Occasionally I’d be lucid enough to think: This is not normal. I should not be trying to write a book during this.
By summer, after they were three or four months old, the boys started sleeping better at night. Four hours. Sometimes five. There were even one or two rare and terrifying times when both would sleep six hours without waking. But by then it was too late. So many nights of sleeplessness had broken some flimsy little gyroscope inside my skull, and the rested world had left me behind.
I’d lie awake and the clock beside the bed would flip through the minutes, click, breathe, click, breathe, and the moon would crawl across the panes of the windows. I’d worry the boys were suffocating in their blankets, I’d worry over the impending publication of my second book, I’d worry about September and moving to Rome. I’d worry I was worrying too much. I tried Unisom, exercise, alcohol. I tried thinking the same word over and over, blue blue blue blue blue rain rain rain rain rain. Shauna would take both boys all night, offering to, as we called it, throw herself under the bus, but still I’d lie awake, pillows clamped over my ears, heart roaring.
The only way to fall asleep is to stop trying to fall asleep. Sleep is a horizon: the harder you row toward it, the faster it recedes.
Now we have moved to Rome, my second book has just been published, and it is happening again. I stare at the ceiling, I paddle for the horizon, I hear what I am sure is a screaming baby. I tiptoe down the hall in the darkness and listen outside their doors. Nothing. Phantoms. Ghosts.
Our first storm: Lightning lashes the domes of churches. Hail clatters on the terrace. In the early morning, the air seems shinier and purer than I’ve seen it. Dawn stretches across the gardens, pulling tiny shadows out of the blades of grass, draining through the needles of the umbrella pines. The old walls look washed, almost new: a thousand speckled tints of bronze, trailing lacework of ivy, glossy tangles of capers.
We walk to the Vatican. It’s closer than we expected, maybe five hundred yards along the rim of the Janiculum, past a huge statue of the nineteenth-century patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi on horseback, past dozens of stone busts of Garibaldi’s lieutenants, past a children’s hospital. We descend a steep alley, slip beneath an archway, skirt some shuttered restaurants. Suddenly St. Peter’s and its vast piazza are upon us: the twin arms of a pillared colonnade, a ring of saints standing sentry around its circumference, a massive obelisk in the very center sending a needle-tipped shadow across a knot of tourists. The boys are quiet, huge-eyed. Twin fountains spray and gurgle. I feel my breath leave me, a flood of different sensations: the roar of space; sunlight coming in streaks through the haze; the huge dome of the church seeming almost to hover above the façade. It is as if, while we look, the basilica expands, swells, adds another layer. Country, continent: the piazza is a prairie, the church a mountain range. And the city crowds in all around it, panting, thronging, sulfurous.
That evening we eat tortellini on the terrace in a daze. Henry falls asleep in my arms. The sky passes through a sequence of darkening blues.
Is this Rome? Or a dream?
Streetlights blink on. A block away, the Fontanone roars over the city. As I’m setting Henry in his crib, a lone church bell, somewhere beyond his window, begins to clang.
We interview a babysitter. We have found her telephone number on wantedinrome.com. Filipina, referenced and experienced babysitter, speaks English and Italian, looking for an afternoon job. She knocks quietly and takes off her shoes before entering. Her name is Tacy. She has a son, back in the Philippines, who is fourteen. She has not seen him in two years. Her socks are navy blue. In under a minute we have run out of questions. She sits on the edge of the couch and holds her glass of water with two hands. What else are we supposed to ask?
“We need two or three afternoons a week,” Shauna says. “And a night once in a while. We’d like to see some things around the city. We haven’t even been to the Colosseum yet.”
Tacy hasn’t been to the Colosseum either. She has been working in Rome for two years, changing the diapers of an old man who has finally died. She likes to buy silver at the flea markets. She likes to read. Her leather jacket smells faintly of cigarettes. Before she came here, she had been a pharmaceutical rep in the Philippines, traveling between islands. Even then, she had to continually leave her son.
“Was it hard for you to come here?” I ask.
“Maybe fifty minutes by bus. Not far.”
No, I want to clarify, was it hard for you to leave home, leave your son, but Shauna gives me a look. So I walk Tacy back down the hall, tiptoeing past the closed doors, the sleeping babies.
She slips on her shoes and points at Owen’s door. “May I see?”
“It’s a bathroom.” I shrug. “It’s darker in there.”
We stand over the crib in the gloom. Owen is asleep facedown, sink on one side, tub on the other. His back rises and falls. His fan whirs.
“I hope I get this job,” she whispers.
“I do, too,” I say.
In the Tom Andrews Studio I try to research German occupations, revivify my characters, coax my imagination onto a hillside in Normandy, but my brain is tired, my eyes are sandy. Words unmoor from their locations on the page and drift, turn, slide toward the margin.
Supposedly, while performing the crucial calculations in his theory of general relativity, Einstein slept ten hours a night.4 I struggle to get five. Here’s a headline from the newspaper: Marriage and Children Kill Creativity in Men? Two-thirds of “great” male scientists, reports some evolutionary psychologist in New Zealand, made their most significant contributions before their mid-thirties and before starting a family.5 Wonderful. Here’s Einstein himself: “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so.” What if all this is true, I wonder, for male writers?
I’m thirty-one. Here’s Coleridge, in 1804, when he turned thirty-two: “Yesterday was my Birth Day. So completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month.—O Sorrow and Shame…I have done nothing!”
I haven’t finished a piece of fiction since the boys were born. I want to write about the French radio resistance, but can’t speak French, have never operated an old radio, and can’t imagine how a Frenchman might talk in 1940, or even what he might carry in his pockets. When I look at copies of my first two books, even the novel published last month, they seem like strange and reticent objects; the paragraphs feel as though a lost brother has written them, a brother with much more time on his hands.
And now there’s Rome, beginning to seep into everything, flooding my notebooks: the slumbering palaces, the hallucinatory light. I never tire of the clouds here, I’ve written across the top of a sheet of paper, the light bleeding through their shoulders.
Or this: Through a window in Monteverde: a ladle smokes on a butcher’s block.
Yesterday I scribbled this: Crossing the Ponte Sisto, over the Tiber, the air fills with shining threads, I wave my hands, squint. Is the light itself separating? For a minute I watch, the babies squirming in the stroller. Then I realize: They are spiderwebs, a tiny spider dangling from the end of each, all of them ballooning downriver.
Every time I turn around here, I witness a miracle: wisteria pours up walls; slices of sky show through the high arches of a bell tower; water leaks nonstop from the spouts of a half-sunken marble boat in the Piazza di Spagna. A church floor looks soft as flesh; the skin from a ball of mozzarella cheese tastes rich enough to change my life. I ought to be reading about Vichy,