. Domenica and I frantically phoned the vet.

“We have an emergency,” we told Tim Johnson, the vet, who sprang into his truck and drove the ten miles from his clinic to our little ranch. Mark managed to keep Walter on his feet but staggering. The vet arrived and gave Walter a powerful shot of bute. We waited but Walter was still in agony—nothing Dr. Johnson did seemed to help.

And so we loaded Walter into the vet’s trailer and followed caravan style in our cars. At the Albuquerque clinic, the operation was long and tricky. Several feet of Walter’s intestine were removed. It was touch and go, but Walter was tough, and with Domenica at his side begging him to pull through, he valiantly turned the corner back to life and made it.

Winter shifted into spring. Turbulent winds swept the valley. Turbulent winds swept our household as well. Mark was increasingly distraught over his job working with adolescents. He had many ideas about how to improve the facility but lacked the clout to see his changes implemented. Increasingly he saw Domenica in terms of the pathologies he dealt with all day.

As the atmosphere around our house persistently darkened, so did my own writing terrain. One more time taking up the tale of Elliot Mayo, I found myself writing a story of sexual obsession. Elliot was involved with strippers and small-time thugs. This world was tawdry and dark. Northern New Mexico was coming into bloom, but I was living on the mean streets of Chicago.

One Sunday morning Mark spotted an article in the Santa Fe paper that talked about Joseph Di Pienza, a visionary educator who was building a film school with the help of Greer Garson. “Call him,” Mark urged me. “You could teach for him.” The idea of being involved with a film school was very attractive to me. I called Di Pienza, who promptly hired me. It was a 150-mile round-trip commute through the treacherous canyon to teach in Santa Fe one night a week, but oddly, the long trip seemed worth it. It kept me with one foot in the outer world. Santa Fe was less isolated and more sophisticated than Taos. It fit better with Mark’s picture of what success looked like, and working again within a filmmaking community gave me a sense of continuity that was important to me. With family life feeling precarious, I one more time turned to work for a sense of stability and self-esteem.

That spring it felt like all three of us were searching for something. We were restless. We were frustrated. We were discontent. Mark, Domenica, Julia—we all yearned for a bond that seemed to elude us. One Saturday Mark surprised me and Domenica by taking us on an excursion to a nearby Morgan farm. He knew how we loved horses and Morgan horses in particular. He thought the adventure would do us all good.

Unlike most of New Mexico’s ranches, which featured barbed wire and unpainted boards, Roy-El Morgan Farm sported snowy white fences and carefully cultivated gardens. The main house was a graceful adobe, and beyond it lay the paddocks and show barns, home to fifty-plus very fancy horses. The matriarch of this domain was a gracious and elegant woman named Elberta Honstein. Her daughter, Debbie Seebold, functioned as a trainer of champions. Mark, Domenica, and I entered the biggest barn as if we were entering wonderland. Row by row the alert and polished Morgans extended their velvet muzzles to our touch.

With that, Mistery was led from his stall. We drew in our collective breath. At sixteen-two hands, he was tall for a Morgan and he was growing still, Debbie assured us. He had a finely chiseled head and an extra inch or two of neck—ideal for jumping.

Taking Mistery turned out to involve certain prerequisites. Elberta Honstein wanted to be assured that we could safely handle such a green horse, and so she required Domenica and me to come for a series of lessons. Under Debbie’s watchful eye, we would each put Mistery through his paces. Lessons finished, we would repair to Elberta’s kitchen for homemade pie. In addition to Elberta and Debbie, there were Debbie’s two daughters, Elberta and Erleen. Domenica loved them immediately, and the feeling was reciprocated. Soon Domenica received invitations to come to the Roy-El Farm and travel with the group to horse shows. This was a great adventure into a specialized world. The Roy-El horses were champions, primped and pampered to perfection. Domenica became an expert groom.

I have photographs of Mistery’s arrival at our little ranch in Taos. He looks like a young prince stepping from the trailer, head held high, surveying his domain. And then there are the pictures of me riding him for the first time. A smile lights my face. Mark has given me my dream horse.

In return I tried to give Mark help and encouragement. While I still thought it was good that he had the structure and the income from the job working with kids, I was always glad when he was writing. He didn’t write as regularly as I did, and when he did, he became happy and excited. His ideas were good, he believed, and worth money. Time proved him right.

His book idea The Prodigal Father sold for a sizable advance, more than double what we had received for both The Artist’s Way and Money Drunk/Money Sober. This was cause for celebration, proof that we could make it as writers, but Mark kept the money to himself. I was hurt and baffled by this decision, another clue that we were no longer a unit moving together in an agreed-upon direction. Although I still couldn’t see it clearly, Mark’s job made him feel small. He needed to feel—and was—someone far larger.

Spring in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is an erratic time, cold one day and warm the next. Spring flowers bloom, only to be buried under snow. The snow melts quickly and the flowers blaze again. In our marriage, Mark and I were experiencing the same tricky weather. Our trust in each other’s goodwill was being slowly eroded.

As is so often the case with me, I could face on the page what I could not face in life. I set my hand to writing a marital tragedy, The Animal in the Trees. The play that emerged was dark and bleak. The female lead was a selfish woman—a charge that I was leveling at myself.

Seeking any avenue that might lead us to some spiritual comfort, Mark and I attended an evening prayer circle run by Larry Lonergan, a spiritualist medium. The circle met in a small room with large windows looking out to the Sacred Mountain. When the time of the service came for messages, Larry, a tall, good-natured man, faced me gravely. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “Your marriage will not endure.” Wind rattled the windows, but my shiver was more than physical. Both Mark and I were irate at these bad tidings. We had gone to the circle seeking comfort. We left more estranged than ever.

Mark continued to work at the clinic, and the work environment there steadily worsened. By temperament an idealist and a visionary, he felt increasingly at risk. Many nights he would come home from work angry. Domenica and I were unable to cheer him up. He projected his work difficulties onto us. We became the enemy. He suspected us of the worst behavior. We got tired of protesting our innocence.

I, too, wanted Mark to remember. I was his loyal wife, wasn’t I? I was in his corner, couldn’t he see that? But no, he could not. He began to mistrust me in my friendships with men. Stubbornly I fought his suspicions just as I had with Martin’s. I thought I had a track record of loyalty and that I didn’t deserve to be questioned, but Mark was questioning everything. His writing was hard and came in fits and starts. His long days at the clinic left him with little creative energy. He was often snappish and discontent. There was no luring him out now for a family horseback ride. “Fun” had left his vocabulary.

Spring moved toward summer. My father planned to come for a long visit. I flew to Florida to drive back with him. When I got off the plane, he met me looking tiny and frail. A handsome man, he was aging suddenly and dramatically. His chestnut hair had turned to silver. His beard was grizzled. I wanted very much for my father to think everything was all right. He had, after all, bought us our house. I wanted him to think it was a happy one.

Mark and I had continued to teach creative unblocking. In our last class before I left for Florida, we had done an exercise called U-turns. In it, we remembered art forms that we had abandoned. Doing it with the class, it suddenly dawned on me that it had been nearly twenty years since I had written a short story. In 1974, I had written a short story called “Zita.” My then best friend Judy Bachrach had read the story and told me, “If you publish this, you will ruin your career.” No matter that I had scant career to worry about at the time. I took Judy’s words to heart and buried the story in a desk drawer, never to write another. Nearly two decades had ticked past. I had written in many other forms but never another story.

And so, as my father drove the long miles across the panhandle, I scribbled in my notebook. It was a short story, the first of twenty-odd short stories that came through one right after another, like planes landing on a newly cleared runway. I was ecstatic. I loved writing short stories again. My father was amused and patient. The stories would become my book Popcorn: Hollywood Stories.

“Oh, Julie B. This is very nice,” my father said as he made his way through the house to the large covered porch that looked north to Taos Mountain. We had positioned some comfortable chairs, a picnic table, and an ashtray for him. Wobbly, he took a seat. His demeanor immediately set off Mark’s alarms. Mark’s father had run military hospitals, and Mark knew sick when he saw it.

Domenica was late to arrive home. She had lately, very happily, discovered the attentions of Ken and Nancy Jenkins, a husband-and-wife teaching pair who directed many of the high school’s drama productions. With the Jenkinses, Domenica was suddenly swimming in her own water, cast in a production of Winnie the Pooh.

But Mark was right to take Dad’s difficulties seriously. Over the next few days my father visibly weakened. I did not want to believe that the altitude was too much for my father. It had simply never occurred to me. Buying the Taos place, I planned that my father would, as he always did, spend summers with me. Casting ahead, I thought that when he was “old,” he would come to live with me—but not if he couldn’t breathe.

Over the next week we tried everything to make Dad comfortable. Nothing helped. His shortness of breath was chronic. Finally, at Mark’s insistence, we took him to a doctor. “Has anyone else mentioned emphysema?” the doctor wondered. He fitted Dad with an oxygen inhaler.

My father was a tough and feisty little man. Rather than submit to the diagnosis, he made one of his own. He would leave. And so, after what felt like the briefest of visits, he got into his little Probe and headed north to Colorado, where he would turn east toward Chicago. We got a call from him from Fort Collins, Colorado. He was lost. Could I come north, find him, and drive to Chicago with him? I said I could. Mark drove me to Fort Collins, where I found my father at a little motel, still short of breath.

It took several days to drive my father to Chicago. Mark held down the fort with Domenica but, as always happened when I was absent awhile, they wanted me to hurry back. Once in Chicago with my father and my siblings, I found it was not so simple as just hurrying back. My father went to see another doctor. This time the diagnosis was worse. Yes, he had emphysema, but he also had a tumor on one lung. The tumor was inoperable and presumed cancerous. It would take a while, but my father would die. He declined treatment of any kind. He did not want radiation or chemotherapy. He wanted simply—and stubbornly—for his allotted days to run their course. There was no budging him from his decision. He would die a “natural” death, and when he did die, his remains would be willed to science. He had made up his mind.

I flew back to Taos, leaving half my heart in Chicago with my father. I found Mark deeply troubled by his work—or his lack of it. The clinic continued to be in the throes of upheaval. “I see what we ought to do, but I am low man on the totem pole,” he complained—correctly. In the meantime Domenica was invited to spend much of the summer traveling with the Honsteins and their horses. She was thrilled by this opportunity. The horse-show world was an exciting one, and the Honsteins usually came home champions. For my part, I was glad to see Domenica with something to focus on other than boys. If her horsey world meant she would be a late bloomer, so be it.

Summer in Taos is marked by sudden storms, and I began to feel that our household was also seized by sudden squalls. Mark and I began fighting. He lashed out at me out of frustration at his world. I was frustrated by his frustration. Why couldn’t he be happier? It seemed to me he was writing well, and writing well always made me happy. But not Mark. Our world was too narrow and claustrophobic and provincial for him. He began to feel our life—and life in Taos in general—smacked of escapism.

“How can we make Mark happier?” Domenica and I asked ourselves. Predictably, we came up with a plan that in retrospect seems spectacularly wrongheaded. Instead of saying “Quit your job at the clinic. Write full-time. Go to Harvard if you need to,” we decided he needed more fun in the few leisure hours he had. What was more fun? A horse. We found Mark a beautiful bay mare, a true cowboy’s dream, far more surefooted and trailworthy than Ing, the horse he had been riding. Mark named his new mare Scarlett and seemed to genuinely love her. We took a few long rides as a family with Scarlett leading the way, nimble as a cat. It was quickly clear, however, that Mark was seized by a darkness that no new possession, however wonderful, could touch.

The clinic was becoming an increasingly volatile place. Torn apart by his feelings of conflicted loyalty—he wanted to stay there and help; he wanted to quit and be done with it—Mark soldiered on. Domenica immersed herself in the drama department at school. She was very happy acting instead of acting out, as so many of her peers were. I wasn’t acting out either. I had no desire to have an affair and survive my marriage that way. I did, however, find Mark increasingly difficult company—just as he found me.

My solution to Mark’s and my distance was to try drawing closer to my new Taos friends. They were a wildly varied lot—artists, for the most part and New Age practitioners of many stripes. I was good friends with Larry Lonergan, the spiritualist medium, with my friend Ellen, an astrologer, and with a tarot reader/metaphysician /astrologer named Rhonda Flemming. If the going was rough at my house, I would ask one of them for a reading, hoping to discover some new strategy or, at the very least, some new explanation. I didn’t eat out. I didn’t buy expensive souvenir trinkets. Readings were my one indulgence, one that Mark greeted with a curious mix of open-mindedness and skepticism. Increasingly he made late evening phone calls to his old friends back in Chicago, many of them traders. As I tried to work on the small picture, Mark tried to work on the big picture. As I tried to burrow more deeply into our new home, he threw himself lines back to our old life, where his version of himself had made more sense to him. I knew Mark was tormented, but I didn’t know how to ease his torment. I would try to lure him into our new life, only to have him reject it. Many of my new friends struck him as flakes. He hated to see me being “gullible.”

As I always had, I turned again to nature for solace. I began taking the dogs on long walks through the sagebrush. Mark had found us a 1965 Chevy pickup truck that I named Louise. I would herd the dogs into the back of the truck and drive to a deserted dirt road, where I would pull over and let the dogs run free. No matter where I walked, Taos Mountain dominated my view. “Please, God,” I would pray in its direction. “Please guide me. Please show me what to do.”

I struck up a friendship with a café owner named Dori Vinella. A tall, warm, golden-haired woman, she was a pillar of the Taos community. I began going to Dori’s café, home to many writers, to work. I would sit at one out-of-the-way table and John Nichols at another, both of us toiling away with words. We didn’t speak to each other, just nodded acknowledgment, “You again.” Both of us wanted our “office” to be private.

Although she catered to writers, Dori herself did not write. “I am just a muse,” she would laughingly say. But what a muse! Nichols’s work poured forth, a steady writerly stream. For my part, I asked Dori how she would feel if I hosted a poetry night once a week in her café. She was game, and so “Wordplay” was inaugurated, gathering a half dozen to a dozen poets weekly, sharing our works in progress at an open mic.

The Artist’s Way had been out nearly a year and was slowly and surely gathering momentum as a word-of-mouth best seller. Even before the book was published internationally, Artist Way groups began popping up on the Internet. We learned there were clusters forming in the jungles of Panama, in Australia, all over the British Isles. In America, demand for the book consistently outstripped the size of the modest printings. Potential readers had to order the book and then wait weeks for delivery. The first of what would be a steady stream of thank-you letters began to arrive, forwarded from Tarcher.

Odd little packets began to arrive. People would send children’s books, slides of their sculpture, greeting cards, and even decks of tarot cards they had designed. I would get small boxes containing thank-you earrings or necklaces, all handmade by artists newly at work or back at work. Sometimes we would get a video: “This is the film that I shot” or “This is the pilot for my TV show.” Sales climbed past one hundred thousand and began picking up velocity. “Do you teach workshops?” inquiries came in. Yes, we did teach workshops. I began to travel and teach.

Meanwhile, Mark continued to work at the ever-more-volatile mental health clinic. In his evening and weekend hours he was writing The Prodigal Father, but his editor was proving to be a difficult and capricious man, wanting first one thing and then another. There was little satisfaction to be found anywhere. No amount of beautiful scenery could console Mark for his lack of meaningful work. Increasingly, he felt Taos was a dead end for him. He was underemployed, working more, he felt, as a glorified jailer than a counselor. This bruised his idealism as well as his ego. Furthermore, the facility felt more and more like a powder keg to him, with sharp divisions among the staff.

What we needed in all of this was a little comic relief. It came to us in the form of a Brittany spaniel whom we named Jake. To begin with, Jake specialized in breaking and entering. We would come home and find Jake mysteriously in the house. He had leapt in through an open window or slipped in through an unlocked door. (Security in Taos was loose.) Or we would sit down to dinner and find Jake staring soulfully at us through the window. Jake was a beautiful dog, clearly purebred, and we could not believe he was truly homeless. Sure enough, a little footwork revealed that he belonged to a gay couple who lived across the field from us, although he clearly felt he belonged with us. We became used to Jake’s visits. We would round him up and return him to his owners, only to have him reappear the next day. One day no Jake appeared. We missed him. Another day went by and then another with still no Jake, and we began to get worried. Finally Mark burst out, “You don’t think they’ve taken him to the pound, do you?” We were alarmed. Yes, Jake was annoying and intrusive, but he was also lovable—so lovable, we went to the pound. Yes, there was Jake, whom we promptly adopted.

Safe back at home, officially our dog, Jake took his duties very seriously. First things first, there was the matter of the cat, Mangela, a plump black cat Domenica had adopted. Jake couldn’t accept the presence of the cat. His manner said, “How could our other dogs have neglected the important priority of ridding the house of cats?” Jake took after Mangela with a vengeance. Mangela began hiding on Domenica’s closet shelf.

“You have a choice,” I told Domenica. “Either Mangela or Jake but not both.” After tearful deliberation, Domenica chose Jake and we found Mangela a home with a woman who doted on her—and bragged ever after about how much happier she was with her than with us.

Jake was an excitable, emotional dog and he quickly became Mark’s alter ego and companion. When we went horseback riding, Jake would come along, ranging in great speedy loops ahead and behind us. Mark would hoot with pride at his dog’s antics. At moments I would hope that all was well with us again, but these moments were fleeting.

An uneasy spring and difficult summer turned to fall. Mark and I began coteaching at the College of Santa Fe. Thanks to Joseph Di Pienza’s vision, The Artist’s Way became a required course for all incoming freshmen. It was exciting to teach together again. Watching our students blossom was like having a vast and varied garden. We enjoyed the flowering.

We were not alone in noticing our success. Mark was approached by a Santa Fe mover and shaker, the man who had franchised est. What would we think, the man wondered, about franchising The Artist’s Way? How would I like to be a huge success like Tony Robbins? He made millions, and, so we were told, there were millions to be made. Mark was very interested. To him money was an integral part of success. He was an entrepreneur at heart. I was not.

“Mark, I will never make art if I have to administer a financial kingdom,” I told him. “If I have to worry about who is paying us our fee and whether or not they are doing things properly, I won’t have the time or energy to be an artist anymore.”

Mark disagreed. He thought of the Artist’s Way as an entrepreneurial venture, a product he wanted to develop to its fullest commercial potential. I thought of the Artist’s Way much more in terms of a movement like AA. I thought it could grow by itself with very little centralized guidance. I didn’t want to be a clearing-house for problems and questions. I felt the book itself was guidance enough.

Looking back, it is easy to see that our issues around the Artist’s Way indicated great differences in our personal identities. As an artist, I thought of the Artist’s Way as being like a work of art—it could stand on its own. As an entrepreneur, Mark thought of it as a brainchild that needed nurturing and guidance to be properly exploited.

I had dedicated The Artist’s Way to Mark and truly felt that without his stubborn instigation it might not have been written. It was Mark who first envisioned the importance of the book and, as sales continued climbing toward the million mark and beyond—two million plus as I write this—Mark hungered for credit for the work he had done. We had, after all, stood shoulder to shoulder printing and binding the early copies of the book. We had taught together using the text that I had written but that Mark had insisted be written.

When the Artist’s Way concept began exploding into more and more clusters all over the Internet, Mark’s frustration reached the boiling point. “We should at least have a Web site of our own,” he insisted. I wanted none of it. I felt that if we had a Web site we would have e-mail and that if we had e-mail to answer no art would get made. I needed to protect my writing time and my identity as an artist, not as a teacher. Mark, on the other hand, hungered to teach and advise. My position was thwarting his true nature.

Domenica was cast in The Skin of Our Teeth, and her father flew into Taos to catch her performance. He stayed uptown at the posh Taos Inn. His presence set the town abuzz. Domenica was thrilled that he had come to see her, but now she was identifiably the child of someone famous. She had enrolled in Taos High School under the name Domenica Cameron, so her father’s arrival on the scene shattered her anonymity. Fortunately, Taos was more able to take Martin’s identity in stride than Chicago had been. Taos, after all, was a town filled with artists, some of them famous in their own right, all of them too hip to be visibly starstruck.

Martin’s visit went well, to my relief. He returned not too long afterward to share Christmas break with Domenica. We decided to give him a Christmas experience that he could not get in New York. With Mark at the wheel and the rest of us bundled up to our necks, we drove into the mountains to harvest a Christmas tree in the deep snow. We were determined to show Martin the magic of Taos. I wanted him to approve of the life Domenica was having far from the glare of the urban spotlight where his celebrity was a constant and very difficult variable.

The winter deepened. Intense snowfalls made Mark’s commute difficult and dangerous. I would hover near the door when he was overdue home, as if I could will him into safety. I could no more will him into safety than I could will him into happiness. We had sudden sharp, escalating fights that seemed to come from out of nowhere and take us no place good. We tried, in our good moments, to work on our fighting style. We would be much happier if we just called each other “you dumb jerk” rather than taking out our intellectual rapiers.

Domenica had found a new group of friends featuring four hyperbright boys: Ezra, Ian, Justin, and Louie. More and more often, the boys came to our house for their after-school relaxation. Mark was as much a part of the draw as Domenica. He drew the boys out in long conversations. Domenica, understandably wanting to be the focus of their attention, began to feel meddled with. Her concerns were largely brushed aside. Sober, articulate, and interested, Mark seemed to fill a void in the boys’ lives. Could that be bad?

In the meantime, Domenica and I both felt a void in our life with Mark. If there had been some slogan like “The family that plays together, stays together,” we might have been able to put language to our feelings. The darkness from Mark’s job was a cloud overshadowing our lives. He would come home from work tired and discouraged. In his new clinical language, a language he would use when we fought, I thought Mark was suffering from “depression.” Call it that or call it the mean reds, he was not himself and we could not seem to lure him back from the abyss.

While Mark was trying to just survive a life he no longer liked or understood, I was trying to make a new life for myself in Taos. From the classes that we taught, I gathered a small group of friends: Dori, Sambhu Vaughan, and Peter Ziminsky. From my spiritual explorations, I found others: Larry and Rhonda and Pam Hogan. From my poetry nights, I garnered still others. From my days writing at Dori’s, I eventually made the acquaintance of John Nichols. A splendid writer, he captured my admiration. He had enjoyed great success as a young novelist, publishing both The Sterile Cuckoo and The Wizard of Loneliness, then endured a long dry spell. Throughout his publishing drought, he continued to write, and eventually his fortunes turned again with the success of The Milagro Beanfield War, adapted to film by Robert Redford. A seriously political man, Nichols additionally collaborated with Costa-Gavras on Missing. Like me, John wrote daily, year in and year out. Sitting across the room at Dori’s Café, I felt a sense of camaraderie and shared values.

Mark had a difficult time with my affection for John. He worried—and I think correctly—that I romanticized him. When John fell ill, I did whatever I could think of to help him, making pots of homemade soup and the occasional pie. The truth was, there was no need for me to play Florence Nightingale. John had a beautiful young lover who hovered near his side. A flamenco dancer, Miel was sensual enough to rally any man’s will to live.

If my friendship with Nichols was hard for Mark, my friendship with Crawford Tall proved to be a breaking point. Like me, Crawford had a hard-drinking past, and like me, he was determined to stay sober. Both of us had shared drinking time with Hunter Thompson, and we shared a sense of humor as well. Just at that moment, we needed it. My household was tense. Crawford’s life was worse. He was in love with a woman named Susan who was embroiled in a nasty divorce.

To me, Crawford was a colleague and comrade in arms. A bush pilot and builder, to Mark he was a charismatic figure who had captured my imagination. I felt that I was a needed sounding board for Crawford. To my eye, we were helping each other to stay sober. Mark turned a deaf ear to my explanations.

But Mark would have none of it. He felt I was out of line pursuing a friendship with Crawford, to his eyes an available single man. He felt I was engaging in “emotional infidelity,” an emotional if not physical affair. With Mark on the warpath, I became both defensive and rebellious. I deserved to be trusted, didn’t I? I had a right to friends. If he felt better about himself, he wouldn’t feel so bad about John or Crawford. He should look to himself, not me. I felt he was policing my behavior and indulging himself in sophomoric jealousy at my expense. He was paranoid, I thought, and I was determined not to give in to his demands, which I saw as controlling.

Then Mark announced that he wanted to take a trip to Chicago. With a strange feeling of foreboding, I watched him drive away from our house. Officially, I thought it was good that he take the time to go to see old friends. But as the days of his trip ticked by, I couldn’t shake my sense of apprehension. There was nothing I could articulate, but something felt very, very wrong. Then Martin called to talk to Domenica and I found myself suddenly spilling out my heart to him.

“Martin, I think he’s going to come back from Chicago and leave me!” I sobbed. Martin listened carefully. “My marriage is over. I know it.” This was the first time I had articulated such a fear, even to myself, but as I wept, it felt less like a fear than an inevitable reality. Mark was going to leave me. He had gone back to Chicago to gather his resolve.

Mark phoned from Chicago. He sounded like his old self, warm and humorous. His visit had been great, but he was coming home. He missed me. The call was warm and comforting. There was no mention of a divorce. I chalked up my fears to a writer’s overactive imagination and was glad to open the door to him when he returned, genial as a big bear, happy to see me, filled with greetings from the friends he had seen, friends we had shared.