Story of My Wife
Calvin Trillin Brings His Greatest Love to Life on the Printed Page

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 31, 2006

NEW YORK It is a truth universally acknowledged that getting a happy marriage down on the page is one of the hardest challenges a writer can take on.

"All happy families are alike," as that best-selling chronicler of marital misery Leo Tolstoy famously put it -- the unstated corollary being that if Tolstoy had churned out heartwarming tales of wedded bliss, his readers would have flocked to Dostoyevsky in droves.

Or, as Calvin Trillin likes to say when invited to speak at writing conferences: "It's this hideous disadvantage, not having any bestiality to report."

This makes what Trillin has accomplished with his latest book all the more impressive:

He's made his own family's happiness come alive.

The book is called "About Alice," and it's expanded -- though not much -- from a New Yorker piece that appeared in March. The title refers to the smart, confident, beautiful woman with the strongly held opinions who transformed his existence when he had the luck to "wander into the right party" in 1963. The result was a connection Trillin friends tend to describe with phrases like "as true a love story as I ever saw."

For decades, he had the good sense not to attempt deconstruction of his marriage in print.

Oh, he'd written plenty about Alice over the years. She appeared as a kind of sitcom character ("a dietitian in sensible shoes," as she once put it) in her husband's lighter writings, collected in books with titles like "Travels With Alice" and "Alice, Let's Eat." In the latter she was described -- in an opening line perhaps less immortal than Tolstoy's, but memorable nonetheless -- as having "a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day."

But he'd never done anything like "About Alice," which was published this week, five years after her death from heart failure at 63.

"I was trying to make her a real person," Trillin says.

He wrote about the Alice who attracted what he called "guys smoking pipes" at parties and could explain concepts like heuristics to an intellectually challenged spouse. Who was constantly "involved in taking care of someone else." Who dealt systematically with problems that came up, whether they were "the small matters of logistics and maintenance that were known around our house as Administrative Caca, or serious issues, of, say, catastrophic illness or financial disaster." Who retained "something close to a child's sense of wonderment," as demonstrated by the fact that she was "the only adult I ever knew who might respond to encountering a deer on a forest path by saying, 'Wowsers!' "

In the process, he evoked a lovingly enmeshed family it's hard not to wish you were part of -- yet whose blessings would likely have lulled the author of "Anna Karenina" to sleep.

But Trillin had a darker layer to work with, as well.

It gave him access to happiness's flip side, to what cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker once described as "the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything."

Alice Trillin knew that rumble all too well. She borrowed Becker's line for an article she wrote about the existential implications of the lung cancer diagnosis she received in 1976 -- a cancer, her surgeon said, that she had just a 10 percent chance to survive.

'Life Is Long'

Call him Bud -- everyone who knows him does. Ring his Greenwich Village doorbell at the ungodly appointed hour, 7:30 a.m., and you'll find a hospitable fellow of 71 whose regular-guy appearance (not tall, a bit short on hair) makes you suspect that youthful good looks weren't the only thing that attracted that glowing young woman in 1963.

"Life is long," Alice used to say, and what she meant -- according to the Trillin's younger daughter, Sarah -- was, "Don't marry someone who's not going to make you laugh."

The house is a remodeled brownstone across the street from the grade school Sarah and her sister, Abigail, attended. "I got up earlier than Alice," Trillin says, "so I would give them breakfast and then Abigail would take Sarah by the hood of her parka and I would watch them out the window."

He's been out foraging already, to Hudson Bagels. Over breakfast, the subject of his bagel oeuvre comes up -- specifically his futile quest for the Magic Bagel, chronicled a few years back, which he hoped might lure his bagel-loving older daughter back from San Francisco. And he reminisces about a family bagel ritual that involved more extensive foraging on the Lower East Side. On Sundays, they'd go for smoked salmon at Russ & Daughters, bagels at Tanenbaum's, cream cheese at Ben's Dairy . . .

Close families tend to have a lot of rituals. "We found the kids were very conservative," he says. "They don't like changes much."

As for good marriages: They work, Trillin thinks, not because the partners have the same personality but because they share core values. The most important thing he and Alice agreed on was their response to the simple notion that "your children are either the center of your life or they're not."

In the Trillin household, there were no doubts. Whenever you were in the same room with Bud and Alice, says old family friend James Edmunds, "you were going to get the girls."

Trillin met Edmunds on a reporting trip to Louisiana. The New Yorker, at the time, was sending Trillin on the road every three weeks to do a series of pieces called "U.S. Journal." Written straight, without the writer's persona intruding, they helped establish him as one of the great reporters of his era.

With his reporter's hat off, he also wrote comic fiction, including a now-legendary sendup of weekly newsmagazines. (No editor should be permitted to assign a trend story without first reading "Floater.") He applied his deadpan humor to light nonfiction, too, in a first-person voice that dealt more in self-mockery than self-revelation.

Alice taught writing, with special enthusiasm for the kind of student who needed the most help, and went on to produce educational TV programs. The Trillins shared parenting duties to a degree unusual in the 1970s. They also shared Bud's work: He showed Alice rough drafts of everything.

"If the piece was meant to be funny," he writes, "the sound of laughter from the next room was a great reward."

Surely, he's asked, there must have been some points of tension besides the spat over the too-spartan Japanese hotel room he mentions in "About Alice"?

Well -- no. The most serious fight he comes up with has to do with the home-movie musicals the four of them used to make while spending summers in Canada (sample title: "If There's No Nova Scotia in Nova Scotia, There Can't Be Any French Fries in France"). Apparently Bud criticized the way Alice was cutting one movie and "she thought I was saying that she didn't understand humor or something.

"Alice was a very strong-willed person," Edmunds says, "and could be to some people, I suppose, intimidating. I'd include Bud in that."

Trillin puts it a little differently.

When they first met, he writes, he tried his hardest to impress Alice. And in more than 35 years of marriage, he never really stopped.

'Some Kind of Mistake'

When that lung cancer diagnosis came, 30 years ago, Trillin didn't believe it.

"At first, I thought it was just some kind of mistake, or I'm in a nightmare or something like that," he says. "I mean, she was 38 years old, she had never smoked."

He remembers getting angry, driving home from the hospital, at the guys hanging out in Sheridan Square who were "smoking everything they could get their hands on and shooting up."

Why Alice? Why not them ?

But mostly, he coped by refusing to admit that she could actually die. The girls were 7 and 4: It was easier -- and, of course, essential -- to concentrate on being their father. After surgery, radiation and some chemotherapy had given Alice a couple of healthy years, he realized he wasn't thinking about her cancer every day.

Then out of the blue, as he was walking through an airport somewhere -- if he had to guess, he'd say it was in New Orleans -- the "big dam of denial" that had sustained him collapsed. For the first time, he admitted to himself that things could have ended badly. He pictured himself telling his daughters that their mother was dead.

"It literally sort of knocked me over," Trillin says.

He staggered to a chair. People stopped to ask if he needed help. Soon enough, however, the image faded and he flew home.

He kept this moment to himself. He doesn't think he ever told Alice.

More than two decades of happiness ensued.

Yes, Trillin found himself walking out of "Terms of Endearment" because he couldn't face the part where the dying Debra Winger says goodbye to her kids. Yes, there was a terrifying false alarm about recurrence in 1990.

And yes, close observers might have noticed that Alice, in particular, seemed to place a greater than average value on peak experiences -- a wonderful meal, a perfect sunset -- as if she were counting each day. As a teenager, Sarah says, she sometimes felt exhausted by the pressure to "live life to its fullest," though she understands the impulse now.

But most of the time the rumble of panic remained inaudible. Or at least low enough for laughter to drown it out.

A Bit More Emotion

"You have to promise now," Alice said.

The subject was Abigail's wedding, in the spring of 2001, and the promise she extracted from her husband was that the festivities would go on exactly as planned -- whether or not she was there.

A few weeks before, doctors had discovered serious damage to her heart, an aftereffect of the radiation used to treat her cancer a quarter century earlier. Four months after the wedding, on the evening of Sept. 11 -- yes , that Sept. 11 -- she died of cardiac arrest.

For those close to the Trillins, the merging of public and private griefs felt surreal.

NBC's Tom Brokaw, whom Trillin asked to preside at Alice's memorial service, says he first met Bud while they were working on the same Vietnam story in 1968. Later, when Brokaw's job took him to New York, the two families got together. "It was love at first sight," he says. "It truly has been an extended family."

On Sept. 11, Brokaw was on the air all day. He made it through somehow, he says, got home at 2 a.m. and checked his emotional pulse. He felt as if he'd had "an out-of-body experience" -- but he hadn't broken down.

The next morning, at 7, his assistant called to tell him Alice had died.

"I wept for an hour," he says.

Among many memories, he mentions one from Abigail's wedding. Alice had checked herself out of the hospital to be there. She had a toast to make and she stood to make it.

"Frail, beautiful Alice," Brokaw says. "Bud never took his eyes off her."

Ask Trillin's family and friends how he's doing today and they're likely to say, as James Edmunds does, "far better than I feared." It helps that he has four grandchildren to dote on. He calls them the Wonder Tots.

It may also help that, since Alice's death, he has expressed a bit more emotion in his writing. Abigail points in particular to a New Yorker article, published last year, about a young soldier her father didn't know who'd been killed in Iraq.

Trillin got interested, he wrote in the article's opening paragraph, when he found himself in tears listening to a National Public Radio piece about the man's death. He was en route to visit Sarah and his grandson Toby, in New Jersey, and "for a moment or two" he thought he might have to pull off the road. He linked his feelings to "the way I felt about my wife's not having lived to enjoy her grandchildren."

His new book, of course, is another case in point. It's also something Trillin had no intention of writing.

As the months went by, he says, "people would occasionally ask me, 'Are-you-going-to-write-about-Alice?' " He rushes the words together, conveying the awkwardness of the exchange. "I don't think so," he would reply.

Last year, after New Yorker editor David Remnick asked the same question, he changed his mind.

The article took him a few months to write, "a long time compared to, say, going out and doing a murder story." It got a huge response from widows, widowers and cancer survivors, which Trillin had anticipated, but also from "young, unmarried women, talking about the sort of marriage that they hoped to have."

If all happy families are alike -- well, they wanted the secret of his.

Trillin's daughters say their father is unusually excited about the book's publication. Abigail offers what seems a likely explanation.

"I think my mom would have loved it," she says, "and I think he knows that."