Floor Sample

As John had so keenly known, without work to do, Los Angeles was a beautiful hell. In the weeks that followed, Emma and I both felt displaced. I had my old friends, but they had lives of their own and their careers were well established. Missing her close friendships in New York, Emma was lonely in Los Angeles and often complained that she felt invisible there. I felt visible only as a name brand, the Artist’s Way author. Without John to help me, I did not feel visible as an artist. I felt I had lost me as well as him. Our relationship had been an important part of my artistic identity. He believed in me as a playwright. Now I wondered who I really was. Life without John felt both foreign and undoable.

But life did go on—and it sometimes seemed John still had a ghostly hand in it. Shortly after John’s death, Emma and I were contacted by Marcus Kettles, a New York producer, who listened to the ghost songs and wondered if we wanted a New York reading for our work. By then we were calling the show The Medium at Large, and we were delighted to be offered an opportunity to move it forward. Kettles offered to produce a reading for us in the fall. The reading was back in Manhattan, which we had so recently left behind. Emma was exultant. Manhattan! At least there we had an artistic identity.

The call from Kettles threw me into conflict. Los Angeles felt like a dead end to me. It held my past but not my future. What was I doing there? I fretted. Despite my sober friends, despite the presence of Jeremy Tarcher, my editor, I simply didn’t feel I belonged there without John. He was symbolic to me of both safety and opportunity. Now I missed them both. The reading Kettles offered was a tantalizing carrot. The world we had left behind seemed to loom once again in our future. Maybe I had been wrong to leave New York. As the days wore on, as John’s absence grew more and more real, Los Angeles seemed ever less a fit.

Meanwhile, Emma and I went through our paces daily, writing words and music, but there was no place to land the work once it was done. Los Angeles is a hard town for theater, especially musical theater, and John Newland was a hard act to follow. Increasingly, Emma missed New York and I again, stubbornly, missed New Mexico. She yearned for anonymity and crowds. I yearned for familiarity and wide open spaces. Increasingly, both of us felt alienated from Los Angeles. Although it prides itself on having diverse culture—and more than before, now it does—Los Angeles remains a one-industry town and we were not “in the business.” Instead of feeling “a part of,” we felt our noses were pressed to the candy store window. We were outsiders without John to mount productions, and every day that felt more clear.

As we became less and less comfortable in Los Angeles as a whole, the coziness of the little Nowita Place neighborhood felt nosy and intrusive to us. For our comfortable neighbors, we were the object of gossip and disapproval. Burnt-out and burned up, we decided to take the dogs and drive to Taos for a vacation. We left Los Angeles on April Fools’ Day.

It is two short days or one long one from Los Angeles to Taos, and Emma and I chose to drive slowly. We were both thrilled to leave Los Angeles behind us. Although we were not yet quite admitting it, our transplant there had failed. We were eager to be back in the West again instead of on the coast. Halfway to Taos, we pulled into a barbecue restaurant. Cowboys slouched against the bar. The jukebox played country and western.

No, Taos was not L.A. It was Taos, and this time Emma and I stayed at my familiar and beloved El Pueblo. This time we had the dogs with us, and the El Pueblo gave us what passed for a penthouse, an A-frame condominium looking out at Taos Mountain. I set up a writing table facing the mountain and was dimly aware that I was imitating my earlier self. Nearly twenty years before, Morning Pages had begun at a similar table facing the same mountain.

Emma and I quickly settled in to a Taos routine. It involved long and beautiful walks and long and fruitful days at the page. I was ecstatic to be back in Taos, amid my friends. And yet, if I had missed John in Los Angeles, I missed him even more back home in Taos. I kept expecting to see his white Blazer. I thought I would spot him turning a corner. I phoned his good friend Nancy Jenkins and together we commiserated over missing him. “There’s just no one else like him, is there?” Nancy asked me. No, there was not.

Taos did, however, have some newcomers who were a welcome addition to the mix. Two of director John Huston’s children, Tony and Allegra, had recently taken up residency. I met them with eagerness, happy that Taos had more filmmakers. Out of all the world, I could understand why they had settled there. They had grown up in Ireland, and Taos shared with Ireland a poetic, even mythic, beauty.

As the days ticked past, I found myself reluctant to leave. I was due back in Los Angeles for a large book event, but I didn’t want to go back, and I particularly didn’t want to go back to public appearances and speeches. My mental health was more tenuous than I cared to admit. Just picturing the long drive back to Los Angeles brought this home to me. Nearly daily I spoke with the Sedona healer. Did she really think I was getting better? She prescribed more and more potions, but I was feeling worse.

My words turned out to be prophetic. I had a telephone radio tour to do, and after fourteen hours on the phone, talking with a dozen different interviewers, I was exhausted and shaking. Catching sight of myself in the mirror, I looked both pale and frail. This was something worse than mere fatigue. With growing apprehension I toted up my symptoms. One more time I found myself feeling increased sensitivity to electricity. One more time nature began to glow and speak. I felt inexplicably weak and my appetite one more time disappeared. I didn’t call what was happening to me a breakdown, but I was breaking down and Emma knew it. Our escape to Taos had merely masked my condition.

“Beautiful” was the consolation prize. Officially a best-selling author and at least a semipublic figure, I privately felt that public life was too much for me. Let me live simply and simply write, I told myself. I told Emma the same thing. We would still work on music, I promised her. Telling herself that was enough, telling herself I needed her, Emma soldiered on—but she was worried. Trying to lift my spirits, she kept her worries to herself.

My friend Dori wanted to sell her old adobe house and move into town. Dori’s house was five miles outside Taos in Arroyo Seco, a tiny, picturesque village. The house featured views of the Sacred Mountain and a tiny old campos santos. Huge willow trees graced the property and lilacs guarded the drive. It was a retreat in the best sense of the word. I had always loved Dori’s house, and I resolved to buy it. Without bickering, we quickly settled on a price. If I sold the Virginia farm, I could just swing it.

Thrilled that I would have a Taos home again, and one I loved, I arranged to have a sober alcoholic friend pack up my Nowita Place cottage and ship all of my and Emma’s belongings straight to Taos. When the truck arrived, all of our furniture fit into place as if it had been bought to fill the house. With two separate wings, one for Emma and one for me, the house felt both spacious and cozy. From my little crimson writing room, I could watch a field full of Arabian horses grazing. Like my fragile father, I took consolation and joy in nature’s creatures.

If I felt at home in Arroyo Seco, Emma felt more at home when the Taos School of Music reconvened atop the ski valley. There were concerts two nights a week, and Emma’s favorite teacher, a concert pianist named Robert McDonald, was back in residence. Emma and I invited him for dinner. He was tall, thin, lively, and engaging. After dinner he stayed on until midnight, merrily chasing the conversation wherever it galloped.

With his crystalline playing and ready wit, McDonald became for me an immediate muse. When he played, I felt I could hear the actual architecture of the music he was playing. “I’ve been told that,” he remarked mildly. He instantly catalyzed my music to pour forth.

“That man is like Magic Johnson at the keys,” Nave commented. I agreed. I wrote a series of songs I called simply, The Bob McDonald Songs. They were beautiful and structurally more complex than anything else I had yet attempted. “I wish I could speak music,” the lyric to one of them ran. Trying to speak music to McDonald, I wrote song after song. Every morning I would now write a “flower song.” Every afternoon Emma would harmonize and arrange the morning’s work. Ours was a productive household.

After lunch it was time to take the dogs for their walk, and the walks were now more adventurous than mere rambles through the sagebrush. A small river came crashing down the mountain from the Taos Ski Valley. Every afternoon the dogs and I would wade up that river. “Trout hunting,” I called it, and we often surprised foot-long beauties at their ease. Looking back, it was dangerous, venturing out into the forest with just the little dogs for company. The wilderness held both bears and coyotes. Then, too, there was the constant danger of snakes. I saw no rattlesnakes on our walks that summer, although I saw more than my fair share of garter snakes and little water snakes enjoying the river. The dogs weren’t afraid of snakes, and I had to call to them to stay away.

One of the graces of being back in New Mexico was being within driving distance of my friend Elberta Honstein. Once a week, more often if we could swing it, Emma and I loaded the dogs into my little Honda SUV and drove down the twisting canyon to Espanola, home of the Honsteins’ Roy-El Morgan Farm. Once there, Elberta would greet us with homemade green chili stew and freshly baked pie. She would watch patiently as Emma learned the rudiments of riding. I would sit in her calming presence and feel myself drawing back from the brink. Elberta embodied an optimistic faith. I tried to emulate her. Sometimes I would tell her of my worries.

June and July swept past. Emma made a whirlwind trip to New York to consult with Marcus Kettles and to visit with Max Showalter, sadly failing at his home in Connecticut. I felt too shaky to go. Still plucky and upbeat with only two more weeks to live, Max had pointed Emma toward some signed mementos to him from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. As a young man, he had been Hammerstein’s protégé.

“Always ask them for help,” Max gravely advised Emma. He told her that he himself often sought the guidance of his famous friends who had passed over. “Meet me at dawn,” he would often tell them before he slept at night. In the morning he would get up to write, feeling their inspirational companionship. Emma returned to Taos strengthened by his spiritual beliefs.

Suddenly it was August and time for Bob McDonald to return to New York. We watched his final concert with regret. He had been such good company that we felt suddenly bereft. Taos, after all, was a small town and we had big-city dreams. Even with each other and our work for company, we often felt lonely there. Late in the afternoon the loneliness would hit, and we would clamber into the car and drive uptown to visit our friend Larry Lonergan, the medium.

“Yes, and they’ll miss you, but they’ll be fine. You’ve got business to take care of in New York.” Larry faithfully pointed us toward True North. Although he loved having us in Taos, he did not necessarily believe we belonged there. Faced with my recurrent fragility, he wondered—as Sonia did—if the energy of a big city didn’t help me to stay on track. Emma, too, longed for New York—specifically, New York doctors. She was growing leery of New Age practitioners and what she considered their exotic formulas.

With the cottonwoods turning yellow and the aspen turning gold, Emma and I faced time on the road. Ten cities loomed ahead of us with New York at the very end. We were excited to rendezvous there with Bob McDonald and also with our new mentor and friend, Bruce Pomahac, music director of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization. Bruce had entered our life through Max, who had listened to our rough recording of Avalon and then phoned Bruce in excitement. “You’ve got to help these girls, Bruce,” Max had said. Bruce in his turn had listened to Avalon and agreed, saying of one song, “This could earn you girls an Oscar.” We clung to these compliments like talismans of our future. But first we had to tour.

I worried about the tour: airplanes and airports; crowds and questions and hotel rooms. And yet I was excited to go. Due to Emma’s steadfast company and my actual love of teaching, I have often found book tours to be as rewarding as they are difficult. Nervous as I was, this tour proved to be no exception. A city at a time, a crowd at a time, we made our way cross-country.

It takes resilience to survive a book tour, and Emma and I arrived in New York a little tattered and worn. We were offered refuge at Bruce Pomahac’s house, and we took him up on it for a week. Bruce lives in the heart of the theater district, and just being there with him made our dreams feel more real. After a week we moved to our old favorite, the Hotel Olcott. It was time to rehearse for our reading of The Medium at Large, and the Upper West Side was convenient for the actors and music director.

They say that it takes seven years to shape a musical. Emma and I were in our second year of work on the show, and it was time to hear what we had. All plays play differently than they read but none more so than musicals. We could have something or nothing at all. By doing a reading in New York, using real Broadway talent, we would have the chance to evaluate what we had.

The reading went very well. Our score was tuneful and catchy. The ballads were lovely. The book was funny. “You’ve got something, girls,” the verdict came back to us, which led us to our very next question: Now what? In the wake of the reading, Emma and I soon realized what Larry had been suggesting to us all along: that we could not go back to New Mexico. There was no future for our show there. At best we might swing a workshop production, but where would that get us? No, our time in New Mexico had led us squarely back to New York. We decided to get an apartment and try our luck. In the meantime, we camped out at the Olcott. “I wish we could just stay here,” I would say to Emma, but the Olcott did not take dogs, and Emma and I missed ours.

Few things are as harrowing as searching for an apartment in Manhattan. Emma and I knew we wanted to stay on the Upper West Side, with its density of musicians and performers—not to mention parks for walking. Emma wanted to do advanced studies in conducting and orchestration at Juilliard, and it, too, was in the neighborhood. We looked at apartments that were lovely but in dangerous areas. We looked at apartments that weren’t lovely at all. Finally, our broker told us we could look at a two-year sublease in a building on Riverside Drive. We walked in, saw the large windows overlooking the river and Riverside Park, and thought that for two years at least, we were “home.” The very first thing we did upon moving in was to purchase a good piano. If we were going to work on musicals, we needed a real piano. We bought a fifty-two-inch Petrof upright at the recommendation of Bob McDonald’s piano technician. It had a large, beautiful voice.

Another large, beautiful voice floated through our windows. There was an opera singer in our building, and she rehearsed and taught for hours daily. Far from being annoying, the sound of her voice was inspirational. “What are you doing about your art today?” it asked.

Emma and I were busy with our art indeed. First of all there was Avalon, now ready to go up for sale with all-new arrangements by Emma and a matching demo disk. Next there was The Medium at Large, with which we were constantly tinkering, ready for another reading and needing the sure hand of a wonderful director this time. Then there was Magellan, next up to bat and probably the most beautiful of all. Closer to an opera than a musical, it owed more to La Bohème than it did to The Fantasticks. As we settled into Riverside Drive, it seemed I couldn’t stop writing music. Bob McDonald was one of our neighbors and again a muse. Emma raced to keep up. One more time the music seemed to be good for me. My fears of another breakdown receded.

“Music is good for you,” Bernice, my silver-headed Jungian friend, said. Like my aunt by the same name, Bernice believed in creativity, especially music, as a cure. Even if I weren’t cured, I was certainly better. In between New York and the music, I managed to find elusive stability.

Emma found opera singers and a pianist, and we recorded rough drafts of Magellan. If I felt like an amateur and a musical pretender, the work still sounded glorious. The melodies were beautiful, and in professional hands they were beautiful indeed. Whenever I would say, “I don’t know what I am doing,” Bernice with her eyes twinkling would say, “So do music anyway.” I tried to follow her advice.

Every morning we began our day with dog walking and Morning Pages. After that it was time to sit quietly and ask for guidance. As eccentric as it may sound, we sought daily guidance just as suggested by Max Showalter: we asked for help from him and from his friends Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Sitting quietly, we would take down what we heard and then we would act on it. Very often the advice seemed wiser than anything we could come to on our own.

“Just get to the piano, Julia,” Richard Rodgers repeatedly advised me from the ether. Knowing his own prodigious work habits, such advice seemed likely. Cranky and unwilling, I would go to the piano, only to find a beautiful melody waiting for me. I would take down the melody line and then call to Emma, “Emma, come here! Listen to this one!”Very often “this one” would suit Emma as well.

Tutored by Bruce Pomahac, we began to know something of the history of the American musical. Among many other books, I read Musical Stages, Richard Rodgers’s autobiography. It was clear from his account that what mattered to him first and foremost was the work. Emma and I tried to follow his example. He wrote daily and so did we. From both Rodgers and Hammerstein we learned the value of setting a regular schedule. I would work on music and then, at morning’s end, I would cross to my writing desk, where I was working on a new creativity book, Walking in This World. I would try to write one short essay a day. I tried to hew to the advice of my early sobriety: let God take care of the quality; let me take care of the quantity. The quantity was three daily pages.

By midafternoon Emma and I would be ready for a breather, and Riverside Park lay just outside our front door. “Girls, would you like to take a walk?” we would ask the dogs, and they would come bounding to our sides, tails wagging. We either walked or ran, putting in an hour’s exercise as the sun set through the trees and the river took on its twilight magic. From our windows we could watch boats making their way up and down the Hudson. We could look across the river’s waters to America. For me it was easy to pretend that we were not too far away from Taos, that it lay just to the west, beyond our sight but always there and always waiting for our return.

Emma had no eagerness to return to Taos. She remembered it as lonely and isolated, except for the Taos School of Music, and that convened only eight weeks a year. “I just don’t fit in there,” she would tell me, but I would mention our work and say that we always got vast swaths of it done in the quiet Taos atmosphere.

Nonetheless, I yearned for Taos, and as winter turned to spring and the trees in Riverside Park filled to a bouffant fullness, we decided to spend the summer in Taos, work feverishly on Magellan, and return to New York for the fall. It was mid-May when we set out, the little Honda SUV filled to brimming with all our work, our clothes, and, of course, the dogs. The drive to Taos took five days and was both a respite and a test. It was wonderful to be away from telephones and business. It was scary, wondering on each day’s drive if we would find safe lodging that night for us and the dogs.

Pulling into Taos, crossing the little wooden bridge to our property, was like pulling into another world. The old adobe house stood welcoming us at the end of the drive. The giant willows made green curtains in the air. The lilacs were just budding as we arrived. It was spring, but the nights were still cold and the mornings chill. I was happy to be back in Taos, happy to have the horses grazing outside my window. I was so happy that at first I didn’t realize anything was wrong.

It began as a creeping apprehension that came upon me as I wrote. “I am scared,” I would tell Emma, but I could not tell her what frightened me. When Domenica phoned from L.A., I learned with relief that she was finally moving to a safer building in a safer neighborhood. She was also renting a safe and cozy place in the West Village. Her acting career demanded she be increasingly bi-coastal. Talking to her, I tried to sound normal.

And then something very frightening did happen. My favorite aunt, Bernice, my mother’s older sister, was murdered by her own son, my cousin Jimmy. It was a cocaine-and-alcohol-fueled argument. He shot her point-blank.

I was scheduled to teach creativity camp with Nave, and Aunt Bernice had been slated to attend. She was looking forward to her trip to Taos. She wanted to explore the pueblo. At eighty, she was still lively—and interested in pursuing her creativity. Since my mother’s death, my aunt Bernice had been a mother figure to me—a feisty, funny woman with whom I kept up a lively exchange of letters and books. A daredevil herself, she had been a chemist and pilot during World War II. She had encouraged me in all of my adventures. She remained full of daring. I could not believe she was dead. I still had her voice among my messages.

“Aunt Bernice has been murdered,” I told Emma numbly. From my siblings I learned more and more grisly details. The number of shots. The position of the body. It was impossible not to picture the horror of my aunt’s final moments. She had been shot through the heart.

I called my friend Larry Lonergan. To him, as a medium, death is very matter-of-fact, and I found that he all but overlooked the shocking circumstances of her demise, simply telling me that she was now fine. I needed to hear that, but it did not really help me with my own trauma. Try as I did not to dwell on it, I replayed the death scene over and over. My siblings and cousins told me they did the same. My sister Libby was badly shaken. She e-mailed me updates as they occurred. The news was never good.

I needed my friends and I needed them badly, but some of them were missing in action. I could not find my literary agent, Susan Schulman. She was coping with family emergencies of her own. My friends Dori and Rhonda, normally stalwarts, were also preoccupied with their own life events. Functioning both as a producer and teacher, Nave was busy setting up creativity camp, and when I needed to simply vent, he needed to discuss business. Everywhere I turned, people seemed to have their own agendas. Feeling alienated and alone, I began to complain to Emma that I wasn’t sleeping well. In fact, I was sleeping very little. Then I started to have mysterious stomach pains. They seemed to strike at night, when they were most frightening. My section of the house was far away from Emma’s. I would wake up in pain and then pace and write until morning. Exhausted, I would sleep a few hours.

The pain became chronic. Now I really couldn’t sleep, even in the mornings. My fears mounted, some grounded in reality and others founded on my impression that people seemed quite indifferent to my plight. Emma exhausted herself trying to wrest help from the dysfunctional Taos medical establishment. Was it appendicitis? I wondered. We saw three doctors in a row to no avail. My diagnosis was elusive to them. My condition wasn’t acting like appendicitis. Whatever it was, my pain was nightly and real. For the better part of a month, I slept sketchily, and then, just as it had before, my appetite disappeared.

By then, Emma was talking to Christopher Barley, our New York doctor. She told him about the stomach pains and the sleeplessness and the fact that the Taos doctors had ruled out appendicitis. Dr. Barley listened with mounting alarm. My condition was clearly worsening.

Once more I was afraid of electricity. I begged to be put in a silent, dark room. I wanted to eat only oatmeal. Then I didn’t want to eat at all. I wrapped myself in blankets, turning the kitchen oven to five hundred degrees, claiming I was “cold, cold” and that my heart was going to stop. I started counting my heartbeats. Emma was terrified. Dr. Barley told her I was not about to die of heart failure, that it was mental not physical illness that was the threat. Every day, for no apparent reason, I deteriorated further.

“I don’t know what to do,” Emma would tell Dr. Barley, Gerard, my sister Connie, and my loyal friends Lynnie Lane and Judy Collins—all long distance. They didn’t know what to advise her either, except the impossible: “Try to stay calm.” All I was clinging to was “just don’t drink.” That seemed the one positive I could be assured of. Domenica called me, but I didn’t return her calls. I was afraid of sounding too crazy. My radio silence set off her alarms. She phoned Gerard and she phoned Dr. Barley, both of whom told her to stand by in New York. Anxiously, she waited for news—none was forthcoming.

Emma was reduced to a bodyguard and nurse. Once I escaped her vigilance and ran naked down the drive. She caught up with me and threw a sheet over me. Hysterical now herself, she one more time called Dr. Barley, who said I was having delusions and that it was time to take me to the emergency room. By then he knew how rudimentary Taos health care was and he promised Emma that he would not let them admit me unless they listened to his counsel. Emma called Nave, and together they drove me to the emergency room. I vomited all the way there.

True to his word, Dr. Barley was on the phone to the emergency room staff. They listened—but only up to a point. What they saw was someone delusional, “crazy,” and needing restraints. They tied down my arms and legs. I screamed for help. Emma, hearing my cries, one more time phoned Dr. Barley. He was able to convince the staff to put me in a private room, take off the restraints, and give me some calming Benadryl. Delusional as I was, I was still afraid of drugs. I knew I needed them, but I still fought them. Dr. Barley’s long-distance advice was the only thing I would listen to. With his consent I was transferred to an ambulance and driven the seventy-five miles to a hospital in Santa Fe. I remember Emma sitting by my side as the ambulance made its twisting and turning way along the mountain roads.

Calmer from the Benadryl, but weeping now, I was led into a locked ward. I didn’t want to be there, but I knew I had no choice. With the help of the Benadryl, I fell into an exhausted sleep, and while I slept, Emma figured out to call my old and trusted doctor, Arnold Jones. She reached him at six A.M. He was retired but agreed to come out of retirement to supervise my case. What I needed, he said, was a dose of Navane. That would quickly bring me around. I trusted Dr. Jones and took the drug. Within hours my consciousness had steadied. I began to sleep in great quantities. My appetite returned. By the end of a week I was writing and meeting with Emma daily, always asking to hear her progress on Magellan. I was finally able to talk to Domenica on the phone.

The time had come for creativity camp, but I was clearly unable to participate. Nave shouldered the camp himself while Emma made arrangements for me to visit with my cousin Terry and his wife, Peg, who had planned to attend camp with our aunt Bernice. Theirs was a welcome and calming presence. Emma remembers “talking Terry’s ear off”—it had been three months since she had had a sympathetic listener. With the help of my family, it was arranged that I would fly back to New York, where I would be met by Gerard. Gerard would stay with me at the Riverside Drive apartment until Emma and her brother Ben could drive the dogs back across country and rejoin me. More like a package than a person, I was loaded on a plane and shipped east. Gerard met my plane.

Safely back in New York, I tried to reconstruct what had happened to me. It was frightening to think that a breakdown, a severe breakdown, could come on me out of nowhere. Looking back, I could see that the breakdown had been building for a very long time—as far back as my frantic peripatetic geographic “cures.” Surely it had been madness moving from place to place to place, New York to Los Angeles to Taos. Without Emma I’d have been hospitalized long before. Even with Emma, even with our portable routine, my stability was illusory. It was frightening to think that Navane was all that stood between me and another “psychotic episode,” as my breakdown was now being called.

I do not remember much of Gerard’s stay except for his perennial optimism and insistence on normalcy. Just as he had in London, Gerard tried to cheer me up by drawing my attention to the small things, the beauty all around us. “Look at that bird, will you?” He would direct my attention to a bold grackle on the window ledge. Or “Look at that tug. It’s got all it can handle.” I think that bird watching and boat watching were how I spent my days until Emma’s return. I probably wrote—I always write and I was working on Prayers from a Nonbeliever, a novella about faith in the modern world—but I do not remember working. My journals from those days are lost. I sometimes think it is just as well.

Emma and her brother Ben were back just a few days, when the phone rang early one morning. It was Domenica, who was in New York, and she was panicked. “Mom. They’ve attacked the World Trade Center,” she blurted out. “Turn on your TV. It’s awful.”

I did turn on the TV and saw the images of the planes piercing the sides of the towers. There was a hallucinogenic quality to the sights. “Domenica,” I told my daughter, “put on some loose clothing, take some water with you, and walk to your father’s house. Call me when you are safely there.” Martin’s house was halfway between Domenica’s apartment and my own.

Now Emma needed some reassurance. Her brother Ben was at that moment on his way to Newark airport. He had left our apartment moments before the attack. “We’ll just have to wait until he calls,” I told her. But no call came from Ben. Finally Domenica called back to say she was safely at her father’s house, where she would remain for the next week. At eight P.M. Ben came walking home to us. He had been stranded on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge until he decided to walk back into Manhattan.

For the next few days Emma and Ben were glued to the television, watching the same horrifying images over and over again. I was in constant phone communication with Domenica, who was badly shaken. Her neighborhood south of Fourteenth Street had been evacuated. She couldn’t go home. She remained at her father’s for safe haven. The television made the attack a constant presence. Her stepmother, Helen Morris, carefully monitored the news: more terrorist threats, an anthrax scare.

Up on Riverside Drive, we seemed a world removed from the crisis. We walked the dogs, we went for groceries, and we prayed. It seemed to us that praying was the single most useful thing we could do. Finally the airports began to function again and Ben flew home to Colorado. Like all of New York, Emma and I were poised for a second attack of some kind. Our friends from across the country phoned us repeatedly to see that we were well.

“We’re okay,” we told them—and we were okay. In some ways, it was easier to be in New York than to be watching New York on the news. Like Londoners during the blitz, New Yorkers rallied in the face of the crisis. Money was raised and clothes donated. Shrines appeared on sidewalks. Under a constant barrage of frightening media, the days passed in a blur. Rather than feeling grief, I felt numb, due to medication and perhaps shock.

What I do remember is that when Emma arrived in New York, my chronic stomach pain seemed to come back. I would wake in the night, cramped and in agony, trying to talk or pray or write myself back into slumber. Each night the pain seemed to be worsening, but since the doctors in Taos had ruled out appendicitis, I tried to simply bear with it. It was not too terrible—and then one night it was.

Emma insisted that we call Dr. Barley even though it was the middle of the night. He arranged for me to have a CAT scan at six A.M. The results came back swiftly. I had a rare and unusual type of appendicitis. Dr. Barley hospitalized me immediately and put me on heavy antibiotics to stabilize what was a slowly leaking infection. At that point my appendix had been leaking and miraculously healing itself for about two months—ever since I first went to the doctor in Taos.

And so I was placed on a strong drug called Cipro, at a premium because of an anthrax scare for which it was the recommended treatment. Dr. Barley, who often worked in Third World countries, got a taste of practicing Third World medicine right in New York. I remained in the hospital for about a week, frightened the whole time that the nursing staff would miss a Navane dose and I would one more time find myself skidding toward psychosis.

Home from the hospital, I faced a rigorous drug regime. The antibiotics had to be administered carefully and regularly. I began to write down every time I took a pill. I couldn’t shake the idea that if I missed even a single dose of Navane I would one more time slide toward madness. It did not help that my diagnosis was a “psychotic episode.” The more I read about such episodes, the more they seemed to sweep in out of nowhere, as savage and unpredictable as a tropical storm. Although it wasn’t rational, I resented being dependent on a drug. I felt shamed by my condition, embarrassed by my frailty. Perhaps, I told myself grimly, I had inherited my parents’ fragility after all. This thought made me frightened for Domenica.

If Emma and I had a job during this period, it was to keep our spirits up creatively. It was all too easy for me to be the identified patient and Emma to become my caretaker. These were roles we did not want. The way out of them seemed to lie with music. Emma began to orchestrate and arrange the vast skeleton that was Magellan. I started work on yet another show, this one about Hollywood. I called it Tinseltown, and into it I poured my locked-up feelings. The heroine of Tinseltown endures a locked ward and lives to tell the tale. I, too, hoped to survive and prevail.

“Take it one day at a time,” I told myself. I met faithfully with other sober alcoholics who warned me about the dual dangers of self-pity and self-dramatization. What I was going through was difficult. It was scary, but it was not so difficult or as scary as a drink would make it. “Just don’t drink,” I repeated to myself like a mantra. “Just don’t drink.”

Now it was time to return to the hospital for what they promised me would be a routine appendectomy. When you are the patient, nothing feels very routine. I was slated to be operated on the day before Thanksgiving. All holiday festivities were put on hold. As promised, the operation did turn out to be routine, even minimal in feeling. They were able to operate laproscopically. I had very little pain, a few stitches. One day out of the hospital I went jogging in Riverside Park. “Safe”—I thought I was bionic.

Thanks to my sober friends, I now had the help of an addictions specialist, a distinguished psychopharmacologist. Under her tutelage, taking a carefully monitored dose of Navane, I became more stable and able to focus on my writing. My book Walking in This World was proving demanding. I was trying to articulate difficult creative issues. For the first time, I did not have Jeremy Tarcher as a sounding board. I wanted the rigor of another disciplined mind. Talking to my friend Natalie Goldberg, I discovered that she had worked successfully with an editor named Linda Kahn, rumored to be both tough and smart. She sounded like the ticket to me. Left to my own devices, my book was becoming too cumbersome. Once more, as I had with The Vein of Gold, I was trying to shoehorn everything into a single volume. Clearly, I needed help.

“Trimming” and “shaping” seem like modest words for the overhaul I had in mind. The book was one and a half times as long as it needed to be. I wanted Linda to tell me where I was repetitious. I stood prepared to slash and burn. I wanted a tightly written book.

Walking in This World was to be round two of The Artist’s Way work. I started out with eighteen weeks, but with Linda’s tough-minded assistance, I was able to boil it down to twelve weeks. That felt more doable to me. I wanted to challenge my readers, not overwhelm them. In retrospect, I felt that The Vein of Gold had been too dense a book, too demanding for many people to work through successfully. (Although those who had reported glorious results.) This time, I resolved, I would do it right. With this in mind, I enlisted a small corps of readers, including such hardheaded people as Ed Towle, Bob McDonald, and, as always, Gerard. Their job was to spot softheadedness and redundancy. I wanted the book to be smart and lean—or as lean as I could make it, trying to distill a decade’s worth of teaching.

Playing the piano as I did—badly—I found myself wondering what it might be like to really feel comfortable with the instrument. Perhaps the time had come to take real piano lessons. There were worse things to do with your fifties, I told myself. And so I set out to find a teacher. Bob McDonald taught piano but only to advanced students, and I was a novice. My friend Cyril Brosnan suggested that I try calling the Lucy Moses School for gifted children, which had a small adult program that might suit me. Looking in their catalogue, I saw that one teacher, Chaim Freiberg, advertised himself as loving Broadway as well as Beethoven. “He’s for me,” I thought.

And so I began what I promised myself would be a decade of piano lessons. Every Monday at noon, I entered my teacher’s studio. To my delight, Mr. Freiberg was both playful and inspirational. He didn’t like many of the beginner’s piano books available and so he simply wrote his own. I learned to play on his own compositions, often written out by hand just for me. Who could resist the clumsy, childlike notes in Mr. Freiberg’s hand? Certainly not I.

“Do you like this? Does it interest you?” Mr. Freiberg would cajole me, sniffing out the faintest scent of boredom. I began to feel spoiled, having my piano lessons shaped so carefully to my own needs and desires. Sometimes I would balk altogether at trying another piece of classical music, and it was then that the show tunes came out. “Try this one. It’s wonderful,” Mr. Freiberg might introduce a Rodgers and Hammerstein number. He could play most of their work by ear and he encouraged me to do the same.

I was very lucky to be surrounded by musicians who were not competitive or judgmental. Bob McDonald, Bruce Pomahac, and Emma’s classical friends were all encouraging. My late-blooming gift for melody struck them as miraculous, but they knew stories of other composers who knew nothing of music except how to write it. Time and again, by way of encouragement, people invoked the legends of Irving Berlin. All that he was ever able to do was pick out a melody line, and yet look how that gift had served him! All that was required, I told myself when I despaired of my lack of skills, was the humility to be a musical beginner. Beautiful melodies came to me, and that was a mystery that did not need to be solved, only enjoyed. When Emma played Magellan back to me, I often was unable to believe that I was the source of its melodies. It seemed far grander than anything I could devise. Yet it knocked on my door near daily.

With Magellan unfolding at the living room piano, the dining room became the work site for Walking in This World. Linda would arrive laden with pages. She would have a list of inserts needing to be written. I set up an IBM Selectric typewriter on the dining room table and methodically typed out what Linda felt was required. “It’s all your years of training as a journalist,” Linda would tease me. Grateful for her help, I was eager to do just what she required. Writer’s block was a luxury we could ill afford.

Shaped by both of our sensibilities, the book began to take form. Its essays were more dense than those of The Artist’s Way. Its issues were those encountered by artists further down the trail. Often I felt I was reporting straight from the front. I was trying to clarify the very issues I was grappling with myself in my work on Magellan and The Medium at Large.

“Just tell the truth. Just be accurate,” I would lecture myself. A page at a time, a week at a time, the essays unfolded. “Try to say how it is. Exactly,” I would chide myself. My team of readers chimed in their considerations. I wrote some more. After three grueling months, we had a book.

Perched as we were on Riverside Drive, it was all too easy for Emma and me to feel we were floating in a world of our own, a world made up of books and music. New York was right at our doorstep, but it seemed far away. It fell to our friend Bruce Pomahac to entice us out into the flow of life. It was Richard Rodgers’s centennial year, and there were many special events all throughout the city to which Pomahac invited me and Emma. Finished with my “big” creativity book, I found myself still eager to write, and so I began a “small” creativity book, The Sound of Paper.

Focusing on life in our little neighborhood and on our adventures out with Pomahac, the little book took shape quickly. It was exciting to be writing about real life and not about creative theory. But, of course, real life for me was studded with thoughts about creativity. Outside the window, Riverside Park was turning from winter into spring. I myself felt a sense of hope and renewal. My medication seemed to be working to keep me stable. It seemed miraculous that a tiny dose of Navane could bring me such safety and relief, but it seemed to. So far, I appeared not to suffer from side effects. It didn’t impede my writing, and for that I was doubly grateful.

May brought a festive fullness to the trees in Riverside Park. One more time Emma and I packed the car and set off with our dogs on the drive cross-country to Taos. For Emma it was a reluctant pilgrimage. For me it was a stubborn obsession. This time we went Residence Inn to Residence Inn, grateful that they were dog friendly and clean. I was eager to reach Taos and to resume what I still obstinately thought of as my life there. I missed my friends Larry and Rhonda, but above all I missed the beauty of Taos, which seemed to me to be a friend in itself. “We’re in Ohio,” “We’re in Nebraska,” “We’re in Colorado,” I would nightly report in to Domenica, who was now splitting her time between coasts, going west for pilot season and east for work in the theater. Playwright-director Richard Nelson cast her as one of his leads in Franny’s Way, a play which was put on both off-Broadway and at Los Angeles’s Geffen Theater. Domenica seemed to live on JetBlue. We spoke to each other from airport lounges and cabs.

This year the old adobe house seemed less welcoming—as if it resented our long absence. It took us the better part of a week to put the house in order. My aging neighbor, Bessie Ortega, stopped by to warn us that Taos was suffering from an extended drought and that we should use our water sparingly. We soon learned that the drought was an omnipresent fact of life. The valley’s very air seemed dry and lifeless. A constant low wind was an added irritant.

After our initial flurry of housekeeping shores, Emma and I found ourselves restless, irritable, and discontent. We began to take long daily drives. I would dictate impressions to Emma as I drove. These impressions, sharp as a paper’s edge, became the second half of The Sound of Paper. The long drought spoke to me eloquently of the artist’s creative difficulties. I tried to write of the courage and stamina—the sheer grit—that it took for an artist to sustain an artist’s life.

One more time Bob McDonald was summering at the Taos School of Music. Many starry nights Emma and I drove up the winding canyon to the Taos Ski Valley. There, in the Alpine coziness of the Hotel St. Bernard, we would enjoy a gourmet meal cooked by Jean Meyer and an after-dinner concert provided by McDonald and his students. More and more, the music school seemed to be our habitat. Less and less often, we found ourselves a part of the year-round Taos community. We were becoming summer people.

The first week of August marked the end of the Taos School of Music. Unexpectedly, I began to feel shaky. My restlessness became a nameless apprehension. Sleep was difficult, then elusive. I called back to New York to talk with my psychopharmacologist. She suggested that I increase my Navane dose. My friend Larry abruptly suggested that I get out of Taos, that I make the drive back to New York early.

And so Emma and I packed the car and the dogs and set out on the long drive back. Once again we went Residence Inn to Residence Inn, grateful for familiar surroundings. True to Larry’s guess, I did feel better heading back to New York and a more structured life than I had in Taos. Secretly I was afraid of one more time having a breakdown, and I wanted to be near as much help as I could muster.

If I was coming back to New York for security, that is not what I found there. Instead, I discovered that my New York landlady wanted to move back early and that we would need to find a new place in which to nest. Shaky to begin with, I found this prospect frightening. I was worried we wouldn’t find a building that would allow our dogs. I was worried, period. Emma, ever more optimistic than I, thought that the chance to move was an ideal opportunity to fine-tune how we were living. “Let’s move farther downtown, more in the midst of things,” she suggested. “Let’s see if we can get city views instead of country views so that we really know that we are living in New York.”

I called Renee Chase, the broker who had found us the place on Riverside Drive. I must have sounded panicked, because she went immediately into a calming mode. “Don’t worry. There are apartments to be had, and some of those apartments, some very nice ones, take dogs. I’ll get right on it.”

And she did get right on it, phoning us back almost instantly. “I think I have found a place you should look at,” she said. “It needs some fixing up, but they’ll do that if you commit to it. It’s worth a look.”

I had made a list: “Large, bright, and sunny; city views, dog friendly, separate living wings for Julia and for Emma; convenient to Central Park, room enough for an arranging room and a writing room, good kitchen space, high enough ceilings, close to public transportation; quiet, doorman.” My list seemed unobtainable to me. I simply wanted too many things, some of them contradictory and expensive. I was, for example, asking to be right in the thick of things and yet still have quiet.

The lobby of the building looked shabby. The elevator lacked charm. The door to our prospective home was chipped and dented. Inside, the fixtures were hanging by bare wires and the walls were scuffed dark gray with wear and tear.

“Wait a minute,” I said, mentally replacing the fixtures and painting the walls. The kitchen would need a complete overhaul, but it was more spacious than most New York kitchens. There were large windows and wonderful views. The dingy rooms were actually light and airy. The bedrooms were, as I had wished, in two separate wings, necessary if either Emma or myself acquired a boyfriend. The apartment was half a block off Central Park and located at the building’s rear, far more quiet than the front.

Now it was Emma’s turn to imagine the place transformed by our possessions. Walking through the apartment a room at a time, we began to arrange the furniture. While less formal than our Riverside Drive digs, the apartment had everything we needed and everything I had asked for. I could practically hear my sober mentors chuckling about “let go and let God.”

“Emma, Benny! Come look!” I called out, and together the three of us peered out our eleventh-floor window at the magnificent bird. It perched calmly, turning its majestic head from side to side, as if taking in the view. My years in Taos had been filled with eagles, but spotting one in New York felt like a magical good omen—even when I learned that the Park Service routinely released the birds into nearby Central Park. Emma now lived nearly next door to her closest friend. They met for coffee almost daily. As for me, an old friend and very gifted director suddenly surfaced in New York. As associate creative director at the Denver Center twenty years earlier, Randy Myler knew me as a playwright as well as an author. Like John Newland, he liked my alcoholism play, Four Roses. He quickly staged an excellent reading. That reading convinced me and Emma that he might be the man we were looking for to work on our musical The Medium at Large. We had a reading slated for March at the York Theatre—another introduction courtesy of Max—and we needed a good director.

Once he agreed to work with us, Myler was a stern taskmaster. Tony-nominated himself, he knew what it took to make a solid script—and what it took was a lot of work. We met once a week at the Big Cup, a coffee shop near his home in Chelsea. There, amid booming music and loud conversations, we hammered out our script.

“Why do you need this scene change?” Myler would say. “I think you could just cross-fade.” A veteran dramaturg from his years at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Myler knew exactly how to make a script both lean and playable. Under his hand, our script lost twenty pages and gained a sense of momentum and velocity. As a playwright, I was relieved to be out of the realm of the imagination and into the realm of the actual. Emma and I had talent, but Myler had experience. For us it was a shift away from “this could play” into “this does play.” We were elated. Myler’s expertise was just what we needed. Our creative idyll was soon interrupted, however. It was time for another book tour, this one for Walking in This World.

“I hope so,” I told her, and I did hope that while we were on the road my Navane would “hold.” I thought of the drug as a sort of wall between me and madness. Sometimes, especially when I was overtired or overstimulated—two regular features of a book tour—I feared that wall would not hold. We would soon find out.

The tour opened in Los Angeles, and that is where Emma took a catastrophic fall. It was our second day out, and she went on an errand to a market, where she slipped on a pool of water, shattering her kneecap. The injury was far more serious than we at first thought. Armed with a cane, Emma continued to hobble through the book tour. She took Tylenol for the pain and was determined to carry on. I have a very clear memory of her dressed to the nines in a silver silk floor-length dress for an awards presentation. Science of Mind magazine had chosen me Person of the Year, but it was Emma who deserved a citation as she limped gamely to her place. This she continued through twenty days and ten cities. For once she was the identified patient and I the helper.

For my part, I was seized by an idea and began, longhand, to write a novel I would call Mozart’s Ghost. A romantic comedy set in New York, the novel became a joyous obsession. I wrote it in hotel rooms, in airport lounges, in the back of limousines. One notebook grew to two and then three. I read it aloud to Emma as I went. The novel was lighthearted, and I am sure that undertaking it helped us to relieve the psychic pain of Emma’s injury.

Arriving back in New York, I had the rough draft of a novel. Emma, on the other hand, was faced squarely with the seriousness of her injury. Dr. Barley one more time swung into action, referring her to a specialist, who broke the bad news. It was no mere fall. Her leg was severely damaged. Her knee would require multiple surgeries and lengthy rehabilitation. They needed to operate as soon as possible, early in December.

Waiting for her hospitalization, Emma focused obsessively on both Magellan and Tinseltown. Tragedies felt cathartic to her at the time. She arranged piece after piece. Like me, she blocked anxiety with overwork. Writing flat-out, I finished a second draft of Mozart’s Ghost. I was ready to show it to readers Gerard, Ed Towle, Bob McDonald, and Linda Kahn. I yearned for a little romantic comedy in my own life, and I thoroughly enjoyed putting some of it onto the page, but would readers take to it?

What Linda Kahn didn’t get was the basic premise of the novel, that two shy people could meet, fall in love and drunkenly into bed, and then have reservations about commitment. Was I crazy to have concocted such a scenario?

Still, I knew Linda’s braininess too well to simply shrug off her comments. Instead, I dug back into the book, working to shape my characters more clearly. Drafts three, four, and five followed in fast succession. When I got to draft six, I was ready to show Linda again.

I gave the book to my agent to put up for sale. I gave it to Domenica to adapt to screenplay form. She had optioned a novel, Saturn’s Return to New York, and I had to wait for her to finish that script before she could begin on mine. While I was proud that she was initiating work of her own, I waited impatiently.

Emma was scheduled for surgery December 2. Her brother Ben came to stay with us again to oversee her operation and help her in the days that followed. A jazz violinist, Ben was a welcome presence in our house. He hadn’t been there two days before I was on fire again with yet another book idea, Letters to a Young Artist, for which he was indisputably the muse.

It was tonic to me having a young artist in the house. He was full of questions, and I found that I had some answers I wanted to share with him and other young artists. The book quickly took on form and size. With Emma bedridden and on pain medication, Ben’s company was reassuring. He gave Emma a sense of safety and he gave me a sense of hope. As a threesome, we were an oddly workable household. Perhaps because I had grown up in a large, creative family, I enjoyed having a house full of life.

At Christmas, with Emma still on crutches, we all traveled to Maine to visit with their parents. They greeted us with open arms, plying us with candies and holiday treats. Rob Lively is a theologian. Martha Lively is a computer scientist. Conversations with them are always spirited and interesting. We stayed through the New Year. My bedroom was upstairs under the snowy eaves. Outside my window, birch trees glistened with ice. Although I said nothing of this to anyone, I was quietly auditioning Maine versus Taos.

A director with years of experience under his belt, Myler was for us a stubbornly sure-footed guide. Under his hand, the script became crisper and more fast-paced. We hired Kim Grigsby, a veteran Broadway conductor, to be our musical director, and that allowed us to listen to our score with fresh ears. Now all we needed was actors—but that proved to be a cliffhanger. Myler wanted to use Broadway pros, who always seemed to be in high demand. No one would commit until the last minute. Emma and I were nervous but excited. “Hold out for the best,” Myler would tell us. This was good but difficult advice. Over a long weekend, with the reading nearly upon us, the casting came together. Myler’s stubbornness was vindicated. Our cast was strong.

The York Theatre is dedicated to developing new musicals, and they had a ready audience for ours. Emma and I sat in the very back row. The show whirled by nearly in a blur. Our jokes got laughs. Our songs got applause. The audience seemed to be with us moment by moment. Then it was over. Emma and I stood in the theater lobby receiving comments and compliments. Max’s friend James Morgan, the York’s creative director, was pleased, and so were we.

“Now what?” some people asked, and we asked ourselves the same thing. The answer was that it was time for a backer’s audition. A backer’s audition was a major jump and not one that we could take immediately. “No one” was in town over the summer, we were told. With spring upon us, it was time to head back west to Taos, where we would have more than enough thinking time to consider our options.

This time Taos welcomed us like a spurned lover. The old adobe house felt unmanageable. We had plumbing problems, heating problems, and, worst of all, bugs. The earwig is the cockroach of the West. A succession of expensive experts passed through the property. We decided to rehab an old outbuilding. Our absentee landlordship was clearly taking its toll. As much as I hated to face it, I no longer really lived in Taos. That fact made it feel all the more beautiful. Stubbornly I clung to my past. I reached out to cherished friends: Larry Lonergan, James Nave, Crawford Tall, and Peter Ziminsky.

My closest girlfriend, Rhonda Flemming, had one month earlier suffered the loss of her longtime lover. His death by heart attack was sudden and unexpected. She was catapulted deeply into grief. There was little that I felt I could do for her except take long daily walks with her. I hoped that the land itself could prove to be a healer. There were no easy answers, and in attempting to alleviate Rhonda’s despair, I found myself writing to her. Every day I would sit down and write Rhonda a prayer. She would read them and say that they gave her solace. Gathered together, those prayers became a slender volume, Answered Prayers. I had written a book behind my own back.

Meanwhile, my own prayers felt unheard. I loved Taos but again found myself frightened and uncomfortable there. Except when actually walking or writing, I was apprehensive, and it was a feeling I now knew all too well. My Navane defense seemed like a very weak one.

This announcement frightened but did not surprise her. She got on the phone to New York. It was suggested that I increase my medication. I did this with reluctance. I hated the fragility that the medicine implied. Then, too, there was the fact that Navane could cause dangerous side effects and that the larger the dose, the graver the risk.

Beset by depression, which the Navane did not really address, I turned my hand to some of the darker passages of Magellan. Emma, too, found herself drawn to melancholic melodies. She wrote a harrowing song where Magellan is lost at sea. The metaphor was not lost on us.

“You can’t afford another breakdown,” Emma countered. “Especially out here.” To Emma, New York meant safety and good doctors. I listened to her reluctantly. Then I decided to go to Larry Lonergan for a reading.

“Go back to New York,” Larry advised me, just as he had the summer before. “Pack your things and get out while you still have your health. You’ve got good doctors in New York and the structure back there seems to suit you. Go.”

“Let’s pack the house so we can rent it out,” I suggested. I hated the thought of renting the house, but it seemed only sensible. Emma set to packing with her friend Kathy Walsh, who came in from Texas to help us out. I stayed out of the way, trying to write and work on Magellan, but despite my medication my apprehension kept growing. Daily, I became more distressed. Domenica worried. So did my sister Libby and my childhood friend Lynnie Lane. Everyone feared another breakdown. I listened reluctantly to their fears. I did not want to leave, yet knew I had to. Emma and Kathy put our personal belongings into storage. Stripped of our oil paintings and bric-a-brac, the house stood ready for rental.

Once more we packed the little SUV with our work, our clothes, and the sheepskin throws for our dogs. We pulled across the little wooden bridge that marked our property. It was a long drive back to New York. We anticipated difficulty but quickly found the opposite. By the time we reached Colorado, we were laughing, telling each other jokes, giddy at our timely departure.