Regret

“For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.'” — John Greenleaf Whittier

Perhaps it is just January, and mathematically the saddest time of the year, maybe because I’m home with two sick boys today, but lately my macro-regret, my ur-regret, has been relentlessly dogging me. Is this a mid-life crisis? I am 44, after all. … I’ve spent almost ten years ensconced in domesticity. Happily so, most of the time. But lately, there’s a certain event that keeps surfacing in my mind. I sit and give it time to be there, think it through, and move beyond it. Then it comes back again. And again. Last night I dreamed about it, and I woke up in already depressed. I made my choice, I tell myself. At the time it seemed the right choice. But– what if I had turned the other way at those crossroads?

It’s almost like a dream in itself. For years I completely forgot about it, so that I when it came back to me I actually doubted that it really happened. But it did.

One day in New York, it must have been 1995, my mentor-lady called me. She was sort of a flake and did some strange things, but she was very well-placed in the magazine world and has several well-regarded books to her credit. I had worked for her as an assistant, helping her organize her insane tiny little office on 5th Avenue above Saks. I ran errands for her and created a workable filing system out of utter chaos. I convinced her to keep all her papers and drafts because someone would want them one day, and indeed that has proved true. Then she got me my job working for Diana Trilling, which was a great experience for me.

Anyway, one day she called me. I was standing in my tiny New York kitchen, I remember that part well. She said that there was an editorial assistant position available at The New Yorker. She said she was good friends with the person hiring, and that she had told him all about me, and that in effect… the job was mine for the taking.

I said no.

My logic, if you can call it that, was two-fold: 1) most importantly, I was about to marry Ben and move to Ohio. My life was on that path and I couldn’t really envision it differently. If I took the job, I would need to stay in New York and Ben was moving to Ohio to work for his family business. So if I had taken it, would we have gotten married and lived apart for a year or two or three? Would we have gotten married at all? Ben and Ohio were a package deal, and I took them both. And 2) I had some totally misguided idea that if I took the job I would appear to the New Yorker in the “wrong category.” I wanted to present myself to them in all my glory as a writer, not as a low-level editor who also wrote a bit on the side, in between getting them their coffee.

I told my mentor-lady this, and she was dumbfounded. “Catherine, that’s crazy,” she said. I told a good writing friend this and she too was dumbfounded. “Catherine, that’s crazy,” she also said. I didn’t listen to them. I thought I knew what I was doing.

At the time I was very arrogant and had some actual data to support my delusions of grandeur. I had interest from one of the biggest agents in New York. I personally knew the editor of the New York Times Book Review, who had read my manuscript and loved it. I had worked for Diana Trilling for two years, typing up correspondence with Norman Mailer (even at 88, Diana was still girlishly flattered that Mailer had called her “a smart cunt”), Calvin Trillin, Leon Wieseltier, Andrew Wylie, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, and many other of these important figures in the literary world. I had taken classes at Columbia with Adam Gopnik, Alec Wilkinson, and David Remnick himself (who now is the editor of the New Yorker). They all liked my writing a lot and encouraged me. I was writing little reviews for the NYTBR myself. All in all it seemed that I was effectively launched, and that I didn’t need to work for the New Yorker to accomplish my goals.

At that time, too, the internet was very young but its promise could already be felt. It seemed to me that my physical location wouldn’t matter– I could just e-mail people in New York back and forth. Cleveland didn’t seem all that far away. Ben would work full-time and make enough money that I wouldn’t need to work, and I could write full-time. In a few months, my manuscript would be done, Big Agent would handle it, and it would be excerpted in the New Yorker anyway!

So I thought. But none of this– none– went like I had planned.

And now, as a 44-year-old Ohio housewife with some very dusty clips from the mid-90s and little else to my credit, it seems surreal, almost shocking, that I turned that opportunity down. I hate being such a living cliche– “I coulda been a contenda!” What would’ve happened if I had said okay? For one thing, it’s very possible that I could simply have not gotten the job after all. I honestly wish that that had happened instead, because then at least I’d know. Or, maybe I could’ve stayed in NYC for a year, worked there, and then managed to set up a long-distance job for them, shipping manuscripts back and forth or just e-mailing them. And if I had access, maybe I could have shown them a piece or two and gotten someone to read it. It’s all about access, which now is completely vanished.

But then I look at my boys– one of whom is shirtless and asleep beside me– and I think, if I had taken the job would I have them at all? Would they exist? And then it all folds back on itself. I could not imagine, or want, a life without them in it. If I had stayed in NYC, and my relationship with Ben had fallen apart, what then? Would I now have a fancy career and nothing else? Would I ever ever have wanted that?

It’s an unknowable unknown.

I remember before we were married, I was dreaming aloud with my mother about what it would be like in Ohio. She said, “You’ll have these apple-cheeked children, and you’ll make bread…” And I said, “I’ll have a big garden and I’ll have a big pot of soup on the stove, and they’ll come in from playing to eat some…” and on like that. It was so bucolic and so blissful that it prompted my step-father to chime in sardonically, “I also hear they have unicorns in Ohio…” We laughed, but my life really is a lot like we imagined. It’s not perfect, of course, but it really is wonderful.

Then sometimes I think of my friend Andrew King, who worked and slaved in New York for almost 15 years after we graduated from Columbia, lost and gained countless agents, drafted and redrafted six or seven novels, and always infinitely hopeful and tenacious, always on the cusp of greatness. Until he committed suicide in 2009, yet another unknown famous writer who never made it to the big time.

I think in practical terms the point of all this is: I have to start writing again. That’s the only way to cure this regret. I have to start seriously writing again. I encourage myself that maybe I have another 44 years, at least, to have a serious writing career, and that’s plenty of time. Most likely with advances in health care, I’ll live to be 110. Think of all the great, late bloomers out there! I tell myself this a lot.

Sometimes I even believe it.